NICKERSON AND LEWIS
Selling the Tale
What did Thomas Nickerson, the cabin boy and youngest Essex sailor at age fourteen, know that Chase had carefully concealed from his Narrative? What secrets did he divulge, and what incorrect details did he introduce, when he finally decided to write his own narrative? And what finally drove him to attempt to publish his tale after living in the shadow of Chase’s publication, the de facto authority on the event, for fifty-four years?
One catalyst for committing to publish the story was the discovery by Nickerson, as it had been for Chase, of a willing ghostwriter. This occurred in summer 1875, on Nantucket’s windswept beaches, when Leon Lewis entered the scene. A writer of flashy fiction for Robert Bonner’s New York Ledger, and a showy self-promoter, Lewis had enjoyed the privileges and prestige of occupying the inner circle of the most popular story paper since the early 1860s.1 The gregarious Nickerson and the flamboyant Lewis seemed the perfect match to produce the book to end all books on the Essex tragedy.
This wedding between market-savvy ghostwriter and aging shipwreck survivor, however, would come eventually to resemble the Gilded Age’s innumerable business scams. This was in part because Lewis, forty-two, had fallen out of favor with Bonner, owing to the declining health of the former’s wife Harriet. Over many productive years, Lewis and Harriet had “coauthored” numerous stories. But the real writer, and conceiver of character, setting, and plot, had been Harriet, whereas Lewis had functioned mainly as her business agent and promoter during their most productive years. Lewis, while vacationing on Nantucket in 1875, sought to win back Bonner’s favor. He saw in Nickerson’s tale an opportunity to rescue his career, a back story of which the seventy-two-year-old Nickerson had no notion. Nickerson was also unaware that the seeming serendipity of their Nantucket encounter was really the first step of an elaborate plan to seize control of the century’s most coveted sea narrative from the lone Essex survivor. The doddering Nickerson could not have known that he had entrusted his “Desultory Sketches from a Seaman’s Log,” the fullest account of the Essex tragedy ever written, to a charlatan bound for financial ruin.
As a boardinghouse and tavern proprietor, Nickerson had likely hosted Lewis at his establishment during the summer of 1875. One can imagine the interest Lewis had taken in Nickerson’s repository of sensational nautical lore, which he freely shared with his guests as well as locals. As the last remaining Essex survivor, Nickerson served as an incomparable Nantucket ambassador to the island’s tourists, including with respect to his personal seafaring experiences. It is highly probable, therefore, that Nickerson told the Essex story more than any other survivor. In committing the story to paper, he may well have hoped and expected that one of his cosmopolitan clients, especially one well connected to the publishing industry, would take an interest. These clients indeed represented the first generation of gentrified leisure travelers to Nantucket, and many were increasingly driven by profit in their business dealings. Alternatively, he may have planned on entrusting his manuscript to his family for posthumous publication. Whatever his intentions, Nickerson was painfully aware that his narrated version of events, while colorful and amusing, lacked the authority, continuity, and permanence of a print version. Undoubtedly, Nickerson relished the opportunity, likely spurred by the meeting with Lewis, to capitalize on his status as a living relic of the first mate’s tale—and to move beyond being a kind of human footnote to the Narrative.
One senses that Nickerson ruminated not on whether he should come forward with his manuscript, but on when. Nantucket historian Edouard Stackpole has conjectured that Lewis urged Nickerson to write his memoir of the Essex tragedy, implying that without the popular author’s encouragement, it would have remained unrecorded.2 There is no question that Nickerson aggressively pursued publication subsequent to meeting Lewis. But would the old sailor have had the vigor and sheer power of memory necessary to record an experience from so many decades ago? Or did the tale, thanks to his countless retellings of it, simply flow from his pen as it had from his lips in his parlor?
The fund of detail and description in “Desultory Sketches,” especially in the first eight chapters, which painstakingly recount the voyage prior to the whale encounter, suggests that Nickerson composed it well before the 1870s. This phase of the voyage would not have been fresh in Nickerson’s memory during his old age; his fireside stories probably did not include this relatively dry material. I would thus argue that Nickerson possessed a rough draft of his memoir prior to his introduction to Lewis. Curiously, “Desultory Sketches” shifts in the middle of chapter 9 to a seaman’s log with dates rather than chapter headings dividing the narrative, implying that Nickerson had transcribed his original log into chapter form in anticipation of Lewis’s publication of it as a serializable narrative. After the whale-attack scene, out of either fatigue with transforming the original log into chapters or a desire for verisimilitude during the climatic moments, Nickerson switches to log form. Given his likely fatigue on at least some level, he must have been overjoyed to have an accomplished and popular author assemble his jagged and discontinuous narrative into a coherent whole.
MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE
After Nickerson’s countless retellings, making a fair copy of his log likely seemed to him a natural way to confirm his point of view. Little did he know that his tale would travel like a message in a bottle, set aside by Lewis and utterly dependent on the care and comprehension of a random recipient. This discovery occurred in 1980, when the historian Ann Finch, a native New Englander, was rummaging through an attic in Penn Yan, New York, where Lewis had lived in the 1870s, and brushed off more than a hundred years of dust from a curious-looking volume. The cover bore the title “Desultory Sketches from a Seaman’s Log,” with no mention of an author. After consulting with the historian Stackpole, Finch learned that the penmanship on the 105 leaves, with inserted corrections, belonged to Nickerson. This was the fate of a story, ironically, entrusted to Lewis in faith that it would reach the nation’s widest audience in the periodical press. This was the very belated answer to Chase’s narrative, a forgotten tavern keeper’s twilight rush at fame and fortune.
In “Desultory Sketches,” one discovers a sanitized portrayal of Nickerson, who is not engaging in cannibalism or succumbing to his supposedly juvenile fears. Chase, for his part, comes off a lot worse than he does in the Narrative, with pivotal moments of paralysis and indecision included that were omitted from the first mate’s account. Stackpole, examining the new evidence and feeling pressure to issue an opinion, could only allow that obvious discrepancies existed between the two documents, and that scholars would no doubt debate the vagaries therein.3 But beyond the historical arcana, “Desultory Sketches,” placed alongside Chase’s Narrative, shows a survivor reaching full stride in the race for a popular audience. When it was discovered in the upstate New York attic, Nickerson’s draft was still awaiting the ghostwriter’s alchemy—with his precise desires for publication in the New York Ledger detailed in a letter to Lewis found with the manuscript—while Chase’s Narrative stood as the published result of his collaboration with his own ghostwriter.
By the mid-1870s, when Nickerson met Lewis, the New York Ledger was well known even to the isolated community of Nantucket Island. Nickerson would have been exposed to the Ledger, given its massive advertising campaigns. When Bonner purchased the journal in 1855, he had made a point of revolutionizing authors’ salaries, sparing no expense to acquire the brightest stars in the surging story-paper industry. Bonner did not grow talent so much as poach it, luring big-name writers away from rivals with lucrative contracts and liberal artistic license. By 1875 Nickerson would have therefore understood the privileged position Lewis occupied, and may have even read some of his work. His name typically appeared next to his wife’s in the bylines of their stories, which ran serially, with each weekly installment earning the couple almost three times what they would have taken in for the daily newspapers. The Lewises had been writing for the Ledger and enjoying such an unheard of income for six years prior to the encounter between Leon and Nickerson.4 The former cabin boy, for his part, hadn’t missed out on speculation fever, profiting handsomely from the rising “demand for accommodations for visitors which marked the early years of the 1870s.” And Nickerson “did not remain idle upon his retirement” but “bought a house on North Street (now Cliff Road) and opened a boarding house.” Interestingly, Nickerson’s work as an innkeeper famed for his seafaring yarns had at least two commercial components: his housing of paying guests and the draw of the story. Like Lewis, he became locally renowned and, by the time of his death in 1883, “among the most popular and best known of any here,” according to the Boston Traveller.5
While Nickerson was busy entertaining guests with his stories, and thus attracting a greater clientele and realizing a respectable income, Lewis was employed with not only a periodical but the century’s most powerful literary marketing machine. Bonner’s colossal advertising campaigns involved annual sums routinely exceeding $100,000, reaching well over 400,000 subscribers and setting new records in the history of American journalism.6 As noted, even Nickerson’s post–Civil War location on remote Nantucket, along with other such locations, would have been privy to Bonner’s production and distribution efforts. Indeed, as a storyteller and entrepreneur himself—despite his cluelessness regarding Lewis’s mismanaged finances and penchant for speculation—Nickerson may very well have admired the enterprising spirit of the Ledger and its ability to win a national audience.
Serial fiction was the main selling point of the Ledger from its origins. But the outlet had been steadily building its nonfiction content, beginning with Fanny Fern’s editorial column, which had initially fueled the paper’s astonishing rise. The paper had expanded its reach into popular biography, garnering contributions on the lives of famous military generals from Robert E. Lee to Napoleon. Henry Ward Beecher, the most celebrated preacher of the day, also wrote for the Ledger, as did respected statesman and icon of American democratic diplomacy Edward Everett. Nautical fiction, which had enraptured the nation since the Essex disaster, had also been a staple. Echoes of the Essex are heard throughout Sylvanus Cobb’s racy high-seas adventures, with his “Forest Sketches,” on the life of Colonel Walter B. Dunlap, and his subsequent “Forest Adventures,” following Dunlap to distant locations to “fight elephants, lions, tigers, and cannibals.” The triumphant return of Dunlap appeared in The Cannibal’s Necropolis! Home Again: Last of the Sketches of Adventure by Col. W. B. D.7 Cannibalism was a mainstay of Ledger fare, and global seafaring provided the setting and context.
The culture of the Ledger and its affiliation with the book trade were ideally suited to the Essex tale as told by Nickerson and Lewis. According to Nickerson’s obituary, Lewis’s proposal “to edit and publish [his manuscript] in book form” became the most significant pursuit of the final chapter of his life.8 The most likely avenue for the manuscript would have been through serialization in the Ledger, and subsequent appearance in a printed volume published by Bonner himself or a press like G. W. Dillingham and Company. This was exactly the precedent established for Lewis’s own work as well as some of the best-selling novels of the century, including Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall, E. D. E. N. Southworth’s The Hidden Hand, and Sylvanus Cobb’s The Gunmaker of Moscow, all of which were serially published in the Ledger and later released as books under Bonner’s imprint or others. Southworth’s most popular novel, Ishmael, was a Ledger serial before it became a novel and subsequently went through nineteen reprintings. Although not originally Ledger stories, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and James Fenimore Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans, along with many notable works of the century, were serials before becoming bound novels. Lewis repeatedly exploited this pattern in his own career with novels like Andrée at the Pole: With Details of His Fate, which typically carried a notice after the introduction stating that the story “in almost its complete form, as now published, originally appeared in another paper, the New York Evening World.”9
In the world of nonfiction, similar journal-to-book procedures were common. Henry David Thoreau, for example, was invited to write a series of biographical sketches, in the manner of his profile of Thomas Carlyle, for Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, which the editor had promised to collect and publish as a single volume to capitalize on both periodical and book markets. Though Thoreau demurred, thereby dealing a devastating blow to his professional career, the offer is illustrative of the wealth of such opportunities then available in print culture. Given the lofty status of the Essex saga as the blueprint for nautical narration, Nantucket’s Inquirer and Mirror duly records that Nickerson had been robbed of his one opportunity at stardom by Lewis, the corrupt agent who effectively stole his intellectual property. By 1883, the year of Nickerson’s death, Lewis had disappeared from the pages of the American popular press after squandering his fortune, losing his wife, and fleeing overseas to escape his creditors.
From 1876 to 1883 the fleecing of Nickerson had become common knowledge among Nantucketers. Islanders fostered great expectations for the publication of the new narrative, if only because the sole survivor of the Essex disaster had become a beloved fixture on Nantucket, a resident Rip Van Winkle and storytelling vestige now comfortably ensconced in his role as graying boardinghouse proprietor. One can imagine the intimate community rallying around the amiable host, rooting for the publication of his greatest tale as the just reward to commemorate his illustrious life. It is not surprising, therefore, that the tale of Lewis’s scam receives a full paragraph in Nickerson’s obituary, which functions not only as a lament for his lost magnum opus—the keynote for which he would most want to be remembered—but also as something of a wanted notice for Lewis’s capture, the reward being the poetic justice Nickerson so obviously deserved. Thus maligned as an itinerant swindler, Lewis had become something like Mark Twain’s traveling mesmerist in Life on the Mississippi or the huckster in “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg.” The community’s resentment toward Lewis was proportionate to its own anticipation of “the forthcoming volume” that they had even “announced in our advertising columns.” The Inquirer and Mirror, and by extension the local islanders at large, voiced their disdain for Lewis because they too had naïvely trusted his proposal to edit and publish Nickerson’s manuscript.
That sense of betrayal, interestingly, receives little attention in most histories of the Nickerson-Lewis relationship, which tend to emphasize the miraculous rediscovery of the manuscript after more than a century. Indeed, typical biographical profiles of Nickerson only mention Lewis’s status as a professional author of popular tales, without noting his predilection for gambling and his financial straits. The reemergence of the dusty manuscript in 1980 speaks not only to the role of the uncanny in the life of the Essex story, it also raises the question of what motives drove Lewis in abandoning a manuscript he had obviously treasured and regarded as his financial life buoy, not to mention his relationship to the New York Ledger. Even considering his financial woes, and the death of his spouse, one wonders about the particular circumstances that caused Lewis to flee the North American continent for England.
A DUBIOUS DEAL
Unlike the Duke and Dauphin, the iconoclastic traveling literary hucksters of Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Lewis never cashed in on his stolen goods. He could have easily stripped Nickerson’s name from the manuscript and sold it to a willing publisher. Alternatively he could have written up the story himself in typical sensational Ledger style as derived from the “Desultory Sketches,” only without Nickerson’s consultation or any mention of his name. Less feloniously, he could have simply carried out Nickerson’s wishes as planned, yet snubbed him at the eleventh hour by withholding his fair share of royalties. Given his financial track record, he may have seriously considered all these avenues. But he seems ultimately to have rejected them all. Meanwhile he could have pursued the virtuous option of returning the manuscript and confessing to Nickerson that he had fallen on hard times and could not arrange for its publication.
To arrive at the most plausible answer, one must retrace the conditions of the original deal. Nickerson, as we have seen, was attracted generally to the prestige of publication, but he was also aware, more specifically, of the steadily rising literary status of the Ledger. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Hanging of the Crane,” for example, appeared within its pages in 1874, the year before Nickerson and Lewis first met. Several years earlier, in 1857, Longfellow had refused an offer from Bonner on the general principle that he would not lower himself to writing for the newspapers. After hitting a rough financial patch, however, he felt compelled to accept Bonner’s lucrative contract of $3,000 for a mere two hundred lines of poetry. Names like Longfellow’s in the pages of the Ledger lent it an air of—if not an entirely legitimate claim to—literary seriousness.
Not only could an affiliation with a Ledger writer reflect credit upon Nickerson’s work, but it might also help ensure the protection of his image. The popular press in general, and Robert Bonner in particular, made a concerted effort to appease any sense of moral discomfort in its audience for indulging in tales full of gore and lurid sensationalism. Indeed, Bonner’s advertising for the paper insisted that its content was designed to appeal to the whole family. Bonner was famous for winning over celebrity authors, while also carefully shaping his own image for popular appeal. Reconciling morality and money was always a top priority for Bonner, and his staff writer Lewis clearly intended to take the same approach toward Nickerson and his story. Certainly in his manuscript and probably also in conversation, Nickerson had emphasized to Lewis his wish to be dissociated from cannibalism and to omit the display of cowardice described in Chase’s Narrative. These desires seem even more understandable when one imagines the distinguished, aging Nickerson holding court with guests at his North Street boardinghouse overlooking the Nantucket shoreline and the Atlantic. As his popularity grew as an island personage, Nickerson inevitably was confronted with questions alluding to his own participation in cannibalism, as well as his cowardly lapse. He likely had heard unflattering rumors and innuendo spread among the less sympathetic boarders and among the island’s growing numbers of tourists. Lewis, after decades of writing under Bonner, who peddled grisly tales of murder, abduction, mutiny, theft, and espionage as family entertainment, was an ideal recipient for Nickerson’s demands. Lewis specialized in handling public reputations, just as Bonner had specialized in managing the Ledger’s popular image. The matter was not exactly one of lying but rather of skillful omission of critical facts and embellishment of others, precisely the ploy Chase himself had used.
The culture of ghostwriting in the 1860s and ’70s enabled any writer to recreate himself in the smoke and mirrors of the literary marketplace. Anonymous authorship played a major role, with the exchange, invention, and circulation of pen names reflecting the importance attached to the branding and marketing of literature through author figures. Most of the reading public knew Lewis, for example, through several of his identities. Lewis’s renown, if not his mercenary ambition, was prominently displayed in the New York Weekly’s announcement of his nautical adventure tale “The Silver Ship; or, The Bloodhound of the Caribbean.” The editors credited themselves for securing rights to the pen “of one of the greatest of living romance writers.” This author, “for reasons of his own, chooses to write for us, not under his own proper name, but under the nom de plume of Louis Leon. The fame of the gentleman is world-wide,” the advertisement proclaims, “and it is safe to say that there is hardly a reader of romance on this continent who has not, at one time or another, been charmed by his genius.”10 This thinly veiled alias, of course, beckoned readers who otherwise associated Lewis with rival journals. Further, those “reasons of his own” for making such a deal could only be monetary, especially since his services had been secured “at great expense.” Also appearing under the guise of “Illion Constellano…a citizen of the Mexican Republic [who] is actively employed in the commercial military service of his country,” Lewis freely sold his work to several venues, including the Weekly and the Ledger, each of which boasted that “Señor Constellano, a Mexican, will be exclusively devoted to our journal” despite “some stories by him written under a previous contract.”11 If Lewis could don the identity of a Mexican national so convincingly as to create a bidding war among competing periodicals—while showing no loyalty whatsoever to any of them—then he could also assume the voice of the Essex cabin boy. His ventriloquism knew no bounds.
To Lewis, a pen name was not only a trick of authorship and means of self-promotion but also a process by which he came to perpetually reinvent himself, not unlike F. Scott Fitzgerald’s James Gatz, who recreates himself as the Great Gatsby. Also a creature of the underground world of illegal trade, Lewis abandoned his given name of Julius Warren Lewis in his early twenties to serve his itinerant literary career. In the process he also built extensive experience publicizing and promoting the careers of his partners. Knowing that Lewis was essentially a publicist-and-editor for his wife, Harriet, helps explain why he would have taken to Nickerson. Insofar as he represented a Ledger author to Bonner, and Bonner had represented both Lewises through his advertising to the general public, Lewis seemed to possess many of the same skills as Bonner. Indeed, Lewis’s Bonneresque rhetorical bombast was on full display in his cover letters for his wife’s weekly submissions, as he hawked their literary wares like a carnival barker. He ends one installment summary with the promise that “the interest of the tale has been deepening from the beginning, and it will continue to deepen from this point to the end, making it The Greatest Story of the 19th Century!”12
Bonner’s signing of celebrity preachers like Henry Beecher was central to his effort to sanitize his paper’s image. Some found respected statesman Edward Everett’s agreement to write for the Ledger reprehensible, while others took it as a mutually beneficial partnership. Certainly Lewis felt he could benefit financially from Nickerson’s story as much as Nickerson saw a golden opportunity to shape his image for posterity, and even spread his fame. The Essex and the Ledger, even at this late date, could be a union in the literary marketplace heretofore unseen, given that the survivors had only told their tales in local Nantucket papers or, in Chase’s example, in book form. No Essex survivors had directly entered the pages of what was then the most popular journal in the periodical press, nor had any been promoted through a ghostwritten book by one of its staff writers. The Daily Cleveland Herald’s description of Everett’s motives in accepting a contract from Bonner might also apply to Nickerson’s interest in the Lewis deal. Publication with the Ledger, according to the Herald, was “a good thing for Mr. Everett. No other act of his life has been calculated to add so much to his popularity. Widely as he is known.” Much like Nickerson’s renown achieved through his association with the Essex disaster, “it will make his name a household word in many families where it is hardly known now.” For Lewis and Bonner “it would add largely to [the Ledger’s] already immense number of readers.” However, the claim of Everett enhancing the magazine’s “pure moral tone and scrupulous regard to the nicest sense of propriety” could hardly apply to Nickerson.13 The story, if anything, would have detracted from the magazine’s larger aims in that regard, considering that Lewis undoubtedly would have played up the tale’s already abundant intrigue and gore. Bonner, of course, was fully aware that Lewis was no moralizer, and was employed precisely because he could, both with Harriet and on his own, write a ripping adventure tale filled with violently bizarre and perverse details. Had Lewis written Nickerson’s tale, Bonner in all likelihood would have embraced it openly, especially given its historical basis.
The death of Owen Coffin, the central episode in the Essex narrative, was exactly the sort of high drama on which Bonner’s “family paper” thrived. Nickerson fully recognized that Lewis therefore would have a special interest in this scene, and thus used it as the main selling point in his cover letter. Just as Lewis had echoed Bonner’s own self-aggrandizing tone in cover letters for his wife’s stories, Nickerson, in his own voice, does not refrain from boasts. The letter, dated October 24, 1876, strains so intently to sell Lewis on the tale that it would seem all the assurance he had was a verbal promise and a handshake. Nickerson nonetheless felt confident enough to entrust the lone copy of his life story to Lewis, whose checkered past (and even shakier future) could not have been known to the former cabin boy. Such efforts to convince Lewis of the project’s value are ironic, given that Lewis had likely first sought out Nickerson on Nantucket to begin with.
Nickerson’s letter to Lewis was written with detail and formality rather than casually, and specifically replied to queries from Lewis about Ducie Island, the death of Owen Coffin, and other matters. Namely, Lewis had asked if Nickerson knew whether the missing boat from the Essex reached Ducie Island. Nickerson’s reply confidently affirms that the mates rescued were instead on Elizabeth Island, according to Surry commander Thomas Raine. “Pollard was either mistaken or else the men had either died or were taken off,” Raine concluded, before heading west on the off chance that the crew had instead landed on Elizabeth Island, seventy miles windward. Nickerson assures Lewis that the location of the rescued crew is “fully” and “plainly described in my manuscript.”14
As in Chase’s Narrative, “Desultory Sketches” focuses on Pollard’s error in explaining why a portion of the crew remained on a given island. Lewis, for his part, had also pursued details on another supposed Pollard blunder, the sinking of the Two Brothers. In seeking such material, Lewis seems clearly to have been trying to portray Pollard according to his two signature failures, while hotly pursuing the moral implications of Pollard’s decisions associated with each disaster. In his letter, then, Nickerson cites Pollard’s mistaken location of the remaining crew (not Ducie Island but Elizabeth Island) and where precisely his second ship had wrecked northwest of Hawaii.
Answering questions about Coffin’s survivors, he notes that Owen’s mother had been dead for years and that his brother died in the West Indies while commanding a voyage on the brig Tom O’Shanter. Most important of all is the casting of lots. This line of questioning, and indeed the answers, squarely focuses attention on the ever-salable moral circumstances surrounding Captain Pollard’s role. From the evidence Lewis clearly wanted to paint Pollard as having no preexisting flaws or inclinations, no demons to battle or white whales to chase, yet whose virtue and democratic intentions are upended, leading to the horrifying casting of lots. Nickerson could not resist, therefore, making the beleaguered captain the executioner, according to the “awful die” that would make him pull “the fated trigger.”15 Nickerson’s phrasing in the letter unmistakably signals to Lewis the melodramatic tone and tragic pitch he wishes to emphasize in the scene. As discussed in the previous chapter, this was not only a deviation from Chase’s account but also one from Nickerson’s own original manuscript, which depicts Ramsdell dispatching the youth. One then wonders why Nickerson would change the facts so egregiously, especially if Lewis would be reading the alternative version of the scene himself anyway.
Nickerson, always mindful of his reputation, intimated to Lewis that he wished for him to take extensive liberties with his outline. In his letter his language is too careful, too calculating, and indeed too like the sensational tales of the Ledger and the carnivalesque language of the popular print culture of which Lewis was a creature. Spotlighting Pollard, Nickerson believed, would draw attention away from his own participation in cannibalism and fit of cowardice. Placing himself more peripherally in the narrative would likewise grant him a detached third-person omniscience, that of a witness or reporter instead of a responsible actor. Pollard, the focal point of the letter, “was not nor could be thought to have dealt unfairly with this trying matter,” but he is nonetheless described next as being excoriated by Coffin’s mother.16 Nickerson, accordingly, almost certainly wanted Lewis to end the tale with the captain’s painful homecoming, rather than emphasizing his own experience—with his breakdown having occurred so relatively recently. The deal complete, Nickerson wrote, referring to his letter, that “for having parted with my manuscript I now have to write from memory only.” The “parting,” however, signaled to Lewis that he was free to season the tale for an audience hungry for an unforgettable adventure on the high seas.
THE BANDIT FLEES
“I have confined myself to facts,” Nickerson wrote to Lewis, entrusting his precious “Desultory Sketches” for him “to handle as you think proper.” In reality, of course, Nickerson had wantonly altered the facts for lurid effect, especially with regard to the killing of Owen Coffin. To make the story more salable, Nickerson surrendered full control to Lewis, even encouraging him to take creative departures, just as he himself had done in his recounting of Coffin’s death. Now Nickerson had only to wait for a reply. In the missive’s final sentence, one might sense Nickerson’s suspicion that maybe there would be no reply, and that Lewis might in fact disappear with his manuscript. “I think I will not write to you again,” he announces, “until I hear from you again or know if you are coming.”17 Their next meeting, Nickerson hoped, might confirm the method of publication, whether serially through the Ledger or in a small volume. The closing line feels oddly flat, evincing not a gracious invitation to visit again so much as a statement of his own intentions, which very much depended upon Lewis’s availability. Nickerson’s anxiety in the letter—from his strained sales pitch to this closing—may have arisen from a deeper dread over Lewis’s commitment. Indeed, far from spurring Lewis to action, the letter, if he even read it at all, only hastened his escape from the scandal closing in on him.
The moment Nickerson sent the letter, he seems to have regretted doing so. He did not trust Lewis and would have preferred using another ghostwriter. He also knew that partnering with Lewis would compromise the veracity of the manuscript, which he had written “in a full tide of his recollections—later in life, with his memory reinforced by his former shipmates.”18 But Nickerson, as we have seen, was aware of the risks associated with publication, and knew he had ceded control of his story; moreover, he was prepared to blame any factual errors on his failing memory. So the facts weren’t what worried Nickerson. What worried him was Lewis’s follow-through on publication plans. Nickerson’s suspicions would be validated.
Nickerson’s manuscript, however, was the least of Lewis’s worries. The ghostwriter’s original plan had been to prove himself worthy of Bonner’s lucrative salary without the partnership of his wife, Harriet, who was already ill. The publication of Nickerson’s manuscript would seemingly have erased any doubt about his productivity in Harriet’s absence. On the surface the plan appeared more or less straightforward. But the ghostwriter’s past offers hints of even worse possible consequences had Lewis not abandoned the project.
Lewis’s rash behavior began in 1874, exactly when it became clear his wife would not survive her illness. More than the anguish he felt over losing his life’s partner, Lewis feared for his financial security. While writing for the Ledger, the couple garnered steady combined weekly payments from Bonner of $300 for two separate story installments, presumably one written by each author. Harriet routinely wrote both installments herself, or had some cursory input from Leon. Historian Jan Cohn notes that “the Lewises made a good deal of money from the serialization and subsequent book publication of their stories,” while allowing that their literary labor was shouldered primarily by Harriet. “Although they collaborated on much of their work, that collaboration took the form of Harriet’s contributions to Leon’s fiction; novels signed with Harriet’s name were apparently entirely her own work.”19 Demonstrating his dependence on her, almost all Lewis’s single-author titles appeared after his wife’s death, the earliest of which were The Demon Steer; or, Outlaws on the Abilene Cattle Trail and The Flying Glim; or, The Island Lure, both 1887 Beadle & Adams dime novels. During their years on the Ledger staff, the couple lived extravagantly on an estate with a $1,500 stable, although Bonner’s own world-class thoroughbreds trumped those of his writers.
The Lewises’ opulent lifestyle, which included the finest cuisine and extravagant home furnishings, was—despite their generous salary—well beyond their means. When Harriet fell ill, only Bonner’s routinely granted loans bailed them out of debt and saved them from utter ruin. At one point Lewis requested that Bonner send $1,500 for expenses. This amount, however, far exceeded the couple’s usual requests, so Bonner asked for details. In a tone of confession, if not outright shame, Leon offered a litany of his declining assets, including his library, purchased for $5,000 and now worth half as much; three houses, which had fallen in value from $8,000 to $6,000; outstanding insurance bills amounting to $4,400; and even his furniture, acquired for $1,800 and now worth only $1,200. Leon acknowledged the scale of this particular request, noting, “The above are the principal parts of the information demanded. Personal enough to open my outside debts.”20
All evidence suggests that Leon, not Harriet, was the source of such reckless habits. In a letter to Bonner written after the $1,500 loan request, and thus breaking a pattern whereby Leon was Bonner’s sole correspondent, Harriet told the publisher of the couple’s troubles. Her aim was to ensure steady work for her husband after her death. “He has wild ideas that seem to him to promise wealth or fame,” she wrote of Leon. “I have tried to be his balance wheel. What will he do when I am gone?” She ends with a plea “to continue your friendship with him, and be patient with him,” invoking the state of her own soul upon her imminent death. “If I could think that you would keep him on with the Ledger and see him now and then and keep him busy, I would not dread death for his sake as I do now.”21 Written only nineteen days before her death on May 20, 1878, at age thirty-seven in Rochester, New York, Harriet’s missive reads like an installment of one of the couple’s sensational tales. Bonner recognized this. He published it in the Ledger days after Harriet passed away.
Two decades would pass before Leon’s next extant letter to Bonner, dated 1898. In an arthritic scrawl, the letter shows the wisdom of Harriet’s dire prophecy, with Leon pathetically begging Bonner for “10 dollars to make my connections.” Again the writer emphasizes loss, but this time on a level much more intimate than furniture or library values. He writes that “my boy and I are all alone having lost my wife [Harriet] and daughter.”22 The implied recklessness of the intervening years again presents us with the question of whether and how Lewis might have ghostwritten and carried out the publication of Nickerson’s “Desultory Sketches.”
Kept carefully hidden from view was Lewis’s lengthy history of corrupt dealings, tracing back to his twenties. Such activity took place in the publishing industry and involved high-risk speculative schemes featuring a cocktail of coercion and graft that careened toward assault and, at least once, attempted murder. Thus Lewis made his first foray into publishing with the flash paper Life in Boston, which he launched with $300 coaxed from the financier Enoch Train. The flash press consisted of small weeklies bearing bold titles such as the Whip, the Rake, and the Libertine, journals aimed at entertaining and informing “literate sporting men about leisure-time activities and erotic entertainments” available in their city.23 When the paper lost its market foothold, Lewis promptly requested another $300 loan from Train. But with little incentive to reinvest in a failed venture, Train rebuffed Lewis, whose subsequent erratic and stealthy behavior drew the attention of police. The emerging writer had taken to lurking in alleys, haunting train stations after hours, and consorting with Boston and New York’s criminal element. Eventually he began stalking Train and menacing him with death threats. Then, in the dead of night, Lewis stormed onto the elderly gentleman’s estate and headed straight for the mansion’s main entrance, determined to forcibly extract the needed sum. As artfully intimidating as he had been in the weeks prior, Lewis’s patience had clearly run out. Train’s servant and groundskeeper, having espied his approach, waited poised behind the door. According to a police report, these employees “suddenly opened it and pitched him headlong down the steps, and instantly jumped on him, thus finally securing him. He was then firmly bound with a bed cord and kept until police officers took him into custody.” After being charged with armed robbery and attempted murder, he likely served time in the Boston penitentiary for his crimes. Similar tactics made the April 23, 1853, headlines of the Hartford Weekly Times, when “two ruffians in the employ of the Boston Gamblers” hired by Lewis “beat and bruised the publisher of ‘Life in Boston.’…A sling shot was employed, and there is no doubt they intended to kill him.”24 Although he did not habitually resort to such ruthless methods, his engagement in them at all suggests the ethics and practice that would shape the rest of his career.25 Luckily for Nickerson, unlike Enoch Train, he never invested any money in Lewis.
Just prior to soliciting Nickerson’s manuscript, Lewis had turned his attention toward a new journal he would launch shortly after his wife’s death. The Penn Yan Mystery story paper borrowed heavily from the format and style used for the Ledger, and even exploited Harriet’s memory to draw readers, just as his old employer had done. He would routinely allude to her as his “spirit wife” in an effort to heighten the supernatural intrigue of the tales set in their hometown.26 Strikingly he had married Harriet when she was only fifteen years old, and began immediately employing her as his author, hawking her services up and down publishers’ row in New York. Not coincidentally, Lewis also married his second wife, Julia Wheelock, when she was just fifteen, with the marriage occurring in Brazil, after Lewis had fled Penn Yan in 1879 and before arriving in England. Local media reported the event as a scandal in which Lewis, then forty-seven, “went missing” with the girl, who was also his niece—the daughter of his sister-in-law—whom Leon and Harriet had adopted and raised as their own daughter.27 Perhaps only one cultural taboo is greater in Western culture than incest—cannibalism. Lewis wanted to air these in all their glory through Nickerson’s tale.
Lewis’s Penn Yan Mystery paper collapsed after its first issue, released in a startling print run of 480,000. Like his much earlier Life in Boston gambit, Lewis had overreached. Now, following Harriet’s death and a failed attempt at fashioning his publishing career after Bonner’s, Lewis reached a breaking point. His debts were insurmountable, and his desperation hit a fever pitch. A steadier-minded criminal might have simply focused on recouping through the Nickerson project, but a veritable lynch mob was now on his trail. This was because the bogus stock in the Mexican Pacific and Central American railroad companies he had sold to unwitting investors, along with other debts, totaled more than $50,000. He could only elude his inevitable pursuers—who had been subjected to his trademark elaborate rhetoric and bombastic claims—for so long. With word of his schemes spreading, the manhunt for Lewis officially began when the Penn Yan Express ran a half-column listing of his offenses under the heading “Shams.” After packing his trunk, he sped for the coast with Julia in tow. The next ship, a steamer, was bound for Brazil and eventually the safety of England, where he might begin his life over again as a romance writer. By January 1879 Lewis had escaped the upstate New York chill, his debts, and his dead-end literary career—and was now wedded to his young niece.
Paradise was soon lost, however. Five years later, in 1884, Lewis returned to America with his resources depleted, having once again squandered a steady writing salary on various schemes. His handsome income from contributions to Ralph Rollington’s Our Boys’ Paper and Boys’ World apparently did not satisfy his outsize ambition and desire to match his former U.S. standard of living. Rollington recalled one telling incident “when paying him a cheque for ten numbers.” The publisher remarked, “‘Why, Lewis, old boy, you must be making a fortune.’ ‘Not out of Boys’ Stories,’ he replied laconically, with a slight American accent.” In one sense Rollington may have associated such expressions with Lewis’s wholesome audience and plucky, pure-hearted protagonists, concluding that “he always looked on the bright side of life.” But something darker may have lurked beneath his observation that Lewis “was certain he would eventually make a big fortune in the newspaper world,” which he pursued with characteristic nerve and trickery.28
Lewis was operating at a historical moment when the story papers shared writers of moralistic tales, and a time when the three-volume novel yielded to the single-volume novel. In 1880 readers wanted their fiction and nonfiction fast and sharp, and Lewis trained his powers of imagination on meeting the demand. In addition, according to one study, “previously where the miscellany had sufficed for the family, a number of specialized periodicals targeted specific audiences,” such as boys, girls, or women.29 Lewis adapted to these developments, finding his niche with the boys’ periodical and book markets. The Essex tale, not surprisingly, would be retold innumerable times in periodicals and books specializing in boys’ fiction. Indeed, one of Melville’s great career struggles was to shed an early association with boys’ adventure stories. But for Lewis, as well as Nickerson, the increasing specialization of this genre was a welcome opportunity for profit.
The tale of Nickerson’s lost Essex narrative embodies the corrupt business ethic of the Gilded Age. A useful contrast to Lewis’s chicanery can be found in Chase’s ghostwriter, William Coffin Jr., who worked thoroughly and meticulously. Whereas for Lewis ghostwriting was an opportunity to obfuscate for profit, with little conviction in his words, Coffin Jr. likely saw ghostwriting as something more like a legal defense, a tradition his own father had established through his self-exoneration. It is obvious that Lewis’s objectives, all self-interested and self-aggrandizing, were not to represent his client and his aspirations—however self-serving they may have been—but rather to bolster his own career and wealth.
On his return to America, Lewis lived in Long Island, Dubuque, Iowa, and Chicago before settling in Connecticut, unbothered by his debtors and with Nickerson’s manuscript a distant memory. During these years Lewis did befriend Clarence Darrow and advocate for wage laborers following the Haymarket Riot of 1886. Otherwise, like Nickerson, Lewis remained relatively aloof from politics.
But later, his thirst for the grandiose and his romance writer’s imagination would come together in his most bizarre public appearance since his intimidation tactics of the 1850s. This effort, rooted in an elaborate crackpot theory, also spoke to whether any actual conviction lay beneath Lewis’s devious plots. Bespectacled, portly, and with a giant walrus mustache draping his fleshy mouth and chin, Lewis in his later years appeared every bit the eccentric visionary implied by his new self-appointed role as president of the Deluge Publishing Company. His press, if it could be called such, specialized in spreading word of “The Great Deluge Which Is Now Due Again,” the title of a speech he delivered on the subject. With his son as his “vice president,” Lewis sought to voice without editorial censorship his ardent belief that a flood of biblical proportions threatened the planet. His language was indeed cataclysmic (leading one to imagine what this author would have done with Nickerson’s tale): “All of the countries and continents of our globe are subject to this cataclysm, and very few of us can be safe in the vast regions reached by it. Only here and there on certain plateaus and table lands, which will remain emergent, can possibly save a mere remnant of our species.”30 Given earlier spurious theories from figures such as John Cleves Symmes, stipulating that giant holes existed in both the North and South Poles and could be entered via steamship to access the earth’s interior, Lewis’s mysticism could be located at the convergence of romantic sea fiction and scientific prophecy.
Lewis worked on his magnum opus throughout his final decades. Though he never published it, “The Great Glacial Deluge and Its Impending Recurrence” was intended to be a twelve-volume work. The magnitude of the project indicates that Lewis envisioned himself occupying the same sort of status and authority that Symmes had enjoyed in the 1820s, precisely when Chase’s Narrative spawned an industry of sea tales. But Lewis had underestimated the growing power of scientific knowledge and ability to verify empirical data. Baseless assumptions, he argued ridiculously, “changed Geology from a science to a chatter.”31 Like Nickerson’s “Desultory Sketches,” “The Great Glacial Deluge” would remain unfinished mainly because it fell into the hands of (other) schemers.
Nickerson’s memoir undoubtedly captured Lewis’s imagination at first, but it had little chance of survival in the context of his chaotic life and underhanded dealings. His main goals had to have been economic, as they likely were with his Deluge Company. On the latter count the New York Times seized upon the inane quality of his proposal, gleefully highlighting the absurdity of his predictions. Integral to his rhetoric, as it had been from the start of his career, was a confidence game associated with luring stockholders. Instead of proclaiming himself “Projector, Builder, and Proprietor” of fictitious railroad companies, as he had done in earlier decades, he was now trafficking in biblical prophecy, lunging at much larger claims, boasting even bigger shareholders. Yet frighteningly Lewis seems to have convinced himself of his Deluge Company prophecy, whereas he never for a moment entertained the prospect that his imaginary railroads actually existed.
The language of the scam artist is unmistakable in the Times interview. Literary deals, anchored in his claims to publishing-industry credibility, mark the start of his pitch. “I have two or three offers from magazines for the publication of my work serially—in fact they offer me millions,” he assures his interviewer. He then alleges that the “stockholders of the company number millions.” Broad investment by the general public is thereby made to appear a natural outgrowth of validation by print culture. From publishers’ row, he takes us to Wall Street: “The magnates interested in [the Deluge Company] run into the millions,” he declares, arriving at the White House, as it were, and the preposterous assertion that “the rulers of the earth have subscribed millions.” He goes on to say that his plan is predicated on awakening a new sensibility in a sensible human race. “I’ll lay down principles for it,” he trumpets, not surprisingly, “through a series of novels which solve all the problems now bothering the human race.” As in all plots of Lewis’s life, this too would lead to plots of his own imaginative writing, circling back to the publishing industry, which he had represented so promisingly in his proposal to publish Nickerson’s narrative.
The man who wore his eccentricities on his sleeve, and who would eventually take his own life by lacerating his legs and throat with a rusty razor, mostly hid his demons from his Ledger audience while on staff from 1869 to 1878.32 But this confidence man also failed to follow through for Nickerson, along with, presumably, the entire island community of Nantucket. Beneath the mantle of a “successful professional author” genuinely interested in ghostwriting an old seaman’s life story was a scammer who ruthlessly pursued fame and fortune. Like his Ledger romances and boys’ adventures, Nickerson’s project represented but one of many pawns, the last of which finally seems to have won his own belief and consumed him. Filled with his dreams of a deluge, Lewis had missed an opportunity to bring new life, perhaps immortality, to the seminal sea tale of the century. Though spending a century of silence in a Penn Yan attic, Nickerson’s “Desultory Sketches” helped tell another story: that of Lewis, a literary huckster and a new breed of bandit that would come to characterize publishing in the late 1800s. To Nickerson, Lewis seemed the ideal author to elegantly conceal his cannibalism and cowardice. Thus perhaps the deepest irony of the Lewis-Nickerson relationship was that the memoir Nickerson wanted to publish would have shimmered with the era’s intrigues and deceptions, replete with self-promotion and wild entertainment.