badly, and then he was in another vessel and resolved to desert the
service. This he did at Bombay. So far we can trust what Trelawny has
given us in that remarkable book _Adventures of a Younger Son_; but
from this point on he romances, but romances with an air of reality.
It is not possible to discriminate fact from fiction in what follows.
Undoubtedly Pirate Trelawny started on his memoirs with the intent of
writing his autobiography, but he was inordinately vain, and delighted
in posturing as a hero and in describing marvellous adventures through
which he passed, heightening them sensationally with wonderful skill.
What seems probable is that, after deserting from the navy, he was for
a while in the merchant service, and then joined a privateer cruising
in the India seas. As Mr. E. Garnett well says, "the Younger Son is an
excellent stage hero by the finish; he meets and overcomes all odds;
it is truly a glorious Trelawny--the Trelawny of his own imagination."
He states that he was married when he was twenty-one, and that the
marriage took place in England, so that he must have returned home
somewhere about 1813. But we really know nothing authentic of his
movements till 1822, when he was in England, and thence went to Italy,
where he made acquaintance with Lord Byron and with Shelley. After
the lamentable death of the latter poet he attended at the cremation
of the body. Thence he went with Byron to Greece in the _Hercules_, to
aid the Greeks against the Turks. They arrived at Cephalonia, off the
west coast, in the beginning of August, 1823, and there Lord Byron
resolved on staying till he could ascertain how things were
progressing in Greece and decide on his future course of action. This
delay did not at all suit the impetuosity of the character of
Trelawny, who called it dawdling, and set forward for the mainland in
company with Hamilton Browne, making his way to the seat of the Greek
Government. He also sent emissaries to England to endeavour to raise a
loan, and then proceeded to Athens. Here the insurgent leader Odysseus
was in command, and to his fortunes Trelawny at once attached himself,
and married the sister of the Greek chieftain.
Major Temple, resident at Santa Maura, during his mission to the Morea
in June, 1824, met Odysseus, and described him as "a perfect Albanian
chieftain--savage in manners and appearance, of great muscular
strength, and about six feet high."
He had his head-quarters in a huge cavern in the face of the limestone
precipices of Mount Parnassus, which he had strongly fortified, and in
this he kept his treasure that he had accumulated and lodged his family.
In the meantime dissension had broken out among the Greeks, between the
leaders of the bands that did all the fighting, under Kolokotroni, and
the Executive Government that had been elected by the primates, at the
head of which stood Mavrocordato. A complete rupture had ensued at the
end of 1823 between the parties, and the guerilla chieftains absolutely
refused obedience to the Provisional Government.
In the same winter of 1823-4 Trelawny accompanied Odysseus as
_aide-de-camp_ upon an expedition into Negropont, and on their return
to Athens, where Colonel Stanhope then was, Trelawny sent a letter to
his mother, of which the following is an extract:--
"ATHENS, _18th February, 1824._
"DEAR MOTHER,--I am enabled to keep twenty-five followers,
Albanian soldiers, with whom I have joined the most enterprising
of the Greek captains and most powerful--Ulysses. I am much with
him, and have done my best during the winter campaign, in which we
have besieged Negropont, to make up for the many years of idleness
I have led. I am now in my element, and the energy of my youth is
reawakened. I have clothed myself in the Albanian costume and
sworn to uphold the cause.
"Everything here is going on as well as heart can wish. Great part
of Greece is already emancipated. The Morea is free, and we are
making rapid progress to the westward. Lord Byron spends £5000 a
year in the cause and maintains five hundred soldiers. This will
in the eyes of the world redeem the follies of youth.
"Your affectionate son,
"EDWARD TRELAWNY."
Trelawny and Odysseus desired to get Lord Byron to be with them, but
this plan was frustrated by the death of the poet on April 19th, 1824.
Colonel Stanhope proposed a congress of the civil and military leaders,
so as to effect a reconciliation between the two embittered elements
that were weakening the resistance against the common enemy, the Turk.
Odysseus consented to attend this meeting at Salona, and Trelawny also
agreed to be present. Mavrocordato looked on Trelawny with suspicion as
intimate with Odysseus and as his brother-in-law, and he foisted upon
him an English spy named Fenton, and an accomplice of the name of
Whitcombe, with secret instructions to make away with him.
After returning from Salona, Trelawny was with Odysseus in Eastern
Greece, carrying on the war in guerilla fashion without any great
results.
In the autumn he was at Argos, whence a letter (certainly his, though
unsigned) was sent to his brother Lieutenant Harry Trelawny, R.N.
"... To give you an idea of the misery existing here is beyond all
expression. The town is nothing more or less than a chaos of ruins;
not a house inhabitable. The fever making great havoc, people actually
falling down in the streets. The stench of the place is so great I am
obliged to remove my quarters to the once famous Argos, not more than
an hour's walk from Agamemnon's tomb, which I have not yet seen. The
scenery is beautiful; perfectly romantic. I am now living in a house
without doors or windows, every man armed.
"The Commissioners are both sick. Mr. Bulwer has proposed to raise a
body of fifty men, but I am afraid it will all evaporate in smoke,
like all his undertakings here. I am much afraid nothing is to be
done: they look on all foreigners as intruders. Many of the French
have behaved most shamefully, but, as I told you before, I will exert
every effort. All my hopes are placed in Colonel Gordon's arrival.
"YOUR BROTHER."
* * * * *
The Commissioners referred to were Henry Lytton Bulwer (Lord Dalling)
and J. H. Browne, sent out by the Greek Committee in London, when it
was too late, to ascertain whether the Greek Provisional Government
was sufficiently firmly established, and sufficiently trustworthy, to
warrant the paying over to it of that part of the loan raised in
England on their behalf not already advanced. The loan was of
£800,000, but from this 56.4 per cent was deducted, so that the whole
amount to be forwarded to the Greek Government would be only £348,000.
Odysseus was beset with difficulties, as the Provisional Government
refused to furnish him with men or money. Trelawny made vain attempts
to raise funds.
Ultimately Odysseus made a truce for three months with Omer Pasha, of
Negropont, but being regarded with suspicion on both sides, he
endeavoured to make his escape, and left Trelawny in charge of the
cave and its contents. It was at this time that Fenton, the hired spy,
in May, 1825, made the attempt to assassinate Trelawny. He took the
opportunity when Trelawny's back was towards him to shoot him.
Odysseus was compelled to surrender to the Government, was carried off
to Athens, where he was strangled by order of Mavrocordato.
Trelawny's wounds were so dangerous that he suffered for three months
before he could be said to have recovered, and he then escaped from
the cavern and landed in Cephalonia in September, 1825, bringing his
Albanian wife with him. During the next two years he was engaged in a
lawsuit about his wife, whom he treated with brutality, so that she
left him and retired to a convent, with purpose ultimately to proceed
to Paxo, where lived her sister. Whilst in the convent she was
delivered of a child which she sent to Trelawny to be put out to
nurse, as they objected in the convent to have the infant there.
Trelawny sent it to a woman who undertook to rear it, but it died,
whereupon, as Mr. H. Robinson of Zante wrote to Toole on 22nd
November, 1827, "he sent the dead body to the Castle Monastery, where
she (his wife) was, in a box with her things and a message from him.
The wife knew not what was in the box and refused to open it, and
there it lay until putrid.
"An examination took place with all the fuss which the courts make
about _suspicione d'infanticido_, and ended by T. being fined two
dollars for improperly removing a dead body."
In or about the month of July, 1829, Signora Trelawny made petition to
the Lord High Commissioner to the following effect:--
"It is perhaps known to Your Excellency that at about the age of
thirteen I was given in marriage to Signor Trelawny, my family urging
that I should live happily with one brought up in the courtesy and
good-breeding of his country; but, as my experience proved, he failed
to treat me with that consideration and nobility of character which
distinguish the men of his nation. The nature of the long-continued
treatment which I have had to endure at the hands of the said Signor
Trelawny is not unknown, and at the last, it is perhaps within Your
Excellency's recollection that he brought grief to my very eyes by
sending me while in the convent, with cunning and brutality, the dead
body of my daughter and his."
She then stated that Zante had become lonely for her, as her brothers
and mother had gone to Greece. She wanted to go to Paxo to her sister,
but the custom of Zante obliged a wife separated from her husband to
live in a convent.
She continued: "I venture humbly to ask Your Excellency if, being the
wife of an Englishman, I ought to be subject to the custom of the island
in which I chance to find myself a resident. Should an Englishwoman be
subjected to such treatment as I am?... I promise Your Excellency that,
in whatever place or situation I find myself, I will conduct myself
always as is proper for the wife of an English gentleman; and though he
himself may be wanting in dignity of behaviour, I will do neither him
nor myself the dishonour of imitating him.
"TERSITZA PHILIPPA TRELAWNY."
* * * * *
This petition and the letter of Mr. Robinson suffice to show that the
story of Trelawny sending his dead child in a box to its mother is not
to be rejected as a fable, as it has been by the author of the notice
on Edward John Trelawny in the _Dictionary of National Biography_.[27]
The poor unfortunate girl, then aged seventeen, obtained a separation
from her husband _a mensa et thoro_, by a sentence of the
Ecclesiastical Court, and by definitive sentences of the courts of law
in Zante and Corfu she was entitled to an aliment from her husband of
twenty-five dollars a month, for the payment of which Mr. Barff, the
banker of Zante, and Mr. Stevens, of Corfu, were securities. But this
was the result of much litigation, causing Trelawny annoyance and
angering him to the last degree.
In the autumn of 1828 he visited England, but returned to the Continent
in the spring of the following year, feeling out of his element at home.
"To whom am I a neighbour?" he wrote, "and near whom? I dwell amongst
tame and civilized human beings with somewhat the same feelings as we
may guess the lion feels when, torn from his native wildness, he is
tortured into domestic intercourse with what Shakespeare calls 'forked
animals,' the most abhorrent to his nature." He rambled about; set up a
harem in Athens, bought a Moorish girl to be his concubine, wrote his
_Adventures of a Younger Son_, and sent the MS. in 1830 to Mrs. Shelley,
and it was published in three volumes in 1831, with some excisions of
grossness and licentiousness, which the publisher insisted on having
removed. As already said, no reliance can be placed on this
autobiography as a narrative of the facts of his life, except only of
his boyhood, for, as Lord Byron said of Trelawny, "he could not speak
the truth even if he wished to do so."
When the book appeared, the _Athenæum_ considered the hero--Trelawny
himself--"a kind of ruffian from his birth," as he had painted himself,
leaving out the villainies and brutalities of which he had been guilty.
He was thrice married, and behaved badly to all three wives. He could
not be faithful and generous even to his friends. With Byron he had
been most intimate, yet when Byron died he wrote to Mary Shelley: "It
is well for his name, and better for Greece, that Byron is dead.... I
now feel my face burn with shame that so weak and ignoble a soul could
so long have influenced me. It is a degrading reflection, and ever
will be. I wish he had lived a little longer, that he might have
witnessed how I would have soared above him here, how I would have
triumphed over his mean spirit." Trelawny soaring!--as a vulture only
in quest of carrion.
And when, in 1858, he published his _Recollections of Shelley and
Byron_, thirty-four years after the death of the latter, he painted
Byron in the harshest colours; and one can hardly escape feeling that
this was prompted by jealousy of the esteem in which the world held
Byron for his genius. He himself possessed all the bad qualities that
he despised in Byron, but did not recognize in himself the superadded
brutality which Byron was too much a gentleman to show.
Even Mrs. Shelley, a lifelong friend and correspondent, to whom he had
often poured out his heart, and whom he had contemplated at one time
marrying, could not be spoken of by him after her death but in
disparagement and with a revelation to the world of her little
weaknesses.
He was in England again in 1835, went into society, and married for
the third time, to make another woman miserable. For a number of years
he lived at Putney Hill, and then took a farm at Usk, in
Monmouthshire, and amused himself with farming.
In or about 1870, Trelawny, then seventy-eight years old, bought a
house and a small plot of land at Sompting, near Wortham, and occupied
himself with gardening. One day two men with guns in their hands
requested permission to enter his grounds after a bird that had taken
refuge there. He answered fiercely, "All the leave I will accord you
is to shoot one another."
At Sompting, Trelawny died on August 13th, 1881, at the age of
eighty-six. In accordance with his wish to be laid beside Shelley, his
body was embalmed in England, cremated at Gotha, and the ashes taken
to the Protestant burial-ground in Rome, and laid in the tomb he had
bought fifty-eight years before, next to those of his friend.
Trelawny was a very handsome man, tall and well built; he had flashing
dark eyes under beetling brows, and an aquiline nose, raven-black
hair, and a dusky, Spanish complexion. He spoke very loud. He retained
his good looks to the end of his days.
Shelley described him in _Fragments of an Unfinished Drama_:--
He was as is the sun in his fierce youth,
As terrible and lovely as a tempest.
In Millais' painting of "The North-West Passage," exhibited in the
Royal Academy in 1874, the old sailor is a portrait of Captain
Trelawny; and it has been conjectured that Thackeray delineated him as
Captain Sumph in _Pendennis_, I, cap. 35.
The authorities for Trelawny's life are, beside the first part of his
_Adventures of a Younger Son_, his _Recollections of Shelley and
Byron_, 1858; the new edition of the work, published in 1878, was
called _Records of Shelley, Byron, and the Author_.
Mr. R. Garnett has a notice of the life of Trelawny prefixed to the
edition of the _Adventures of a Younger Son_ of 1890. A lengthy life
of Trelawny is in the _Dictionary of National Biography_. An error in
this is pointed out by Mr. T. C. Down in the article on "Pirate
Trelawny" already referred to and quoted from.
A pleasant account of "Mr. Trelawny and his Friends" appeared in the
_Contemporary Review_ for 1878.
Something further about him may be gleaned from Frances A. Kemble's
_Records of a Girlhood_, 1878, III, 75, 308-12. There are corrections
of some of Trelawny's inaccuracies in D. Guido Biagi's _The Last Days
of Percy Bysshe Shelley_, 1898.
FOOTNOTE:
[27] See for the above and more on the subject of "Pirate Trelawny" an
article by T. C. Down in the _Nineteenth Century_, May, 1907.
JAMES SILK BUCKINGHAM
Mr. S. C. Hall, writing after the death of J. S. Buckingham, thus
expressed his opinion of this truly remarkable man: "Whatever, during
his life, envy, jealousy, monopolous interest or satirical hostility may
have said to the contrary, there can be little doubt, now he is gone,
that the late Mr. James Silk Buckingham was amongst the most useful as
well as the most hopeful and industrious men of his time. His career was
one remarkable illustration of the well-known line of the old song,
'It's wonderful what we can do if we try'; for at almost every step he
took he was met by some disaster or annoyance, yet kept pressing on with
the most dauntless persistence, making the best of the worst
circumstances, and even when failing in his own personal endeavours,
giving such an impulse to the powers of others in whatever cause or
course he had engaged, that the end in view was generally attained, and
in several notable instances within the period of his own life."
The Buckinghams were a North Devon family, and the grandfather of the
subject of this notice had lived in Barnstaple. For several
generations they had been connected with the sea. Christopher
Buckingham settled at Flushing on a small farm, along with his wife
Thomazine, daughter of a Hambley of Bodmin.
James Silk describes his father as wearing a cocked hat, long,
square-tailed coat with large pockets and sleeves, square-toed shoes
with silver buckles, and as walking abroad carrying a tall,
gold-headed cane.
James Silk was born at Flushing on the 25th August, 1786. He had two
brothers and a sister. His father died in 1794.
"The port of Falmouth," wrote he in his unfinished memoirs, "being
nearest to the entrance of the Channel, there were permanently
stationed here two squadrons of frigates, one under the command of Sir
Edward Pellew (afterwards Lord Exmouth), the other under the command
of Sir John Borlase Warren. The former, as commodore, hoisted his
pennant on the _Indefatigable_, the latter on the _Révolutionaire_.
Each squadron consisted of five frigates of thirty-two and forty-four
guns each; and, in addition to these, there were continually arriving
and departing from Carrick Roads, the outer anchorage of Falmouth,
line-of-battle ships and smaller vessels of war; while the prizes
taken from the French were constantly brought into the port for
adjudication and sale. There were two large prisons, with open courts,
for the reception of the French prisoners thus taken, and every month
added many to their inmates.
"Both the naval commodores, as well as such captains of the frigates
belonging to the squadrons as were married, had their families residing
at Flushing, and the numerous officers of different grades, from the
youngest midshipman to the first lieutenant, were continually coming and
going to and fro ... so that the little village literally sparkled with
gold epaulets and gold-laced hats and brilliant uniforms."
He tells a curious story of his childhood. Corn, owing to the war, had
mounted to famine price, and the miners of Cornwall went about in
gangs waging war against all forestallers, regraters, and hoarders
of grain, and demolishing bakers' shops, mills, and grain stores.
[Illustration: JAMES SILK BUCKINGHAM]
"A body of some three or four hundred of these men entered Flushing,
and as they were all dressed in the mud-stained smock frocks and
trousers in which they worked underground, all armed with large clubs
and sticks of various kinds, and speaking an uncouth jargon, which
none but themselves could understand, they struck terror wherever they
went. Their numbers were quite equal to the whole adult male
population of the little village, so that the men stood aghast, the
women retired into their houses, and closed their doors, and the
children seemed struck dumb with affright. The moment of their visit,
too, was most inopportune, for on that very day a large party of the
captains and officers of the packets residing at Flushing were
occupied in storing a cargo of grain that had just been discharged
from a coasting vessel at the quay, and locking it up in warehouses to
secure it from plunder."
At this time it happened that all the ships of war were absent on
their cruising grounds. The situation was dangerous, and the men
threatened an attack on the warehouses, and were muttering and
brandishing their clubs, and falling into ranks, when Captain
Kempthorne snatched up little James Silk, then an urchin of six or
seven, seated him on a sack of corn, and bade him strike up a hymn.
With his shrill little pipe, he started--
Salvation, O! the joyful sound,
'Tis music to our ears.
Whereupon at once the mob took up the chant, sang the hymn, with their
strong masculine lungs; the clubs were let fall, and, the hymn ended,
they dispersed harmlessly.
James Silk went to sea in the _Lady Harriet_, a Government packet. On
his third voyage to Lisbon he was captured by a French corvette and
assigned to prison at Corunna; he was then about ten years old, and
the gaoler's daughter of the same age fell in love with him, and
softened the rigour of his captivity by bringing him dainties from her
father's table. She tried to induce the boy to elope with her, but
James had sufficient English common sense not to accept the offer, and
finally he was sent to Lisbon, obliged to tramp the whole way, several
hundred miles, barefooted, and begging food and a lodging on his way.
At Lisbon he was taken on board the _Prince of Wales_, and returned to
England, where his mother induced him to leave the sea, and provided
him with a small stationer's and bookseller's shop on the Fish Strand,
Falmouth. His mother died in 1804, and when James Silk was aged only
nineteen he married Elizabeth Jennings, a farmer's daughter. He got
tired of being a shopkeeper and volunteered on board a man-of-war; but
on seeing a seaman flogged round the fleet for mutiny, was so
disgusted with the sight that he deserted, and started a bookshop at
Plymouth Dock. However one of the trustees of his wife's inheritance
had speculated with the money in smuggling ventures and lost all, so
that J. S. Buckingham became bankrupt. He went to sea again, and was
appointed chief officer on board the _Titus_, bound for Trinidad,
Captain Jennings, perhaps a kinsman of his wife.
At the age of twenty-two he became commander of a vessel, and made
several voyages to the West Indies and in the Mediterranean. In these
latter he rapidly acquired a knowledge of and even fluency in speech
in French, Italian, Greek, and Arabic, and this determined him to
undertake mercantile life at Malta; but the plague having broken out
there in 1818, he was prevented from landing, and resolved to try his
fortune at Smyrna, but was unsuccessful. He then went to Alexandria,
and thence to Cairo, where he made the acquaintance and gained the
esteem of Mahomet Ali, then Pasha of Egypt.
He now formed the scheme of connecting the Red Sea with the
Mediterranean by a canal, and for this purpose surveyed the Isthmus of
Suez and convinced himself that the cutting of such a waterway was
quite feasible, and that such a connection would be of enormous
advantage to English trade with India. He laid his plans before
Mahomet Ali. "No sooner had the idea of renewing the ancient commerce
between India and the Mediterranean by way of the Red Sea taken
possession of my mind," wrote Buckingham, "than I began to think how
much this would be facilitated by the juncture of the two seas by a
navigable canal; and I bent all my thoughts to the object." But
Mahomet Ali would not hear of the project. He shrewdly asked, "Whose
ships would mostly use the canal?"
"The English vessels assuredly."
"Ah! and then the English would begin to think how nice it would be to
have Egypt so as to secure the passage. I am not going to sharpen the
knife that would cut my own throat."