MY BROTHER.
The reader who may have accompanied me in these wandering memorials
of my own life and casual experiences, will be aware, that in many
cases the neglect of chronological order is not merely permitted, but
is in fact to some degree inevitable: there are cases, for instance,
which, as a whole, connect themselves with my own life at so many
different eras, that, upon any chronological principle of position,
it would have been difficult to assign them a proper place; backwards
or forwards they must have leaped, in whatever place they had been
introduced; and in their entire compass, from first to last, never
could have been represented as properly belonging to any one _present_
time, whensoever that had been selected: belonging to every place
alike, they would belong, according to the proverb, to no place at
all; or, (reversing that proverb,) belonging to no place by preferable
right, they would, in fact, belong to every place, and therefore to
this place.
The incidents I am now going to relate come under this rule; for they
form part of a story which fell in with my own life at many different
points. It is a story taken from the life of my own brother; and I
dwell on it with the more willingness, because it furnishes an indirect
lesson upon a great principle of social life, now and for many years
back struggling for its just supremacy--the principle that all corporal
punishments whatsoever, and upon whomsoever inflicted, are hateful,
and an indignity to our common nature, which (with or without our
consent) is enshrined in the person of the sufferer. Degrading _him_,
they degrade _us_. I will not here add one word upon the general thesis,
but go on to the facts of this case; which, if all its incidents could
now be recovered, was perhaps as romantic as any that ever yet has
tried the spirit of fortitude and patience in a child. But its moral
interest depends upon this--that, simply out of one brutal chastisement,
arose naturally the entire series of events which so very nearly made
shipwreck of all hope for one individual, and did in fact poison the
tranquility of a whole family for seven years.
My next brother, younger by about four years than myself, (he, in fact,
that caused so much affliction to the Sultan Amurath,) was a boy of
exquisite and delicate beauty--delicate, that is, in respect to its
feminine elegance and bloom; for else (as regards constitution) he
turned out remarkably robust. In such excess did his beauty flourish
during childhood, that those who remember him and myself at the public
school at Bath will also remember the ludicrous molestation in the
streets (for to him it _was_ molestation) which it entailed upon
him--ladies stopping constantly to kiss him. On first coming up to
Bath from Greenhay, my mother occupied the very appartments on the
North Parade just quitted by Edmund Burke, then in a decaying condition,
though he did not die (I believe) till 1797. That state of Burkes's
health, connected with the expectation of finding him still there,
brought for some weeks crowds of inquirers, many of whom saw the
childish Adonis, then scarcely seven years old, and inflicted upon him
what he viewed as the martyrdom of their caresses. Thus began a
persecution which continued as long as his years allowed it. The
most brilliant complexion that could be imagined, the features of an
Antinous, and perfect symmetry of figure at that period of his life,
(afterwards he lost it,) made him the subject of never-ending admiration
to the whole female population, gentle and simple, who passed him in
the streets. In after days, he had the grace to regret his own perverse
and scornful coyness. But, at that time, so foolishly insensible was
he to the honor, that he used to kick and struggle with all his might
to liberate himself from the gentle violence which was continually
offered; and he renewed the scene (so elaborately painted by Shakspeare)
of the conflicts between Venus and Adonis. For two years this continued
a subject of irritation the keenest on the one side, and of laughter
on the other, between my brother and his plainer school-fellows. Not
that we had the slightest jealousy on the subject--far from it; it
struck us all (as it generally does strike boys) in the light of an
attaint upon the dignity of a male, that he should be subjected to the
caresses of women, without leave asked; this was felt to be a badge
of childhood, and a proof that the object of such caressing tenderness,
so public and avowed, must be regarded in the light of a baby--not to
mention that the very foundation of all this distinction, a beautiful
face, is as a male distinction regarded in a very questionable light
by multitudes, and often by those most who are the possessors of that
distinction. Certainly that was the fact in my brother's case. Not one
of us could feel so pointedly as himself the ridicule of his situation;
nor did he cease, when increasing years had liberated him from that
female expression of delight in his beauty, to regard the beauty itself
as a degradation; nor could he bear to be flattered upon it; though,
in reality, it did him service in after distresses, when no other
endowment whatsoever would have been availing. Often, in fact, do
men's natures sternly contradict the promise of their features; for
no person would have believed that, under the blooming loveliness of
a Narcissus, lay shrouded a most heroic nature; not merely an
adventurous courage, but with a capacity of patient submission to
hardship, and of wrestling with calamity, such as is rarely found
amongst the endowments of youth. I have reason, also, to think that
the state of degradation in which he believed himself to have passed
his childish years, from the sort of public petting which I have
described, and his strong recoil from it as an insult, went much deeper
than was supposed, and had much to do in his subsequent conduct, and
in nerving him to the strong resolutions he adopted. He seemed to
resent, as an original insult of nature, the having given him a false
index of character in his feminine beauty, and to take a pleasure in
contradicting it. Had it been in his power, he would have spoiled it.
Certain it is, that, from the time he reached his eleventh birthday,
he had begun already to withdraw himself from the society of all other
boys,--to fall into long fits of abstraction,--and to throw himself
upon his own resources in a way neither usual nor necessary.
Schoolfellows of his own age and standing--those, even, who were the
most amiable--he shunned; and, many years after his disappearance,
I found, in his handwriting, a collection of fragments, couched in a
sort of wild lyrical verses, presenting, unquestionably, the most
extraordinary evidences of a proud, self-sustained mind, consciously
concentrating his own hopes in himself, and abjuring the rest of the
world, that can ever have emanated from so young a person; since, upon
the largest allowance, and supposing them to have been written on the
eve of his quitting England, they must have been written at the age
of twelve. I have often speculated on the subject of these mysterious
compositions; they were of a nature to have proceeded rather from some
mystical quietist, such as Madame Guyon, if with this rapt devotion
one can suppose the union of a rebellious and murmuring ambition.
Passionate apostrophes there were to nature and the powers of nature;
and what seemed strangest of all was, that, in style, not only were
they free from all tumor and inflation which might have been looked
for in so young a writer, but were even wilfully childish and colloquial
in a pathetic degree--in fact, in point of tone, allowing for the
difference between a narrative poem and a lyrical, they somewhat
resemble that beautiful poem [1] of George Herbert, entitled LOVE
UNKNOWN, in which he describes symbolically to a friend, under the form
of treacherous ill usage he had experienced, the religious processes by
which his soul had been weaned from the world. The most obvious solution
of the mystery would be, to suppose these fragments to have been copied
from some obscure author; but, besides that no author could have remained
obscure in this age of elaborate research, who had been capable of sighs
(for such I may call them) drawn up from such well-like depths of
feeling, and expressed with such fervor and simplicity of language, there
was another testimony to their being the productions of him who owned the
penmanship; which was, that some of the papers exhibited the whole
process of creation and growth, such as erasures, substitutions, doubts
expressed as to this and that form of expression, together with
references backwards and forwards. Now, that the handwriting was my
brother's, admitted of no doubt whatsoever. I go on with his story. In
1800, my visit to Ireland, and visits to other places subsequently,
separated me from him for above a year. In 1801, we were at very
different schools--I in the highest class of a great public school, he at
a very sequestered parsonage on a wild moor (Horwich Moor) in Lancashire.
This situation, probably, fed and cherished his melancholy habits; for he
had no society except-that of a younger brother, who would give him no
disturbance at all. The development of our national resources had not yet
gone so far as absolutely to exterminate from the map of England
everything like a heath, a breezy down, (such as gave so peculiar a
character to the counties of Wilts, Somerset, Dorset, &c.,) or even a
village common. Heaths were yet to be found in England, not so spacious,
indeed, as the _landes_ of France, but equally wild and romantic. In such
a situation my brother lived, and under the tuition of a clergyman,
retired in his habits, and even ascetic, but gentle in his manners. To
that I can speak myself; for in the winter of 1801 I dined with him, and
found that his yoke was, indeed, a mild one; since, even to my youngest
brother H., a headstrong child of seven, he used no stronger
remonstrance, in urging him to some essential point of duty, than "_Do be
persuaded, sir._" On another occasion I, accompanied by a friend, slept
at Mr. J.'s: we were accidentally detained there through the greater part
of the following day by snow; and, to the inexpressible surprise of my
companion, a mercantile man from Manchester, for a considerable time
after breakfast the reverend gentleman persisted in pursuing my brother
from room to room, and at last from the ground floor up to the attics,
holding a book open, (which turned out to be a Latin grammar;) each of
them (pursuer and pursued) moving at a tolerably slow pace, my brother H.
silent; but Mr. J., with a voice of adjuration, solemn and even sad, yet
kind and conciliatory, singing out at intervals, "Do be persuaded, sir!"
"It is _your_ welfare I seek!" "Let your own interest, sir, plead in this
matter between us!" And so the chase continued, ascending and descending,
up to the very garrets, down to the very cellars, then steadily revolving
from front to rear of the house; but finally with no result at all. The
spectacle reminded me of a groom attempting to catch a coy pony by
holding out a sieve containing, or pretending to contain, a bribe of
oats. Mrs. J., the reverend gentleman's wife, assured us that the same
process went on at intervals throughout the week; and in any case it was
clearly good as a mode of exercise. Now, such a master, though little
adapted for the headstrong H., was the very person for the thoughtful and
too sensitive R. Search the island through, there could not have been
found another situation so suitable to my brother's wayward and haughty
nature. The clergyman was learned, quiet, absorbed in his studies; humble
and modest beyond the proprieties of his situation, and treating my
brother in all points as a companion; whilst, on the other hand, my
brother was not the person to forget the respect due, by a triple title,
to a clergyman, a scholar, and his own preceptor--one, besides, who so
little thought of exacting it. How happy might all parties have been--
what suffering, what danger, what years of miserable anxiety might have
been spared to all who were interested--had the guardians and executors
of my father's will thought fit to "let _well_ alone"! But, "_per star
meglio_" [2] they chose to remove my brother from this gentle recluse to
an active, bustling man of the world, the very anti-pole in character.
What might be the pretensions of this gentleman to scholarship, I never
had any means of judging; and, considering that he must now, (if living
at all,) at a distance of thirty-six years, be gray headed, I shall
respect his age so far as to suppress his name. He was of a class now
annually declining (and I hope rapidly) to extinction. Thanks be to God,
in this point at least, for the dignity of human nature, that, amongst
the many, many cases of reform destined eventually to turn out
chimerical, this one, at least, never can be defeated, injured, or
eclipsed. As man grows more intellectual, the power of managing him by
his intellect and his moral nature, in utter contempt of all appeals to
his mere animal instincts of pain, must go on _pari passu_. And, if a
"_Te Deum_," or an "_O, Jubilate!_" were to be celebrated by all nations
and languages for any one advance and absolute conquest over wrong and
error won by human nature in our times,--yes, not excepting
"The bloody writing by all nations torn"--
the abolition of the commerce in slaves,--to my thinking, that festival
should be for the mighty progress made towards the suppression of
brutal, bestial modes of punishment. Nay, I may call them worse than
bestial; for a man of any goodness of nature does not willingly or
needlessly resort to the spur or the lash with his horse or with his
hound. But, with respect to man, if he will not be moved or won over
by conciliatory means,--by means that presuppose him a reasonable
creature,--then let him die, confounded in his own vileness; but let
not me, let not the man (that is to say) who has him in his power,
dishonor himself by inflicting punishments, violating that grandeur
of human nature which, not in any vague rhetorical sense, but upon a
religious principle of duty, (viz., the scriptural doctrine that the
human person is "the temple of the Holy Ghost,") ought to be a
consecrated thing in the eyes of all good men; and of this we may be
assured,--this is more sure than day or night,--that, in proportion
as man is honored, exalted, trusted, in that proportion will he become
more worthy of honor, of exaltation, of trust.
This schoolmaster had very different views of man and his nature. He
not only thought that physical coercion was the one sole engine by
which man could be managed, but--on the principle of that common maxim
which declares that, when two schoolboys meet, with powers at all near
to a balance, no peace can be expected between them until it is fairly
settled _which_ is the master--on that same principle he fancied that
no pupil could adequately or proportionably reverence his master until
he had settled the precise proportion of superiority in animal powers
by which his master was in advance of himself. Strength of blows only
could ascertain _that_; and, as he was not very nice about creating
his opportunities, as he plunged at once "_in medias res_," and more
especially when he saw or suspected my rebellious tendencies, he soon
picked a quarrel with my unfortunate brother. Not, be it observed,
that he much cared for a well-looking or respectable quarrel. No. I
have been assured that, even when the most fawning obsequiousness ad
appealed to his clemency, in the person of some timorous new-comer,
appalled by the reports he had heard, even in such cases, (deeming it
wise to impress, from the beginning, a salutary awe of his Jovian
thunders) he made a practice of doing thus: He would speak loud, utter
some order, not very clearly, perhaps, as respected the sound, but
with _perfect_ perplexity as regarded the sense, to the timid, sensitive
boy upon whom he intended to fix a charge of disobedience. "Sir, if
you please, what was it that you said?" "What was it that I said? What!
playing upon my words? Chopping logic? Strip, sir; strip this instant."
Thenceforward this timid boy became a serviceable instrument in his
equipage. Not only was he a proof, even without coöperation on the
master's part, that extreme cases of submission could not insure
mercy, but also he, this boy, in his own person, breathed forth, at
intervals, a dim sense of awe and worship--the religion of fear--towards
the grim Moloch of the scene. Hence, as by electrical conductors, was
conveyed throughout every region of the establishment a tremulous
sensibility that vibrated towards the centre. Different, O Rowland
Hill! are the laws of thy establishment; far other are the echoes heard
amid the ancient halls of Bruce. [3] There it is possible for the timid
child to be happy--for the child destined to an early grave to reap his
brief harvest in peace. Wherefore were there no such asylums in those
days? Man flourished then, as now, in beauty and in power. Wherefore did
he not put forth his power upon establishments that might cultivate
happiness as well as knowledge? Wherefore did no man cry aloud, in the
spirit of Wordsworth,--
"Ah, what avails heroic deed?
What liberty? if no defence
Be won for feeble innocence.
Father of all! though wilful manhood read
His punishment in soul distress
Grant to the _morn_ of life its natural blessedness"?
Meantime, my brother R., in an evil hour, having been removed from
that most quiet of human sanctuaries, having forfeited that peace which
possibly he was never to retrieve, fell (as I have said) into the power
of this Moloch. And this Moloch upon him illustrated the laws of his
establishment; him also, the gentle, the beautiful, but, also the
proud, the haughty, the beat, kicked, trampled on!
In two hours from that time, my brother was on the road to Liverpool.
Painfully he made out his way, having not much money, and with a sense
of total abandonment which made him feel that all he might have would
prove little enough for his purposes.
My brother went to an inn, after his long, long journey to Liverpool,
footsore--(for he had walked through four days, and, from ignorance
of the world, combined with excessive shyness,--O, how shy do people
become from pride!--had not profited by those well-known incidents
upon English high roads--return post chaises, stage coaches, led horses,
or wagons)--footsore, and eager for sleep. Sleep, supper, breakfast
in the morning,--all these he had; so far his slender finances reached;
and for these he paid the treacherous landlord; who then proposed to
him that they should take a walk out together, by way of looking at
the public buildings and the docks. It seems the man had noticed my
brother's beauty, some circumstances about his dress inconsistent with
his mode of travelling, and also his style of conversation. Accordingly,
he wiled him along from street to street, until they reached the Town
Hall. "Here _seems_ to be a fine building," said this Jesuitical
guide,--as if it had been some new Pompeii, some Luxor or Palmyra,
that he had unexpectedly lit upon amongst the undiscovered parts of
Liverpool,--"here seems to be a fine building; shall we go in and ask
leave to look at it?" My brother, thinking less of the spectacle than
the spectator, whom, in a wilderness of man, naturally he wished to
make his friend, consented readily. In they went; and, by the merest
accident, Mr. Mayor and the town council were then sitting. To them
the insidious landlord communicated privately an account of his
suspicions. He himself conducted my brother, under pretence of
discovering the best station for picturesque purposes, to the particular
box for prisoners at the bar. This was not suspected by the poor boy,
not even when Mr. Mayor began to question him. He still thought it an
accident, though doubtless he blushed excessively on being questioned,
and questioned so impertinently, in public. The object of the mayor
and of other Liverpool gentlemen then present was, to ascertain my
brother's real rank and family; for he persisted in representing himself
as a poor wandering boy. Various means were vainly tried to elicit
this information; until at length--like the wily Ulysses, who mixed
with his peddler's budget of female ornaments and attire a few arms,
by way of tempting Achilles to a self-detection in the court of
Lycomedes--one gentleman counselled the mayor to send for a Greek
Testament. This was done; the Testament was presented open at St.
John's Gospel to my brother, and he was requested to say whether he
knew in what language that book was written; or whether, perhaps, he
could furnish them with a translation from the page before him. R.,
in his confusion, did not read the meaning of this appeal, and fell
into the snare; construed a few verses; and immediately was consigned
to the care of a gentleman, who won from him by kindness what he had
refused to importunities or menaces. His family he confessed at once,
but not his school. An express was therefore forwarded from Liverpool
to our nearest male relative--a military man, then by accident on leave
of absence from India. He came over, took my brother back, (looking
upon the whole as a boyish frolic of no permanent importance,) made
some stipulations in his behalf for indemnity from punishment, and
immediately returned home. Left to himself, the grim tyrant of the
school easily evaded the stipulations, and repeated his brutalities
more fiercely than before--now acting in the double spirit of tyranny
and revenge.
In a few hours, my brother was again on the road to Liverpool. But not
on this occasion did he resort to any inn, or visit any treacherous
hunter of the picturesque. He offered himself to no temptations now,
nor to any risks. Right onwards he went to the docks, addressed himself
to a grave, elderly master of a trading vessel, bound upon a distant
voyage, and instantly procured an engagement. The skipper was a good
and sensible man, and (as it turned out) a sailor accomplished in all
parts of his profession. The ship which he commanded was a South Sea
whaler, belonging to Lord Grenville--whether lying at Liverpool or in
the Thames at that moment, I am not sure. However, they soon afterwards
sailed.
For somewhat less than three years my brother continued under the care
of this good man, who was interested by his appearance, and by some
resemblance which he fancied in his features to a son whom he had lost.
Fortunate, indeed, for the poor boy was this interval of fatherly
superintendence; for, under this captain, he was not only preserved
from the perils which afterwards beseiged him, until his years had
made him more capable of confronting them, but also he had thus an
opportunity, which he improved to the utmost, of making himself
acquainted with the two separate branches of his profession--navigation
and seamanship, qualifications which are not very often united.
After the death of his captain, my brother ran through many wild
adventures; until at length, after a severe action, fought off the
coast of Peru, the armed merchant-man in which he then served was
captured by pirates. Most of the crew were massacred. My brother, on
account of the important services he could render, was spared; and
with these pirates, cruising under a black flag, and perpetrating
unnumbered atrocities, he was obliged to sail for the next two years;
nor could he, in all that period, find any opportunity for effecting
his escape.
During this long expatriation, let any thoughtful reader imagine the
perils of every sort which beseiged one so young, so inexperienced,
so sensitive, and so haughty; perils to his life; (but these it was
the very expression of his unhappy situation, were the perils least
to be mourned for;) perils to his good name, going the length of
absolute infamy--since, if the piratical ship had been captured by a
British man-of-war, he might have found it impossible to clear himself
of a voluntary participation in the bloody actions of his shipmates;
and, on the other hand, (a case equally probable in the regions which
they frequented,) supposing him to have been captured by a Spanish
_guarda costa_, he would scarcely have been able, from his ignorance
of the Spanish language, to draw even a momentary attention to the
special circumstances of his own situation; he would have been involved
in the general presumptions of the case, and would have been executed
in a summary way, upon the _prima facie_ evidence against him, that
he did not appear to be in the condition of a prisoner; and, if his
name had ever again reached his country, it would have been in some
sad list of ruffians, murderers, traitors to their country; and even
these titles, as if not enough in themselves, aggravated by the name
of pirate, which at once includes them all, and surpasses them all.
These were perils sufficiently distressing at any rate; but last of
all came others even more appalling--the perils of moral contamination,
in that excess which might be looked for from such associates; not,
be it recollected, a few wild notions or lawless principles adopted
into his creed of practical ethics, but that brutal transfiguration
of the entire character, which occurs, for instance, in the case of
the young gypsy son of Effie Deans; a change making it impossible to
rely upon the very holiest instincts of the moral nature, and consigning
its victim to hopeless reprobation. Murder itself might have lost its
horrors to one who must have been but too familiar with the spectacle
of massacre by wholesale upon unresisting crews, upon passengers
enfeebled by sickness, or upon sequestered villagers, roused from their
slumbers by the glare of conflagration, reflected from gleaming
cutlasses and from the faces of demons. This fear it was--a fear like
this, as I have often thought--which must, amidst her other woes, have
been the Aaron woe that swallowed up all the rest to the unhappy Marie
Antoinette. This must have been the sting of death to her maternal
heart, the grief paramount, the "crowning" grief--the prospect, namely,
that her royal boy would not be dismissed from the horrors of royalty
to peace and humble innocence; but that his fair cheek would be ravaged
by vice as well as sorrow; that he would be tempted into brutal orgies,
and every mode of moral pollution; until, like poor Constance with her
young Arthur, but for a sadder reason, even if it were possible that
the royal mother should see her son in "the courts of heaven," she
would not know again one so fearfully transfigured. This prospect for
the royal Constance of revolutionary France was but too painfully
fulfilled, as we are taught to guess even from the faithful records
of the Duchesse d'Angoulême. The young dauphin, (_it has been said_,
1837,) to the infamy of his keepers, was so trained as to become
loathsome for coarse brutality, as well as for habits of uncleanliness,
to all who approached him--one purpose of his guilty tutors being to
render royalty and august descent contemptible in his person. And, in
fact, they were so far likely to succeed in this purpose, for the
moment, and to the extent of an individual case, that, upon that account
alone, but still more for the sake of the poor child, the most welcome
news with respect to _him_--him whose birth [4] had drawn anthems of
exultation from twenty-five millions of men--was the news of his death.
And what else can well be expected for children suddenly withdrawn from
parental tenderness, and thrown upon their own guardianship at such an
age as nine or ten, and under the wilful misleading of perfidious guides?
But, in my brother's case, all the adverse chances, overwhelming as they
seemed, were turned aside by some good angel; all had failed to harm him;
and from the fiery furnace he came out unsinged.
I have said that he would not have appeared to any capturing ship as
standing in the situation of prisoner amongst the pirates, nor was he
such in the sense of being confined. He moved about, when on board
ship, in freedom; but he was watched, never trusted on shore, unless
under very peculiar circumstances; and tolerated at all only because
one accomplishment made him indispensable to the prosperity of the
ship. Amongst the various parts of nautical skill communicated to my
brother by his first fatherly captain, was the management of
chronometers. Several had been captured, some of the highest value,
in the many prizes, European or American. My brother happened to be
perfect in the skill of managing them; and, fortunately for him, no
other person amongst them had that skill, even in its lowest degree.
To this one qualification, therefore, (and ultimately to this only,)
he was indebted for, both safety and freedom; since, though he might
have been spared in the first moments of carnage from other
considerations, there is little doubt that, in some one of the
innumerable brawls which followed through the years of his captivity,
he would have fallen a sacrifice to hasty impulses of anger or
wantonness, had not his safety been made an object of interest and
vigilance to those in command, and to all who assumed any care for the
general welfare. Much, therefore, it was that he owed to this
accomplishment. Still, there is no good thing without its alloy; and
this great blessing brought along with it something worse than a dull
duty--the necessity, in fact, of facing fears and trials to which the
sailor's heart is preeminently sensible. All sailors, it is notorious,
are superstitious; partly, I suppose, from looking out so much upon
the wilderness of waves, empty of all human life; for mighty solitudes
are generally fear-haunted and fear-peopled; such, for instance, as
the solitudes of forests, where, in the absence of human forms and
ordinary human sounds, are discerned forms more dusky and vague, not
referred by the eye to any known type, and sounds imperfectly
intelligible. And, therefore, are all German coal burners, woodcutters,
&c., superstitious. Now, the sea is often peopled, amidst its ravings,
with what seem innumerable human voices--such voices, or as ominous,
as what were heard by Kubla Khan--"ancestral voices prophesying war;"
oftentimes laughter mixes, from a distance, (seeming to come also from
distant times, as well as distant places,) with the uproar of waters;
and doubtless shapes of fear, or shapes of beauty not less awful, are
at times seen upon the waves by the diseased eye of the sailor, in
other cases besides the somewhat rare one of calenture. This vast
solitude of the sea being taken, therefore, as one condition of the
superstitious fear found so commonly among sailors, a second may be
the perilous insecurity of their own lives, or (if the lives of sailors,
after all, by means of large immunities from danger in other shapes
are _not_ so insecure as is supposed, though, by the way, it is enough
for this result that to themselves they seem so) yet, at all events,
the insecurity of the ships in which they sail. In such a case, in the
case of battle, and in others where the empire of chance seems absolute,
there the temptation is greatest to dally with supernatural oracles
and supernatural means of consulting them. Finally, the interruption
habitually of all ordinary avenues to information about the fate of
their dearest relatives; the consequent agitation which must often
possess those who are reëntering upon home waters; and the sudden
burst, upon stepping ashore, of heart-shaking news in long accumulated
arrears,--these are circumstances which dispose the mind to look out
for relief towards signs and omens as one way of breaking the shock
by dim anticipations. Rats leaving a vessel destined to sink, although
the political application of it as a name of reproach is purely modern,
must be ranked among the oldest of omens; and perhaps the most
sober-minded of men might have leave to be moved with any augury of
an ancient traditional order, such as had won faith for centuries,
applied to a fate so interesting as that of the ship to which he was
on the point of committing himself. Other causes might be assigned,
causative of nautical superstition, and tending to feed it. But enough.
It is well known that the whole family of sailors _is_ superstitious.
My brother, poor Pink, (this was an old household name which he retained
amongst us from an incident of his childhood,) was so in an immoderate
degree. Being a great reader, (in fact, he had read every thing in his
mother tongue that was of general interest,) he was pretty well aware
how general was the ridicule attached in our times to the subject of
ghosts. But this--nor the reverence he yielded otherwise to some of
those writers who had joined in that ridicule--any more had unsettled
his faith in their existence than the submission of a sailor in a
religious sense to his spiritual counsellor upon the false and
fraudulent pleasures of luxury can ever disturb his remembrance of the
virtues lodged in rum or tobacco. His own unconquerable, unanswerable
experience, the blank realities of pleasure and pain, put to flight
all arguments whatsoever that anchor only in his understanding. Pink
used, in arguing the case with me, to admit that ghosts might be
questionable realities in our hemisphere; but "it's a different thing
to the _suthard_ of the line." And then he would go on to tell me of
his own fearful experience; in particular of one many times renewed,
and investigated to no purpose by parties of men communicating from
a distance upon a system of concerted signals, in one of the Gallapagos
Islands. These islands, which were visited, and I think described, by
Dampier, and therefore must have been an asylum to the buccaneers and
flibustiers [5] in the latter part of the seventeenth century, were so
still to their more desperate successors, the pirates, at the beginning
of the nineteenth; and for the same reason--the facilities they offer
(rare in those seas) for procuring wood and water. Hither, then, the
black flag often resorted; and here, amidst these romantic solitudes,--
islands untenanted by man,--oftentimes it lay furled up for weeks
together; rapine and murder had rest for a season, and the bloody cutlass
slept within its scabbard. When this happened, and when it became known
beforehand that it _would_ happen, a tent was pitched on shore for my
brother, and the chronometers were transported thither for the period of
their stay.
The island selected for this purpose, amongst the many equally open
to their choice, might, according to circumstances, be that which
offered the best anchorage, or that from which the reëmbarkation was
easiest, or that which allowed the readiest access to wood and water.
But for some, or all these advantages, the particular island most
generally honored by the piratical custom and "good will" was one known
to American navigators as "The Woodcutter's Island." There was some
old tradition--and I know not but it was a tradition dating from the
times of Dampier--that a Spaniard or an Indian settler in this island
(relying, perhaps, too entirely upon the protection of perfect solitude)
had been murdered in pure wantonness by some of the lawless rovers who
frequented this solitary archipelago. Whether it were from some peculiar
atrocity of bad faith in the act, or from the sanctity of the man, or
the deep solitude of the island, or with a view to the peculiar
edification of mariners in these semi-Christian seas, so, however, it
was, and attested by generations of sea vagabonds, (for most of the
armed roamers in these ocean Zaaras at one time were of a suspicious
order,) that every night, duly as the sun went down and the twilight
began to prevail, a sound arose--audible to other islands, and to every
ship lying quietly at anchor in that neighborhood--of a woodcutter's
axe. Sturdy were the blows, and steady the succession in which they
followed: some even fancied they could hear that sort of groaning
respiration which is made by men who use an axe, or by those who in
towns ply the "three-man beetle" of Falstaff, as paviers; echoes they
certainly heard of every blow, from the profound woods and the sylvan
precipices on the margin of the shores; which, however, should rather
indicate that the sounds were _not_ supernatural, since, if a visual
object, falling under hyper-physical or cata-physical laws, loses its
shadow, by parity of argument, an audible object, in the same
circumstances, should lose its echo. But this was the story; and amongst
sailors there is as little variety of versions in telling any true sea
story as there is in a log book, or in "The Flying Dutchman:"
_literatim_ fidelity is, with a sailor, a point at once of religious
faith and worldly honor. The close of the story was--that after,
suppose, ten or twelve minutes of hacking and hewing, a horrid crash
was heard, announcing that the tree, if tree it were, that never yet
was made visible to daylight search, had yielded to the old woodman's
persecution. It was exactly the crash, so familiar to many ears on
board the neighboring vessels, which expresses the harsh tearing asunder
of the fibres, caused by the weight of the trunk in falling; beginning
slowly, increasing rapidly, and terminating in one rush of rending.
This over,--one tree felled "towards his winter store,"--there was an
interval; man must have rest; and the old woodman, after working for
more than a century, must want repose. Time enough to begin again after
a quarter of an hour's relaxation. Sure enough, in that space of time,
again began, in the words of Comus, "the wonted roar amid the woods."
Again the blows became quicker, as the catastrophe drew nearer; again
the final crash resounded; and again the mighty echoes travelled through
the solitary forests, and were taken up by all the islands near and
far, like Joanna's laugh amongst the Westmoreland hills, to the
astonishment of the silent ocean. Yet, wherefore should the ocean be
astonished?--he that had heard this nightly tumult, by all accounts,
for more than a century. My brother, however, poor Pink, _was_
astonished, in good earnest, being, in that respect, of the _genus
attonitorum_; and as often as the gentlemen pirates steered their
course for the Gallapagos, he would sink in spirit before the trials
he might be summoned to face. No second person was ever put on shore
with Pink, lest poor Pink and he might become jovial over the liquor,
and the chronometers be broken or neglected; for a considerable quantity
of spirits was necessarily landed, as well as of provisions, because
sometimes a sudden change of weather, or the sudden appearance of a
suspicious sail, might draw the ship off the island for a fortnight.
My brother could have pleaded his fears without shame; but he had a
character to maintain with the sailors: he was respected equally for
his seamanship and his shipmanship. [6] By the way, when it is
considered that one half of a sailor's professional science refers him
to the stars, (though it is true the other half refers him to the sails
and shrouds of a ship,) just as, in geodesical operations, one part
is referred to heaven and one to earth, when this is considered, another
argument arises for the superstition of sailors, so far as it is
astrological. They who know (but know the _oti_ without knowing
the _dia ti_) that the stars have much to do in guiding their
own movements, which are yet so far from the stars, and, to all
appearance, so little connected with them, may be excused for supposing
that the stars are connected astrologically with human destinies. But
this by the way. The sailors, looking to Pink's double skill, and to
his experience on shore, (more astonishing than all beside, being
experience gathered amongst ghosts,) expressed an admiration which,
to one who was also a sailor, had too genial a sound to be sacrificed,
if it could be maintained at any price. Therefore it was that Pink
still clung, in spite of his terrors, to his shore appointment. But
hard was his trial; and many a time has he described to me one effect
of it, when too long continued, or combined with darkness too intense.
The woodcutter would begin his operations soon after the sun had set;
but uniformly, at that time, his noise was less. Three hours after
sunset it had increased; and generally at midnight it was greatest,
but not always. Sometimes the case varied thus far: that it greatly
increased towards three or four o'clock in the morning; and, as the
sound grew louder, and thereby seemed to draw nearer, poor Pink's
ghostly panic grew insupportable; and he absolutely crept from his
pavilion, and its luxurious comforts, to a point of rock--a
promontory--about half a mile off, from which he could see the ship.
The mere sight of a human abode, though an abode of ruffians, comforted
his panic. With the approach of daylight, the mysterious sounds ceased.
Cockcrow there happened to be none, in those islands of the Gallapagos,
or none in that particular island; though many cocks are heard crowing
in the woods of America, and these, perhaps, might be caught by
spiritual senses; or the woodcutter may be supposed, upon Hamlet's
principle, either scenting the morning air, or catching the sounds of
Christian matin bells, from some dim convent, in the depth of American
forests. However, so it was; the woodcutter's axe began to intermit
about the earliest approach of dawn; and, as light strengthened, it
ceased entirely. At nine, ten, or eleven o'clock in the forenoon the
whole appeared to have been a delusion; but towards sunset it revived
in credit; during twilight it strengthened; and, very soon afterwards,
superstitious panic was again seated on her throne. Such were the
fluctuations of the case. Meantime, Pink, sitting on his promontory
in early dawn, and consoling his terrors by looking away from the
mighty woods to the tranquil ship, on board of which (in spite of her
secret black flag) the whole crew, murderers and all, were sleeping
peacefully--he, a beautiful English boy, chased away to the antipodes
from one early home by his sense of wounded honor, and from his
immediate home by superstitious fear, recalled to my mind an image and
a situation that had been beautifully sketched by Miss Bannerman in
"Basil," one of the striking (though, to rapid readers, somewhat
unintelligible) metrical tales published early in this century, entitled
"Tales of Superstition and Chivalry." Basil is a "rude sea boy,"
desolate and neglected from infancy, but with feelings profound from
nature, and fed by solitude. He dwells alone in a rocky cave; but, in
consequence of some supernatural terrors connected with a murder,
arising in some way (not very clearly made out) to trouble the repose
of his home, he leaves it in horror, and rushes in the gray dawn to
the seaside rocks; seated on which, he draws a sort of consolation for
his terrors, or of sympathy with his wounded heart, from that mimicry
of life which goes on forever amongst the raving waves.
From the Gallapagos, Pink went often to Juan (or, as he chose to call
it, after Dampier and others, _John_) Fernandez. Very lately, (December,
1837,) the newspapers of America informed us, and the story was current
for full nine days, that this fair island had been swallowed up by an
earthquake; or, at least, that in some way or other it had disappeared.
Had that story proved true, one pleasant bower would have perished,
raised by Pink as a memorial expression of his youthful feelings either
towards De Foe, or his visionary creature, Robinson Crusoe--but rather,
perhaps, towards the substantial Alexander Selkirk; for it was raised
on some spot known or reputed by tradition to have been one of those
most occupied as a home by Selkirk. I say, "rather towards Alexander
Selkirk;" for there is a difficulty to the judgment in associating
Robinson Crusoe with this lovely island of the Pacific, and a difficulty
even to the fancy. _Why_, it is hard to guess, or through what perverse
contradiction to the facts, De Foe chose to place the shipwreck of
Robinson Crusoe upon the _eastern_ side of the American continent.
Now, not only was this in direct opposition to the realities of the
case upon which he built, as first reported (I believe) by Woodes
Rogers, from the log book of the Duke and Duchess,--(a privateer fitted
out, to the best of my remembrance, by the Bristol merchants, two or
three years before the peace of Utrecht,) and so far the mind of any
man acquainted with these circumstances was staggered, in attempting
to associate this eastern wreck of Crusoe with this western island,--but
a worse obstacle than that, because a moral one, is this, that, by
thus perversely transferring the scene from the Pacific to the Atlantic,
De Foe has transferred it from a quiet and sequestered to a populous
and troubled sea,--the Fleet Street or Cheapside of the navigating
world, the great throughfare of nations,--and thus has prejudiced the
moral sense and the fancy against his fiction still more inevitably
than his judgment, and in a way that was perfectly needless; for the
change brought along with it no shadow of compensation.
My brother's wild adventures amongst these desperate sea rovers were
afterwards communicated in long letters to a female relative; and,
even as letters, apart from the fearful burden of their contents, I
can bear witness that they had very extraordinary merit. This, in fact,
was the happy result of writing from his heart; feeling profoundly
what he communicated, and anticipating the profoundest sympathy with
all that he uttered from her whom he addressed. A man of business, who
opened some of these letters, in his character of agent for my brother's
five guardians, and who had not any special interest in the affair,
assured me that, throughout the whole course of his life, he had never
read any thing so affecting, from the facts they contained, and from
the sentiments which they expressed; above all, the yearning for that
England which he remembered as the land of his youthful pleasures, but
also of his youthful degradations. Three of the guardians were present
at the reading of these letters, and were all affected to tears,
not-withstanding they had been irritated to the uttermost by the course
which both myself and my brother had pursued--a course which seemed
to argue some defect of judgment, or of reasonable kindness, in
themselves. These letters, I hope, are still preserved, though they
have been long removed from my control. Thinking of them, and their
extraordinary merit, I have often been led to believe that every post
town (and many times in the course of a month) carries out numbers of
beautifully-written letters, and more from women than from men; not
that men are to be supposed less capable of writing good letters,--and,
in fact, amongst all the celebrated letter writers of past or present
times, a large overbalance happens to have been men,--but that more
frequently women write from their hearts; and the very same cause
operates to make female letters good which operated at one period to
make the diction of Roman ladies more pure than that of orators or
professional cultivators of the Roman language--and which, at another
period, in the Byzantine court, operated to preserve the purity of the
mother idiom within the nurseries and the female drawing rooms of the
palace, whilst it was corrupted in the forensic standards and the
academic--in the standards of the pulpit and the throne.
With respect to Pink's yearning for England, that had been partially
gratified in some part of his long exile: twice, as we learned long
afterwards, he had landed in England; but such was his haughty adherence
to his purpose, and such his consequent terror of being discovered
and reclaimed by his guardians, that he never attempted to communicate
with any of his brothers or sisters. There he was wrong; me they should
have cut to pieces before I would have betrayed him. I, like him, had
been an obstinate recusant to what I viewed as unjust pretensions of
authority; and, having been the first to raise the standard of revolt,
had been taxed by my guardians with having seduced Pink by my example.
But that was untrue; Pink acted for himself. However, he could know
little of all this; and he traversed England twice, without making an
overture towards any communication with his friends. Two circumstances
of these journeys he used to mention; both were from the port of London
(for he never contemplated London but as a port) to Liverpool; or,
thus far I may be wrong, that one of the two might be (in the return
order) from Liverpool to London. On the first of these journeys, his
route lay through Coventry; on the other, through Oxford and Birmingham.
In neither case had he started with much money; and he was going to
have retired from the coach at the place of supping on the first night,
(the journey then occupying two entire days and two entire nights,)
when the passengers insisted on paying for him: that was a tribute to
his beauty--not yet extinct. He mentioned this part of his adventures
somewhat shyly, whilst going over them with a sailor's literal accuracy;
though, as a record belonging to what he viewed as childish years, he
had ceased to care about it. On the other journey his experience was
different, but equally testified to the spirit of kindness that is
every where abroad. He had no money, on this occasion, that could
purchase even a momentary lift by a stage coach: as a pedestrian, he
had travelled down to Oxford, occupying two days in the fifty-four or
fifty-six miles which then measured the road from London, and sleeping
in a farmer's barn, without leave asked. Wearied and depressed in
spirits, he had reached Oxford, hopeless of any aid, and with a deadly
shame at the thought of asking it. But, somewhere in the High
Street,--and, according to his very accurate sailor's description of
that noble street, it must have been about the entrance of All Souls'
College,--he met a gentleman, a gownsman, who (at the very moment of
turning into the college gate) looked at Pink earnestly, and then gave
him a guinea, saying at the time, "I know what it is to be in your
situation. You are a schoolboy, and you have run away from your school.
Well, I was once in your situation, and I pity you." The kind gownsman,
who wore a velvet cap with a silk gown, and must, therefore, have been
what in Oxford is called a gentleman commoner, gave him an address at
some college or other, (Magdalen, he fancied, in after years,) where
he instructed him to call before he quitted Oxford. Had Pink done this,
and had he frankly communicated his whole story, very probably he would
have received, not assistance merely, but the best advice for guiding
his future motions. His reason for not keeping the appointment was
simply that he was nervously shy, and, above all things, jealous of
being entrapped by insidious kindness into revelations that might prove
dangerously circumstantial. Oxford had a mayor; Oxford had a
corporation; Oxford had Greek Testaments past all counting; and so,
remembering past experiences, Pink held it to be the wisest counsel
that he should pursue his route on foot to Liverpool. That guinea,
however, he used to say, saved him from despair.
One circumstance affected me in this part of Pink's story. I was a
student in Oxford at that time. By comparing dates, there was no doubt
whatever that I, who held my guardians in abhorrence, and, above all
things, admired my brother for his conduct, might have rescued him at
this point of his youthful trials, four years before the fortunate
catastrophe of his case, from the calamities which awaited him. This
is felt generally to be the most distressing form of human
blindness--the case when accident brings two fraternal hearts, yearning
for reunion, into almost touching neighborhood, and then, in a moment
after, by the difference, perhaps, of three inches in space, or three
seconds in time, will separate them again, unconscious of their brief
neighborhood, perhaps forever. In the present case, however, it may
be doubted whether this unconscious rencontre and unconscious parting
in Oxford ought to be viewed as a misfortune. Pink, it is true, endured
years of suffering, four, at least, that might have been saved by this
seasonable rencontre; but, on the other hand, by travelling through
his misfortunes with unabated spirit, and to their natural end, he won
experience and distinctions that else he would have missed. His further
history was briefly this:--
Somewhere in the River of Plate he had effected his escape from the
pirates; and a long time after, in 1807, I believe, (I write without
books to consult,) he joined the storming party of the English at Monte
Video. Here he happened fortunately to fall under the eye of Sir Home
Popham; and Sir Home forthwith rated my brother as a midshipman on
board his own ship, which was at that time, I think, a fifty-gun
ship--the Diadem. Thus, by merits of the most appropriate kind, and
without one particle of interest, my brother passed into the royal
navy. His nautical accomplishments were now of the utmost importance
to him; and, as often as he shifted his ship, which (to say the truth)
was far too often,--for his temper was fickle and delighting in
change,--so often these accomplishments were made the basis of very
earnest eulogy. I have read a vast heap of certificates vouching for
Pink's qualifications as a sailor in the highest terms, and from
several of the most distinguished officers in the service. Early in
his career as a midshipman, he suffered a mortifying interruption of
the active life which had long since become essential to his comfort.
He had contrived to get appointed on board a fire ship, the Prometheus,
(chiefly with a wish to enlarge his experience by this variety of naval
warfare,) at the time of the last Copenhagen expedition, and he obtained
his wish; for the Prometheus had a very distinguished station assigned
her on the great night of bombardment, and from her decks, I believe,
was made almost the first effectual trial of the Congreve rockets.
Soon after the Danish capital had fallen, and whilst the Prometheus
was still cruising in the Baltic, Pink, in company with the purser of
his ship, landed on the coast of Jutland, for the purpose of a morning's
sporting. It seems strange that this should have been allowed upon a
hostile shore; and perhaps it was _not_ allowed, but might have been
a thoughtless abuse of some other mission shorewards. So it was,
unfortunately; and one at least of the two sailors had reason to rue
the sporting of that day for eighteen long months of captivity. They
were perfectly unacquainted with the localities, but conceived
themselves able at any time to make good their retreat to the boat,
by means of fleet heels, and arms sufficient to deal with any opposition
of the sort they apprehended. Venturing, however, too far into the
country, they became suddenly aware of certain sentinels, posted
expressly for the benefit of chance English visitors. These men did
not pursue, but they did worse, for they fired signal shots; and, by
the time our two thoughtless Jack tars had reached the shore, they saw
a detachment of Danish cavalry trotting their horses pretty coolly
down in a direction for the boat. Feeling confident of their power to
keep ahead of the pursuit, the sailors amused themselves with various
sallies of nautical wit; and Pink, in particular, was just telling
them to present his dutiful respects to the crown prince, and assure
him that, but for this lubberly interruption, he trusted to have
improved his royal dinner by a brace of birds, when--O sight of blank
confusion!--all at once they became aware that between themselves and
their boat lay a perfect network of streams, deep watery holes,
requiring both time and local knowledge to unravel. The purser hit
upon a course which enabled him to regain the boat; but I am not sure
whether he also was not captured. Poor Pink _was_, at all events; and,
through seventeen or eighteen months, bewailed this boyish imprudence.
At the end of that time there was an exchange of prisoners, and he
was again serving on board various and splendid frigates. Wyborg, in
Jutland, was the seat of his Danish captivity; and such was the
amiableness of the Danish character, that, except for the loss of his
time, to one who was aspiring to distinction and professional honor,
none of the prisoners who were on parole could have had much reason
for complaint. The street mob, excusably irritated with England at
that time, (for, without entering on the question of right or of
expedience as regarded that war, it is notorious that such arguments
as we had for our unannounced hostilities could not be pleaded openly
by the English cabinet, for fear of compromising our private friend
and informant, the King of Sweden,) the mob, therefore, were rough in
their treatment of the British prisoners: at night, they would pelt
them with stones; and here and there some honest burgher, who might
have suffered grievously in his property, or in the person of his
nearest friends, by the ruin inflicted upon the Danish commercial
shipping, or by the dreadful havoc made in Zealand, would show something
of the same bitter spirit. But the great body of the richer and more
educated inhabitants showed the most hospitable attention to all who
justified that sort of notice by their conduct. And their remembrance
of these English friendships was not fugitive; for, through long years
after my brother's death, I used to receive letters, written in the
Danish, (a language which I had attained in the course of my studies,
and which I have since endeavored to turn to account in a public
journal, for some useful purposes of research,) from young men as well
as women in Jutland--letters couched in the most friendly terms, and
recalling to his remembrance scenes and incidents which sufficiently
proved the terms of fraternal affection upon which he had lived amongst
these public enemies; and some of them I have preserved to this day,
as memorials that do honor, on different considerations, to both parties
alike. [7]
FOOTNOTES
[1] This poem, from great admiration of its mother English, and to
illustrate some ideas upon style, Mr. Coleridge republished in his
"Biographia Literaria."
[2] From the well-known Italian epitaph--"_Stava bene; ma per star
meglio, sto qui_"--I was well; but, because I would be better than well,
I am--where you see.
[3] This was not meant assuredly as any advertisement of an
establishment, which could not by all reports need any man's praise, but
was written under a very natural impulse derived from a recent visit to
the place, and under an unaffected sympathy with the spirit of freedom
and enjoyment that seemed to reign amongst the young people.
[4] To those who are open to the impression of omens, there is a most
striking one on record with respect to the birth of this ill-fated
prince, not less so than the falling off of the head from the cane of
Charles I. at his trial, or the same king's striking a medal, bearing an
oak tress, (prefiguring the oak of _Boscobel_,) with this prophetic
inscription, "_Seris nepotibus umbram_." At the very moment when
(according to immemorial usage) the birth of a child was in the act of
annunciation to the great officers of state assembled in the queen's bed
chamber, and when a private signal from a lady had made known the glad
tidings that it was a dauphin, (the first child having been a princess,
to the signal disappointment of the nation; and the second, who was a
boy, having died,) the whole frame of carved woodwork at the back of the
queen's bed, representing the crown and other regalia of France, with the
Bourbon lilies, came rattling down in ruins. There is another and more
direct ill omen connected, apparently, with the birth of this prince; in
fact, a distinct prophecy of his ruin,--a prophecy that he should survive
his father, and yet no reign,--which is so obscurely told, that one knows
not in what light to view it; and especially since Louis XVIII., who is
the original authority for it, obviously confounds the first dauphin, who
died before the calamities of his family commenced, with the second. As
to this second, who is of course the prince concerned in the references
of the text, a new and most extraordinary interest has begun to invest
his tragical story in this very month of April, 1853; at least, it is now
first brought before universal Christendom. In the monthly journal of
Putnam, (published in New York,) the No. for April contains a most
interesting memoir upon the subject, signed T. H. Hanson. Naturally, it
indisposed most readers to put faith in any fresh pretensions of this
nature, that at least one false dauphin had been pronounced such by so
undeniable a judge of the Duchesse d'Angoulême. Meantime, it is made
probably enough by Mr Hanson that the true dauphin did not die in the
year 1795 at the Temple, but was personated by a boy unknown; that two
separate parties had an equal interest in sustaining the fraud, and _did_
sustain it; but one would hesitate to believe whether at the price of
murdering a celebrated physician; that they had the prince conveyed
secretly to an Indian settlement in Lower Canada, as a situation in which
French, being the prevailing language, would attract no attention, as it
must have done in most other parts of North America; that the boy was
educated and trained as a missionary clergyman; and finally, that he is
now acting in that capacity under the name of Eleazar Williams--
perfectly aware of the royal pretensions put forward on his behalf, but
equally, through age (being about 69) and through absorption in spiritual
views, indifferent to these pretensions. It is admitted on all hands that
the Prince de Joinville had an interview with Eleazar Williams a dozen
years since--the prince alleges through mere accident; but this seems
improbable; and Mr Hanson is likely to be right in supposing this visit
to have been a pre-concerted one, growing out of some anxiety to test the
reports current, so far as they were grounded upon resemblances in Mr.
Williams's features to those of the Bourbon and Austrian families. The
most pathetic fact is that of the idiocy common to the dauphin and Mr.
Eleazar Williams. It is clear from all the most authentic accounts of the
young prince that idiocy was in reality stealing over him--due,
doubtless, to the stunning nature of the calamities that overwhelmed his
family; to the removal from him by tragical deaths, in so rapid a
succession, of the Princesse de Lamballe, of his aunt, of his father, of
his mother, and others whom most he had loved; to his cruel separation
from his sister; and to the astounding (for him naturally
incomprehensible) change that had come over the demeanor and the language
of nearly all the people placed about the persons of himself and his
family. An idiocy resulting from what must have seemed a causeless and
demoniac conspiracy would be more likely to melt away under the sudden
transfer to kindness and the gayety of forest life than any idiocy
belonging to original organic imbecility. Mr. Williams describes his own
confusion of mind as continuing up to his fourteenth year, and all things
which had happened in earlier years as gleaming through clouds of
oblivion, and as painfully perplexing; but otherwise he shows no desire
to strengthen the pretensions made for himself by any reminiscences
piercing these clouds that could point specially to France or to royal
experiences.
[5] "_Flibustiers_."--This word, which is just now revolving upon us in
connection with the attempts on Cuba, &c., is constantly spelt by our own
and the American journals as _fillibustiers_ and fillibusteros. But the
true word of nearly two centuries back amongst the old original race of
sea robbers (French and English) that made irregular war upon the Spanish
shipping and maritime towns was that which I have here retained.
[6] "_Seamanship and shipmanship_"--These are two functions of a sailor
seldom, separated in the mind of a landsman. The conducting a ship
(causing her to _choose_ a right path) through the ocean; that is one
thing. Then there is the management of the ship within herself, the
trimming of her sails, &c., (causing her to _keep_ the line chosen;) that
is another thing. The first is called seamanship; the second might be
called shipmanship, but is, I believe, called navigation. They are
perfectly distinct; one man rarely has both in perfection. Both may be
illustrated from the rudder. The question is, suppose at the Cape of Good
Hope, to steer for India: trust the rudder to him, as a seaman, who knows
the passage whether within or without Madagascar. The question is to
avoid a sunk rock: trust the rudder to him, as a navigator, who
understands the art of steering to a nicety.
[7] For this little parenthetical record of my brother's early history
the exact chronology of the several items in the case may possible be now
irrecoverable; but any error must be of trivial importance. His two
pedestrian journeys between London and Liverpool occurred, I believe, in
the same year--viz., after the death of the friendly captain, and during
the last visit of his ship to England. The capture of Pink by the pirates
took place after the ship's return to the Pacific.