Shipwreck Narratives: Out of our Depth (Maritime Literature and Culture) 3030870405, 9783030870409

Citation preview

MARITIME LITERATURE AND CULTURE

Shipwreck Narratives: Out of our Depth Michael Titlestad

Maritime Literature and Culture Series Editors Alexandra Ganser Wien, Wien, Austria Meg Samuelson University of Adelaide Adelaide, Australia Charne Lavery University of the Witwatersrand Johannesburg, South Africa

This series offers new rubrics for literary and cultural studies by focusing on maritime and coastal regions, in contrast to nation, continent and area. In doing so, it engages with current debates on comparative and world literatures, globalization, and planetary or Anthropocene thought in illuminating ways. Broadly situated in the humanities and in relation to critical theory, it invites contributions that focus particularly on cultural practices – predominantly literary scholarship, but potentially also performance studies, cultural histories and media and film studies. The geographical scope allows for enquiries into single maritime regions or coastal areas but also encourages inter-ocean perspectives. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15773

Michael Titlestad

Shipwreck Narratives: Out of our Depth

Michael Titlestad University of the Witwatersrand Johannesburg, South Africa

Maritime Literature and Culture ISBN 978-3-030-87040-9    ISBN 978-3-030-87041-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87041-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover image: Michael Titlestad This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

These essays are a long letter to Aaron and Rebecca Titlestad

Acknowledgements

Samantha Vice is always my first and most perceptive reader; Mike Kissack, a model scholar; and Jackie McInnes, a generous collaborator. I am indebted to those who have engaged my writing: Josiah Blackmore (Harvard), Stephen Donovan (Uppsala), Steven Mentz (St Johns, NY), Cindy McCreery (Sydney), Margaret Cohen (Stanford, who pointed me to Costeau’s Épave), Isabel Hofmeyr (Witwatersrand), Carl Thompson (Surrey), Mark Byron (Sydney), Meg Samuelson (Adelaide), Charne Lavery (Pretoria), and Joanna Taylor (Witwatersrand, psychiatrist). For their assistance: The Department of English and the Faculty of the Humanities at the University of the Witwatersrand (Johannesburg), the South African National Research Foundation, the Greenwich Maritime Museum (London), WA Shipwrecks Museum (Fremantle), and the National Library of South Africa (Cape Town).

vii

Contents

1 Introduction  1 Work Cited   3 Part I Historical Narratives   5 2 An Incidental Dystopia: The Wreck of the Batavia (1629)  7 Works Cited  17 3 Captain of a Shipwreck: The Wreck of the Wager (1741) 19 Works Cited  34 4 The Limits of the Law: The Wreck of the Grosvenor (1791) 35 Works Cited  46 5 Remembering William Mackay: The Wreck of the Juno (1795) 47 Works Cited  59 6 The Cannibals and the Butterfly: The Wreck of the Medusa (1816) 61 Works Cited  73

ix

x 

Contents

7 King Baba’s Largesse: The Wreck of the Winterton (1792) 75 Works Cited  88 Part II Representations  91 8 James F. Cobb and Daphne du Maurier in Cornwall 93 Works Cited 101 9 Stephen Crane and James Hanley’s Open Boats103 Works Cited 112 10 Proximity in Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat113 Works cited 119 11 John Steinbeck’s ‘Lifeboat’: An Unfinished Journey121 Works Cited 130 12 Making Room: The Lifeboat, an Invidious Motif133 Works Cited 140 13 The Inner Wreck in Sheila Fugard’s The Castaways143 Coda 150 Works Cited 151 14 Soundings: Gavin Bryars and Brian Eno’s Titanics153 Works Cited 162 15 Politics in Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s The Sinking of the Titanic165 Works Cited 174 16 ‘The Endlessly Sinking Ship’: Günter Grass’s Crabwalk177 Works Cited 185 17 Regarding Lampedusa187 Works Cited 196

 Contents 

xi

18 Jacki McInnes’s Urban Wreck197 Works Cited 207 19 Constructive Wrecks209 Works Cited 215 20 Postscript: Thinking from the Sea217 Works Cited 221 Index223

About the Author

Michael Titlestad  is a Professor in the Department of English, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. He has published widely on aspects of colonial, postcolonial, and maritime literature, and edits English Studies in Africa.

xiii

List of Figures

Fig. 18.1

Sleeps with the fishes (the raft of the Medusa). Jacki McInnes (photograph by Leon Krige) 2016 Figs. 18.2 House 38: hazardous objects. Jacki McInnes (Photographs by and 18.3 John Hodgkiss), 2009 Fig. 18.4 Plan of the raft of the Medusa: fifteen only were saved thirteen days after. Jacki McInnes. Fig. 18.5 House 38: hazardous objects Jacki McInnes (Photographs by John Hodgkiss), 2009

198 202 204 206

xv

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

In 1943, Jacques-Yves Costeau and Machel Echac tested their prototype ‘self-contained underwater breathing apparatus’ (SCUBA) in the short film, Épaves. It was only Costeau’s second film, following his 1942 directorial debut, Par dix-huit mètres de fond, in which he free-dived. Although their SCUBA was three large oxygen cylinders taped together and strapped precariously to their backs, Costeau and Echac, freed from air cables and lines, conducted the first modern wreck dive. They traversed the deck, overgrown with seaweed, inspected the giant barnacled propeller, swam down a hatchway into the hold, and climbed a ladder up towards the circle of light of a porthole. The camera gets close to details: stanchions, the deck rail, the ship’s wheel, the base of the mast, and the ragged hole torn in the freighter’s hull by a torpedo fired by a German U-boat. There is nothing like diving a modern shipwreck. As you descend and it comes into view, your first impression is that it is inordinate—a giant steel vessel, an apotheosis of technology, that pandemonium has brought to this final resting place. Most are hauntingly intact, their journeys stopped abruptly, encapsulating forever a moment in time. Close up, small machined and hand-worked parts evoke those who brought the ship into being, and you begin to imagine hands grasping rails, the steersman forcing the handles of the ship’s wheel, feet running across decks, shouted commands, and months of emergency drills suddenly shaping fate. It is when swimming belowdecks and through the narrow doors to cabins and sleeping quarters that one is intruding; this is the private life of a ship; bunks, fold-down desks, abandoned possessions, even keepsakes. Up © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Titlestad, Shipwreck Narratives: Out of our Depth, Maritime Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87041-6_1

1

2 

M. TITLESTAD

through hatchways, looking back on the ship as you ascend, wrecks are cathedrals: you recall their naves, transepts, and chancels, you have entered their sepulchres, and their bows, masts, or funnels reach up towards the light. Why do wrecks compel us? Whether formidable modern structures or the auratic fragments of the age of sail—cannons, curved metal beaten into shape in fiery forges, waterlogged timbers, stone ballast, even delicate crockery, and instruments of navigation—we are drawn to the seabed or to littorals in which the flotsam from foundering ships has washed up. As the chapters in this volume attest, wrecks are archaeological and arkeological—flooded caissons of technology, artefacts, and social history. They are also storied—wrecks generate floods of texts, which are subsequently anthologised, fictionalised, adapted, and translated into other media. We have never stopped speaking and writing about wrecks. The eighteen Chapters comprising this collection are divided into two Parts: historical narratives and representations. This is slightly deceptive. The first six Chapters concern narratives published within a year or two of the wrecks themselves, written either by survivors or by their amanuenses between 1629 and 1820. I present the context of each, but the Chapters also focus on a theme of historical shipwreck narratives generally: respectively, the descent into dystopia, the politics of command, moral fortitude, death-in-life, abjection, and hospitality. Part II comprises twelve ruminations on representations of shipwrecks in fiction, film, music, visual art— and in one instance, social theory. Parts I and II of the book are not discrepant; ideas raised in the first are elaborated in the second. Although each can be read independently, they are incremental, and my hope is that you will read all eighteen in sequence. Each Chapter is tentative, inconclusive, occasionally personal, and colloquial, although I do, on occasion, lapse into academic exegesis, which has become part of my nature. I was at pains, though, to embed rather than belabour philosophical scaffolding and to minimise the use of jargon. This is because, over the years, I have encountered diverse groups of professional and amateur maritime historians, dinner guests fascinated by shipwreck anecdotes, students enthralled by cannibalism, abjection, and captivity, and literary scholars and voracious readers alike who have a favourite shipwreck story. I intended to write essays that could be engaged by these various publics. As the dedication of this collection attests, I also had two special readers in mind: my thirteen-year-old daughter, Rebecca, and my seventeen-year-old son, Aaron. Some of the writing is probably

1 INTRODUCTION 

3

too wordy for them, but—as my health is increasingly uncertain—I wanted to tell them what I think, believe, and care about. Writing about shipwrecks allowed me to tell them almost everything I know. I do not presume that Aaron and Rebecca will one day pore over this book to discover the contours of my thought and the structure of my meditations (parents are inevitably realists), but it was invaluable to spend a few years writing to them. I do not baulk at repeating anecdotes and recounting in detail the events of wrecks and what occurred in their wakes. Anecdotes stitch narrative to intriguing ideas but must be left to speak for themselves. As to retelling shipwreck stories: they are simply too revealing, fascinating, and horrifying not to repeat. I also—somewhat presumptuously—wished to join the succession of writers who have recast these narratives, consolidated different sources, inflected them with different concerns, and reached conclusions that are different from their antecedents’. It was a delightful honour to join their ranks.

Work Cited Cousteau, Jacques-Yves and Machel Echac. 1943. Épaves. Trans. as Ten fathoms deep. Castle Films: UK.

PART I

Historical Narratives

CHAPTER 2

An Incidental Dystopia: The Wreck of the Batavia (1629)

On the morning of Friday, 12 June 1629, Jeronimus Cornelisz, an apothecary, clung to a bowsprit spar of the wrecked Dutch India Company (VOC) retourschip, the Batavia. Two days earlier, with all her canvas set, she had ploughed a trench into a half-hidden coral reef off a small stark island in the Houtman Abrolhos archipelago, about eighty kilometres from the west coast of Australia. Around 280 crew, passengers, and Company officials made land, but forty belligerent sailors spent another day on the wreck: raiding the grog store, breaking open the chests of coin and donning officers’ uniforms. Eventually the carnival dissipated, and the men were enticed ashore. Only Cornelisz remained. He could not get up the courage to let go. Finally, the choice was taken from him; the bowsprit broke apart and he fell into the sea. Like most sixteenth-century sailors and passengers, Cornelisz could not swim. The Company discouraged learning to swim and favoured recruits who could not since it reduced the chances of desertion. Amid floating debris, though, the waves carried Cornelisz, clinging to a beam, over the reef and safely onto the island. The other castaways were relieved to see him. The previous day, Commandeur Francisco Pelsaert (a VOC director, diplomat, and intellectual), Adriaen Jacobsz, the Batavia’s skipper, and thirty-eight others had set off in the ship’s longboat for the Company station at Batavia (Jakarta). Their departure had been clandestine; they feared that those remaining on the weather-beaten island would rush to join them and swamp the boat. The castaways would name © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Titlestad, Shipwreck Narratives: Out of our Depth, Maritime Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87041-6_2

7

8 

M. TITLESTAD

an island to the south ‘Traitors’ Island’ to mark this betrayal. Since Company appointment trumped mercantile-marine rank, as ‘Under-­ Merchant’ on the Batavia, Cornelisz was now the most senior person on the island. The castaways handed control to him; he seemed a godsend. Three-and-a half months later, Commandeur Pelsaert returned to the island with a contingent of Company soldiers and officials aboard the VOC jacht, the Sardam, to rescue the castaways. In the interim, Cornelisz, who had gathered around him a group of henchmen, had ordered the murder of ninety-six men, twelve women and seven children. When victims were drowned, their remains were left to drift off on the currents. Those who had been strangled, stabbed with daggers, or hacked to death with axes or cutlasses were buried in shallow graves. Pelsaert put Cornelisz on trial directly. The verdict read at his execution included the statement, ‘Jeronimus Cornelisz of Haarlem, aged about thirty years, apothecary, and late under Merchant of the ship Batavia, has misbehaved himself so gruesomely and has gone beyond himself, yea has even been denuded of all humanity and has been changed as to a tiger’ (‘The journals of Francisco Pelsaert’ 172). The sentence passed on the self-styled ‘Captain-General’ of the castaways was the harshest possible: his hands were hacked off with a hammer and chisel and then he was hanged from the rudimentary gallows that Pelsaert had ordered constructed on Seal Island, a few miles away. Although he consistently shifted responsibility (Pelsaert says, ‘he tried to talk himself clean, with his glib tongue’ [144]), under torture Cornelisz confessed to his crimes. Still, as he ascended the ladder to his death, he wept and implored Pelsaert to grant him mercy. In 2002, I visited the Abrolhos archipelago. My brother, Bruce, and I sat in Brearley Terminal at Geraldton Airport, a dingy hall dominated by a scale replica of the Sardam and a salvaged Batavia cannon, blued and wavy from submersion. It had been storming all morning and the pilot of the four-seater charter was loath to fly in those conditions and, he said, we would not see much anyway. Then, mid-afternoon, a radio call came through: a cray fisherman had come down with dysentery and the pilot would meet him on East Wallabi, the only island in the archipelago with a landing strip, and bring him to hospital. We were welcome to go along. The flight was in another world: bulging cloud castles, pelting rain and hail, a chiaroscuro of light and fragments of rainbows everywhere. Facing steadfastly forward, the plane—with its lawnmower engine—was blown diagonally across the sky as it rode the waves of wind. Then it happened: the skies parted miraculously as we approached the islands. We looked

2  AN INCIDENTAL DYSTOPIA: THE WRECK OF THE BATAVIA (1629) 

9

down on the bands of deep and light blue sea, the reefs, and the islands below us, and some in the distance: Traitors’, East Wallabi, West Wallabi, Long, Rat, Morley, North, Pelsaert, and Batavia’s Graveyard (now Beacon Island). As we walked around East Wallabi a little later, we looked out across the archipelago: ‘How could that have happened here? How could it have happened at all?’ The questions you ask when you are standing in the ruins of death camps, on killing fields, at crime scenes. The Batavia now floats in a sea of ink. Writers in all genres have been drawn to the limits that were manifest on the island, for they delineate evil, violence, power, authority, complicity, and dystopia. The unspeakable bleeds into the indescribable: much of the writing about the massacre reflects on its own inadequacy, suggesting that the reality of the violence and the true conditions of its emergence cannot be captured in either analytical or creative discourse. But, of course, writers carry on regardless of their self-deprecation and their suspicion that language will inevitably fail them. It has been writers’ quest to answer the questions that we asked on East Wallabi. Although it is now immanent in the history of shipwreck, the wreck and story of the Batavia were ‘discovered’ only in the 1960s. In April 1840, Captain John Lort Stokes, surveying the Abrolhos Islands for the British Admiralty, had reported the discovery of a ship’s beams on the south-west point of an island and deduced that they were those of the dismembered Batavia, but the location was soon forgotten. It was only in 1963 that a cray fisherman, David Johnson, spotted the wreck, and salvage began. Earlier that year, a study had appeared that had predicted that the ship would be found in the Wallabi Group, and the author, Henrietta Drake-Brockman, was only one reef out. She was a West Australian novelist, playwright, journalist, and amateur historian who set out to write a novel based on the wreck, about which very little had been written in English. She corresponded with archivists in Holland and Java and discovered the existence of seventeenth-century reports, juridical documents, passengers’ letters and petitions, and a series of polemical and ecclesiastical pamphlets. Two documents told most of the story: ‘The journals of Francisco Pelsaert’ (1629) and Ongeluckige voyagie van’t schip Batavia (1647). These became the basis of Drake-Brockman’s novel, the Christian allegory, The wicked and the fair (1957), which still bears scrutiny, and her foundational study of the Batavia events, Voyage to disaster (1963), which includes E. D. Drok’s translation of Pelsaert’s journals. As cannons, coins, jewels, countless domestic artifacts, and the carved stone used as ballast

10 

M. TITLESTAD

(intended for the construction of a portico at the VOC headquarters in Batavia) were being recovered, so was the story. Disbelief, like faith, is infectious. Drake-Brockman’s study is routed through the biography of Pelsaert, who she seems intent on exonerating, perhaps because he was shamefully dismissed by the Company just weeks after Cornelisz was hanged, and he died indigent within the year. She fixes on Pelsaert’s bewilderment: the Under-Merchant ‘assumes gigantic proportions, twisting in his mind’ (75); he ‘unquestionably [filled] Pelsaert’s mind with doubt to a degree that led to much re-questioning and considerable heart-searching on the part of the Commandeur’ (75). Drake-­ Brockman proclaims her own existential disorientation. Like Pelsaert, she keeps telling us that she cannot find a path into either representation or explanation. Yet, despite her sense that she could never describe Cornelisz’s actions or understand his motivation, Drake-Brockman identified the details that became salient in subsequent scholars’ interpretations. She suggests that ‘we need to seek some clue to [Cornelisz’s] behaviour in the teachings of Johannes Torrentius van der Beecke, of whom he confessed himself a follower’ (73). This confession was of signal importance for Pelsaert for whom it was proof that Cornelisz was a heretic capable of anything. Born in 1589, Torrentius was an Amsterdam artist renowned for his still-life paintings. He became notorious for living in luxury and for his heretical pronouncements, particularly to a group of young acolytes he gathered around himself at ‘Thibault’s fencing club’. At Drake-Brockman’s request, Dutch archivists established that Torrentius was arrested on 30 August 1627 ‘accused of living a very scandalous life, with loathsome blasphemy and shameful heresy’ (74). He was ‘put to the question’ (tortured) for days but did not confess. After the trial, the English Ambassador to Holland, Sir Dudley Carlton, assisted Torrentius to escape to the court of Charles I, who was a passionate admirer of his paintings. Apparently, his behaviour did not improve. Torrentius fell from royal favour and returned in disgrace to Amsterdam, where he lived in hiding until his death, seventeen years later, in 1644. Drake-Brockman sets out something of the genealogy of the ‘philosophies of Torrentius’ that so appalled Pelsaert. She situates Torrentius in the lineage of the Adamites of the second century, the Brethren of the Free Spirit—‘a pantheistic group flourishing in Western Europe in the early thirteenth century’—and sects of Anabaptism which were the ‘most extreme of the Reformation groups in the northern Netherlands and Westphalia’ (74–75). She saw the violence on Batavia’s Graveyard as a

2  AN INCIDENTAL DYSTOPIA: THE WRECK OF THE BATAVIA (1629) 

11

manifestation of a persistent millennial heresy; Cornelisz was the inheritor of a blasphemous tradition and embodied it on Batavia, where it went unchecked. The dystopian island, in Drake-Brockman’s view, was— although she does not use the term—a chronotope; it concentrated in space and time a set of heretical ideas, revealing both their nature and their consequences. A battle between good and evil played itself out, and— largely because of the craftily contrived exile of Wiebbe Hayes and the other soldiers to a neighbouring island—evil reigned until Pelsaert’s return. In 2002, Mike Dash, the Cambridge historian, published the fullest and most insightful study of the Batavia catastrophe, Batavia’s Graveyard. His explanation of the events is less pedantically ‘theological’ than Drake-­ Brockman’s, or at least less Manichean. He delves deeply into Cornelisz’s intellectual context, reflects on the rise and various manifestations of antinomianism, and strays—I will argue, inadvisably—into the territory of psychoanalysis. Dash had additional facts about Cornelisz at his disposal. Litigation by a creditor combined with a domestic scandal had caused his apothecary business to fail. His infant son died from syphilis, probably contracted from a poorly chosen wet nurse, and his clients deserted him as his reputation sullied. His entry into the Company, and his departure on his first ever voyage, on the Batavia, was because he had nothing to lose. That he was appointed as Under-Merchant suggests, though, that he was still respected and could seemingly be entrusted with the commercial interests of the VOC. He was, though, profoundly disenchanted with the world that had, despite his learning and renown, brought him to ruin. Dash considers this personal disenchantment less important than Cornelisz’s social associations and philosophical commitments or, perhaps more accurately, his theological obfuscations. Torrentius, Cornelisz’s guide in these matters, was accused by public officials of being a black magician and it was claimed that his paintings were produced under the influence of infernal agency. Reports attest that he made heretical declarations to his followers: that he mocked the suffering of Christ, described the Bible as mere fable, and advanced the Epicurean notion that ‘true happiness is to be found in the pursuit of pleasure’ (Dash 37). These are, however, the standard charges in the denouncement of heretics at the time and they commonly concealed more complex disputes. While Protestant reformers and state ideologues were striving to regulate faith and political doctrine in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic, universities—as elsewhere in Europe—promoted ‘dialectical disputation’. (The emergence and importance of this practice is mapped by David Riggs in his excellent

12 

M. TITLESTAD

biography, The world of Christopher Marlowe [2004].) Dialectical disputation entailed the public presentation of cases for and against a proposition, with equal conviction and in the presence of undergraduates. Although this might seem no more than conventional debate, what set it apart at the time was that the propositions addressed the fundamental precepts of the Christian faith: the existence of hell and heaven, transubstantiation, the resurrection of Christ, the authority of the clergy, and so on. This mode of disputation spread from the universities into the public sphere (Riggs 134). In the context of competing versions of Protestantism and contesting claims to knowledge, it must have seemed for the first time as if there was no end to what could be said. Consequently, public intellectual flamboyance became fashionable. The charges brought against Torrentius were likely yet another expression of the church and state’s alarm at this tendency towards free thought. Dash deduces from court records that Torrentius was a Gnostic rather than an atheist; he was a ‘believer in the ancient heresy that God and Satan are of equal strength, and that the world is the creation of the devil’ (37). He also hinted at the possibility that a spark of divinity existed in each human being and that it could be fostered, here on earth, by living life to the full. This belief accords with the Gospel of St. Thomas, the ‘lost gospel’ sometimes included in the Apocrypha, generally suppressed by the Vatican, and much beloved by contemporary anti-Catholic conspiracy theorists. These were common debates at the time, though, and do not amount to evidence that Torrentius was a thoroughgoing Epicurean or atheist zealot. He can be identified with a pastiche of ideas circulating at the time and he was probably best equipped for provocation in taverns and for justifying his self-indulgence. If not Epicureanism or atheism, what did Cornelisz learn from Torrentius at Thibault’s fencing club? Cornelisz’s capacity to set aside standards of morality and accountability originated in the heretical maxim, ‘All that I do, God gave the same into my heart’. Antinomianism—the defining conviction of Anabaptists—is a belief in quotidian absolution; that devotees enter a state of grace on conversion and are, therefore, liberated from the petty moral constraints that are relevant to others. Anything antinomians do, since they are already redeemed, is an expression of divine will, which coincides with their desires. Frederic J. Baumgartner, a historian of millennial movements, describes the antinomian Anabaptists as behaving as if the end time were upon them: ‘speaking in tongues, engaging in free sex, seizing property, and predicting Christ’s return’ (1999,

2  AN INCIDENTAL DYSTOPIA: THE WRECK OF THE BATAVIA (1629) 

13

89). During the first significant Anabaptist uprising, in Zurich in 1525, the Swiss authorities imposed the death sentence on all members of the sect and executed its ringleaders. Nine years later, in 1534, Anabaptists proclaimed that only devotees who gathered in Münster—their ‘New Jerusalem’—would be spared death and damnation when the imminent apocalypse occurred. A protracted siege ended with a bloody massacre on 24 June 1535. Although Anabaptism was crushed at Münster, antinomianism was not. Related sects sprung up all over Europe, with the Brethren of the Free Spirit being the most widespread. It drew the ire of authorities. In Antwerp, where the Brethren had gained most traction, members were rounded up in 1544 and put to the sword. Some probably escaped though, as antinomian principles flourished among the Libertines for half a century. Torrentius and Cornelisz seem closest to the derivative and rather muddled philosophies of Libertinism. We might argue, in simplified Freudian terms, that Cornelisz yielded to his ‘id’ and suspended all authority of his ‘superego’; that he gave in entirely to his desires and was able to act without conscience. Drake-­ Brockman concludes that Pelsaert’s journals ‘create an elusive picture of a subtle, even paranoiac, personality that was capable of fascinating and deceiving many, of attracting devotion, of demanding and receiving deference’ (75). Dash turned to a psychologist, Dr Robert Hare of the University of British Columbia, and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV 1994) to categorise Cornelisz (278–81). He determined—perhaps unsurprisingly—that Cornelisz was ‘psychopath,’ although Hare suggested that he would be better described as a ‘sociopath’. (Hare developed the ‘sociopathy checklist’ which is still widely applied.) ‘Psychopathy’ and ‘psychoticism,’ Hare pointed out, are often confused to the detriment of analysis. Moreover, ‘sociopathy’ implies that ‘psychopathy’ is not a generalised, ahistorical condition, but arises within a particular ideological context. This is the crux. I am not convinced that Drake-Brockman or Dash’s turn to psychology is useful: it is highly questionable whether modern tools for the analysis of mental illness apply to earlier historical periods. Beginning with Madness and civilization (1961), Michel Foucault has argued consistently and convincingly that human subjectivity is historically constituted; that the notion of ‘being human’ (of subjectivity itself) changes with successive epistemic horizons. To place Cornelisz in a contemporary taxonomy of mental illness misconstrues the matter. At this remove, we cannot meaningfully conceive of his (particular and historical) madness. It is better that we consider the dystopian society

14 

M. TITLESTAD

that arose on Batavia’s Graveyard as something more than an extension of one man’s unbalanced, diseased mind. In the weeks before the Batavia wrecked, Cornelisz was planning a mutiny. He and his co-conspirators decided to enrage Pelsaert in the hope of turning him against the skipper, Adriaen Jacobsz. One night, when she was walking on deck, they seized Lucretia (Creesje) Jansz, the beautiful young wife of a Company official, who had also become the Commandeur’s confidante. They lifted her skirts and smeared a mixture of tar and excrement on her legs, buttocks, and genitals. Unsure of the exact contours of the conspiracy, Pelsaert decided not to act, intending instead to report the matter for investigation when they reached Batavia. But, before the munity could proceed, the ship was wrecked. When he arrived on the island, Cornelisz was, then, already the leader of a mutinous faction and he quickly set about consolidating his control. He dispatched a group of Company soldiers, under the command of a capable and enterprising young private from Groningen, Wiebbe Hayes, to West Wallabi, supposedly to scout for water. Cornelisz’s men left them marooned. With the false promise of better resources, he sent three other parties to outlying islands. He had reduced the group to a manageable number and had rid himself of those who might challenge his authority. The killing began in the first week of July. The first victim was Abraham Hendrix, who was caught siphoning wine from a barrel. During the debate that ensued, Cornelisz unilaterally disbanded the raad (the governing committee) that had been established in the days after the wreck, replacing it with a council of his mutineers and henchmen. Hendrix was summarily executed by stabbing—as, immediately thereafter, were two carpenters accused of conspiracy. Carpenters possessed the skills to make boats from wreck timber, which could have thwarted Cornelisz’s plans. For the first two weeks, the Under-Merchant, claiming to be the legitimate representative of the Company, could disguise the succession of murders as necessary and procedural. But he and his followers were developing a taste for murder, then rape and then the two combined. They began to see whether they could outdo one another in the perversity and duration of a killing, predominantly of men and the older women, while they gathered the girls and younger women into a tent-harem. All pretence of procedure was abandoned. Although he ordered and organised the murder of all 115 victims, Cornelisz did not personally kill anyone. He tried once. In addition to their other skills, apothecaries were poisoners. On 20 July, irritated by the

2  AN INCIDENTAL DYSTOPIA: THE WRECK OF THE BATAVIA (1629) 

15

crying of Mayken Cardoes’ malnourished baby, Cornelisz decided to experiment with mercurium sublimatum. He had his men clear the tent so that he could administer the poison. He only succeeded in putting the infant into a coma and then panicked. He called on Deschamps, one of the mutineers, to strangle the baby. Simon Leys (the nom de plume of Pierre Ryckmans), the prize-winning linguist, literary scholar, and essayist, had been preoccupied with the Batavia story for much of his life. In addition to intermittent archival research, he had spent several weeks living in one of the two small houses on Beacon Island. With characteristic modesty, when he read Mike Dash’s book, Leys declared that he had nothing more to say. Yet he penned an essay, ‘The wreck of the Batavia’ (2005), that Phillip Sollers, writing in Le Monde, described as ‘brief, direct, essential—and monstrous’ (n.p.). Leys’s important contribution to Batavia scholarship is his insight into the practices of totalitarian regimes. He suggests that power is always contextual: the ship was wrecked in the space between the authority of the Dutch Republic and the Company headquarters at Batavia, and, furthermore, Cornelisz stepped into the vacuum created by the departure of Pelsaert and the skipper. In this zone of relative autonomy, the Under-Merchant set about scripting a reality that would serve his ends. He did so in the first instance by mimicking the accepted protocols and practices of state and Company authority (the formation of the raad, staging mock trials, having the castaways sign oaths of allegiance, and distributing titles and honours). Then he separated the group into competing factions, setting each against the others, acting at times as the beneficent arbitrator in disputes he had devised. Since violence, and the fear it induces, are the basis of totalitarianism, he instituted a reign of terror based on arbitrariness: ‘from time to time, individuals were selected [for slaughter] at random, under various pretexts, or without any reason’ (Leys 154). He and his lieutenants decided who would live and who would die; and it ‘was imperative to show total obedience at all times—which did not guarantee what would happen the next day’ (35). Finally, Cornelisz dragged bystanders into complicity by making them murder other survivors—which ‘[erased] the distinction between victim and murderer’ (20). In his essay, Leys does not labour interpretation. He could have digressed into the work of theorists of totalitarianism—from V. I. Lenin, Karl Popper, George Orwell, Hannah Arendt, Carl Schmitt, to Georgio Agamben, and Noam Chomsky—but he allows the parallels to speak for themselves. It emerges from his reflections that ‘evil’ is contextual and

16 

M. TITLESTAD

perpetrated in the interests of power. Theological, philosophical, and psychological explanations of Cornelisz’s conduct and its dystopian consequences undervalue the fact that Batavia’s Graveyard modelled totalitarian states and that it potentially teaches us as much about politics as it does about religion and morality. Back in Geraldton Airport, Bruce and I sit next to the life-size brass statue of Wiebbe Hayes that guards the coffee and gift shop. Bruce, still green with the vestiges of travel sickness, begins, as if out of nowhere, to reminisce about a day during his National Service. In the language of Oshakati, Angola, ambushes, going ‘bossies,’ and dead ‘terrs,’ he tells me again of the four hours he spent lying in a furrow as shrapnel shredded the trees just a few feet above his head. I reciprocate. I arrived, bewildered and weeping, at the doors of the psychiatric ward of 2 Military Hospital in Cape Town. I think we are looking for corollaries: moments when forms no longer held us. Something like a personal apocalypse—when a veil of familiarity is ripped asunder, bare life is revealed and the structures of power become apparent. We are refusing to give in to the ineffability of Cornelisz’s evil. It was just a banal and grubby amplification of a normality we once inhabited. In the WA Shipwreck Galleries in Fremantle, a salvaged, conserved, and carefully reconstructed section of the Batavia stern is suspended above the floor with steel rods. It hangs there like an imposing dark wing on a metal skeleton. In its shadow is a glass case displaying the remains of one of Cornelisz’s victims. A six-centimetre groove on his skull reveals that he was killed with a single sword stroke. Hugh Edwards’s team of archaeologists thought that the skeleton is probably that of the young Edward de Vries, but recent forensics suggest that the unformed pelvis is that of Jacob Hendrizxen Drayer, who Cornelisz had executed because he was ‘half lame and thus useless’ (Dash 273). Metaphorically, there is proliferation in the shadow of that dark wooden wing. In the last twenty years, at least five novels concerning the Batavia have been published—by Arabella Edge (2000), Gary Crew (2001), Tim Berman (2002), Katherine Heyman (2003), and Greta van der Rol (2010)—an opera has been staged, a suite composed, a play performed, three exhibitions have been mounted, and an additional monograph, by Peter FitzSimons (2011), has appeared. This preoccupation relates to the contemporary fascination with catastrophe and our endless speculations regarding the effects of social collapse. What would happen if everything broke down, if the containing and organising structures of our being disintegrated? What if, following Joseph

2  AN INCIDENTAL DYSTOPIA: THE WRECK OF THE BATAVIA (1629) 

17

Conrad’s notion, we were suddenly freed from our neighbour’s gaze (Heart of darkness 1988, 49–50)? Would the psychological and political transformations be real, incremental, spectacular, dramatic, even violent? These questions are integral to shipwreck narratives. The Batavia ‘episode’—for it was only that—is most productively interpreted as neither a manifestation of the grandeur of the eschatological end times, nor as simply an expression of Cornelisz’s deep pathology, neither epic Armageddon nor only individual perversion. These explanations are two orders of evasion: theological melodrama and a convenient recourse to individualism. As Cornelisz climbed the ladder and inserted his head into the noose, he wept and pleaded for his life. There was nothing titanic about him, only weakness; nothing spectacular, only the frighteningly mundane. The darkness on Batavia’s Graveyard, while cultivated by the Under-­ Merchant, was systemic and collective (even though Cornelisz and each of his henchmen was accountable for his actions). We are presently enmeshed in the hyperboles of ‘apocalypse’ and ‘dystopia,’ and we cling to a spectacular conception of monstrous individuals. But evil, which is easier to recognise than define, takes hold incrementally; it arises from a succession of small decisions, a combination of dispositions, within a network of social relations, and through degrees of complicity. If the Batavia story is one about a dystopia, it reveals that, in certain circumstances, morality and ethics require only a nudge to give way to rapacity and violence. Dystopias are common and proximate. We should not anticipate the apocalypse for it has always been unfolding in our midst—like islands in an archipelago linked by the sea floor, it has repeatedly broken through the surface into view. For this reason, we should moderate our rhetoric and increase our vigilance.

Works Cited Baumgartner, Frederic J. 1999. Longing for the end: a history of millennialism in Western civilization. New York: St Martin’s Press. Berman, Tim. 2002. Batavia: the counterfeit coin conspiracy. Perth: Greenwell Point. Conrad, Joseph. 1988. Heart of darkness. New York: Norton, 1988. Crew, Gary. 2001. Strange objects. Sydney: Headline. Dash, Mike. 2002. Batavia’s Graveyard. London: Weidenfeld. Drake-Brockman, Henrietta. 1995. Voyage to disaster. Perth: University of Western Australia Press.

18 

M. TITLESTAD

Drake-Brockman, Henrietta. 1957. The wicked and the fair. Sydney: Angus and Robertson. Edge, Arabella. 2000. The Company. London: Picador. Edwards, Hugh. 2000. Islands of angry ghosts: murder, mutiny and mayhem: the story of the Batavia. London: HarperCollins. FitzSimons, Peter. 2011. Batavia. Sydney: RHYW. Foucault, Michel. 1998. Madness and civilization: a history of insanity in the Age of Reason. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Vintage. Hare, Robert D, Stephen D. Hart and Timothy J. Harper. 1991. Psychology and the DSM-IV: criteria for antisocial personality disorder. Journal of Abnormal Psychology 100.3: 391–8. doi: https://doi.org/10.1037//0021-843x.100.3.391. Heyman, Kathryn. 2003. The accomplice. London: Headline. Leys, Simon. 2005. The wreck of the Batavia and Prosper. Melbourne: Black Inc. Riggs, David. 2004. The world of Christopher Marlowe. London: Faber. Sollers, Phillipe. 2005. Review: The wreck of the Batavia and Prosper, Le Monde https://www.blackincbooks.com.au/books/wreck-­batavia-­prosper. Accessed 6 April 2021. Van der Rol, Greta. 2010. To die a dry death. Winchester: Dragon.

CHAPTER 3

Captain of a Shipwreck: The Wreck of the Wager (1741)

A fracas arose when, on the evening of Wednesday, 10 June 1741, Midshipman Cozens arrived at the doorway of an Indian-built hut on the shore of a desolate island in the Golfo de Peñas (‘Gulf of Sorrow’) off the coast of Chile. Captain Cheap and a motley group of sycophantic warrant and marine officers had felt entitled to the hut, the only viable shelter on a desolate, muddy, windswept coast. They had settled in a month earlier, on 15 May 1741, the day after the Wager drifted uncontrolledly into the Guayaneco Archipelago, and came to a jarring, grinding stop, wedged between two rocky islets. Mr Cozens had come to the hut demanding wine from the purser since the daily allowance had been inexplicably denied. John Bulkeley (sometimes ‘Bulkley’), the gunner, and author (with John Cummins, the carpenter) of the most detailed and widely read account of the wreck, the blandly titled A voyage to the South Seas 1740–1 (1743), observes that Cozens was affable, well liked, and a respected junior officer; an opinion shared by John Byron, Alexander Campbell, and Isaac Morris, his fellow midshipmen. But he was short-tempered. Three days earlier, Cheap had berated Cozens for not putting enough effort into rolling a ‘cask of pease, he found too heavy for him’ (Bulkeley and Cummins 15). Cozens called for some men to assist him. Cheap reacted violently to this perceived insubordination, accusing the midshipman of ‘drunkenness,’ and then striking him repeatedly with his cane. Humiliated at being beaten in the presence of the men under his command, Cozens, Bulkeley tells us, ‘talked to the captain about one Captain © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Titlestad, Shipwreck Narratives: Out of our Depth, Maritime Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87041-6_3

19

20 

M. TITLESTAD

Shelvocke’. ‘I heard Mr Cozens use very unbecoming language to the captain, telling him that he was come to those seas to pay Shelvocke’s debts and insolently added tho’ Shelvocke was a rogue, he was not a fool; and by G–d you are both’ (16). In 1720, George Shelvocke’s Speedwell was wrecked on Más a Tierra off Juan Fernández, but within five months his crew built a twenty-ton boat from her wreck, captured the first ship they encountered, which prize they named the Happy Return, and resumed privateering. Cozens’s outburst referred to Shelvocke’s ambiguous reputation; he was accused of piracy and charged with fraud, though he was later exonerated on a technicality, but he had also displayed remarkable leadership and enterprise—both of which Cozens knew Cheap lacked. It was an eloquently coupled insult, particularly from a man in his cups. The midshipman was summarily detained in the store tent, but when the seething captain returned an hour later with the intention of beating him again, a brave sentry—the Articles of War on his side and the captain surprisingly compliant—prevented the assault. On that direful Wednesday night, when Cozens, two days after his release, arrived at the hut demanding wine, the purser declared ‘that he had come to mutiny, and without any further ceremony, discharged a pistol at his head, and would have shot him, had he not been prevented by the cooper’s canting the pistol with his elbow at the instant of its going off’ (Bulkeley and Cummins 17). Hearing the discharge of the pistol, Lieutenant Hamilton of the marines, armed with a loaded flintlock, called the captain, claiming that Cozens had come to ‘mutiny’. Cheap stormed up to Cozens, ‘clapped a cock’d pistol to [his] cheek, and precipitously shot him, without asking any questions’ (18). The captain then summoned all the men to proclaim that he was still their commander and retained complete authority. Bulkeley, who was already emerging as the informal leader of the largest contingent of the crew, prudently advised that they go unarmed. But Cheap’s declaration already had the ring of sophistry. Cozens was not dead; he lay with his head on his right hand, bleeding heavily. For some time, no one dared to assist him. S.W.C. Pack, the first contemporary historian to reconstruct the Wager story, describes the captain, rather pallidly, as ‘unforgiving and unrelenting’ (1964, 64). After a considerable time had passed, Cheap ordered the surgeon, William Elliot, to have Cozens carried to the sick tent, but being one of captain’s cronies, Elliot left his care to the junior mate who, unassisted, removed the ball that had penetrated three inches below Cozens’s right eye. Then, seeking

3  CAPTAIN OF A SHIPWRECK: THE WRECK OF THE WAGER (1741) 

21

to make the dying man an example, Cheap publicised his bizarre intention to have the midshipman tried by Commander Anson for mutiny and then capriciously refused any further treatment for Cozens—who lingered, unattended and screaming in agony for the next three days, leaving a dark, indelible impression on the men. The murder of the midshipman was, in various ways, the pivot of the Wager story. She was a twenty-eight gun, sixth-rate square-rigged East Indiaman, with a 123 feet gundeck, built in 1734 and purchased by the Royal Navy in 1739. The Wager was to function as a fighting supply ship on an ambitious expedition under Commodore George Anson. The war against Spain that began in 1740 and only ended in 1748 with the Treaty of Aix-la-­ Chapelle was known as the ‘War of Jenkins’ Ear,’ since—anecdotally—it was precipitated by a Spanish attack on the English barque, Rebecca, and the severing in a scuffle of Captain Robert Jenkins’s ear—which was presented ceremonially before the House of Commons. But, as Glyn Williams, points out, ‘the files of ministers already bulged with plans for attacks on all parts of Spain’s overseas empires: Havana, Vera Cruz, Cartagena and Darien in the Caribbean; Panama and Lima in the South Sea. Manila, far distant across the North Pacific’ (1999, 2). The objective of the Anson squadron, comprising six ships and two victuallers (or ‘pinks’) was twofold: to wrest control of the eastern Pacific from the Spanish by attacking coastal fortresses and strongholds and—foremost in the imagination of the public and crews—to capture the treasure ship, Galeón de Manila or Galeón de Acapulco (her name changed depending on her destination), which was known colloquially as ‘the prize of all the oceans’. She had been captured twice before (in 1587 and 1709) and on both occasions the English were amazed by both the riches she carried (mostly Chinese goods acquired in Manila) and the relative ease with which she had been taken. Three years later, in 1744, the flagship of the Anson Expedition, the Centurion, sailed up the Thames River laden with treasure taken from another galleon, the Nuestra Señora de Covadonga, which she came across fortuitously rather than through garnered intelligence or by diligent navigation. Wagons loaded with gold and artefacts were paraded through the streets of London (valued somewhere between £500 000 and twice that) and Anson, proclaimed a national hero, was rewarded with a meteoric rise in the hierarchy of naval command. Courting understatement, the success of the expedition was relative: one of the pinks had to return a few days into the voyage (transferring her cargo—largely of brandy—to the overloaded Wager); the Severn and the Pearl experienced such difficulty

22 

M. TITLESTAD

rounding the Horn that they lost contact with the squadron and returned before reaching the Pacific; the Tryal was so badly damaged that she had to be abandoned at Juan Fernández; the disabled Gloucester had to be blown up in the Pacific lest, drifting aimlessly, she was captured by the Spanish; and the Wager was wrecked on the Patagonian coast. But the real adversary had been scurvy: of the official 1854 sailors and marines (some estimates are as high as 2300) who sailed on the six ships, only 145 of the Centurion’s original 400 crew survived (see Log of the Centurion, Herpes 1973, 254–55) and, in the next years, only a handful of stragglers from the other ships made it back to England by various routes. The greatest losses were among the marine detachments, with most scorbutic before the squadron even reached Madeira. The situation was aggravated by the fact that a significant number of the marines were officially classified as ‘invalids’—retired and injured soldiers mustered at Chelsea Hospital by the Admiralty at the last minute to make up numbers. It is estimated that scurvy caused the death of around 72% of the men who sailed from Portsmouth on Christmas Day 1739, the worst mortality rate of any Pacific expedition in the eighteenth century. The Wager was initially captained by Dandy Kidd, but on 4 November, he was transferred to the Pearl when her commander, Richard Norris, was sent home from Madeira due to ill health. On Kidd’s death from scurvy on the voyage from St Catherine’s, the Hon. George Murray took command of the Pearl and Anson promoted David Cheap, one of his trusted lieutenants on the Centurion, to captain the Wager. This succession is important: this was Cheap’s first command and there had been no time—even if he had had the capacity—to secure the trust and loyalty of his crew. His inexperience, combined with his gratitude for Anson’s patronage, left him resolved to follow his Admiral’s confidential orders to rendezvous at Nuestra Señora de Socorro rather than to sail west to the safety of Juan Fernández, where the damage suffered by the Wager rounding the Horn in a tempest could have been repaired. Following a 480-kilometre miscalculation of longitude by the master of the Centurion, the subsequent dispersal of the squadron, and the deterioration of sailing conditions, three of the captains sensibly headed west. Cheap, against the advice of some of his officers, including Bulkeley, who objected vociferously, insisted on sailing north, parallel to the treacherous Chilean lee shore. On the 14 May 1741, the Wager contumaciously drifted up the Golfo de Peñas and despite the crew’s desperate efforts—loosing the topsails, casting the anchors, and hacking down the main and foremast—she shuddered violently as her oak

3  CAPTAIN OF A SHIPWRECK: THE WRECK OF THE WAGER (1741) 

23

hull lodged between two ragged cays. There were consolations: the Wager had remained upright and roughly intact (increasing the chances of salvaging provisions), her boats (a barge, a yawl, and what was to become the all-important cutter) were still serviceable, and, most significantly, the coast was in sight. But Cheap was now the captain of a shipwreck. Wrecks are obviously chaotic. There were regular drills of the procedures during evacuation, and certain remits had become conventions: officers were to remain calm, in control and direct an orderly evacuation; the captain should be the last to leave the ship (taking with him the ship’s log to present at the inevitable subsequent enquiry); and, although there were earlier precedents, by the nineteenth century it had become a maxim that women, children, noble passengers, and the injured and vulnerable should be prioritised during disembarkation. Nonetheless, rioting was characteristic of Georgian wrecks and the aftermath of the Wager contretemps became legend in this regard. John Byron, then a nineteen-year-old midshipman (and later grandfather of the poet George Gordon, Lord Byron) penned in 1768, that the men ‘grew very riotous, broke open every chest and box that was at hand, stove in the heads of casks of brandy and wine as they were borne up to the hatchways, and got so drunk, that several of them were drowned on board, and lay floating about the decks for some days after’ (1768, 17). It was subsequently discovered that several corpses bore signs of strangulation and stabbing. Bulkeley and Cummins’s description is even more carnivalesque: ‘upon the principal officers leaving her, [many] fell into the most violent outrage and disorder: they began with broaching the wine in the lazaretto; then to breaking open cabbins and chests, arming themselves with swords and pistols, threatening to murder those who should oppose or question them; being drunk and mad with liquor, they plunder’d chests and cabbins for money and other things of value, cloathed themselves in the richest apparel they could find, and imagined themselves lords paramount’ (11). Byron observes, rather obviously, that one would imagine ‘that getting to the land was the highest attainment of their wishes’ (1678, 17), that donning officers’ uniforms and arming themselves might be a lesser priority. A decade later, in 1751, as First Lord of the Admiralty commanding the navy during The Seven Years War, Anson instituted far-reaching reforms. In addition to mandating standardised uniforms for all commissioned officers, improving medical care, and targeting widespread graft, he redrafted the Articles of War—which were read aloud every day at noon to all crews. Among his amendments, Anson resolved two lingering ambiguities:

24 

M. TITLESTAD

henceforth, the authority of the captain and other officers remained unaffected in the event of a wreck and continued if the crew were stranded and, second, castaway crews would be paid at the same rate as if they were serving at sea. The Wager may have been in the back of Anson’s mind: when she struck, many of the men assumed themselves no longer subject to the officers’ authority and all knew that their pay had been stopped. It must have been craic to imitate your erstwhile officers in drunken revelry and not unwise to arm yourself given the prospect of imminent factionalism. The reason for drunkenness is clear: through daily dispensing of grog, the navy and mercantile marine cultivated mild alcoholism (if such a thing exists) to ensure the compliance of crews. Its unrationed availability during wreck was a godsend, but quaffing was also rebellion—seizing the means of control. This debauchery, we might add, was not far removed from the notoriously Dionysian conduct of seamen in port. Released from the confines of their ships—after journeys lasting anything from a few weeks to several years—they were renowned for spending their accumulated wages in a rampage of drunken whoring and gambling. Violence, ranging from settling personal scores to running street battles between crews of different ships, was routine. The five months that the 140 survivors of the Wager spent on the island (before Bulkeley’s men headed south and Cheap’s handful of lackies set off northwards) were marked by disorder, dissent, insubordination, schisms, plotting, and violence. To conceive of Cheap’s loss of authority, which occurred rapidly after Cozens’s murder, we need to consider the destruction of two related ‘structures’ (by which I mean ‘arrangements’ or ‘orders’) that occur when ships founder. Their collapse is fundamental in the aftermath of most wrecks, although the consequences are unique in each instance. I am concerned here with the Georgian Wager, but most of the chapters in this volume touch on corresponding concerns. The first ‘structure’ is self-evident: naval and mercantile ships were highly organised mechanisms based in practices (and theories) of authority, hierarchy, discipline, specialisation, cooperation, custom, and law. Whether a naval frigate or an East Indiamen, eighteenth-century ships were epitomes of technology that functioned by virtue of a trained community of practice with its provenance in centuries of inherited skill and knowledge. Shipwreck destroyed that world—it wrenched men (and women) out of place, undoing obligations, allegiances, relationships, roles, and functions. My discussion below of the destruction of the ‘wooden world’ in shipwreck may

3  CAPTAIN OF A SHIPWRECK: THE WRECK OF THE WAGER (1741) 

25

seem a little plodding to those familiar with eighteenth-century shipboard life, but several details are salient to the aftermath of the wreck of the Wager. The second ‘structure’ undone in shipwreck relates to the first because practice (or function), place (physical and social), and power are clearly existential, not only practical considerations. I am concerned, in my concluding reflections, with shipwreck as the traumatising destruction of ‘dwelling’. What, I wonder, did it mean to ‘belong’ to a ship (‘Bulkeley was of the Wager’), occupy a place (from the relative spaciousness of the main cabin to a twenty-eight-inch berth on the gundeck), work in a specific domain of that small, over-populated world, to eat together, share confidences and sexual intimacy, to be in love—and then, during a wreck, to be violently ejected into the vast expanse of the sea or become a stranger on a strange shore. What might it have meant to be ‘un-homed’ by wreck; to be cast out of a familiar order that—if not actually your home—was the closest thing to it? Let us begin with the hierarchy of shipboard life. N.A.M. Rodger, a preeminent maritime historian, took the title of his book, The wooden world: an anatomy of the Georgian navy (1988), from a frequently republished satirical pamphlet of 1707, The wooden world dissected in the character of a ship of war. Rodger counters the misconception that Georgian ships were ‘total institutions’ (I use Erving Goffman’s 1957 phrase to conjure Charles Laughton as William Bligh in the 1936 Mutiny on the Bounty, strutting about the quarterdeck, raining down violence on a benign, loyal, and hard-working crew). Rather, Rodger suggests, ‘the company of every ship was divided in many overlapping, ambiguous, and untidy ways, some ill-defined by the regulations, and some not mentioned at all. Shipboard society was a complex world in which each person’s place was defined by many invisible and subtle distinctions’ (16). Commissioned officers (generally the governing class gone to sea) ranged from Admiral of the Fleet to the various degrees of lieutenant (first, second, third, and so on) and were regarded, and expected to behave, as gentlemen. ‘Captain’ was a rank above Commander and below Commodore, but it was also an appellation used to designate the officer in command of a ship at sea of any size or rating. There were only two naval commissioned officers on the Wager; Cheap and the unpopular and ineffectual Lieutenant Baines (‘Baynes’ or ‘Beans’—no one seems certain), but there were also two marine officers, Captain Pembleton and Lieutenant Harris. Midshipmen (Cozens, and the loquacious Byron, Morris, and Campbell, all of whom published accounts of the Wager) dressed like officers, had most likely

26 

M. TITLESTAD

passed through the Royal Naval Academy at Portsmouth, and were destined to become officers. Part of each of their days was spent in tuition, learning theoretical and practical seamanship. Warrant officers—such as Bulkeley, the gunner, and Cummins, the carpenter—included the master (the navigator and pilot), purser (who was responsible for victualling and managing stores), the surgeon, and the boatswain (who was responsible for order and discipline on deck). They commonly had ‘mates,’ who were assistants and apprentices. Unlike other ranks, warrant officers often remained with one ship for years if not for their entire careers and consequently created enclaves of relative (spatial and dispositional) autonomy and, importantly, owned the tools of their trades. At times trusted warrant officers performed tasks usually allocated to those who were commissioned. Bulkeley, for instance, was in command of a watch, making him at times the senior officer on deck. Common sailors (also referred to as ‘ratings’) were variously ‘able-seamen’ (who were experienced and informally ‘qualified’), ‘seamen,’ ‘landsmen’ (usually pressed into service and forced to learn basic seamanship, and who accounted for most of the men on the Anson Expedition), and ‘idlers’ (workers who performed menial supplementary tasks). Marine detachments—not all as ineffectual as the ‘invalid’ pensioners on the Anson Expedition—were simply soldiers in transit. Ranks were entangled by law and custom. The Georgian navy (at least during The Seven Years War) was not ‘a strictly ordered, hierarchical society, brutally repressing the slightest deviance and entirely controlling the public and private lives of its personnel’ (Rodger 210). Of course, duties were assigned, and their prompt and effective execution required, orders had to be obeyed and due deference to officers was demanded (although saluting was rare), and days were defined by the monotonous succession of ‘watches’ and ‘bells’. But, Rodger observes, contrary to the Hollywood stereotype of the ‘whipping-captain,’ ‘when brutality occurred, it tended to destroy naval discipline, which rested on unstated consent, not force. Ill treatment, especially capricious and arbitrary ill treatment, made for disordered and dangerous ships’ (210–11). The maximum punishment a commander could mandate was twelve lashes (although this was exceeded on many recorded occasions), officers were permitted to use a light cane (although striking a man’s face was forbidden), and only eight crimes (specified in the Articles of War) could result in a death sentence being passed by formally constituted courts martial: ‘corresponding with the enemy, cowardice or neglect of duty (three offences defined in a vague overlapping fashion), taking a ship over to the enemy, burning a ship,

3  CAPTAIN OF A SHIPWRECK: THE WRECK OF THE WAGER (1741) 

27

murder, and buggery’ (221). It is also not commonly appreciated that insubordination, petition, delegations to the captain, and even grievances sent directly to the Admiralty were part of daily shipboard life. Complaints by any rank were taken seriously and all had to be officially noted and logged. Based on detailed analysis of Admiralty records, Rodger argues that ‘mutinies’ were rare before the 1770s (237–44; see also Rodger 2017, 129–43). The word usually referred to striking an officer, and occasional instances of collective insubordination due to the failure of the navy to pay wages, conspicuously incompetent command, or inadequate rations, were often treated by the Admiralty as legitimate organised protest rather than sedition. Arguably, Rodger’s portrait of Royal Navy life is conservative, verging on romantic—as events on Wager Island (as it come to be known) reveal. He maintains that ‘those in positions of power and authority, and those without either, felt themselves far more bound by mutual ties of dependence and obligation than separated by divisions of class’ (206). The ‘many-headed hydra’—as Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker (2000) describe the loosely affiliated, but ideologically consonant, rebellions of sailors, slaves, and commoners following the elimination of the commons and rise of the international maritime corporations from the seventeenth century—regularly reared its head. A trans-Atlantic republicanism was gathering momentum by the mid-eighteenth century, which culminated in the radicalism of the Spithead and Nore mutinies of 1797. While Cheap’s faults were numerous—he was arrogant, high-handed, a poor judge of character, impetuous, insecure, and utterly lacking in initiative— it is also clear from Bulkeley and Cummins’s narrative that they were well versed in sailors’ rights to petition superiors, challenge abuses of power by senior officers, and invoke the Articles of War against errant captains. The tone of the warrant officers’ narrative (and the ‘official’ documentation they drafted) smacks of nascent democratic collectivism. Things went badly for Cheap from the start. He was handed a ship crippled by illness and was laid low with scurvy for the first three weeks of his command, seldom appearing on deck—on which occasions he seemed to his fellow officers alternatively abrupt or supercilious. It is likely, under the circumstances, that he felt himself in a pageant: a captain in everything other than reality. Then, the day before the Wager struck, he slipped on the wet quarterdeck stairs, severely dislocating his shoulder: ‘soe that the head of the Bone came down below the armpit’ (Ellis in Peck 1964, 42). Rendered immobile, his officers had to report to him in the surgeon’s

28 

M. TITLESTAD

cabin. When Bulkeley and Lieutenant Baynes came to warn Cheap that they were drifting towards the lee shore, he asserted, on what evidence it is not clear, that the master, Thomas Clark, was ‘not worthy of the charge of a watch’ (Bulkeley and Cummins 9) and ordered Bulkeley and Baynes to take charge of one each. Bulkeley was in command, assisted by Cummins, when the ship struck. Including officers, they could muster only twelve men to loosen the topsails and then cut down the masts—the rest being sick below. According to Byron, the captain remained composed, issued coherent commands from his sickbed (‘with much coolness’), instructed that as many of the incapacitated men as possible be saved, and proclaimed ‘that he would be the last to leave the ship’ (1768, 15). When the rioting began, however, Bulkeley and the midshipmen insisted that Cheap be ‘helped out of his bed, put into the boat, and carried on shore’ (16). The first act of mutiny explicitly directed at the captain happened the next day when the boatswain, John King, drunk and festooned in pilfered regalia, ordered a cannon fired at the hut on the beach in which Cheap, Elliot, Hamilton, Pembleton, and others had taken shelter. The ball overshot—but Bulkeley and two other officers immediately returned to the ship and ordered the rioters ashore. Cheap stood on the beach awaiting the arrival of the boatswain: he ‘called him a rogue and a villain, and felled him to the ground with his cane, so that he was motionless, and to appearance dead; when he had recovered from the blow, and saw a cockt pistol in the captain’s hand, he offered his naked breast; the captain told him that he deserved to be shot, and said no more to him’ (Bulkeley and Cummins 13). Having relented, Cheap ordered Bulkeley and Cummins to return to the ship to recover stores and tools, and they also took the initiative to haul in the thirty-two-foot cutter. As the two warrant officers took charge of practicalities and began to organise the men, Hamilton of the marines and Harvey (the twenty-five-year-old purser) assembled a contingent of armed men, evidently to protect Cheap from simmering animosity and to guard the stores tent. A detachment of men was now divisively armed against the rest. Despite this, the pilfering of stores continued (Smith and Crusset, two marines, were sentenced to 400 lashes spread over successive days) and an insurrectionary plot was thwarted when a marine discovered a trail of black powder leading to a pile of kegs stacked against a wall of the hut. Then a group of deserters, having stolen a significant proportion of the provisions, took to a nearby hill. It was amid these crises that Cheap lost his temper and shot Cozens. From that moment, Bulkeley and Cummins,

3  CAPTAIN OF A SHIPWRECK: THE WRECK OF THE WAGER (1741) 

29

now trusted and respected by the crew, were effectively in command, and began to devise a plan to leave the island. Competence, camaraderie, and resourcefulness had won over hierarchy and custom—even at the risk of illegality. The captain had been reduced to a hindrance; a hollow man invested in the trappings and the etiquette of power, but who nonetheless embodied some vestige of the Crown. He performed occasional gestures of authority, but they signified nothing. Cummins set about lengthening the longboat (the ‘cutter’) by about twelve feet and installing a deck. That would make her, Peck observes (72), nearly fifty feet long, with a beam of around nine feet, and capable of accommodating eighty men if they were tightly packed. But a dispute arose. Cheap, who had no role in the practicalities or the plans, insisted that the improvised vessel sail north—towards Socorro, Anson’s original rendezvous—while Bulkeley and his supporters ‘conceived an opinion that our going through the Streights of Magellan for the coast of Brazil, would be the only way to prevent our throwing ourselves into the hands of a cruel, barbarous, and insulting Enemy [the Spanish]’ (Bulkeley and Cummins 26). It may be possible to overstate Bulkeley’s centrality, although all accounts speak of the gunner as the commander of the converted cutter (now a schooner) and he was the principle negotiator with Cheap. Peck, who refers to Bulkeley by the disparaging sobriquet a ‘sea-­ lawyer’ (a term used by officers to describe sailors more aware of their rights than committed to their duties), also identifies the gunner’s hand in the succession of ‘official’ documents expressing the opinions and intentions of ‘the People’ (101). On Tuesday, 4 August ‘the People’ set out a ‘paper,’ which began: ‘We whose names are under-mentioned, do, upon mature consideration, as we have met with so happy a deliverance, think it the best, surest, and most safe way, for the preservation of the body of people on the spot, to proceed through the Streights of Magellan for England’ (27). The document was signed by seventeen midshipmen, warrant officers, and mates, and twenty-six seamen. It was the first indication that Bulkeley’s men feared being accused of mutiny if they reached England having acted against the orders of their captain. The debate between Cheap and the ‘mutineers’ (as the captain now referred to them) became more heated and then belligerent. Lieutenant Baynes, interestingly absent from the narratives to this point, presided over a meeting at which it was decided—in a semblance of legal procedure—that Cheap should be arrested for the murder of Cozens and forcibly taken to England to stand trial. Bulkeley and Cummins wrote

30 

M. TITLESTAD

of Cheap, ‘We think him a gentleman worthy of having a limited command, but too dangerous a person to be trusted with an absolute one’ (49). Two days later, however, the ‘imprisonment’ of the captain was deemed impractical. In a penultimate ‘official’ document comprising four articles (again signed by the ‘mutineers’), Cheap was indicted for his conduct since the wreck five months earlier. A final ‘statement’ was penned on the morning of the Speedwell’s departure (as the longboat was named, after Shelvocke’s ship, perhaps honouring Cozens’s first insult of Cheap). It distilled the reasons for leaving the Captain and Elliot, the surgeon, Hamilton, and the few who chose to remain, standing on the shore of Wager Island as they sailed off, heavily laden with men and armed with the documents they hoped would convince the Admiralty that Cheap had failed them; that they had had no option but to take charge when the only world the captain was able to command had come apart. One ‘mutineer’ suffered a crisis of conscience (or fear of consequence) at the last moment: using the excuse that he was returning to collect more canvas, Midshipman John Byron re-joined Cheap, and accompanied him for five months as they worked their way slowly up the west coast of South America, assisted at each stage by Indians. In his account, Byron reports that the captain’s arrogance and sense of entitlement remained unwavering. As they inched north, Cheap adamantly refused to row (Byron 178). At the same time, heading south, the Speedwell was labouring around the Horn. She was overburdened, and Bulkeley contrived to maroon ten men a few weeks after their departure (one of whom, Midshipman Alexander Campbell, wrote a surprisingly forgiving account of the castaways’ subsequent trek to Buenos Aires). The Wager saga had an oddly anti-climactic ending. Some of Bulkeley’s men—seeking respite from sailing that was alternately arduous and monotonous—availed themselves of the hospitality of settlements from Bahia to Rio de Janeiro, but most continued on course and were eventually rescued from the Speedwell and ferried to Lisbon by the friendly Portuguese captain of the Saint Tubes. They finally returned to England on the H.M.S. Stirling Castle, arriving on New Year’s Day, 1743. Cheap’s party’s progress was slower—and retrospectively endorsed Bulkeley’s decisions. They eventually arrived in Chaco and were held for a considerable time in Valparaiso as prisoners of war. It was only Anson’s diplomacy that convinced the Spanish to release them, and they were permitted to sail for England on board the French frigate, Lys, on 20 December 1744. In 1743, the Admiralty had decided to delay the trial of Bulkeley and

3  CAPTAIN OF A SHIPWRECK: THE WRECK OF THE WAGER (1741) 

31

Cummins until Anson’s return and then, following news of Cheap’s survival, it determined that he should also be present at the hearing. In the interim, both warrant officers remained in the employ of the Navy and were permitted to publish their bestselling A voyage to the South Seas in the years 1740–1. The court martial was finally held, eighteen months later, on 14 April 1746 in Spithead, but the sole matter to be decided—presumably on Anson’s advice—was the reason for the loss of the Wager. The tribunal recorded the depositions of all those involved (they are archived at the Greenwich Maritime Museum). No one was found to be specifically at fault and at no point in the proceedings was the word ‘mutiny’ mentioned. As I explained, my closing observations, which concern the existential element of shipwreck, are conjectural. In part, this is because the tide of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century narratives that swept across Europe (as reports, chapbooks, pamphlets, broadsides, anthologies, folk ballads, and elaborations in epic poems and eventually imperial romances) signally comprised reportage (or its imitation), reducing emotion to ‘affecting scenes’ or sentimental vignettes. Abstract nouns abounded—lamentation, dread, travail, suffering, grief, and mourning—but there is little sense of the experiential loss of ‘dwelling’ in shipwreck. I use ‘dwelling’ in three distinct senses: that one lived, at any one time, in a particular ship, the identity of which was a function of its history, class, reputation, rating, and purpose, but which was also defined by its particular itinerary or mission; that ships comprised divided spaces variously occupied and used by particular groups or individuals; and, finally, that—despite the almost unimaginable spatial constraints of Georgian ships—sailors improvised modes of being and belonging in practices we might call ‘homing’ (which opposed the unheimlich, the uncanny sense of the fragile wooden form of the ship on the formless sea bounded by strange shores). Shipwreck extirpated dwelling at each of these three levels; it was the catastrophic inauguration of a new (often deadly) mode of being. It is irresistible to ask my students whether, since every plank and beam on the Victory at Portsmouth has been replaced multiple times since Trafalgar, it is still the same ship. (Legend has it that the section of the deck where Nelson fell and asked Hardy to kiss him—though presumably not to French kiss him—is original). The ‘identity’ or ‘being’ of a ship is no simple matter. New vessels were commonly built on existing hulls, ships were often refitted, repurposed, or renamed, prizes sailed under new colours, and ‘repairs’ were often extensive enough to alter the topology of the communal spaces and cabins. When the East Indiaman Wager was

32 

M. TITLESTAD

repurposed, she was named for the principal sponsor of the Anson Expedition, Admiral Sir Charles Wager, and her crew of 120 men were— except for most of the warrant officers—new to the ship (nearly half the crew and most of the marines had never been to sea). The supplies she carried after the Industry was forced to abandon her voyage and transfer her cargo exceeded the capacity of the hold, and some had to be piled on the gundeck, which was already packed with the twenty-eight portable (but large and antiquated) guns and ammunition which Anson intended for assaults on enemy bases. The general layout of the Wager was typical of East Indiamen. Seamen slung their hammocks on the ‘lower deck,’ many in the spaces between the cannons (officially it was ‘gun deck,’ the middle of the three decks). They ate there too, on suspended tables that could be easily secured during storms or in combat. According to naval regulations, each seaman was entitled to twenty-eight inches of space (shared with another man as watches alternated) and room for a sea chest in which all his possessions had to be stowed. The least reliable or the ill-disciplined crewmembers billeted in the afterguard under the quarterdeck, while the older and able seamen gravitated to the fo’c’sle. This arrangement was as unofficial as it was rigorously enforced—by the seamen rather than officers. Given the load of the Wager and its distribution, and the addition of thirty marines, conditions would have been unconscionably crowded and it is impossible that Admiralty guidelines as to billeting could have been observed. In stark contrast to the crowded gundeck was the captain’s cabin, which occupied the afterpart under the poop. He had a private stern gallery and two quarter-galleries, one fitted with a toilet. Forward of the main cabin was the anteroom or dining cabin which opened onto the quarterdeck. Captains managed their quarterdecks differently: for some (in an ekphrastic turn) it staged their power, no one was allowed access without explicit permission, and anyone making an entrance was obliged to salute. Others treated their quarterdecks as concourses of seniority onto which midshipmen and warrant officers were welcome to come and go as they pleased. Commissioned officers were usually berthed below the main cabin (on the Wager, in a small wardroom that had been partitioned off into four eight-­ by-­ eight rooms), while warrant officers improvised berths under the fo’c’sle—making ‘private’ abodes in corners, nooks, and crannies. We should think of the Wager, prior to being wrecked, as a constructed dwelling that was literally and figuratively a dangerous, inadequate, and insecure home. There was nothing settled, dependable, or familiar in her

3  CAPTAIN OF A SHIPWRECK: THE WRECK OF THE WAGER (1741) 

33

spatial organisation, her command, or her itinerary. It is rhetorical to claim that we could have predicted the wreck; it is less so to suggest that we could have predicted—in broad strokes at least—its aftermath. The defeasance of the Wager (physical, political, and social)—which began even before she sailed up the Golfo de Peñas—took on the form it did because she was an unhomely ship (if one might indulge a reverie: she was a stranger to herself incapable of the hospitality on which the very idea of home depends). Eventually it was the warrant officers who secured a version of dwelling on Wager Island—a collective, an itinerary, a spectacle of legitimate procedure, and a notion of fairness. And the Speedwell—for all its commander’s faults and the schooner’s precarity—held the men, granting them, for a time, coherent being. Perhaps, considering dwelling, it is best to end with intimacy. I am not concerned specifically with ‘buggery’ in the Georgian navy, which was, as I mentioned, designated a capital crime in the Articles of War. Burg presents a thoroughly researched account of trials for sodomy during the Seven Years War and details debates in courts martial regarding definitions of ‘indecency’ and the ‘unnatural’ (2017, 89–105). Given the navy’s reputation (according to a flippant Winston Churchill, for ‘rum, sodomy and the lash’), there were surprisingly few litigations for ‘buggery’—only twelve documented cases in seventeen years—and these either entailed ‘ratings’ reporting coercion by officers or sexual acts (whether or not they involved penetration) where officers repeatedly ‘used’ or ‘raped’ children or young crew members. Rodger describes his book as ‘chaste’ (14), in the antiquated sense of being restrained in style and free of unnecessary ornamentation, but it is also ‘chaste’ in deftly skirting any discussion of sexuality. Even Roy and Lesley Adkins’s rollicking account of seamen’s lives in Nelson’s navy, Jack Tar (2008), includes only two fleeting comments on homosexuality, and then dwells for a few pages on two famous cases of cross-dressing cabin boys (183–85). While Burg observes that on five occasions during the Seven Years War ‘guilty officers [were] cashiered, humiliated, flogged with the cat, imprisoned or hanged’ (105), he is more urbane and realistic than other naval historians. Officers and ratings knew the punishments well enough—but there was a flourishing and familiar world of consensual intimacy, flirtation, and romance, usually among men of similar rank, or between officers and younger seamen. There were protocols, plots, liaisons, infidelities, and betrayals—this was, after all, a real world.

34 

M. TITLESTAD

I end with maritime sexuality not for salacious reasons, but philosophical ones. We need to think beyond the trope of ‘the wooden world’ to the creativity of ‘worlding’. In The poetics of space (1994), Gaston Bachelard— whose concerns range from the phenomenology of houses to wardrobes— becomes preoccupied with corners. He imagines a little child finding (in her mind’s eye) ‘a sort of chimerical home, in a corner of a boat’ (139). The ‘recess in the boat’ becomes ‘a corner of her being’ to which she can return when she is in ‘the vast universe […] in the middle of the ocean’ (139). Sailors learned to dwell in corners (real and imagined). On an uncanny ocean, in a vast and strange world, they made temporary, modest, and insecure homes within the spatial and social structures of the ship. These were lost—with deepest consequence—when a ship was wrecked.

Works Cited Adkins, Roy and Lesley Adkins. 2009. Jack Tar: the extraordinary lives of ordinary seamen in Nelson’s navy. London: Little Brown. Bachelard, Gaston. 1994. The poetics of space. Trans. Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon. Bulkeley, John and John Byron. 2004. The loss of the Wager: the narratives of John Bulkeley and the Hon. John Byron. Ed. Alan Gurney. Woodridge: Boydell. Burg, B. R. 2017. Officers, Shipboard Boys and Courts Martial for Sodomy and Indecency in the Georgian Navy. In The social history of English seamen 1650–1815, ed. Cheryl A. Fury, 89–105. Woodridge: Boydell. Byron, John. 1768. The narrative of the Honourable John Byron. London: Baker and Leigh. Heaps, Leo. 1973. Log of the Centurion. London: Hart-Davis. Linebaugh, Peter and Marcus Rediker. 2000. The many-headed hydra: sailors, slaves, commoners, and the hidden history of the revolutionary Atlantic. Boston: Beacon. Peck, S.W.C. 1964. The Wager mutiny. London: Alvin Redman. Rodger, N.A.M. 1988. The wooden world: an anatomy of the Georgian navy. London: Fontana. Rodger, N.A.M. 2017. Officers and men of the Navy, 1660–1815. In The Social History of English Seamen 1650–1815, ed. Cheryl A.  Fury, 51–70. Woodridge: Boydell. Williams, Glynn. 2000. The prize of all the oceans. New York: Viking.

CHAPTER 4

The Limits of the Law: The Wreck of the Grosvenor (1791)

On the morning of Monday, 4 November 1782, three months to the day after the East Indiaman Grosvenor ran aground on the Pondoland Coast (now the Transkei, South Africa), the seven-year-old Master Law finally succumbed. An unaccompanied, aristocratic passenger, Law had displayed remarkable fortitude to the crewmen who carried him when he grew weary, built rafts to assist him across swollen rivers, and who shared the paltry provisions they foraged along the coast. By the morning of his death, on a beach near Cape Padrone, his small party had walked more than 600 kilometres from the wreck site. Of the 109 ship’s crew and passengers who lost their lives during and after the merchantman’s wreck, the boy’s death captured the imagination of one survivor, John Hynes. When Hynes, an illiterate Irish sailor in the Honourable East India Company’s (HEIC) employ, narrated the events of the wreck and its aftermath to George Carter, he lingered on the bravery, deterioration, and poignant passing of Master Law. In A narrative of the loss of the Grosvenor, published by John Murray of Fleet Street in 1791, Carter elaborated further, turning the boy’s story into a series of sentimental vignettes (almost Stations of the Cross), and chose to illustrate his death-scene in copperplate, one of only two plates in the book. When Carter met Hynes, he was being driven by another aspiration altogether; in 1785 he was en route to Kolkata to try his hand at official Company portraiture, then a potentially lucrative profession. However, he remained in Kolkata for less than two years, returning with the sense that he had © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Titlestad, Shipwreck Narratives: Out of our Depth, Maritime Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87041-6_4

35

36 

M. TITLESTAD

failed as an artist. Judging by his painting of a drawing-room scene, commissioned by the HEIC and on display in the Victoria Memorial in Kolkata, his assessment of his abilities was sadly accurate. Carter is remembered not for his art, but for his best-selling Grosvenor book born of his serendipitous encounter with Hynes and his decision to act as his amanuensis. Many of those who read the expensive, handsomely bound book edition of Carter’s Narrative in 1791 would already have known the Grosvenor story. The first comprehensive account of the wreck and the fate of the survivors was the report commissioned by the Company, written by Alexander Dalrymple, its official hydrographer, and published in 1783 as An account of the loss of the Grosvenor Indiaman. He transcribed interviews with four survivors—Robert Price, Thomas Lewis, John Warmington, and Barney Larey (probably ‘Leary’)—read the transcriptions back to the sailors for correction, and then organised them into a chronological sequence. He added occasional reflections intended to guide future Company voyages around the treacherous south-eastern coast of Southern Africa, as well as advice on how castaways ought to conduct themselves ashore. The sailors’ voices do show through in Dalrymple’s report, but—true to its purpose—it is dry factual reportage notable for its precision and its author’s self-effacement. One of the few occasions on which Dalrymple allows himself to express an opinion is when he reflects on the conduct of the Grosvenor’s captain, Commander John Coxon. While generally applauding his actions when the ship struck the rocks and when she began to come apart, he gently indicts Coxon for his behaviour on land: ‘in great part, [the castaways’] calamities seem to have arisen from want of management with the natives’ (31). He goes on to point out that ‘the natives […] treated the individuals that fell singly amongst them, rather with kindness than brutality’ and that it was ‘natural to expect that so large a body of Europeans would raise apprehensions; and fear always produces hostility’ (31). Had Coxon only been less volatile and more assured in command (Dalrymple describes him as being ‘in great distress’ and ‘out of heart’ [39]), things might have turned out quite differently. Despite its unadorned style, a large print run of Dalrymple’s report sold out and the work was re-published in 1785, the second edition including a thirty-eight-page appendix: the journal of William Hubberley (sometimes given as ‘Habberley’), composed—perhaps dictated—as this fifth survivor journeyed back to England. Dalrymple, who compared the

4  THE LIMITS OF THE LAW: THE WRECK OF THE GROSVENOR (1791) 

37

journal with the other four survivors’ accounts, was astounded that Hubberley had recalled, with remarkable precision, each of the 114 days of their ordeal. Incongruously, bound with one of the few surviving copies of Dalrymple’s Account, which is held by the National Library of South Africa in Cape Town, is its generic opposite: a melodramatic Grubb Street invention that purports to be A narrative of the two sailors, lately arrived in England, and who were, wrecked in the Grosvenor, East Indiaman, on the Coast of Caffraria, August 4, 1782, also published in 1783. It is one of the countless sensationalised, elaborated, often entirely fabricated, shipwreck stories which presents in lurid detail the suffering, abjection and death of survivors, and the barbarity of indigenous populations. These eighteenthand nineteenth-century pamphlets, broadsides, and chapbooks are described by Carl Thompson (2007), who suggests that they comprise what might be considered one of the earliest European popular literatures. The putative transcriber of A narrative of the two sailors dwells on ‘the savages’ inhuman rapacity’ (1783, 2): they steal food from the castaways and then make ‘the poor sufferers dance round them in a state of nature, and then [stone] them as long as they [remain] within their reach or power’ (2). It weaves together myths and half-truths, drawn from early-modern travellers’ tales, the nascent anthropology of the eighteenth century and garbled myths from antiquity. In a trope that undergirds much of later colonial and imperial fiction, it casts the survivors as heroes adopted by a clan of ‘noble savages’ who then lead a titanic struggle against depraved neighbouring clans (and a menagerie of real and imaginary animals). Two moments reveal the account’s burlesque: first, we are told that in African marriages it is customary for the assembled gathering to urinate on the bride and, second, that it is standard practice in African societies for men to have a testicle removed lest their partners conceive twins. George Carter’s A narrative of the loss of the Grosvenor, East Indiaman combines reportage and imaginative flair. Its aura of authenticity rests in reproducing Hynes’s testimony as direct speech, seemingly as a transcription. Carter then interjects, elaborates, and reflects, turning the sailor’s account into a work that is more overtly literary and didactic. This division is less obvious than it first seems; the voices begin to merge and, at times, lapses in punctuation make it quite unclear as to whether Hynes or Carter is speaking. The balance between the voices is as much a narrative effect created by Carter as it reflects the work’s emergence. If the lush edition and self-consciously literary style of the Narrative attest to its author’s ambitions, his citing of two long passages from august eighteenth-century

38 

M. TITLESTAD

travellers in the Cape reveals his desire to be counted among their number. Capitalising on their cultural capital, he cites geographical, historical, and anthropological descriptions by the Englishman, Lieutenant William Patterson (famous for, among other colonial achievements, leading the settlement of Tasmania from 1804) and the flamboyant French adventurer, François le Vaillant (who authored two highly successful accounts of journeys east and northwards of the Cape, one of which describes word reaching him in the interior of the Grosvenor wreck, as well as reports of the abduction of women passengers by the amaMpondo). Despite the widespread circulation of Dalrymple’s authoritative account, rumours about the fate of the survivors spread like wildfire in the eight years between the wreck and the publication of Carter’s Narrative. The most tenacious of these had its origin in the imagination of a French ship’s captain. On the 21 April 1783, the London Morning herald and daily advertiser presented the first ‘authentic intelligence’ of the wreck (see Kirby 1953, 8). It was brought to London by Captain François Renier Duminy, whose ship, the Postillon, had sailed from the Cape on 17 December 1782. Duminy, evidently an avid reader of shipwreck narratives and inclined to exaggeration, stated that the women passengers had been carried off by the natives. While none of the survivors supported this version of events, the public fixated on the idea that, in the words of the Morning herald and daily advertiser of 25 April 1783, the women had been ‘dragged up into the interior parts of the country, for the purposes of the vilest brutish prostitution’ (see Kirby 1953, 10). Not only did this possibility lead to a second relief expedition in 1790–1791 (the Van Reenen Expedition), it also sedimented in the British and South African public imaginations. Seeking to soothe such unsettled colonial minds, Carter reiterates emphatically that none of the sailors witnessed any of the women being abducted and that, given the general conduct of the amaMpondo, it seemed unlikely that this would ever have occurred. Carter also sought to suppress another lingering insinuation. Seven days after the wreck, the first mate of the Grosvenor, William Shaw, led a breakaway party of sailors and lascars (Indian seamen) to forge ahead towards Swellendam, leaving behind Captain Coxon and all but three of the passengers. None of the Captain’s contingent was ever heard of again. To some, Shaw’s decision amounted to mutiny. Carter is at pains to explain that the division of the group was by design and was executed with Coxon’s consent. To others, though (Hubberley among them), it was an inevitable consequence of Coxon’s failure to command authority on land.

4  THE LIMITS OF THE LAW: THE WRECK OF THE GROSVENOR (1791) 

39

Carter, who kowtows to the Company’s authorised version, defends Coxon, characterising him as a capable and honourable victim of circumstance, and describes in highly emotive terms the Captain’s valediction as Shaw’s party headed off—taking with them the young Master Law. Let us consider in more detail those parts of Carter’s Narrative that concern Master Law. In the week following the wreck, the party had made only desultory progress along the coast. They had been repeatedly harassed by the amaMpondo (who stoned them whenever they seemed to be heading inland towards their kraals and rummaged in the women passengers’ hair, where they had concealed their jewels). The castaways were drawn into two skirmishes. During the second, a passenger was rendered delirious having been stabbed in the ear with an assegai. At night, they were ‘so disturbed by the howlings of wild beasts, that they could get but little sleep’ (Carter 21). It became obvious that the more robust members of the crew, seamen, and lascars, should go on ahead, and perhaps organise the rescue of the remainder. Carter recounts the agony of the separation: ‘it did not take place without much regret on all sides. They had shared together hitherto the difficulties and distresses incident to their situation, and through these, were familiarised, as one might say, to each other; to part therefore in a strange land, and almost without hopes of meeting again, could not be accomplished, at least by the most susceptible part, without many pangs’ (25). Master Law wept inconsolably: his obvious place was with the rest of the children under Coxon’s (ineffectual) protection, but he had become attached to Henry Lillburne, the ship’s steward, who had cared for him since the wreck. Shaw’s party elected to take the boy with them, agreeing ‘to carry him by turns, whenever he should be unable to walk’ (25). Although Lillburne is identified as the child’s primary custodian, Carter states (as do Dalrymple and Hubberley) that the party collectively committed itself to the boy’s care. Caring for Law was arduous. Not only did the sailors have to carry him for much of the way, but they also had to construct ‘catamarands, or floating stages’ (31) on which to place him, and then push him in front of them when they crossed a succession of swollen, fast-flowing rivers. A combination of exhaustion and impatience at the resulting delays caused John Hynes, at one point, to swim a river, leaving Law behind in the company of those similarly unable to cross without assistance. Carter struggles to forgive his informant. ‘Here I cannot help lamenting, that persons in so perilous a situation as these poor shipwrecked wanderers were, should ever be wanting in that unanimity which alone could ensure their preservation.

40 

M. TITLESTAD

I feel particularly when I reflect on the inconveniences the weaker part must be exposed to, when deserted by the healthy and robust. But what excites my most poignant sensibility is, that the youth, whose tender years rendered him incapable of combating the perils and fatigues of so long a journey, should be left behind, to the care of those who were scarcely able to take care of themselves’ (54). In counterpoint to Hynes is the steadfast Lillburne: ‘much praise is due to the worthy man who chiefly endeavoured to alleviate that fatigue which his infant limbs were unable to bear, who heard with pity his unavoidable complainings; who fed him when he had wherewithal to do it; and who lulled his weary soul to rest! A deed so humane and generous, cannot escape the cognisance of those powers who interest themselves in the protection of innocence, and will most assuredly atone for many a misspent hour!’ (54). The steward is redeemed by his penitential labour of love. As he carries Law, he atones step-by-step for the sins of a sailor’s life. Similarly, when the other sailors give the best portions of foraged food to the child or assist by carrying him some of the way, they are saving their souls even as they labour toward their deaths. Law was not a passive recipient of care. He exerted himself to his utmost (‘Where the road was even and good, he walked, and was able to keep pace with the party’ [58]) and contributed what he could to his small, ragged community (‘When they went on fishing parties, he was stationed near the fires, in order to keep them alight; and on their return was rewarded with part of the spoil’ [58]). Tragically, even this combination of the sailors’ custodianship and his own efforts was insufficient to keep Law alive. When both he and the steward became incapacitated, the party agreed to wait for two days to establish whether they would recover sufficiently to continue. On the morning of the third day, they discovered that, ‘in the course of the night the poor child resigned his breath, and ceased any longer to share with his companions in their fatigues and sorrows’ (92). In his eulogy, Carter employs the conceit of a wreck: ‘Alas sweet youth, thy bark, too early launched by misfortune on the tempestuous sea of life, though it withstood the boisterous blast much longer than could have been expected at thy early years, was at last obliged to yield to the impetuous waves, and was overwhelmed by them before it could reach some sheltering haven!’ (92–93). The effect of Law’s death on the surviving members of the party was profound. It left Lillburne in a condition of stunned stasis: he was ‘nearly overwhelmed’ by ‘the loss of a young person he so valued, and who had so long been the object of his tenderest care’ (95). It is only with utmost

4  THE LIMITS OF THE LAW: THE WRECK OF THE GROSVENOR (1791) 

41

difficulty that his companions were able to convince him to leave the shallow grave in which they had placed the child’s body. The awful death portended even greater tribulation: ‘Whatever their distresses had been, they were not to be compared to the situation to which they were now reduced’ (97). Unable to produce urine to drink, the steward and another sailor were forced ‘to borrow a shell full of his companion who was more fortunate’ (97). Despite this abject charity, both proved unable ‘to survive their melancholy situation’ for even a day longer, and both expired (97). Now there were only three members of this faction of the breakaway party left alive: Hynes, Evans, and Warmington. They discussed drawing lots to determine who should be sacrificed to nourish the others, but Hynes wept hysterically at the prospect. Given his desperate, incoherent resistance, a different course of action was chosen: two of the men set out ‘to cut off some of the flesh of the recently buried steward; and bring it back for their immediate support’ (103). Through the ‘kind interposition of Providence’ though, they were spared the debasement of cannibalism: at the last moment, they came across the carcass of a young seal lying near the steward’s grave, and ‘instead of taking back to their companions disgusting human flesh, they carried [its] more pleasing flesh’ (103–4). The three men’s suffering continued for a week longer, by which time they were reduced to skeletal, dazed wanderers who struggled to recognise the human forms of their rescuers, Dutch farm workers in the outlying eastern fields of the Swellendam District. In the months following, the three castaways were reunited with another six surviving sailors and the five lascars and ayahs (Indian female domestic workers) who had straggled as far as the colonial frontier. Tragically, all but one of the Indians would drown a few months later when the Nicobar, on which they were being repatriated out of Cape Town, went down off the south coast of Southern Africa. What does the resolve and sad death of Master Law in Carter’s Narrative signify? First, we need to consider shipwreck narrative more generally. In Manifest perdition: shipwreck narrative and the disruption of empire (2002), Josiah Blackmore describes Portuguese shipwreck literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as ‘a mutable and often highly idiosyncratic form of narrative’ (xxiii). It was contrapuntal to the official and triumphalist historiography of the Iberian seaborne empire. While official accounts depicted the epic mastery of the carreira da Índia (the India route) and ‘the expansive itinerancy of the sovereignty of the king’ (80), shipwreck narratives relate the shocking interruption of linear itineraries.

42 

M. TITLESTAD

In each of the twelve relações de naufrágios comprising the História trágico-maritima (The tragic history of the sea) compiled and edited by Gomes de Brito in the eighteenth century, ships are written to pieces (Blackmore 59). The hull, the ‘dividing line between order and the chaos of the abyss, symbolically significant as the marker between rational thought and fear’ (82), is fractured. This splintering presents a sobering rejoinder to imperial hubris: the vaunted ‘linear forward movement and predictability’ of expansionism is disastrously interrupted (54). When the ship disintegrates, it loses its power to encapsulate the social and political structure of the metropolis. Enlightenment and Romantic-era shipwreck narratives also depict a counter-hegemonic social fracture and subsequent efforts at rehabilitating order on land. The hierarchical world of the ship (in which social practices of regulation, discipline, and surveillance are heightened) is ‘written to pieces’ and castaways find themselves un-cabined, unprotected by the material and ideological structures that previously accommodated them. The land phase of shipwreck narratives is most often marked by officers’ attempts to assert the old order or junior officers’ efforts to inaugurate a new one, which seems better suited to the new, stressed demands of surviving in unfamiliar circumstances. Most often, soon after survivors assemble, those who take charge put protocols and procedures in place: supplies are assessed and their distribution regulated, structures of command are clarified, and necessary and acceptable conduct is defined. Even though these procedures were clarified by the Admiralty after the wreck of the Wager, they were often debated or contested, especially after the wreck of merchantmen, on which the contours and protocols of power were significantly less defined than in the navy. It is clear from all the Grosvenor narratives that Commander Coxon was only an adequate captain at sea and ineffectual and impetuous on land. He was unable to organise the survivors into a coherent group, to decide on a clear course of action that might increase their chances of survival or to identify the strengths and frailties in those under his command. He had also failed as a navigator and, because of his catastrophic error, had no accurate sense of their location on the coast. He had led them all astray and would continue to do so. This was the basis of Shaw’s decision to lead a breakaway party, and—judging by Hynes and Hubberley’s narratives— the first mate proved a far more resolute and resourceful leader than Coxon ever did. Yet, to further allay suspicions of desertion and mutiny,

4  THE LIMITS OF THE LAW: THE WRECK OF THE GROSVENOR (1791) 

43

Carter elaborates a most sentimental separation, as if an abundance of feeling compensates for Shaw’s challenge to Coxon’s authority. Master Law is integral to Carter’s vignette of farewell. The fact that Shaw’s party chose to take Law with them suggests the transfer of a mantle of care. Lillburne becomes St. Christopher bearing aloft the child Jesus— the party sanctified beyond blame. Such didactic scenes are common in eighteenth-century popular narratives. While they might strike contemporary readers as sentimental in the pejorative sense, they were generally understood to refine a reader’s sentiments and sensibility through evoking compassion, thereby cultivating the depth and subtleties of feeling necessary for both intellectual acuity and to live a moral life. Carter’s portrait of the survivors, stumbling along the Cape littoral yet always caring for Law, shows us that all is not lost. Even in extremis, as their humanity is otherwise stripped away, they reach out to the better angels of their nature, who guide them, and we, in the future, learn from their travails and the manner of their redemption. It is in the suffering body of Master Law that a structure of meaning is recovered and perpetuated in circumstances that are rapidly tending towards meaninglessness. We might also think in more individual terms. The metonymic logic of narratives of trauma is familiar: in the face of the existential disorientation caused by extreme suffering, people cling onto seemingly incidental details as coordinates of meaning. Perhaps caring for Law was an unconscious survival strategy. It allowed Shaw’s party to rationalise deserting Coxon and the other passengers, and it gave them a sense of purpose and moral orientation in the face of creeping despondency. In addition to organising meaning, protecting the boy may have facilitated a measure of affective containment at the edges of expression, at least some possibility of curtailing the emotional unravelling experienced in trauma. Perhaps they treasured the well-being of a child (who was even more vulnerable than they were) in order that they might each cohere emotionally. Given his name, it is difficult not to suggest an allegorical meaning of Master Law’s death. It may seem a glib interpretation of Carter’s investment, but there are ways in which the boy’s name is an abstract sign in the symbolic scheme of the Narrative. When he dies, moral codes are suspended and any sense of mutuality—of sociality—is lost. This is indicated by the men countenancing the possibility of cannibalism, which Thompson describes as the ‘ne plus ultra of horror’ in shipwreck literature (2007, 68). The death of Law is that in both senses: the boy’s death represents the fracturing of legal and moral constraint. From that point on, anything

44 

M. TITLESTAD

is possible; the black sun, to allude to the writing of Julia Kristeva (1992), has truly risen and the men have become inarticulate from their suffering and abjection. Meaning, with the death of their organising metonym, had become impossible. The relation of Carter’s two copperplates in the Narrative is significant. The first, ‘Shipwreck of the Grosvenor—the manner in which the sailors escaped on shore,’ was based on his earlier gouache, which is wisely tucked away in the vaults of the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich. It struggles, as do many shipwreck paintings or those depicting naval engagements, to bring several events that unfolded over time into a single frame. It presents an illogical clutter: sailors can be seen warping along a hawser connecting the stern of the foundering (split) ship to the shore, while sailors clamber down onto an improvised raft, and a small, illuminated family group, presumably the Hoseas, shelters in the foreground (they are unruffled, the mother swooning). None of the scenes depicted occurred simultaneously, but over the course of a long day. Carter explains his second copperplate, ‘The unhappy fate of Master Law’: ‘The affectionate concern of his fellow sufferers, particularly the friendly steward who had afforded him all the succour in his power, during their long and perilous journey, I have endeavoured to represent in as just and striking a manner as my abilities, and the description of the narrator could furnish me with, would enable me to do in the annexed plate’ (Carter 95). Stephen Taylor, in The Caliban Shore: the fate of the Grosvenor castaways (2004), describes Carter’s painting and subsequent etching: ‘in his hands the child becomes an incongruous as well as unconvincing figure, a rigidly reclining “Blue Boy” in satin suit and ringlets’ (152). That both copperplates represent wrecks—is borne out by Carter’s metaphorical description of Master Law’s death which we saw earlier. The second, the death of Master Law, is the consequence and the fulfilment of the first, the destruction of the Grosvenor. The body of the ship and the body of the boy contained meaning, and their loss is a gateway to chaos. Little is known about the historical Master Law. Percival Kirby, a musicologist at the University of the Witwatersrand in the 1950s and 1960s and the most avid of the Grosvenor researchers (see 1953, 1958 and 1960), ascertained that he was the son of Thomas Law, a writer in the HEIC who arrived in Bengal at the age of fourteen, and whose first wife, the boy’s mother, was Indian. What else we know was uncovered by Stephen Taylor (2004). In 1793, after the death of his son had been broadly publicised, Thomas Law migrated to the United States, where he became a close

4  THE LIMITS OF THE LAW: THE WRECK OF THE GROSVENOR (1791) 

45

friend of George Washington, eventually marrying as his second wife, Anne Custis who was granddaughter of Mrs Martha Custis, the President’s wife. We can only imagine what impact the death of his Anglo-Indian son, presumably en route to school in England, had on him. The literary afterlife of Master Law is easier to fathom. Carter’s Narrative was widely anthologised: it was included, in expurgated and adapted forms, in the most widely read nineteenth-century shipwreck anthologies, among them those edited respectively by Duncan, Thomas, and Barrington. Charles Dickens, who was much preoccupied with shipwreck stories, chose the littoral life and death of Law as the centrepiece for an essay, ‘The long voyage,’ published in Household words on 31 December 1853. ‘This child,’ he writes, ‘is sublimely made a sacred charge. He is pushed, on a little raft, across broad rivers by the swimming sailors; they carry him by turns through the deep sand and long grass (he patiently walking at all other times); they share with him such putrid fish as they find to eat; they lie down and wait for him when the rough carpenter, who becomes his especial friend, lags behind. Beset by lions and tigers, by savages, by thirst, by hunger, by death in a crowd of ghastly shapes, they never—O Father of all mankind, thy name be blessed for it!—forget this child’ (reprinted in Edwin Drood and reprinted pieces 1890, 203–210). ‘The Long Voyage’ is also illustrated with a copperplate engraving (facing 209): a mournful yet determined Lillburne cradles the small Law in his arms as he leads the party of survivors up a beach. It was not only here that Master Law was committed to posterity. Jean Marquard (1981) and Ian Glenn (1995) both mapped the Grosvenor narratives as foundational texts in South African literature (discussing their adaptation and elaboration in, among others, works by W.  C. Scully, Captain Frederick Marryat, and Harriet Ward, in contemporary novels by Sheila Fugard and Nadine Gordimer, and in an important poem by Mike Kirkwood). Yet, beyond their explicit legacy, the narratives have—as Stephen Gray (1979) and others have discussed—underpinned the symbolic structures of the colonial engagement with Southern Africa imagined by novelists, poets, and dramatists. Carter’s Narrative is the most significant node in this web of texts. The true nature of the gift of Master Law—to the Grosvenor survivors and onwards to authors and readers in posterity—cannot be fully fathomed.

46 

M. TITLESTAD

Works Cited Anon. 1783. A narrative of the two sailors. London: Pownall. Blackmore, Josiah. 2002. Manifest perdition: shipwreck narrative and the disruption of empire. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Carter, George. 1927. The wreck of the Grosvenor (and Edward Riou Journal of a journey). Cape Town: Van Riebeeck Society. Dalrymple, Alexander. 1785. An account of the loss of the Grosvenor Indiaman. London: Court of HEIC Directors, 1785. [Also reprinted in Kirby, Percival. 1953. A Source Book on the Wreck of the Grosvenor] Dickens, Charles. 1890. Edwin Drood and reprinted pieces, Volume XVIII of the special authorised edition of the works of Charles Dickens. London: Cassall. Glenn, Ian E. 1995. The wreck of the Grosvenor and the making of South African literature. English in Africa 22.2:1–18. doi: 10.520/AJA03768902431 Gray, Stephen. 1979. Southern African literature: an introduction. Cape Town: David Philip. Kirby, Percival. 1958. Jacob van Reenen and the Grosvenor Expedition of 1790–1791. Johannesburg: University of the Witwatersrand Press. Kirby, Percival. 1953. A source book on the wreck of the Grosvenor East Indiaman. Cape Town: Van Riebeeck Society. Kirby, Percival. 1960. The true story of the Grosvenor East Indiaman. Cape Town: Oxford University Press. Kristeva, Julia. 1992. Black sun: depression and melancholia. New York: Columbia University Press. Marquard, Jean. 1981. The Grosvenor and its literary heritage. English Studies in Africa 24.2: 117–137. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/00138398108690786 Taylor, Stephen. 2004. The Caliban Shore: the fate of the Grosvenor castaways. London: Faber. Thompson, Carl. 2007. The suffering traveller and the Romantic imagination. Oxford: Clarendon.

CHAPTER 5

Remembering William Mackay: The Wreck of the Juno (1795)

As I write, there is a shard of a grey marble tablet next to my keyboard. It is about the size and shape of my hand. The partial words of an epitaph, ‘May,’ ‘departed,’ and ‘Year’ and, directly in the centre, ‘1788,’ might have been etched yesterday, so sharp are the edges of the script. I kicked it out of the dust at the base of a pile of clay chai cups and chunks of limestone cement near the perimeter wall of the South Park Street Cemetery in Kolkata. The phrase ‘the theft of historical artefacts’ ringing in my mind, I set off to find anyone to ask if I could keep it. A groundsman was sweeping an already pristine red-dirt avenue between two rows of tombstones. With only the authority of kindness, he reassured me that I was now the owner of the epitaphic fragment. At most Indian historical and cultural sites, informal guides have at their disposal a congeries of anecdotes; they sell their stories for a gratuity. The groundsman and I chatted for an hour. I had been gifted my first true interlocutor in the matter I was there to think about: here was someone else preoccupied with the life and narrative of William Mackay, the second officer of the Juno, wrecked in the Bay of Bengal in 1795. In 1767, the Great Cemetery replaced St. John’s Churchyard as the final resting place for Kolkata’s East India Company dead. Since mariners, factors, writers, administrators, and soldiers had extended the Company’s reach across West Bengal, death had been their constant companion. More than a third of those who travelled east in the service of the Company succumbed, a disproportionate number of whom were wives and children © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Titlestad, Shipwreck Narratives: Out of our Depth, Maritime Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87041-6_5

47

48 

M. TITLESTAD

(see Keay 1993, 162–66). Perhaps the Great Cemetery was an effort to keep death at arms’ length, at some consoling distance from HEIC headquarters at Fort William and Dalhousie Square. The cemetery was connected to Fort William by the Burial Ground Road, a narrow, raised causeway that became impassable during the monsoon season. It must have been an arduous journey: three kilometres through marshy fields and patches of jungle that were still wild enough to provide good tiger hunting for gentlemen. The Burial Ground Road has become Park Street: a major thoroughfare along which the city inhales taxis, scooters, and auto-rickshaws in the mornings and exhales them at night. Park Street bisected the Great Cemetery into the North and South Park Street Cemeteries, and hundreds of graves were bulldozed during its construction. An effort was made to save the marble tablets from the destroyed graves; a few dozen were mounted in the walls of the new gatehouse. Some are inscribed with surprisingly lengthy eulogies setting out genealogies and accomplishments, and remembering the towns, villages, boroughs, pastures, and hills of home. These are texts of displacement. The surviving gravestones, mausoleums, and sepulchres in the South Park Street Cemetery, with their classical arches, Roman cupolas, and Grecian urns, also imply that home was elsewhere: these men, women, and children might have died in the new settlements along the Hooghly River, far from London, Portsmouth, or Edinburgh, but they would face eternity guarded by the words, names, and forms of their heritage. The South Park Street Cemetery is deceptive. As you walk into its solemn, gloomy humidity, you think yourself stepping into history. The moss-covered graves and monuments seem caught in an age-old struggle between nature and structure: seedlings sprouting from the smallest ledges are splitting stone, creepers have forced chunks of cement to the ground, and trees are quietly pushing down walls. Here there is a collapsed column, there a decapitated angel, and, just beyond, an ornate cement urn lies on its side in the grass. It is so easy to succumb to this gothic picture of imperial decline, particularly as a murder of crows clatters in the canopy of banyan trees. In fact, all the graves have been rebuilt in the last thirty years, many of them more than once. When Ash Kapur became the president of the Association for the Preservation of Historical Cemeteries in India in 1978, South Park was derelict (Kapur 2009, 8). Most of the structures had collapsed and those with roofs still intact housed vagrants. The site was notorious for feral dogs and snakes, and as a place where

5  REMEMBERING WILLIAM MACKAY: THE WRECK OF THE JUNO (1795) 

49

thieves hid their loot. Having secured the support of, among other benefactors, Indian Aluminium Company and Dunlop India Ltd, Kapur initiated a remarkable restoration: not only were individual graves and mausoleums rebuilt (in the absence of plans or photographs, somewhat impressionistically), but a perimeter wall was constructed to secure an area of more than two square kilometres. Into this wall were mounted around two hundred and fifty unbroken marble tablets left without the context of their monuments. Since then, about a quarter have fallen from the wall and shattered—or have disappeared into the structures of Kolkata’s sprawling informal settlements. ‘Preservation,’ in the name of Ash Kumar’s association, expresses a disposition and hope rather than a possibility. Here and there around the graveyard, workers kneeling on planks supported by reed scaffolding are remaking the past in an endless swirl of limestone and memory; they are extrapolating from ruins what are only contours of possibility. I had come to Kolkata—I explained to the groundsman—on a fool’s errand. Having read William Mackay’s Narrative of the shipwreck of the Juno (1798) and having traced a transcription of his epigraph to the Bengal Obituary, published in 1851 (88), I wanted to see his grave for myself. I did not embark on my journey in the most scholarly state of mind; disguised as research, my motivation was a confused pilgrimage. For some reason unclear even to myself, I wanted to stand at his grave and read: Sacred to the Memory of Captain William Mackay, who died 27th March 1804, aged 22 years. This marble would express, the affection of relations and esteem of friends, for him whose characteristics were unaffected worth and manly fortitude, in how eminent a degree, he possessed the latter quality, his interesting narrative of the Ship-wreck of the Juno, will testify to future times.

What I found was a monument rising six metres from a rectangular sepulchral base into the overarching trees. It is decorated on two faces with reliefs of anchors and coiled ropes. As in all cases in the cemetery where the original tablet was lost, it has been replaced with a small white marble square bearing only rank, initial, surname, and the birth and death dates of the deceased: ‘Capt. W. Mackay 1741–1804’. The date of birth is incorrect. When morning broke over the Indian Ocean on 21 June 1795, it revealed a bizarre scene. Two ship’s masts protruded from a rough sea,

50 

M. TITLESTAD

with waves breaking over a partially submerged quarterdeck, the rest of the hull having sunk beneath the surface. This perverse equilibrium—a ship arrested in the process of sinking—resulted from the buoyancy of her cargo: teak being ferried from the Arakan Coast (Burma) to the East India Company dockyards on the banks of the Hooghly River in Kolkata. In the desperate moments as she went under, the crew of English officers and lascars and a contingent of Malay workmen had scrambled up the rigging seeking the safety of the mizzen top. We know little about William Mackay, where ‘we’ refers to half a dozen archivists who have guided my journey through a textual labyrinth, the enthusiastic members of the Lairg Local History Society, and the groundsman in the South Park Street Cemetery. Apart from the events narrated in the Narrative, a biographical note in The Scottish nation, a multivolume genealogical history published in 1863, is the most informative source (see 8–9). William, a member of the Scourie Mackay clan of Lairg, followed his brother Hugh into the Company. He quickly rose in the estimation of his seniors and by the time he joined the Juno he was already regarded as ‘one of the most skilful navigators of the Indian seas’. This at least is the opinion of his ‘biographer,’ who the entry in The Scottish nation names as ‘Mr Moore’. The name haunts me; in all these years of digging, I have found no trace of the biography. We know from the transcribed epitaph that Mackay died at the age of twenty-two: the editor of The Scottish nation is convinced that his premature death was a result of his suffering during the Juno disaster. If Mackay did die in 1804—which is, after all, written in stone—he would have been born in 1781 or 1782. When he joined the Juno in 1795, he was, it follows, only thirteen or fourteen years old. It was a small country ship, and it is just imaginable that he might, given his family connections, have been appointed second officer. Mr Moore’s appraisal of Mackay’s navigational skills at that stage must be flattering though. As we read the Narrative, we should remember that it is an edited account written, at the insistence of his grandfather, by a sixteen-­year-old William reflecting on events that occurred when he was an even younger boy. The Juno set out from Rangoon for Madras on Friday, 29 May 1795. The tons of teak in her hold had been guided down rivers from the highlands by death-defying workers who leapt from log to log. The Company was a world of wood. One of hundreds of smaller vessels servicing the epic ambitions of the global corporation, the Juno was captained by Alexander Bremner who was accompanied by his wife, known to history only as ‘Mrs

5  REMEMBERING WILLIAM MACKAY: THE WRECK OF THE JUNO (1795) 

51

Bremner’. On the ship’s first day out, it shoaled on a hard sandbank. After repeated efforts at using the anchors to dislodge her, the crew managed to float her on the flood tide. There seemed to be no material damage to the hull. But on 1 June, a gale commenced ‘at S.S.W. with a very high sea’ and the ship ‘laboured much and very soon sprang a leak’ (Mackay 1798, 3). Five days of incessant pumping followed which was complicated by the pumps ‘getting frequently out of order by constant hard working’ (4). Their function was further compromised when sand ballast—commonly used in eighteenth-century ships—began choking their mechanisms. Bremner, Mr Wade (the chief mate), and Mackay discussed the possibility of returning to Rangoon, but ‘the many dangers attending the making that coast, (a lee shore so low as not to be seen above ten or twelve miles off, and at that distance only seven fathoms water)’ made them of the unanimous opinion that they should endeavour to keep the Juno ‘clear of the coast of Pegu’ (4). On the sixth day the gale abated, and the ship seemed to be taking on less water; only one pump had to be kept going. At last, there was a chance to investigate. ‘We discovered a leak between wind and water along the stern-port’ (4). The jolly boat was lowered and the hole in the hull repaired using oakum (fibres from unravelled ropes mixed with pitch) and sheets of tarred canvas, and the whole area was covered with sheet-lead. The crew was self-congratulatory. Calamity had been averted and their voyage could resume. But, Mackay remarks, ‘We must have been infatuated when we imagined that a piece of canvas, though it might exclude the water in moderate weather, could sufficiently secure such a leak as ours when the ship should come to labour’ (5). In the eighteenth century, ‘infatuation’ (from the Latin verb infatuare, ‘to make a fool of’) implied the opposite of rationality; to be infatuated was to be in a state of—ecstatic or abject—disorientation; to lose the coordinates of being and drift into formless impressions and sensations. Jonathan Lamb, the author of notable studies of the contours of Enlightenment selfhood, self-preservation, and maritime exploration, observes that sailors commonly fell prey to an ‘ungovernable yet equivocal emotion’ which occasionally became ‘pathologically intensified’ (2001, 9). Infatuation, he suggests, arose from the combined experience of long-­ distance seafaring and entering mare incognitae, in which sailors had ‘no base, no longitude, no system of cognitive mapping’ (165). This condition of perceptual and ontological drift might also be identified in the increasingly erratic behaviour of Captain James Cook during his last

52 

M. TITLESTAD

voyage and in his apparent dissociation on the day of his death and dismemberment in Kealakekua Bay—a tragedy observed at a distance by the young William Bligh who, years later, would confront the infatuated mutineer, Fletcher Christian, on the quarterdeck of the Bounty. The crew of the Juno believed that, through their skill and enterprise, they had restored the integrity of the hull, but this was hubris. A second gale raged from the morning of 12 June and the ship began to take on water at even a faster rate. By 16 June, the crew was ‘almost exhausted with fatigue and want of rest’ and they ‘began to entertain serious apprehensions for [their] safety’ (5). As their situation continued to deteriorate, they set course for the Coromandel shore in the hope that they might be able to coast it along to Madras. But on the morning of 20 June, the men at the pumps came up to inform the officers that the water had reached the lower deck. The sailors ‘became clamorous for getting out the boats, which we knew could be of no service, as we had only an old jolly-boat, and six-oared pinnace, both shattered and leaky’ (6). According to standard procedure—albeit a surrender—the mainmast was cut away to lighten the ship. It fell disastrously, smashing into the deck of the Juno. In the subsequent confusion, the crew let the ship broach; the sea began washing over her decks. But she did not sink. The Juno remained suspended with her upper deck only a metre or two below the surface. For the next twenty-three days, she rolled and drifted in the Bay of Bengal. Most of her officers, crew, and the Malay labourers had scuttled up the rigging of the two remaining masts. They were cast away aloft, buffeted by wind, scorched by the sun, dehydrated and starving, and surrounded by the dying and the dead who had lashed themselves to the shrouds and stays. It is not only its representation of a preternatural shipwreck and its aftermath which makes Mackay’s Narrative exceptional. It is also that we witness him grappling texts and literary conventions to come to terms with a singular uncanny reality. His conspicuous struggle to discover organising principles, tropes, and registers presents, in heightened form, the dilemma of all shipwreck writers: how does one devise a representational configuration that is adequate to the exorbitant, formless, and unspeakable experience of the wreck? Obviously, the Narrative was written at a cool distance, almost three years after the events it describes, and Mackay’s reflections at the time of the catastrophe were doubtlessly less lucid than his Narrative suggests. Perhaps, though, the published account can be read as a subsequent attempt to make sense of an irreducibly traumatic memory.

5  REMEMBERING WILLIAM MACKAY: THE WRECK OF THE JUNO (1795) 

53

As Mackay looks down from the mizzen mast on all that the world had become, he mediates the horror by recalling shipwreck narratives. He remembers, for instance, Captain Inglefield’s narrative, The loss of the Centaur in 1782, in which castaways in an open boat ‘received great benefit from lying down in turns in a blanket which had been previously dipped in the sea’ (11). Consequently, Mackay climbs down the mast, dips his flannel waistcoat into the sea, and puts it on soaked, in the hope that the pores of his skin will absorb sustaining water while the salt would remain on the surface. Many of his companions followed his example and consequently felt ‘refreshed’ (11). Mackay is insightful—for a young boy even precociously so. He recognises that, rather than actual sustenance, the activity provided necessary distraction, ‘occupying the mind, and preventing despondency’ (11). The Narrative assumes that—not only could one learn from shipwreck narratives how to apply practical reason in extremis—but also that the public it convenes is familiar with a range of tropes, narrative conventions, and ethical considerations. Armchair seafarers had become so accustomed to the preoccupations of the genre that they knew what to expect. As he recounts the first day aloft, Mackay addresses, oddly prematurely, the possibility of cannibalism. ‘I confess it was my intention, as well as that of the rest, to prolong my existence by the only means that seemed likely to occur, eating the flesh of any whose life might terminate before my own’ (9). Rather than leave his readers in any doubt, Mackay helpfully reassures them that he and the others would, if it proved necessary, eat the dead. A little later, he again gestures towards the textual world he shares with his public. Describing the unrelenting approach of hunger, he writes, ‘You will be surprised I do not mention leather; but none of us wore shoes at the time the ship went down’ (17). Boiling and chewing on leather shoes is routine in eighteenth-century shipwreck narratives. Obviously, this practice offered only consolation, not nutrition. It is strange how often it is a set piece in shipwreck accounts, where it was presumably far more tenacious than the practice itself. Intertexuality provides coordinates, both during Mackay’s suffering and subsequently in its narration. Rehearsed literary dispositions, generic conventions, and poetic devices give solace as physical and existential dismemberment proceeds; the familiar protects him from Julia Kristeva’s ‘black sun’ (1992). How else does Mackay seek to contain the exorbitant melancholia of the wreck? At moments, striving to come to terms with inexpressible fear and dread, he settles on metonym. This is the case with

54 

M. TITLESTAD

his description of a lascar’s corpse. The sailor had died just beyond Mackay’s reach, suspended in the cat harpings directly below the mizzen top. No one was able to dislodge the body: it bloated in the hot sun and the stench became ‘intolerable’ (18). The Narrative—despite the appalling events it represents—is decorous and restrained; the description of the lascar’s rotting body is its most explicit passage (his ‘whole body broke out in ulcers of a very disgusting appearance’ [18]). This is because its putrefaction stands for the cadaverization of all of those in the rigging. The corpse also suggests that death has become uncontained and, therefore, unmanageable. Eighteenth-century sailors were on intimate terms with death from scurvy, dysentery, shipwreck, accidents, or battle. This intimacy, combined with reactionary superstitions, saw them—even more than land folk—committed to rituals intended to keep the dead at bay, to ensure that the dead and their spirits would remain submerged beneath the province of the living. Burial at sea commonly entailed a corpse being stitched into a weighted canvas shroud and the needle passed through the nose at the last (precautionary) stitch (see Stewart 2005, 276–85). The suspended lascar decomposing above the water indicates the failure in shipwreck of a system for organising death and its relation to the living. Analogous to the voyage of the Juno itself, a (rite of) passage has been tragically prevented. Loss and mourning can find no structure. Even as Mackay reaches to represent the horror of their situation, he is concerned to describe ‘affecting scenes’. In his 1689 An essay concerning human understanding (1997), John Locke regards the self as constituted in its perceptions. First among these is the cognitive apprehension of the world around us. But cognition is hollow (even potentially dangerous) if we do not identify with—and feel for—others. It is everyone’s responsibility to refine, as far as possible, what we think and feel. The highest refinement, according to Locke, and the Moral Sense philosophers who elaborated his ideas, is when thoughts and emotions are selfless, when they are orientated towards the needs or suffering of others. It is no easy matter for an author to engage the sympathy of her readers: overblown emotion and clunky didacticism are obvious traps along the way. But, before the end of the eighteenth century, when ‘sentiment’ acquired the pejorative connotation of ‘sentimentality,’ authors, particularly of generic fiction, were commonly committed to the sentimental education of their readers. Mackay represents the castaways as deeply moved by the deaths of their companions. The vignette of the death of the hallucinated Captain Bremner in his wife’s arms places redemptive love in counterpoint to the

5  REMEMBERING WILLIAM MACKAY: THE WRECK OF THE JUNO (1795) 

55

despair of the wretched. Incidentally, her kindness should not be taken for granted. A few days earlier, members of the crew had launched a makeshift raft in the hope of reaching the Arakan coast. Abandoning his wife to her fate, Bremner barged his way through to secure a place for himself—while Mackay and Wade held back to increase the chance of the plan’s success. Two days after drifting aimlessly over the horizon, the raft approached the wreck from the opposite quarter from which they had set out. Even taking winds and currents into consideration, the chance that two vessels drifting in the Bay of Bengal would meet is extremely small. In terms of its subsequent dissemination, which I will consider later, the most important ‘affecting scene’ in the Narrative is the parable of the two fathers. One young crew member, Mr Wade’s boy (i.e. servant), ‘a stout and healthy lad, died early, and almost without a groan’ (20). His father seemed relatively indifferent, remarking only that ‘he could do nothing for him’ (20). A second boy, ‘who had a less promising appearance, held out longer’ (20). His father, on hearing that his son was ailing, hurried down the foretop, waited for a moment when the waves abated, and crawled on all fours along the gunwale to his child, who had tied himself to the mizzen rigging. He carried his son to the small section of the quarterdeck still above water—three or four planks—and secured him to the rail. Then he held the boy above the waves and comforted him as he retched convulsively. Whenever it rained, the father would gather water in his cupped hands and pour it into his son’s mouth. The two remained thus for three or four days until the boy passed away. Then his father lifted his son’s body, ‘gazed wistfully at it, and when he could no longer entertain any doubt, watched it in silence till it was carried off by the sea’ (20–21). The father wrapped himself in canvas and lay down where he stood, shivering for two days before following his son in death. The ‘good father’s’ self-abnegation, his morally persuasive love, is paralleled by an encounter during the land phase of the Juno narrative. On the morning of the twenty-third day adrift, 10 July, a lascar shouted that he had spotted land. Mackay, ‘incapable of any acute sensation’ and fearing false hope, refused to countenance the possibility (22). The lascar was right; a few hours later the ship washed onto a treacherous reef not far from the Arakan shore. Only fourteen people had survived. They struggled across lacerating rocks to the relative safety of the beach. Like most European shipwreck survivors, Mackay’s signal fear was that they would ‘be torn to pieces by tygers’ (26).

56 

M. TITLESTAD

A new drama began to unfold. Utterly depleted and injured during the hazardous landing, Mackay sought to follow Mrs Bremner’s example and hire some of the lascars to carry him on an improvised litter. Unsurprisingly, they refused and, dejected and exhausted, he stumbled along some distance behind the others. He was deeply gratified when he was befriended by a group of Arakanese, to whom he refers as ‘Muggs’ (the colonial name for the Islamic Rohingya). They fed him ‘the best victuals’ they had, reassured him of his safety and guided him along routes which minimised the danger of ‘tygers’ (41). A ‘humane stranger’ among them, later described as ‘the Chief of the Muggs,’ washed Mackay’s wounds and rubbed them with ghee, ‘by which they were soon healed’ (41–42). ‘I was so much affected with his kindness,’ he recounts, ‘that I could hardly bid him adieu […]. After recommending me to the blessed Virgin, he hurried me away that I might arrive before night at a hut two miles further on’ (42). When he was a little way down the beach, Mackay heard the Chief calling and saw him running towards him. He handed Mackay a pair of trousers, ‘which he desired me to put on before I reached Ramoo, that my feelings might not be hurt by appearing there without clothes’ (42). Mackay was deeply moved. ‘At this fresh instance of his goodness I burst into tears; I could not thank him; once more we took an affectionate leave of each other, and I pursued my journey in high spirits’ (42). The ‘Chief of the Muggs’ is goodness personified. His actions echo Matthew 25:35 (‘For I was hungry and you fed me […] Naked and ye clothed me’). He is also the embodiment of hospitality—where being hospitable is a moral disposition. The Chief welcomes the stranger without hesitation or expectation. He recognises Mackay’s demoted and deteriorated condition and, in an inversion of colonial relations, is self-effacingly paternal. The pattern of the Narrative suggests that we should understand this as love. Following the abject disorientation of the preceding twenty-­ three days, it is the Chief’s care that begins to right the world; to restore the sociality and mutuality shredded by catastrophe. The parable suggests a moral compass following a traumatic loss of bearings. Like the parable of the ‘good father’ earlier in the narrative, it is a sentimental vignette, and it is significant that Mackay is at pains to point out the nobility of the Chief (he does not come to love any common native). But the impulse to offset the splintering of form in shipwreck with (even stock) tropes gives us insight into the relation between suffering and stories. It is no great challenge for a literary critic to dismiss popular shipwreck narratives as clichéd

5  REMEMBERING WILLIAM MACKAY: THE WRECK OF THE JUNO (1795) 

57

and repetitive. Yet, in extremis, our own efforts to save ourselves from disintegration may be neither sophisticated nor original. Mackay’s Narrative resolves on a strange note. Having placed dread and love in dramatic counterpoint throughout, he settles finally on industry and enterprise. The party of castaways was detained briefly by a local zamindar, who feared Company reprisals since the Juno wreck had been plundered in his territory. Hearing of their situation, the Company immediately dispatched a boat, which ferried all its registered employees to the safety of its nearest trading station. Rather than languishing, Mackay immediately set about securing a sizeable vessel and a crew of lascars. He sailed for the wreck site the next day and proceeded to salvage wood and copper from the Juno, which he sold back to the Company to ‘great [personal] advantage’ (56). We could interpret this narrative turn as Mackay repressing the entire emotional upheaval using the currency of commerce. He was, after all, an embodiment of a global corporation. Alternatively, it affirms the sentimental conclusion that good comes of all catastrophes: in shaking us to our foundations, they cause us to realign the principles that underlie our practices. We only catch glimpses of the pathway of a text through time. It is like spotting a dolphin. In a vast and endlessly proliferating sea of intertextual relations, the true provenance and legacy of a single work is impossible to discern. We see only an arc or two. I have mentioned some of the texts that flowed into the Narrative: the tide of shipwreck stories and their pre-­ texts, the eighteenth-century literature of sentimental education and its underlying philosophy, the Gospels, representations of trauma, and various scripts of colonial encounter. There are obviously countless others. What of the even less discernible texts that flow from the Narrative of the Juno? There is evidence that Mackay’s account was widely circulated— it is referred to in a variety of nineteenth-century shipwreck texts—and it was included in at least one popular anthology, the typically named Shipwrecks and disasters at sea, or historical narratives of the most noted calamities and providential deliverances from fire and famine on the ocean, compiled by Charles Ellms of Boston and published in 1836. This version is bizarrely expurgated and edited. The Narrative would also find a notable literary embedding. George Gordon, Lord Byron was the grandson of John Byron (‘Foul-Weather Jack’), Captain Cheap’s loyal midshipman following the wreck of the Wager on the Patagonian coast of Chile in April 1741. Lord Byron based the shipwreck of his hero in the second canto of his mock-heroic epic, Don Juan (published between 1819 and 1824), on

58 

M. TITLESTAD

his grandfather’s published account and his diaries. As critics have noted (see Thompson 2007, 69, 250), Byron also renders Mackay’s parable of the two fathers in verse. At the heart of his satirical presentation of lurid open-boat narratives and cannibalism, Byron’s vignette is an instance of the urbane sincerity that often confounds readers’ attempts to gauge his tone. There were two fathers in this ghastly crew, And with them their two sons, of whom the one Was more robust and hardy to the view, But he died early; and when he was gone, His nearest messmate told his sire, who threw One glance on him, and said, ‘Heaven’s will be done! I can do nothing,’ and saw him thrown Into the deep without a tear or a groan.

The first father’s lack of empathy is—true to its source in the Narrative— juxtaposed with the love of the good father. The boy expired—the father held the clay, And looked upon it long, and when at last Death held no doubt, and the dead burthen lay Stiff on his heart, and pulse and hope were past, He watched it wistfully, until away ’Twas borne by the rude wave wherein ’twas cast; Then he himself sank down all dumb and shivering, And gave no sign of life, save his limbs quivering. (432–33)

This selfless empathy, the moral acuity it expresses, stands out in Don Juan as the opposite of both the breakdown of reciprocity in shipwreck and the indulgent sensationalism of so many representations. It is a moment of a quiet gathering, a delicate inward turn, in a narrative tradition that inclines gleefully to manipulate its readers into wildly vicarious horror. Stated anachronistically, Byron’s reflective moment is an Arnoldian touchstone: a morally dependable vignette in a spectacularly unreliable field of narrative. The lane in the South Park Street Cemetery where the groundsman and I sat and chatted is called ‘Derozio Way’. It is the only named avenue in the cemetery. It commemorates and leads to the grave of Henry Louis

5  REMEMBERING WILLIAM MACKAY: THE WRECK OF THE JUNO (1795) 

59

Derozio (1809–1831), a poet, teacher and philosopher buried just a stone’s throw from Mackay. His remarkably diligent biographer, Rosinka Chaudhuri, describes Derozio as one of the first educationalists to disseminate Western philosophy and learning among the young men of Bengal, and probably the first to articulate specifically Indian preoccupations in a nineteenth-century English poetic idiom. His commitment to English verse derived signally from his preoccupation with Byron. Across his oeuvre, Derozio emulated Byron’s style and poetic demeanour (often in ways so plodding that they are more humorous than was intended). His most explicit homage to Byron is Don Juanics, published in four instalments in the India gazette, beginning on 26 December 1825, under the nom de plume, ‘Juvenis’. I pored over the stanzas—written by this Indian who was so determined to be buried among the Company dead—for any explicit reference to Mackay’s Narrative, but here the dolphin disappears beneath the surface. Derozio and Mackay may be neighbours or just proximate strangers. What might follow from my short story of graves, writing, and survival? How does writing in stone relate to the boundless fluidity of intertextuality (W. B. Yeats’s ‘that dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea’)? It might be practical to state the obvious: nothing lasts for long. Any writer— whether etching in marble or scratching out ephemeral pamphlets—is misguided if she hopes for immortality for herself or her subjects. Any commitment to the future will fragment or it will be edited out of recognition. Yet I return to that mustiness beneath the trees in the South Park Street Cemetery; the sense of being haunted by a distant past you then discover is modern. Perhaps this is an oceanic feeling of time and writing, which is quite at odds with the linearity of crumbling monuments.

Works Cited Anderson, William. 1863. The Scottish nation, or the surnames, families, literature, honours and biographical history of the people of Scotland, Volume III: MAC– ZET. London: Fullarton. Byron, George Gordon, Lord. 2008. Lord Byron: the major works, ed. Jerome J. McGann. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Derozio, H.L.V. 2008. Derozio: poet of India; the definitive edition, ed. Rosinka Chaudhuri. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

60 

M. TITLESTAD

Ellms, Charles (ed.). 1836. Shipwrecks and disasters at sea, or historical narratives of the most noted calamities and providential deliverances from fire and famine on the ocean. Boston: Grigg and Eliot. Holmes and Company, 1851. The Bengal obituary, or a record to perpetuate the memory of departed worth: being a compilation of tablets and memorial inscriptions from various parts of the Bengal and Agra Presidencies (to which is added of such as which have pre-eminently distinguished themselves in the history of British India since the formation of the European settlement to the present time). London and Calcutta: W. Thacker. Kapur, Ash. 2009. The South Park Street Cemetery, Calcutta. Pamphlet: Kolkata. Keay, John. 1993. The Honourable Company: a history of the English East India Company 1680–1840. London: HarperCollins. Kristeva, Julia. 1992. Black sun: depression and melancholia. New York: Columbia University Press. Lamb, Jonathan. 2001. Preserving the self in the South Seas 1680–1840. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Locke, John. 1997. An essay on human understanding, ed. Roger Woolhouse. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Mackay, William. 1798. Narrative of the shipwreck of the Juno, on the Coast of Aracan, and of the singular preservation of fourteen of her company on the wreck, without food, during a period of twenty-three days. London: Debrett. Stewart, D.J. 2005. Burial at sea: separating and placing the dead during the age of sail. Mortality 10.4 November: 276–285. doi: https://doi. org/10.1080/13576270500321795 Thompson, Carl. 2007. The suffering traveller and the Romantic imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Yeats, W.B. 1966. ‘Sailing to Byzantium’. The Collected poems of W.B. Yeats. Edited by Richard J Finneran. New York: Scribner.

CHAPTER 6

The Cannibals and the Butterfly: The Wreck of the Medusa (1816)

In their Narrative of a voyage to Senegal in 1816, Alexandre Corréad and J.B.  Henry Savigny recount that, on the fifth day after the raft of the Medusa had been cut loose, a white butterfly, ‘of a species so common in France, appeared fluttering over our heads, and settled on our sail’ (1818, 121). Of the 147 who had boarded the raft, only fifteen were still alive; the previous day twelve had been thrown into the sea when it was adjudged that their chances of survival were negligible. Pieces of flesh cut from cadavers hung about the makeshift mast to dry, to make them more palatable. The dehydrated and starving survivors had succumbed to mute inactivity: they simply braced themselves against the waves washing over the raft. Yet they gathered themselves to debate the significance of the butterfly. The optimistic interpretation: it was a ‘harbinger, which brought us the news of a speedy approach to land,’ the possibility of which raised them to a ‘delirium of joy’ (121). But some, according Corréad and Savigny, wanted, rather unhelpfully, to eat it—they ‘devoured, with haggard eyes, this wretched prey, and seemed ready to dispute it’—while those of a more metaphysical bent claimed it was a ‘messenger from heaven’ and swore to protect it (121). Putting this contestation aside, it is remarkable that the survivors sought to interpret the butterfly’s significance at all. They had been driven beyond the edge of language. Their ‘lamentable cries’ (80) had given way to a ‘state of torpor’ (101); ‘the deepest despondency was painted on every face’ (104). Taken to be

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Titlestad, Shipwreck Narratives: Out of our Depth, Maritime Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87041-6_6

61

62 

M. TITLESTAD

metonymical, the butterfly (a delicate white fluttering against a black sun) opened doors to meaning that had closed. On 17 June 1816, the Medusa, a forty-four-gun frigate, cleared the Straits of Antioch—accompanied by the Echo (a corvette), La Lois (a flute), and the Argus (a brig)—and set sail for Senegal. She was captained by the commander of the expedition, Hugues Douroy de Chaumareys. He was a relic of the ancien régime, a counterrevolutionary who had remained loyal to the crown during the Napoleonic Republican and Imperial intervals. After the Cent-Jours (the brief period between Napoleon’s escape from Elba and his defeat at Waterloo), Louise XVIII was restored to the throne. The monarch felt obliged to reward loyalists such as Chaumareys, who had not been to sea for a quarter of a century, had little experience of captaincy, and knew nothing of the treacherous and only partially mapped sand banks along the west coast of Africa. The 166 officers and crew doubted his competence and a contingent that harboured republican convictions was outraged at his preferment. Insecure, Chaumareys sought approval from Antoine Richefort, an aristocratic member of the Société philanthropique, one of the sponsors of the expedition. In his definitive Medusa: the shipwreck, the scandal, the masterpiece (2008), Jonathan Miles describes Richefort as ‘an ex-mariner and braggart with a clouded history [who] claimed great knowledge of the west coast of Africa’ (39). The Arguin Bank off Cap Blanc was notorious and the ship’s approach obvious as the water shallowed. Yet the chummy pair, Chaumareys and Richefort, ignored the warnings of the more experienced mariners. The frigate came to a sudden, grinding halt on the sand bank with the coast still twelve to fifteen leagues distant. In addition to sixty-one passengers, the Medusa carried two companies (161 men) of the Africa Battalion. In their Narrative, Corréad and Savigny (respectively a geographical engineer and the ship’s surgeon) characterise the soldiers: ‘they were the scum of all countries, the refuse of the prisons, where they had been collected to make up the force charged with the defence and the protection of the colony’ (94). Miles describes the troop more informatively; they were ‘men from Italy, Arabia, Guadeloupe, San Domingo, India, Asia, America, Poland and Ireland—an explosive grab-­ bag of mercenaries, captives, ex-convicts, all furious with the French leadership’ (2008, 98). While efforts were being made to dislodge the Medusa from the sand bank, Lieutenant Espiaux took charge of the construction of a raft comprising the boom, masts, and the yards from the ship lashed together, across which timbers were secured. It was an impressive twenty

6  THE CANNIBALS AND THE BUTTERFLY: THE WRECK… 

63

metres in length (with a prow fashioned from the two topgallant yards) and nearly seven metres wide. Long pieces of wood projecting three metres on either side increased stability (see frontispiece illustration by Corréad, Narrative, and Miles 58). At 3 am on 5 July, the frigate began to take on water excessively and the evacuation began. The ship’s six boats were lowered and roped stern to prow. Corréad’s second sketch in the Narrative shows four in convoy: the ‘Captain’s Barge’ foremost, followed by the ‘Senegal Boat’ (intended for use at the colony), the ‘Pinnace and’ the ‘Governor’s Barge’. The longboat commanded by Espiaux did not join the others; the lieutenant elected to remain in the vicinity of the wreck to assist those still on board. The skiff was too small to make a difference. The soldiers of the Africa Battalion clambered onto the raft. By the time only fifty were aboard, it was submerged seventy centimetres. To encourage the remaining soldiers to leave the Medusa, the captain ‘[swore] not to abandon us’ (Corréad and Savigny 55), promising that the boats would tow the raft safely to shore. A clutch of sailors and a handful of passengers, appreciating the limited capacity of the boats and acknowledging their duty to the men, elected to board the raft, Corréad and Savigny among them. As the convoy inched away from the listing ship, the soldiers and sailors on the raft bid a noisy farewell to a group of sixty-three comrades who, deciding that drunken revelry unto death was preferable, remained on board. It was only five hours later that Lieutenant Joseph Reynaud, commanding the Governor’s Barge, performed one of the most perfidious acts in maritime history. ‘It is painful to us,’ Corréad and Savigny reflect, ‘to have to shew to what a degree the imagination of man is susceptible of being struck by the presence of danger, so as to make him even forget the duties which honour imposes on him’ (56). Manoeuvring in a rough sea to transfer passengers from the overcrowded longboat to the smaller Senegal Boat, Espiaux, to avoid a collision, was forced to cut the rope tethering it to the Pinnace. The opportunistic Chaumareys, still under the sway of Richefort, took advantage of the confusion; he ordered their barge to be detached. There were now only two boats pulling the raft, the Pinnace and the Governor’s Barge. It was then, following the example of the cowardly Chaumareys, that Joseph Reynaud ordered the rope attached to the raft to be cut, which was accomplished by repeated blows with an axe. Not only did the soldiers and sailors witness the betrayal; they heard a cry go up, ‘we forsake them’ (65). Corréad and Savigny—who describe Reynaud’s actions but do not name him—observe that effective leadership from any

64 

M. TITLESTAD

of the officers could have restored order and ensured the safe passage of all. But in their desperate self-interest, the officers (the worthy Espiaux excepted) deserted the men five leagues from the wreck of the Medusa, only seven or eight leagues from the coast. Espiaux steered the longboat alongside the raft. There was no possibility of transferring any men—the waves were already breaking over the longboat’s gunwales. Sharing the men’s outrage, the lieutenant offered to fire his boat’s twelve-pounder at the captain’s barge, but it was soon out of range. All that was left for Espiaux to do was to save the men in the longboat, so he set off reluctantly for the coast. The abandoned 147 were now adrift on a rudderless, overcrowded, undecked vessel with no mast and almost no provisions. To lighten the raft during embarkation all but a few barrels of wine and one of flour had been jettisoned, but it was nonetheless up to a metre below the surface in places. Hungry from hours of exertion, the castaways had their first meal: a handful of biscuit-paste (the barrel had been submersed) mixed with a small ration of wine. Midshipman Jean-Daniel Coudein was nominally in charge of the raft, but he had been injured during the evacuation of the Medusa and he lay immobilised. Nonetheless, at first discipline prevailed; rations were determined, ropes were attached to the raft for men to cling to, and a search was conducted for charts (which were promised, yet never handed over) and a compass (one of the men had an inadequate compass the size of a crown piece, but it was dropped into the sea as it was being handed to Coudein). Savigny ‘took on himself the care of setting up the mast’ (76–77). The ship’s main topgallant was raised; the mast kept upright using the rope that had previously towed the raft. The first night adrift was pitch dark and a storm arose; ‘a dreadful sea lifted us every moment from the raft, and threatened to carry us away […] the whole night was contended against death’ (79). Through prayer and believing that the ship’s company would soon return to rescue them, the men did not lose heart during that ‘dreadful night’ (79). Morning light revealed that ‘[t]en or twelve unhappy wretches, having their lower extremities entangled in the openings between the pieces of the raft, having not been able to disengage themselves, […] had lost their lives; several others had been carried off by the violence of the sea’ (80–81). Corréad and Savigny, as is so common in shipwreck narratives, offset this horror with the first sentimental vignette, ‘an affecting scene of filial piety [that] forced us to shed tears: two young men raised and recognised, for their father, an unfortunate man who was stretched senseless under the feet of the

6  THE CANNIBALS AND THE BUTTERFLY: THE WRECK… 

65

people’. He was not dead; the authors describe how the men ‘lavished on him all the assistance in our power,’ and the old man was temporarily restored (81). As night arrived, the calm on the raft descended into chaos; despondency gave rise to mutiny—‘the voice of the officers was wholly disregarded’ (82). The soldiers of the Africa Battalion and some of the sailors fell to drinking the wine which ‘disordered their brains, already affected by the presence of danger and want of food’ (84). They attacked the subaltern officers and passengers, who gathered in a circle around the base of the mast to withstand the assault. All the men had been forced to leave their firearms on deck when they disembarked from the Medusa, so they used sabres, bayonets, and axes. One mutineer began to hack at the ropes holding the raft together; he was quickly run through by an officer. The melee left dozens dead or injured, and most of those who had instigated the uprising were thrown into the sea. In another ‘affecting scene,’ Corréad suddenly realised that a mutineer, Dominique, who had been thrown from the raft, was ‘one of his workmen’ and, ‘forgetting the fault and treachery of this man,’ he dived in to save him (90), dragging him safely back on board. Corréad’s courage was manifest again just minutes later when, after fastening a rope around his waist, he jumped back into the sea to save a married couple. Once back on the raft, the ‘wife’ (a sutler) expressed her ‘warmest gratitude’ by invoking ‘Our Lady of Laux’ (Notre-Dame lu Laus) and she gifted Corréad, whose home was not far from Saint-Étienne-le-Laus, a small quantity of snuff, which he magnanimously passed on to a ‘poor sailor’ (90–91). Just three days later, as the situation deteriorated and starvation had truly set in, Corréad, without flinching, assisted in throwing the woman and her husband into the sea to increase the chances of the strongest surviving. The interval after the first insurrection was short. At midnight on the third day, the mutineers attacked again: ‘their senses were entirely deranged; they rushed upon us like madmen, with their knives or sabres in their hands’. Those without weapons ‘cruelly’ bit the officers and passengers (79). This second assault was even more deadly than the first. When it finally abated, with the mutineers defeated, the raft was strewn with the bodies of the dead. Throughout that night and into the next morning sporadic violence broke out. At one point, Coudein and a twelve-year-old boy, Léon, ‘to whom he had attached himself’ (100), were thrown into the sea, but the ensign was able to grab onto the raft and save the boy. From the afternoon of the fourth day, the violence was uncoordinated and

66 

M. TITLESTAD

undirected. Hallucinated men, many ‘furious,’ arbitrarily attacked one another, demanding non-existent food. Others imagined themselves still in the familiar wooden world of the Medusa and called for their hammocks, while several saw (phantom) ships on the horizon or harbours nearby, one soldier even describing a magnificent city on the horizon (101–2). Both Savigny and Corréad were brought to the limits of consciousness by their suffering. In a lethargic trance, the surgeon thought himself to be walking in a magnificent plantation, surrounded ‘by objects which delighted all his senses’ (101), while the engineer imagined he was ‘travelling through the fine plains of Italy’ and repeatedly asked the men around him for a pigeon to carry his orders with celerity (102). They liken their delirium to a ‘[fit] of burning fever’ which ‘consumed’ them. ‘We were really seized with a fever on the brain, the consequence of a mental exhalation carried to the extreme’ (103–4). That night sixteen deranged men hurled themselves into the sea. In their Narrative, Corréad and Savigny set the monstrous mutineers against the rational and ethical minority. Manichaeism, with its clear sense of rectitude, is the prerogative of survivors (particularly authors) reflecting on and rationalising their actions. Does the decision to eat of the corpses, in which neither Corréad nor Savigny ever disavowed agency, blur this moral binary? Survival cannibalism was a fact of the age of sail. In his monograph concerning ‘suffering travellers’ in the Romantic imagination, Carl Thompson describes cannibalism as the ‘ne plus ultra’ of eighteenthand nineteenth-century shipwreck texts (2007, 68). Cannibalism was rare but, to titillate armchair mariners, it is a louring possibility in many narratives. The raft of the Medusa is commonly a touchstone among other recorded instances: the Peggy (1765), the Francis Mary (1826), Captain Pollard’s boat after the sinking of the Essex by a whale (1820), the Franklin Expedition survivors on King William’s Island after the sinking of the Erebus and the Terror (1848)—who, evidence now suggests, never resorted to cannibalism—and the Cospatrick disaster (1874). In narratives about each, writers are simultaneously seduced by gothic possibilities and drawn to ethical questions regarding convention, necessity, custom, and context. The shrouded phenomenon of survival cannibalism was put on trial only in 1884, seventy years after the Medusa sank. The case concerned the events following the foundering of the yacht Mignonette that same year. In Cannibalism and the common law (1984), A.W. Brian Simpson describes the incident and brings his legal training to bear on the subsequent

6  THE CANNIBALS AND THE BUTTERFLY: THE WRECK… 

67

proceedings, R. v Dudley and Stephens 14QBD 273  DC (1884). The Mignonette set out from Tollesbury in Essex on 5 March 1884 en route to Sydney, Australia. She was captained by Tom Riley Dudley, an experienced sailor who had spent his life at sea, and crewed by Ned Brooks, Edwin Stephens, and the young Richard Parker. The yacht sank on 5 July and the men drifted for twenty-four days mid-sea in a dinghy. Starving and dehydrated, they discussed drawing lots, but the three older men settled instead on killing Parker, who was the frailest and was drifting in and out of consciousness. Dudley cut his throat with a penknife and his severed head, feet, and hands were thrown into the sea before his remains were eaten. The three survivors were picked up by a passing ship, the Montezuma, just two days later. The Tollesbury community was bewildered when the men were arrested on arrival in Falmouth and outraged when the Crown charged Dudley and Stephens with murder. At issue was the relation between custom and the law. If conducted correctly, survival cannibalism—euphemistically referred to as ‘the custom of the sea’—was considered by seafarers and their communities to be a legitimate ‘settled practice’ (Simpson 110). It was only Dudley’s failure to draw lots that troubled them. The law has always struggled to regulate seafarers, whose practices and beliefs are distinct from those of their counterparts on solid ground. The well-worn phrase ‘the outlaw sea’ suggests, not only the prevalence of transgression at sea, but also that seafaring, given its precarity and the relative autonomy of ships, necessitates practical heurism. Ships, in Bakhtin’s terms, are chronotopes, that is, distinct arrangements of time and space (a notion developed incrementally in The dialogic imagination 1982), and Foucault terms them heterotopias, which are intense and incompatible spaces that are ‘other’ (see Foucault’s first use of heterotopia in the preface to The order of things 1970, xvii). I will not dwell on these concepts, but together they suggest that wooden worlds compress time and space and, in doing so, instantiate particular and conspicuous forms and practices of sociality, power, governance, and law, as well as their disruption. When we consider ships at sea, which are at a significant remove from the province of landed institutions, it is important to recognise their different realities (although they are never wholly discrepant), in which alternative versions of moral conduct are customary. The court in R. v Dudley and Stephens stepped lightly. The judge did not wish to set a precedent by exonerating the two men, but also understood the authority of convention and lived experience. The compromise was to find Dudley and Stephens guilty, yet pass a sentence incommensurate with murder and on the captain alone.

68 

M. TITLESTAD

Within the year, Dudley was pardoned by Queen Victoria herself and freed from prison. R. v Dudley and Stephens casts retrospective light on the long history of survival cannibalism. The authors of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century shipwreck narratives, not unlike the judge in Dudley’s trial, navigate a course between acknowledging public outrage and the abhorrence of cannibalism, while simultaneously suggesting that it occurs in a ‘state of exception’. I take the phrase from the Italian philosopher, Georgio Agamben’s Homer sacer: sovereign power and bare life (1995). While he is more directly concerned with spaces in which governments or their proxies suspend the law and reduce individuals to nothing other than confined bodies in pain (such as concentration camps and Guantanamo Bay), the Medusa raft was also in a state of exception, having drifted beyond the reach of edicts, codes, and the social contract. Cadaverized and mentally and emotionally exhausted, the men could not manage an inordinate reality through quaint legal injunctions, and they could not reduce, as readers do, an overwhelming reality to spectacle. Their bodies became unadulterated, their subjectivities radically corporeal. They were reduced to ‘bare life’. Yet, kowtowing to their readers’ expectations, Corréad and Savigny begin with circumlocution, acknowledging the odium of their actions and imploring readers to understand and forgive them. ‘We tremble with horror at being obliged to mention that which we made use of! we feel our pen drop from our hand; a deathlike chill pervades all our limbs; our hair stands erect on our heads!—Reader, we beseech you, do not feel indignation towards men who are already too unfortunate; but have compassion on them, and shed some tears of pity on their unhappy fate’ (107–8). Then they present beguiling details and normalise their cannibalism. On the sixth day, having exhausted all options, including chewing and swallowing morsels of sword belts, cartouche-boxes, and linen, and drinking their urine (Corréad and Savigny explain at length that some men’s urine is more palatable than others), a few ‘fell upon the dead bodies with which the raft was covered, and cut off pieces, which [they] instantly devoured’. This gluttony gave ‘strength to those who had made use of it,’ and the practical problem became how ‘to render [the flesh] a little less disgusting’ that all might benefit from it (108). The decision was taken to dry it, and cuts were hung from the mast. The authors’ tone shifts as the cannibalism becomes routine. At 4 pm on the fourth day, a shoal of flying fish passed across the raft and the men caught and ate as many as they could, but ‘our

6  THE CANNIBALS AND THE BUTTERFLY: THE WRECK… 

69

hunger was so great and our portion of fish so small, that we added to it some human flesh, which dressing rendered less disgusting; it was this which the officers touched, for the first time. From that day we continued to use it, but we could not dress it any more’ (111). This rhetorical progression—from forlorn repentance, to thrilling details, and settling on bland necessity—is typically how cannibalism at sea is represented in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century shipwreck narratives, which tells us more about readers than it does about cannibals. At what juncture do humans become meat? In his acclaimed work, Cannibalism: a perfectly natural history (2017), Bill Schutt describes widespread cannibalism in nature. It makes ‘perfect sense from an evolutionary standpoint,’ he suggests, ‘reducing competition, as a component of sexual behaviour, or an aspect of parental care’ (172). Practised among countless species, cannibalism is not the exception but the rule, and it is not—as many suppose—only prevalent in stressed environments. But, among humans, apart from ceremonial cannibalism, it occurs only in horribly pressured circumstances. It is not part of our mating rituals, we do not (as a rule) eat our young, and we do not usually consume colleagues at work to secure promotion. ‘When they resort to cannibalism, the unfortunates involved in shipwrecks, strandings, and sieges [are exhibiting] biologically and behaviourally predictable responses to specific forms of extreme stress’ (172). Yet biological (‘innate’ or ‘natural’) imperatives are never sufficient when considering complex, particularly transgressive, human behaviour; we need also to reflect on the cognitive and affective shifts that facilitate decisions and make actions possible. In the case of survival cannibalism on the Medusa raft, we might usefully consider three related concepts deriving from the insights of the literary theorist and psychoanalyst, Julia Kristeva—‘horror,’ ‘abjection,’ and ‘melancholic asymbolia’. As the suffering on the raft unfolds, Corréad and Savigny describe, in various ways, the enervation and the creeping melancholia that beset the castaways. ‘Melancholy’ is named repeatedly in the Narrative (82, 109, 217, 219, 223, 225, 265, 266, 335), as are associated symptoms: emotional paralysis (71), despondency (82, 87, 90, 100, 103), fatigue (74), trance (101), torpor (101), indifference (107) and ‘mental dissolution’ (109). These are all consonant with the features of melancholia described by Sigmund Freud: ‘profoundly painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love, inhibition of all activity, and a lowering of the self-regarding feelings’ (‘Mourning and Melancholia’

70 

M. TITLESTAD

1964, 244). As Freud realised while treating his analysands, there are numerous causes of melancholia. Among the Medusa castaways, it arose, though variously in each afflicted person, from the trauma of the officers’ abandonment, the subsequent violence (there were another two uprisings after those I have discussed), and prolonged privation. Julia Kristeva, whose work concerns particularly the relation between melancholia and language, elaborates the Freudian diagnosis. She describes the experience as ‘an abyss of sorrow, a noncommunicable grief that at times, and often on a long-term basis, lays claim upon us to the extent of having us lose interest in words, actions and even life itself’ (1989, 3). Her ventriloquism of a melancholic analysand resonates with Corréad and Savigny’s representation of their state of mind: ‘I live a living death, my flesh is wounded, bleeding, cadaverized, my rhythm slowed down or interrupted, time has been erased or bloated, absorbed into sorrow’ (4). Throughout the Narrative, the authors evoke the soundscape of the raft. It is marked by a shift from coherent language (planning, disputation, commands, and reassurances) to discordant lamentations, ‘loud’ and ‘plaintive’ cries of ‘fury,’ ‘anguish,’ and ‘outrage’ (70, 71, 72, 109, 117, 119, 175,). Inarticulacy afflicts Savigny, whose ‘discourse was vague and disconnected’ (101) and who experienced ‘inexpressible anguish’ (132). To be ‘unaccommodated man […] no more but a bare, poor, forked animal’ (King Lear IV.iii.), suggests that a person is not only cast out of the quotidian concourse of society, but also experiences the collapse of systems of meaning in terms of which our humanity is organised. This is the ‘horror’ of meaninglessness (Corréad and Savigny 81, 120, 121), the ‘black sun’ that Corréad, Savigny and others saw rise above the horizon: ‘No word, no object in reality will be likely to have coherent concatenation that will also be suitable to a meaning or referent’ (Kristeva 51). In Powers of horror (1982), Kristeva links melancholic asymbolia to abjection. The etymology of ‘abjection’ is ‘being cast off’. From what is the abject person cast away? Abjection ‘disturbs identity, system, order’ (1982, 4); consoling, organised meaning is lost as the individual plunges towards the blunt materiality of ourselves. ‘A wound with blood and puss, or the sickly, acrid smell of sweat, of decay, does not signify death. In the presence of signified death—a flat encephalograph, for instance—I would understand, react, or accept. No, in the true theatre, without makeup or masks, refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside to live’ (3). Starvation, dehydration, the drinking of urine—in one case a soldier on the raft attempted to eat his excrement (Corréad and Savigny

6  THE CANNIBALS AND THE BUTTERFLY: THE WRECK… 

71

108)—wounds, infection, and the accumulation then consumption of corpses drew the castaways into abjection, to ‘the border of [their] condition as […] living being[s]’ (Kristeva 3). They were not able to keep bodies (theirs and others’) at bay; that is, submerged beneath abstractions and metaphors. Rather, bodies rose to the surface as fluids, bones emerged with cadaverization, appetite became all, and corpses, rather than remains, became meat. Cannibalism on the raft, as the judge understood in relation to Dudley and Stephens of the Mignonette years later, was death-in-life consuming a corpse: two bodies beyond the boundaries of meaning. The butterfly that alighted on the mast drew the men, no matter how evanescently, out of their asymbolia. ‘[Hope] penetrated the inmost recesses of our souls, revived our enfeebled strength, and inspired us with an ardour, of which we should not have thought ourselves capable’ (122). It drew them back into systems of meaning; for a moment, their active interpretation of a metonym and their lively debate interrupted their decline into abjection. It is ironic that the men are oblivious—as we all were until recently—that butterflies are generally cannibals (see Schutt 5). Binaries, no matter how much we depend on them, never quite hold us. The young Théodore Géricault, seeking to make his name on the Parisian art scene, chose the Medusa story for his subject. For ten months, he immersed himself in reports and accounts, spoke at length with Corréad and Savigny, and developed a lasting friendship with Corréad, who spent a considerable amount of time with the artist as he worked (McKee 236–37). Géricault moved his studio to a location near the Hȏpital Beaujon, and studied and sketched the process of cadaverization in its morgue. He went further, bringing ‘death into his studio’ (Miles 174): he convinced the nurses to overlook him smuggling out severed limbs, pieces of flesh, and at least one severed head. Several of his preliminary sketches represented cannibalism on board the raft, but Géricault elected not to include it in his masterpiece. For that, he chose the moment when the brig, the Argus, was first spotted on the horizon by one of the fifteen moribund survivors. Corréad directed the artist in the construction of a full-scale replica of the raft in his studio. Interestingly, Géricault would have another frequent visitor, Eugene Delacroix, pose for the man face down in the centre foreground of the picture. In 1840, Delacroix would paint ‘Shipwreck of the Don Juan,’ which depicts an overcrowded open boat of starving survivors drawing lots to determine who will be sacrificed to save the others.

72 

M. TITLESTAD

After the first sighting, the Argus dropped behind the horizon, leaving the men utterly despondent, but minutes later, she reappeared. ‘We all embraced each other with transports, that looked like delirium, and tears of joy rolled down our cheeks, sunk by the most cruel privations. Everyone seized handkerchiefs, or pieces of linen to make signals to the brig, which was approaching rapidly’ (Corréad and Savigny 137–38). It was thirteen days since they had embarked. Géricault made the progressive decision to situate a black sailor centrally and raised above the others, waving a flag to summon the Argus. ‘To place a figure who, because of his colour, was generally considered to be sub-human at the summit of whatever hope ‘The Raft of the Medusa’ may be said to express, was daringly, dangerously avant-garde’ (Miles 185). There is another indication that the painting is a republican critique of the despicable conduct of the senior officers: at the extreme right-hand side, a uniform trails in the water that references the revolutionary tricolore. Géricault’s progressive convictions were fuelled by Corréad who, following the publication of the Narrative, became a celebrated writer, bookseller, and publisher of anti-royalist works (he was eventually prosecuted and jailed for publishing and distributing seditious material). He is placed centrally in the painting: it ‘does not present Corréard as a victim, but Corréard as a messenger, Corréard the polemicist, the saviour who would take up arms against a sea of troubles’ (Miles 182). He continued his abolitionist work until his death in 1857. Géricault’s painting eschews realism; it avoids gothic excess in favour of political engagement. In doing so, he became ‘not only a witness to the malfunctioning French administration, but also an advocate for a fundamental shift in human rights’ (Miles 185). Hugues Douroy de Chaumareys faced a naval tribunal at Brest in 1816 for his part in the Medusa tragedy. The trial dragged on into 1817, having been moved to Rochefort. The judge, who could have imposed the death sentence, desisted but stated ‘I am far from finding him “Not Guilty”’ (see McKee 193). Chaumareys was convicted of dishonourable misconduct, which covered his failure to remain aboard until the ship was evacuated, his inadequate command after it had run aground, and abandoning the raft. He was struck from the Navy List, compelled to forfeit his orders and decorations, and was imprisoned. Chaumareys was released in 1819 just three days after Géricault was informed that he has won a gold medal at the Salon for ‘The Raft of the Medusa’. Apart from Géricault’s masterpiece, the tragedy had a significant afterlife. It became emblematic of the failure of ancien régime, a basis on which

6  THE CANNIBALS AND THE BUTTERFLY: THE WRECK… 

73

to promote republicanism, which was anachronistically disparaged after the Cent-Jours and the second restoration, and it encouraged debates regarding the form of emergent French nationalism. In Francophobe Britain, the story became—in broadsides and pamphlets—proof of the inadequacy of French command and the superiority of British discipline (see Thompson 114). It seems then that the raft sailing into the future would be interpreted politically, the horror only buttressing reformist intentions. If genuine turpitude—evil even—was manifest on the raft, it was neither in the fury of the desperate attacks on the junior officers and passengers by the Africa Battalion nor in the resigned starving cannibals. Rather, it gathered in Chaumareys’ weakness and ineffectual command, and in Reynaud’s axe as it hacked repeatedly at the rope. Debasement, Corréad and Savigny ultimately imply, consists in indifference to the fate of others.

Works Cited Agamben, Georgio. 1995. Homer sacer: sovereign power and bare life. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 1982. The dialogic imagination: four essays, ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press. Freud, Sigmund. 1964. Mourning and melancholia. The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV 1914–1916, ed. and trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth. Foucault, Michel. 1970. The order of things: an archaeology of the human sciences. Trans. from French, no translator named. London: Tavistock. Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of horror: an essay on abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP. Kristeva, Julia. 1989. Black sun: depression and melancholia. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia. McKee, Alexander. 1975. Death raft: the human tragedy of the Medusa shipwreck. London: Souvenir. Miles, Jonathan. 2008. Medusa: the shipwreck, the scandal, the masterpiece. London: Pimlico. Savigny, J B Henry and Alexandre Corréad. 1818. Narrative of a voyage to Senegal in 1816; undertaken by order of the French government; comprising an account of the shipwreck of the Medusa, the sufferings of the crew and the various occurrences on board the raft, in the Desert of Zaara, at St. Louis and at the Port of Daccard 1818. Trans. from the French, 1816 edition. London: Henry Colburn.

74 

M. TITLESTAD

Schutt, Bill. 2017. Cannibalism: a perfectly natural history. Chapel Hill: Algonquin. Shakespeare, William. 1997. King Lear, ed. R.A. Foakes. London: Arden. Simpson, A.W.  Brian. 1984. Cannibalism and the common law: the story of the tragic last voyage of the Mignonette and the legal proceedings to which it gave rise. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Thompson, Carl. 2007. The suffering traveller and the Romantic imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER 7

King Baba’s Largesse: The Wreck of the Winterton (1792)

On 19 November 1794, the Portuguese cargo superintendent appeared before the Tribunel at Port Louis, Mauritius, to petition for the lifting of the French embargo on the departure of foreign ships for India (Hood 2003, 190). Two factors led to the Tribunel’s accession to the request: first, papers had been discovered on the British privateer, Princess Royal, which indicated such detailed strategic and political knowledge that the French blockade had become irrelevant. The second reason was altogether more human. ‘Isabella Cullen and Charlotte Bristow went in person to the National Assembly and begged to be allowed to leave. Isabella’s matriarchal authority, Charlotte’s youth and Anglo-Indian beauty, and a display of feminine tears—whether spontaneous or carefully calculated to wring the hearts of the delegates—triumphed over bureaucracy’ (Hood 190). The women’s appeal, at that moment in the muddled history of the colonisation of Mauritius, led to the departure a few weeks later of eighty-four survivors of the wreck of the East Indiaman Winterton for Madras, where they arrived on 18 January 1794. The next day the Madras Courier carried front-page news of the passengers’ return—the well-being of Isabella Cullen and her daughter Margaret at the heart of the report. It had been more than one year and five months since the Winterton had wrecked, on 19 August 1792, off the east coast of Madagascar as it sailed up the Mozambique Channel, the ‘Inner Route’ to India. The remarkable story of Isabella Cullen and the others who sailed on board the Winterton from Gravesend on 29 April 1792, is told in various © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Titlestad, Shipwreck Narratives: Out of our Depth, Maritime Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87041-6_7

75

76 

M. TITLESTAD

works: the third mate John Dale’s Narrative of the loss of the Winterton, East Indiaman, which was wrecked off the island of Madagascar, August 20th 1792, a matter-of-fact thirty-page report hastily published in London in 1794 by Simon & Castleman; Dale’s unpublished journal, ‘The loss of the Winterton,’ a section of which was presented to the Marquis of Cornwallis at Madras the year it was written; a passenger, George Buchan’s, self-consciously literary and comprehensive Narrative of the loss of the Winterton, East Indiaman (1820), published in Edinburgh twenty-eight years after the events; William Ellis’s encyclopaedic two-volume History of Madagascar (1830), the life’s work of a London Missionary Society reverend which remains the most comprehensive study of the island’s Indian Ocean history, cultural hybridity, and ecology; and, finally, Jean Hood’s commendable Winterton monograph, Marked for misfortune: an epic tale of shipwreck, human endeavour and survival in the age of sail (2003). These texts reveal fragments of Isabella Cullen’s experiences during and after the wreck. She comes and goes, into focus now and then blurs into the background, just as she does in this essay. I do not intend to flesh out her life beyond existing accounts, but rather to host her as a spectral guest whose suffering and salvation was orientated by hospitality. My preoccupation is with ethics but requires contextualisation. George Dundas, commander of the Winterton, was one of the first Honourable East India Company (HEIC) captains to invest in one of John Harrison’s chronometers (which at the time cost nearly a third of an East Indiaman). It had served him well on two previous voyages and he was so confident of their longitude as they sailed up the Mozambique Channel that, when the lookout descried white water in the distance, he ascribed it to the breaching and blowing of whales. However, it marked the reef on which the ship foundered an hour later. George Buchan’s Narrative sets out the dismemberment of the ship—he ‘writes it to pieces’ (see Blackmore 2002, xxi) in even more painstaking detail than was typical of the genre. Buchan singles out John Dale for praise for ordering the crew to hack through the beams around the periphery of the poop deck so that it could function as a raft. Dundas guided the women—who were coordinated by Isabella Cullen, their thirty-two-year-old doyenne—‘under the lee of the starboard side of the ship, as the most sheltered; but the surf that was then making free way through all the cabins below and above, was continually washing over them’ (Buchan 25). When the ship finally broke apart, the poop floated free. Buchan estimates that around forty drowned in the subsequent scramble. Three were women: ‘Two young

7  KING BABA’S LARGESSE: THE WRECK OF THE WINTERTON (1792) 

77

ladies, Miss R—and Miss M—, going out to their friends in India, and an interesting young creature, about twelve years of age, the eldest daughter of Mrs. C–, were among the lamented number’ (39). Isabella Cullen’s eldest is only referred to as ‘Miss Cullen’ in the manifest and the Dale and Buchan narratives (and their countless expurgated and anthologised adaptations), but her Christian name is not lost to us: there is a scribbled note in the margins of one of the appendices of Dale’s journal. Her name was ‘Ann’. Buchan touchingly describes the distraught Isabella on the verge of throwing herself into the sea as she watched Ann drown, but, when some of the women brought her ten-year-old daughter, Margaret, to her, she was restored to the calm resolution the survivors admired in her and on which they would depend in the months ahead. In their respective accounts, neither Dale nor Buchan indict Captain Dundas for his navigational error or his decisions as the Winterton ceased to be a ‘ship’ and became a ‘wreck’ (for eighteenth-century mariners this change was not semantic: when a ship—a legal entity—wrecked, hierarchies, duties, obligations, rights, expectations, and the protocols of payment changed). Dale does, though, allude to Dundas’s creeping melancholia. Having only hours before delivered a rousing speech which was cheered by the crew, the captain ‘waver[ed] from his original declaration to the men,’ and at the first opportunity ‘expressed his wish to accompany the Ladies on shore’ (1793, 12). The last time Dale saw the captain, he was sitting—catatonic—on the poop with the women. The first mate, Charles Chambers, ‘repeatedly urged him to attempt to save his life,’ yet he remained resolutely ‘inactive, declaring that he was sensible all his efforts would be in vain’ (12). ‘With perfect resignation to his fate,’ he chose an unheroic death. The poop drifted alternately parallel to and then towards the coast, slowly breaking apart, sections drifting among a flotilla of makeshift rafts and men clinging to flotsam. Buchan was on the largest remnant, about twenty feet in length, onto which fifty or sixty people were crowded. The only women in this group were Isabella Cullen and Margaret. Buchan was moved by Isabella’s profound suffering and endurance. ‘In addition to the general pressure of distress, affliction particularly her own, as has been seen, lay heavy on her; and the interest which this naturally excited, was greatly increased by the calm, resigned fortitude which she wonderfully evinced under a severity of trial as great as the female mind, perhaps, was ever called to encounter’ (45). It was decided that Isabella and Margaret should board the first native canoe that approached—into which Buchan,

78 

M. TITLESTAD

who claimed to be an ‘invalid,’ also clambered (for one apparently so frail, he lived a long and healthy life, dying on 3 January 1856 at the age of eighty on his estate at Kelloe in County Durham). The other survivors fought against swirling currents, some assisted by Madagascans in canoes (many of whom retreated when their unstable outriggers were swamped by sailors trying to save themselves). Although dozens of the crew and passengers succumbed—drowned from exhaustion or torn by the reef—most straggled ashore, some miles apart, many unaware of who had survived. Accounts of initial engagements with the islanders vary. Even Dale contradicts himself. In his published narrative, he describes rapacity and hostility: ‘Many things drove on the beach, but whatever was of any value, the natives secured, threat’ning everyone who attempted to oppose them with death’ (14). Yet, in his more intimate journal, written a year earlier, his first memory is of their small party being approached shortly after landing by four ‘natives who joined us in a friendly way’ (52), asked after the whereabouts of ‘the captain,’ and—having given them water—offered to guide them and their compatriots to the ‘king’. The settlement they reached an hour later was a cluster of fishing huts (which Dale misconstrued as their destination), and here they discovered that, not only had a thriving barter economy between the locals and survivors already arisen, but that Isabella Cullen and Margaret had been accommodated in the main hut, provided with the best of the food, and left to mourn privately Ann’s death. When most of the crew and passengers were assembled, the party set off, guided on an arduous journey north towards St. Augustin Bay. Isabella Cullen and the other women travelled much of the way adjacent to the coast in the Winterton’s yawl and were able to forge ahead, while the men trudged along, engaged in what seemed to them oddly unpredictable interactions with the locals. At times they were recipients of almost sacramental hospitality—being offered, for instance, the largest portions of scarce provisions—while at others they felt themselves neglected and deprived, treated even with open hostility. After trudging eighty miles in five days, they arrived at ‘Tullear,’ the provincial capital and seat of the ‘King of Baba,’ to which Isabella Cullen and Margaret and several other survivors had been variously guided. Buchan’s relief is palpable: ‘Woful as the difference was, I felt as if I had got back again to our own country. We had not now before us the immediate fear of being starved; we had a hut to cover us, and a comfortable bed of dried rushes to lie on; and we were again among our former shipmates’ (86).

7  KING BABA’S LARGESSE: THE WRECK OF THE WINTERTON (1792) 

79

Toliara (‘Tullear’) is the southernmost point of the Sakalava region of south-western Madagascar (it is north of Malafahy and west of Bara). It is pointless to attempt here a description of late eighteenth-century Madagascar. William Ellis (1830) dedicates more than two thousand pages to the island’s cosmopolitan history, its demographics, cultural and economic hybridity (it was an intersection of African, Middle Eastern, Indian, and Indonesian trade routes), the multiple internecine struggles between diverse chieftaincies, and its diverse and unique ecology. He also describes the island’s lingering association with piracy (for a century, the coves of the north and north-east coasts were the primary haven for pirate vessels hunting in the Indian Ocean) and the ham-fisted and half-hearted colonial projects of the Dutch, French, and Portuguese during more than a century. Much of Ellis’s work has been refined and elaborated, but not much has been contested (see Brown 1978; Campbell 1993). Let us consider just the salient details about Toliara and neighbouring St. Augustin Bay at the time the Winterton survivors arrived. In the midto late-eighteenth century, Madagascar was divided into autonomous dominions, with those in the west economically dominant due to their participation in the Portuguese slave trade. Toliara was a slaving port, and the ‘King of Baba’ was a trader, but that was not—by the 1790s—the settlement’s primary economic activity. The village’s vast fertile hinterland (Fiherenana), its low population density, and the relatively high altitude of the adjacent plains made the region ideal for cattle-farming, and it was this that made the ‘King of Baba’s’ largesse possible. Until the 1780s, St. Augustin Bay had been a regular HEIC supply port and, according to Ellis (II, 97), a small English settlement existed there for several years (the Winterton survivors were horrified when they arrived at Toliara to discover that only one Company ship now visited annually). Many of the Toliarians spoke some English, and several had adopted British names—the French influence in Madagascar, which had been as erratic as its efforts at colonisation, was largely limited to the east coast in the vicinity of Fort-Dauphin (now Tolagnaro). Interestingly, the Chief never objected to being called the ‘King of Baba,’ although even at the time Buchan knew this was ‘entirely a European appellation’ (105). Ellis observes that ‘Baba’ derived from the Bantu word for father (or grandfather) and, ‘while it acknowledged the kindness and hospitality of the king’ and signified patriarchal dignity, it was not a proper noun (105). There is no indication in the survivors’ narratives or any of the HEIC documents that anyone took the trouble to establish his actual name or title. Records suggest that when

80 

M. TITLESTAD

Admiral Watson’s Company squadron spent some time at St. Augustin Bay in 1784, they came to know a Sakalavan chieftain, ‘Babaw,’ who ‘greatly affected English manners and customs’ (Ellis II, 98). This, given that Madagascan cultures were characterised by sacrosanct nomenclature and that eighteenth-century phonetic transcriptions were erratic (see Stephen Ellis 2007: 451–52), is probably not much closer to the actual name or title of the Maroseranana clan chief who ruled Toliara: but let us refer to him as ‘Babaw’. John Dale’s description of meeting Babaw is the most lyrical moment in his notebook: ‘His reception of us was such as I shall never forget. He embraced me with much affection; I offered him a present—one of the few trinkets we had saved from the wreck—but he declined accepting it, and directed his interpreter to tell me how sorry he was for our misfortunes, and also, that he could not think of taking anything from us, but that he would be happy to give us anything he had; that the king Baba and the king George [III] were one, were brothers, and as such he could afford us every protection in his power’ (Dale in Ellis II, 96). In his official Narrative, with a different readership in mind, Dale still wished it to be known that ‘every praise and credit is due to [Babaw] for his kind and humane treatment to us, from our first arrival till the melancholy and reduced number of the Winterton’s crew were taken off the island’ (Dale Narrative 14). Buchan is no less effusive: ‘The personal kindness that we experienced from the King is what we never can acknowledge with sufficient gratitude, nor adequately express. […] He continued during the whole of our residence in the country, to act on the same generous and humane principle without a moment’s deviation. It matters not whether the object was material or otherwise, the same feeling uniformly operated’ (Buchan 147). Babaw saw to all their needs: providing a bullock each day to be slaughtered, supplying rice, selling or trading other essential provisions as cheaply as he could, providing clothing, organising the building and maintenance of their huts, and frequently visiting for casual conversation (usually accompanied by a young boy carrying his smoking pipe and his half-German mistress, who was apparently obsessed with croquet). A particular incident impressed Buchan: a Winterton sailor who had committed some transgression was about to be flogged when Babaw intervened, saying ‘that he was sure that if any of his people had been wrecked in England, King George would not allow them to be punished; and that he could not therefore allow King George’s people to be so’ (148). On another occasion, when Babaw announced his intention to progress across

7  KING BABA’S LARGESSE: THE WRECK OF THE WINTERTON (1792) 

81

his province, the survivors pleaded with him to stay, lest the villagers— who occasionally inclined to drunken pilfering and other forms of mischief—took advantage of his absence. He agreed to remain. As soon as the Winterton survivors realised they would have to wait nearly a year for the arrival of an HEIC vessel, they began to discuss their options. John Dale—with typical resolve—set about repairing the yawl, hoping to make it sufficiently seaworthy to sail to the east coast of Africa to negotiate for a vessel to rescue the others. After setting off, following days of being blown back and forth across the Channel, Dale and his small crew eventually fought the leaky ship’s boat to Sofala. They were initially treated hospitably and given a boat to sail up to Mozambique Island, but when they returned because the vessel proved derelict, they were unaccountably subjected to blunt hostility, refused further assistance, and were forced to walk nearly eight hundred miles to the Island—a tortuous trek through the remnants of a moribund Portuguese empire and a wasteland desolated by slavery. At Mozambique Island, Portuguese officials treated them lavishly, restored them to health and, after an inscrutable set of negotiations, Dale’s crew were given a vessel without being asked to issue a promissory note—a guarantee of payment—on behalf of the HEIC, an incredibly generous act the reason for which neither Dale nor the Company could ever fathom. They set off immediately—eight months after their departure from Madagascar—to embark the Winterton survivors. For all his efforts to keep the castaways safe, Babaw could not protect them from the ravages of a malarial epidemic, to which his own people were relatively immune. The Winterton castaways began to die in December. Buchan reflects on becoming inured to the horror of witnessing six hundred survivors being reduced to half that number in seven months: ‘The spectacle of those themselves who could barely walk, being often called to take part in the internment of their departed companions might be thought to have been sufficiently impressive; but I fear it too often happens, when the mind is somewhat not under right regulation, that the frequent recurrence of death blunts its impression; at least, I must own, such was much my own feeling at that period’ (Buchan 153). In an otherwise painstakingly detailed narrative, the months of the plague take up only a few pages of Buchan’s account, and those describe only general symptoms and the deaths of just two of his friends: it was clearly unspeakable. Not only did the Cullens not succumb to malaria, but they also ministered to the dying, and Isabella, resolute in her faith, prayed at the graveside of each sailor or passenger who perished.

82 

M. TITLESTAD

When things were at their darkest, on a bright Sunday, 24 March 1793, a tumult went up: Dale had sailed into St. Augustin Bay. He set out joyously for a reunion with his shipmates at Toliara but was overwhelmed by what he saw. ‘My abilities are unequal (and probably the power of human language is inadequate),’ he wrote, ‘to paint the miserable state in which I found the whole of the survivors.’ Not only were most of them diseased or dying, they were also ‘overwhelmed with mental affliction’ (23). Desperate to exonerate himself, Babaw explained to Dale that ‘it was not the King of Baba who made the Englishmen die, but God; that he had supplied them with bullocks, rice, &c to make them live, “But,” says he, “if God do this thing, who can help?”’ (Dale in Buchan 213). By his own admission, Dale rushed the departure of the ailing, malnourished survivors, now numbering only a hundred and thirty. He knew that they could simply stand no more. Within a few days, they were safely on Mozambique Island. On 10 June, the Joachim departed Mozambique Island with Isabella and Margaret Cullen, and eighty-three other Winterton survivors aboard. They must have imagined, after all they had endured, that it would be plain sailing for Madras. But, in a turn worthy of maritime pulp fiction, unbeknownst to them, war had been declared between England and France just weeks earlier, and the Joachim, no more than a Portuguese tub, was easily overtaken and captured by the Le Mutin, a 120-ton privateer from Mauritius. The able-bodied crew of the Joachim were put to service on the Le Mutin (John Dale among them), while the remainder of the Winterton survivors—including Isabella and Margaret—were ferried to Port Louis in Mauritius to be held for ransom. The Le Mutin, emboldened by its recent success and newly incremented crew, set off to hunt along the Coromandel Coast, only to be outgunned and captured by the fifth-rated Dutch ship, the Ceylon, which disembarked the pressed Winterton and Joachim sailors in Bengal. It would still be another five months until the French and the Portuguese bickering in the Mauritian Tribunel over the necessity for a French blockade and Isabel Cullen and Charlotte Bristow’s pleas for release would result in the repatriation of the largest group of the Winterton survivors. On 16 January 1794, they set off aboard the Henry for Kolkata and arrived—almost surprisingly—without further incident. Aboard the Henry, Isabella Cullen was preoccupied with Babaw. On 21 February, she and a few others wrote a long and effusive letter to Sir John Shaw, a senior commander at the HEIC headquarters in Kolkata. After a

7  KING BABA’S LARGESSE: THE WRECK OF THE WINTERTON (1792) 

83

brief contextualisation, even before praising the initiative and bravery of John Dale, they wrote of Babaw, for whom they were seeking both recognition and recompense. ‘It is unnecessary to take up your time with dealing with the steady conduct, the uniform tenderness to the sick or the universal benevolence of this man. Habituated to intoxication and to acts of savage violence towards his own people […] to us he was invariably gentle and humane […] even in cases where the impertinence of our people and their violation of the laws of hospitality exposed us all to immediate death from his enraged subjects’ (see Hood 195–96). The fullest praise, and a further petition to reward Babaw, is a tattered appendix to John Dale’s notebook (MSB158 1793). Following his personal account of events intended for the Marquis of Cornwallis, Dale presents a range of observations on the cultural and political practices he witnessed in Madagascar, and reflections on its topography, ecology, and climate. Amid his survey and Linnaean enthusiasms, he devotes three pages to a description of ‘the King’. They are written in a different register: unadulterated love. He begins with ‘there is something great in his Idea of Justice’ (38). He explains that the chief would accept no gifts because of the survivors’ wretchedness and that there was never any implication that Babaw’s daily gifts to them of bullocks and rice were in any way conditional or transactional. He also came to realise that the value of the bullocks—both literal and cultural—was increasingly resented by the villagers, but Babaw consistently defended his hospitality (often by violently beating any dissenting subjects). What moved Dale most, even beyond the provision of food, accommodation, and Baba’s easy-going interactions, was that he responded to the survivors’ anxieties. Whenever they felt they needed his protection, he would forgo his official duties, choosing above all else to be their custodian. Dale concludes: ‘his conduct towards us must have in a great measure proceeded from a real generosity of Disposition and a really good heart’ (39). When the HEIC acceded to Isabella Cullen and Dale’s requests and sent generous gifts to Madagascar, Babaw was apparently bewildered—partly because he could not understand why the Company considered itself to be in his debt, but more particularly because he could discern no moral connection between those he had hosted for months and the uniformed officials who arrived at his village laden with luxuries and intent on him inspecting their ship, the Drake, moored in St. Augustin Bay. Let us remind ourselves of another castaway. Odysseus is shipwrecked in Book 5 of The Odyssey (Homer 2003) when ‘a massive wave came crashing down on his head / a terrific onslaught spinning his craft round and

84 

M. TITLESTAD

round—/ and he was thrown clear of the decks—/ the steering oar wrenched / from his grasp—/ and in one lightning attack the brawling / galewinds struck full force, snapping the mast and mid-shaft / and hurling the sail and sailyard far across the sea’ (346–51). Poseidon’s wrath is relentless: Odysseus is caught ‘in the boom of a heavy surf on jagged reefs—/ roaring breakers crashing down on an ironbound coast, / exploding in fury’ (445–47). He hangs onto a reef, but ‘strips of skin [are] torn / from his clawing hands stuck to the rock face (476–77). He prays, struggles through the briny pandemonium back to the surface—and is providentially saved. Odysseus finds himself ‘bone-weary, about to breathe his last (519), but safely resting in a small wood alongside a stream inlet, where ‘Athena showered sleep / upon his eyes’ (546–47). On waking, at the start of Book 6, Odysseus hears voices: ‘whose land have I lit on now? / What are they here—violent, savage, lawless? / or friendly to strangers, god fearing men?’ (133–34). He comes upon a scene that could not be more pleasant: a group of nubile Phaeacian women playing games in the sun as they wait for their washing to dry. As he approaches to engage Nausicaa, daughter of King Alcinous, he becomes self-conscious about his appearance: he is naked, covering his nether regions with a large leaf, and is ‘a terrible sight, all crusted and caked with brine’ (172). The women flee in terror, except Nausicaa: she ‘held fast, for Athena planted courage in her heart / and she firmly stood her ground and faced Odysseus’ (155–56). In her first words to him, she refers to him as both ‘stranger’ and ‘friend’ (203–4). She acknowledges the marks on his body left by his ordeal but is sanguine about the inevitability of affliction: ‘Zeus […] gave you pain it seems. You simply have to bear it’ (207–8). Then she offers unqualified hospitality. ‘But now, seeing that you’ve reached our city and our land, / you’ll never lack for clothing or any other gift, the right of worn-out suppliants come our way. / I’ll show you our town, tell you our people’s name’ (210–13). It is only after Odysseus has washed the encrusted salt from his face and body, dressed his bleeding wounds, combed his matted hair, bathed in oil, and dressed in the vestments of nobility that the Phaeacians realise they have welcomed and accommodated a noble hero. ‘Hospitality’ is entrenched in academic and political discussions in the registers of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida. They undergird discussions of the ethical lineaments of late-capitalist globalisation: migrancy, genocide, xenophobia, patriarchy, race, class and caste, the resurgence of nationalist myths, and our failure to acknowledge that we are only guests on this planet. I have neither the knowledge nor acumen to engage Levinas

7  KING BABA’S LARGESSE: THE WRECK OF THE WINTERTON (1792) 

85

or Derrida meaningfully, but what follows is a trace of their thought. I want simply to think through Odysseus’ encounter with Nausicaa to understand what might have been in Isabella Cullen’s mind as she drafted the letter to Sir John Shaw praising so sincerely the hospitality of Babaw. ‘Hospitality’ hinges the texts of John Dale, George Buchan, William Ellis, the HEIC writers in Kolkata, the letter to Sir John Shaw, and all subsequent accounts of the Winterton. Matthew Heard (2010) traces the peculiar etymological transition: from the Latin hostis (essentially ‘foreigner’ or ‘enemy’) to the thirteenth-century French hôte, by which point it ‘suggests not only a relationship between the wealthy and the destitute, but also a spiritual obligation on the part of the wealthy to attend to this relationship’ (315). The colloquial connotation of the word—welcoming others into your domestic space and attending to their wants and needs— etiolates this ethical gravitas. To be unconditionally hospitable, to be a hôte, is to admit the vulnerable stranger, to welcome the newcomer across the threshold that divides the private from the public, to suppress our innate hostility to the unfamiliar, and to forgo all demands (even hopes) for reciprocity. The ‘distant’ becomes unconditionally ‘proximate’: the host does not set conditions, does not anticipate the eventual departure of the guest, nor does she make demands on the guest’s conduct. Most significantly for Levinas and Derrida, the host does not question the stranger; does not seek to recoup her identity, establish homology, or even assert connection. The guest’s severalty—usually termed ‘otherness’ or ‘alterity’—is neither challenged nor contested. Anne Dufourmantelle (Derrida’s interlocutor in his best-known seminar on hospitality), states: ‘Hospitality, in its essence, is unconditional, contrary to all other forms of human society that depend on conditions—laws’ (2013, 14). Derrida, she continues, ‘was the first to ask us to reconsider [the] unresolved tension between unconditional hospitality and the conditions imposed upon the act of hospitality’ (14). Derrida sets out the aporia at the heart of ‘hospitality’: absolute openness to ‘the other’ rests in sovereign exclusion (which he expresses by coining the word hostipitality). This contradiction inheres in the idea/l of ‘hospitality,’ which renders it inevitably compromised. In their essay, ‘The Return to Hospitality’ (2012), the political anthropologists, Matae Candea and Giovanni da Col (elaborating the insights of Marcel Mauss), set out to debunk the romanticised characterisation of ‘unconditional hospitality’ prevalent in early anthropology. Hostipitality (‘hospitality’ embedded in sovereignty) embeds existing social and material relations; it raises

86 

M. TITLESTAD

questions of calculation and enmity; local theatres of hospitality usually relate to global flows of capital (as evasion, affirmation, mimicry, index, or metaphor); performances of hospitality (which are commonly nativist spectacles) are often symbolic, placatory, or diversionary; displays of hospitality are often fraught with sectarian politics; the ‘absolute unknown’ and ‘first encounter’ are most often collusive myths; and guests are widely placed under very strict and particular terms, even when these are carefully concealed. The examples Candea and da Col set out give us little faith that the shipwrecked Odysseus, a stranger by circumstance and accident, could have been welcomed unconditionally: that Nausicaa would not ask his name, seek to establish his origins, insist on knowing the identity of this naked man obscured by blood and brine, who had arrived out of the wild littoral—or that she would invite him home to Phaeacia, and to their home, promising and intending to take care of his every need. What, next to Nausicaa, was the nature of Babaw’s hospitality in Madagascar and can we imagine how he thought of Isabella Cullen? Despite the existence of the HEIC port and erstwhile settlement at St Augustin Bay, the adjacent section of the east coast of the island was almost as mysterious to the Company as the rest. It is also possible that their minds were cluttered with the lurid stories of piracy with which the island had been associated for a century. Further, in 1728 a book entitled Madagascar; or Robert Dury’s journal during fifteen years of captivity on that island had been published in London describing the wreck of an Indiaman on the south coast of the island, the captivity of crew and passengers at the capital of the Antrandroy people, and their violent massacre when they attempted to escape—leaving only the midshipman Drury (1728) to tell the tale. Despite certifications of its authenticity, the work is graphically embellished, and the extent of its veracity has been widely questioned (see Pearson 1997, 233–56). It had though been widely circulated in countless expurgated—and even more sensationalised versions— and was probably known to many on the Winterton. During the dismemberment of the ship, Isabella Cullen rallied the women and even as the poop floated away from the wreck, she was encouraging and steadfast. Only seeing her daughter, Ann, disappear onto the jagged reef beneath the waves broke her heart. When, after days of uncertainty and a frightening canoe journey north, she was greeted wholeheartedly by Babaw—who at once invited her to a hut, into the care of women to bathe and dress her—the world changed: Isabella was guided out of the wild into the domestic space protected by the chief of Toliara. The poetics

7  KING BABA’S LARGESSE: THE WRECK OF THE WINTERTON (1792) 

87

of wreck, the precarious raft, the deathly crossing, and the confusing littoral were replaced by the containment and safety of a dwelling. Nothing had been asked of her. Isabella’s welcome had been just like that of Odysseus—and from that moment on, she and her shipmates were generously fed, housed, and protected. Babaw was their host: his care of them, as far as any of them would ever be able to tell, was unconditional. And, when it was all over, and the George was dispatched by the HEIC, he was bewildered by the possibility of a reward: this was no transaction, economy, or exchange. Should we be cynical about Babaw’s hospitality—which seems to approach the Derridean ideal which the philosopher, using a typical aporetic turn, deconstructs? If we are not suspicious of Babaw’s motives, are we not condoning a nativist noble primitivism and buttressing colonial ideology? We must remember that both Dale and Buchan observe that Babaw was a capricious and often violent ruler of his community, who lurched between considered, consultative governance and outbursts of (often drunken) rage that led to flogging or executing his subjects. His unwavering care for the Winterton survivors—and his provision of food even in times of scarcity—was at the cost of his own people, whose dissent he violently suppressed. His protection of the castaways was an assertive, often aggressive, demonstration of his sovereignty, and although we must admire his concessions to their needs, he was also staging his absolute power, which was also manifest in selling, not only families of defeated neighbouring clans, but some of his own people into Portuguese slavery. We also recognise Babaw’s invocations of George III as his equal as claims to (cultural, political, and economic) capital. By 1792, the HEIC was a multinational corporation whose commercial and military might had never been imagined; and while it was run by its Board of Directors, George III was its symbolic head and political representative. The Iberian seaborne empire was dwindling, and the French and Dutch Companies were lapsing into squabbling disarray. Babaw used the Winterton survivors as his ‘subjects,’ not to mimic the English king as much as to embody the monarch in his small province in south west Sakalava. It had been noted by earlier HEIC crews that he was obsessively Anglophile; and there may seem something burlesque in him acting the role of an English gentleman taking care of Isabella Cullen and her daughter, but there is not a single indication in any of the narratives that anyone thought him laughable. Exactly the reverse: they treated him as they would have treated their own king.

88 

M. TITLESTAD

Unconditional hospitality is philosophically, politically, culturally, existentially, and practically impossible. Yearning for pure hospitality is naïve and amounts to posturing. Place in parallel the mythical encounter of Nausicca and Odysseus and the historical relationship between Isabella Cullen and Babaw. It is too easy to think of the second as a diminished, complicit, compromised, and prudential version of the first. Allegory and history are related—often even aligned—in complex, productive, and compelling ways. We cannot afford to consider hospitality failed because it is tainted by complexity or compromised by the fragilities, desires, and aspirations in which we, and it, inevitably consist. At its best, hospitality is a hopeful muddle that points towards an intimation of utopia. The Winterton narratives are stories of an impulse that we would do well to heed—to take seriously—for perhaps our common humanity is constituted, and not only incidentally, in our compromised and complicit desire to save those drowning at sea, guide them through the littoral and house them, even when we are not sure that we are doing so to the best of our abilities or for all the right reasons. Perhaps we would do well always to think of Isabella Cullen and Margaret as guests—and imagine ourselves forever their hosts.

Works Cited Blackmore, Josiah. 2002. Manifest perdition: shipwreck narrative and the disruption of empire. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Brown, Mervyn. 1978. Madagascar rediscovered: a history from early times to independence. London: Damien Tunnacliff. Buchan, George. [First edition ‘By a Passenger on the Ship’]. 1820. Narrative of the loss of the Winterton, East Indiaman, wrecked on the coast of Madagascar. Edinburgh: Waugh & Innes. Campbell, Gwynn. 1993. The structure of trade in Madagascar 1750–1810. The International Journal of African Historical Studies, 26.1: 111–148. https:// doi.org/10.2307/219188. Candea, Matei and Giovanni da Col. 2012. The return to hospitality. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 18: S1–S19. https://doi.org/10.1111/ j.1467-9655.2012.01757. Dale, John. 1794. Narrative of the loss of the Winterton, East Indiaman, which was wrecked off the island of Madagascar, August 20th, 1792. London: Tegg & Castleman. Dale, John 1793. Journal: the loss of the Winterton (Manuscript MSB158 South African Library).

7  KING BABA’S LARGESSE: THE WRECK OF THE WINTERTON (1792) 

89

Dufourmantelle, Anne. 2013. Hospitality—under compassion and violence. The conditions of hospitality: ethics, politics, and aesthetics on the threshold of the possible, ed. Thomas Claviez. New York: Fordham. 13–23. Drury, Robert 1728. Madagascar; or Robert Drury’s journal during fifteen years of captivity on that island. London: Meadows. Ellis, Stephen. 2007. Tom and Toakafo: The Betsimisaraka Kingdom and state formation in Madagascar, 1715–1750. The Journal of African History 48(3): 439–455. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853707003064. Ellis, Rev. William. 1830. History of Madagascar. Volumes I and II.  London: Fisher and Son. Heard, Matthew. 2010. Hospitality and generosity. JAC, 30(1–2): 315–355. https://doi.org/10.2307/20866946. Homer. The odyssey (Translated by Robert Fagles). New York: Penguin, 2003. Hood, Jean. 2003. Marked for misfortune: an epic tale of shipwreck, human endeavour, and survival in the age of sail. London: Conway. Pearson, Mike Parker. 1997. Close encounters of the worst kind: Malagasy resistance and colonial disasters in southern Madagascar. World Archaeology 28(3): 393–417. https://doi.org/10.1080/00438243.1997.9980355.

PART II

Representations

CHAPTER 8

James F. Cobb and Daphne du Maurier in Cornwall

On the morning of Wednesday, 21 August 1743, following in the footsteps of his brother Charles, John Wesley set out on the first of thirty-two preaching tours of Cornwall. He knew what he was about: he was carrying the light of Christian redemption into one of the dark corners of England. Charles had warned him; the Cornish fisherman and tinners were savage heathens who ‘neither feared God nor regarded man’ (see Pearce 2010, 117). They were capable of neither empathy nor collective responsibility because they were licentious and ravening. Seventy years later, when the Methodist Missionary Society was founded in 1813, it based its colonial mission in part on John Wesley’s Cornish journals: his Manichean logic found its way into the new forms of savagery imagined by evangelists (see Probert 1971). For Wesley, the apotheosis of Cornish barbarity was ‘wrecking’. He was obsessed with it, dwelled on it in his writing, and preached about it in his sermons, many of which were transcribed and widely disseminated as pamphlets. Among all forms of Protestantism, Methodism was the most textual. Within a few decades, Cornwall and wrecking had become synonymous, and it would linger for centuries as an insinuation. What is wrecking? The term does not only refer to the dark marauders of Wesley’s imagination luring ships onto the rocks with false lights, bludgeoning survivors, and pillaging their sinking ships. In also indicates relatively benign activities practiced along the Cornish coast, as they were elsewhere. Most entailed gathering the proceeds from wrecks: from © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Titlestad, Shipwreck Narratives: Out of our Depth, Maritime Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87041-6_8

93

94 

M. TITLESTAD

beachcombing to collecting objects floating around a wreck (flotsam), intentionally jettisoned cargo (jetsam), or crates marked by crews with buoys for later retrieval (lagan). At times collecting was premature, to say the least. Bella Bathurst (2005), who seems to have read every British edict, statute, legal opinion, trial transcript, and news report relating to wrecking published since the sixteenth century, salvaged accounts of flotillas of small boats surrounding foundering ships and men boarding— sometimes under the guise of rescue—to steal cargo and strip fittings. On occasion, they ignored those who were injured or drowning. To do coastal communities justice, though, there are numerous records of fishermen setting out heroically to rescue crews and passengers on ailing ships. But, while occasional flagrant rapacity was offset by such brave altruism, wrecking remained a constant in the lives and economies of many coastal settlements. Any invocation of the ocean’s natural, even providential beneficence— ‘the bounty of the sea’—is euphemistic when it comes to wrecking. All cargo and parts of a ship are private property. Strict legal procedures pertained from the sixteenth century. Generally, those who collected flotsam, jetsam, or lagan were entitled to the payment of a salvage fee, but if the cargo or timber was not claimed by the owners within a specified time period, it became the property of the landowner, who was then expected to make concessions to the finders and, particularly in the case of luxury goods, to the Crown though customs officials. Despite these clear legal prescriptions, Bathurst observes, salvage was commonly the ‘subject of an undignified wrestle’ (79). Grasping at ownership in the littoral could not be effectively regulated. There was a customary assumption that ‘anything touched by salt water is also considered to have been washed clean of ownership’ (22). If immersion symbolically washed away the institution of private property, there would always be a wrangle. Further, ships passing at some distance from the coast were often viewed by those ashore as ‘foreign’ even if they were not, making ‘harvesting’ from them seem more acceptable. These were, after all, the vessels of global capitalism sailing past villages of the working and marginalised poor. Why not ‘finders-keepers’? Where, given these widespread practices and entrenched assumptions, does the wreckers’ reputation for violence and savagery come from? It was based on two phrases: ‘dead wrecks’ and ‘false lights’. Cathryn Pearce, author of a detailed monograph concerning Cornish wrecking, cites the most widely quoted description of a ‘dead wreck,’ which derives from Edward I’s Statute of Westminster (1275): ‘where a man, a Dog or a Cat

8  JAMES F. COBB AND DAPHNE DU MAURIER IN CORNWALL 

95

escape quick out of a Ship, that Ship or Barge, nor anything within them, shall be adjudged a wreck’ (45). If any living being survived, nothing could be freely salvaged; and so, it entered the popular imagination that wreckers killed all survivors. But the greatest travesty blamed on the wreckers was the flying of false lights. Luring ships to their doom represented the greatest evil for it manifested a complete disregard for human life, commerce, and the structures of authority. If shipwreck was the awful cost of trade, militarism, and expansionism, the intentional destruction of ships and lives was the darkest and most sinister materialism. Bathurst traced the earliest mention of ‘false lights’ to a 1410 charter incorporating Trinity House—‘the lighthouse authority for England and Wales’—which suggested that the construction of lighthouses was to prevent ‘evil-disposed persons bringing ships to destruction by showing false beacons’ (see Bathurst 13). The first statutory mention is in the preamble to Chapter 19 of ‘Act 26, George II’ (1753): ‘if any person or persons shall put out false lights with intent to bring any [distressed] ship or vessel into danger, then such person or persons so offending shall be deemed guilty of felony’ (81). There was an ongoing legal preoccupation with false lights. Yet, while there were many prosecutions for ‘plunder and riot’ after wrecks, and convictions for related smuggling, theft, and disorderly conduct, there is only one case in all British legal history that mentions false lights. It was reported in the Shrewsbury Chronicle in 1774 that Captain Chilcote brought charges against three ‘opulent inhabitants’ of Anglesey for plundering casts of rum and brandy from the Charming Jenny after she had supposedly been lured onto the rocks by false lights. One of the accused was acquitted and the other two were hanged. Even here, according to Bathurst (228–29), the article implies that Chilcote may have been covering up a navigational error. It is generally assumed that where there is a law there must be a crime. We should acknowledge, though, that the law is cluttered with fictions to which it has given credence in the interests of metropolitan power. Wrecking myths—particularly dead wrecks and false lights—vilified the coastal poor and were used to justify and expedite the imposition of ironclad controls. Demonised wreckers became the ideological embodiment of flouting state authority, but—given the evidence of the legal record— London was primarily concerned that smugglers and wreckers were evading the mechanisms for the accumulation of government revenue. States abhor independent enclaves that insinuate their own priorities and practices, but they are particularly outraged by tax evasion. This is what

96 

M. TITLESTAD

concerned the state most, and wrecking mythology expressed their abhorrence. Apart from their conspicuous absence in legal records, there is another reason to doubt the historical use of false lights. Would they have worked? The assumptions are that a captain might think the false light that of another ship safely at anchor and head towards it, or that he might mistake the false light for a lighthouse, misconstrue his position, and sail directly into danger. But, as all the shipwreck narratives that I discuss in this volume attest, the accepted practice on descrying lights was to put about immediately and head out to sea—even using anchors and ships’ boats to accomplish this dramatic manoeuvre. On this evidence, false lights were a myth incubated by the powerful, fuelled by class prejudice, and endlessly elaborated in the gothic imaginations of legislators, priests, social reformers, novelists, and filmmakers. I will consider just two literary depictions of Cornish wreckers, the first a Christian novel, The watchers on the longships: a tale of Cornwall in the last century (1878) and the second, Daphne du Maurier’s gothic romance, Jamaica Inn (1936). They present contrapuntal improvisations on the myths of Cornish wrecking. James F. Cobb’s The watchers ran to twenty-five editions by 1905 and has remained in print (it was reissued in 2005 and again in 2012). Cobb’s previous books were Noble workers: a book of examples for young men (1876), which he co-authored with H.A. Page, and the novel, Silent Jim (1875), published by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. Like these, The watchers is Protestant didacticism. The novel is the story of Owen Tresilian, who is appointed the keeper of a newly constructed lighthouse on the Longships, treacherous rocky islets off Sennen Cove on the Cornish coast. The residents of the nearby village are a ‘rude, and almost savage, set of people […] little removed from barbarians, who have gained an unenviable notoriety’ (5). Wrecks near the Cove are common ‘owing to the fringe of rocks which surround their coast, to the violence of the tempests which raged there, and to the absence, in those days, of any lighthouses or light-ships on the shore’ (5). Despite the frequency with which ships run aground, the villagers are not content to leave matters to fate: they ‘ensnare’ ships with false lights and misleading signals, luring them into ‘that maze of rocks which bristle round the Land’s End’ (5). As they are smashed to pieces, their crews are consigned to ‘watery graves in the angry surf’ (5); the ‘more luckless still, succeeded in reaching land,

8  JAMES F. COBB AND DAPHNE DU MAURIER IN CORNWALL 

97

only to be put to death by the inhuman hands of those who should have been the first to rescue them’ (5). Cobb’s moral counterpoint to the wreckers is the district squire, Arthur Pendrean, who organises the construction of a lighthouse on the Longships. Having studied Catholic theology at Oxford, Pendrean converted to Methodism—Cobb’s allegiances could not be clearer—and he has taken to evangelising among the villagers. He guides Owen Tresilian from wrecking, along the path of righteousness, and then to the allegorical heights of becoming the lighthouse keeper. ‘The man who takes up his abode there,’ Pendrean tells him, ‘must be honest, steady, and thoroughly trustworthy, above taking a bribe, able to bear the scorn, mockery, and annoyance that he is sure to meet with from the Sennen people, who of course will regard him as an enemy’ (32). At the climax of the novel, the wreckers bind Tresilian and confine him to a cave so that ‘the lighthouse might be left without a guardian’ (199). His young daughter, Mary, is left alone in the lighthouse, staring out at an approaching storm; then she sees a ship being tossed about, heading for the false lights in the Cove. Unbeknownst to Mary, her brother Philip, having been pressed into the Royal Navy and then captured by the French, is aboard. She is a ‘resolute little girl’ (208) and is determined to light the lamps and save the day, but they are out of reach. She glances around and her eyes alight on the Tresilian family bible: ‘Ah! That, she said to herself, would make her just high enough’. ‘But to stand upon the Bible! She could never do that!’ (208). But God guides her to do so and, borne aloft on His word, she lights the lamps, and saves the frigate from its worst fate, albeit that it is crewed by secular Republicans, ‘brought up in the school of Voltaire and Rousseau,’ who believe ‘that at the moment of death all is over and the soul ceases to exist’ (85). Even the French, apparently, are worthy of God’s grace. Although the light guides the ship away from the Cove—in which none would have survived—it wrecks a little up the coast. The ‘poor shipwrecked strangers’ are left battling the surf (85). In a melodramatic reversal, the wreckers begin to rescue the survivors. Pendrean, charging into the surf on horseback, bellows, ‘I am proud of you, my lads; you’re acting gallantly now; you’ll retrieve the bad character we have in these parts’ (250). When most of the sailors—including Philip Tresilian—have been saved, Pendrean sees the lead wrecker, Nichols, floundering in the waves. He rides his horse ‘into that boiling surf’ to save him (253) but is overwhelmed by the waves and drowned. His ‘noble generous attempt to save

98 

M. TITLESTAD

the life of Nichols, his bitterest enemy, [causes] every man there to honour and love him’ (263). Cobb was adamant that he had not invented the plot of The watchers: ‘all the circumstances, also, relating to the little girl who was left alone in the lighthouse—her father, the keeper, having been purposely kidnapped and confined by the wreckers—and who was reluctantly obliged to stand on the Family Bible to light the lamps, are perfectly authentic’ (v). Even if the events were recounted to Cobb as facts, The watchers is a Protestant allegory which has its origins in the Cornish textual tradition initiated by John Wesley. The signs are cogently, if pedantically, arranged: Pendrean is a recent convert to Methodism who missionizes among the heathen wreckers and converts Tresilian; his lighthouse will illuminate the way for those in danger of losing themselves; the convert becomes the custodian of the light and his daughter, Mary, inherits the kingdom of heaven; and finally, Pendrean is willing to sacrifice himself to save a sinner, for which act he is resurrected in the hearts of the reformed wreckers. The littoral has changed, at the hands of the righteous guided by God’s grace, from a place of moral havoc to one of baptism. The false lights suggest, of course, that we can be misled by believing in that which only mimics the truth: we need to know the True Light and use it unwaveringly to orientate our course through life. In flying false lights, the wreckers are not only baneful in the devastation and death they cause, but specifically because their lights masquerade as guidance—they simulate benevolence to avaricious and materialistic ends. There is, the allegorical logic of The watchers implies, no greater evil than this. When Daphne du Maurier decided in 1935 to write a romance set in her beloved Cornwall, she was steeped in wrecking stories (see Foster 2007, 120–22). Yet, Jamaica Inn (1936) is no simple reiteration of the Manichaeism that had gained literary purchase. Yes, the novel does include the most famous descriptions of brutish wreckers in all literature, and we are horrified by Joss Merlyn’s account of bludgeoning a drowning mother to death, but du Maurier works Cornish wrecking mythology into a strange weave of progressive gender politics and idiosyncratic theology. Jamaica Inn routes its version of evil through wrecking—but, it turns out, the wreckers are only puppets. Following the death of her mother, Mary Yellan sets out for Jamaica Inn to live with her Aunt Patience and Joss Merlyn, her heavy-drinking and abusive husband. From the outset, Mary lives in fear of violence, particularly that Joss might rape her at any time. She comes to realise that he

8  JAMES F. COBB AND DAPHNE DU MAURIER IN CORNWALL 

99

is involved in some nefarious activity, but with characteristic mastery, du Maurier hides its exact nature from readers. A few months into her stay, Mary overhears a conversation between Joss and his roguish brother, Jem, who says, ‘I am thinking of my conscience and of Almighty God; and though I’ll face any man in a fair fight, and take punishment if needs be, when it comes to killing innocent folk, and maybe women and children among them, that’s going straight to hell, Joss Merlyn, and you know it as well as I do’ (61). A few weeks later, in a bout of drunken despair, Joss confesses his wrecking and murder to Mary: ‘Damn it Mary, I’ve killed men with my own hands, trampled them under water, beaten them with rocks and stones; and I’ve never thought no more about it’ (147). He remembers two victims: a mother and child. ‘The ship was close in on the rocks, you see, and the sea was as flat as your hand; they were all coming in alive, the whole bunch of ‘em. […] She cried out to me to help her, Mary, and I smashed her face in with a stone; she fell back, her hands beating the raft. She let go of the child and I hit her again; I watched them drown in four feet of water’ (147). Mary heads off across Bodmin Moor in panic, where she encounters Francis Davey, the albino vicar of the neighbouring village of Altarnun. He speaks, echoing John Wesley, of a Cornish future in which the wrecker ‘would be broken by the new law, he and his kind; they would be blotted out and razed from the countryside’ (196). But when Mary returns to the inn, Joss is resolved to entrench her silence by making her complicit in his crimes. Soon she finds herself among the wreckers after a ship is lured onto the rocks using false lights. They are running like ‘madmen hither and thither upon the beach […] animals fighting and snarling over lengths of splintered wood’ (214). ‘They chattered and squabbled like monkeys, tearing things from one another’ (215), and fall on the dead bodies, ‘tearing even at the smashed fingers in search of rings’ (215). She resolves to reveal everything to Francis Davey to both summon the authorities and to confess her concealment of the wreckers’ activities. At first, the vicarage seems like a harbour, but then Mary discovers a drawing in Davey’s desk. It depicts him as a wolf-man slavering over a sheepish congregation. There have been intimations all along that Joss Merlyn is only the agent of a more powerful person, and Mary realises that it is Davey, who then—frenzied—drags her to his horse and heads off with her across country. He rants about his beliefs: he is a devotee of the ‘old pagan barbarism’ which was ‘naked and clean’ (316), and he despises the creeping modernity of the nineteenth century. He has not controlled the

100 

M. TITLESTAD

wreckers for material gain; he is invested in the wild rampage in the littoral, for this represents the Dionysian force quashed by the Apollonian religions rooted in repression, abstention, temperance, and discipline. He shouts that he will teach Mary to live ‘as men and women have not lived for four thousand years or more,’ to ‘go to the moors and the hills and tread granite and heather as the Druids did before us’ (318). With the exemplary deportment of many of du Maurier’s heroines, she politely declines and is eventually rescued by Jem, to whom she pledges herself with a degree of resignation. The vicar of Altarnun is a false light. Mary thinks he will guide her to refuge, but he only betrays her with deepest consequence. The Manichean scheme of the wrecking myths travels from the littoral to the parish, and rather than wrecking being the archetype of evil, it merely approximates and expresses the primal darkness embodied by Francis Davey. Whereas The watchers capitalises on wrecking for didactic ends, Jamaica Inn translates the mythology in imagining what potentially motivates it: a dark, archaic, and irrepressible force that cannot be concealed by the veil of civilisation, by reason, progress, or Protestantism. Yet, as Melanie Heeley (2007) elegantly argues in an analysis of both the novel and several of du Maurier’s poems, she characterised her sensibility as orientated towards both the Christian God and his pagan predecessors, particularly Gaia, who she saw immanent in the world around her. Gaia represented liberation at two levels: from the paternal God du Maurier came increasingly to resent (as she did the patriarchy that originated in Him) and from hypocritical constraints on desire (2007, 125). Heeley considers the representation of Francis Davey ambiguous, that his energy attests to a pervasive Christian hypocrisy. Yet his contiguity with wrecking and his perfidy in relation to Mary make his paganism not only morally reprehensible, but also delusional. Nonetheless, du Maurier’s is a more interesting reflection on the Dionysian–Apollonian boundary than is typical of the adventure romance generally and particularly wrecking myths. Further, Sarah Dunant (2007) points out that, for a romantic adventure story in the mode of Robert Louis Stevenson, Jamaica Inn ‘is full of decidedly unromantic thoughts’ (154). There is painful realism in Mary’s growing understanding of relationships between men and women—there is neither playful teasing nor any satisfying union in the novel, only abuse, domination, and women’s seemingly inevitable resignation. The ethical logic of Jamaica Inn is that spectacular evil (such as wrecking) is underpinned by ideological structures (from repressive puritanism to

8  JAMES F. COBB AND DAPHNE DU MAURIER IN CORNWALL 

101

patriarchy), the true victims of which are less obvious than the woman and child beaten to death in the surf. In her subsequent novels, du Maurier deepens her sense that the gothic is commonly a symptom of pervasive modes of repression. The ceiling in my grandmother’s kitchen in Struisbaai was held aloft by a ship’s mast. It was always tacky; the creosote-based varnish did not dry in a hundred years. It was placed, rather oddly, in the centre of the room, so we all shuffled around and stuck to it. There are ships’ timbers in many of the houses across the Overberg District of the Western Cape. Wrecking, in its benign if illegal versions, served these communities, as it has countless others, very well; it buttressed their lives. Yet we do not think of wrecking as this constructive use of ships’ masts and hulls: we remain trapped in the gothic hyperbole of the myths used didactically by Cobb in The watchers and more thoughtfully by du Maurier in Jamaica Inn. Wrecking is taken to stand for the violent refusal of our common humanity, the blunt desire to kill the stranger from the sea. New ways of thinking about wrecking began in 1975 with the work of John Rule (‘Wrecking in coastal plunder’ in Albion’s fatal tree). Bathurst and Pearce have contributed to this revisionist historiography. But we need to think even more critically about what the flows of capital look like from remote shores. Seaborne empires were built on the lives of the poor. For centuries, Cornwall was harvested for resources and men. Wrecking was redress, and wrecking myths were just another form of ideological plunder.

Works Cited Bathurst, Bella. 2005. The wreckers: a story of killing seas and plundered shipwrecks, from the eighteenth century to the present day. New York: Harper Collins. Cobb, James F. 1905. The watchers on the Longships: a tale of Cornwall in the last century. London: Wells Gardner. Du Maurier, Daphne. 1936. Jamaica Inn. London: Victor Gollancz. Dunant, Sarah. 2007. Jamaica Inn. In The Daphne du Maurier companion, ed. Helen Taylor. Grangemouth: Virago. 151–155. Foster, Margaret. 2007. Daphne du Maurier. London: Arrow. Heeley, Melanie. 2007. Christianity versus paganism: Daphne du Maurier’s divided mind. In The Daphne du Maurier Companion, ed. Helen Taylor. Grangemouth: Virago. 122–132. Pearce, Cathryn. 2010. Cornish wrecking, 1700–1860: reality and popular myth. Woodbridge: Boydell.

102 

M. TITLESTAD

Probert, John C. C. 1971. The sociology of Cornish Methodism to the present day. Redruth: Cornish Methodist Historical Association. Rule, John. 1975. Wrecking and coastal plunder. In Albion’s fatal tree: crime and society in eighteenth-century England. Ed. Douglas Hay, Peter Linebaugh, John G.  Rule, E.  P. Thompson, and Carl Winslow. London: Allen Lane. 167–88, 179–80.

CHAPTER 9

Stephen Crane and James Hanley’s Open Boats

In the early hours of Saturday, 2 January 1897, the Commodore, a steamship carrying arms and munitions to the Cuban rebels fighting the Spanish, foundered eighteen miles north-east of Mosquito Inlet on the Florida Coast. Two days earlier, a little more than a mile downriver from Jacksonville, her pilot had rammed her bow into a sandbank in thick fog. The filibustering crew, in the wake of a vaunted departure, faced an ignominious wait for low tide before she could be re-floated. Subsequent speculations as to the cause of the wreck—overloading and sabotage—discount the more sober probability that she carried damage from that New Year’s Eve collision; that the seams of the hull opened slowly, letting in the water that would flood the engine room and then cause the pumps to fail. As her furnaces continued to burn, the crew endeavoured—in her hellish interior—to empty the accumulating water with buckets. Captain Murphy would subsequently praise the men for their efforts: none stood back. The water gained on them, though, and Murphy ordered the men to the boats. The Cubans occupied the two soundest boats, which reached the Florida shore safely at ten o’clock and midday respectively. It was the crew who would suffer. As the situation deteriorated and the ship began to roll, the captain invited those crew members who so wished to lower the remaining lifeboat. Seven men boarded and set off but decided to remain close to the stricken Commodore in case they might be able to assist the four men who had remained. These four were Captain Murphy, a steward named Montgomery, William Higgins, an oiler, and a newspaper © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Titlestad, Shipwreck Narratives: Out of our Depth, Maritime Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87041-6_9

103

104 

M. TITLESTAD

correspondent, Stephen Crane, already renowned as the author of the Civil War novel, The red badge of courage (1895). As the ship began to roll, these four men climbed down into the dinghy, the smallest of the boats with the lowest clearance. Bizarrely, the lifeboat occupied by seven men returned to the Commodore—one of them, Mate Grain, had evidently forgotten something and insisted that they return to fetch it. The lifeboat was stove against the side of the ship and the men were forced to climb back onto the sinking ship. In their last frantic minutes, the seven assembled makeshift rafts and threw them into the sea, now sweeping across the deck. Three jumped in succession and swam towards the dinghy: the old chief engineer, a stoker, and then the first mate. The stoker succeeded in casting a towline to the dinghy. Crane wrote in an account of the wreck that appeared on the front page of the New York Press on 7 January that the stoker ‘turned into a demon. He was wild—wild as a tiger. He was crouched on this raft and ready to spring. Every muscle of him seemed to be turned into an elastic spring. His eyes were almost white. His face was the face of a lost man reaching upward, and we knew that the weight of his hand on our gunwale doomed us’ (Crane 1952, 473.). Murphy ordered the cook to let go of the line. The four men in the dinghy would be haunted by the faces of the seven staring at them as each slipped beneath the surface. Crane fixes on their silence: ‘neither from the deck nor from the rafts was a voiced raised’ (473). What he understood as ‘a most singular and indefinable fortitude’ (474) may have been his traumatised refusal to hear the desperate screams of the drowning men. Crane’s journalistic account concludes with a tantalising prospect. ‘The history of life in an open boat for thirty hours would no doubt be instructive for the young, but none is to be told here and now. For my part I would prefer to tell the story at once, because from it would shine the splendid manhood of Captain Edward Murphy and of William (‘Billy’) Higgins, the oiler’ (475). The tale of those thirty hours, ‘The open boat,’ appeared in Scribner’s in 1897, and was republished in a volume of Crane’s short stories in 1898. In a century, the story has been swamped by critical engagements. One reason is that it is, in Roland Barthes’ sense, a ‘writerly’ text. ‘The open boat’ presents, in an impressionistic mode, the efforts of the men not only to survive but to come to terms with their experience; to give meaningful shape to the aftermath of the catastrophe, the deaths they witnessed, and then their physical and existential precarity in the dinghy. Crane presents the narrator’s glancing ruminations on the irreducibly

9  STEPHEN CRANE AND JAMES HANLEY’S OPEN BOATS 

105

complex relations between perception and understanding, experience and knowledge, nature and the sublime, and empathy and mutuality. The story consists in images, metaphors, and philosophical provocations, which are open to a flood of interpretative possibilities. The men in the dinghy are at sea in both senses: they lurch from one threatening wave to the next, but they have also been cast beyond the familiar and fathomable. Their dinghy is ‘open’ in ways other than literally. For castaways, physical exposure in the wasteland of the sea links to the wreck of meaning in which we are usually cabined. The formlessness of the sea below, the emptiness of the sky above, and the surfacing of the skull beneath the skin impress upon survivors a world without discernible contours or boundaries. In our quotidian landed lives, a veil of familiarity obscures the world’s unrelenting indifference to our fate. We pass around the worn coins of stock phrases so as not to confront the contingency and fragility of meaning. In an open boat, drifting on an abysmal sea with sharks circling, these consolations are insufficient protection from imminent danger and immanent meaninglessness. This is open boat ‘exposure’: an inconsolable subject is stripped of protective familiarity, from routines of meaning. Albeit a Romantic notion that we might question, the survivor in open boat narratives is considered to face reality head-on. Crane’s ‘The open boat’ begins, ‘None of them knew the color of the sky. Their eyes glanced level, and were fastened upon the waves that swept towards them. These waves were of the hue of slate, save for the tops, which were of foaming white, and all of the men knew the colors of the sea’ (1969–1975, 68). Danger compels the men’s perspective. The ‘average experience,’ the narrator tells us, ‘is never at sea in a dingey’. Faced with the ‘singular disadvantage’ that each wave is ‘nervously anxious to do something effective in the way of swamping boats,’ the men’s gaze is fixed on the fluid forces of the sea (69). There is no possibility of extricating their perception from the immediate threat, of somehow gazing down upon the scene as if it were unfolding at a distance. The correspondent imagines that, ‘viewed from a balcony, the whole thing would doubtlessly have been weirdly picturesque’ (69). But the men are denied such an overview. The experience cannot be framed by a gaze that might contain it, which might—through the cool rationality of distance—transform the torsions of the present into an image. Denied transcendence (a view from a balcony) and a consoling aesthetic structure (say, the picturesque), the men in the dinghy are condemned to the present; they are transformed

106 

M. TITLESTAD

into radically embodied subjectivities whose (perceptual and experiential) world cannot extend beyond the next wave. The world around them is ‘not […] cruel, nor beneficent, nor treacherous, nor wise. But […] indifferent, flatly indifferent’ (69). This indifference is manifest in the ‘grewsome and ominous’ gulls and the fulcrum of their ‘black bead-like eyes,’ which are ‘uncanny and sinister in their unblinking scrutiny’ (72). While gulls, which attest to the proximity of land, are conventionally omens of deliverance in open boat narratives, here their gaze is unmitigated blankness. They are signs of a stark reality: in Crane’s story, nature has no moral valence, offers no reciprocity, and is not educative. It simply presses down on the lives of the men with its blunt materiality. The bird’s-eye view is nothingness. How do the four respond to this mute power of the natural? ‘It would be difficult to describe,’ the correspondent tells us, ‘the subtle brotherhood of men that was here established on the seas. No one said that it was so. No one mentioned it. But it dwelt in the boat, and each man felt it warm him’ (73). The ‘preparatory and long growl’ of the waves is placed in counterpoint to the refrain, ‘Will you spell me?’ It is a harmony of collaboration—‘the oiler rowed and then the correspondent rowed, and then the oiler rowed’—that offers protection, both the best possibility of survival and a rejoinder to meaninglessness. Although unable to row, the injured captain is not excluded from this small community of men. Even as he lies at the bottom of the boat, suffering the ‘profound rejection and indifference which comes, temporarily at least, to even the bravest and most enduring when, willy nilly, the firm fails, the army loses, the ship goes down’ (68), the men respect him and his erstwhile command. He remains their brave comrade and commander even when he is unable to contribute physically to their endeavour. Their collaboration, which is their best prospect, respects its precedent; they extend and elaborate the Commodore community to which they previously belonged. It is this capacity for collaboration, care, and continuity that revises the correspondent’s view of humanity. While he had been ‘taught to be cynical of men,’ he realises, ‘even at the time,’ that this ‘was the best experience of my life’ (73). As the men approach the coast, as ‘slowly the land rose from the sea,’ they look desperately for ‘signs of life’ (75). They hope that a lifesaving station will despatch a boat, but none appears. ‘There was the shore of the populous land, and it was bitter and bitter to them that from it came no sign.’ When signs at last appear, they are ambiguous. A man on the beach removes his coat and waves it above his head: ‘What’s that idiot with the

9  STEPHEN CRANE AND JAMES HANLEY’S OPEN BOATS 

107

coat mean? What’s he signalling, anyhow?’ (80). Is he, oblivious to their plight, simply greeting them? Is he telling them to proceed north? Is he hailing them towards the land? When the castaways discern something on the beach, they cannot tell whether it is a boat about to be despatched or a hotel omnibus for ferrying tourists. Uncertain of facing the breakers in such a small craft, the men confer and elect to spend another night at sea. During that night, when his three companions have fallen asleep from exhaustion and as a shark ominously circles the boat, the correspondent recalls an image from a popular broadside ballad (‘Bingen on the Rhine’ by Caroline Sheridan Norton, published in 1867): ‘A soldier of the Legion lay dying in Algiers’ (86). Previously just a trivial line, he now ‘plainly saw the soldier. He lay on the sand with his feet out straight and still’ (86). The situation has opened the correspondent to the suffering of others. The Legionnaire’s death, far from home, has—in that boat out at sea—become comprehensible and affecting. Empathy emerges from his limit experience in the open boat. The next morning, despairing of being rescued, the men set off for the shore that ‘was set before [them] like a bit of scenery on a stage’ (90). The boat is swamped. Even in the chaos of the breakers, the men struggle to assist one another. A man on the beach tears off his clothing and rushes into the sea to help them. ‘He was naked, naked as a tree in winter, but a halo was about his head, and he shone like a saint’ (92). Despite these efforts, Billy, the oiler, drowns. ‘In the shallows, face downward, lay the oiler. His forehead touched the sand that was periodically, between each wave, clear of the sea’ (92). All that awaited him on shore was ‘the different and sinister hospitality of the grave’. The drowning is startling; the proximity of safety, the desperate concern of his fellow crewmen, and the metaphorical sanctity of their ‘saviour’ all prove insufficient. Death claims the bravest, most selfless man. Yet his death, which attests once again to the indifference of fate, is not without meaning. It represents a horizon in the men’s transformation, the last stage in a journey that brings them to a new understanding. ‘When it came night, the white waves paced to and fro in the moonlight, and the wind brought the sound of the great sea’s voice to the men on shore, and they felt that they could be interpreters’ (92). Set apart from others by their experience and its profound mediation of reality, they would now be able to explain some fundamental aspect of the world and existence to others. With the collapse of the familiar, and the attenuation of consciousness in fear and suffering, has come learning.

108 

M. TITLESTAD

According to his biographer, Paul Sorrentino (2014), on his deathbed, dying of pulmonary tuberculosis, Stephen Crane spoke deliriously to Cora of ‘changing places in an open boat’ (368–69). Crane had met Cora Taylor (Cora E. Stewart) only days before the Commodore sailed. She was then the golden-haired hostess of a fashionable nightclub, the Hotel de Dream in Jacksonville. She would become Crane’s partner until his premature death at the age of twenty-eight. Indigent, his health failing, and desperate to communicate his final literary intentions to his friends Joseph Conrad and H.G. Wells, Cora placed all her hope for Crane’s restoration in taking him first to Dover, then to Calais and on to a Black Forest sanatorium in Badenweiler, in the Baden district of Lörrach in southwest Germany. The Channel crossing was uneventful, but Crane would continue to drown slowly in his own blood. At a point in ‘The open boat’ the correspondent declares that shipwreck ‘is apropos of nothing’ (Crane 74). Apropos, from the seventeenth-century French à propos: to the purpose, pertinent, opportunely. Next to nothing: the experience of changing places in the open boat—of taking the oars from one sharing your predicament and steering a common course. Facing infinity once again, Crane sought rest in this memory. Crane’s Modernism bears a trace of vestigial Romanticism. For all the intimation of universal meaninglessness, the transcendental collaboration of the men in the dinghy verges on faith, albeit experiential in origin. A qualified idealism offsets materialism. Let us consider a less optimistic open boat narrative, James Hanley’s (1999) underrated novel, The ocean (1941). Since the 1970s, there have been various calls for the critical rehabilitation and reissue of the oeuvre of James Hanley (1901–1985). Brought up in Liverpool, Hanley became a professional writer after being a merchant seaman and he is best known for his literary portraits of the industrial north of England and sailors’ lives aboard steamships. His novels combine the representation of harsh proletarian realities and experimental Modernism. Stephen Wade (1999), one of those who argue for Hanley’s significance, lauds his capacity to capture ‘bare states of vulnerable being’ (308). The six works that Wade selects for an envisaged Hanley canon, for their ‘stylistic panache and sense of adventure’ (310), are Boy (1931), The Furys (1935), Grey children (1937), No directions (1946), Welsh Sonata (1954), and the stories collected in The last voyage (1997). His selection is judicious, representing as it does both the author’s range of concerns and narrative techniques. The ocean is a conspicuous omission.

9  STEPHEN CRANE AND JAMES HANLEY’S OPEN BOATS 

109

Only two monographs explore the novel in any detail: Edward Stokes’s The novels of James Hanley (1964, 119–27), which suggests that it might be productive to compare The ocean to ‘The open boat’ (127), and John Fordham’s monograph, James Hanley: Modernism and the working class (2002, 62–70). Fordham observes that The ocean was published in 1941, under wartime restrictions on writers, and that it has, manifesting its pressing context, a propagandist dimension. After the Aurora is torpedoed and six men manage to make their way from the listing ship down a rope into a boat, they are machine-gunned and one of the men is killed. This, according to Fordham, betrays ‘a vulgar complicity in the widespread belief that the German navy machine-gunned survivors of U-boat attacks’ (64). It is also, he argues, the only sense in which the novel engages the war, which from that point in the narrative is no more than a contingent opportunity for Hanley to explore his social and philosophical preoccupations. Of the five survivors in the boat, Joseph Curtain is the only sailor. It falls to him by virtue of his expertise and experience (he has previously spent ten days in an open boat), not only to ration the water, biscuit, and the few tins of milk, but also, as far as possible, to accomplish the group’s cohesion and maintain morale. Much of the narrative consists in Curtain’s interior monologues regarding this responsibility. ‘Everything would be alright so long as they held together,’ he says to himself, ‘didn’t get on one another’s nerves, didn’t growl, didn’t ask the same questions’ (26). He strives to keep the company ‘balanced’ (78), not only by setting a goal (reaching ‘the shipping lanes’) and encouraging each to participate in the shared project of survival to the extent of his capacities (‘All are equal in a boat’ [29]), but also by endeavouring to allay their fears. He is privately fatalistic, though: ‘You would be picked up or you would not be picked up. That was how it was. You got what was coming to you’ (26). In the face of Curtain’s capable but firm leadership, one of the men begins to foment discontent: ‘Complaints piled, grumbles gathered speed, suspicion stirred. So these encircled Curtain’ (61). At times, the narrative point of view migrates among the other four castaways. We learn of John Gaunt’s life of wandering at the instigation of his discontented wife, Kay, who probably drowned when the Aurora sank. To him ‘the world had always been an ocean,’ which he traversed in Kay’s wake, sacrificing both his sense of belonging and his relationship with his son (72). The ‘excitable youngster’ (72), Benton, who has previously only ever rowed on the Thames, is ineffectual, plagued as he is by nightmarish

110 

M. TITLESTAD

visions (of giant cockroaches) and incapacitated by an injured leg. Stone is more capable, and initially offers Curtain a sense of camaraderie, but later betrays him. The last man in the boat is the elderly Father Michaels, who sits in the bow for much of the time, staring out to sea in the hope of a ship. Michaels has an abiding faith in Curtain: ‘The language of the ocean was alien to them, Curtain had the key to this’; ‘He’s been in these situations before. He knows’ (59). He is, Father Michaels believes, their interpreter. Curtain stares at ‘the indifferent sky, the monotony of slow, of swift moving waters,’ sensing that there ‘is nothing in this ocean but one crawling boat’ (114). Yet, at a moment, breaching this sense of meaninglessness, a whale surfaces near the boat, and all five men are enraptured. ‘Thirst was gone—hunger gone—bad blood gone—while the whale plunged and rose, tossed and turned, and water churned, danced higher, higher, the noise like voices speaking to them’ (98). For once the silence of the world, ‘like mountains, stupid with power,’ is interrupted by what might be considered an intimation of the sublime. This is Fordham’s interpretation. He sees the whale as essential to the ideology of the novel: ‘it is consistently the natural world,’ he suggests, ‘which takes precedence over the already compromised and degraded human domain’ (66). If we accept this interpretation, The ocean contrasts Crane’s anti-Romantic view of nature. But I am not sure that the scene of the whale’s surfacing, this one event, reflects the novel’s underlying ideology. When Curtain falls asleep from exhaustion, the boat not only drifts aimlessly, but the precarious order he has struggled to maintain collapses into violence. Stone, Benton, and Gaunt steal water, and in their desperation become struggling bodies threatening to capsize the boat and spilling all but the last few drops from the canteen. Curtain wakes and restores order, but any semblance of community has disintegrated. Each man lapses slowly into solitary despair. Then, quite startlingly, Gaunt thinks he discerns a ship on the horizon. But it is a deception of scale: it is no more than a small rowing boat, in a condition even more precarious than their own. In the boat is a German airman who is unconscious due to dehydration, starvation, and exposure. After bickering, the men save the airman. As they drag him into the boat, Curtain feels the airman’s ‘iron cross cold against his cheek’ (144). Suddenly, their anti-German invective falters. In their recognition of his suffering, that this is just a person struggling to stay alive, they give their fellow castaway the last of their water. We are reminded of Curtain’s ‘All are equal in a boat’. Ideology and propaganda

9  STEPHEN CRANE AND JAMES HANLEY’S OPEN BOATS 

111

give way in a moment of recognition; the boundary between ‘us’ and ‘them’ proves unsustainable in the face of suffering; when we register how fragile is the symbolic in the face of existential struggle. The final chapter, which is almost a coda, casts something of a mist over the novel’s meaning. It is narrated from the perspective of the delirious Father Michaels who, from his position in the bow, discerns, in the middle of the ocean, a man standing on a rock. He looks heavenward to see the bird they have so longed for wheeling above the boat. This religious iconography is muted, but not erased, when the apparition transforms into the wooden hull of a fishing boat heading towards them. A fisherman can be seen above the prow. ‘The priest looked out at him, and in his eyes,’ the last line reads, ‘his was the shape of Christ’ (152). We need to recall that this image occurs in the mind of the hallucinated priest. Earlier in the novel, we are told that his mind is ‘Christ-filled,’ and that ‘he saw Him walk these waters’ (44). What can be read as divine deliverance is more cogently understood as a delirious interpretation of their rescue by a priest whose mind is constituted of such allegories. Throughout their journey, each man’s consciousness has flown off in discrepant directions manifesting his memories, convictions, and fears. Despite two moments of tentative commonality—when they watch the whale and when they come across the German airman—there is no sense in The ocean of Crane’s ‘subtle brotherhood of men’. Early on in the novel Curtain remarks, ‘One saw strangers aboard the Aurora, but in this small boat men were stranger still’ (18). Their proximity, which each fleetingly escapes through private fantasies, exacerbates their alienation; it serves only to underline their solitude. As the fishing boat approaches, each man lies alone in exhausted reverie in a ‘wilderness of sea’ with ‘black sluggish water gobbling at the bows’ (151). Are the whale and the German false promises? Does the sublime (some prospect of a powerful, unsettling truth rising out of the depths) or the ethical (a recognition of brotherhood where one saw only difference) offer a way out of the harsh existential realities the novel depicts? Either could resolve, or at least clarify, the novel’s ideology. Hanley’s fiction does not generally incline to such resolution; there are always moments of promise but never of unqualified redemption. We are generally left with the reality of suffering, a sense that there is no abiding contrary to the wasteland of the world and our fragility. We are always in an open boat, with just the sea below and the sky above. Whatever meaning we contrive is evanescent.

112 

M. TITLESTAD

It seems ponderous to describe open boat narratives as commonly epistemological and ontological enquiries. Yet, the most compelling dwell on the limits of knowledge, the dynamics of belief, and the ways in which these both intersect with being-in-the-world: big questions in small boats. This sub-genre of shipwreck narratives accomplishes a particular concentration; the physical limits of a small boat create proximity, which in turn places diverse or discrepant ideas alongside one another. In these narrow confines we see democracy and demagoguery, empathy and predation, understanding and prejudice, progress and atavism, and love and despair. Given their limited narrative options and opportunities, open boat stories are siblings; in their inevitable intertextuality they bear a family resemblance. Subtle differences are, however, philosophically compelling. Crane’s ‘The open boat’ and Hanley’s The ocean are not opposites: they are very similar in structure and engage related concerns. The difference is their versions of solace. Both set aside transcendence, albeit gently and symbolically, and both authors represent the world as threatening, as louring dark danger. But for Crane our mortal, contingent, and racked condition can be redeemed, even if only hesitantly and partially, through affiliation, through mutuality and reciprocity. In The ocean, any answer to the torsions of being is elusive or false promise. The questions that remain with us after reading the two works in conjunction are, ‘Is Crane’s sense of solace merely a sentimental evasion of reality?’ and ‘Can we be saved by faith, whales, or dying enemies?’ In answering these questions, we predict, but never ensure, our rescue.

Works Cited Crane, Stephen. 1952. An omnibus, ed. Robert Wooster Stallman. New York: Knopf. Crane, Stephen. 1969–1975. The works of Stephen Crane (10 volumes). Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Fordham, John. 2002. James Hanley: Modernism and the working class. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Hanley, James. 1999. The ocean. London: Harvill. Sorrentino, Paul. 2014. Stephen Crane: A Life of Fire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Stokes, Edward. 1964. The novels of James Hanley. Melbourne: Cheshire. Wade, Stephen. 1999. James Hanley: a case for reassessment. Contemporary Review, 274.1601: 307–311.

CHAPTER 10

Proximity in Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat

When Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat was released in January 1944, Bosley Crowther, writing for the New York Times, objected to the film’s representation of the German U-boat commander, ‘Kapitan’ Willi, who is pulled from the sea by a group of Allied survivors after their freighter is torpedoed. He is, Crowther suggested, elevated to the status of a Nazi ‘superman’ dominating ‘decadent democracies’ (3). While ‘the Americans’ bicker and then lapse into despondent lethargy, ‘Kapitan’ Willi proves to be the ‘most efficient and resourceful man in this “Lifeboat” […] the man with “a plan”’ (3). Crowther understood Lifeboat to be ‘an allegorical film,’ praising it as ‘a trenchant and blistering symbolisation of the world and its woes today’ (2), but concluded that it failed—and dangerously so—as wartime propaganda. The enemy, ‘Kapitan’ Willi, was insufficiently demonised and his competence in the face of the Americans’ petty squabbles reflected well on him and poorly on them. Crowther was not alone in this indictment. Writing in the Amarillo Globe, also in 1944, Dorothy Thompson supported his view. She claimed that, if translated into German, ‘Lifeboat could be presented in Berlin as a morale-builder for the Nazi’s war’ (1); that the Nazi ‘superman […] is the only person on the boat who has intelligence, skill and purpose’ (1). The others—the socialite journalist, the working-class oiler, the seemingly liberal capitalist, the injured crew member, the nurse, and the radio

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Titlestad, Shipwreck Narratives: Out of our Depth, Maritime Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87041-6_10

113

114 

M. TITLESTAD

operator—‘spend their time gambling, making love, and expressing concern only over personal interests’ (1). For Thompson, the film will leave ‘the innocent observer’ with the impression that ‘the Democratic world […] deserves to perish, and certainly will’ (1). Hitchcock’s response was characteristically spirited. First, when pressed on Crowther and Thompson’s criticism, he claimed that the film does not show the Americans ‘individually as weaklings’ (2). Rather, it is ‘a question of non-seafaring people up against an experienced and skilled seaman’ (2). It is a matter of competence not ideology. Then, defending his didactic intentions, Hitchcock went on to rebut the accusation that he had ‘shown Americans in an unsympathetic light,’ stating that this was ‘preposterously untrue [and] a trifle irksome’ (2). If he disliked Americans, he went on— slightly oddly—‘I should scarcely betray my dislike in such an unsubtle fashion’ (2). His ‘unsubtle’ portrayal of the Americans was, then, by design. He had set out to depict a ‘ruthless, efficient Nazi against divided fellow passengers,’ elaborating a negative lesson: ‘Do not let it happen again’ (2). Crowther and Thompson had misunderstood the film’s allegorical import. Rather than ennobling German resolution and purpose, Lifeboat reveals how totalitarianism can take control of an irresolute, divided, and petty polity. What we have here are two interpretations of the film as an allegory of the conflict between the Allied and Axis powers: respectively, that it fails as propaganda and that its import is clear and pertinent. This disagreement begs various questions. Why is the film susceptible to these conflicting interpretations? Is there some intrinsic ambiguity that complicates its meaning? I presented an earlier draft of this essay to an audience of two at the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies at San Jose State University in January 2020. I travelled there to read John Steinbeck’s ‘Lifeboat’ (1943), an unpublished manuscript which was the basis of the film. At this point in my presentation, I set out on a whistle-stop account of allegory, that sped from religious didactic texts, past Paul de Man’s ‘The rhetoric of temporality’ (1983) and came to a halt at recent engagements with the potential and limits of allegory—by Fredric Jameson (1986), Stephen Slemon (1988), and Derek Attridge (2005). My explanation proved that it is easy to be both flamboyant and dull. It was that odd intimacy—the three of us gathered around a desk—that forced me to reassess. A world away, writing at my Johannesburg desk, I had fooled myself that

10  PROXIMITY IN ALFRED HITCHCOCK’S LIFEBOAT 

115

the essay was crisp, elegant, and insightful. I had a plan. Two pairs of eyes glazing over, and increasingly polite smiles, exposed its presumption. Let me just sum up instead what I said. An element in an allegory (a sign) indicates a field of settled denotations and connotations, and a constellation of signs represents relations among established differences. ‘Kapitan’ Willi (in Crowther, Thompson, and Hitchcock’s descriptions) is not really an ‘individual’ (if we understand that to mean a character with a contoured subjectivity). Rather, he signifies a field of meaning encompassing aspects of National Socialism. He is an embodiment of history and ideology: their representative (from res praesentare, Lat. ‘to make something present again’). We cannot interpret allegorical meaning without knowing the structure of difference in which an element inheres. Stated slightly differently, we require access to the field of meaning and affect to which each sign refers if we are to understand the significance of the relations among signs (between ‘Kapitan’ Willi and the Americans). Allegory, it follows, depends on pre-texts, on a prior knowledge of the field of meaning that is organised by an individual text. If one knew nothing of the ideology and historical reality of Nazism, ‘Kapitan’ Willi’s disposition and actions would mean very little, if anything significant at all. A public unaware of the system of meaning activated by the allegory would be bewildered. Since allegories depend on anterior texts and practices of expression, they are commonly understood to affirm an ossified range of meanings and, hence, to reiterate rather than qualify or subvert existing understanding and attitudes. When an individual is taken to represent a nation, class, race, gender, ideology or, say, a component of the psyche, there is inevitably an appeal to ‘type’ (often stereotype). Allegory, in this view, inclines to confirm both our worldview and our prejudices. But this has been contested. New allegories, it has been argued (by Jameson, Slemon, and Attridge), can subvert old allegories; revisions can ridicule conventions and challenge the structures of power they endorse or undergird. Further, allegory seldom exists in an unmitigated form. Many films, novels, and plays are allegorical to a degree, stitching together various representational modes. None of the more persuasive contemporary allegories is dully mechanistic in the correspondences it constructs—these works are tempered with realism, introspection, self-reflexivity, postmodern, or postcolonial inflections. Returning to the film, to what degree is Hitchcock’s Lifeboat allegorical? Even if Hitchcock claims that it is, that this was his intention, there are

116 

M. TITLESTAD

clear, but I will argue, ethically constructive ways in which it fails to function as propaganda. I am not suggesting, as Crowther and Thompson do, that the film allegorises something other than that which Hitchcock intended, but rather that it fails allegorical logic with profound consequences; that it is divided against itself, and that this might be the most interesting thing about it, and open boat (or analogous) narratives more generally. It also tells us something important about propaganda more generally, and particularly about the different publics that various texts convene or fail to influence as they were intended to do. When ‘Kapitan’ Willi’s hands appear out of the sea clasping the boat’s gunwale, we get the impression of a portentous presence emerging from the deep. Critics refer to the ragtag group of castaways in the boat as ‘the Americans’ although two are English: Alice MacKenzie (played by Mary Anderson) is the ‘feminine ideal’ of a caring nurse, and her gentle ineffectual love-interest, Stanley ‘Sparks’ Garrett (Hume Cronyn). The others are: John Kovak (John Hodiak), a steamy oiler who is insubordinate but proves incapable of command; Constance ‘Connie’ Porter (Tallulah Bankhead), an acerbic nouveau-riche socialite, who—in the opening scenes—sits alone, resplendent and top-lit in the boat wearing a Revillon Freres mink coat and doing her makeup; Charles J. Rittenhouse Jr. (Henry Hull) is an industrialist who exudes Fordist bonhomie and spouts sentimental—and, as it transpires, entirely superficial—moral commitments; Gus Smith (William Bendix) is a Coney Island common man and innocent caught up in the horrors of war; and Joe Spencer (Canada Lee), an African American who plays the flute, often sits at the margins of the group, and who, we learn, has been saved from a life of crime by a return to his evangelical Christian roots. ‘Kapitan’ Willi obtrudes on a group comprising representatives of different social and economic classes, who have already been wrangling over the question of captaincy. He is self-effacing at first, yet the Americans soon realise that, contrary to his claim, he was no lowly crewmember but the commander of the U-boat that sank their ship. When he is challenged on the atrocity of firing on the lifeboats after the freighter went down, he claims to have simply been ‘following orders,’ a phrase repeated several times in the film—and which, of course, was to acquire an increasingly chilling resonance. When he is first saved, there is disagreement as to what to do with ‘Kapitan’ Willi: throw him overboard, treat him as a prisoner of war, or attempt to convert him to liberal principles. As the Americans bicker, he sets about making himself indispensable. Since he was a surgeon

10  PROXIMITY IN ALFRED HITCHCOCK’S LIFEBOAT 

117

in civilian life, he offers to perform the amputation of Gus’s injured and increasingly gangrenous leg. Then, since he is far more robust and decisive than the others, he takes over the rowing of the boat and sings German lullabies (accompanied by Rittenhouse on Joe’s flute) in a manner we might associate with Joseph Conrad’s racist caricature of ‘the jolly pioneers of progress [who] drink the jolly lager-beer’ (Heart of darkness 1988, 13). Most importantly, he determines the boat’s course, steering them towards a German supply ship in the middle of the ocean. The audience witnesses his guile: he drinks water from a concealed flask while the others collapse from dehydration. He takes food pills and furtively checks a concealed compass to ensure that they are keeping to his course. Then, when the others have drifted off into exhausted sleep, he pushes the hallucinating Gus out of the boat and dispassionately watches him drown. If ‘Kapitan’ Willi is a Nietzschean ‘superman’—an interpretation that is at best paranoid—he is also a cartoonish villain. So that the audience is left in no doubt, there is even a close-up shot of his malevolent staring eyes fixed at the enervated passengers, and his furtive actions are all Dickensian melodrama; an uncanny Allied echo of the characterisation of Joseph Süß Oppenheimer in Jud Süß (1940). Yet ‘Kapitan’ Willi is not only an element in a schematic political allegory or a pat malefactor. There are moments at which he is humanised; at which he is rendered as compassionate, concerned, and connected to the Americans—when he volunteers to operate on Gus’s leg, in various conversations with the other passengers, when he gently advises that Gus should not feel embarrassed by his surname (Schmidt), and even in his reassurances to Gus just before he pushes him to his death. Hitchcock portrays ‘Kapitan’ Willi as participating in the Americans’ suffering and anxieties. The cliché: he recognises and acknowledges that they are all in the same boat. Could it have been otherwise? Could Hitchcock have crafted pure allegory without the muddle of intersubjectivity? Lifeboat was Hitchcock’s first attempt at propaganda. Later in 1944 he went on to make two short French propaganda films that reflect on the Occupation, Bon voyage and Aventure Malgache, both of which are as subtle as they are ideologically clear. Lifeboat is not. The impulse not merely to stereotype ‘Kapitan’ Willi is consistent with Hitchcock’s general disposition as a director: to craft scenes which are visually compelling but morally ambiguous, if not frighteningly vague (think of the gathering of crows behind Tippi Hedren). His unfolding vision across his oeuvre of the dark sublime and the ways in which individuals inhabit fear by clinging to one another, did not lend

118 

M. TITLESTAD

itself to the symmetrical expedience of wartime propaganda. Driven by guilt about his emigration from Britain before the Blitz, which he acknowledged as instigating his desire to contribute to the war effort, he learned to suppress his ambivalence about the condition of the human soul by the time he made Bon voyage. But another reason for the ambiguity of Lifeboat is what we might think of as the narrative consequences of proximity. Even more than Rope (1948), Lifeboat is a claustrophobic film: there are countless long and medium shots that are unusually populated, even cluttered; characters are constantly making room, giving way, jostling, and coming up against one another; every gesture, no matter how slight, is visible; even intimacy, in this bounded world, is public; and, when he is exiled from the company, ‘Kapitan’ Willi is only a few feet away. Interaction—human interaction—is an inevitable consequence of the poetics of space in the open boat narrative. Intersubjectivity is unavoidable. When the Americans attack and throw the ‘Kapitan’ overboard, they have been reduced, as Hitchcock said in his canonical interviews with François Truffaut, to ‘a pack of dogs’ (1984, 156). In the subsequent shots, they are ruminative, preoccupied, and guilty. They know that, when it comes down to it, they have killed a man; that they have debased themselves and are suddenly the same, if not worse, than the Nazi. Then, in an obvious circularity, hands appear again at the gunwale, recalling the arrival of ‘Kapitan’ Willi. The proximate enemy has not, after all, been dealt with; the submerged, the repressed, has returned, this time in the figure of a terrified soldier who is no more than a child. Again, the Americans argue, this time more experienced and each more determined, about what to do with him. They are spared the need to decide by the arrival of the Allied ship responsible for sinking the German supply vessel on which the young German was sailing. The enemy remains within. Propaganda is at its most effective, Crowther and Thompson imply, when, at a distance, one can fix difference in a readily comprehensible allegory. It is easiest to be prejudiced at a remove, to traffic in stereotypes and lucid Apollonian ideologies when one is spared the complications that arise from engagement. Lifeboat is a qualified, compromised allegory which stages, perhaps inadvertently, the limits—even the absurdity—of reducing political and individual complexity to allegory. The messy and muddled reality of engagement makes it impossible—except with a mindless will and extreme violence—to fix the other in a scheme of meaning. To come close is, in a phrase from Yeats’s ‘The circus animal’s desertion,’

10  PROXIMITY IN ALFRED HITCHCOCK’S LIFEBOAT 

119

to implicate ‘the foul rag and bone shop of the heart’ (1996, 347). Our projects will not work when we listen to others intently, when we allow others to insinuate their fragile humanity, their needs, and their gifts, into our ideological, intellectual, narrative, and emotional plans. My audience of two at the Martha Heasley Cox Steinbeck Center: Tim Matterson, a master-brewer living in a Californian shelter (the economic boom has squeezed thousands out of their homes), and Maria Judnick, an academic from San Jose State and Santa Clara University, who I had contacted after reading her chapter concerning Steinbeck’s unpublished novel, ‘Lifeboat,’ which was the basis of Hitchcock’s film (2014, 191–206). I had written a paper and prepared a presentation with an anxiety born of my innate disposition and a growing awareness of my neurological deterioration. I had been warned by the director of the Center, Peter van Coutren, encouragingly a Grateful Dead fan, that the audience would be small, but I did not expect to be sitting opposite just two strangers. I revised my intentions. A desk in that archive: an open boat, a broken compass, and a meaningless chart—a necessary practice, perhaps even an ethics, of proximity.

Works cited Attridge, Derek. 2005. J.M. Coetzee and the ethics of reading. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Conrad, Joseph. 1988. Heart of darkness. New York: Norton. Crowther, Bosley. 2019. The screen in review: ‘Lifeboat,’ a film picturization of shipwreck survivors, with Tallulah Bankhead, opens at the Astor Theatre. New York Times 13 January 1944. https://www.nytimes.com/1944/01/13. Accessed 11 December 2019. De Man, Paul. 1983. Blindness and insight: essays in the rhetoric of contemporary criticism. London: Methuen. Hitchcock, Alfred. 2012. Lifeboat (film). Eureka, The Masters of Cinema Series. Jameson, Frederic. 1986. Third-world literature in the era of multinational capitalism. Social Text 15 (Autumn): 65–88. https://doi.org/10.2307/466493 Judnick, Maria. A. 2014. ‘The name of Hitchcock! The fame of Steinbeck!’: The legacy of Lifeboat. Hitchcock and adaptation: on page and screen, ed. Mark Osteen. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefiield. 191–206. Slemon, Stephen. 1988. Post-colonial allegory and the transformation of history. Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 23: 157–68. https://doi.org/ 10.1177/002198948802300115

120 

M. TITLESTAD

Thompson, Dorothy. 2019. A film that could aid German morale. Amarillo Globe 31 January 1944. https://the.hitchcock.zone/wiki/Amarillo_Globe_(31/ Jan/1944). Accessed 11 December 2019. Truffaut, Francois (with Helen G.  Scott). 1984. Hitchcock. New  York: Simon and Schuster. Yeats, William Butler. 1996. The circus animal’s desertion. In The collected poems of W.B. Yeats. Edited by Richard J. Finneran. New York: Scriber. 346–347. No author. Anti US charge denied (quoting Alfred Hitchcock). Gloucestershire Echo 16 March 1944. https://the.hitchcock.zone/wiki/Gloucestershire_ Echo_(16/Mar/1944). Accessed 11 December 2019.

CHAPTER 11

John Steinbeck’s ‘Lifeboat’: An Unfinished Journey

There is a wonder to things that are unfinished, but not necessarily incomplete. There are works in the Musée Rodin in Paris that the sculptor abandoned in process. In one, a naked woman is unfurling herself from the white marble substrate, her back beautifully resolved, and her face half-­ embedded, about to turn out of the stone. Another is a muscled and bearded man facing us, wrestling himself out of roughhewn marble. His head is bent backwards towards his right, as if in agony as he tries to wrench his left arm into form. And one is of a male figure sitting on the lump of stone out of which he is rising, weighed down by an unfashioned block, carrying the burden of his own emergence. These three works— among others left unfinished by Auguste Rodin during the 1890s—are about becoming: complete in part, yet to begin in others, they reveal process more than resolution; the ‘how’ of creation more frankly that the ‘what’. They are monumental intimations of dynamism. These three arrested figures, caught long ago in an instant of time before the next chisel strike, might embody Rodin’s impulse to achieve form more than the sculptures we view as complete; those we accept as resolved in terms of his intention. I first engaged John Steinbeck’s ‘Lifeboat’ manuscript in the Martha Heasley Cox Center for John Steinbeck Studies at San Jose State University. It comprises 158 typed pages (the pages are numbered to 244 because a central section—pages 110–97—was removed by the author during editing). It was retrieved by Robert E. Morseberger from the archives of the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Titlestad, Shipwreck Narratives: Out of our Depth, Maritime Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87041-6_11

121

122 

M. TITLESTAD

research department at Twentieth Century Fox in 1975 (Morseberger 1976, 325–38). Steinbeck began work on the ‘novelette’ (as he referred to it) in 1942, and when, in 1943, Kenneth McGowan from Fox approached him with a request from the Maritime Commission to write a script for a propaganda film, he salvaged it. ‘Lifeboat’ is neither a film script nor a ‘treatment’ but a work of narrative fiction comprising a narrator’s retrospective account of a series of calamitous events and his rumination on their significance. Alfred Hitchcock had been involved in the decision to approach Steinbeck, to ask him to write a screenplay that would reflect their common desire to support the war-effort. They never met and Steinbeck’s novelette would be rewritten twice, in its second iteration by Jo Swerling, before Hitchcock would pummel the script into a more workable shape in the days before he began shooting. Steinbeck’s text, while it tells roughly the same story as Lifeboat (1944) and develops related concerns, differs significantly from the film which was first screened first in New York in 1944. This variance is mapped by Morseberger (1976) and Maria Judnick (2014), both of whom consider, among other things, the necessities and compromises entailed in screen adaptation. While I draw on their work here, my preoccupation is different from theirs. I am concerned with what was lost in the process: how translating Steinbeck’s story into Hitchcock’s film reduced ethical and political returns. We could extrapolate from this exploration questions relating to media, mode, and register, but I will not do so here. Steinbeck’s novelette is narrated by the merchant mariner Bud Abbott. Morseberger points out that the name was probably a placeholder, as it evokes one half of the comedy duo (Bud) Abbott and (Lou) Costello who were famous at the time (331). At the start, Abbott is possessed by urgency: ‘I have a feeling that I want to get this written down fast—I don’t even know why’ (Steinbeck 1). This uncertainty prevails throughout the novelette: Abbott senses that there is something significant about his experience, but it remains opaque. In the wake of the sinking of the torpedoed freighter, the Frances Sweeney, with her crew of Greeks, a Russian (who, Abbott reflects, may in fact be Armenian), and ten or twelve passengers, Abbott finds himself in a lifeboat with a small group of survivors: Albert Shienkowitz (a Polish-American factory worker from Chicago), Mrs Constance Porter (who, unlike Hitchcock’s Connie, has retrieved only an ‘alligator bag’ of personal effects), Alice Both (a second-lieutenant army nurse in blue uniform), Brennan (an ex-racing driver, who has capitalised on his fame to become an entrepreneur in aircraft manufacture),

11  JOHN STEINBECK’S ‘LIFEBOAT’: AN UNFINISHED JOURNEY 

123

Joe (‘a God damn buck nigger,’ as Abbott first refers to him, yet who later emerges as the most rounded character in the narrative), and a desperate English mother (whose baby dies shortly after they are rescued and who later—driven abject with despair—throws herself into the sea to drown). Steinbeck’s castaways are wretched: weary until death, covered in the oil left on the surface by their sunken freighter, bruised, cut, and variously broken. Brennan, possessed of a rather presumptuous authority, takes control of the boat: ‘I guess he’s been on so many boards of directors and he’s been the boss of factories—so long, that he just felt that he ought to take command and he did’ (29). Then, as they tend to the weeping mother tragically nursing her dead baby, they notice a man in the water. His arm ‘is bent all crooked’ and his clothes ‘look kind of foreign’ (33). Brennan declaims, ‘By God, this guy’s a German’ (33). This survivor of the U-boat crew which torpedoed the Frances Sweeney may or may not have been her captain—Abbott notices a patch on his uniform where rank-insignia might have been torn off, but there is never any certainty on this matter since the German speaks no English and none of them speaks any German. Albert immediately proposes throwing him overboard. ‘Poles, I guess, just don’t like Germans any more. Of course, right now nobody likes them, but the Poles just kind of hate them’ (33). But then Brennan intervenes, designating the German a prisoner of war, whose rights should be protected accordingly. The German remains enigmatic for the remainder of the narrative; his priorities are elusive and his efforts to communicate are unsuccessful. He is an unknowable, proximate enemy who, at various points, engages Abbott despite their mutual incomprehension ‘he’d talk to me and it was kind of like I knew what he was talking about except that I didn’t. It was just a kind of conversation’ (48). Abbott wishes he ‘could talk good German’ to discover whether the two of them ‘thought some of the same things’ (79). In his affectionately blunt manner, Abbott cuts across the logic of allies and enemies: ‘He may have been the dirtiest son-of-a-bitch in the world, but he was our son-of-a-bitch now’ (40). At no point is it clear that the German—who is blue from the cold and shivering from the pain of his broken arm—betrays them. Once, as Abbott emerges from unconsciousness, he suspects that the German might be steering them towards some self-serving destination, but he immediately doubts his own suspicions. He has no ideological polestar. Generally, Abbott considers himself and the German to be ordinary people betrayed by the divisive and violent nationalist ideologies of their present. ‘If those fellows who talk on the

124 

M. TITLESTAD

radio and write for magazines and stuff […] get us all steamed up and we start foaming at the mouth, then we’ll go out and win a war for them. Ok, they’ll help, too, but we go out and get mad and we fight with bayonets and things like that—us common people. And I wonder if those fellows think they’re kidding us’ (76). A little later Abbott adds, ‘we’ll fight this war, God damn it, and we’ll win it but we hate to be kidded all the time, and we hate to be yelled at and told what we ought to think and what we ought to do’ (78). There is another way in which Abbott reaches across a divide. While his initial representation of Joe, the African American steward, is embedded in racist language, Abbott comes to admire his bravery (particularly his Herculean effort to save the mother and her baby), his self-effacing propriety (when he refuses to remove his wet lifejacket for fear that his bare torso might offend the ladies), his steadfast refusal to engage in the petty bickering, and his outstanding work ethic. Abbott’s gradual recognition of Joe’s humanity is clearly a sentimental and didactic rejoinder to racism. In its ethical pedantry, it arguably re-inscribes some of the prejudices it seeks to counter. (Steinbeck’s political shortcomings in relation to race are mapped in two interventions by Tom Barden, both 2017.) Nonetheless, there are resonant ways in which Abbott and Joe, and the others in the boat, become entwined. Joe’s flute playing is haunting and sublime: it is ‘the sweetest music’ Abbott has ever heard, ‘strange and soft like something you maybe dreamed’ (74). It intimates a possibility of some universal harmony: ‘it kind of went with the water, and it kind of matched the wind […] it seemed that it came from inside your head—not from outside at all’ (51). Abbott points out that Joe, who was born in Bermuda and attended high school in Harlem, learned to play ‘good music’—rather than merely lapsing into ‘the St. Louis blues’ (200)—so that he could play in classical ensembles and orchestras. Let us ascribe Abbott’s pejorative view of jazz to a racist misconception of the music (perpetuated in contemporary thought most detrimentally by Theodor Adorno). It matters, though, that Joe’s music, contrary to the most common compositional practices of the Western classical tradition, is improvised: ‘I guess he must have made it up as he went along’ (74). It originates within him and expresses his experience. Significantly, the music transports Abbott into a remote time and affect: ‘It was just like the ocean and it drove me back inside myself. It made me think of things that were gone. It made me think of my old man sitting beside the kitchen stove trying to figure out how we were going to

11  JOHN STEINBECK’S ‘LIFEBOAT’: AN UNFINISHED JOURNEY 

125

live and how he had locked himself in the bedroom after he had been out looking for a job and couldn’t get one, locked himself in and stayed for a long time’ (202). In both senses, the improvised music articulates suffering: it is simultaneously expressive and draws Abbott into a historicised intersubjectivity; into his and Joe’s ‘common’ experience of being victims of an exploitative system founded on racial and class inequalities. The memory of his dejected father leads to Abbott’s most extensive reflection in ‘Lifeboat’. He remembers the agony of poverty his parents endured during the Depression. ‘It wasn’t a sharp, clean pain like a war. It was like getting nibbled to death by ducks’ (202–3). This is a counterpoint to the meteoric rise of Brennan, who has built an empire on manufacturing aircraft for the Allied military. Abbott ruminates on the structure of capitalism: production depends on consumption, consumption depends on earning a living wage, factory and farm owners seek to maximise profit by forcing wages as low as possible, and poverty leads to alienation and resentment (205–6). This chain of consequence leads Abbott to question Brennan’s optimistic view that, after the war, a new administration will ‘get things going—get the factories going’; that the ‘people [will] have all the work they need and, [won’t] need to be on relief’ (205). Picturing the Dust Bowl migrants, who Steinbeck had brought to the world’s attention four years earlier with the publication of The grapes of wrath (1939), Abbott concludes that ‘politics isn’t anything you think’ (206). ‘It’s just how much money you have and whether you’ve had a good time of it or a bad time of it’ (206). In the lifeboat, they are at least equal: ‘We all had just about the same amount and that was nothing’ (206). Yet, despite the great equaliser of shipwreck, it ‘was pretty easy to see that the last thing Mrs. Porter and Brennan were going to lose was their politics’ (206). The emerging sociality of the boat is suddenly interrupted when Abbott, confused and hallucinating, accuses the German of steering them on the wrong course. Something comes over them all: ‘I could see it in the faces of every one. The German could see it and I think he knew what it meant too. We were scared and we were mad and we were fierce’ (224). They rush to obey Albert’s command: ‘Let’s throw the Son of a Bitch overboard!’ (224). Joe cries out, ‘Don’t you do nothing to him—don’t you do nothing to him,’ but they are already ‘right up to him’ and throw him overboard regardless. Joe dives in to save him, but the German sinks too quickly. Hitchcock retained the climax of the German being thrown overboard but there are important differences. First, Steinbeck establishes quite clearly that Joe is the moral authority in the boat. Joe chastises the

126 

M. TITLESTAD

others: ‘Hell you fellows were a mob and I’m scared of mobs. I don’t like mobs […] I seen mobs before and I know what they look like’ (225). Invoking the history of racist burning and lynching, he accuses the other passengers directly of having perpetrated an unforgivable injustice. Secondly, while Hitchcock simply shows the survivors shocked at their own actions, Steinbeck implies that the killing of the German destroys any hope of cohesion in the boat. This is evident in the vociferous arguments after the drowning, which reflect blame, doubt, grief, regret, and a desire for repentance. It is Brennan’s chilling comment that finally silences them: ‘Well the German looked like he was telling the truth. Maybe he was trying to save us all. We can’t tell’ (230–31). It is metaphorically significant that, swimming out to save the German, the string tied around Joe’s neck breaks and his flute is lost. Finally, while the passengers in Hitchcock’s Lifeboat experience an uncanny ‘return’ when a second German’s hands appear at the gunwale, Steinbeck’s characters link their possible rescue to questions of guilt. When a ship approaches their small boat, Brennan shouts, ‘I guess we’re not murderers. I guess God heard our prayers and sent us this ship’ (241). But it transpires that the ship is a German raider, which seems to them to be divine retribution. Fortuitously, the raider is sunk a few minutes later and the motley guilt-ridden survivors are saved by an Allied vessel. Steinbeck wrote his novelette at the height of his fame at the end of five remarkably productive years. While Tortilla Flat (1935) announced the arrival of an important new American novelist, it was the Pulitzer Prize-­ winning The grapes of wrath (1939) that made Steinbeck’s reputation. His biographer, Jackson J.  Benson (1984), documents Steinbeck’s growing awareness of the poverty and mass migration of the Dust Bowl migrants (the ‘Okies’) to California during the 1920s (334–48). In the year 1935–1936 alone, 87,302 migrants entered California, fleeing the environmental degradation of the mid-West. Steinbeck was commissioned by George West of the San Francisco news to write a series of investigative articles and developed a friendship with Tom Collins, a ‘demonstration camp’ manager, many of whose assiduously collected anecdotes, vignettes, descriptions, and portraits Steinbeck would incorporate into The grapes of wrath. The novel remains one of the great humanitarian works of literature. While Steinbeck eschewed Marxism (while at the same time opposing the ‘anti-Red’ vigilantism that accompanied the rise of unionism among the migrants), he was deeply moved by the suffering of the ‘Okies’ and was intensely aware of the brutalising effects of capitalism that they

11  JOHN STEINBECK’S ‘LIFEBOAT’: AN UNFINISHED JOURNEY 

127

were experiencing. His economic and political understanding was robust and prescient. In The grapes of wrath and in his subsequent work, Steinbeck sought in the ideology and institutions of American democracy a response to cruelty, privation, and injustice; the terms of the redress he advocated were, as Benson, suggests, transcendental values manifest in the history of liberal self-determination and justice for all, specifically those advanced by Ralph Waldo Emerson (341–42). The humanist sensibility of John Steinbeck is compellingly described in three essays by Edwin Berry Burgum (1946), Jan Whitt (2006), and Charles Williams (2014) respectively. Steinbeck was averse to fame and intrusions into his private life, and so in 1940 he fled the attention lavished on him after the publication of The grapes of wrath by travelling with his wife, Carol, and his friend and collaborator, the biologist Ed Ricketts, to the Sea of Cortez (or, less poetically, the Gulf of California). The resulting publications, first The Sea of Cortez (1941) and then the narrative extract, The log of the ‘Sea of Cortez’ (1951), detail the daily collection of species of marine invertebrates of the littoral, but also afforded Steinbeck the space for philosophical reflection, although we should remember that the ideas he explores were conversations with Ricketts and it is uncertain whose notions we are encountering. (Steinbeck uses the pronoun ‘we’ to voice the ruminations, which might also include Carol, who is otherwise disturbingly invisible in the narrative.) In The log, Steinbeck advances the possibility that one might ‘think from the sea’ (31)—‘it is important where you are thinking from’ (31). We might characterise this thinking as an ode to fecundity and enthusiasm. Steinbeck delights unabashedly in the abundant and multiplying life of the tide pools; he is swept away in his accounts of their ecological vivacity and the ‘energy of mind’ it encourages in the observer, which he opposes to the dull cultish science of the academies (72). We are, he argues, inclined to narrow ourselves in relation to that which we observe rather than being—in the spirit of the natural world—expansive. Our thought and our being should approximate the tide pool: ‘it should [stretch] both ways, dig back to electrons and leap space into the universe and fight out of the moment into non-conceptual time. Then ecology has a synonym which is ALL’ (72). While celebrating the joys of marine and maritime life in the Sea of Cortez, Steinbeck was intensely aware of the war in Europe: ‘There is a war now which no one wants to fight, in which no one sees a gain—a zombie war of sleep-walkers which nevertheless goes on out of all control

128 

M. TITLESTAD

of intelligence’ (The log 74). On returning from the expedition, he wrote to President Roosevelt, encouraging him to set up a propaganda office (Benson 486). In later life he would joke that all his suggestions in this respect were completely ignored, but over the next three years he did perform various functions for the Coordinator of Information (later, the Office of Strategic Services) and the Office of War Information (which became the CIA). The latter set Steinbeck an assignment: to write a novel that would reflect on the Nazi occupation of European countries and offer support to the subjugated. The result was The moon is down (1942), which was adapted as a play later that year and then filmed in 1943. The story unfolds in an occupied country (which is never named, but which resembles, and was later taken to be Norway) by a fascist military power which simulates the Nazis. It is a subtle work by the standards of wartime propaganda. It investigates the intricacies of complicity, collaboration, and resistance. Rather than being schematic and tub-thumping, it is an intimate portrait of fascist domination. Much to Steinbeck’s chagrin, the effectiveness of The moon is down as propaganda was vociferously challenged, most vitriolically by James Thurber in New Republic (see Benson 498). Steinbeck was outraged: he was never defensive about the work’s literary merits (he freely admitted, even trumpeted, its shortcomings), but he was convinced that its political message was an important contribution to the Allied cause. The study of the illegal duplication, illicit publication, and clandestine distribution of the novel, John Steinbeck goes to war (1991) by Donald Coers, irrefutably vindicates Steinbeck. The moon is down was an essential inspirational text in the resistance movements in Norway, Denmark, France, and Holland—and following the war, Steinbeck’s other works were translated for those readerships and sold exceptionally well. It is clear from their comments that readers in the occupied territories thought that propaganda which reiterated ‘Manichean simplicities [and] which presented German soldiers as ogres’ was absurd (Coers 130). Steinbeck, Coers argues, intuitively understood that proximate enemies could not be reduced to cartoonish stereotypes; that the closer one comes to the ‘enemy’ the more one registers his humanity, and the more careful and assured one must be when inscribing the fine line that divides you. Steinbeck wrote ‘Lifeboat’ in the context of these three works—The grapes of wrath, The Sea of Cortez and The moon is down—and their reception. It might seem exaggerated to liken ‘Lifeboat’ to Rodin’s unfinished statues, yet they are interesting counterpoints. Both Judnick and Morseberger point out—accurately enough—that ‘Lifeboat’ is clearly a

11  JOHN STEINBECK’S ‘LIFEBOAT’: AN UNFINISHED JOURNEY 

129

work in progress; that Steinbeck would never have condoned its publication in the form that it was sent to Twentieth Century Fox. It is somewhat mawkishly paced, Abbott’s dialogue, as Judnick observes, ‘is occasionally repetitive, longwinded and dull’ (196), Mrs Porter, Albert Shienkowitz, Brennan, and Alice Both are wooden characters, and what passes for Abbott’s development in relation to Joe is heavy-handed. Also, there are stylistic infelicities that, during additional revision, Steinbeck (or Carol, always his first editor) would have addressed. Yet, we can discern the contours of a text that is emerging, and recognise the author’s narrative, aesthetic, and political impulses, even though they have not yet achieved full expression. Perhaps it is in their becoming—before they are fashioned in more conventionally ‘literary’ terms—that we see more clearly some of Steinbeck’s social and philosophical preoccupations. The open boat narrative invariably subverts the logic of Manichean propaganda; human proximity undermines the settled differences on which allegories depend. What intrigued me when I began reading Steinbeck’s ‘Lifeboat’ is that it is even less allegorical than Hitchcock’s film. In the novelette, the survivors have a common predicament—the German and the other passengers are understood as coextensive: as castaways in a sea of difference that is imposed upon them by the tides of ideology. This is not the logic of the microcosm, rather a view that if you remove individuals from overweening structures of political difference, they are inclined to identify commonality and even common cause. Rather than a manifestation of the world, Steinbeck’s open boat is a humanist rejoinder to the political logic of war. Had this version found its way into publication or into a more literal film adaptation, it would have been entirely vulnerable to the accusations levelled at The moon is down. Abbott’s reflections draw the German closer—just as they draw Joe into the lived reality of those whose self-identification has hitherto depended on difference. Steinbeck gives more credence, even metaphysical gravitas, to the potential of human connection as constituting intersubjectivity. A blunt assertion of difference, in this view, is invariably violence against the possibility of a fecund human ecology, against the prospect of an oceanic connection of the self to the infinite prospects of others. Morseberger argues that Hitchcock’s Lifeboat ‘has much less political consciousness’ than the novelette (336), and he is right. This is obviously the case given Abbott’s explicit reflections on the Depression, racial prejudice (and its violent expression), the interrelation of capitalism and militarism, the inevitable and necessary rise of organised labour, and the dangers

130 

M. TITLESTAD

of nationalism. Further, if we consider the subtle dynamics of the ways in which an enemy (the German) or the social other (Joe) is constructed, we see ideology in (or as) practice. Difference is given in schemes of meaning, but—the novelette suggests—individuals inhabit these structures and can either follow well-worn orthodox paths or cut across the prevailing logic of prejudice. But there is another aspect to Steinbeck’s inchoate text, which resonates with Emersonian transcendentalism. I would call this a ‘politics of enthusiasm’. Steinbeck’s urge (desire, impulse) to reach up from the tide pool to the stars to understand simultaneously humanity’s place and its potential is energetic, lively, and fecund. Perhaps this libidinal investment in the prospects of connection seems naïve, possibly too reminiscent of the precedents of E.M. Forster and Walt Whitman. But ‘Lifeboat’ expresses Steinbeck’s unabashed faith in crossing boundaries, linking things together in a giant variegated ecology of meaning. This enthusiasm might well have been muted had the novelette journeyed towards publication—it may well have reduced through respectable restraint. We see in the novelette the full glow of an energy that is diffused across Steinbeck’s oeuvre. There is art and example in its vivacious humanism and its sense of unfettered potential.

Works Cited Barden, Thomas E. 2017a. Race in Steinbeck’s novelette ‘Lifeboat’. The Steinbeck Review 14.2: 177–183. https://doi.org/10.5325/steinbeckreview.14.2.0177. Barden, Thomas E. 2017b. ‘The stable buck’s a nigger’: race and racism in Of mice and men. In Critical insights: ‘Of mice and men’ by John Steinbeck, ed. Barbara A. Heavilin. Ipswich: Grey House: 161–8. Benson, Jackson J. 1984. John Steinbeck, writer: a biography. New York: Penguin. Burgum, Edwin Berry. 1946. The sensibility of John Steinbeck. Science & Society 10.2: 132–147. https://doi.org/10.2307/40399749. Coers, Donald V. 1991. John Steinbeck goes to war: ‘The moon is down’ as propaganda. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Judnick, Maria A. 2014. ‘The Name of Hitchcock! The Fame of Steinbeck!’: the legacy of Lifeboat. In Hitchcock and adaptation: on the page and screen, ed. Mark Osteen. New York: Rowman and Littlefield. 191–206. Morseberger, Robert E. 1976. Adrift in Steinbeck’s Lifeboat. Literature/Film Quarterly 4.4 Fall: 325–338. 43795522. Steinbeck, John. 1943. ‘Lifeboat’. Unpublished MS. Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies at San Jose State University. (Revised March 26, 1943), Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation.

11  JOHN STEINBECK’S ‘LIFEBOAT’: AN UNFINISHED JOURNEY 

131

Steinbeck, John. 1995a. The moon is down. New York: Penguin. Steinbeck, John. 1995b.The log from ‘The Sea of Cortez’. New York: Penguin. Steinbeck, John. 1996. The grapes of wrath, in Steinbeck: ‘The grapes of wrath’ and other writings 1936–1941, ed. Robert DeMott and Elaine A. Steinbeck. New York: The Library of America. Whitt, Jan. 2006. ‘To do some good and no harm’: the literary journalism of John Steinbeck. The Steinbeck Review 3.2 Fall: 41–62. https://doi.org/10.1111/ j.1754-­6087.2006.00080. Williams, Charles. 2014. Steinbeck as anti-fascist. American Studies 53.4: 49–71. https://doi.org/10.1353/ams.2014.0169.

CHAPTER 12

Making Room: The Lifeboat, an Invidious Motif

The William Brown had a crew of seventeen and carried sixty-five Scottish and Irish passengers destined for the ‘new world’. On 19 April 1841, en route from Liverpool to Philadelphia, she struck an iceberg two hundred miles off Cape Race, Newfoundland, and began to take on water. Her jolly boat and a longboat were lowered. The captain, George L. Harris, and the rest of the crew were the first to board the boats, after which they permitted only thirty-three of the passengers to embark. The others went down with the ship minutes later. Harris commanded the jolly boat, which was occupied only by him, crew members, and one passenger. He shouted across the waves that the first mate, Francis Rhodes, was to take charge of the overcrowded longboat. Then, since the jolly boat was seaworthy, he set off, leaving the others to fend for themselves. His excuse was that it would improve their chances of rescue if the boats proceeded in different directions. The longboat, straining to avoid floating ice, began to leak and then it began to rain. As the sea became heavier, it was obvious that it would soon be swamped. Rhodes, supported by another senior member of the crew, Alexander William Holmes, made the decision to put passengers overboard to lighten the load. Over the next hours, the crew manhandled twelve (unmarried) men into the sea, as well as two women, the sisters of Frank Askin, who in their despondency were determined to follow their brother into the water. In a cruel irony, the American ship Crescent chanced upon the longboat that morning and the survivors were taken to Harve de © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Titlestad, Shipwreck Narratives: Out of our Depth, Maritime Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87041-6_12

133

134 

M. TITLESTAD

Grâce, Seine-Maritime, France, and then travelled back to Philadelphia. They had been in the boat for less than a day. The captain and the crew were picked up six days later by a French fishing boat—all survived. After a complaint was lodged by some of the surviving passengers, the case was brought to trial in Philadelphia. The court determined that Francis Rhodes and Alexander Holmes should be prosecuted. Rhodes fled the city, leaving Holmes alone to face the prosecutor, William M. Meredith, and the judge, Mr Baldwin (his first name is not given in the records). The trial lasted from 13–23 April 1884 and was a worldwide sensation. Holmes’s defence was self-evident: the danger was instant and overwhelming, and he acted on the command of the first mate in the interests of saving as many occupants of the lifeboat as possible. The prosecution, the record suggests, was most concerned with timing and matters of official responsibility: had the actions of the crew not been premature and were the crew not obliged to prioritise the wellbeing of the passengers above their own? The legal principle, of course, is whether self-preservation is— under these circumstances—a defence against murder charges. The jury deliberated for sixteen hours, eventually returning a guilty verdict but pleading for mercy for Holmes. Judge Baldwin passed the most lenient sentence possible: six months in prison and a $20 fine. As with the cannibalism of the survivors of the Mignonette, a judge had sought a subtle reconciliation of the law and the customs of the sea. Ted Lesser’s script for Souls at sea (1938), directed by Henry Hathaway and starring Gary Cooper and George Raft, takes elements from the story of the William Brown (including the name of the ship). ‘This story,’ the voiceover tells us at the start, ‘was inspired by dramatic incidents disclosed in a trial for mass murder on the high seas which a century ago made legal and maritime history’. Yet the film reduces the ethical conundrum to a gloriously-lit Alexander Holmes (Gary Cooper), a tender abolitionist, shooting—in the last three minutes of the film—at a swarm of passengers threatening to swamp a lifeboat amidst the chaos of the William Brown sinking. There is no deliberation, just spontaneous, urgent action. For Richard Sale, the pulp fiction writer and later film director, the heart of the story is the ethical challenge faced by the lifeboat’s commander. In his short story, ‘Seven waves away,’ published in Scribner’s in April 1938 (16–22, 92–93), the knells are Mr Holmes’s repeated phrases, ‘too many in the boat’ and ‘if she were lighter’. In a rejoinder to the first line of Crane’s ‘The open boat’ (‘None of them knew the colour of the sky’), the narrator declaims flatly, ‘The sky is yellow’ (17), setting the tone

12  MAKING ROOM: THE LIFEBOAT, AN INVIDIOUS MOTIF 

135

of the story: here there is no redemption through camaraderie and shared purpose, just the blunt reality of survival. When he is convinced that there is no choice, Holmes declares, ‘The weaklings must go. […] The ones who are of no use’ (21). A crew member, Jano, objects; this is taken to be mutiny, and Holmes shoots him. Mrs Jackson is then pushed into the sea followed by another weeping woman passenger, an elderly man, an injured dockhand, the cabin boy, and the unconscious captain. Soon afterwards, a ship approaches and the remaining occupants of the lifeboat are saved. Just before boarding her, an anguished Holmes desperately seeks his fellow castaways’ endorsement of his decisions, yet having supported him at the time, they distance themselves: ‘It’s not for us to say. […] We had no hand in it. […] We obeyed orders, that’s all, under threat o’ death we did’ (93). He is left isolated, the scapegoat. When Richard Sale, eighteen years after the publication of his story, wrote the screenplay for and directed Seven waves away he would be slightly less pedantic. Alexander Holmes—who Tyrone Power plays with Solomonic gravitas—is left in charge of an overcrowded lifeboat after a derelict mine bounces along the hull of a luxury liner, the Crescent Star, and explodes. As the camera pans over bobbing flotsam and a mournful accordion plays, the voiceover tells us that, of the 1556 souls on board, 1119 perished and only thirty-seven survived in an overcrowded lifeboat or floating alongside in a shark-infested sea (at least in the 35 000-gallon water tank built by the Royal Navy for filming). The visual sense is of a population spilling over the gunwales, the boat being dragged down into the water. Holmes is authorised by the dying captain, who not only gives him the signet ring he received on gaining his first command, but also calls another crew member to witness the exchange. Holmes assumes the disposition of maritime authority. The captain’s dying injunction: ‘Save as many as you can, Alec’. Holmes creates order: those in the sea must alternate with those in the boat, the injured will be treated in the order of their need (by Julie White, the nurse he loves), and all must obey his commands on threat of death, which he underlines by conspicuously placing the captain’s revolver in his belt. An argument ensues about a black retriever belonging to the depressed playwright, Aubrey Clark (played with camp aplomb by Noel Willman), which is taking up a place in the boat. Holmes determines that the dog will remain. When challenged by the pompous and entitled Major General Barrington, who claims to be ‘cognizant of the nature of command,’ he responds simply, ‘We can’t eat you’. Among those in the water

136 

M. TITLESTAD

alongside the boat is Sam, played by the Nigerian-born Orlando Martins, Britain’s most famous black actor at the time. He cries out petulantly for his rights, but quickly concedes Holmes’s authority—and is later rotated into the boat. Soon the matter of carrying capacity becomes central. Food and water supplies are low, waves are threatening to swamp the boat, and rainclouds are gathering. Will McKinley (Stephen Boyd), an injured crew member, throws himself into the sea to free them of his burden, after declaring that, ‘Some must go overboard’. Holmes’s manner changes: rather than brooding, he becomes chillingly resolved. ‘I want only those that can make it’. Given that no SOS was sent when the ship was foundering, and rescue is therefore unlikely, he wants only those capable of rowing the 1500 miles to Africa; ‘It’s survival of the fittest,’ he declares, ‘the only civilized way to do it […] the law of the jungle’. Although Holmes’s Darwinism is countered by ‘the Professor’ (Moultrie Kelsall)—‘The whole point of civilization is for the strong to protect the weak’—he sets about what he describes as necessary in this ‘last extremity’. The injured Mrs Spencer, a young boy, the ineffectual playwright (whose dog follows him into the water), a young man with broken wrists, and another floating in the water are sacrificed in turn. The boat is swamped when an ejected passenger intentionally drags it down, but by shooting him and frantic bailing, the occupants manage to save it. A ‘Force 5’ storm ensues (presumably stronger than the ‘fresh breeze’ to which ‘Gale Force 5’ refers), seemingly legitimising Holmes’s decision, but—as in the short story—a ship appears on the horizon early the next morning and all those left in the lifeboat are saved. The film concludes with a rather ponderous voiceover: ‘The story you have just seen is a true one. In real life Captain Alexander Holmes was brought to trial on a charge of murder. He was convicted and given the minimum sentence of six months because of the unusual circumstances surrounding the incident. If you had been a member of the jury, how would you have voted?’ And then, in dramatic font, words appear on the screen, ‘Guilty or innocent?’ The motif of the overloaded lifeboat journeyed from history to fiction and film, and then to political and economic analysis. It presents an image (sociologists, political scientists, environmentalists, and economists incline to ‘metaphor’) which compresses the neo-Malthusian anxieties that have framed public debate about food aid since the 1970s. The commentator most closely identified with ‘lifeboat ethics’ is Garett Hardin. In ‘Living in a lifeboat,’ published in BioScience in 1974 (561–68) he opposes

12  MAKING ROOM: THE LIFEBOAT, AN INVIDIOUS MOTIF 

137

Euro-­America granting food aid to poverty-stricken nations in the global south. He identifies all nations as lifeboats—rich countries in some and the poor in others that are overcrowded. There are, according to Hardin, three options for the rich. First, following the ‘Christian or Marxist ideal’ (562) they could admit all those suffering in other boats or drowning in the sea into theirs. The result would be disaster. ‘The boat is swamped, and everyone drowns. Complete justice, complete catastrophe’ (562). The second option—if the rich have excess capacity in their boat—would be to admit just as many of the poor as there are unoccupied places. Hardin rejects this compromise. Not only are the criteria for selection inevitably problematic, but, more significantly, this eliminates the ‘safety factor’ (562). Should the situation change adversely for those in the ‘rich’ lifeboat (the sea becomes rough, it rains heavily, or food becomes scarce) they become less able to preserve themselves. The third option is to ‘admit no more to the boat and preserve the small safety factor’. Hardin concedes that this is abhorrent to many people but argues that those who are ‘addicted to guilt,’ those who are ‘conscience-stricken,’ are free to relinquish their ‘unjustly held positions’ in the lifeboat (562). The basis of Hardin’s lifeboat motif is his conviction that the population growth in poorer countries is disproportionately high, that this is placing impossible strain on their environments and limited infrastructures, and that disasters are therefore inevitable and will be ongoing. (He provides selected demographic and economic statistics to support this picture, some of which would be subsequently contested.) The only solution to this imbalance, he suggests, is that the population must be reduced to the ‘carrying capacity’ of the environment (564). The provision of food aid to poor countries prevents such equilibrium from being achieved because, by delaying starvation, it converts into ‘extra babies’ (564). Any attempt to achieve (even a measure of) distributive justice is doomed to aggravate the circumstances of the impoverished and will lead, in the long run, to more deaths than would have been the case had aid not been provided. This argument is utilitarian: we need to cause the least amount of (aggregated) suffering possible, and since aid is realistically and inevitably limited, it is better to let the starving die now than cause a greater number to die in the future. Posterity, Hardin concludes, will only be served by lifeboat ethics: by maximising the long-term prospects for survival of those who are best equipped to face the future. Outrage is neither the most helpful nor interesting response to lifeboat ethics. Rejoinders to Hardin’s arguments appeared regularly in BioScience

138 

M. TITLESTAD

in the four years following the publication of his article, and there have been countless contributions in the fields of economics, politics, sociology, demography, and environmental, political, and global ethics that have addressed his conclusions. I can present these only schematically. The first order of response has been to question the analytical valence of the lifeboat motif. Societies are not lifeboats in that they are not (nor have they ever been) meaningfully separate from one another. Historically, a great deal of Euro-American wealth has been based on the natural resources and cheap labour of the global south and, given neo-colonial exchanges, the survival of those in the ‘rich’ lifeboat still depends on those people outside the boat. C. Ronald Carroll, having made this point, calls Hardin’s lifeboat metaphor ‘obscene’ (1975, 147). What is demanded of us, given the history and reality of inequality, is what Martin Soroos develops as an alternative to ‘lifeboat ethics’: a ‘one-world response’ (1977, 672). On one side is the lifeboat metaphor; on the other the stock-phrase—‘we are all in the same boat’. The second set of responses questions the statistical basis of Hardin’s argument. Demographers assert that—contrary to his unsubstantiated claims—there is evidence of a correlation between a higher standard of living and lower birth rates. Food security can be associated with a decline in population growth, largely because there is less need to have large families as insurance against the vicissitudes of poverty. There is also not a clearly defined ‘carrying capacity’ of any given environment. Development and technology can improve environmental sustainability while simultaneously increasing the number of people who can benefit from limited resources. The condition of the people in the ‘poor’ lifeboats can be altered by them, particularly if they are assisted financially (recompensed) with infrastructural development. William Aiken argues this persuasively (1980, 1–11), concluding that, ‘A nation’s carrying capacity is a by-­ product of the market—nothing more’. The last group of responses to Hardin challenges his utilitarian ethics, often by advocating a rights-based alternative. These interventions are too varied to summarise—they extend from the hypothetical scenarios used in the training of Jesuits to the debate concerning Tom Regan’s conclusion (in his far-reaching work on the moral status of animals, The case for animal rights 1983) that, in the event of having to eject one passenger from a lifeboat of four people and a dog, it should be the dog. Ethicists focus on questions of the inherent value of life, the nature of historically constituted moral obligations, the definition of ‘community’ (most happiness

12  MAKING ROOM: THE LIFEBOAT, AN INVIDIOUS MOTIF 

139

for whom?), the long-term effects of callousness, indifference, and cruelty on perpetrators, and the fact that neglecting the poor unto death amounts to intentional killing. The rhetorical lifeboat inevitably implicates value; its use is never ethically neutral. Why have I dwelt on Hardin’s essay and responses to it? Hardin’s lifeboat motif distorts reality. When his BioScience essay was anthologised in two influential collections, World hunger and morality (1995) and Environmental ethics: an anthology (2003), the first two paragraphs were omitted. Referring as they do to the writing of Susan Langer, best known for her seminal Philosophy in a new key (1941), and George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–1872), the editors may have considered them extraneous—no more than a piffling departure. They are more than that. Hardin begins his original essay suggesting (from Langer) that an unsolved problem can only be approached through ‘the door of metaphor’ (561) since common language is comprised, in large part, of ossified tropes. He then quotes from Middlemarch (2003, 57): ‘All of us get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them’. To overcome this entanglement, Hardin argues that we need to pass through the figural level of language to ‘metaphor-free solutions to our problems’—to decisive and unadorned necessity. Yet Hardin’s lifeboat motif, as we can see from the responses it elicited, constructs a false basis for social, economic, and historical analysis, and it propels his rhetoric towards a violent, ethically indefensible conclusion. His argument is fashioned from his central motif. Perhaps our first intellectual and moral obligation is to weigh metaphors against reality. Many of us have fallen into a lazy understanding of discursive constructionism—generally yoked to the Derridean maxim il n’y a pas de hors-texte (‘there is nothing outside the text’—an idea that Jacques Derrida interrogates carefully throughout his writing). On this basis (following the interpretative strategy he sets out in Of grammatology [1967]), we might be tempted to demonstrate the way in which Hardin’s argument collapses in on itself: first, he seeks a non-metaphorical solution founded on a purely figural basis, and then he indulges a succession of metaphors which represent those outside the ‘rich’ boat as hordes forming boarding parties threatening to swamp the only desirable future. So yes, the text is based on a false binary (‘figuration’ and ‘reality’) and, on scrutiny, it does collapse. But that is not where the argument should stop. I have rehearsed the responses to Hardin’s essay because the matter is not only discursive: a metaphor can lead us astray, both in our politics and economics, and in ideology and morality. Metaphors can betray us.

140 

M. TITLESTAD

There is another level of betrayal. The image of the lifeboat—crashing waves, desperate survivors, looming weather, louring death—induces a particular affect. It leads, as we have seen, to analytical and moral errors, but it also makes us feel a particular panic. Fed by recycled historical narratives and their literary and filmic representation, we experience vicariously (and anachronistically) a distinctly maritime fear. We are drawn into an order of economic, political, and moral choices that misconstrues, often wilfully, the dynamics of the contemporary world. If you listen to public voices in the next few weeks, you will hear lifeboat ethics everywhere: in discussions of migrancy, in the endless iterations of nationalist populism, in debates about the allocation of resources, in questions about birth control, social welfare, and health, and—in ways that are complex and provoking—in contemporary environmentalism. In all instances highly dubious in its characterisation of reality, the lifeboat creates a mode and register of panic. There are always imagined hordes of ‘extra people’ reaching for the gunwales of your lifeboat and it is always up to you to decide what to do with them. All the chapters in this volume are concerned, directly or indirectly, with the journeys of shipwrecks from historical events (already mediated by narrative), their representation in fiction, film, poetry, and music, and then to some figural, interpretative valence and value. In this essay: the journey is from the various William Browns and the embodiments of Alexander Holmes to distorted and dangerous social analysis. Inasmuch as shipwreck metaphorics are integral to knowledge and being, we need to avoid vicarious indulgence of their historical aura, their ability to coalesce connotations, their visual immediacy, and their encapsulation of meaning. In modern Athens, as Michel de Certeau observes, the trams are called metaphorai (The practice of everyday life 1984, 115). The metaphor—the trope, the figure, the image—takes us from one place to another, but we must take responsibility for the journey.

Works Cited Aiken, William. 1980. The ‘carrying capacity’ equivocation. Social Theory and Practice 6.1: 1–11. 23557716. Aiken, William and Hugh la Follette (eds.). 1995. World hunger and morality. New York: Pearson. Carroll, Ronald C. 1975. Letter. BioScience, 25.3 March: 147.

12  MAKING ROOM: THE LIFEBOAT, AN INVIDIOUS MOTIF 

141

Certeau, Michel de. 1984. The practice of everyday life. Trans. Steven Randall. Berkeley: University of California Press. Eliot, George. 2003. Middlemarch. New York: Penguin. Hardin, Garrett. 1974. Living in a lifeboat. BioScience 24. 10 October: 561–568. Hathaway, Henry (dir.) 1938. Souls at sea. Paramount, US. Light, Andrew and Rolston Holmes III (eds.). 2003. Environmental ethics: an anthology. Oxford: Blackwell. Sale, Richard (dir.) 1957. Abandon ship/seven waves away. Copa Productions, UK. Sale, Richard. 1938. Abandon Ship. Scribner’s 103.4 April: 16–22, 92–3. Soroos, Martin. 1977. The commons and lifeboat as guides for international ecological policy. International Studies Quarterly 21.4 December: 647–674. https://doi.org/10.2307/2600194

CHAPTER 13

The Inner Wreck in Sheila Fugard’s The Castaways

Sheila Fugard’s The castaways was published in 1972 and reissued in paperback in 1979 and again in 2002. None of these three editions was particularly successful in terms of sales (all but a few copies of the most recent were remaindered and then pulped) and, although the novel won both the prestigious Olive Schreiner and CNA literary awards, it has never received much attention. Apart from a handful of cursory reviews in the year it appeared, and now incidental mentions in surveys of South African literature, there are only two published scholarly articles which engage the work in detail—and, it is slightly awkward to admit, I co-authored both with Mike Kissack (2005, 2006). There are reasons which are now self-evident why The castaways did not seem of much consequence at the time it was first published. Its Modernist experimentation (its multiple narrators, its discrepant form, temporal slippages, and self-conscious allegory) were at odds with the turn to social realist, politically engaged writing in South Africa in the 1970s. Existential involution, hallucinated solipsism, and the pathological tenacity of archetypes of settler dislocation must have seemed mere bourgeois indulgence at a time when affiliation and resistance were imperative in literary and other cultural practices. The contortions of white liberal identity were trivial in the face of the emergence of a literature of the oppressed; l’écriture engagée informed by Black Consciousness and suffused with proletarian aesthetics. Dwelling on the dynamics and self-absorbed frustration of

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Titlestad, Shipwreck Narratives: Out of our Depth, Maritime Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87041-6_13

143

144 

M. TITLESTAD

white marginalisation—as Fugard does in her novel—only underlined white liberal marginality. Further, the novel’s narrator, Christiaan Jordan, who suffers from dissociative identity disorder and speaks in different voices, seeks guidance through the torsions of his subjectivity by following a man wearing saffron robes, to whom he refers as ‘the Buddhist’. This version (this vision) of escaping the intractable binaries of South African experience via a spiritual reconciliation—an ethereal liberation—is arcane; it was far removed from the ideologies of liberation, and the mass protests and armed resistance, that—simmering for decades—were at last gathering momentum. Perhaps, though, there are reasons to salvage The castaways at our historical horizon. The first is that the novel is a unique example of the experimental turn in South African fiction which is undervalued in our literary histories, which incline to political pedantry and teleology. We tend to overlook or undervalue works whose stylistic and existential obliquity made them less obviously ‘relevant’ in paving the way towards the post-­ apartheid dispensation. The second reason is that the novel deftly explores the dynamics of white liberal anxiety and the predicament of the ‘unhomeliness’ of an unjust apartheid South Africa, the future of which was then unpredictable. This racked state of being seems almost quaint in retrospect: detritus drifting in the wake of the tide of history. It keeps resurfacing—familiar fragments of old South African white fear—but the ship of apartheid has foundered; it is now more or less safely settled on the seabed. Perhaps, though, a novel, an encapsulation, like The castaways is a detailed map of a state of being that (mis)guided significant voyages along the lee shores of the past and continues to do so, now and then, in the present. We should not lose this chart of white fear. A final reason for keeping The castaways in mind will seem odd at first: it is the only South African novel that dwells on a connection between shipwreck, being cast away in the littoral, and psychosis. South African literature—and our cultural imaginary more generally—is littered with wrecks of European ships, and castaways in the littoral, desperate, clinging to life, lost, or driven mad at the edges of the uncanny continent. Our literary foothold in the Renaissance—Camoes’ Lusiads—has Manoel de Sousa Sepulveda, having survived the wreck of the São João, running deranged into the African interior after he discovers his wife and children murdered by ‘natives’ on the beach (his wife, Leonora de Sá, having buried herself in the sand to protect her virtue). Since the seventeenth

13  THE INNER WRECK IN SHEILA FUGARD’S THE CASTAWAYS 

145

century, shipwreck and the survival of European castaways have been constitutive tropes in ‘white writing’. I cannot present a survey of this South African fixation here, although the successive variations on the Grosvenor story in our literature are an example of one lineage, which includes The castaways. Fugard’s novel, though, has the distinction of being the only work that dwells in agonised detail on the metaphorical conjunction of shipwreck, whiteness, and delusion, which is ubiquitous elsewhere only as inference or metaphor. To resort to the gauche postmodern device of ‘verbing’: the novel ‘littoralises’ white South African subjectivity—it places it in an interstitial domain, exploring the perverse ontology of being washed up by accident (as the wooden world of home disintegrates) into an unhomely zone in which everything is constantly shifting, in which one has no reliable intuition as to how to proceed, and in which there are no fixed markers. The castaways is narrated by Christiaan Jordan, a hallucinated inmate of the fictitious Port Berkley Mental Hospital, who has been repeatedly subjected to electroshock therapy. The first panel of the narrative triptych comprises Jordan’s frame narration and his seven ‘inner-voices,’ presented in first person, each of which is a character linked to the wreck of the ‘East Indiaman, The Berkley’. The wreck resembles in most details—many rendered precisely—that of the Grosvenor and its muddled aftermath, as Captain Coxon misled most of the wealthy passengers, women, and children to their deaths. There is every reason to assume that the revision of the historical record entails more than Fugard’s creative indirection. Jordan’s improvisation on the Grosvenor story is a symptom of his psychosis; he is re-telling, personalising, a familiar story in an inner phenomenological drama. The allegory—in which he ascribes a role to each actor in his dissociated drama—manifests a yearning for the order of a symbolic and narrative scheme: the captain of The Berkley, Christopher George Middleton, is the primary protagonist; the escaped Malay slave, Perels, embodies the limited prospects of assimilating into an indigenous population; the ‘Caffre,’ Chief Mulwena, represents a habitus of belonging; Dr Locke is a generic missionary who, some years after the wreck, is endeavouring to convert Mulwena to Christianity; Phillip Greene, the English brother-in-law of one of the Berkley survivors, undergoes a conversion to abolitionism, and comes to stand for the liberal disposition; Rowntree is the ‘man of science,’ a naturalist intent on the taxonomical ordering of this ‘new world’;

146 

M. TITLESTAD

and, finally, there is a resident of the Cape Colony who, thirty-eight years after the event, is staging a ‘hilarious account of our very own shipwreck,’ as burlesque (25). History appears ‘first as tragedy, then as farce’ (Marx 2020, 2). In his mind, or having escaped temporarily from the hospital, Jordan sets off down the beach, walking in the footsteps of The Berkley castaways. The six voices contend with one another; they are the chimera of Jordan’s consciousness in which each plays a part, even as he struggles for the stability of a coherent selfhood. ‘I am Middleton! Dr Locke! Rowntree! If only I were Rowntree holding a botanical specimen in my hand. Knowing only about the root of things […] I must follow the castaways […] I know what I am, I am Christiaan Jordan, a white man’ (110, 124, 144). It is this, ‘a white man’ in his diverse roles, that is staged in his delusional drama. The second part of the novel concerns Jordan’s encounter with the ‘terrorist,’ Captain Patrick Choma, who has occupied the beach on which the ship foundered, which he has renamed ‘Cuba’. At points, the figure of Choma blurs into Mulwena, the amaMpondo chief encountered by The Berkley castaways, but, in a bathetic reversal, it seems that both are simply apparitions of Jonas, the hospital ‘tea boy’ (30). Choma, who has graduated from a ‘Terrorist Training Camp at Dar-es-Salaam’ (43), proclaims his intention to ‘plant a seed shaped like a bullet’ from which ‘violent men will grow’ (44), and he scrawls slogans on the walls of his cave: ‘DEATH TO WHITES,’ ‘LIBERATION,’ and ‘KILL NOW PRAY LATER’ (45). These slogans ring hollow: Choma waits for a revolutionary army that never arrives and compensates by marching back and forth across his territory so that ‘it looks as if twenty people had crossed and recrossed it’ (52). He is a forlorn Friday in charge of a ‘mythical army’ (52). Despite his delusions, Choma has a ‘map of the future,’ while Jordan’s is only of the past (95). He confronts Jordan with revolutionary possibilities, but— although he is openly empathetic—Jordan remains fearful and occasionally patronising. Weighed down by history, he is always at a remove from any prospect of actual, let alone fundamental change. The final panel of the novel’s triptych sets out the dialectic explicitly: the ‘castaway’ is the thesis, the ‘terrorist’ its antithesis (see 83), and the question is whether the Buddhist can guide Jordan towards a ‘synthesis’. Rowntree, Middleton, Greene, and Locke speak again, respectively, about the need to bury The Berkley dead and move into the future, of moribund settler identity, the hope that faith will ‘purge the anarchy that hangs over the continent like a plague’ (132) and to affirm the unquenchable life of

13  THE INNER WRECK IN SHEILA FUGARD’S THE CASTAWAYS 

147

Mulwena. Then Jordan seems to sleep, journeying deeper into his unconscious: a dream within a hallucination. Choma, whose death Jordan had imagined earlier, returns. He has not wavered in his purpose, which Jordan ‘sees’ now embodied in the ‘petrol attendant, bread boy or clerk’ (140), a succession of proletarian roles that keeps floating up to the surface of his mind (the anonymous, ubiquitous presence of blackness). The castaways are entrenched; Choma is dispersed among countless others. This is the final ‘Kaffir War,’ and the Saracens, the armoured vehicles of the apartheid forces, are gathering. History, forcing its way into the present, seems the eternal return. Amid this escalating inner conflict, the Buddhist holds out to Jordan the promise of ‘illumination,’ that he might, at the confluence of nirvana and samsara, evade the logic of violent political confrontation (Kissack and Titlestad 2006, 136–37). But Jordan negatively assesses the Zen Buddhist path, ‘I will never experience enlightenment’ (7), and is resigned to the fact that the ‘Buddhist propounds all that I can never be’ (34). His mind is too cluttered with the violence of the past, present, and its imminence to permit transcendence. In the last paragraphs of the novel, Jordan is helped to his feet by a fisherman and taken back to the hospital, back to the reality of the electroshock treatments that are steadily erasing him. For a while, the Buddhist walks in front of him, but then he loses the ‘consolation of a visionary guide’ (155): he cannot follow him ‘headlong into the setting sun’ (155). Jordan resigns himself to ‘the void, the perennial nothingness of the moment’ (155). Fugard’s representation of Jordan’s mind is at once obvious and recondite. When she discussed The castaways, she stated that the first paragraph of the novel (‘I have always known shipwreck. Deep inside, I know the foundering of the self and the voices of the castaways of the East Indiaman, The Berkley foundering off the coast of Pondoland’ [1]) is ‘the fictional statement [that] informs my life’ (1984, 29). She went on to describe her ‘lack of identity or affiliation with any race group here’ and the ‘inimical forces’ that relentlessly challenged her interstitial subjectivity (31). There is a common enough irony in her declaration, ‘I cannot leave South Africa’ (31), since, shortly after the interview, she emigrated to the United States—leaving the country in one sense at least. In the novel, the wreck of The Berkley inaugurates this existential situation: the castaways are stranded when the consoling cabins of the ship (a microcosm of a familiar homeland) splinter and they are forced to contend with their demoted position in a foreign land. They can strive to exert

148 

M. TITLESTAD

power (militarily or ideologically) and know their context (by organising its variety in catalogues), but they will ultimately buckle under the weight of the uncanny and the injustice they inflict on the indigenous population. Settler aspirations, Fugard implies, will inevitably be thwarted because the antinomies of white identity prevent coherence (in ideation or action). There is no going back and no going forward. The survivors of The Berkley are history’s castaways: their existence fundamentally un-homed (unheimlich). Striving to assimilate into, or at least affiliate with, those who ‘belong’ to the country will always be unsuccessful, for the subject positions of the oppressed are historically inscribed and adamant. Choma will always be a stranger. Liberal rapprochement—in the face of hypostasised differences— is no more than a romantic consolation for settlers, who are condemned to wander aimlessly, like Middleton, in the littoral, caught between the ocean they have crossed and the interior, which they cannot occupy (unless, like Supulveda, they succumb to madness and run without a sense of destination). It is her sense of this stranding that makes the castaway ‘the seminal image’ for Fugard (31), but presumably a seed that will— unlike Choma’s bullet—never germinate. Might we think about The castaways differently on the assumption that Fugard’s reductive encapsulation of its meaning does not exhaust the possibilities of its figuration? ‘The sea lives, the massive heartbeat of the ocean. I hold a shell to my ear, and the sea roars the news’ (4). The news Jordan hears is of the wreck of The Berkley which, ‘sailing from the latitude of tears and the longitude of ruination’ (47), has lost its way and run aground. He imagines the sea beneath the ship as ‘a totality of being’ (69). He can see the ocean from his hospital window. He lowers his eyes to the ‘pale’ water in his glass, which ‘was like the patients around me—indoors and kept quiet by the tranquilisers, so gentle and so insidious’ (75–76). The hull of the ship and the drinking glass are containers, both victories of form over formlessness. Yet, if Jordan’s inner shipwreck, the splintering of the hull of himself, and his escape (real or imagined) from the mental hospital are liberations of sorts, he is left ‘measuring the sea against death’ (76), ‘swirling in the depths of water, still clutching at the debris of shipwreck’ (98). To be unaccommodated man is to experience the full force of meaninglessness. All that is left to one, drifting without coordinates in a voracious sea, is to cling to the flotsam of the wreck. There are two implications of this figuration. First, the novel’s version of an oceanic (and littoral) selfhood suggests that the flotsam at which Jordan clutches are splintered histories and fragmented forms of thought.

13  THE INNER WRECK IN SHEILA FUGARD’S THE CASTAWAYS 

149

When he sets out to find the wreck, he hunts for a compass—Middleton’s compass, which had ironically led The Berkley (and then the survivors) off course. He finds a pebble: ‘Round, that’s magic. Grey, that’s soothing. This pebble is my compass’ (4). As readers, like Jordan, we have nothing that can guide us; the castaway-terrorist dialectic and the impression of history’s eternal return are not true-north, only a succession of declinations. We are misguided if we listen to any one of the voices as authoritative. It is common to conceive of the littoral as a place of becoming; that journeying from sea to land or land to sea presents as (ontological) transition, often understood as the emergence of dynamic, positive hybridity. The castaways offers no such consolation. Jordan is trapped in the littoral, searching, haunted, and disorientated. It is quite clear that he will not be able to build a ship from the splinters of wrecks on the beach nor find common cause with Choma. My second proposition is that Fugard’s depiction of Jordan’s hallucinated state is subversive. Colonial ideologies stabilise settler identity. Allegories of racial cultural domination and social development require that ‘the settler’ figures as a sign. Fragmenting that sign—suggesting that there is no principle or value in which it coheres—undermines colonialism’s allegorical logic. The foundation of South African literature has been taken, both influentially and slightly perversely, by Stephen Gray (1979) and Malvern van Wyk Smith (1988), to be the epic Adamastor myth. Like Sepulveda’s madness, it originates in Camoes’ Luciads, when Vasco da Gama’s fleet descries the figure of the titan in the rock formations of the Cape, and he condemns them and all subsequent generations of Europeans to wretchedness and death. The coast of (South) Africa, he declares, will withstand the hubris of seaborne empires, and exclude them from an interior that would anyway drive them mad. At one level, Jordan’s littoral psychosis seems to be a result of Adamastor’s curse: the inevitable consequence of yet another white man encroaching on alien African ground, with Mulwena and then Choma substituting for the titan. But this view, which Fugard herself endorsed in the interview I cited, is simplistic. Jordan’s inner oceanic allegories are irreducibly complicated. They are not variations on one overweening myth, and Jordan constantly doubts their hermeneutic value. Adamastor flits onto stage only now and then and the legacy of The Berkley epic is eventually a farce staged at the Castle. Fugard’s novel undermines the adamantine mythic structures taken to be the basis of white South African identity. Obviously, it is not unique among South African novels in doing

150 

M. TITLESTAD

so. Not at all. But it is significant that The castaways unfolds at the feet of Adamastor, ‘littoralising’ white South African’s attachment to colonial allegory as a symptom of madness. South African whiteness is at its core dissociative and psychotic—the only consolation is that it is not settled.

Coda I am sitting on the island of the stairs twelve feet from my front door. I left my apartment at five in the morning as I always do, but something happened on that short journey. I sat there for nine hours, holding the dull brown bannister. I remember only one action during that time: crawling across the concrete, then the terracotta tiles (block-by-block) and trying to find the key on the bunch to open my security gate. I could not—returned to the stairs. Mid-afternoon Samantha came to find me, and took me to hospital, although I cannot recall my admission or the few days that followed. This was not my first dissociation. In the last five years, gaps have begun to occur: usually they last only for a few minutes, sometimes hours, and only occasionally for days. I sometimes require institutionalisation when they persist. Most troubling, though, is a seeping loss of memory, not only of what occurs when I am dissociated, but more generally. Events, days, months, thoughts, and feelings are disappearing: a slow and unpredictable erasure of myself. I depend more and more on writing: notes, lists, lectures, and essays—each list concludes with a reminder to make a new list. It is impossible to tell if madness or metaphor comes first. I can only remember crawling towards my flat as ‘subaquatic’. The intersection of trope and psychosis is complicated—I am not suggesting that thinking in specific rhetorical terms causes dissociation, although it might. I am thinking rather of my twenty-year obsession with shipwreck. Why do I think of my condition as foundering, clinging to a beam, hoping to make land, and be treated hospitably? Why is my neurological condition—probably caused by protein deposits on my brain—linked to a wooden world breaking apart and being cast into water and sinking beneath the waves? I cannot remember when the conjunction began, but everything I have written about shipwreck in the last decade has also been about the dissolution of the self. I cannot think of one without the other. As I surface from dissociation or awake each morning from symptomatic dark dreams, I hear sounds and voices as if I am diving a wreck. Subaquatic sound travels faster and further, and it reflects (even off the surface) and refracts more efficiently. What I hear is a blunt polyphony,

13  THE INNER WRECK IN SHEILA FUGARD’S THE CASTAWAYS 

151

deriving from innumerable sources stretching over years and coming from miles away. The result is that, accompanying the gradual loss of myself, is the counterpoint of the return of distant voices, soundscapes, conversations which are lost to conscious memory—and they are often simultaneously discrete, distorted, and overlapping. It is a dark, oily sludge of sound that evokes people, places, and images. It does not stop with the return of consciousness after dissociation or, each day, with waking. It lingers or recurs for hours or days, amplified by the physical symptoms of the condition: moving is becoming more difficult. My shipwrecking self, when I can reflect on it, also surprises me. The underwater sounds originate in remote corners of my life, but dominant among them, almost every day, are the sounds of military service thirty years ago, during which I was first admitted to a psychiatric ward, in 2 Military Hospital in Cape Town. It is not just the army, though, but the noises it gathered in a cacophony of whiteness that have echoed since then—back and forth through my floating mind. I am not saying that I am going mad because I am a white South African, but it has sounded-out my neurological degeneration. There is nothing new in arguing that subjectivity and ideology are coextensive and inevitably raced. But just as Christiaan Jordan in The castaways knew shipwreck within himself, ‘a white man,’ I know it now. At the conclusion of the novel, he is led back to the Port Berkley Mental Hospital to be further erased by electroshock therapy. During national service, my psychosis protected me from having to shoot at black South Africans. In different ways—some quite productive—madness still makes me difficult to control. I can get away with things. Each day, though, is shaped by the fear that the ship will go down and I will not surface.

Works Cited Fugard, Sheila. 1972. The castaways. Johannesburg: Macmillan. Fugard, Sheila. 1984. A castaway in Africa. In Momentum: on recent South African writing, eds. M. J. Daymond, J. U. Jacobs, and Margaret Lenta. Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press. 29–31. Gray, Stephen. 1979. Southern African literature: an introduction. Cape Town: David Philips. Kissack, Mike and Michael Titlestad. 2006. ‘I am Christian Jordan, a white man’: liberal anxieties and the politics of transition in Sheila Fugard’s The castaways. Religion and theology 13.2: 125–149. https://doi.org/10.1163/157 430106778540642.

152 

M. TITLESTAD

Marx, Karl. 2020. The eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon. 2010, 2. https:// www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/18th-­Brumaire.pdf. Accessed 13 September 2020. Titlestad, Michael and Mike Kissack. 2005. ‘I have always known shipwreck’: whiteness in Sheila Fugard’s The castaways’. Ariel 36.1–2: 135–155. 1920–1222 Van Wyk Smith, Malvern. 1988. Shades of Adamastor: Africa and the Portuguese connection. Grahamstown: NELM.

CHAPTER 14

Soundings: Gavin Bryars and Brian Eno’s Titanics

I dived the wreck of the MS Zenobia in 1994. She is a Swedish-built Challenger-class ferry which sank, on her maiden voyage on 7 June 1980 off Larnaca, Cyprus. She lies forty-two metres down, listed to port. I was a novice accompanied by a master, and it was my deepest dive yet. That close to shore, the Mediterranean is a noisy sea. Sound travels further and faster underwater than in air because of the greater density of molecules. It also reflects and refracts more effectively and with less dissipation. Reverberations from miles away intersect other sounds, silencing or quieting some, amplifying others, changing tones. Underwater sound is vertical. Since they travel faster in colder temperatures and at greater depths, and reflect off the seabed and the surface, the encompassing sounds change as you descend—even over forty-two metres. As we swam slowly down to the stern of the wreck, I felt lost in the changing sonic waves, knowing that the source of some was proximate and recent, while others had come from some time ago and much farther away—some perhaps hundreds of miles, from Greece, Italy, Libya, Spain even. My dive companion indicated that I should cup my mask to exclude peripheral light and gaze down the length of the ship: there, 170 metres distant, a prick of light, an opening at the bow that felt like a glimmer of hope in a cathedral. Then he showed me a lever that still moved, striking it against the hull. The sound was loud and edged, the origin of a long journey along unknowable routes with unfathomable acoustic consequences. While I © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Titlestad, Shipwreck Narratives: Out of our Depth, Maritime Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87041-6_14

153

154 

M. TITLESTAD

was listening meditatively, for some trivial reason we would only discover later, I began to breathe aerated water, then more heavily. I changed to the emergency diving valve, but nothing improved. Since neither of us could do anything else, we had to ascend too fast and, because of congestion, I burst both of my ear drums. My hearing recovered in the next months, but in my left ear to only about half. Those were the last sounds, finally overwhelmed by the bubbles of my panic, which I heard perfectly. How might one sound a wreck? There could be simple mimesis: stormy waves, a foghorn, frantic Morse code, the crashing of a ship against the rocks, the crying and thrashing of survivors, the dead clump of the ship settling on the seabed. This chapter concerns two works that incorporate mimetic sounds and hydro-acoustics in creating soundscapes that ruminate musically on, among others, history, memory, trauma, and hubris. Both concern the Titanic, the ‘unsinkable’ luxury liner that hit an iceberg in the North Atlantic on 14 April 1912 and went down at 2:20 the next morning. Gavin Bryars’s The sinking of the Titanic (1991, 1994, 1998)—versions of which range from twenty-five minutes to just over an hour—sounds out the wreck for its duration, while Brian Eno’s The ship (2016) has the disaster resonate with soldiers’ experiences in the trenches of World War I. There is no description or analysis which substitutes for listening to the works; it is something of a truism, variously attributed, that writing about music is like dancing about architecture. But these works, in addition to their specific musical elements and structures, are also conceptual. I will dwell on this while describing the former here and there, lest we forget that these are compositions that we experience before any abstraction. Bryars’s The sinking of the Titanic ‘originated in a sketch written for an exhibition in support of beleaguered art students at Portsmouth in 1969’ (Bryars, liner note, 1994). At first, the work was not scored but was based on a description, on one side of an A4 page, of how it should ‘sound’. ‘I was interested to see what might be the musical equivalent of a work of conceptual art.’ In 1972, Bryars completed a conventional score for a performance in the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London. Sinking was recorded in 1975, the first of the ten works produced for Brian Eno’s Obscure Records label. This twenty-five-minute version, Bryars explains, formed the basis for subsequent performances, until it was recorded ‘live’ on 12 and 13 April 1990 at the Printemps de Bourges Festival in the Chateau d’Eau, a disused three-story Napoleonic water tower. This performance, principally by the six regular members of the Gavin Bryars Ensemble (three violins, two cellos, and Bryars on a bass fitted with an

14  SOUNDINGS: GAVIN BRYARS AND BRIAN ENO’S TITANICS 

155

octave pedal), would then be sampled—along with a performance in an Art Nouveau swimming pool in Brussels in 1973—in subsequent iterations, and in the 1994 hour-long recording (Point Music/Polygram), which is now the most widely circulated and influential rendition. Brian Eno, with his inveterate attention to detail, oversaw Don C.  Taylor’s remastering of his original recording, releasing it in 1998 on Virgin, accompanied by Bryars’s Jesus’ blood never failed me yet. Sinking is, then, an ‘open’ or ‘indeterminate’ work: successive versions introduce new elements, alter orchestration, sample earlier recordings and, importantly, take account of new developments in the Titanic story. Bryars mentions in his 1994 liner note that, since 1986, the work has taken account of the discovery of the wreck on 1 September 1985 by the Franco-American expedition led by Jean-Louis Michel and Robert Ballard. He imagined, as the Taurus International submersible relayed images from the depths at 41.46N, 50.14W, that the sounds of the wreck were finally surfacing, which now inflects the final minutes of all versions. The materials Bryars used in Sinking derived from research. In an interview for the New York Times on 19 April 1912, Harold Bride, the junior wireless operator, described what he heard as the ship went down: the onboard string sextet playing ‘Autumn,’ a heartening valediction which has been tiresomely sentimentalised. (So as not to forget them: two other members of the White Star octet—the pianist and percussionist—stayed with the string section throughout, although, obviously without instruments, they could not play.) Bride’s account preoccupied Bryars. Bride thought that the ‘way the band kept playing was a noble thing. I heard it first when we were still working wireless, when there was a ragtime tune for us, and the last I saw of the band when I was floating out in the sea with my lifebelt on, it was still on deck playing “Autumn”. How they ever did I cannot imagine’ (see Bryars 1994). The Episcopal hymn is the salient recurring tune of Sinking; it ‘forms a base over which other material is superimposed’ (Bryars 1994). Variations are played at different speeds, at times they fade in, as if floating upwards into audibility or drifting into range on some sub-aquatic current, and often the tune is something we can only just hear—a spectral string sextet in the distance. On occasions, a choir and the strings soar upwards to high-C, evoking Gregorio Allegri’s Miserere (circa. 1630). It is a heart-rending, beautiful cry that is at once resolutely quotidian and yearning. It is a musical cross motif—the vertical divine penetrating humanity’s horizon of contingencies.

156 

M. TITLESTAD

There are other musical elements in the work. It is possible, some survivors suggested, that when, in the wake of the events, Bride asked someone to identify the tune, he misheard ‘Aughton’ (‘He leadeth me’), the Baptist hymn written by Pastor Joseph Gilmore in 1862. Others recalled hearing ‘Nearer my God to Thee (Horbury)’ as they clambered into the overcrowded boats; some the ragtime tune, ‘O you beautiful doll’. It may have been all of these: lowering the boats and embarking the women and children was a painstakingly slow process. To console a wretched young girl sitting opposite her in the lifeboat, Miss Russell played ‘La Maxine’ from a toy pig that produced the tune when its tail was twisted. Sinking is capacious: Bryars respectfully included phrases from all these works, each in fleeting counterpoint to ‘Autumn’. Compelled by the ‘ceiling effect’ of the surface and Marconi’s poetic notion that sound, once produced, never dies, he imagined the hydro-acoustics if the band continued to play as the Titanic sank, and then the music recurred in the wavelike patterns of memory: oceanic music, where consciousness and the sea resonate. He offsets a wry acknowledgment, that at ‘a purely physical level, of course, [the music] simply stops because the strings would fail to produce much of a sound,’ with acoustic poetics (Bryars 1994). Less obviously musical effects are used minimally. Occasionally, a bass clarinet produces a mournful wail that is also the low modulation of a fogged ship’s horn; a marimba and wood blocks tap out fragments of a Morse code signal; there are evanescent allusions to the sounds of the two pipers, one Scottish the other Irish, who played on board; and there are indistinct words, phrases, and occasional sentences from the testimonies of two survivors, Miss Eva Hart and Miss Edith Russell, who Bryars interviewed (beginning at 4:52, 1994). At one point, there is a grating sound, picked up by the timbre of the strings and a sequence of pizzicato passages: the scraping of the iceberg. There are two seemingly incongruous sounds: recurrent dripping, produced by woodblocks, from various inlets and resonating in a large chamber (presumably the Chateau d’Eau) and the persistent sense that we are hearing the blips of ‘sound navigation and ranging’  (SONAR). The latter, which seems at first anachronistic (SONAR was patented in 1913, having been developed partly in response to the Titanic disaster), alludes at one level to the Taurus expedition discovering the wreck at 2500 fathoms after seventy-three years. There is a less literal consequence of the sound: the blips are a sonic map of the topography of the seabed on which the Titanic lies. The dripping creates the cavernous state rooms of the ship, now empty and haunted, but still resonant

14  SOUNDINGS: GAVIN BRYARS AND BRIAN ENO’S TITANICS 

157

(illogically, of course, since water does not drip in flooded spaces), echoing perpetually across space and time. As we listen to Sinking, we are haunted by the dead, who are always with us, and are brought to hear that trauma cannot remain submerged over time; the uncanny will inevitably rise to take its place in consciousness, and the sublime might be only a submersible’s 2500-fathom-dive away. One of the more compelling reflections on the work is Sam Cleeves’s ‘Searching for lost time: psychoanalytic perspectives on Gavin Bryars’s The sinking of the Titanic’ (2015). He hears the work as a ‘manipulation of one’s sense of the present,’ as drawing one into ‘an inescapable preoccupation with the past’ (145–46). Sigmund Freud begins Civilization and its discontents (1930) with a prefatory digression. He refers to ‘discrepancies between people’s thoughts and actions and the diversity of their desires’ (3) and, to illustrate this, he cites a letter he received from a friend, Romaine Rollard, the French novelist, dramatist, essayist, and mystic. In this letter, Rollard questions Freud’s conviction that religion is self-­ delusion. He characterises for Freud ‘a particular feeling of which he himself was never free,’ which he describes as ‘a sense of “eternity,” a feeling of something limitless, unbounded—as it were “oceanic”’ (4). Based on this feeling, Rollard maintains, one can call oneself ‘religious’; orthodoxies are variously roads to this affective experience. Freud, as we would expect, identifies this ‘blissful oneness, or a euphoric absence of divisions or segmentations’ with the pre-Oedipal stage (Cleeves 149); prior to the time at which ‘the child can even differentiate between itself and the rest of the cosmos’ (151). From among the implications of this undifferentiated state, Cleeves chooses ‘oceanic’ temporality, which he identifies in Bryars’s Sinking. The repetitive structures of the work (which should not be confused with mechanical looping) eschew any impression of perceptible change since they ‘forgo any sense of expectation or recollection’ (155). The sound is ‘vertical’: in telescoping past, present, and future, by minimising the order of events, Sinking creates the sense of a specious, on-going present. The wreck and the dead are perpetually where and when they were on 15 April 1912, yet, simultaneously here and now. The ‘oceanic’ temporality—here expressed as musical structure—both underscores and creates overtones of this perpetual presence. And since the acoustics of the disaster and the accompanying lamentations are not contained ‘in the past,’ Sinking catalyses our empathy in a way that museum exhibits, mausoleums, or even testimonies, all fixed in time, do not.

158 

M. TITLESTAD

There is a more obvious sense in which Bryars’s wreck is ongoing. Works of music, when realised in performance, are particular (except for those consciously exploring pure repetition). But each performance of Sinking—since it is an ‘open,’ developing work which includes elements of prior performances, responds to the environment in which it is performed, and changes instrumentation, samples, and soundscapes—is a new wrecking of the Titanic. Performances and recordings are not repetitions, nor even interpretations, of a master work. The luxury liner keeps striking the iceberg, the ship is always going down, and there are never enough lifeboats. It has endlessly intrigued people that the wreck of the Titanic was ‘foretold’ in Morgan Robertson’s novel, Futility, or the wreck of the Titan (1898), in which the titular ship, a triple-screw liner, capable of 24.25 knots, peopled with pompous socialites, strikes an iceberg in the North Atlantic on a cold April night, and most of the passengers drown because the capacity of the lifeboats is woefully inadequate. With customary flamboyance, Slavoj Žižek argues that the novel’s ‘prophecy’ shows that the Titanic is a ‘sublime object of ideology’; that the ideational and political substructure of the world had already prepared a place for a such a disaster—that it was, in a radical sense, a disaster waiting to happen (see 1989). Our catastrophes and their meaning, he believes, are of our own making, even if we do so unconsciously. In the liner notes of the 1990 Chateau d’Eau recording, Bryars mentions Robertson’s Futility. He indulges a flight of fancy: ‘It is possible, but unlikely, that Captain Smith may have been performing a very strict realisation of Sinking when the ship went down’. In his idiosyncratic shuffling of Robertson’s novel, the disaster, and his work(s)—prediction, representation, and retrospection—Bryars whimsically hypothesises an unbounded, undifferentiated temporality: in musical terms, ‘oceanic’ timing. Having produced the first recording of Bryars’s Sinking in 1975, Brian Eno returned to the Titanic in his own composition, The ship, released in 2016. It arranges the disaster alongside the tragedy of soldiers fighting in the trenches at Passchendaele and the Somme. Bryars and Eno compose music differently. In an unguarded moment, which can only have strained their friendship, Bryars observed, ‘Where Brian is strong is in working with other people—when he’s a hands-on enabler. […] He can’t really play anything, nor can he read music, but he makes a virtue of it; he always has other people do these things for him. As an artist, he hardly begins to get through the door, for me’ (in Sheppard 2015, 5). None of his fans and

14  SOUNDINGS: GAVIN BRYARS AND BRIAN ENO’S TITANICS 

159

few critics or scholars would agree. Not only did Eno, who began his music career as the keyboard player for Roxy Music in 1972, craft the sound of David Bowie’s Berlin Trilogy (Low, Heroes, Lodger) and albums by John Cale, Talking Heads, Ultravox, Devo, and U2, he appeared as an instrumentalist (playing synthesiser, bass, or guitar) on at least twenty-­ three albums between 1972 and 1988, by artists ranging from Cornelius Cardew to the Ghanaian pop group, Edikanfo. He also collaborated on albums with Robert Fripp, David Byrne, Harold Budd, John Hassell, and Daniel Lanois (see Tamm 1995, 4–5). His contributions to modern experimental music, progressive rock, the New York punk scene, and pop are unparalleled. But it is primarily for his ‘gentle music of low dynamics, blurred edges, and washes of sound colour, produced primarily through electronic means’ that Eno is known (Tamm 3). His Ambient #1: music for airports (2004)—in some respects an elaboration of the principles of Erik Satie’s musique d’ameublement or ‘furnishing music’ (see Sean Albiez and Ruth Dockwray 2016, 139–173)—inaugurated the genre of ‘ambient music’ and the album is still ranked by Pitchfork as its finest example in a list that includes Terry Riley, Aphex Twin, The Caretaker, Alice Coltrane, and William Basinski (see Pitchfork). Eno has always called the studio his ‘real instrument’—and we always picture him in front of several mixing desks and multi-track tape recorders, surrounded by keyboards, banks of computing equipment, and a clutter of instruments and objects, as he traces acoustic journeys and paints layers of sound. The ship is divided into two ‘movements’: ‘The ship’ (at just over twenty minutes) and ‘Fickle sun,’ comprising three parts: ‘Fickle sun,’ ‘The hour is thin’ (a poem read by Peter Serafinowicz), and a cover version of ‘I’m set free,’ a song written by Lou Reed, originally recorded in 1968 and released on The Velvet Underground’s eponymous 1969 album. ‘The ship’ begins with six minutes of slow wave-like synths, characterised by the ‘vertical’ harmonics typical of Eno’s ambient compositions: timbres are played over one another, the harmonic spectrum producing shifting acoustic colours, at times not unlike whale-song. At 2:28, over this palette, there is something like a mournful foghorn; discord swells; at 4:48 there is a distinct scraping noise and then we hear distant, discordant, then wailing voices, which the liner notes call ‘siren voices’ (attributed to the plainsong group, The Elgin Marvels). There are SONAR blips, which manifest, rise and fall, then disappear to return later. At 5:54, Eno’s voice begins: ‘The ship was from the willing land / The waves about it rode’. Eno, who had not included vocals in his recordings for decades—let alone

160 

M. TITLESTAD

sung himself—discovered that, using a programme in Logic called Vocal Transformer, he could tweak his voice to create, what he calls, a ‘muted ghostliness’ (Eno in, Christopher Weingarten, Rolling Stone 14 April 2016). Greg Kot, in a review that adjudged The ship ‘a late-career landmark,’ observes that Eno’s voice ‘evokes the rumbling low-end of Tuvan throat singers and the droning harmonies of medieval monks’ (Chicago Tribune 29 April 2016). The lyrics disappear at times into the lowest registers, but we hear, ‘The sail is down / The wind is gone / The sky is black with crows / And we are as the undefined / The waves above us roll’. A woman’s voice (Nuria Homs) speaking Catalan can be heard at 14:50, but it is incrementally overwhelmed by a multitude of voices speaking more and more volubly, yet still from a distance (produced, rather eccentrically, from manipulating the Apple email disclaimer message read in Flemish). There is a crescendo at 18:41, which is succeeded, until the work’s conclusion, by the sound of waves over Eno’s basso-profundo, hovering at low-­ C, repeating, ‘Wave after wave’. The first part of the second movement, ‘Fickle sun,’ reworks the oscillation of the synths in ‘The ship’ into a more discordant, less oceanic soundscape. Eno’s voice intones: ‘Another day / The work is done / We toiled away in fickle sun / And the day the web is spun / And so the dismal work is done,’ and later, ‘Humans turning back to clay / Right there beneath the fickle sun / The empty eyes /  The empty gun’. We have journeyed just two years since the Titanic wrecked into the trenches of World War I: ‘All the boys are going down / Falling over one by one / All the boys are turned around / Gone to soldiers everyone / All the boys are falling down / Turned to ashes everyone’. There is no consolation; the dead are not, as they are in Peter, Paul, and Mary’s cosmic cycle, finally turned to flowers: this is just a brutal end with no prospect of regeneration. Then the Titanic returns in the lyrics, having lingered at almost indiscernible acoustic depths and in the occasional foghorn and SONAR: ‘Now the boats are all astray / There’s no one rowing anyway / There’s no-one rowing anymore’. The two disasters interpenetrate; both are consequences of hubris, nationalist triumphalism, capitalist opportunism, and fatally misguided investments in the technologies of progress. All the lyrics of The ship, including the poem comprising the second part of ‘Fickle sun,’ derive from an algorithmic text generator. Eno fed in a survivor’s account of the Titanic sinking as she witnessed it from a

14  SOUNDINGS: GAVIN BRYARS AND BRIAN ENO’S TITANICS 

161

lifeboat, a selection of soldiers’ songs from World War I (many of them bawdy), an essay he had written about the London Blitz of 1940–1941, and several of his ‘failed lyrics’. He explains that he used a Markov chain generator to ‘rejig the material,’ that he then printed out twenty to thirty pages and went through them with a highlighter, choosing evocative words and phrases that combined coherently. He did not significantly alter their order. This led to an expressive unpredictability: ‘there were sentences and word combinations there that I would never have arrived at any other way. I would never have said, “The hour is thin,” for example. As soon as I saw it, I thought, “Wow! That really makes sense”’ (see Eno, in Weingarten). Some of the lines of ‘The hour is thin,’ read into coherence by Serafinowicz, are evocative: ‘The hour is thin / Trafalgar Square is calm / Birds and cold black dark / The final famine of a wicked sun / And the web that died yesterday’. We hear the stunted nationalism of young men being sent off to the Front: ‘With the women waving at war and the news that war is faith / Filled with tremendous cheering, leaping and night rings’. Then, like a tolling bell: ‘Not enough boats’. The album concludes with The Velvet Underground’s ‘I’m set free’. Oddly, less attentive reviewers (John Hugar among them, 2016) misconstrued the song as an uplifting rejoinder to the pessimistic vision of history’s waves of disaster that Eno presents to that point. But the song turns on the lines: ‘I’ve been set free and I’ve been bound / To the memories of yesterday’s clowns’ and ‘I saw my head laughing / Rolling on the ground / And I’m set free / I’m set free to find a new illusion’. While the darker acoustic dynamics of the earlier sections of the album give way to something like an avant-pop tune, the lyrics suggest only false promise: that humanity will inevitably adopt new, equally destructive myths that will once again misguide us with terrifying consequences. In describing the ‘oceanic’ elements of Bryars and Eno’s Titanics we are confounded by the visual, spatial, and topographical tropes that dominate our analytical languages. Although it is important to do so, turning from landlocked analytical tropes to watery figuration is insufficient in coming to terms with ‘oceanic’ music. In his history of sound in the arts, Noise water meat (2001), Douglas Kahn tests a critical vocabulary including waves, submersion, dripping, gushing, depths, currents, dripping, flows, eddies, and tides (245–59), and only comes up against its limits. Thinking through hydro-acoustics, as musicality and in

162 

M. TITLESTAD

relation to musical elements, can only be a slow conceptual drift. In Bryars and Eno’s verticality—their sounding out the wreck on the seabed—we hear intimations of the fluid temporalities of history, trauma, and humanity’s self-deception. We come to realise something of the potential of ‘oceanic’ sound, composition, understanding, and emotion. It is not coincidental that—as the works finish, as we turn off the CD player or walk out of the concert hall—we sense that we have learned something significant, not only about the nature of suffering, but also about the depths of loss. These two composers, these sad captains of shipwrecks, have sounded out love.

Works Cited Albiez, Sean and Ruth Dockwray. 2016. Before and after Eno: situating ‘the recording studio as a compositional tool’. In Brian Eno: oblique music, eds. Sean Albiez and David Pattie. New York: Bloomsbury. 139–173. Bryars, Gavin [Gavin Bryars Ensemble under the Direction of Gavin Bryars] 1991. The sinking of the Titanic; Chateau d’Eau Place Seraucourt 12/13 April 1990, Bourges (sound recording). North Elmham: LTM Recordings. Bryars, Gavin. 1994. The sinking of the Titanic (sound recording). New  York: Point/Polygram. Bryars, Gavin. 1998. The sinking of the Titanic and Jesus’ blood never failed me yet (sound recording). London: Virgin EG. Cleeves, Sam. 2015. Searching for lost time: psychoanalytic perspectives on Gavin Bryars’s The sinking of the Titanic. Perspectives of New Music 53.2: 145–176. https://doi.org/10.7757/persnewmusi.53.2.0145. Eno, Brian. 2016. The ship (sound recording). London: Opal/Warp Records. Eno, Brian. 2004. Ambient #1: music for airports (sound recording). London: Virgin. Hugar, John. 2016. Brian Eno’s dark near-masterpiece is well worth the struggle. AV Club 29 April. https://music.avclub.com/brian-­eno-­s-­dark-­near-­ masterpiece-­is-­well-­worth-­the-­str-­1798187578. Accessed 28 March 2020. Kahn, Douglas. 2001. Noise water meat: a history of sound in the arts. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kot, Greg. 2016. Brian Eno brings another wave of Innovation with The ship. Chicago Tribune 29 April. https://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/ music/greg-­kot/sc-­brian-­eno-­the-­ship-­album-­review-­20160429. Accessed 28 March 2020. Pitchfork. The fifty best ambient albums of all time. https://pitchfork.com/features/lists-­a nd-­g uides/9948-­t he-­5 0-­b est-­a mbient-­a lbums-­o f-­a ll-­t ime. Accessed 28 March 2020.

14  SOUNDINGS: GAVIN BRYARS AND BRIAN ENO’S TITANICS 

163

Sheppard, David. 2015. On some faraway beach: the life and times of Brian Eno. London: Orion. Tamm, Eric. 1995. Brian Eno: his music and the vertical color of sound. Boston: De Capo. Weingarten, Christopher R. 2016. Brian Eno on Kanye West, David Bowie, and His Immersive LP The ship. Rolling Stone 14 April. https://www.rollingstone. com/music/music-­features/brian-­eno-­on-­kanye-­west-­david-­bowie-­and-­his-­ immersive-­lp-­the-­ship-­185193. Accessed on 28 March 2020. Žižek, Slavoj. 1989. The sublime object of ideology. London: Verso.

CHAPTER 15

Politics in Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s The Sinking of the Titanic

In my study of shipwreck over the decades, I have often returned to Hans Blumenberg’s essay, Shipwreck with spectator: paradigm of a metaphor for existence (1979, translated 1997), specifically to its conclusion. Attempting a summary of the essay would be audacious: it is a tile in Blumenberg’s Byzantine intellectual mosaic, which attests to his formidable philosophical and theological learning. For much of his life, Blumenberg’s primary concern was the ascendance of secularism and realism—in this regard his The legitimacy of the modern age (1985) is central. In the last decades of his life, his emphasis shifted to elaborating a theory of knowledge which, translated from the German, is termed ‘metaphorology’. It is based on identifying what he terms ‘absolute metaphors’ which ‘“answer” the supposedly naïve, in principle unanswerable questions whose relevance lies quite simply in the fact that they cannot be brushed aside, since we do not pose them ourselves but find them already posed in the ground of our existence’ (Blumenberg Paradigms 2016, 14). ‘Absolute metaphors’ are paradigmatic figurations, constellations of elements of meaning that simultaneously reflect and fashion thought. They are—reductively expressed—a foundational structure of (rhetorical or poetic) substitution that is integral to the Lebenswelt or ‘life-world’ at any historical horizon. It follows that an intellectual history might comprise tracing the transformations of these structures, not just tracking a succession of individual metaphors across texts but identifying tectonic shifts in the figural ground.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Titlestad, Shipwreck Narratives: Out of our Depth, Maritime Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87041-6_15

165

166 

M. TITLESTAD

These terrestrial metaphors (ground, tectonic, foundational) are, Blumenberg suggests, less compelling than their counterpart. ‘Humans live their lives and build their institutions on dry land. Nevertheless, they seek to grasp the movement of their existence above all through a metaphorics of the perilous sea voyage. The repertory of nautical metaphorics of existence is very rich. It includes coasts and islands, harbors and high seas, reefs and storms, shallows and calms, sail and rudder, helmsmen and anchorages, compass and astronomical navigation, lighthouses and pilots’ (Shipwreck 7). Shipwreck with spectator charts these ‘metaphorics’ in the history of philosophical reflection on (human) being and knowledge: how philosophers (from the pre-Socratics to contemporary social constructionists) have inscribed—indeed depended on—the trope of shipwreck and, in their various inscriptions, have elaborated or assumed a particular relation between a maritime catastrophe and the observer standing safely on shore (most commonly the philosopher herself). What is surprising in the first place is the prevalence of shipwrecks in Western philosophical disquisition: they are constitutive tropes in, among the dozens mentioned by Blumenberg, the exegeses of Aristippus, who sees shipwreck as revealing what is essential to existence and the importance of identifying what we have in common with strangers (12–13); Fontenelle’s Enlightenment epistemology; Montaigne’s reflections on moral autarky and optical subjectivity (14–15); Goethe’s considerations of the solitude of the survivor; Nietzsche’s conception, in The gay science and elsewhere, of the ideal of philosophical ‘heroic nihilism’ (20) and of the logical consequence that the inevitable condition of the philosopher is that of a survivor of shipwreck, clinging to a beam; Jacob Burckhardt’s development of the Lucretian proposition that historians incline to modelling time as analogous to a single human life (as if humanity is a castaway struggling for survival); and Du Bois-Reymond’s interpretation of the Darwinian conclusion that existence necessitates ‘living with shipwrecks’— that we have to resign ourselves to ‘being borne along on the sea indefinitely’ (73), with shipwreck being the inevitable consequence of ontological seafaring. While it does Shipwreck with spectator a disservice, I would like to dwell on its conclusion, which is a thought-provoking port from which to depart on a journey through Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s poem, The sinking of the Titanic (1978). Blumenberg maintains that we now live in a world in which, while shipwreck remains indelible, it ‘has lost its story setting’ (73). In our constructivist philosophical environment (Blumenberg explores

15  POLITICS IN HANS MAGNUS ENZENSBERGER’S THE SINKING… 

167

the ways in which the work of Paul Lorenzen displaces Kantian axioms), hermeneutics orientated towards language undermines the distinction between shipwreck and spectator (for the binary itself is purely rhetorical). Blumenberg cites Lorenzen: ‘If there is no attainable solid ground, then the ship must already have been built on the high seas; not by us but by our ancestors. Our ancestors, then, were able to swim, and no doubt— using scraps of wood floating around—they somehow initially put together a raft, and then continually improved on it, until today it has become such a comfortable ship that we do not have the courage any more to jump into the water and start from the beginning’ (77–78). How then do we respond to the modern desire to experience the ‘naked nothingness of the leap overboard’ (78)? How do we—in our generally post-maritime setting— find our way back to the ‘absolute metaphor,’ to the wrecks on the seabed of our cognition and affect? How can we recover shipwreck (salvage it from history) so as not to forgo its embedded provenance—so that we do not lose its valence and potential? How, obliquely stated, can we create the new wrecks we need? Blumenberg proposes: ‘the sea evidently contains material other than what has already been used. Where can it come from, in order to give courage to the ones who are beginning anew? Perhaps from earlier shipwrecks’ (78–79). The story of the sinking of the Titanic is a collection of details passed around like worn coins since 1912. There is, if James Cameron’s ‘botty-­ dribble’ is anything to go by, nothing new to say about the disaster (the phrase  ‘botty-dribble’ is Stephen Fry’s  assessment of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code). Even discussions of tangents have long submerged the interest Plimsoll line: Morgan Robertson’s seemingly proleptic Futility, or the wreck of the Titan (1898), the film commissioned by Goebbels in 1943 that was not shown in Germany until 1950 (see Garden 62–71, Welch 228–29), the notion that the disaster has proved ideologically versatile (which Slavoj Žižek encapsulates by describing the Titanic as a ‘sublime object of ideology’ [1989]), and the ship’s place in the Ulster imaginary (see Hill 15–24). Yet, in 1969, while living in Cuba for a year, Hans Magnus Enzensberger—the great German poet, novelist, editor, and political commentator—began a counter-epic, The sinking of the Titanic, which he completed in Berlin in 1977, and translated into English the following year. It is the most compelling example I know of what Blumenberg imagined at the conclusion of Shipwreck with spectator: making a new shipwreck out of the (discursive) flotsam of an earlier wreck in order to articulate a contemporary predicament: the persistent danger of putting our faith in one seemingly unsinkable utopian or radical ideology after another.

168 

M. TITLESTAD

The poem is a voyage—of thirty-three cantos and sixteen interleaved poems—that navigates the aesthetic and political (and perhaps existential) gains of being a castaway, adrift without the consolations of a safe cabin in a ship following a set itinerary, the positive prospect of having urgently to assemble a raft in the middle of the ocean. From February to March 1967, Kommune 1 (K1) was based in Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s previously empty apartment, Fregestraße 19, Friedenau, Berlin. The commune—the membership of which included Dieter Kunzelmann, Rudi Dutschke, Bernd Rabehl, Enzensberger’s ex-­ wife, Dagrun, and his brother, Ulrich Enzensberger—was an offshoot of radical student politics rooted in the situationist movement and the emerging Frankfurt School. The intention of K1 was—in the language of 1967— to undermine the bourgeois institution of the family and contrive a counter-cultural model conducive to a radical political alternative to (bureaucratised) German hegemony. Evidently, they expected a different reaction from Enzensberger on his return from a long (and disillusioning) period of study in Moscow. He immediately ejected all the members from his flat and, in retrospect, described K1—which through various antics in the years to come achieved international fame (or infamy)—as an ‘ideological lunatic asylum’ (Tumult 2016, 131). Yet there was still a flicker of Leftist utopianism in Enzensberger. In 1969, Fidel Castro invited five hundred artists, scientists, and writers to ‘Habana Libre’ (Havana)—it was a gathering of the European left and the new generation of postcolonial revolutionaries. At first Enzensberger was won over: ‘At least, the Cuban revolution hadn’t been imported on Soviet tanks. It had been achieved independently of the Russians. I had the impression that the majority of the people in the streets didn’t just accept it, they were happy about it’ (149). ‘It seemed to us / as if something were close at hand, / something for us to invent’ (Sinking 9). In the next year, though, working in various capacities, he witnessed the elaboration of state surveillance, the failing ‘managed’ economy, and Castro’s increasingly dictatorial conduct: ‘the past voluptuously fading, / and scarcity gnawing away, day and night, / at the Ten Year Plan’ (8). ‘We did not know / that the party had finished long ago, / and that all that was left was a matter / to be dealt with by a man from the World Bank / and the comrade from State Security, / exactly like back home and in any other place’ (9). He decided, once and for all— something he reiterated in a 2015 interview (A closer look)—that nothing with the suffix ‘-ism’ would ever take hold of his imagination again.

15  POLITICS IN HANS MAGNUS ENZENSBERGER’S THE SINKING… 

169

The first version of The sinking of the Titanic foundered: Enzensberger mailed his notebook home, ‘wrapped up / in black oilcloth’ but it never arrived. There was no copy ‘because on the entire island of Cuba / there was not one sheet of carbon paper / to be found’ (13). Back in Berlin— salvaging fragments of the poem from the sea of his memory—he recalled a day in Havana when, standing on a ‘quay at the Caribbean Sea,’ he saw in his mind’s eye ‘the iceberg, looming high and cold, like a cold fata morgana, it drifted slowly, irrevocably, white, nearer to me’ (10). While the catastrophe aggregates various meanings as the poem proceeds, Cuba was Enzensberger’s Titanic: a hubristic project doomed by the contingencies of reality and the grubby contentions of the political quotidian. Inevitably, his rejection of programmatic socialism (Trotskyism, Marxism, Maoism, and communism) was understood by the 1970s German Left as reactionary. The poem—which shifts back and forth from lyric to ballad and the dramatic to the folkloric—assembles a montage of the multiple representations of the wreck derived from various sources: among others, news reports, survivors’ testimonies, eye-witness accounts, radio communications, African American ‘toasts,’ the preoccupations of obsessive amateur researchers, scholarly accounts, and even the First-Class menu on ‘April 14, 1912’ (22). In the First Canto we have, vividly rendered, the moment of impact: ‘A scraping sound. A creaking. A crack. / This is it. An icy fingernail  /  scratching at the door and stopping short’ (2). The Second Canto presents an improvisation on the standard counterpoint of John Jacob Astor IV and the passengers in steerage: ‘Those down below are always the first / to understand danger. Hastily they collect / their bundles, babies and ruby-red feather beds. / The steerage may not be fluent in English or German,  /  but it does not need an interpreter to find out / that the First Class is always first served / and that there are never enough milk bottles, / shoes or lifeboats for all of us’ (4–5). Astor, with chilling irony, rips up ‘a lifesaver in order to show  /  to his wife (ne’e Connaught) what is inside / (probably cork)’ (4). Enzensberger reflects on his practice of sampling and assemblage: ‘I have nothing to lose. I deal / with the menu, the radiograms, the drowning men. / I collect them, I pick them up / from the black, icy waters of the past’ (14). Aware that the Titanic has sunk beneath a sea of representation, he is free to combine ‘dismembered verses, with lifebelts  /  and swirling souvenirs’ (15). The disaster has become nothing more than repetitions (floating fragments of superficial history), and a marketable brand—‘Titanic ashtrays and Titanic T-shirts’ (77), buying the menu

170 

M. TITLESTAD

‘reprinted in full facsimile,’ or ordering ‘the Original Titanic Model Set plastic washable, one yard long / copyright Entex Industries, Inc.’ (82). In the poem there are transcripts of radiograms—‘0015 hours Mayday CQ Position 41846’ North / 50814’ West’ (4), fragments of the songs played by the band as the ship sank—‘Nearer my God to Thee’ and ‘Autumn’ (38–9), in the Twenty-Fifth Canto, a list of survivors, including the villain of Goebbels’s film, ‘J. B. Ismay, Esq. K.B.E., F.R.G.S., / shipowner of S.S. Titanic, President, White Star Line  /  of America, Inc., coward’ (p.  72), who is—in a flash of surreal intertextuality—sharing a lifeboat with the ghost of Edgar Allan Poe’s Gordon Pym (72), and there is a table listing the numbers of those who embarked, were saved and who drowned in, respectively, first class, second class, steerage, and among the crew (59). Many of the details—down to the Chinese man who lashed himself to a door (51)—derive from Walter Lord’s A night to remember (1955), the most widely read and arguably the most influential account. There is nothing new in Enzensberger’s wreck, but the discursive flotsam is transposed in place and time, uniquely combined, idiosyncratically rendered, inflected poetically, and placed in conjunction with related poems that make something new of the disaster. This is not just defamiliarisation: clinging to this new wreck, this gathered wreckage, we drift into contradistinctive (aesthetic and ideological) waters. In Down with the old canoe (1997), Steven Biel argues that the wreck of the Titanic ‘has worked and been reworked in a series of presents […] its meanings are contingent and contextual rather than inherent and timeless’ (226). He links the representation of the disaster in the United States to synchronous social realties: patriarchal fears of the suffragist movement, the gathering power of organised labour, anxieties about immigration, the decline of Christian hegemony in capitalist modernity, and the nascent Civil Rights struggle. In addition to his impressive survey of these ideologically invested representations of the wreck by journalists, politicians, suffragettes, African American leaders and troubadours, labour activists, and the clergy, Biel investigated contemporary oddities such as the ‘Titanic Historical Society,’ which publishes the quarterly Titanic Commutator (a ‘commutator’ is an instrument used to measure the list of a vessel)—and which Enzensberger refers to as the ‘Official Organ / of the Society for the Investigator of Catastrophe’ (Sinking 82). Its members not only indulge in lengthy debates about minutiae (such as the patterns on the China), but also style their endeavours as ‘a moral undertaking—a way of reasserting the authority of older values’ (Biel 183).

15  POLITICS IN HANS MAGNUS ENZENSBERGER’S THE SINKING… 

171

There are altogether less conservative, more subversive revisions. The Twentieth Canto of Enzensberger’s poem (54–55) is an adaptation of an African American ‘toast’ anthologised in Roger D. Abrahams, Deep down in the jungle: negro narrative folklore from the streets of Philadelphia (1970). These Titanic toasts—originally collected in Louisiana and Mississippi in the 1930s—represent what Biel describes as a ‘social genre’: narrative poems that were performed, elaborated, and localised in any number of settings (115). In most, including the one adapted by Enzensberger, the hero is ‘Shine,’ who is working as a stevedore below decks when the liner strikes the iceberg (strangely, there were no African Americans in any capacity on board the Titanic). He refuses the Captain’s instruction to ‘sit [his] black ass down’ (Sinking 54), even turning down the Captain’s daughter’s offer to ‘give him more pussy than any black man see’ (55). Shine strikes out for the shore, passing a foul-mouthed whale—‘you gotta be a swimming motherfucker to outswim me’ (55). At the end of the toast, by the time word reaches Washington that the Titanic has foundered, Shine is safely on the street corner ‘damn near drunk’ (55). Enzensberger is right: the disaster is truly there for the taking. ‘Something always remains—  /  bottles, planks, deckchairs, crutches,  /  splintered mastheads –  /  debris left behind,  /  a vortex of words  /  cantos, lies, relics—  /  breakage all of it, dancing and tumbling / after us in the water’ (83). Yet, as Jeremy Hathorne argues convincingly in Cunnning passages (1996), the fact that one only has wreckage at one’s disposal—‘what we write and think about the Titanic can never be, or even recapture the experience of those on the ship’ (145)—does not lead Enzensberger to a ‘general pessimism’ (140) or a ‘glib retreat into fashionable despair’ (151). Alasdair King mentions in passing Michel de Certeau’s distinction—set out in The practice of everyday life (1984)—between strategy and tactics to characterise Enzensberger’s poetics (2004, 73–83). The ‘strategy,’ for Certeau, correlates with the act of mapping—he develops the analogy of gazing down on Manhattan from the 110th floor of the World Trade Center (Certeau 1984, 92). The ‘voyeur-god’ sees himself as disentangled from ‘the murky intertwining of daily behaviors of those down below’ (93). He generates ‘visual, panoptic and theoretical constructions’ that organise the proliferating practices of those who live ‘below the threshold at which visibility begins’ (93). ‘Political, economic and scientific rationality has been constructed in this strategic model’ (xix). The ‘tactic,’ on the other hand, does not render reality schematically, does not keep it at a distance, and—in terms of temporality—does not presume to identify

172 

M. TITLESTAD

teleology. The ‘tactician’ or ‘practitioner’ insinuates herself ‘into the other’s place, fragmentarily’ (xix). She watches for opportunities that must be ‘seized “on the wing”’ (xix). Her gains are fleeting: ‘whatever [she] wins, [she] does not keep’ (xix). Tactics are marked by errantry rather than a proprietary relationship to meaning; the practitioner borrows a place and, through the ruses of appropriation, manipulation, and recombination, diverts materials and their possibilities to other purposes. In a sense, the panoptic order is tricked into meaning something other than what has been ordained in the strategist’s ‘epic of the eye’ (xxi). These tricks aggregate, and their disseminating consequences create the possibility that they might alter the tonality of the system. King observes that—judging by Leftist commentary in the late 1970s— what frustrated Enzensberger’s progressive contemporaries was that The sinking of the Titanic not only subverted the essential idiom (clichés, really) of socialist utopianism, but that it disavows the usefulness of any oppositional ‘strategy’. The practice it manifests—and the aesthetics and politics it defends—are ‘habitation’ and ‘pedestrianism’: walking through a city of received meanings, eschewing the arrogance of assuming one has an overview; that one can plan the world and the lives of individuals that one—in both senses—looks down upon. In an essay, ‘The world language of modern poetry’ (1974), Enzensberger describes his political ennui at the time of writing Sinking somewhat differently: the ‘concept of modernity has exhausted itself in movements and countermovements, manifestoes and countermanifestoes. Its energy is spent’ (58). Poetry, on the other hand, through its generative insinuation of different possibilities ‘is a trace element. Its mere existence calls into question the status quo, which is the reason why force cannot come to terms with it and all totalitarian regimes find it intolerable’ (58). The poet, whether motivated by jouissance or the impulse to subvert bloated ideologies, has at her disposal the elusive tactics of slippage, irony, recuperation, defamiliarisation, and so on, to insinuate unsettling meanings into structures that present themselves as ‘total,’ as defining being and its possibilities. The poet is the ludic figure of Shine outplaying the titanic ‘modernities’ that were the basis of the Cultural Revolution, reconditioning camps, Ten Year Plans, cordons sanitaire, the Free Market, Second Amendment Rights, apartheid, and libertarianism. The Red Army Faction (the Rote Armee Fraktion), gathered around Kommune 2 a decade after Enzensberger chased its first iteration from his flat, dealt a deathblow to German utopianism when Ulrike

15  POLITICS IN HANS MAGNUS ENZENSBERGER’S THE SINKING… 

173

Meinhof committed suicide in 1976 and the Stammheim trial concluded with the conviction of the movement’s leaders in 1977—the year that Enzensberger’s Sinking was published. It is difficult to ignore the symmetry. ‘People are rather too eager for Doom to come’ (Sinking 26). Utopian schemes are not only maps of reality, they are also imagined temporalities: progress, evolution, development, perfectibility. Yet they are undergirded by the converse: a rectilinear version of time and a concomitant imminent ending—a dystopian imaginary that is invested in catastrophism and apocalypse. In one of Enzensberger’s interleaved poems, ‘Apocalypse, Umbrian Master, about 1490’ (Sinking 6–7), the artist struggles: ‘How do you go about painting Doom?’ ‘Everything, you see,’ he explains, ‘is to be rent asunder and torn to pieces, except the canvas’ (6). Eventually, the Umbrian Master succeeds—‘Doom is happily consummated’ and the artist made ‘unmindfully merry’ (7). He celebrates—in the mundane quotidian—by organising a dinner party, treating his guests ‘to truffles, to grouse and to old wine’ (7), and sits down at rest, ‘with the season’s first rainstorm pounding away at the shutters’ (7). Seasonal cyclicity and the prospect of fecundity mock his ‘success’ in coming to terms with the ‘end times’. In another poem, ‘Last Supper. Venetian. Sixteenth Century’ (23–25), an artist reflects on the ‘endless Crucifixions, / Deluges and Massacres of the Innocent’ (24) that he is called upon to execute. In a moment of bathos, he tells us, it all ‘became too much for me […] I rechristened my Last Supper / and decided to call it / A Dinner at Mr Levi’s’ (24). The Titanic disaster has always proved susceptible to the apocalyptic imagination. Preachers declaimed from pulpits about hubris, secular moralists wrote polemics about fragile modernity, and conservative politicians mumbled about the collapse of essential hierarchies. All agreed: the wreck gave the lie to the vaunted progress of an age; it spelled the end of the world it materialised and encapsulated. Walter Lord, in an oft-cited passage from A night to remember, spells out, ‘Overriding everything else, the Titanic […] marked the end of a general feeling of confidence. Until then men felt they had found the answer to a steady, orderly, civilized life. […] Before the Titanic, all was quiet. Afterwards, all was tumult. […] The Titanic more than any other single event marks the end of the old days, and the beginning of a new, uneasy era’ (99). This over-attachment to an ending—derived from rectilinear Judeo-­ Christian temporality—turns on the notion of a revelation: that cataclysm

174 

M. TITLESTAD

will tear asunder the veil of the familiar and show us the world for what it is and ourselves for what we are. Enzensberger will have none of this: there is no end, no Last Supper, just ‘The Dinner at Mr Levi’s’. A refrain in the poem is ‘the dinner is going on’ (79). The sinking liner—as the existence and achievement of the poem and the disposition of the poet attest—is not ‘the End,’ not even an end. There is flotsam all around us—enough, as Hans Blumenberg imagined at the end of Shipwreck with spectator, to make a new wreck. In the inescapable sea of intertextuality there are countless opportunities for building rafts, even though we know that they will not save us, but only sustain us long enough to collect more beams, other planks. The sinking of the Titanic was not the end of the world. Like us and the ocean, it was just of this world. Enzensberger practices the tactics advocated by Lorenzen: salvaging possibilities from the history of loss and fragmentation. This anti-­ totalitarian, generative relation to history celebrates using the flotsam of the most detrimental strategies that were intended to save the world and us from ourselves. It is not naïve celebratory optimism—there is no champagne bottle bursting against a hull—and it is certainly not a map guiding us to a future. It is, however, a poetics—a practice—of qualified optimism. If I might respond to the opening that is Blumenberg’s conclusion with a gambit: of course, his poetics entail aesthetic, historical, and ideological advocacy, but they are also a metaphorics of the mind and the self; lessons in how, when we find ourselves overboard and adrift, we might not lose hope.

Works Cited Biel, Steven. 1997. Down with the old canoe: a cultural history of the Titanic disaster. New York: Norton. Blumenberg, Hans. 1985. The legitimacy of the modern age. Trans. Robert M. Wallace. Cambridge Mass.: MIT. Blumenberg, Hans. 1997. Shipwreck with spectator: paradigm of a metaphor for existence. Trans. Steven Rendall. Cambridge Mass.: MIT. Blumenberg, Hans. 2016. Paradigms for a metaphorology. Trans. Robert Savage. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Certeau, Michel de. 1984. The practice of everyday life. Trans. Steven Randall. Berkeley: University of California Press. Enzensberger, Hans Magnus, 1974. The World Language of Modern Poetry. In The consciousness industry: on literature, politics and the media, ed. Michael Roloff. New York: Continuum. 42–61.

15  POLITICS IN HANS MAGNUS ENZENSBERGER’S THE SINKING… 

175

Enzensberger, Hans Magnus. 1978. The sinking of the Titanic. Manchester: Carcanet New Press. Enzensberger, Hans Magnus. 2016. Tumult. London: Seagull. Enzensberger, Hans Magnus. 2018. Hans Magnus Enzensberger interview: a closer look. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lu9hZnTueM. Accessed 30 September 2020. Garden, Ian. 2012. The Third Reich’s celluloid war: propaganda in Nazi feature films, documentaries, and television. Stroud: History Press. Hawthorn, Jeremy. 1996. Cunning passages: New Historicism, Cultural Materialism and Marxism in the contemporary literary debate. London: Arnold. Hill, John. 2004. The relaunching of Ulster pride: the Titanic, Belfast and film. In The ‘Titanic’ in myth and memory: representations in visual and literary culture, ed. Tim Bergfelder and Sarah Street. London: Taurus. 15–24. King, Alastair. 2004. Enzensberger’s Titanic: the sinking of the German Left and the aesthetics of survival. In The ‘Titanic’ in myth and memory: representations in visual and literary culture, ed. Tim Bergfelder and Sarah Street. London: Taurus. 73–84. Lord, Walter. 1956. A night to remember. London: Longman. Welch, David. 2001. Propaganda and the German cinema:1933–1945. London: Taurus. Žižek, Slavoj. 2008. The sublime object of ideology. London: Verso.

CHAPTER 16

‘The Endlessly Sinking Ship’: Günter Grass’s Crabwalk

Günter Grass’s novel, Crabwalk (Im krebsgang), published in 2002, concludes with Paul Pokriefke, an ageing listless journalist, visiting his son in a derelict juvenile detention centre. Konrad has been incarcerated for the murder of Wolfgang Stremplin, a young German gentile who had posed in the chat room on Konrad’s website as ‘David, a Jew’. The two debated politics, the revanchist and revisionist Konrad (who adopted the name ‘Wilhelm’) against ‘David,’ who presented the Holocaust as the beating heart of German history. The particular focus of their argument, which was at once mordant and oddly convivial, was the history and fate of the Wilhelm Gustloff, a Kraft durch Freude (‘Strength Through Joy’; KdF) cruise ship launched in 1937. While she had once ferried party members on subsidised cruises to Madeira and the Norwegian fjords, she was converted into a hospital ship in 1939 and then into floating barracks in 1940 to house 1000 U-boat trainees of the 2nd Submarine Training Division (Unterseeboot-Lehrdivision). Anchored off Gdynia (then Gotenhafen), her hospital ship markings (white with a green stripe) were painted over with standard naval grey. She was sunk by a Soviet U-boat (U13), captained by Alexander Marinesko, on 30 January 1945. In terms of loss of life, the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff was the worst maritime disaster in history. The exact number of casualties cannot be determined since it was impossible, amidst the scramble for places on board, to list the names of the refugees fleeing the vengeful and murderous advance of the Red Army across East Prussia, then West Prussia, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Titlestad, Shipwreck Narratives: Out of our Depth, Maritime Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87041-6_16

177

178 

M. TITLESTAD

Silesia, and Pomerania. We know that, when she was torpedoed, the ship was carrying around three times her capacity, in the region of 9000–10000 people, the vast majority of whom were terrified refugees. But there were military personnel on board: a division of air force auxiliaries (uniformed women), U-boat crews intended for redeployment, a group of naval officers, and a significant number of injured German soldiers who had been evacuated from the Eastern Front. When the Wilhelm Gustloff sank, at least 6000 people drowned in the freezing waters of the Baltic (some historians’ estimates are as high as 9400). Of those, over 4000 were children, many pushed up the gangway alone by their desperate parents. The ship had been named for Wilhelm Gustloff, a Nazi functionary based in Davos, Switzerland, who was recruiting for the NDSAP/OA (which organised Nazis living abroad) when, in 1936, he was assassinated by the prescient Croatian, David Frankfurter, whose sole defence was, ‘I fired the shots because I am a Jew’. Frankfurter was sentenced to eighteen years in a Swiss prison but was released at the end of the war. The name of the martyred Gustloff was chosen for the KdF ship after a public debate over the alternative: Adolf Hitler. Thus, the ‘Wilhelm’ and ‘David’ chosen by the interlocutors in Konrad’s chat room. On Paul’s first visit to the detention centre, Konrad proudly shows him a model of the ship that he had meticulously assembled from a kit given to him by his grandmother, Tulla, a survivor of the disaster who gave birth to Paul in one of the lifeboats. Paul studies the model. ‘From stem to stern, the Strength through Joy ship showed herself in all of her beauty. From the thousands of parts my son had fashioned the vacationer’s classless dream boat. How spacious the sundeck was, not chopped up by any superstructures! How elegantly the single funnel rose amidships, slightly inclined toward the stern! Clearly recognizable the glassed-in promenade deck!’ (226). He observes, too, that Konrad had added three miniature paper flags to the stern bearing, respectively, the KdF and German Labour Front insignia, and the swastika. As Paul is studying the model, expressing his ‘admiration, though with a touch of irony’ (226), Konrad carefully places three red paste-on dots, ‘the size of a pfennig,’ to show ‘the places in the hull where the torpedoes hit their mark’ (226). He adds these ‘stigmata’ solemnly, then steps back and says, ‘Nice work’ (226). Paul is allowed into Konrad’s cell for the first time on his second visit. He notices that Konrad has dispensed with the framed photographs he had requested Tulla to find for him: ‘David as Wolfgang, Frankfurter young and old, the two purported images of the U-boat commander

16  ‘THE ENDLESSLY SINKING SHIP’: GÜNTER GRASS’S CRABWALK 

179

Marinesko’ (232). Then the visit takes a dramatic turn. Konrad ‘leaned the [model] ship against the rack as if it were listing, and then began, not in haste or in anger, but rather with premeditated deliberateness, to smash with his bare fist his carefully pieced-together creation’ (233). The side of his fist begins to bleed, yet he continues. When the hull refuses to break, he throws it to the floor and tramples ‘what was left of the model Wilhelm Gustloff, the last thing being the remaining lifeboats, which had popped out of their davits’ (233). Readers are left to ponder the significance of the act—whether it is some sort of cathartic exorcism or a reiteration of the wreck, a small-scale simulation that ushers the disaster into the present. Pondering this ambiguity, Paul returns home and continues researching neo-Nazi websites (he has been commissioned by an enigmatic ‘old man’ to write about the Wilhelm Gustloff ) only to discover that Konrad—on www.kameradschaft-konrad-pokriefke—is being heralded a hero and martyr by those ‘campaigning for someone whose conduct and thinking [they] held up as exemplary’ (234): ‘“We believe in you, we will wait for you, we will follow you …”. And so on and so forth’ (234). A despondent Paul concludes—the last line of the novel—‘It doesn’t end. Never will it end’ (234). Crabwalk topped bestseller lists in Germany in 2002, selling more than 400,000 copies. Even this does not reflect the cultural significance it was accorded in reviews and public debates. The novel has consistently been listed among those works that both reflected and catalysed a ‘new era’—a Vergangenheitsbewältigung—in discussions of German collective memory, relating particularly to German suffering during World War II (see, among others, Langenbacher and Eigler 2, Thesz 295–306, Moses 49, Eigler 19). This ‘new era’ has been described as the evolution of ‘a new sense of a less-burdened German identity’ (Michel 65), which was characterised by Eric Langenbacher as a shift from ‘Holocaust-centred memory’ to ‘German-centred memory’ (53). The other texts commonly associated with this turn are a precedent, W.  G. Sebald’s Luftkrieg und literatur, translated as On the natural history of destruction (2003), and Jorg Friedrich’s 564-page history of the Allied bombing campaign, Der brand: Deutschland im Bombenkrieg 1940–1945 (2002), which was published as The fire: the bombing of Germany 1940–1945 in 2008. Both traced the silences in historiography surrounding the suffering of German civilians during the Allied bombing campaigns, particularly in the last year of the war. Around 410,000 residents and refugees died in the bombing of Hamburg, Berlin, Dresden, and Munich alone.

180 

M. TITLESTAD

German-centred memory have been discussed repeatedly since 2002, notably following the release in 2004 of Oliver Hirschbiegel’s film Downfall (Der untergang), which showed the human side of the suicides in the Berlin bunker in 1945, and more recently in relation to Florian Huber’s Kind, versprich mir, dass du dich ereschießt (Promise me you’ll shoot yourself: the downfall of ordinary Germans in 1945), published in German in 2015 and in English translation in 2019. Huber’s work, which like Crabwalk was a bestseller in Germany, investigates the hitherto occluded ‘suicide epidemic,’ when tens of thousands of Germans, mostly women and children, killed themselves ahead of the Red Army advance in January– April 1945, and thousands more after Adolf Hitler committed suicide. Huber and Grass are intensely aware of the potential threats of emphasising German suffering in the public domain. Interestingly though, commentators dwelled on their depiction of Allied atrocities, generally ignoring the authors’ sober warnings. Langenbacher and Eigler suggest that collective cultural memory is ‘usefully defined as intersubjectively shared interpretations of a common past with a high degree of affect’ (7). Affect seems, in most quarters, to have occluded Grass and Huber’s combined historical accuracy and probity. The notion of a watershed Vergangenheitsbewältigung is a simplification. Nicole Thesz (2004) is among those who argue (and demonstrate) that authors, journalists, and scholars had, since the 1950s, consistently, if quietly, reflected on German suffering (295–96). The shift identified so volubly in 2002 had a far longer, tectonic history. She concedes, though, that the conversation changed register after reunification in October 1991, intensified after 9/11, and found a focus in Sebald, Grass, and Jorg’s works. They, she suggests, were as much symptoms as causes of historical revisionism (296). Reunification raised pressing questions about the history of German nationalism. It also saw the consolidation of right-wing movements and an upsurge in reactionary violence, which was only exacerbated by Islamophobia and anti-immigration sentiments after the attacks on the World Trade Center. In terms of epistemic shifts, the 1990s saw a surge in identity politics and a ‘memory boom’ linked to the broadening, deepening, and proliferation of Holocaust Studies and the propagation of truth and reconciliation commissions in various liberated and post-­ genocidal contexts. An etiolated, loosely psychoanalytic, understanding of trauma and ‘recovery’ (both ‘salvaging’ and ‘healing’) prevailed, lending itself to unlikely recuperations (in Guy Debord’s sense of the term). It was at the confluence of these political and epistemic trends that the permissive

16  ‘THE ENDLESSLY SINKING SHIP’: GÜNTER GRASS’S CRABWALK 

181

conviction arose that German suffering in World War II needed, not only to be acknowledged, but ‘processed’ and monumentalised. The self-­ flagellation of earlier generations should be set aside and long repressed and unworked-through collective traumas addressed (which conviction resonates uncomfortably with the pronouncements of Hitler in the 1930s regarding the need to step out of the shadow of the Treaty of Versailles). It is no simple matter to memorialise those killed in the Allied bombing campaigns, the 1.4 million German girls and women from eight to eighty who were raped during the Russian advance, those who took their own lives in the ‘suicide epidemic,’ or those who drowned when the Wilhelm Gustloff was torpedoed. Doing so risks relativising the Holocaust. There is no utterance as petulant and vile as, ‘Look! We also suffered’. Further, German suffering has been mobilised and instrumentalised (weaponised even) by right-wing revanchists since reunification. This has been based in a ‘Teutonic’ sentimentality that has galvanised new waves of anti-­Semitism, other racisms, and homophobia. Revisionism that turns perpetrators into victims not only deforms history, but it also (in a seeming contradiction) erases and reiterates the original violence of perpetrators. Is it possible to keep both in mind, the Holocaust and German suffering, without any sense of ‘offsetting’ (Aufrechnung), ‘cancelling out,’ catharsis or even comparison? ‘It is striking,’ A.  Dirk Moses observes, ‘how long the debate has been framed by stark polarities: remembering or forgetting, too much memory or too little, its cynical instrumentalization or redeeming quality, capitulation in 1945 or liberation’ (50). Eigler suggests that literary works—that are ‘less driven by political interests or other immediate goals’—can ‘decouple’ these binaries (25). They can hold contrary existential impulses, moral positions, and political commitments in tension without reaching for simple, programmatic resolution. Literature can construct and elaborate interstitial spaces that are singular rather than settled or mundane. Obviously, certain modes of historiography can also do so, yet perhaps most persuasively when they deploy literary devices that—in the awkward translation of the Russian Formalists’ ostranenie— ‘defamiliarize’ our routine formulations of meaning. I am aware that this is special pleading for the literary—arguing that it has, paraphrasing Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ‘A defence of poetry,’ the unique capacity to ‘lift the veil’ of routine representation and hence perception and, through the application of the ethical imagination, to enliven understanding and renew the past (Shelley 1906, 1–35). Crabwalk certainly does so: it presents, through an affective turn, conflicted characters, elaborated tropes, carefully crafted

182 

M. TITLESTAD

irresolution, and the ideational substructure and potentially dangerous consequences of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, while neither compromising complexity nor re-inscribing habitual binaries. In Crabwalk, Paul Pokriefke describes the Wilhelm Gustloff as ‘the endlessly sinking ship’ (43). The three main characters in the novel—Tulla, Paul, and Konrad—each represents the disaster. Tulla (who, like Grass, was born in 1927) regales any willing listener with melodramatic anecdotes about the sinking. After the war she remained in the GDR while Paul escaped to West Berlin. A dedicated and diligent Communist Party member, Tulla rose to the position of head of a carpentry brigade ‘in a large state-owned plant that produced bedroom furniture on the Five-­ Year plan’ (17). She sees no contradiction in vilifying Marichenko for torpedoing the Wilhelm Gustloff and her enthusiastic participation in the Soviet national project. Hers is a free-floating sentimentality equally capable of latching onto outrage as onto her Soviet nationalist duty. Yet, some of her anecdotes—which seduce Konrad—are poignant. She describes the death of the children: ‘They all skidded off the ship the wrong way round, headfirst. So there they was, floating in them bulky life jackets, their little legs poking up in the air […]’ (149). Her hair, she tells everyone in earshot, turned white at the sight. Florian Huber describes Hannah Arendt’s five-month visit to Germany in 1950, in her capacity as the director of Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, formed in 1947, then engaged in identifying and redistributing Jewish property, particularly because so many were left heirless by the Holocaust. She found that ‘people trotted out well-rehearsed stories about the Germans’ suffering’: ‘This general lack of emotion, at any rate this apparent heartlessness, sometimes covered over with cheap sentimentality, is only the most conspicuous outward symptom of a deep-rooted, stubborn, and at times vicious refusal to face and come to terms with what really happened’ (Arendt in Huber 248–49). This capacity to live on in wilful, self-pitying blindness—as Tulla does—is commonly identified with the ‘forty-fivers,’ the generation of Germans who lived through the war, but repressed (sometimes denied) the realities of the Holocaust. Paul is a ‘sixty-eighter,’ which refers to that generation which came of age in the generally left-wing public sphere of the 1960s and early 1970s. Although employed by the right-wing Springer tabloids on his arrival in the Federal Republic, following the attack on Rudi Dutschke, Paul joined the staff of the left-wing Tageszeitung. The corruption of revolutionary ideals in Germany is commonly associated with the rise to prominence of

16  ‘THE ENDLESSLY SINKING SHIP’: GÜNTER GRASS’S CRABWALK 

183

the militant Rote Armee Fraktion (the Baarder-Meinhof Group), whose development left mainstream leftist organisations and individuals rudderless, seemingly doomed to agonised self-doubt and equivocation. Paul embodies the resulting existential and ideological ennui. He is trapped between the undeniable and insurmountable reality of the Holocaust and the fact of German suffering, which he is unable to either acknowledge or assimilate. This mezzanine ontology induces immobility. In a public address, ‘Literature and politics,’ delivered in 1973, Grass set out his commitment to ‘unbelief’: My children have their doubts. They say: You don’t believe in anything anyway. I admit to my unbelieving life and tell them: As soon as belief gets ahead of reason you can count on the demise of both politics and literature. Examples include the belief in one God, the belief in Germany, and the belief in true Socialism.—At most, dear children, I believe in doubt. (109)

This resonates with Paul’s unwillingness (or inability) to commit wholeheartedly to any (political or epistemic) position, for he too cannot set aside reason. His approach to writing about the Wilhelm Gustloff entails detailed research and accurate reportage. He is alarmed when, reading Konrad’s online account of the disaster, he sees his calculated dismissal of reality. Why did the boy deceive himself and others? Why, when he was otherwise such a stickler for detail, and knew every inch of the ship, from the shaft tunnel to the most remote corner of the onboard laundry, did he refuse to admit that it was neither a Red Cross transport nor a cargo ship that lay tied up at the dock, loaded exclusively with refugees, but an armed passenger liner under the command of the navy, into which the most varied freight had been packed? Why did he deny facts available in print for years, facts that even the eternal has-beens hardly contested anymore? Did he want to fabricate a war crime and impress the skinheads in Germany and elsewhere with a prettied-up version of what had actually happened? (108–9)

Konrad’s ‘emotional need for clear-cut victims’ (109) leads him to suppress contradictory details; his revisionist history of uncomplicated German suffering depends on tactical representation; on a wilful selection of details that serve his ideological purposes. Paul cannot countenance conviction displacing knowledge; affiliation—with an ideology or group

184 

M. TITLESTAD

of ‘believers’—that necessitates the suppression of historical complexities and, hence, abandoning moral integrity. Konrad’s twisted obsession with the Wilhelm Gustloff tragedy motivates him to assume the identity of ‘Wilhelm’ and to invite ‘David’ to meet him at the destroyed Nazi monument to Gustloff in Schwerin. Konrad carries a handgun, also a gift from Tulla, supposedly to protect himself against the excesses of the skinheads with whom he now associates. He shoots at ‘David’ four times; one shot misses but the other three mortally wound the ‘philosemite’. When asked by the authorities to account for his action, Konrad states simply, ‘Because I am a German’ (188), echoing Frankfurter’s, ‘I fired the shots because I am a Jew’. Konrad’s murder of Wolfgang Stremplin is not simple mimicry. As with David Frankfurter’s assassination of Wilhelm Gustloff in 1936, Konrad is motivated by neither personal animosity nor vindictiveness. Rather, he and Stremplin come to occupy positions in an ideological scheme they have inherited. These positions seem to have nothing to do with them as individuals—it is clear from their discussions and their affable meeting in Schwerin that they could easily be friends. Tragically, they have much in common—their convivial demeanours and their obsession with the Wilhelm Gustloff—but ideological provenance, the toxic history they inherit, makes Konrad the perpetrator of murderous violence and Stremplin his victim. The positions they occupy pre-existed them and will continue to exist after ‘David’ is dead. New actors will be called upon to play old, scripted roles—German history, in Paul’s view, is ineluctable, doomed to eternal recurrence: ‘History, or, to be more precise, the history we Germans have repeatedly mucked up, is a clogged toilet. We flush and flush, but the shit keeps rising’ (122). This recurrence has only been exacerbated by the Internet, where atomised and generally anonymous individuals are free—without realism or ethical accountability—to craft, in the privacy of their bedrooms, a habitus in a field of pre-existing options. Thesz describes Konrad and Wolfgang as ‘two teenagers whose grasp on reality is loosened through the fantasy world on the Internet’ (295). ‘Crises are literature’s bread and butter,’ Grass writes in ‘Literature and history’. ‘It blossoms amid ruins. Rifling through the pockets of the dead is its business. Paid or unpaid it keeps watch over the body and always tells the survivors the old stories anew’ (258–59). Crabwalk shows that the Wilhelm Gustloff tragedy is susceptible to revision—from representing it as an unforgivable Russian atrocity to understanding it as Soviet revenge against Germans for their brutality (against soldiers and civilians) as they advanced towards Stalingrad, from being a symptomatic historiographic

16  ‘THE ENDLESSLY SINKING SHIP’: GÜNTER GRASS’S CRABWALK 

185

silence caused by unwarranted German guilt to an inevitable consequence of unmitigated Nazi aggression and Hitler’s sociopathic refusal to accept defeat in 1945 (his last, defiant speech was broadcast through loudspeakers across the crowded decks of the ship just before she was torpedoed). At each interpretative (historical and ideological) horizon, a different ship sinks; the disaster is variously conceived and used to different rhetorical, ideological ends. The ship is always sinking—the Wilhelm Gustloff is a tragedy that has happened, is happening, and will continue to happen. Let us return to Konrad smashing the model in his cell, that shipwreck in miniature. I mentioned that it might be interpreted as either catharsis, Konrad’s desire to put behind him the Nazism he has embraced and defended, or it might be a pointed reiteration, a metaphoric proclamation that the ship is always sinking, revitalising animosities. Given Konrad’s decision to remove the photographs of the various actors in the disaster, the first interpretation might be more persuasive, yet ambiguity remains. Rather than ‘crabwalk,’ Im krebsgang can be translated as ‘crabwise’. Literature can come at history sideways, unrestrained by the teleology to which historiography inevitably inclines. Suspension, ambiguity, irresolution, affect, modalities of belief, existential resonance, fumbled ideologies, relationality, and contest are at the heart of Crabwalk. The narrative draws us into the questions at the political and existential heart of the matter, but it refuses to provide answers.

Works Cited Eigler, Friederike. 2005. Writing in the new Germany: cultural memory and family narratives. German politics & society 23.3 Fall. Special Issue: Transformations of the past in contemporary German politics and culture: 16–41. https://doi. org/10.3167/104503005780979967. Friedrich, Jőrg. 2008. The fire: the bombing of Germany 1940–1945. Trans. Allison Brown. New York: Columbia University Press. Grass, Günter. 2004a. Literature and politics. Trans. W Martin. The Günter Grass reader, ed. Helmut Frielinghaus. Orlando: Harcourt. 106–110. Grass, Günter. 2004b. Literature and History. Trans. W Martin. The Günter Grass reader, ed. Helmut Frielinghaus. Orlando: Harcourt. 254–260. Grass, Günter. 2004c. Crabwalk. Trans. Krishna Winston. London: Faber. Hirschbiegel, Oliver (dir.). 2004. Downfall. Constantin Film. Huber, Florian. 2019. Promise me you’ll shoot yourself: the downfall of ordinary Germans in 1945. Trans. Imogen Taylor. London: Allen Lane.

186 

M. TITLESTAD

Langenbacher, Eric. 2003. Changing memory regimes in contemporary Germany? German politics & society  21.2 Summer: 46–68. https://doi. org/10.3167/104503003782353484. Langenbacher, Eric and Friederike Eigler. 2005. Introduction: memory boom or memory fatigue in twenty-first century Germany? German politics & society 23.3 Fall. Special Issue: Transformations of the past in contemporary German politics and culture: 1–15. https://doi.org/10.3167/104503005780979976 Michel, Andreas. 2005. Heroes and taboos: the expansion of memory in contemporary Germany. War, Literature, and the Arts 17: 58–73. www.wlajournal. com/wlaarchive/17_1-­2/hero_michel.pdf. Accessed 28 March 2020. Moses, A. Dirk. 2007. The non-German German and the German German: dilemmas of identity after the Holocaust. New German critique 101 Summer: 45–94. https://doi.org/10.1215/0094033X-­2007-­003. Sebald. W.  G. 2003. On the natural history of destruction. Trans. Anthea Bell. New York: Modern Library. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. 1906. A defence of poetry. Prose works, Vol. 2. London: Chatto and Windus. 1–35. Thesz, Nicole. 2004. Against a new era in Vergangenheitsbewältigung: continuities from Grass’s Hundejahre to Im krebsgang. Colloquia Germanica 37.3–4: 291–306. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23981873. Accessed 9 April 2021.

CHAPTER 17

Regarding Lampedusa

The chapters comprising this volume are a long letter to Aaron and Rebecca, my children. It is presumptuous to think that they will read this collection to see what I learned from meditating on shipwrecks. Nonetheless, this chapter is unapologetically didactic; my little ones are my imagined readers (but you, too, are welcome). Parental advice is commonly naïve and sentimental in the knowledge that the torsions of experience will bend our maxims out of shape. My defence—as I dwell on the mass death of migrants attempting to cross the Mediterranean—is that I do not know how we should regard the suffering of others or how we should respond to it. My guidelines are based, not on assumed clarity or authority, but on raising unruly questions without reaching for quaint, abstract, or convenient answers. This chapter might leave you, Aaron and Rebecca, more at sea than you are now, but perhaps that it is better than imagining ourselves on solid ground. The Italian Mediterranean island, Lampedusa, is twenty square-­ kilometres of land protruding from the African continental shelf. It is the southernmost speck of Europe, just 346 kilometres from the Tunisian port, Zuwara, one of the main migrant smuggling hubs. The island has a population of around 5300 people, many of whom relocate to the mainland to escape windswept winters. It depends for its survival on fishing and tourism, both modest enterprises. Yet, since the Arab Spring of 2011, Lampedusa has become the world’s deadliest border. In The figure of the migrant (2015), Thomas Nail states unequivocally that the ‘twenty-first century will be the century of the migrant’ (1)—it is estimated that there were over one billion migrants at the turn of the century, and increasing © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Titlestad, Shipwreck Narratives: Out of our Depth, Maritime Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87041-6_17

187

188 

M. TITLESTAD

political, economic, and environmental instability will only cause this number to rise. If the migrant is the embodiment of this century, the foundering of overcrowded migrant boats is the ongoing shipwreck of the present. Maurizio Albahari (2016) observes that ‘Lampedusa’s fishermen avoid the stretch of sea to their island’s south—experience tells them their fishing nets are likely to be torn by the many wrecks on the seabed,’ while citizens in Zuwara avoid ‘wild-caught fish’ because they are afraid that they feed off human flesh (275). This sediment of human remains and boats—settling on wrecks, from Greek triremes to oil tankers—will reveal to future generations our disregard for life, our brutal economics, and our racism. Our contribution to the history of the Mediterranean is the debris and remains of avoidable death. In early 2011, around 19,000 migrants arrived on Lampedusa from Tunisia and Libya alone (Puggioni 2015). This was the first wave of mass migration and the number of deaths at sea increased proportionally. Crossings were made in overcrowded rubber dinghies and leaky fishing boats, often with hundreds of migrants locked belowdecks. The possibility of death did not deter them: most were escaping extreme economic precarity, starvation, political persecution, or civil wars in Eritrea, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. For many, the crossing was only a stage in a much longer journey—those from the Horn and the Middle East had first to cross the Sahara, and then bribe their way across borders, before heading for Lampedusa. If they arrived safely, they would be relocated to mainland detention centres, in Italy and elsewhere, where they would wait in hope of being granted a residence permit to settle (optimally in Scandinavia, Germany, or the United Kingdom). It is not unusual for migrants to have networks in European countries, but—based on sixty detailed interviews— Robert Press (2017) shows that networks are also formed during the arduous journeys, as the legal status of migrants changes from one context to the next (22). Migrant identity is fluid, contingent and relational—less ‘national’ than born of movement and urgency. Many of those who are denied permits are extradited to countries in which they have never lived. It was only in the days following a shipwreck on 3 October 2013 off Lampedusa that the precarious lives of these migrants—particularly their perilous sea crossing—became conspicuous. Europe’s attention focused on 366 lifeless bodies floating less than a mile off the island. A fishing boat ferrying over 560 migrants had sunk; when the shore came into view, a man had lit a piece of cloth to signal for assistance, which started a fire, causing a stampede, and the boat capsized. Those locked in the hold,

17  REGARDING LAMPEDUSA 

189

mostly women and children, drowned in minutes, while the rest, most without lifejackets, struggled to remain afloat. Their screaming was mistaken for the cries of seagulls. Fishing and leisure vessels came upon the scene, coincidentally at first, after the migrants had been in the sea for several hours. Hundreds of people were thrashing amidst floating corpses. Crews and passengers saved those they could, their task made more difficult by the fact that the migrants were covered in diesel, their hands too slippery to grasp. The Coast Guard arrived later to assist; by that stage it was largely a matter of retrieving corpses. The remains, zipped in green body bags, were lined up in a disused warehouse near the port. Photographs were taken of each of the deceased and stored on DVD, possessions collected and itemised, and DNA samples preserved—it was the first systematic effort to catalogue dead migrants so that they might be identified later by family or friends. But migrants go to great lengths to conceal their identities—even burning or etching off their fingerprints (see Grant 2011). Most of the drowned remained anonymous and were buried in unmarked graves in the local cemetery. The people of Lampedusa ‘had already voiced their dissent against the modalities of policing the Mediterranean many times’ (Puggioni 2015), but, given that this time the toll was so high and death so proximate, there was an outcry that could not be ignored. The night after the wreck, on Friday, 4 October, 5000 islanders walked slowly down the Via Roma, the main street of Lampedusa, in a silent candlelit vigil. They assembled above the port, where they were led in elegiac prayers by Father Stefano, the Catholic parish priest. In the next days, similar vigils were held in Valletta, Tel Aviv, and Rome, attended by residents and migrants (mostly Eritreans, for that was the country from which most of the dead hailed). This tragedy, and one which followed just a week later, in which over 200 Syrians drowned, jolted public opinion. The Italian government responded: it inaugurated Mare Nostrum (‘Our Sea’), a search and rescue mission operating across the Mediterranean, as far as the Libyan coast. Within two years, though, spurred on by populist anti-immigrant sentiment in Italy, Mare Nostrum was defunded, and responsibility passed to Operation Triton, which was haphazardly organised by the European Union, underfunded, and which only permitted its ships to venture 30 kilometres from the Italian coast. Current strategies to reduce migration, which are staggering in their immorality, are to criminalise unsanctioned rescues (even those by the Italian Navy and Coast Guard) and to turn back boats, regardless of whether they are seaworthy. To placate its flaccid conscience,

190 

M. TITLESTAD

the EU has also decided to target traffickers. Given that fares are exorbitant (usually above US$1000, raised by extended families) and that traffickers ‘supply’ women and children to criminal and exploitative undertakings, this is both justified and important. But the belief that it addresses migrancy ‘at its source’ is wilfully naïve: traffickers derive power from the demand for passage, which results from the violence and deprivation experienced by prospective migrants. Traffickers are middlemen without scruples who monetise desperation; they are not its cause. We incline towards empathy by numbers. In our mediated society, we organise the severity of migrant shipwrecks by death tolls, mentally putting aside those that do not compare with the worst. Rebecca, you have been at pains to explain to me that each Covid-19 death rips a fabric of attachment, kinship, and dependence. You are right; numbers give us no sense of the emotional, interpersonal, cultural, political, and familial costs of a single death. We only get a sense of the repercussions of a migrant’s death by gathering, translating, and disseminating survivors’ accounts. These should be the first voices to which we listen: those who have travailed alongside the drowned, those who knew and depended on them. Individuals, NGOs, and Christian and Muslim associations have organised projects with this intention—to replace the saturating commentary by outsiders with migrants’ voices (see Press 2017). As Karabo Kgoleng affirms in her foreword to I want to go home forever (2018), ‘When we tell our stories ourselves, rather than have them told by others, we maintain personal agency and therefore our dignity’ (xiii). Since trauma, experienced or witnessed, drives survivors to the edges of expression, alternatives to language have become integral to therapy and activism. Migrants have turned to photography, filmmaking, and fine art to represent shipwrecks and their arrival on Lampedusa. These activities and works have become fashionable among scholars (see Griswold 2012; Kuschner 2016; Mazzara 2016; Zagaria 2016; Ramsay 2016; Dauksza 2018). Perversely, I will not reflect on migrants’ representations here, but on three works of creative non-fiction (all published in 2017) that represent the islanders’ perception of migrants. This is a tangential consideration that privileges ‘European’ consciousness. But, as much as we—the three of us—believe in the moral duty of self-abnegation, strive to put ourselves in the place of those who suffer, we must concede the limits of our imagination. Even though you two are migrants of a sort, having relocated to Israel, you know that your buttressed transition is a world away from that of a young Eritrean mother desperate to leave a warzone, but with no clear

17  REGARDING LAMPEDUSA 

191

sense of arrival. We cannot think or feel our way into her experience, even though it is our duty to try. The questions I ask now are qualified by this limitation; they are, I hope, prudent. How should we, who are privileged observers, think about migrants, what are we entitled to feel, and is there an imperative to act? In Notes on a shipwreck: a story of refugees, borders, and hope (2017), the Italian novelist and journalist, Davide Enia, weaves autobiography into an account of his visits to Lampedusa, first as a tourist and, from 2011, as a newspaper correspondent. His papà, a retired cardiologist and dedicated photographer, accompanies Davide on the visit that is the centrepiece of the book. In his compositional elegance, Enia does not labour contradistinctions; they resonate. His close relationship with his taciturn, astute, and loving father, is in counterpoint to the migrants he encounters, whose families have been violently rent asunder. Davide also learns from his father, who is a healer of hearts and a photographer of minutiae, that affect is honest only when it arises from compassionate observation and proximity. Papà observes sardonically, ‘Modern-day medicine is a blind form of medicine, in-depth investigations tell us basically that doctors no longer know how to use their eyes. And doctors no longer know how to use their eyes because no one taught them how. But I was taught to use my eyes’ (40). Technology has displaced techne; we live with a diminished sense that reality is concrete, variable, and context specific; that perception is first and foremost an activity. Similarly, in saturated fields of representation, we tend to receive and recycle words, phrases, and ideas. Names, categories, and polemics—stale, hackneyed, and imprecise language—lead us astray. The ‘concrete,’ as George Orwell argues, ‘melts into the abstract’ (1994, 350). The outlines of individual lives are blurred by the cataracts of enervated language and rehearsed positions. Paola, Davide’s friend and host, observes, ‘Lampedusa itself is now a container word: migrations, borders, shipwrecks, human solidarity, tourism, summer season, marginal lives, miracles, heroism, desperation, heartbreak, death, rebirth, redemption, all of it is there in a single name, in an impasto that still seems to defy a clear interpretation or recognizable form. […] And in a container, sure enough, you can put anything you like’ (9). When Davide is on the dock for the first time as rescued migrants are being disembarked from a Coast Guard vessel, he observes details: a newborn passed from hand to hand, a child’s torn t-shirt, a young girl fainting as a male volunteer relief worker approaches her, a man’s first slow steps on solid ground, the smell of diesel, the force of the wind. This is not a

192 

M. TITLESTAD

time or place for received formulations, for language that inures us. He cannot think of these migrants in terms of ‘quotas,’ ‘security,’ ‘statelessness,’ ‘fortification,’ ‘crisis,’ or ‘fundamentalism’. ‘Definitions,’ Enia writes, ‘mean nothing, they’re incapable of rendering the complexity of an event or of a human being. Perhaps, in the end, it all comes down to a simple fork in the road: If there’s a person drowning in a stormy sea, who am I? The one who dives in, even if it means risking my life, or the one who, terrified of death, remains safely clinging to dry land?’ (81–82). Seeing individuals clearly—as far as possible, for who they are—impels us to action. If, having seen, we stand back, then we have actively chosen to do so, and no political platitude can exonerate us. Seeing is both a moral imperative and a burden. Enia was not on Lampedusa on 3 October 2013. He includes the accounts of several of those who were. An islander, Vito, recounts how his leisure boat, with eight people on board, was the first on the scene. On seeing more than 200 dark silhouettes in the early morning light, struggling in the water, crying for help, he experienced paralysing fear: ‘How would we succeed in saving them all?’ (178). Seconds later, his instinct took over; he headed for the stern, gathering ropes and lifejackets along the way, and began pulling people from the water. Vito’s initial apprehension about the capacity of his boat became irrelevant and their task simple: ‘We continued hauling in people. Without even counting them. Without thinking about it. Without the slightest idea of where we’d put them. Get one in and keep looking. Get another and move on. Another and move on’ (178–79). The vessel was transformed into a lifeboat, a vital refuge afloat on a sunless sea. It would, if one had a bird’s eye view, be easy to trivialise the effort of Vito and his friends—theirs was a small boat in a sea of death. It is equally easy to sentimentalise linked hands and the women passengers rushing below deck and tearing down curtains to wrap the freezing Eritreans. But there is a middle course between self-indulgent cynicism and sentimentality. It is, as Enia suggests, simply not to cling to dry land; to commit to those who are drowning within your reach. This commitment, originating in the irreducible recognition of a drowning person’s humanity, should be uncomplicated. We should strive to be one of those people who does not even have to decide. Vito is presumably Carmine Menna. Emma Jane Kirby, a foreign correspondent and radio broadcaster for the BBC since 2001, travelled to Lampedusa after the 3 October shipwreck and, like Davide Enia, interviewed survivors as well as those who had been involved in the rescue and

17  REGARDING LAMPEDUSA 

193

recovery. Her radio reports are empathetic, nuanced, and insightful. Of those who she engaged, one preoccupied her. The optician of Lampedusa (2017) is her poetic rendering of the story of Carmine Menna’s awakening after he and his friends were the first to come upon that dreadful scene in the early hours of that Thursday morning. He is not named in the narrative; ‘the optician’ is a diffident, unassuming everyman. As the story proceeds, his occupation becomes a trope. ‘You had to be trustworthy as an optician. There was an intimacy about his job, about peering right inside someone’s eyeball, your face just inches from his or hers’ (15). Although his life’s work has been to help others to see clearly, the optician had, until the shipwreck, successfully overlooked the human tragedy unfolding in walking distance from his home and practice. Obviously, he was aware of it; migrants had been climbing through a hole in the fence at the reception centre and wandering down the Via Roma for months, many to ask residents for internet access so that they could contact their families or friends. They were met with trepidation and generosity in equal measure. On that awful morning, when the optician first saw the migrants ‘churning the sea into a frenzy with their flailing arms and legs,’ his first thought—as ‘Vito’ also recounted to Enia—was, ‘How […] do I save them all’ (28). But then he ‘lowered his outstretched arm slowly. In the water hands snatched despairingly upwards, clutching at air, reaching futilely towards him. He could see yellowing eyes staring wild and wide at him, frantic at the hope of salvation’ (28). Meeting the Eritrean’s gaze is intimacy; a recognition that the migrant and the optician, at that moment, are existentially coupled. Right-wing invective against identity politics and political correctness is nothing more than veiled racism, sexism, and homophobia. Yet we should be concerned that our fear of appropriating the suffering of others emphasises differences over our common humanity. Of course, we cannot identify with migrants, for their experience is unapproachable from our privileged settled lives. And we must never speak for them: it is our responsibility, where we have or can contrive influence, to ensure that they are afforded opportunities to speak for themselves, and that we do not drown out their voices. The question that Enia and Kirby confront is whether they are guilty of appropriation. Do they, and by extension their readers, reduce migrants’ suffering to a stage for the dramas of European consciousness and conscience? It is not coincidental that both works have untalkative, reticent characters at their centres (Papà and the optician), and that they both privilege sight over speech. Language—indelibly

194 

M. TITLESTAD

marked by misuse and rationalisation—obtrudes; it comes between us and the other. The silent witness who acts spontaneously with moral acuity is each writer’s touchstone. Neither Notes on a shipwreck nor The optician of Lampedusa, despite also being documentaries, are works of unqualified realism. They are also allegories in which Papà and the optician embody political and personal positions. The only defensible response to migrancy, which is a symptom of the radical inequalities of the contemporary world, is to plunge your hand into the water unthinkingly to save a dying man, woman, or child. That moment is not surveilled; it is intimate and private. It concerns just you and that person. As soon as you step back, wondering whether it is appropriate to reach out or how you will explain doing so, you have lost your chance. Writing about these moments in retrospect—as Enia and Kirby do—is not presumptuous, but courageous. Liberal humanism is regularly patronised by the left and the right. Their writing does not save a life, but it shows us how silent, observant, and spontaneous we need to be to do so. First, we need to learn truly to see. We can set Pietro Bartolo, a gynaecologist on Lampedusa, alongside the cardiologist and optician. Lampedusa: gateway to Europe (2017), co-­ authored with the Italian journalist, Lidia Tilotta, has none of the writerly self-reflection or poetic inflections of Enia and Kirby’s works. Bartolo has been responsible for the island’s clinic since 1991, is both a specialist gynaecologist and, out of necessity, a general practitioner, and he regularly conducts autopsies. His accounts of migrants’ injuries, illnesses, and the causes of their deaths are bleak. The details that he recounts are mediated by Tilotta (and translated by Chenxin Jiang), which may contribute to the work’s rather prosaic and unrelenting presentation of suffering. Yet, what Bartolo’s descriptions reveal is a doctor who, through meticulous examination, maps each migrant’s history of suffering, violation, and disease. Each patient’s body or a corpse articulates its traumatic past: most have been beaten or broken, almost all the women have been repeatedly raped, many are pregnant, and most of the migrants have septic wounds and diseases. Women, who are often relegated to the floors of dinghies, commonly have genitals burned from sitting in puddles of diesel, and more women than men suffer the effects of starvation. Migrancy, Enia observes, ‘is always worse for a woman’ (61). Bartolo repeatedly expresses his frustration that he can attend to only conspicuous injuries and illness: ‘it often troubles me that there is no drug that I can prescribe, no procedure I can perform to rid the soul of suffering, or treat the wounds you cannot see’ (32). He confesses frankly, ‘We

17  REGARDING LAMPEDUSA 

195

hardly ever consider the emotional fragility of the people who come to us for help, or the trauma they have suffered. We treat them unconsciously as beings with a different kind of psyche from our own, one that somehow deserves less attention’ (32). We are generally so guarded against possible accusations of racism, that we are unable to admit to our entrenched prejudices. Pietro Bartolo is unguarded; he recognises and admits to the limits of his empathy, while striving to address his shortcomings. He observes his patients so carefully, sees them in remarkable, even disconcerting detail, but struggles to get beyond the corporeal to the deeper damage of migrancy and precarity. The essential journey, he suggests each time he struggles for clarity, is from eyes to head, and then to heart; from diligent observation, to understanding as best we can in the labyrinths of our minds, to the least muddled empathy of which we are capable. In this chapter, I have neglected the obvious political and economic challenges: Europe cannot accommodate and integrate all migrants since employment opportunities are limited and welfare systems are stressed; opposition to migrancy has been the basis for the rise of populist politics and humanitarian, liberal, and socialist politics are increasingly on the defensive; states are motivated by nationalist priorities—internationalism, even regional cooperation, is more tenuous than it has been since World War II; and global inequality is, in spite and because of the digital divide, increasing (as indicated by GINI coefficient trends worldwide). Consequently, the ideas I have set out here probably seem sentimental and naïve. My commitment is that personal starting points—questions of sensibility—matter more than analysis and exegesis; that our first obligation is to strive for relationality, to jump into the sea or reach out for the hands of those who are drowning. We must not be mired in a web of propositions and contentions. You, Aaron and Rebecca, might also ask whether, to act, you need to travel to Lampedusa or Sicily, Juarez, El Paso or Aleppo, Sana’a or Kinshasa, Kigali or Zuwara. It is disrespectful to generalise migrancy, to lapse into a sugary notion that ‘we are all migrants of some sort’ or, even, that all migrants struggle equally. You are citizens of Israel and I am South African; both countries are primary migrant destinations with erratically and violently policed borders. We do not have to look far afield. Remember, too, that migrants—and more generally the sufferings of others—are a gift to us. It is only in the space of others that we have any chance of becoming meaningfully human.

196 

M. TITLESTAD

Works Cited Albahari, Maurizio. 2016. After the shipwreck: mourning and citizenship in the Mediterranean. Social research 83.2: 275–294. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/631163. Accessed 26 January 2021. Bartolo, Pietro and Lidia Tilotta. 2017. Lampedusa: gateway to Europe. Trans. Chenxin Jiang. London: Quercus. Dauksza, Agnieszka. 2018. Affective Diffusion Between Migrants and Inhabitants. Art Based on Migrant Movement. Open Cultural Studies 2: 262–272. https:// doi.org/10.1515/culture-­2018-­0024. Enia, Davide. 2017. Notes on a shipwreck: a story of refugees, borders, and hope. Trans. Antony Shugaar. New York: Other Press. Grant, Stephanie. 2011. Recording and identifying European Frontier deaths. European Journal of Migration and Law 13.2: 135–56. https://doi.org/1 0.1163/157181611X571259. Griswold, Eliza. 2012. Everyone is an immigrant. Poetry 199(4): 311–325. https://www.poetr yfoundation.org/poetr ymagazine/articles/69761/ everyone-­is-­an-­immigrant. Accessed 25 January 2021. Kirby, Emma Jane. 2017. The optician of Lampedusa. London: Penguin. Kuschner, Tony. 2016. Lampedusa and the migrant crisis: ethics, representation, and history. Mobile Culture Studies 2: 59–92. https://doi. org/10.25364/08.2:2016.1.6. Landau, Loren B. and Tanya Pamalone. 2018. I want to go home forever. Johannesburg: University of Witwatersrand. Mazzara, Federica. 2016. Subverting the narrative of the Lampedusa borderscape. Crossings: Journal of Migration & Culture 7.2: 135–147. https://doi. org/10.1386/cjmc.7.2.135_1. Nail, Thomas. 2015. The figure of the migrant. Palo Alto: Stanford. Orwell, George. 1994. Politics and the English language. In George Orwell: essays, ed. Bernard Crick. Harmondsworth: Penguin. 348–360. Press, Robert. 2017. Dangerous crossings: voices from the African migration to Italy/Europe. Africa today 64.1: 3–27. Gale Academic OneFile. Accessed 9 April 2021. Puggioni, Raffaela. 2015. Border politics, right to life and acts of dissensus: voices from the Lampedusa borderland. Third World Quarterly 36.6: 1145–1159. https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2015.1047199. Ramsay, Maya. 2016. Reframing the debate: the art of Lampedusa crossings. Crossings: Journal of Migration & Culture 7.2: 209–225. https://doi. org/10.1386/cjmc.7.2.209_1. Zagaria, Valentina. 2016. Performing Lampedusa in Miraculi: thoughts on theatre and research in a saturated field-site. Crossings: Journal of Migration & Culture 7.2: 193–208. https://doi.org/10.1386/cjmc.7.2.193_1.

CHAPTER 18

Jacki McInnes’s Urban Wreck

Jacki McInnes’s installation, Sleeps with the fishes, which was first exhibited in a group show, ‘When tomorrow comes’ (Wits Art Museum 2016), centred on a colour photograph, 80 cm in height and 190 cm wide. ‘Raft of the Medusa’ was conceived by McInnes and shot by Leon Krige. It depicts a group of thirteen men in a matt-grey dinghy, while two are supine, having seemingly fallen over the gunwales. The men—some wearing orange lifebelts—are arranged to evoke Théodore Géricault’s ‘The Raft of the Medusa,’ painted in 1818–1819. As we look at the photograph, the eye travels from the foreground, where a man lies over the stern with his arms outstretched, to the apex of the group, a figure waving a piece of red cloth towards the horizon. Géricault captured the moment when the fifteen survivors first descried the ship, the Argus, in the distance and desperately beckoned her. The mine dump looms wavelike in the background. Krige created this dry ocean by superimposing twenty to thirty images taken from the same vantage point at Shaft 2, Booysens, Johannesburg, over a three-year period (Interview 2021). To the left of the overcrowded boat is a plastic trolley, one of those used to move crates in supermarkets, to which are attached, as handles, the legs of an ironing board. The trolley, along with the men’s clothes, gender, and race, mark them as informal recyclers (Fig. 18.1). It is necessary to reiterate here the relevant events in the Medusa disaster. They are well known but can be variously inflected. In 1816, Hugues Douroy de Chaumareys, a pompous relic of the ancien régime, was rewarded with the captaincy of the Medusa by Louise XVIII, who had been restored to the throne after the Cent-Jours, which ended with © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Titlestad, Shipwreck Narratives: Out of our Depth, Maritime Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87041-6_18

197

198 

M. TITLESTAD

Fig. 18.1  Sleeps with the fishes (the raft of the Medusa). Jacki McInnes (photograph by Leon Krige) 2016

Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo. The Medusa, a forty-four-gun frigate, was the flagship of a flotilla sailing to Senegal, the possession of which reverted to France after the republican and imperial intervals. Chaumareys, who had not been to sea for a quarter of a century, refused the guidance of his more experienced officers, and fell under the influence of a braggart, Antoine Richefort, a member of the Société philanthropique, which was, in large measure, funding the expedition. Both men claimed more knowledge and expertise than they possessed and egged one another on to disaster: on the 16 July 1816, the Medusa ran aground on the treacherous Arguin Bank off Cap Blanc, with the West African coast still twelve to fifteen leagues distant. The crew did all they could to dislodge the ship, but over the next hours she began to take on water, and Chaumareys ordered evacuation. The officers and more esteemed passengers were allocated to the ship’s six boats. Lieutenant Jean-Baptiste Espiaux, a capable mariner and honourable officer, supervised the construction of a sizeable raft intended to carry the two companies of the Africa Battalion (a ragtag of 161 men), the sailors and the labourers: the boom, masts and spars were lashed together, and timber secured across them. As the men disembarked onto the raft, it sank beneath the surface and, once 147 were on board, it was a metre underwater. Seeing this, a group of sixty-three men decided to remain on the Medusa, raid the grog store, and jig down a happier road to oblivion. A handful of army officers and a few government officials volunteered to accompany the men, among them J.B. Henry Savigny, the ship’s surgeon and Alexandre Corréad, a geographical surveyor. These

18  JACKI MCINNES’S URBAN WRECK 

199

two would author the definitive account of the wreck and its aftermath, Narrative of a voyage to Senegal in 1816 (1818), which exposed the perfidy of the officers and formed the basis of the criminal prosecution of Chaumareys by a naval tribunal in Brest in 1816–1817. What act was so perfidious that it would scandalise France, catalyse English self-righteousness (see McKee 1975, 200–15 and Thompson 2007, 118–19), and lead to the imprisonment of Chaumareys and the demotion of several of his officers? As the last men disembarked onto the overcrowded raft, the captain promised that four of the boats in roped convoy would tow it to safety, while the other two boats would coast alongside. But there was a moment of confusion when the longboat, commanded by Espiaux, approached the ‘Senegal boat’ (as Corréad and Savigny refer to it) to transfer passengers. To avoid a collision, the lieutenant ordered the rope connecting the Senegal boat to the pinnace to be cut. The opportunistic or panicked Chaumareys, still under Richefort’s influence, ordered his leading barge to be detached. Then the men on the raft watched in horror as Lieutenant Joseph Reynaud, commanding the ‘Governor’s barge,’ hacked at the rope that was their lifeline. The raft was cut adrift; it was mastless and rudderless in a rough sea. The men waited in anticipation, expecting the boats to return. Only Espiaux’s longboat came alongside. The lieutenant offered to fire his boat’s twelve-pounder at Chaumareys’ barge, but it was soon out of range. The longboat was overcrowded and could not take in any more men; Espiaux sailed for the coast with the intention of summoning help. It was thirteen days before the fifteen survivors saw the Argus in the distance: it dipped below the horizon for a time and they became despondent, but it reappeared half an hour later and came to their rescue. The days on the raft had been hellish. Three bloody skirmishes had occurred when the men of the Africa Battalion—many having enlisted in the colonial corps to avoid sentences for violent crimes—and some of the sailors revolted against the junior officers and the ‘gentlemen’ who had assumed command. All the men had been coerced into leaving their firearms on board the Medusa, so they attacked one another and defended themselves with swords, axes, and pieces of timber ripped from the raft. Dozens died in these frenzies; a significant number were subsequently thrown into the sea to drown. When relative calm returned, the men began to experience lethargy, melancholia, and hallucinations brought on by hunger, dehydration, and despair. At the start of the journey their provisions amounted to one barrel of biscuit flour, which was soaked, turning its contents into

200 

M. TITLESTAD

paste, several barrels of wine, which dehydrated and inflamed those who quaffed it, and one barrel of water. By the fourth day, all of this had been consumed. In the nine ensuing days, waves crashing across the raft, the men clinging to ropes they had tied to the frame of the raft, they were reduced to unutterable abjection. On the sixth day, having exhausted all their options, including drinking their own and one another’s urine, chewing torn pieces of clothing and their sword belts, the men resorted to cannibalism, hanging cuts of flesh about the improvised mast to dry them to make them more palatable. Alexandre Corréad, at first Théodore Géricault’s informant, became his close friend and visited the artist’s studio frequently. It was opposite the Hȏpital Beaujon in Paris, a location Géricault had chosen with purpose. By befriending the nurses, he gained access to the hospital morgue, where he cut limbs from cadavers, on at least two occasion heads, and on another stole an entire corpse. He hoped that ‘The Raft of the Medusa’ would secure his place in the upper echelons of the Parisian art world, and his research was meticulous. He wished to study and sketch every stage of cadaverization and decomposition (see Miles 2008, 174). Corréad guided the construction of a scale replica of the raft in his studio, and Géricault carefully selected subjects to pose as each of the castaways, including Corréad as himself and the artist, Eugene Delacroix, as the man in the foreground face down with his arms outstretched. Although Géricault’s preliminary sketches depict putrefaction and cannibalism, the final painting is not explicit. It inflects the men’s inordinate suffering with republican sentiments. On the right-hand side, a half-submerged uniform evokes the tricolore; the nobility of the men’s bodies—which are classical in form rather than abject—sets them against the morally degenerate officers who abandoned them; and the figure at the apex waving a piece of white cloth is a black man. All hope depends on a person who, at the time, would barely have been regarded as human (see Miles 2008, 179–82). While he was politically progressive, it is possible that Géricault was also influenced by Corréad’s convictions; he was a staunch anti-royalist, abolitionist, and a bookseller trading in republican works. A few years after the painting was exhibited in Paris and then in London, Corréad was arrested and jailed for sedition. Jacki McInnes’s doctoral dissertation begins, ‘Contemporary South African society is deeply inequitable, thrusting the consumerist waste of those who have the means into the sphere of those whose most basic needs for survival are not adequately met’ (2021, 2). At 63 (or 63%), South

18  JACKI MCINNES’S URBAN WRECK 

201

Africa has the highest GINI coefficient in the world, which is an index of inequality or the disparity in wealth (see World Bank Report 2021), and unemployment hovers around 25% of the population and 55% of those between fifteen and twenty-five years of age (Government Statistics 2021). While constitutional apartheid ended with the first democratic election in 1994, the unemployed and the proletariat are overwhelmingly black, and capital is substantially owned or controlled by white South Africans. The post-apartheid government initiated economic and infrastructural reforms (set out in the various iterations of the Reconstruction and Development Plan), implemented widespread social welfare measures, and promoted, through employment equity strategies, the expansion of the black bourgeoisie. These policies have been moderately successful in offsetting the crippling legacy of apartheid. But the current regime has perpetuated, if not elaborated, the South African tradition of graft, while also fostering a bloated and inefficient administration, and an unwieldy public sector. Transition has been marked by internecine conflicts, cynical pacts, and special pleading within the Tripartite Alliance (dominated by the African National Congress); a shrill liberal opposition; an uncontrollable rise in crime; the unmet expectations of the poor; and a tide of African immigration, which has cultivated vile and violent xenophobia. Although the South African state is routinely characterised as teetering at the edge of an abyss, we should recall that it has always been considered unsustainable, yet it perseveres—driven, not by romantic nationalisms, as much as by a dogged determination of the working class and unemployed to survive one exploitative system after another. ‘Sleeps with the fishes (raft of the Medusa)’ translates Géricault’s painting and its political resonances into this post-apartheid context. The original painting metaphorizes Lieutenant Joseph Reynaud’s hacking of the lifeline connecting his barge to the Medusa raft; it stands for the ancien régime’s abandonment of republicanism and its crippling disregard for the well-being of common people. In Jacki McInnes’s ‘recontextualization’ (see McInnes 17), the informal recyclers on the mine dump represent those who the state and civil society have cut loose and set adrift. Informal recyclers, by their thousands, walk the streets of South African cities each day—most notably, Johannesburg—collecting categories of trash (tins, white paper, plastic, scrap metal, and cardboard), which they ferry to depots in plastic-weave bulk-bags atop their improvised trolleys. Their survival, and that of their families and comrades, depends on collecting and selling trash that is the detritus of the flailing machine of capitalism.

202 

M. TITLESTAD

The system itself, only buttressed by inequity, does not founder—rather, it wrecks the lives and worlds of those at its margins, making them castaways. The informal recyclers are condemned to salvaging the residual value that inheres in detritus. In the dehumanising logic of market economics, these are disposable men living off leftovers. The dinghy and the recycler’s trolley are contrivances saving the men from ‘drowning’ in the economic and political flows they are forced to navigate. It is not stretching the metaphorical line to see their trolleys as life rafts, their small sails billowing, as the men voyage for survival (Figs. 18.2 and 18.3). Arranged on a mine dump, McInnes’s tableau aggregates meaning. Johannesburg’s dumps are icons of the city’s rationale; it was founded on gold mining, which secured South Africa’s place in global flows of capital. The dumps are formed by the deposits from drying effluent after the gold has been extracted by dissolving it in a cyanide solution. The fine dust blown from the dumps is toxic, containing significant traces of radioactive uranium, arsenic, and lead (McInnes 38). These toxins are also leaching into the groundwater, causing intermittent contamination in the present while casting fundamental doubt on the city and its hinterland’s water security. But the mine dumps are not only mountains of toxic residuum; they are also monumental reminders of the history of South African labour. Since the first gold rush in 1886, mines on the Reef have drawn on a vast reserve of black labour extending up into the continent. These migrations accelerated the collapse of agrarian economies, undermined social structures, and gave rise to a serrated modernity—men and women were forced into exploitative wage labour, extending the reach and depth of the market, which in turn cultivated and consolidated inequality.

Figs. 18.2 and 18.3  House 38: hazardous objects. Jacki McInnes (Photographs by John Hodgkiss), 2009

18  JACKI MCINNES’S URBAN WRECK 

203

The Medusa’s voyage to Senegal was a colonial mission—the newly appointed Governor of the territory, all his officials, and the senior military commanders arrived safely in the boats to take up their positions. The men abandoned on the raft were expendable. Why endanger such a mission to preserve the lives of a conscripted lumpenproletariat, sailors, labourers, and the few professionals who acted morally by joining them? Colonialism contrives excess labour; there is always a population from which to recruit or enslave workers. The informal recyclers on the mine dump, crammed into the overcrowded boat, are the human remainder of neo-colonial economics. The boats still sail away and do not return, although the elite are now less conspicuous; only some wear uniforms, have titles, or are appointed by the state. But their power is only more invidious for its inscrutability. It is constituted at the confluence of capital, political influence, nepotism, access, influence, and bureaucratic acumen. This postcolonial maelstrom of power has the centrifugal force to cast ‘surplus people’ beyond its vortex into a state of precarity, homelessness, and poverty. Then, if one needs them at any stage, they can simply be drawn back into the formal economy. The large photograph, ‘Sleeps with the fishes (raft of the Medusa),’ was accompanied in the installation by three small framed works: ‘Land’s End’ (an abstract work, painted in oils and burnt tyre soot, that evokes a rocky outcrop and a horizon), ‘To them living means not dying (Kgalema Mothlanthe)’ (tangled lead thread mounted on paper), and ‘Plan of the raft of the Medusa: fifteen only were saved thirteen days after’ (a representation, in lead tape, of Alexandre Corréad’s illustration in Narrative of a voyage to Senegal). Finally, on the floor in front of the photograph, on a small wooden table, were a pair of men’s shoes made from beaten sheet lead (Fig. 18.4). Lead has been McInnes’s signature medium. One of her early works, the first iteration of Hazardous objects, comprises numerous trash objects replicated from beaten sheet lead collected in a recycler’s woven bulk-bag, and since then she has fashioned over fifty objects from lead which she has placed and photographed in various contexts, either in juxtaposition with concordant natural objects or in land- or seascapes. Lead, so dense and malleable and with a low melting temperature, was once essential in plumbing, construction, printing, soldering, cosmetics, and as ballast in ships, but since its toxicity was established (it is a neurotoxin), it is used as rarely as possible. To what various ends does McInnes use lead? Among them, it signifies the inert opposite of life. Its dull, grey, unreflective

204 

M. TITLESTAD

Fig. 18.4  Plan of the raft of the Medusa: fifteen only were saved thirteen days after. Jacki McInnes.

surface gives nothing back, and seeing nothing in it other than a remainder of all that is radiant, we comprehend and experience a dead end—it is a ‘base’ metal. We also associate lead with being weighed or dragged down, hence with encumbrance, burden, and hinderance. The ecocritical strand of McInnes’s work employs these connotations to stage our

18  JACKI MCINNES’S URBAN WRECK 

205

destruction of the natural world, its degradation by the trash that weighs it down and our displacement of life with its dead contrary or, in her fashioning seed pods from the metal, its replacement with a degenerated simulacrum. In Sleeps with the fishes, we are presented with lead shoes (which, like Mafia concrete, would make you ‘sleep with the fishes’); a tangled lead wire which, in conjunction with the statement by Kgalema Mothlanthe (who served as the country’s president for a year), suggests that survival is the only feasible priority of the poor; and an ironic lead replica of Medusa raft (the life raft is simultaneously a raft of death). We are also aware that particles of lead are swirling off the waves of the mine dump in the photograph, as well as contaminating the groundwater below. The earth itself is a ship which we are filling with more ballast than it can sustain. The installation depicts a moribund world in which atrophy, depravation, abasement, and indifference prevail. Yet, as with much of McInnes’s work, it is not solely nihilistic. As in Géricault’s painting, the men in the tableau have agency: their survival to this point is an accomplishment, the trolley metaphorizes enterprise among the ruins, and they are striving to be rescued. In her 2009 collaboration with John Hodgkiss, House 38: hazardous objects, the two were invited into a so-called ‘dark building’ in Sievewright Street in Central Johannesburg. There they encountered a Basuto community of around fifty men (migrants from Lesotho). These recyclers had established a community, with daily and weekly work routines, rotas for cooking, and financial arrangements (‘had’ because House 38 has been boarded up and partly demolished, presumably to be renovated by the property developers moving like steamrollers across the inner city). The men’s rooms were examples of domestication; they had made living spaces their own using discarded items, pictures, and furniture. They had, at least to the extent that it was possible, insinuated their needs and priorities to transform the empty cells of the disintegrating building into something more habitable and hospitable (Fig. 18.5). This is emblematic of the informal recyclers’ existence: they are sustained by trash. Whether deploying its use value in demarcating living quarters, or generating income from collecting and selling it, they are capitalising on consumers’ general wastefulness and disregard for the environment. In converting waste into sustenance, they create small eddies in the flows of capital, turning its sciolism and disregard for universal well-­ being into monetary value. Given that so many of these recyclers are migrants, from either rural South Africa or neighbouring African countries, portions of their income are disbursed in other contexts, in most of which poverty is endemic.

206 

M. TITLESTAD

Fig. 18.5  House 38: hazardous objects Jacki McInnes (Photographs by John Hodgkiss), 2009

In addition to this economic recycling, we can also characterise their labour as a version of environmentalism. Profligate industry and suburbia barely conceive the destination of what they discard—there are choking piles of trash across Johannesburg, illegal dumping is rife, and landfills of plastic are spilling over. We experience one public health crisis after another because of tainted water supplies, streams are clogged, and children play alongside rotting piles of uncollected garbage. In many areas, a sea of plastic is washing across uncontaminated land. Informal recyclers cannot stem this tide, but their work is far from incidental. Sadly, we need to acknowledge that their labour instigates another chain of exploitation and environmental degradation: garbage commonly flows down the gradient of wealth—from richer to poorer countries—where it is processed by exploitative and polluting companies. The flow of capital does not stop at the recycling depot, but at least the damage of discard is reduced along the way. It is morally and ideologically perplexing when bourgeois artists and naïve eco-warriors sentimentalise the lives and labour of informal

18  JACKI MCINNES’S URBAN WRECK 

207

recyclers. Their days are marked by rivalries, violence, superstition, and xenophobia; metaphorically, they are Ouroboros, a community of interest devouring itself. Their enclaves are as diverse, flawed, and riven as all communities in Johannesburg are. The recyclers are neither new-age emissaries nor heralds of some utopian political and economic opportunity. But they are also not embodiments of some post-apocalyptic future in which we are all homeless hunter-gatherers picking through the remains of late capitalism. Theirs is a pedestrian reality: step-by-step, hour-by-hour, they pick their way across the city, inhabiting it, appropriating here and there, making a living, making do. This is the productive ambiguity of Jacki McInnes’s ‘Raft of the Medusa’: the men, floating on a toxic sea of residuum, dependent for their livelihoods on trash, retain their dignity, and descry something that has only recently dropped below the horizon. But the lookout on the Argus will not spot them, and navigate to their rescue, if we extinguish the hope expressed in that waved red rag. But I sense that the Argus is currently a contrivance that will sail by the men on the raft, its navigator wilfully blind.

Works Cited Government unemployment statistics. 2021. stats.gov.za. Accessed on 5 March 2021. Krige, Leon. 2021. Email interview. 4 March 2021. McInnes, Jacki. 2021. Plumbing the depths: recycling conceived as life raft in a mediation from trash to worth. Doctoral Dissertation, submitted to the University of the Witwatersrand. McKee, Alexander. 1975. Death raft: the human tragedy of the Medusa shipwreck. London: Souvenir. Miles, Jonathan. 2008. Medusa: the shipwreck, the scandal, the masterpiece. London: Pimlico. Savigny, J, B Henry and Alexandre Corréad. 1818. Narrative of a voyage to Senegal in 1816; undertaken by order of the French government; comprising an account of the shipwreck of the Medusa, the sufferings of the crew and the various occurrences on board the raft, in the Desert of Zaara, at St. Louis and at the Port of Daccard 1818. Trans. from the French 1816 edition. London: Henry Colburn. Thompson, Carl. 2007. The suffering traveller and the Romantic imagination. Oxford: Oxford UP. World Bank. 2021. Gini Indices. Accessed 5 March 2021. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.POV.GINI?locations=ZA

CHAPTER 19

Constructive Wrecks

In July 2010, archaeologists were called to Ground Zero in Manhattan when construction workers clearing the site came across the bulwark planking of a wooden ship buried 6.7 meters below street level. Excavation had to be fastidious given the frangibility of the timber, yet also hasty since many of the more delicate oak fragments deteriorated visibly on exposure to the air (see Gannon 2014). Within days, a 9.75-meter section of the hull of an eighteenth-century sloop had been unearthed. Parts of the traverse frame, as well as beams, ribs, and planks could be removed for preservation and, in the days following (the short time for which construction could be suspended), around 7500 objects associated with the ship, including two of its anchors, were discovered. Experts set about establishing the ship’s age and origin. Through ‘dendrochronological dating,’ the counting and measuring of tree-rings, Dario Martin-Benito and his colleagues at the INIA Forest Research Centre were able to establish that the ship was built in 1773 of the same white oak used in the construction of Independence Hall, where the Declaration of Independence was signed. This precision was possible because there exists a ‘280-year floating chronology from nineteen samples of the white oak group’ (65)—wetter seasons result in proportionally wider rings. Given regional weather variations and historical records, they could also establish with certainty that the sloop had been built in a small shipyard outside Philadelphia. The timber revealed something else: researchers at the Maryland Archaeological Conservation Lab discovered traces of Lyrodus pedicellatus, a type of ‘shipworm’ found only in warm oceans (correspondence, Samford 2020). Given the range of the relatively small sloop, these © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Titlestad, Shipwreck Narratives: Out of our Depth, Maritime Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87041-6_19

209

210 

M. TITLESTAD

must have infested the hull in the Caribbean, from which we can deduce that she must have been either a trader or a slaver. The hulk had been used for ‘cribbing’. In the early 1800s, the sloop had been intentionally sunk. As real estate prices in New York skyrocketed, developers set about extending Manhattan into the Hudson River, before building a starburst of wharves along its east coast. Aging ships that could not be recommissioned were floated and roped into place, filled with rocks until they sank, and used for landfill. This practice was not uncommon—a few other ships similarly employed have been discovered beneath the streets of New York. This is not a shipwreck in the common sense. The sloop did not sink accidentally, and it entailed loss of neither life nor livelihood. The hull was used. There are analogous practices of ‘wrecking’: through history, coastal communities have capitalised on shipwreck—collected flotsam, stolen lagan, built their houses from ships’ timbers. But there are also figurative ways in which we have built on sunken ships. How might we think about the complicated relation between shipwreck and benefit, disaster and creation? We must proceed carefully. Intervention after disasters conventionally entails the extension of prevailing power structures. There is nothing like a good catastrophe for propagating and prolonging hegemony. Crises reduce the elite’s accountability; by invoking emergency powers—in Giorgio Agamben’s terms, by declaring ‘a state of exception’ (2005)— political and economic agents institute control, which persists long after the disaster has been managed. One of capitalism’s clarion calls, a stock obfuscation, is ‘the upside of down’. In this regard, two texts are typical: the Republican, Thomas Homer-Dixon’s The upside of down: catastrophe, creativity, and the renewal of civilization (2006) and, in our local context, The upside of down: how chaos and uncertainty breed opportunity in South Africa by Bruce Whitfield, a business guru (2020). Both promote what Naomi Klein calls ‘disaster capitalism’ or the ‘shock doctrine’ (2008). Global profiteers, she argues, exploit political, economic, even natural, upheaval. She identifies Milton Friedman as the arch-advocate of US exploitation of provincial vulnerability. While blustery gammon promotes disaster as an opportunity for revitalisation, adaptation, and invention, it is demonstrably an opportunity for corporations, bankers, investors, and other plutocrats to enhance the status quo. Since the elite generally profit from disaster and use it to consolidate their interests, we need to be modest in extolling its constructive aspects.

19  CONSTRUCTIVE WRECKS 

211

The buried ship—that once traded in commodities or slaves from the colonised Caribbean—and the World Trade Center are icons of commercial globalisation: respectively its origins and its culmination. Using the ship as landfill for the construction of a cathedral of capitalism figures the layered history of exploitative trade in which the metropolis sets the terms and exacts the cost. There is a further correspondence: the hulk had instrumental value as a foundation (literal and economic), while 9/11, in the guise of war against Al-Qaeda, licensed invasions, coups, profiteering by multinational corporations (most obviously Haliburton), and the declaration of operative states of exception, in Abu Ghraib and elsewhere (see Burke 2012). The US (and the UK and EU) built on 9/11, protracting the disaster as it proved increasingly profitable and politically expedient. The powerful put catastrophe and the shock it induced in the population to use. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, shipwreck and its representation were politically, economically, and ideologically functional. The calamitous interruption of mapped itineraries, in many instances, abetted European expansionism. We read in shipwreck narratives that soon after officers, crews, functionaries, and passengers were washed up on strange shores, they set about studying and documenting indigenous societies, naturalists set about their codifying work, and representatives of states or companies assessed the economic viability of a territory and described opportunities for settlement. It was not uncommon for a small party from a wrecked ship to remain on shore when the others were rescued—to stake a claim. We think of empire as proceeding according to a grand plan framed by organised intentions and clear priorities: yet error, disorientation, coincidence, and poor judgement oft-times served imperialism well. Being lost, agents of empire discovered new regions to survey, new opportunities to exploit; then, finding their bearings, they mapped the world in relation to London, Paris, Berlin, Brussels, and New York. The representation of shipwreck and castaway experiences in pamphlets, chapbooks, broadsheets, fictional adaptations, and even official reports constituted one of the first European popular literatures (from the sixteenth century in Portugal and Spain, and the eighteenth in Britain, Germany, France, the US, and their colonies). Synchronous with the emergence of the novel, these narratives nourished the new genre. Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) was the first English novel and the four adventures in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s travels (1726) are initiated by wrecks, desertion by shipmates, and marooning. One might assume that

212 

M. TITLESTAD

tales of misfortune and travail would detract from the desire for voyaging and discovery and temper the public’s belief in manifest destiny. Yet shipwreck narratives were integral to the textual culture that buttressed European imperialism and then colonialism. They extolled colonial values, which were clarified and pronounced in adversity, and they promoted the robust masculinity we associate with imperialist polemics. Castaways’ mastery of themselves, circumstance, and others was exemplary; their moral fortitude, even when they were abject, embodied ideals embraced and propagated by armchair mariners and explorers. There is a more subtle level at which shipwreck narratives served European expansionism. Many represent the demotion of European subjects, indicated by their nakedness, vulnerability, capture, and even enslavement (the last particularly in eighteenth-century accounts of British and American sailors wrecked on the Barbary Coast or in West Africa and taken by Arab slavers). Castaways were susceptible to attacks and humiliation by natives, the environment was inhospitable, even hostile, they were reduced to savagery, often to the condition of hunter-gatherers, and the props of European ‘civilisation’ were rendered worthless. But the inversion of colonial relations was isolated and temporary. In a general sense (rather than Agamben’s), the precarity of the shipwreck survivor is ‘a state of exception’. Hegemony awaits just over the horizon; the order of power shall be restored, and the world will right itself. Shipwrecks, it follows, commonly undergird colonial relations—strengthen its foundations, rather than erode them. We might add ‘disaster colonialism’ to Naomi Klein’s ‘disaster capitalism,’ but the two are really synonyms. What political function do shipwreck narratives fulfil in our contemporary world? A neo-Romantic adulation of solitude, fortitude, and endurance persists, with the number of days at sea and scarcity of rations being the most important indices of hardship. Occasional instances of cannibalism and abjection continue to fascinate us, and we are amused by a coked­up captain being blown by a prostitute as his cruise liner sails into an island. There is an obsession with the Titanic, sentimentalised in the abomination that is James Cameron’s film. But the only wrecks that are truly significant in the present are those of migrants, with the mass death on the Mediterranean crossing being most visible. In 2020, 1 400 African and Middle Eastern migrants en route to Europe drowned, down from the highest number, 5142, in 2016 (UNHCR 2020). This atrocity has been widely reported and studied, but inhumanly managed. It is glib to assert a single cause, but global inequities in wealth and development are

19  CONSTRUCTIVE WRECKS 

213

its root—those scrabbling over limited resources have been drawn into civil and internecine conflicts, violent fundamentalism has escalated across the regions, food insecurity has become endemic, and the rape of women has been used systematically by military regimes and militias. This desperate situation is exacerbated by corrupt and brutal leadership. Migrant maritime disasters, unlike colonial shipwrecks, do not brace the contemporary neo-colonial order other than creating the impression that ‘Fortress Europe’ is being stormed, and needs to be protected at all costs. The failing underfunded Operations Triton and Poseidon are doing little to save lives: the range of their vessels is limited to 30  km off the Italian and Greek coasts respectively, and their emphasis is on border control rather than rescue—all boats encountered are turned back, irrespective of whether they are seaworthy. In addition to confronting us with the realities of globalisation and inequality, migrant shipwrecks—if we even look—reveal Europeans’ inhumanity and the contours of their fear. For a minority, the ongoing tragedy has revitalised their ethical imagination. These shipwrecks and thrashing black bodies in the sea compel our conscience: make us see and think about others and, in doing so, force us to confront ourselves. They call us to duty. There are other ways in which structures of feeling and thought have arisen from contemplating historical wrecks and their inscription in texts. These are subtle and any description is impressionistic. We might think first of revisions. Postcolonial and feminist authors have intervened in the colonial archive of shipwreck and castaway narrative, revising it to reflect history in less distorted, Eurocentric, and patriarchal terms. Writing against the grain of received representations, they have exposed the ideological substructure of their progenitors’ works; in revising them, they have insinuated new imaginative and political possibilities into the tradition. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century shipwreck stories are commonly phallocentric allegories of colonialism, or at least endorse the values and priorities that are its basis. Although the legacy of imperial romance is tenacious in popular literature, the most compelling authors of contemporary shipwreck fiction and poetry present counter narratives that unseat the white male sovereign subject. They trouble the historical water, sink inscribed ships, and assemble from their detritus new hulls and masts— which they smash against the rocks with different ideological consequences. Often the most constructive engagement with an archive of representation is subversion, and the insinuation of new priorities. We can count among these engagements Aimé Césaire (Une têmpete), Derek

214 

M. TITLESTAD

Walcott (Omeros), J. M. Coetzee (Foe), Patrick White (A fringe of leaves), David Malouf (Remembering Babylon), Gabriel Garciá Márquez (The story of a shipwrecked sailor), Akira Yoshimura (Shipwrecks), Charlotte Rogan (The lifeboat), and Josué Guébo (Think of Lampedusa). At each historical horizon, we (re)invent the shipwrecks that we need. Space voyaging is figured in nautical—often specifically naval—terms, particularly in speculative fiction. The captain commands the star ship from the bridge, the navigator describes a course through uncharted space (aster incognitae) or to colonised planets, the science officer is a naturalist studying and classifying alien life forms, life-pods are used for evacuation, and ships crash on unknown planets, leaving a small group of crew or passengers, or an individual, stranded—from Charles Logan’s Shipwrecked (1975) to Andy Weir’s The Martian (2014). Science fiction reworks the Robinsonade, stretching it into new technologies and temporalities, yet still placing hope, resilience, and enterprise on trial. The genre is what Frederic Jameson terms an ‘archaeology of the future’—our future imaginary is held hostage by the past and its modes of production (2005: xiii). Disaster, at least our comprehension and representation of it, is intertextual, and in salient ways shipwreck, which is not fundamental in our modern world, reaches into the present and into our conception of possible futures. Shipwrecks continue to sail. We cannot subsume all encounters with the uncanny, experiences of hospitality and hostility, epistemic rupture, and insights into human relationality under ‘the political’. Inasmuch as we need to historicise shipwreck, it has also been a rhetorical and conceptual basis of philosophical enquiry. This is set out in Hans Blumenberg’s aphoristic history of the use of shipwrecks and castaways in disquisitions and polemics, from the pre-­ Socratics to postmodernists (1997). Maritime disaster, beyond being a compulsive subject across human history, has given us motifs and tropes with which to think about the human condition, the nature of fate and fortune, our encounters and engagements with others, and overwhelming loss. As we have reconstructed human history by diving wrecks—capsules of the past lying on the seabed—so we can trace a history of thought, understanding, and affect by considering the lineage of shipwreck tropes and their ontological and epistemological import. Representations build upon prior representations; each successive figuration is dependent on precursors, while also situating new configurations of wrecks at successive epistemic horizons. At some level, we cannot think without shipwrecks and castaways.

19  CONSTRUCTIVE WRECKS 

215

A specific lineage of figuration informs my obligation to shipwreck. Imbricated with the political, literary, and philosophical significance of shipwreck is the existential. Much of my recent writing about wrecks is contextualised by a neurological condition which is causing dissociation, disorientation, and failing memory. It is currently navigable, but degeneration is making my death, or at least erasure, take shape. In the last five years, these changes have transacted with shipwreck: they resonate with it and it makes them easier to imagine and express. My writing has also become a repository of thinking and feeling. When I revisit and revise it, I am aware of changes—but not only of loss. My wrecks are taking on new inflections—I am approaching them with increasing obliquity and with less allegiance to scholarly protocols. The splintering of a hull in a formless sea has become part of my story. This is not unique to me. Shipwreck writers are often aware of this dimension: their stories are also about the fracturing of the self, of being washed onto institutional rocks, of being lost at sea and losing your bearings, and of swimming desperately to grab the gunwales of a life raft that is forever drifting away. We have built edifices of meaning—from the political to the personal— on a foundation of shipwrecks, and we continue to do so. This is not special pleading; shipwrecks are only one bedrock of thought. At the same time, if you look at them long enough, the world passes in front of your eyes.

Works Cited Agamben, Giorgio. 2005. The state of exception. Trans. Kevin Attell. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Blumenberg, Hans. 1997. Shipwreck with spectator: paradigm of a metaphor for existence. Trans. Steven Rendall. Cambridge Mass.: MIT. Burke, Jason. 2012. The 9/11 wars. London: Penguin. Césaire, Aimé. 2000. Une têmpete/A tempest. Trans. Philip Crispin. London: Oberon. Coetzee, J. M. 1986. Foe. London: Secker and Warburg. Defoe, Daniel. 1993. Robinson Crusoe. Ladybird Books Ltd. Gannon, Megan. 2014. Origins of the World Trade Center ship. Live Science, 28 July. https://www.livescience.com/47026-­origins-­world-­trade-­center-­ship. html. Accessed 18 March 2021. Guébo, Josué. 2017. Think of Lampedusa. Trans. Todd Fredson. Lincoln: University of Nebraska.

216 

M. TITLESTAD

Homer-Dixon, Thomas. 2006. The upside of down: catastrophe, creativity, and the renewal of civilization. London: Souvenir. Klein, Naomi. 2008. The shock doctrine. London: Penguin. Jameson, Frederic. 2005. Archaeologies of the future: the desire called utopia and other science fictions. London: Verso. Logan, Charles. 1975. Shipwrecked. London: Gollansz. Malouf, David. 1994. Remembering Babylon. New York: Vintage. Márquez, Gabriel Garciá. 1989. The story of a shipwrecked sailor. Trans. Randolph Hogan. New York: Vintage. Martin-Benito, Dario (et  al.). 2014. Dendrochronological dating of the World Trade Center ship, Lower Manhattan, New  York City. Tree-ring research 70.2. 65–77. Rogan, Charlotte. 2013. The lifeboat. New York: Back Bay. Samford, Pamela. 2020. Email correspondence: Director, Maryland Archaeological Conservation Lab. 6–9 September. Swift, Jonathan. 2001. Gulliver’s travels. New York: Norton. UNHCR. 2020. The sea route to Europe. unhcr.org. Accessed 28 March 2021. Walcott, Derek. 1992. Omeros, New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. Weir, Andy. 2014. The Martian. New York: Crown. White, Patrick. 1977. A fringe of leaves. New York: Viking. Whitfield, Bruce. 2020. The upside of down: how chaos and uncertainty breed opportunity in South Africa. Johannesburg: Pan Macmillan. Yoshimura, Akira. 2000. Shipwrecks. Trans. Mark Ealey. Boston: Mariner.

CHAPTER 20

Postscript: Thinking from the Sea

How do we change our perspective? Colloquially, we bring a new—less familiar, less settled—language to bear on phenomena. In scholarship, this new language must comprise a lexicon and range of tropes that present as coherent and cogent, and which prize open new cognitive, intellectual, and political possibilities. It is not uncommon to term these moments of repositioning, following Thomas Kuhn’s posited history of science (see 1962), ‘paradigm shifts’—a phrase that carries with it the implication of ‘revolutions’ in thinking. In the humanities, epistemic interruptions of business as usual are fuzzier. They are indicated by the incremental adoption of new idioms, which fashion interpretative obliquities that subsequently attract converts, who develop related courses, form research entities, and attract funding. Novel methodologies, proclaimed as ‘cutting edge,’ come to drive intellectual agendas—and affiliation, loyalty, and commitment are the badges of belonging. It follows that ‘new approaches’ (or at least reorganised emphases) incline to stress their differences from their forebears rather than conceding continuities. They also police their boundaries, largely to assert their innovation and coherence, but also to ring-fence institutional resources. One such shift in the humanities—which began two decades ago—was the ‘oceanic turn’. It was championed by a range of luminaries, particularly cultural historians and literary scholars, among whom the most influential have been Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh, Bernard Klein, Paul Gilroy, Heather Blum, Iain Chambers, Margaret Cohen, Steve Mentz, Josiah Blackmore, Michael Pearson, David Armitage, and David Abulafia. As one might expect, early rallying calls verged on evangelism. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Titlestad, Shipwreck Narratives: Out of our Depth, Maritime Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87041-6_20

217

218 

M. TITLESTAD

Iain Chambers claimed, ‘To return to the sea, to a maritime discipline, is to unhook a particular language and its explanations from the chains of authority, allowing it to drift toward another shore, from where the locality and provincialism of its previous home can be registered’ (2010, 680). The implication is that—having been trapped in our landlocked perception and analysis—we have lost sight of the oceanic dynamics of culture, and the interpretations and knowledge we can derive from them. Scholars have been tethered to nation states and nationalism, citizenship, cultural exceptionalism, and territorial sovereignty. Returning to the sea, in Chambers’s opinion, will free us from this ‘provincialism’ by emphasising mobility, exchanges, dispersion, heterogeneity, littorality, navigation, the hydrosphere, and—above all—exchange and relationality. Further, cosmopolitan, fluid, and discrepant communities of seafarers (sailors, fisherman, traders, labourers, and tradesmen) present sociality, arrangements of authority, and communities of practice, that contrast informatively with their landed counterparts. Hester Blum’s advocating of the ‘oceanic turn’ is no less spirited: we need, she argues, to ‘[shove] off from land- and nation-based perspectives [to find] new critical locations from which to investigate questions of affiliation, citizenship, economic exchange, mobility, rights, and sovereignty’ (2013, 152). This harmonises with the growth in the 1990s of transnational studies but encourages an expanded scholarly remit: to focus on networks and circulation at hemispheric and global levels. As economic and cultural globalisation came to dominate public discourse, ‘ocean studies’ was well placed for engagement—and their importance will only increase with ecological and climate emergencies. The sea-changes we are already experiencing will cause mass climate migrancy and food shortages within a decade and the lives of coastal and littoral communities will be forever altered. Our signal obligation as scholars will be to engage increasingly with what Paul Gilroy (1993) and Arjun Appadurai describe as ‘planetarity’—storms are gathering, and although the poor will suffer first and most, it will soon matter less where and how you live. Inevitably, the oceanic turn gave rise to nomenclature to encompass academic communities and attract resources: book series, conferences, and research projects were gathered as ‘critical ocean studies,’ ‘the new thalassology,’ ‘maritime studies,’ ‘blue cultural studies,’ and the ‘blue humanities’—the last two coined by Steve Mentz (2015, 178). In addition to its intellectual priorities, this confederacy had affective and political strands. There seemed promise, sometimes euphoria, in abandoning landlocked

20  POSTSCRIPT: THINKING FROM THE SEA 

219

projects—that appeared bounded, bordered, located, divisive, and regulated—in favour of thinking from the sea, producing studies that would be more inclusive, subtle, versatile, and fluid than terrene pedantry and intellectual cartography had made possible. James L. Smith and Steve Mentz (2015) see this inclusivity as potentially integral, not only to critical pedagogy, but to an ethical reorientation of the academy. ‘A necessary component of our efforts at respectful knowledge sharing in ocean studies will be to recognise the limits of our own expertise and to listen to a diversity of oceanic knowledge from beyond the global north. We embrace multiplicity and refuse totality. In this respect, we recognize different patterns in current representations of global blue humanities’ (1). The modern academy, they continue, ‘requires a deliberately inclusive scholarly apparatus, made up of a community of listeners and amplifiers, rather than talkers and totalizers’ (2). It is optimistic to believe that the oceanic turn could have this democratising effect—but there is no harm in aiming high. The critical ocean studies network has served me well—I have been mentored, funded, published, and welcomed into various academies because of my affiliations and connections. It seems churlish, then, to sound two cautionary notes. Implied in ‘turn’ and central to conceptions of the blue humanities is an assumption that we have left the oceanic and maritime world behind us and we need to return to galvanise our intellectual enterprises. There is so much evidence to the contrary. Some examples: languages are saturated with marine vocabulary and permeated with boat, ship, and seafaring terms (see Jeans 2004); nautical tropes have percolated, not only into common speech, but—as Blumenberg (1997) and others have demonstrated – into the most profound (and abstruse) epistemological, existential, and ontological enquiries; so much literature, visual art, and music has been briny or littoral; and the professional and amateur obsession with naval and mercantile marine history has never wavered (these are all explored in this volume). It is also rhetorical to suggest that sociological, political, economic, or literary studies have, in any meaningful sense, neglected the sea and its multiple relations with tellurian communities, city authorities, and landsmen. This is not to suggest that oceanic studies are conceptually flawed, but rather that we should emphasise the entanglement of land and sea and in metaphorical terms, locate our thought in the littoral. My second caution relates to free-floating metaphorisation. When writing about shipwrecks, I find myself lured into nautical tropes: shallows, tides, reefs, lifeboats, shoals, anchors, the high seas, stranding, being cast

220 

M. TITLESTAD

away, adrift, and drowning, take on figural meanings. While these metaphors can be analytically apposite, they risk being quaint. Many of those engaged in ‘blue studies’ endorse this transposition (from the literal to the figural), but it can come at a cost. The actual sea—more accurately, the various distinct oceans—is quickly dematerialised and deprived of its historicity through figuration. While poststructuralists of a watery ilk (the acolytes of those Geoffrey Hartman called the ‘boa-deconstructors’) see no meaningful difference between reality and tropes, free-flowing oceanic figuration can take us further from the sea—into abstraction, a universalising soggy poetics. Helen M. Rozwadowski (2018) warns against this tendency in maritime scholarship and defends the alternative. ‘We must jettison our perception of the sea as a timeless place, apart from humans. We must transform our understanding of the sea to one bound with history and interconnected with humanity’ (227). Elizabeth Deloughrey is similarly unambiguous. ‘In positioning the sea as history, maritime studies focuses on how human beings are formed by the ocean rather than how the ocean might be formed by human history’ (707). The ocean is not simply at our disposal to be remade flamboyantly at our analytical convenience. What, with Rozwadowski and Deloughrey’s positions in mind, can we take from shipwreck studies? As a panacea to poststructuralist incontinence, Blum (2010, 670–674) considers the figure of the historical and mythological sailor. Her ‘new historicism’ is cognisant of shifting models of onboard sociality from the seventeenth century, the lineaments of naval and marine mercantile authority, and the impact of economics on seafaring (the distribution of capital, speculation, wages, and organised labour). But she also considers ships to be chronotopes that offer opportunities to contemplate landed arrangements of power and social practices—for her, the analytical importance of oceanic studies rests in counterpoint and contrast. This is how I read shipwreck narratives in this volume. Coastal shipwreck narratives represent the catastrophic destruction of a microcosmic maritime world, and its—usually traumatic—adjustment to a landed context marked by distinct lineaments of power, social practices, and ethical demands. Shipwreck stories are persuasive and provoking stories of the imbrication of oceanic and terrestrial worlds—the littoral is a space of cultural and existential liminality (see Turner 1969). The historical and cultural contextualisation I endeavour to provide in each of my chapters is intended to dispel any sense that the littoral and liminal are abstract

20  POSTSCRIPT: THINKING FROM THE SEA 

221

concepts: men and women, situated in time and place, swam ashore, discovered specific worlds and societies in which they had to make do. This begs a question: can the existential themes of shipwreck narratives be historicised? People do not die in the same way over time, the emotion and practice of grief is specific to a historical horizon, and the textual representation of death is variously encoded (see Kellerhear 2007, and Airés 2008). Shipwreck narratives present a history and a taxonomy of abjection, death, grief, trauma, and trauma. We should recall that these narratives are biased in favour of the literate, wealthy, socially connected, and influential. The mass death of the poor—migrants, passengers on Indian and African ferries, fishermen (among whom death is more common than in any other profession), and common sailors—barely leaves a textual trace. If we are to historicise suffering and death, we need to read texts closely for omissions. Finally, let me personalise and historicise the existential. Over the last decade, my shipwreck writing has paralleled a neurological degeneration, perhaps caused by Lewy bodies. This volume of essays has entailed—in several instances—revisioning and rewriting earlier pieces considering my current preoccupations (and from my troubled present). Each inscribes and bares a trace of personal history, at the same time as I strive to reframe the political, cultural, and literary history presented in each shipwreck narrative. This might be self-indulgence, but there is at least one defence. The history of shipwreck narrative is one of revision, adaptation, the insinuation of new possibilities, and claiming ownership. People have made these stories their own; they have made from them new works that ensure that shipwrecks, the dead, the survivors, the strangers they encounter, and mourners live on. While my project is personal, it has also been an honour to join the ranks of armchair mariners, obsessed readers of maritime writing, and those who simply cannot stop themselves repeating shipwreck stories.

Works Cited Airés, Phillipe. 2008. The hour of our death. Trans. Helen Weaver. London: Vintage. Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at large: cultural discussions of globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Blum, Hester. 2010. Appeal of oceanic studies. PMLA 125.3 May: 670-77. doi: https://doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2010.125.3.670.

222 

M. TITLESTAD

Blum, Hester. 2013. Introduction: oceanic studies. Atlantic Studies 10.2: 151-155. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/14788810.2013.785186 Blumenberg, Hans. 1997. Shipwreck with spectator: paradigm for a metaphor of existence. Trans. Steven Rendall. Cambridge Mass.: MIT. Chambers, Iain. 2010. Maritime criticism and theoretical shipwrecks. PMLA 125.3: 678-684. doi: https://doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2010.125.3.678. Elizabeth Deloughrey.2010. Heavy waters: waste and Atlantic modernity. PMLA 125. 3 703-712. doi: https://doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2010.125.3.703. Gilroy, Paul. 1995. The black Atlantic. Boston: Harvard University Press. Gilroy, Paul. 1993. The black Atlantic: modernity and double-consciosness. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Jeans, Peter D. 2004. Ship to shore: a dictionary of everyday words and phrases derived from the sea. New York: International Marine. Kellerhear, Allan. 2007. A social history of dying. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kuhn, Thomas. 2012. The structure of scientific revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mentz, Steve. 2015. Shipwreck modernity: ecologies of globalisation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. Rozwadowski, Helen M. 2018. Vast expanses: a history of the oceans. London: Reaktion. Smith, James L. and Steve Mentz. 2020, Learning an inclusive blue humanities: Oceania and academia through the Lens of Cinema. Humanities 9. 67. doi:https://doi.org/10.3390/h9030067 Turner, Victor. 1969. The ritual process: structure and anti-structure. Oxford: Aldine.

Index

A Abjection, 2, 37, 44, 69–71, 200, 212, 221 Adamastor, 149, 150 Africa Battalion, 62, 63, 65, 73, 198, 199 African American, 116, 124, 169–171 ‘toast,’ 169, 171 Agamben, Giorgio, 15, 68, 210, 212 ‘bare life,’ 68 Homer sacer, 68 ‘state of exception,’ 68, 210, 212 Allegory, 9, 88, 98, 114, 115, 117, 118, 143, 145, 150 AmaMpondo, 38, 39, 146 Anabaptism, 10, 13 Ancien régime, 62, 72, 197, 201 Anson, Commodore George, 21–24, 29–32 Anson Expedition, 21, 26, 32 Antinomianism, 11–13 Apartheid, 144, 147, 172, 201

Apocalypse, 13, 16, 17, 173 Apollonian, 100, 118 Arakan Coast, 50, 55 Archaeology, 214 Articles of War, 20, 23, 26, 27, 33 Asymbolia, 69–71 Aufrechnung, 181 Authority, 9, 12–15, 20, 24, 27, 29, 38, 43, 47, 67, 75, 95, 123, 125, 135, 136, 170, 187, 218, 220 ‘Autumn’ (hymn), 155, 156, 170 B Bakhtin, Mikhail, 67 Barthes, Roland, 104 Bartolo, Pietro, 194, 195 Lampedusa: gateway to Europe, 194 Batavia’s Graveyard (now Beacon Island), 9, 10, 14, 16, 17 Batavia (ship), 7–17 Bathurst, Bella, 94, 95, 101

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Titlestad, Shipwreck Narratives: Out of our Depth, Maritime Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87041-6

223

224 

INDEX

Blackmore, Josiah, 41, 42, 217 Manifest perdition, 41 Blue cultural studies, 218 Blue humanities, 218, 219 Blumenberg, Hans, 165–167, 174, 214, 219 metaphorics, 166, 174 Boatswain, 26, 28 ‘Bounty of the sea,’ 94 Bounty (ship), 52 Brethren of the Free Spirit, 10, 13 Brito, Gomes de, 42 História trágico-maritima, 42 Bryars, Gavin, 153–162 conceptual art, 154 Jesus’ blood never failed me yet, 155 The sinking of the Titanic, 154, 157 Buchan, George, 76–82, 85, 87 Narrative of the loss of the Winterton, 76 Bulkeley, John, 19, 20, 22–30 A voyage to the South Seas 1740–1, 19, 31 Burial at sea, 54 Byron, George Gordon Lord, 23, 25, 28, 57–59 Don Juan, 57, 58 Byron, John, 19, 23, 30, 57 C Cadaverization, 54, 71, 200 Cameron, James, 167, 212 Camões, Luís Vaz de, 144, 149 The Luciads (Os Lucíados), 149 Campbell, Alexander, 19, 25, 30, 79 Cannibalism, 2, 41, 43, 53, 58, 66–69, 71, 134, 200, 212 Captaincy, 62, 116, 197 Captivity, 2, 86 Carnivalesque, 23 Carrying capacity, 136–138

Carter, George, 35–41, 43–45 A narrative of the loss of the Grosvenor, 35 Castaway, 7, 8, 15, 24, 30, 36, 37, 39, 41, 42, 53, 54, 57, 64, 69–71, 81, 83, 87, 105, 107, 109, 110, 116, 123, 129, 135, 166, 168, 200, 202, 211–214 Cent-Jours, 62, 73, 197 Centurion (ship), 21, 22 Certeau, Michel de, 140, 171 Césaire, Aimé, 213 Chaudhuri, Rosinka, 59 Chaumareys, Hugues Douroy de, 62, 63, 72, 73, 197–199 Cheap, Captain David, 19–25, 27–31, 57 Chronotope, 11, 67, 220 Cobb, James Daphne, 93–101 The watchers on the longships, 96 Coetzee, J. M., 214 Command, 1, 2, 14, 19, 21, 22, 25–30, 33, 36, 38, 42, 70, 72, 73, 106, 116, 123, 125, 134, 135, 183, 199, 214 Commodore (ship), 103, 104, 106, 108 Composition (music), 154, 158, 159, 162 Cornelisz, Jeronimus, 7, 8, 10–17 Cornish wreckers, 96 Corréad, Alexandre, 61–66, 68–73, 198–200, 203 Narrative of a voyage to Senegal in 1816, 61, 199, 203 sedition, 200 Costeau, Jacques-Yves, 1 Épaves (Ten fathoms deep), 1 Par dix-huit mètres de fond, 1 Court martial, 31 Coxon, Captain John, 36, 38, 39, 42, 43, 145 Cozens, Henry, 19–21, 24, 25, 28–30

 INDEX 

Crane, Stephen, 103–112, 134 ‘The open boat,’ 104, 105, 108, 112, 134 Red badge of courage, 104 Cribbing (landfill), 210 Critical ocean studies, 219 Cullen, Isabella, 75–78, 81–83, 85–88 Cummins, John, 19, 20, 23, 26–29, 31 A voyage to the South Seas 1740–1, 19, 31 ‘Custom of the sea,’ 67 D Dale, John, 76–78, 80–83, 85, 87 Narrative of the loss of the Winterton, 76 Dalrymple, Alexander, 36–39 An account of the loss of the Grosvenor, 36 Dash, Mike, 11–13, 15, 16 Batavia’s Graveyard, 11 ‘Dead wreck,’ 94, 95 Debris, 7, 148, 171, 188 Defamiliarisation, 170 Defoe, Daniel, 211 Robinson Crusoe, 211 Delacroix, Eugene, 71, 200 Delusion, 145, 146 Depression, 125, 129 Derozio, Henry Louis, 58–59 Derrida, Jacques, 84, 85, 139 aporia, 85 Of grammatology, 139 hospitality, 84, 85 hostipitality, 85 il n’y a pas de hors-texte, 139 Despair, 55, 99, 110, 112, 123, 171, 199 Dickens, Charles, 45 Household Words, 45

225

Didacticism, 54, 96 Dionysian, 24, 100 Disorientation, 10, 43, 51, 56, 211, 215 Distributive justice, 137 Drake-Brockman, Henrietta, 9–11, 13 Voyage to disaster, 9 The wicked and the fair, 9 Drury, Robert, 86 Madagascar (journal), 86 Dufourmantelle, Anne, 85 Du Maurier, Daphne, 93–101 Jamaica Inn, 96, 98, 101 Duminy, Captain François Renier, 38 Dundas, Captain George, 76, 77 Dutch East India Company (VOC), 7, 87 Dysentery, 8, 54 Dystopia, 2, 7–17 E East Indiaman, 21, 31, 35, 75, 76, 145, 147 Echac, Machel, 1 Enia, Davide, 191–194 Notes on a shipwreck, 191, 194 Eno, Brian, 153–162 ambient music, 159 The ship, 158–160 studio, 159 Velvet Underground, 161 vertical sound, 159 Enzensberger, Hans Magnus, 165–174 Cuba, 167, 169 Kommune 1, 168 Kommune 2, 172 The sinking of the Titanic, 165–174 Tumult, 168 Epicureanism, 12

226 

INDEX

F False lights, 93–100 Fata morgana, 169 Flotsam, 2, 77, 94, 135, 148, 167, 170, 174, 210 Fo’c’sle, 32 ‘Fortress Europe,’ 213 Foucault, Michel, 13, 67 heterotopia, 67 Madness and civilization, 13 The order of things, 67 French Occupation (WWII), 117 Freud, Sigmund, 69, 70, 157 Civilization and its discontents, 157 melancholia, 69, 70 mourning, 69 uncanny, 157 Friedrich, Jőrg, 179 Fugard, Sheila, 45, 143–151 The castaways, 143–151 G Galeón de Manila/Acapulco (ship), 21 Georgian navy, 26, 33 Géricault, Théodore, 71, 72, 197, 200, 201, 205 The raft of the Medusa (painting), 72, 197, 200 German-centred memory, 179, 180 GINI coefficient, 195, 201 Golfo de Penas, 19, 22, 33 Grass, Günter, 177–185 Crabwalk (Im Krebsgang), 177–185 Grog, 7, 24, 198 Grosvenor (ship), 35–45, 145 Ground Zero, 209 Guébo, Josué, 214

H Hanley, James, 103–112 The ocean, 108–112 Happy Return (ship), 20 Hardin, Garrett, 136–139 Heresy, 10–12 Hermeneutics, 149, 167 Heterotopia, 67 Hitchcock, Alfred, 113–119, 122, 125, 126, 129 Aventure Malgache, 117 Bon voyage, 117, 118 Lifeboat, 113–119, 122, 126, 129 Holocaust-centred memory, 179 Homer, The Odyssey, 83 Honourable East India Company (HEIC), 35, 36, 44, 48, 76, 79, 81–83, 85–87 Hood, Jean, 75, 76, 83 Horror, 43, 53, 54, 58, 64, 68–70, 73, 81, 116, 199 Hospitality, 2, 30, 33, 56, 76, 78, 79, 83–88, 107, 214 Houtman Abrolhos, 7 Huber, Florian, 180, 182 Hydro-acoustics, 154, 156, 161 Hynes, John, 35–37, 39–42 I Improvisation (musical), 96, 145, 169 Indian Ocean, 49, 76, 79 ‘Infatuation,’ 51 Informal recyclers, 197, 201–203, 205–207 J Jetsam, 94 Johannesburg, 114, 197, 201, 202, 206, 207 Jud Süß (film), 117 Juno (ship), 47–59

 INDEX 

K King Lear (William Shakespeare), 70 King of Baba (Babaw), 78, 79, 82 Kirby, Emma Jane, 192–194 The optician of Lampedusa, 193 Kirby, Percival, 38, 44 Klein, Naomi, 210, 212 disaster capitalism, 210, 212 Kolkata (‘Calcutta’), 35, 36, 47, 49, 50, 82, 85 Kraft durch Freude, 177 Kristeva, Julia, 44, 53, 69–71 ‘black sun,’ 44, 53 L Lagan, 94, 210 Lampedusa, 187–195 L’écriture engage, 143 Levinas, Emmanuel, 84, 85 Lieutenant, 15, 22, 25, 63, 64, 199 Lifeboat, 103, 104, 113, 116, 121–130, 133–140, 156, 158, 161, 169, 170, 178, 179, 192, 219 Lifeboat ethics, 136–138, 140 Lighthouse, 96–98, 166 Littoral, 2, 43, 45, 86–88, 94, 98, 100, 127, 144, 148, 149, 218–220 Locke, John, 54, 145, 146 Logan, Charles, 214 Lumpenproletariat, 203 M Mackay, William, 47–59 Narrative of the Shipwreck of the Juno, 49 Madagascar, 75, 79, 81, 83, 86 Madness, 13, 148–151 Madras, 50, 52, 75, 76, 82 Malaria, 81

227

Malouf, David, 214 Manichaeism, 66, 98 Manifest perdition, 41 Mare incognitae, 51 Marines, 19, 20, 22, 25, 26, 28, 32, 47, 62, 66, 77, 122, 127, 219, 220 Maritime studies, 218, 220 Marooning, 211 Márquez, Gabriel Garciá, 214 ‘Master Law,’ 35, 39, 41, 43–45 Mauritius, 75, 82 McInnes, Jacki, 197–207 Sleeps with the fishes, 197, 198, 201, 203, 205 Mediterranean, 153, 187–189, 212 Medusa (ship), 61–73, 197–201, 203, 205 Melancholia, 53, 69, 70, 77, 199 Mentz, Steve, 217–219 Mercantile marine, 8, 24, 219 Metaphorai, 140 Methodism, 93, 97, 98 Midshipman, 19–21, 23, 30, 57, 86 Migrancy, 84, 140, 190, 194, 195, 218 Migrants, 125, 126, 187–195, 205, 212, 213, 221 Mimesis, 154 Modernism, 108 Moral sense philosophy, 54 Morris, Isaac, 19, 25 Mozambique Channel, 75, 76 Mozambique Island, 81, 82 ‘Muggs,’ 56 Mutiny, 14, 20, 21, 28, 29, 31, 38, 42, 65, 135 N Natives, 36, 38, 56, 77, 78, 144, 212 Nazism, 115, 185 Nearer my God to Thee (Horbury) (hymn), 156, 170

228 

INDEX

Neo-Malthusian, 136 New historicism, 220 New thalassology, 218 ‘Noble savages,’ 37 Nuestra Señora de Covadonga (ship), 21 O Oceanic, 59, 129, 148, 149, 156–158, 160–162, 217–220 Odysseus, 83–88 Open boat, 53, 58, 71, 103–112, 116, 118, 119, 129 P Pelsaert, Commandeur Francisco, 7–11, 13–15 Pondoland, 35, 147 Precarity, 33, 67, 104, 188, 195, 203, 212 Proletariat, 201 Propaganda, 110, 113, 114, 116–118, 122, 128, 129 Protestantism, 12, 93, 100 Proximity, 106, 107, 111–119, 129, 191 Psychosis, 144, 145, 149–151 Q Quarterdeck, 25, 27, 32, 50, 52, 55 R Raft of the Medusa, 61, 66, 72, 197, 207 Recycling, 206 Republicanism, 27, 73, 201 Reverberation, 153 Revolutionary, 72, 146, 182 Reynaud, Joseph, 63, 73, 199, 201

Richefort, Antoine, 62, 63, 198, 199 Robertson, Morgan, 158, 167 Futility, 158, 167 Rodger, N.A.M., 25–27, 33 ‘wooden world,’ 25 Rodin, Auguste, 121, 128 Rogan, Charlotte, 214 Rollard, Romaine, 157 ‘oceanic,’ 157 Rote Armee Fraktion (Red Army Faction), 172, 183 Royal Navy, 21, 27, 97, 135 R. v Dudley and Stephens, 67, 68 S St Augustin Bay, 78–80, 82, 83, 86 Sale, Richard, 134, 135 Seven Waves Away (film), 135 ‘Seven waves away’ (story), 134 Salvage, 9, 57, 94, 144, 167 Sardam (yacht), 8 Savages, 37, 45, 83, 84, 93, 96 Savigny, J.B. Henry, 61–64, 66, 68–73, 198, 199 Seaman, 32, 108, 114 Sebald, W.G., 179, 180 Self-contained underwater breathing apparatus (SCUBA), 1 Senegal, 62, 198, 203 Sentiment, 43, 54, 180, 189, 200 Sentimentality, 54, 181, 182, 192 Sentimental vignette, 31, 35, 56, 64 Shaw, William, 38, 39, 42, 43 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 181 Shelvocke, Captain George, 20, 30 Shipwreck narratives anthologies, 31, 45 broadsides, 31, 37 chapbooks, 31, 37 ephemera, 59 folk ballads, 31

 INDEX 

Grubb Street versions, 37 intertextuality, 59, 174 official reports, 211 pamphlets, 31, 37, 59, 211 Romantic era, 42 Slavery, 81, 87 Sociopathy, 13 Sodomy, 33 Souls at sea (film dir, Henry Hathaway), 134 Sound navigation and ranging (SONAR), 156, 159, 160 Sousa Sepulveda, Manoel de, 144 South Park Street Cemetery, 47, 48, 50, 58, 59 Speedwell (ship), 20, 30, 33 Steamship, 103, 108 Steinbeck, John, 114, 119, 121–130 Grapes of wrath, 125–128 ‘Lifeboat,’ 121–130 Log of the ‘Sea of Cortez, 127 The moon is down, 128, 129 Tortilla Flat, 126 Stirling Castle (ship), 30 Streights of Magellan, 29 Sublime, 105, 110, 111, 117, 124, 157, 158, 167 ‘Superman’ (Nazism), 113, 117 Survival, 31, 42, 43, 59, 61, 106, 109, 135–138, 145, 166, 187, 200–202, 205 Survival cannibalism, 66–69 Swift, Jonathan, 211 Gulliver’s travels, 211 T Temporality, 114, 157, 158, 171, 173 Terrorist, 146 Thompson, Carl, 37, 43, 58, 66, 73, 114–116, 118, 199 Suffering Traveller, 66

229

Tilotta, Lidia, 194 Titanic Commutator, 170 Titanic (ship), 153–162, 167, 169–171, 173, 174, 212 Toliara (‘Tullear’), 79, 80, 82, 86 Totalitarianism, 15, 114 Traitors’ Island, 8 Trauma, 43, 57, 70, 154, 157, 162, 180, 181, 190, 195, 221 ‘Tygers,’ 55, 56 U U-boat, 109, 113, 116, 123, 177, 178 Uncanny, 31, 34, 52, 106, 117, 126, 144, 148, 157, 214 Unheimlich, 31, 148 ‘Upside of down,’ 210 V Vaillant, François le, 38 Van der Beecke, Johannes Torrentius, 10 Vergangenheitsbewältigung, 179, 180, 182 W Wager Island, 27, 30, 33 Wager (ship), 19–34, 42, 57 Walcott, Derek, 213–214 Warrant officer, 26–29, 31–33 Waste, 200, 205 Weir, Andy, 214 Wesley, John, 93, 98, 99 White, Patrick, 214 Whiteness, 145, 150, 151 Wilhelm Gustloff (ship), 177–179, 181–185

230 

INDEX

William Brown (ship), 133, 134, 140 Winterton (ship), 75–88 World Trade Center, 171, 180, 211 World War Two, 179, 181, 195 Wreck diving, 150, 214 Wrecking, 93–101, 158, 210

Y Yeats, W. B., 59, 118 Yoshimura, Akira, 214 Z Zenobia (ship), 153 Žižek, Slavoj, 158, 167