The known, the traceable, history of Edward John Trelawny begins with
his birth in London in 1792, and comes to an abrupt end some seventeen
years afterward. His father, Lt. Colonel Charles Trelawny, was a middle
aged army officer who had retired to economise his wife’s fortune, the
relics of his own, and play the rôle of stern, Roman father on the stage
of family life. Both family and family name were Cornish, and the boy
began life with the heritage of those of Cornish blood, the heritage of
an ancient and separate race whose antiquity runs past the pillars of
Stonehenge into the dawn of time. There was a Celtic streak in Trelawny;
the joy of battle was his, the quickening fire, the strange madness, and
even the Celt’s power over the souls of words.
Something darker and far more ancient, however, had fought its way back
to life in Trelawny’s veins. The boy was born a warrior, but not a
warrior of Celtic Arthur’s kind. The true comrades of his spirit were the
heroes of the primitive Gaels, the mighty men whose blood seemed to “run
up into their fiery hair,” during the exultation of killing and war.
Fanny Kemble saw Trelawny in his later years during his visit to the
United States, and divined the dark side of his inheritance. “Mr.
Trelawny’s countenance,” she wrote, “was habitually serene, occasionally
sweet in its expression, but sometimes savage with the fierceness of a
wild beast.”
When a young savage comes into the world, the problem of how to civilize
him usually commands attention, but no one bothered his head about Edward
John Trelawny. The savagery of neglected boyhood was allowed to grow wild
in the congenial soil of the boy’s obscure and primitive inheritance.
It was not a pretty childhood, and the following anecdote preserves its
quality.
The Trelawny urchins had an enemy, a tame raven “with ragged wings and
a grave antique aspect,” who used to drive them away from some fruits
they coveted. This old demon had a trick of rushing at the children with
outstretched wings, and though they threw stones, he carried the day.
Little Edward John, however, having courage and the warrior instinct,
kept up the fight, and presently managed to wound the enemy. Shouting
and yelling, the children raced to the gruesome execution, and a final
curtain descended on Edward John hanging the horrible blood-stained old
mass of feathers in a noose made of a sash borrowed from his little
sister!
Spelling lessons were battles. “Spell your name, you young savage,”
shouts the Roman father. “Spell, sir?” The boy, becoming confused,
misplaces the vowels. At this, the Roman father “arose in wrath,
overturned the table, and bruised his shins in an attempt to kick me as I
dodged him, and rushed out of the room.”
From the bosom of this peppery homelife, the great, bony, awkward boy
was kicked into a school. There he encountered floggings, canings, and
hideous practical jokes. The young Cornish Celt with the black hair and
the wild blue eyes fought the savagery with savagery. His Roman father
countered by handing him over to the Royal Navy. The new life was the
school all over again, save that the sea-hazing was more brutal and the
practical jokes even more atrocious. A strange trait, that English liking
for practical jokes! Then followed a season at Dr. Burney’s Naval Academy
at Greenwich, a voyage on a frigate during whose course “Tre” revenged
himself on a persecutor by jabbing him with a pen knife, and then a long
world cruise on a sloop of war.
Brutalised at home, brutalised at school, brutalised in the Navy, it is a
wonder that the young savage remained reasonably human. With the arrival
of adolescence a sense of injustice and an urge to rebellion struck root
in his mind. Rebellion was his only outlet, and in rebelling, he was
most his primitive self. For the boy was only primitive, not vicious.
Presently he decided that he had had enough, and made up his mind to
desert.
The neglected sailor whelp, whom no one had received with affection or
troubled to civilise, was now seventeen years old, he stood six feet
tall, and was strongly built, though of a certain adolescent gauntness.
“My face was bronzed, my hair black, my features perfectly Arab.” The
loneliness of adolescence troubled him, his parents’ “hard usage and
abandonment” gnawed at his heart; he felt “alienated” from his “family
and kindred.” He would follow a new trail, and “seek the love of
strangers in the wide world.”
The phrases are almost sentimental, and doubtless reflect genuine
feeling, but the young savage was still the young savage in his way of
life. Having determined to jump ship, the demon midshipman prepared to
pay off an old score. A lieutenant of his ship, a Scotchman, had been
nagging him, and “Tre” fell upon the man with the supreme strength which
is born of anger. The ship being at Bombay, the encounter took place in
a billiard room ashore frequented by naval officers. It was a ferocious
business of blows, kicks, bruises, blood, cries and broken teeth. The
lieutenant attempted to beg off. Tre’s narrative then continues,—
“‘What,—you white-livered scoundrel? Can no words move you? Then blows
shall!’ And I struck him with the hilt of my sword in the mouth, and
kicked him, and trampled on him. I tore his coat off and rent it to
fragments...” Thus the young savage spoke and fought.
So ends that chapter of Trelawny’s early life which is traceable. A
certain use, to be sure, has here been made of his thinly disguised
autobiography, but the use has been scrupulous, and the borrowings
confined to an incident or two which are accepted as historic. Now comes
mystery. After his desertion in Bombay, all trace of him disappears for
some seven or eight years. What was he doing all this while, and what
regions of the earth and sea were filled with his adventures?
The bronzed young man in his middle twenties, who drifted back to England
either in 1815 or ’16, had little to say to his questioners, though there
were hints of a lurid career. As always, the mystery fed on mystery. The
man’s fine presence, his Oriental features, and his piercing eyes were
enough in themselves to inspire interest; little by little the moonlight
of romantic imagination gathered him into its beam. His intimate friends,
it was whispered, heard blood-curdling tales of piracies as they sat in
the chimney corner. Ah,—if “Tre” would only tell the whole story! They
waited for it fifteen years.
The account must now anticipate a little, and leap the years to 1830.
The summer months are at hand, and Mary Shelley, the poet’s widow, is
arranging and correcting an extraordinary manuscript from “our friend
Tre.” Sensible Mary Shelley, with fair complexion, her light hair and
calm grey eyes,—what did she make of the wild tale in those numberless
pages? One sees her at a desk, remedying Trelawny’s frequent deficiencies
of spelling, writing “postponed” for “posponed,” and inserting “gs” in
all words such as “strength” and “length.” Trelawny treated the letter
with a Cornish disdain. The manuscript in the widow’s hands was a novel
of adventure which Trelawny insisted was really an account of his own
career. First purposing to call the book “A Man’s Life,” he later changed
it to “The Adventures of a Younger Son.”
The scene now returns to the billiard room in Bombay, with the Scotch
lieutenant lying on the floor, barely alive. The young savage brandishes
the heavy end of a billiard cue he has just broken over his enemy and
in true Berseker fashion is about to finish his man, when a voice calms
him, and forbids the murder. The speaker who has thus intervened is one
De Ruyter, a mysterious adventurer who has made friends with the young
savage. In spite of his Dutch name, he is an American, and even claims
Boston as his beloved birthplace. The young deserter and this incredible
Bostonian now escape to De Ruyter’s ship, an Arab craft almost openly
engaged in piracy.
The years that follow find the savage in his element; the tale is one
of piracies, pursuits, boardings, battles, pistol shots, stab-wounds
and slicings, and blood running bright and stickily through scuppers
into waters alive with gathering sharks. There are tiger hunts, fevers,
corpses, despairing yells, and sudden deaths numberless as sands of the
sea. Having no definite base of operations, the precious pair indulge
in grand and petty larceny all through the eastern seas; the scene is
now the Indian ocean, now the coast of Celebes, now the inlets of the
Philippines. What there is of “love interest” is very slight, and centres
about the corsair’s Arabian child-wife, Zela, a Byronic heroine who
perishes opportunely, and is then cremated on a funeral pyre.
There are three volumes of this fee-fi-fo-fum and manslaughter, the
last ending with the return of De Ruyter and his acolyte to Europe,
their separation, De Ruyter’s death at sea while in the service of
Napoleon, and the resolve of the hero to struggle on for the liberty of
“the pallid slaves of Europe.” Cutting a throat, it appeared, was but
a whimsey when compared to the guilt of those who continued to consort
with the “sycophantic wretches who crouch and crawl and fawn on kings and
priests.”...
“Romance can go no farther,” said a contemporary critic in the _Military
Review_, “than the actual adventures of the homicidal renegade and
corsair, the ‘Younger Son.’”
Time has confirmed this sensible opinion. A more brutal, a more ruthless,
a more utterly unfeeling book does not exist in English literature. Save
for the rhetoric about the “pallid slaves,” and some Byronic transports
over the body of Zela, the story knows less of sympathy than a crocodile.
Moreover, it is nowhere amusing. What carries it along, what made it
a success in its own time, and has won it a reprint in our own, is its
superlative vividness. The picture may be that of a man, shot in the
heart, spinning about; it may be the impression of thick resistance which
human flesh offers to the hand that stabs;—whatever it may be, image or
sensation, it is real, it is true, and it is the unconscious artist who
affects us and no mere business of superlative photography. Overlong,
chaotic, and ruffianly as it is, the book is no lifeless curiosity of
literature.
Such was the existence from which the deserter and adventurer returned
to Europe. Were one to swallow the book whole, it might well be
imagined that the Trelawny who arrived in London was a proper subject
for a gallows. Yet the adventurer who in England took the place that
was his by birth as a gentleman’s son was no skull and bones ruffian.
There are no stories, no rumours that tell of ruffianism or ruffianly
qualities; when this young Arab-featured man called on his neighbours,
there were no blanched faces at the windows, or wild whispers to send
the ladies upstairs and hide the spoons. Sometimes a good family will
unaccountably produce a ruffianly type; the incident is rare, but it is
encountered,—but Trelawny was not of these.
The Younger Son who had been born with something dark and ancient in his
blood, who had endured a savage and neglected boyhood and adolescence,
had returned to England reasonably civilised at least. Such was not the
customary result of seven years of piracy!
The explanation is probably a very simple one; the boy savage, the demon
midshipman, had grown up. With the arrival of manhood, the fundamental
qualities of the man’s character and original mind had broken through the
barbarism of his early life.
The streak of Celtic battle savagery he had inherited was still in his
veins; he never lost it. Seven years later, while accompanying Byron
to the revolt in Greece, he spoke of “the best of all excitement.” The
poet showed curiosity. “Fighting,” added Trelawny, and was not guilty of
a pose. There were times when he showed a certain cold-blooded streak;
the pirate was not touchily fastidious. He had a mind, he was a born
observer, and he was nobody’s fool. There is no evidence that he had
much imaginative quality. The ideas he had, he clung to emotionally,
for they were really emotions in borrowed clothes. His enthusiasm for
“Europe’s pallid slaves,” for instance;—what is it but his own transmuted
resentment for his own loveless and cruel boyhood,—what was his hatred of
“sycophants, priests and kings” but his own hatred of those in authority
who had oppressed his youth? He does not appear ever to have arrived at
any intellectual understanding of his attitude.
The young man of mystery returned to England with a little money, and
presently carried out an anchor to windward. He married, and in a
sentence of matchless pathos, lamented his rose-decked chain. He had
become “a shackled, care-worn and spirit-broken married man of the
civilised west.” There are those who say that the lady was frivolous and
wasteful. It probably mattered little, for the adventurer’s relations
with his various wives were astoundingly casual; they have something of
the kiss and good-bye of the legendary sailor.
The roses of matrimony beginning to lose their petals, the younger
son took to escaping on vagabond adventures. The incredible snobbery
of contemporary British life, “its mystic castes, coteries, sets and
sects, its ... purseproud tuft-hunting and toadying” got on the nerves of
this man who had seen life in the raw. Fleeing to Switzerland, he made
friends with another wandering Briton, one Mr. Edward Elliker Williams,
a half-pay lieutenant of the Eighth Dragoons. Mr. Williams chattered for
hours of his marvellous friend, Mr. Percy Shelley, the poet, who had so
splendidly defied the ideas and conventions of contemporary Britain.
There was a man and a rebel! Expelled from Oxford for atheism, the hero
of a romantic elopement at eighteen, the hero of a defiant free union at
twenty-one, the contemner and accuser of every dastardly sycophant, king
and priest in the solar system. And a poet, sir!
Mr. Shelley the exile,—here was a man for Trelawny of his own
unconventional mould. Shelley the rebel. Shelley the Lucifer! He would
go to him; the sycophants, kings and so forths had better take care. “I
swore to dedicate myself,” said the pirate later, “hand and heart to war,
even to the knife, against the triple alliance of hoary headed impostors,
their ministers and priests!” How the rhetoric brings before one’s eyes
the liberal anger at the Tory reaction following the wild revolutionary
years!
Mr. Williams arranged the meeting, and took “our friend Tre” to Pisa. Was
“Tre” a little disappointed at the appearance of the exiled Lucifer and
poetic arch-scandaliser; had he prepared himself for something robust,
defiant and rhetorical, someone quite in his own style? There are times
when this emotion seems visible between the lines of Trelawny’s account
of the meeting. Whatever the expectation may have been, Shelley won his
piratic visitor heart and soul. A young man with an Arab’s thin nose and
bronzed cheeks and a young man with great open eyes, a boy’s fresh face
and a crown of yellow hair,—the pirate and the scholar rebel—a fantastic
alliance!
No wild outcries from British throats, however, disturbed the stout and
comfortable Italian padres who stopped in the streets of Pisa to take
snuff, and wandered off brushing the specklets of brown dust from their
soutanes. Incomprehensible _Ingleses_! The exiles were all under thirty,
they had all made their lives something of an adventure, they were all
glad to be alive.
Destiny was preparing strange things.