Chapter 8 Literature of the ocean
Janet Sorensen
The sea is everywhere, so to speak, in verse and fiction of 1680 to 1820, omnipresent in stories and poems and ranging widely
in meaning. Setting, plot device, metaphor, aesthetic object, it is there troubling a sense of fixed national identity but
also offering a theatre for heroic national naval exploits; beckoning the intrepid on voyages of discovery or economic opportunity;
imposing radical changes on the lives of men and women unlucky enough to fall victim to the press gang or to the punishment
of transport; threatening, stranding, and drowning sailors and passengers; eliciting encounters with the sublime; and conveying
the goods and people that will fundamentally transform spatial relations and social affiliations. Transatlantic literary studies,
aiming to interrogate the model of literary production that restricts it to national borders, might borrow from what some
have called “Oceanic Studies” to look not only at the exchange between various geographically based cultures but also at the
writing of the sea itself, of the literal space across but also outside of fixed geopolitical territories that was so ubiquitous
in writing in English in the long eighteenth century.
1
Fascination with the sea and sea travel was not new; references to the sea and even international maritime travel abound in
writing across centuries. Yet while writing of the sea during the expansion in British maritime empire from 1680 through 1820
extended longstanding maritime themes, it also responded to new realities, such as a growing maritime commercial empire, a
mounting trade in slaves, and the increasing consolidation of nationalism
. It also took part in and helped shape various generic transformations. Writing generated out of maritime experience in this
period ranged from official multi-volume prose accounts of oceanic travels, scientific discoveries, and military encounters
to broadsheet ballads and songs recounting everything from English victories at sea to the exploits of infamous buccaneers.
It included picaresque and, later, historical fiction, georgic poems describing and even instructing in the ways of maritime
labor, and highly aestheticized
poetic representations of the sea. In the experiments in fiction writing we have come to call novels and in hybrid verse forms
deploying complex uses of voice, these forms comingle and shape each other, as representations of the ocean become the ground
for intricate and varying forms of cultural affiliation.
Take, for example, the relationship between the dense descriptive accounts of voyages appearing in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries and the early novel. William Dampier’s three-volume
A New Voyage Round the World (1697), provided a model for similar hefty volumes, including George Anson’s
A Voyage Round the World in the Years MDCCXL, I, II, III, and IV (1748), John Atkin’s
A Voyage to Guinea (1735), and George Forster’s
A Voyage Round the World about his adventures with James Cook (1777), all of which had wide readerships
and went through multiple editions.
2 These captains’ recountings of voyages of discovery, which included detailed information on weather conditions, coastal topography,
and problems in navigation, were written in decidedly unadorned prose. Dampier’s defense in
A Voyage to New Holland in the Year 1699 instantiated a particular form of “plain style” as appropriate to narratives of maritime discovery: “It has been Objected
against me by some, that my Accounts and Descriptions of Things are dry and jejune…If I have been exactly and strictly careful
to give only…a Plain and just Account of the True nature and State of the Things described than of a polite and Rhetorical
narrative: I hope all the defects of my stile will meet with an easy and ready pardon.”
3
Daniel Defoe’s account of sea travel, shipwrecks, and a castaway’s life in
Robinson Crusoe (1719) often adopts the empirical descriptive writing of these non-fiction prose narratives of sea voyages. As Margaret Cohen
has pointed out, Crusoe’s journals of life on his island also owe much to the form of a ship’s log, an even less mediated
and adorned writing than the published accounts of voyages which drew from those logs.
4 This emphasis on what is true, over what might be pleasing or rhetorically enthralling, distinguishes Crusoe’s narrative
from continental Romance with its disregard for probability. And yet the sea he and voyage writers describe furnishes sights
and events as marvelous as any in the pages of a romance
. Such wondrous moments, along with the fictional itself – there was no actual Robinson Crusoe, no one could remember years-old
occurrences in such detail – work side by side with the “true…descriptions” to produce the format that would become central
to the English novel. The generic form of the maritime voyage and the ship’s log, working in tandem with the openly fictional,
become central to the novel form designated specifically
as English.
5 Crusoe’s Atlantic travels and eventual shipwreck on a far-flung island provide an occasion for his production of Englishness,
with his “country house” and his own acts of “enclosure.” Twentieth-century commentators have situated
Robinson Crusoe at the heart of English novel writing and of Englishness itself.
The tension between centrifugal movement across oceans and the formation and maintenance of national identity, however, is
never fully resolved. What could be the status of Crusoe’s Englishness, his name an Anglicized version of his German father’s
name, his ultimate domination preceded by his own shipboard enslavement and predicated on a violence that haunts his more
cultural-relativist moments (he sells a fellow servant into slavery, murders intruding cannibals, and becomes himself a slaveholder)?
Frequently, even in early eighteenth-century representations, the ocean disorients, shifting subjective perspectives as it
removes the ground from beneath its travelers. One need only consider Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), and Gulliver’s lost bearings in the wake of his transoceanic journeys, to get a sense of the ways in which literature
of the ocean invited – or uncomfortably forced – a rethinking of the known world when it put readers, literally and figuratively,
at sea.
Ominous connections to disorientation, violence, and the slave trade notwithstanding, the Atlantic Ocean and travel across
it remain key to the formation of British identity for the protagonists in Defoe’s
Colonel Jack (1722) and
Moll Flanders (1722), whose protagonists’ multiple Atlantic crossings (more often than not against their will) enable their ascension to
respectable English subjecthood. Here travel across the Atlantic becomes not simply a counterintuitive means of producing
Englishness, but also a place to work out the friction between the low, outsider status of many newly transient subjects and
respectable Englishness, or at least its appearance. Unlike Crusoe, Colonel Jack and Moll Flanders are part of an urban criminal
class, outsiders in the heart of the nation, whose stories draw on the generic moves of the period’s criminal biographies
that depict the language and manners of interloping reprobates. In their entertaining and specific descriptions of London
underworlds, Defoe’s novels
also suggest the influence of Grub Street “journalist” Ned Ward’s popular writings, most notably his
London Spy (1698–99).
6 Even here, in the closely recorded unseemly details of life in the center of London, transatlantic travel was formative.
A struggling Ward emigrated briefly to Jamaica and wrote a short account of his time in Port Royal.
7 The formal device he developed in that work – the narrative perspective of the new-in-town traveler who unwittingly exposes
the furtive goings on of a lively port city – informs
both his
London Spy and Defoe’s fiction writing. Things came full circle when Ward added to his collection of accounts of the sordid elements
of eighteenth-century London society his
Wooden World Dissected (1709), which treats sailors as akin to criminals with their own practices, social codes, and language. He described the
“crabbed terms” of the sailor who “cannot have so much as a tooth drawn ashore, without carrying his interpreters. It’s the
aftmost grinder aloft, on the Starboard quarter, will he cry to the all wondering operator.”
8
Not simply as oceanic transients but as inhabitants of a culture detached from proper Englishness, Jack’s and Moll’s position
resembles the figuration of sailors themselves in the early eighteenth century. They take part in distinct and low cultures
largely unknown but fascinating to upstanding British readers. Moll and Jack stand in dangerous proximity to those fundamentally
outside of the nation, not simply as criminals but as captive figures, imprisoned aboard ships and transported across the
Atlantic. Colonel Jack, like that unsuspecting and entrapped figure before him, Oroonoko, is tricked onto a ship and finds
himself captive and enslaved – his trip lands him in indentured servitude in North America. Moll, sentenced to transport to
North America, finds herself in “Deptford Reach…clapt under Hatches, and kept so close, that I thought I should have been
suffocated for want of air, and the next Morning the Ship weigh’d, and fell down the River to a Place they call Bugsby’s Hole,
which was done, as they told us…that all opportunity of Escape should be taken from us.”
9 The airless, claustrophobic ship’s hold in which Moll finds herself comes close to sounding like the conditions of the Middle
Passage.
If these moments of forced oceanic migration subject these characters to something like an enslaved – and non-English – status,
they are also transformative. Transatlantic transport enables Moll to “begin the World upon a new Foundation, and that such
a one…cou’d not fail of Success in.”
10 Through such maritime passage she and her husband will rewrite their identities. No longer criminals, they become successful
plantation owners, with their own African and English-born “servants.” Atlantic travel has become a narrative sleight of hand
that allows impoverished criminals to erase their past and garner fortunes. The sea’s powers of this seemingly magical production
are figured in the last pages of
Moll Flanders, as one of Moll’s own transported servants “happen’d to come double, having been got with Child by one of the Seamen in the
Ship.”
11 Similarly, the sea, scene of Jack’s transformation to indentured servitude, also becomes necessary for his transition to
the status of a free Briton. Making good after his own maritime entrapment, he leaves behind his criminal life to ascend to
the
status of a wealthy plantation owner. And, as George Boulukos has noted, it is only after his watery passage, and brief stint
as an indentured servant, working alongside those he initially calls African servants, that he learns to distinguish himself,
as a Briton, from those fellow laborers, whom he comes to rule and call “slaves.”
12
Literature of the ocean of this period harbors a deep and abiding conflict between the links of seafaring to slavery
, the press gang, and imprisonment – Samuel Johnson had likened life on a ship to “being in a jail, with the chance of being
drowned”
13 – and freedom. The proximity between the two is less surprising in the wake of Linda Colley’s research on the wide extent
of the capture and enslavement of Britons throughout the territories of its blue empire expansion.
14 In the maritime empire of a small island nation
, the ocean poses the possibility of both endless expansion and threatening invasion, of freedom and enslavement. James Thomson’s
“Rule Britannia” famously and enduringly bases Britain’s national power and indeed freedom – “Britons never shall be slaves”
– on its ability to “rule the waves” in a song which is, however, ridden with its own vexed complexities regarding slavery,
as Suvir Kaul has shown.
15 Britain’s maritime empire generated many triumphalist poems and songs in which the ocean figured as a distant but all-important
crucible of imperial nation formation. These range from more elevated works, such as Alexander Pope’s
Windsor Forest (1713), Edwar
d Young’s
The Ocean (1728), and John Dyer’s
The Fleece (1757), to popular songs and broadsheets appealing to wider audiences, such as the 1704 “Captain Gordon’s Welcome Home,”
honoring a Scots captain who defeated numerous privateers; and “Song, on Admiral Rodney,” celebrating that admiral’s leadership
in the Moonlight Battle against the Spanish in 1780, in which he sunk the Spanish Dons “all in brine around / Old Neptune’s
coral throne.”
16
These songs themselves, however, often reflect the shifting frames of nautical lives and the ocean’s entwined thematics of
freedom and enslavement. Readers of “Hosier’s Ghost” (written after Admiral Vernon captured Porto Bello from the Spanish in
1739), for instance, were instructed to sing it to the “Tune, Come and Listen to my Ditty – Sailor’s Complaint.” That ditty
describes not the exploits of an admiral but the sufferings of the lowly sailor. (The relationship between these ditties,
songs of sea labor, and the ballad form, often understood in relation to landed space, remains to be explored.) Decades later,
the tune for “Hosier’s Ghost” went on to serve William Cowper’s ballad for the abolitionist movement, “The Negro’s Complaint.”
17 No longer the scene of vindicated naval triumph (or of the sailor’s labor), the sea morphs into the means of divine retribution.
The Negro of the song asks, has God “bid you buy and sell us?…Hark! He answers – wild tornadoes / Strewing yonder sea with
wrecks.” When they sang of ruling the waves in Thomson’s “Rule Britannia,” British men and women sang of themselves in the
third person – “Britons never shall be slaves.” When they sang of transport across those waves in “Negro’s Complaint” they
sang, oddly, in a slave’s first-person voice, both singular, “Afric’s coast I left forlorn, /…O’er the raging billows borne”
and plural, of the “mis’ries which we tasted / Crossing, in your barks, the main.” Literature of the ocean of this period
invites various points of identification, the sea seemingly fostering the fluid sense of subjectivity associated with modernity
itself.
At the same time, literature of the ocean continues to consolidate British and even regional identities. Tobias Smollett’s
The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748), a vivid portrait of British life on land and sea, employs formal and thematic aspects of earlier literature of the
ocean. Its description of life aboard a ship includes vestiges of the “true description” of voyage narratives’ form; a thematics
of slavery
, at once remote and proximal, literal and figural, also undergirds the narrative. Slaves inhabit the background of Roderick’s
Atlantic travels and slavery is the unremarked basis of the fortune Roderick’s father has accrued in his own Caribbean exploits.
On a figurative level, however, Roderick becomes himself a captive, entrapped by the press gang. His description of what he
sees aboard the ship on which he finds himself again veers dangerously close to Middle Passage descriptions; Roderick “saw
about fifty miserable distempered wretches, suspended in rows, so huddled one upon another, that not more than fourteen inches
of space was allotted for each with his bed and bedding; and deprived of the light of the day, as well as of fresh air; breathing
nothing but a noisome atmosphere of the morbid steams exhaling from their own excrements and diseased bodies.”
18
In Smollett’s sweeping picaresque, the ocean is less a scene of national victory, a space to be crossed over for transformative
ends, or a metaphor for the punishments visited upon an enslaving and overreaching empire, than a space in need of description
to portray British society and, more particularly, understand the costs of a poorly administered maritime empire. Drawing
from his time in the Royal Navy and his deployment to Cartagena, where the British suffered catastrophic disease and defeats,
Smollett evokes a realm of grotesque disorientation. Dismembered body parts move of their own accord, as Roderick explains
how in the midst of an attack “the head of the officer of marines, who stood near me, being shot off, bounced from the deck
athwar
t my face” (p. 169). The ship becomes a
host for the rupture of bodily integrity: the explosive decapitation of his shipmate, Roderick notes, left “me well-nigh blinded
with brains” (p. 169), and the “wounds and stumps” of those injured in battle “being neglected, contracted filth and putrefaction,
and millions of maggots were hatched amid the corruption of their sores” (p. 187).
The sea in Roderick Random is no metaphor but a space filled with maritime empire’s history of violence. The ocean becomes a literal and visible site
of death; in port, “numbers of human carcasses floated in the harbour” (p. 189). Smollett’s bold depictions of the horrific
side of imperial ocean-going life were atypical of literary representations of the ocean. In pushing the limits of realist
representation of that life, he left little room for a return to metaphorical and uncandid depictions of sea life in eighteenth-century
fiction, and the ocean disappears from the pages of novels until the nineteenth century.
Like Defoe’s criminal underground, Smollett’s ship-world is a culture that builds its sense of community through its own language,
and yet these terms also suggestively draw from remote global spaces. Roderick explains the mariners’ term “banyan day” as
a day without meat – “they take their denomination from a sect of devotees in some parts of the East Indies, who never taste
flesh” (p. 149). Smollett recuperates that language as part of Britishness itself. Nautical jargon is just one of any number
of languages spoken within the ship by good Britons – it appears right alongside the dialect of the Welsh Dr. Morgan, eccentric
but faithful shipboard friend to Roderick. Sea language comprises the name of Tom Bowling, Roderick’s stout, naval-jargon-speaking
uncle, who is the only familial connection to offer unstinting, if necessarily limited, support to Roderick.
19
Tom Bowling is a Briton who makes his life on the sea. His removal from land has also detached him from the petty interests
of landlubbers. He is a generous, sentimental figure not despite but because of his status as a tar. Popular song representing
naval life helps cue that sentimentality, as on his first appearance Bowling quotes from a well-known theatrical tune “The
Sailor’s Ballad,” the chorus of which is “Then why whould [
sic] we quarrel for riches / Or any such glittery toy? / A light heart and a thin pair of breeches / Goes thorough the world
brave boy.” Sentiment becomes central to the literature of the ocean in the second half of the eighteenth century, particularly
in poetic representations of the sea. Earlier in the century, the sea in poetry
was often a figure for mediation and distance between the triumphs and goods a maritime empire produced and the British who
were their beneficiaries and consumers. As Henry Needler writes in his 1711 “A Sea-Piece,” “To ev’ry Part of the whole Globe
we roam, / And bring the
Richs of each Climate home; / With Northern Furrs we’re clad and Eastern Gold, / Yet know nor India’s heat, nor Russia’s Cold.”
20 His poem, which observes placid seas transform into a deadly, shipwrecking storm, formally replicates that distance, its
speaker a detached spectator safe on shore.
William Falconer’s georgic poem
The Shipwreck, in contrast, is told, primarily, from the first-person point of view of a sailor caught in a violent storm, and the poem
aims to bridge the distance between land-born readers and those at sea. In Falconer’s poem, which first appeared in 1762,
the speaker voices his desire “to wake to sympathy the feeling heart.”
21 The poem went through over 100 editions in the eighteenth century and was anthologized alongside poetry of Milton and Pope
in collections of “great English poets” – right through the middle of the nineteenth century. Unlike other writers of the
ocean, Falconer was first and foremost a sailor. He went to sea for what would have been a three-year apprenticeship at fourteen
years old, was quite likely pressed into military service, and also worked on merchant ships in the Levant and in the Atlantic,
on a route between Cork and Jamaica. He lived through a shipwreck that proved fatal to most of his shipmates and which became
the subject of his highly popular poem. Subsequent editions in 1764 and 1769 elaborate an increasingly sentimental narrative
of the doomed love between the speaker’s shipmate and the Captain’s daughter. This back story, along with the representation
of the shipwreck and desperate sailors struggling at sea, draws out readers’ sympathies for the normally distant sailors,
whose lives must always be mediated for terrestrial readers’ access. These sentimental moves are strikingly connected to and
mediated through technical nautical language. Terms like “bowsprits” and “for-cat-harpings” form a significant part of
The Shipwreck’s lexicon, and copious footnotes explaining those terms make up a large portion of the volume. These technical terms, and
the tacit instruction the poem offers in how sailors should respond to a storm at sea, elevate maritime life to the stuff
of georgic poetry, and even national epic – the ship’s name is the
Britannia.
Poeticizing and revaluing technical sea language, Falconer rewrites older literary representations of sea language as a criminally
or humorously confining idiom into association with feeling. Elizabeth DeLoughrey has argued that “the perpetual circulation
of the ocean dissolved local phenomenology,” but in Falconer’s poem, at least, technical language seems to recuperate a very
local phenomenology, linked, as the local and familiar often are, with high sentiment and affect.
22 Thus, the technical language of this poem only emerges in full force during its later scenes of highly charged and failing
efforts to preserve life and limb in the face of the fatal
storm. After the mortal threat of the storm becomes clear, passage after passage describing the impact of the turbulent sea
on a floundering ship, the master’s commands, and the sailors’ actions feature an abundance of those highly specialized terms.
The poem describes the sailors’ actions at the beginning of the storm, for instance, “Impell’d by mighty pressure, down she
lies; / ‘Brail up the mizzen quick!’ the Master cried: / ‘Man the clue-garnetts, let the main-sheet fly!’ / In thousand shiv’ring
shreds it rends on high!” (1762, p. 176). It is through this language that the speaker compels emotions, with imperative statements,
exclamations, and odd personifications of the ship’s parts, the main sheet’s shreds here shivering. His aim with this language
is, as the speaker later states, to “draw compassion’s melting tear /…For all the pangs, the complicated ill / Her bravest
sons her guardian sailors feel.” A compassion, he explains, that is already felt not for sailors, but only for those less
remote “kindred wretches oft in ruin cast / On Albion’s strand, beneath the wintry blast” (1769, p. 233). The remote figures
will become the objects of sympathy, but oddly through a poetical technical language. Falconer’s harrowing images of a shipwreck
alongside the poem’s technical sea language dramatizes the connection between what Ian Baucom calls the abstracting discourse
of the technical and melancholic realism.
23
Yet the poem’s structure also short-circuits this entwining of the technical and sentimental, reinstating distance and remoteness.
For most, reading the poem itself, with its technical jargon, would be fairly disjointed: the affecting narrative is halted
as the non-specialist attempts to picture exactly what action is taking place, looking down to the footnotes for explanation.
Further, the particular, technical terms of sentimental attachment in the poem are finally lost and forever inaccessible.
As Falconer’s poem documents the shipwreck, the technical parts of the ship and the work of sailing are presented in the process
of their destruction and disappearance. Each named technical part of the ship is demolished or disappears in the face of storm
– or of the crew’s attempts to survive the storm, as they hack away at the parts of the ship, just as they are technically
named in the poem, frantically dispensing with them. In the midst of the dramatic tempest, for instance, the captain counsels,
“let all our axes be secur’d, / To cut the masts and rigging from aboard” (1769, p. 221). Just as the poem’s speaker names
technical parts of the ship, those parts are dismantled and subsumed by the stormy sea, cast into a wild oblivion. The ship’s
technical parts – and sailors too – are simultaneously heaved into the watery throes of the raging ocean. The speaker describes
how, “Flung from the mast, the seamen strive in vain / Thro hostile floods their vessel to regain” (1769, p. 273). The
poem continues like this – the sentimentally charged technical parts of the ship are named at the point at which they are
sawn off or broken and submerged into the “oozing” ocean. The remaining hulk is finally demolished and entirely subsumed into
a now sublime ocean – no disinterred bodies remain on the ocean’s surface, as they did in Smollett’s novel, where the sea
is never sublime.
In its imagery of an unfathomable deep, Falconer’s poem participates in an aestheticization of the sea while still retaining
a sense of the sea as practical space, as Margaret Cohen has noted.
24 Falconer’s poem was influential to two generations of Romantic poets, both for the specificity of its nautical terms and
for the haunting sublimity of the shipwreck. Samuel Taylor Coleridge admired Falconer’s
Shipwreck; the ship in his 1798 “Rime of the Ancyent Marinere” is chased south to eerie and frightful phenomena by a “storm and wind,
/ A wind and Tempest Strong.”
25 In Coleridge’s wild sea imagery of “ice, mast-high…/ as green as emerald” (Book
I, lines 47–48) and “slimy things [that] did crawl with legs / upon the slimy sea” (Book
II, lines 41–42), the sea becomes fully wondrous again, but also the site of dense symbolism, allegory, and, some have argued,
metaphorical reference to the very real horrors of disease and slavery that were so much a part of ocean-going in this period.
For Samuel Baker, the poem’s ambiguous attempts to reorient readers in the face of waves of new and bewildering experience
and information – figured in and located at sea – is a founding moment in the making of a modern, specifically British concept
of culture. “The Britishness of the poem,” he argues, “is a function of its linguistic singularity.”
26 Yet the poem’s brief moments of nautical language, a transnational language transcending the myriad languages of a ship,
and the anachronistic sense of the English language of that “ancyent marinere” suggest that such national frames might just
as easily give way to new bearings.
The sea as a site of oscillation between national affiliation and the impossibility of true sociality operates complexly in
William Cowper’s 1799 “The Castaway.” In this poem the sea is specified: “Th’ Atlantic Billows roar’d,” and the poem invokes
that unadorned prose of voyagers past: this poem imagines not poetry memorializing the drowned sailor’s perils but “the page
/ Of narrative sincere; / That tells his name, his worth, his age, / … wet with Anson’s tear.”
27 The official record of this sailor becomes, however, the site of sentimentality – the page documenting the technicalities
of actuarial value and age become the place upon which the tear is shed. And the practical references in this poem shift into
mythic language – the sailor hails not from England or Britain but “Albion”
(line 7). And the castaway of the poem, of course, is overdetermined. The very act of representing the castaway figures misery
that “still delights to trace / Its semblance in another’s case” (lines 59–60). The castaway’s experience also marks a new
representation of the storm at sea, now bereft of providential meaning, “No voice divine the storm allay’d, / No light propitious
shone; / When, snatch’d from all effectual aid” (lines 61–63), and the poem draws out the larger existential consequences
of that loss of divine meaning, “We perish’d, each alone” (line 64).
Critics have decried the aestheticization of the sea that begins to dominate its representation towards the end of the eighteenth
century, for sublimation threatens to empty the sea of specific histories – of slavery, of disease and death, of transnational
contact – turning it into an empty space over which humans can write, a watery waste that will become the dumping grounds
of modern industry.
28 Yet complex use of voice in many of these poems destabilizes the object and subject of that aestheticization. In Falconer’s
poem, the voice shifts at the poem’s end from first person to third. The narrating speaker who has been the subject of the
poem and subject to the deadly forces he describes shifts into a third-person speaker, safely distanced from the scene on
which he spectates. Yet the first-person account that has long preceded that distanced third-person position undermines and
questions the possibility of that detached position of sublime experience.
“The Castaway” stages more complex shifts in voice. The reader first encounters the castaway as the first-person speaker –
“When such a destin’d wretch as I / Wash’d headlong from on board” (lines 3–4), and yet the speaker is almost the same as
the castaway, but not quite. The speaker is not “I” but such a one as I. Through most of the rest of the poem the speaker
describes the castaway in the third person – until the final lines of the poem, in which the “I” and the “he” become a “we”
that fails to be a we – “We perish’d, each alone” (line 64). Such abstract meditations on subject and object, singular or
plural voice, might seem far removed from Defoe’s transforming transatlantic subjects or Smollett’s concrete descriptions
of wounded and dying sailors. All suggest, however, that the sea is a place of radical instability, where criminals can become
“one of us” – upstanding Britons, and subjects (fellow sailors) can become objects (bouncing heads, floating bodies) – and
where identifying the “I” becomes difficult when someone else’s blood and brains are splattered on that I.
In these later poems of the period, the sea becomes a place of painful estrangement, travel on it prompting tantalizing, illusory
images of what has been left behind. But those seaborne images were also a reminder that
England’s green pastures were forever receding, perhaps best and only truly imagined from the hull of a ship. In Cowper’s
“The Task,” when a homesick mariner peers over his ship’s wall, “Far fields appear below, such as he left / Far Distant.”
29 His attempt to return to those fields results in a suicidal leap into the ocean. In William Wordsworth’s “Female Vagrant”
(1798), infected and dying emigrating soldiers and their families, anchored close to Britain’s shores, see her “Green fields.”
If the sea becomes the only place from which to conjure a pastoral Britain no longer available to these reluctant nomads,
the sea on which they travel is a scene of terror and death or, alternatively, lifeless sanctuary in the face of insurmountable
loss. No longer a sign of triumph and appealing transformation, in “Female Vagrant,” as in Oliver Goldsmith’s
The Deserted Village, forced ocean-going becomes a sign for all that is wrong with the British nation
, including its ocean-bound commerce, its war
s and military drafts, disenfranchising enclosure, and the destruction of social bonds that are driving people from their
land.
The Napoleonic Wars prompted rousing songs and poems that identified the sea once again with naval prowess and national triumph,
most popularly in the works and performances of Charles Dibdin.
30 Poems commemorating the bravery of Lord Nelson celebrated Britain’s naval triumphs; so widespread was the mobilization for
support of the British navy that women reemerge in literature’s nautical imagery. They travel aboard ship with their husbands,
their polite appearance on ships
forms the basis of dedicatory poems, and they teach themselves and invent codes for naval signal flags in James Fenimore
Cooper’s
The Pilot (1824), which marks a turn to history in the maritime fiction of the early nineteenth century.
31 Modeled on John Paul Jones, its secretive hero has forsaken his native Scotland
for North America and the revolution
ary cause, and he uses his local knowledge of Britain’s coast for raids against it. In
The Pilot, life on the ocean provides the idealized space of primitive martial immediacy that so many eighteenth-century writers had
longingly imagined. If such scenes were no longer available anywhere on earth, they are, in
The Pilot, common aboard ships. In one of many instances, “silence was first broken by the sounds of the boatswain’s whistle, followed
by the hoarse cry of ‘all hands, up anchor, ahoy!’…The change produced by this customary summons was magical. Human beings
sprung out from between the guns, rushed up the hatches, threw themselves with careless activity from the booms, and gathered
from every quarter so rapidly that, in an instant, the deck of the frigate was alive with men.”
32 In
The Pilot, American
Revolutionaries have seized the mantle of naval prowess and manly fellow feeling from superannuated and landlubbing British
subjects. Respectively cowardly, scheming,
or simply outdated, the British men who battle the Americans cannot hold a candle to them in bravery or heroism. The Americans
defeat all attempts to make them captives on land, but it is at sea that their intrepidity and expertise come most to the
fore. The laconic Pilot skillfully steers them out of the dangers of a raging sea on a jagged coast, cockswain Long-Tom Coffin
single-handedly turns the battle against a British ship, when he appears “with his iron visage rendered fierce…his grizzled
locks drenched with the briny element, from which he had risen, looking like Neptune with his trident. Without speaking, he
poised his harpoon, and with a powerful effort, pinned the unfortunate Englishman to the mast of his own vessel” (p. 200).
Myth and fearless manhood mix aboard the North American ship, and in the fiction of the end of this period, the sea becomes
the site of seductive adventure and unequivocal virtue that is also associated with the new country of America. In Cooper’s
influential novel, the English who own slaves
and who aim to make Americans – both revolutionaries abroad and those venturing back to England – their slaves, are history
.
Cooper’s sea heroes, however, pose a question that loomed in many of the period’s representations of sailors at sea. Might
their disinvestment from the interests of the landed world, their lack of deep connection to any landed territory, make them
not national heroes but cosmopolitans? At home only at sea, naval-jargon-speaking Tom Coffin’s deepest affiliations are for
the ocean. When Coffin valiantly and willingly goes down with the ship during a storm, his body never reappears “for the sea
was never known to give up the body of the man who might be emphatically called its own dead” (p. 287). Like Smollett’s Tom
Bowling, Tom Coffin is the sea’s own, and, as such, far above the petty interests of land lovers. For the Pilot himself, in
providing an avenue to greatness, the sea demands disaffiliation from home. He accuses his estranged love, Alice, of “forever
harping on that word, home!” and asks “Is a man a stick or a stone, that he must be cast into the fire, or buried in a wall,
wherever his fate may have doomed him to appear on the earth?” (p. 360). Further attention to these naval figures might help
expand understanding of cosmopolitanism, which has been limited to the privileged man able to travel and disinterestedly observe
all about him. What might it mean to understand the sailor as a cosmopolitan, offering a subject position with neither British
nor American affiliations? And what would it have meant that so many readers were captivated by these figures? By the end
of this period, as the characters of historical
fiction, these ocean-going cosmopolites might already have been a thing of the past. And yet in writing from Defoe to Cooper,
this commitment
to a homelessness made possible by the ocean is central to the idea of the nation on both sides of the Atlantic.
NOTES
1 For an introduction to the theories and methodologies of Oceanic Studies see “Oceanic Studies,” PMLA 125:3 (May 2010), 657–736.
2 William Dampier, A New Voyage Round the World (London, 1697);
George Anson, A Voyage Round the World in the Years MDCCXL, I, II, III, and IV (London, 1748);
John Atkins, A Voyage to Guinea (London, 1735); and
George Forster, A Voyage Round the World in His Britannic Majesty’s Sloop “Resolution,” Commanded by Capt. James Cook, during the Years, 1772,
3, 4, and 5 (London, 1777).
3 William Dampier, A Voyage to New Holland in the Year 1699 (London, 1703), p. 9.
4 Margaret Cohen, The Novel and the Sea (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), p. 67. More generally, Cohen links the plain style of voyage writing and logbooks to the style of the early novel.
5 Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, ed. Michael Shinagel (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), p. 75.
6 Ned Ward, London Spy, published monthly in London from November 1698.
7 Ned Ward, A Trip to Jamaica (London, 1698).
8 Ned Ward, The Wooden World Dissected (London, 1709), p. 48.
9 Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders, ed. Albert J. Rivero (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), p. 240.
12 George Boulukos, “Daniel Defoe, Colonel Jack, Grateful Slaves, and Racial Difference,” ELH 68 (2001), 615–31.
13 James Boswell, The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, intro. and notes by Peter Levi (London: Penguin, 1984), p. 234.
14 Linda Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire, and the World, 1600–1850 (New York: Anchor, 2004).
15 Suvir Kaul, Poems of Nation, Anthems of Empire (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000).
16 “Captain Gordon’s Welcome Home,” National Library of Scotland, Ry.
III.a.10(022); “Hosier’s Ghost,”
http://literaryballadarchive.com/PDF/Glover_1_Admiral_Hosier_s_f.pdf, accessed online January
31, 2011; “Song, on Admiral Rodney” (London, 1787), National Maritime Museum
CRK/14/82; “Captain Gordon’s Welcome Home,” National Library of Scotland,
http://digital.nls.uk/broadsides/broadside.cfm/id/14475.
17 See Kaul’s
Poems of Nation, Anthems of Empire for an analysis of the ventriloquy at work in this poem.
18 Tobias Smollett, Roderick Random, ed. Paul Gabriel Bouce (Oxford: World’s Classics, 1981), p. 149. All citations are from this edition; page numbers are noted parenthetically in the text.
19 Ibid., p. 438. Bouce notes that “Bowling” “may refer either to a ship ‘bowling along’, or to a rope used to keep the sail taut
and steady.”
20 Henry Needler, The Works of Mr. Henry Needler (London, 1724), p. 25.
21 William Falconer, A Critical Edition of the Poetical Works of William Falconer, ed. William R. Jones (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2003), 1769 edition, p. 279. Further citations will cite the edition year and critical edition page number from this text.
22 Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Routes and Roots (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007), p. 55.
23 Ian Baucom, Spectres of the Atlantic (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).
24 Cohen,
The Novel and the Sea, p. 127.
25 William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads (London, 1798), Book
I, lines 15–16. Further citations are from this edition.
26 Samuel Baker, Written on the Water: British Romanticism and the Maritime Empire of Culture (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010), pp. 27, 28.
27 William Cowper, Poetical Works of William Cowper, 3 vols. (London: Pickering, 1830–31), III: 316–18, lines 2 and 55–58. Further citations of this poem give line numbers from this edition.
28 Patricia Yaeger, “Sea Trash, Dark Pools, and the Tragedy of the Commons,” PMLA 125 (2010), 523–45 (530).
29 Cowper, The Task (London, 1817), Book I, p. 18.
30 Dibdin wrote and published a song entitled “Tom Bowling” in 1790. His songs could be purchased as single sheets or collections,
such as
Songs &c. Britons Strike Home (London, 1803).
31 The Caird Library at the National Maritime Museum holds a number of such poems, see for instance MS PVS in that collection.
32 James Fenimore Cooper, The Pilot, ed. Kay Seymour House and Thomas Philbrick (New York: Library of America, 1991), p. 37.