CHAPTER FIVE

Genera Mixta

The Scurvy owns not one universal cause, but is the Bastard of many Parents.

—Everard Maynwaringe, Morbus Polyrhizos et Polymorphaeus: A Treatise of the Scurvy (1666)

Fiction has shadowed and skirted the discussion of scurvy through the four previous chapters. Insofar as the disease has been associated with remote and unknown places, difficult to comprehend or to imagine from a distance and outrageous in its impact on the nerves of the sufferer, it is part of the blur that makes experience in such places hard to absorb, and the reports of it difficult to authenticate or even to understand. Novelty combined with extreme mood swings makes for a volatile and improbable mixture, with the result that uncorroborated accounts of events so far from the ordinary are received as fiction. Readers decide to understand them as having been adjusted by fancy to advance self-interest, justify diffidence, or indulge a taste for the marvellous. Thus William Dampier’s caution in a sea fight, George Anson’s lordly treatment of the Chinese, John Byron’s encounters with the Patagonian giants, and George Shelvocke’s strangely muted tale of taking Spanish treasure ships, are all greeted back home with the same derisive cry of “romance.”

Voyagers themselves are keenly aware that in very alien places events lack the symmetry of form and the order of succession upon which any claim for probability must rest. When situations become (in David Collins’s lexicon) “peculiar,” such as John Oxley’s when he finds his chronometer stopped and his compass reversed in the middle of the Australian desert, or Bligh when he lands in a dream at Coupang, the experience is unpleasantly unreal and overwhelming, and the place itself usurps the authority of those who came to measure it. Under these circumstances, Collins himself reaches for the disreputable category of romance as the only one available. Just before he died exploring central Australia, W. J. Wills bravely fetched a comic parallel from a novel, writing in his journal, “Nothing now but the greatest good luck can save any of us…. I can only look out, like Mr Micawber, for something to turn up” (Scheckter 1998: 37). So in this chapter, I want to see how fiction, and the genre of romance in particular, supplies the scorbutic imagination with models suitable for “peculiarity” and, having suggested in the previous chapter that there may be something like an aesthetics of the dazzled eye, to explore the possibility of a connection between that and the genres of scorbutic literature.

The histories of scurvy and fiction arrive at a curious junction in the work of Trotter and Beddoes when, in their later work on the nervous temperament, they cite novels not so much as an epistemological or aesthetic blemish on modern culture but as a significant challenge to public health. Earlier in the century, George Cheyne had estimated nervous diseases as comprising a third of all maladies; but by the beginning of the nineteenth century, they had grown and diversified so rapidly that, according to Trotter, they represented two-thirds of the whole catalogue. Explaining why nervous diseases had displaced fevers as the leading sickness of the age, he wrote: “The passion of novel reading is intitled to a place here. In the present age it is one of the great causes of nervous disorders. The mind that can amuse itself with the love-sick trash of most modern compositions of this kind, seeks enjoyment beneath the level of a rational being. It creates for itself an ideal world, on the loose descriptions of romantic love, that leave passion without any moral guide in the real occurrences of life” (Trotter 1807: 89).

The “deluded and vivid imaginations” of novel readers enslave them, he declared, to “all that is extravagant … or absurd in fiction” (218), seducing them into an involuntary state of excitement typical of reverie. In Trotter’s opinion, this addiction aggravates a general nervous weakness that is now endemic among the middle class, owing chiefly to the incalculable effects of chance on life in a market-driven economy. The vagaries of credit, the heavy investment in shipborne trade, and the undulations of stock prices and interest rates all conspire to wind the nerves up to an unhealthy pitch. Similarly, innovations in the conduct of fashionable life and warfare are liable to expose people to extremes of boredom and excitement: the longueurs of country life interspersed with sudden charms of the London Season, or the explosive interludes of battle between the tedious duty of naval blockades (idem 1812: 165). The alternating spikes and troughs of the passions provoked by books, speculation, fashion, trade, and war then invade even the meditative intervals of interiority, as castles built in air collapse and torpor (or something worse) supervenes, and people “sit for hours in the same posture, without paying the least attention to what is going on around them,” or suddenly burst into pointless laughter (192, 175). The odd fantasies about the depletion of the body noticed by Darwin, such as the lady who could see that her head had rolled on the floor and was presently in the corner being chewed by the dog (Darwin 1801: 2.362), are evident too: patients who feel their insides are nothing but a vacuum, a man who was sure his lower part was connected to his upper by a waist as narrow as a wasp’s, a disease now known as Cotard’s Syndrome (Trotter 1812: 205). Trotter was beholding in the neuroses of the most privileged enclaves of metropolitan society oddities of perception and affect he had witnessed among the stressed crews of naval vessels and the tormented human cargo of slave ships. The difference between them, in his opinion, was that the symptoms of the one were induced by a culpable indulgence in absurd lies, while those of the other were involuntary reactions to the extreme privations of service or servitude. Yet they had much in common, not only in the exhibition of mental distress but also in the circumstances causing it, which one way or other flowed from an expanding global market economy that included a large trade in ephemeral literature.

Beddoes wrote a survey of health called Hygeia (1802) with the same intention as Trotter, exploring “the Causes affecting the personal state of our middling and affluent classes.” He culled his examples from the same sources: fashion, print culture, public opinion, the hurry and fatigue of business, all necessary to keep up the whirl of artificial pleasures and ambitions that displaced attention from what Trotter called “the real occurrences of life.” News had become a signal of excitement, not of information: “Did you see the papers today? Have you read the new play?—the new poem—the new pamphlet—the last novel?” Equipping oneself with the opinions necessary to answer these questions encourages a hubbub in the brain that Beddoes compares with the madness of Don Quixote (Beddoes 1802: 3.163–64). He finds several examples of Quixotic reader-errantry: a woman “so affected by the reading of a romance, having for its subject a disappointment in love, as to be deprived of her senses and fall into convulsions,” and a lunatic who immersed himself in a novel, changing the names of the characters into those of his own acquaintance, so that the pathos of the story he had half-invented overwhelmed him, and he went on transposing and reading in floods of tears (3.164, 55). Pathologies like these provide the material for imitations of Cervantes in the eighteenth century, such as Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote (1752) and Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1817). Among the theorists of reverie most directly concerned with the confusions that exercised Trotter and Beddoes, Lord Kames stands out as one who had linked it directly to the experience of reading fiction. He had concluded (as, with some reservations, Coleridge was to conclude later) that absorption in a fiction was productive of a trance he called “ideal presence.” He compared it to a dream or reverie in being in an unreflective and immediate engagement with images instantly presented to the reader’s mind as an event. In such a receptive state the will is suspended, time is compressed into an instant, and space into the compass of what is imagined; for “if reflection be laid aside,” Kames wrote, “history stands upon the same footing with fable: what effect either may have to raise our sympathy, depends on the vivacity of the ideas they raise; and with respect to that circumstance, fable is generally more successful than history” (Kames 2005: 1.71; Vickers 2004: 71; Dames 2007: 13–16).

Like many of his contemporaries, Kames was intrigued by the more lawless feats of the imagination since they were often pleasurable, placing (as Kames says) “every object in our sight,” turning the patient into a spectator and the mind into a theater (1.70). Nor were they limited to the middle class, being observable (as Erasmus Darwin and William Wordsworth had shown, and Trotter, too, at length) in the lives of ordinary seamen and rural laborers. Calenture, somnambulism, sensory hallucinations, and second sight were all worthy of interest. Samuel Johnson’s tour of the Highlands gave him an opportunity to authenticate evidence of the last, and Darwin provides a specimen in his Zoonomia of a woman who went upstairs to find her sister in her bedroom at the very instant the same sister died twenty miles away. Darwin lists it along with these other pathologies of perception under the genus of “Increased Actions of the Organs of Sense” (Darwin 1801: 2.358). After his theory of septon had been dispatched, Samuel Mitchill went on to write an analysis of fifteen distinct genera of the class of reveries he called somnia, including second sight (Mitchill 1815: 124–40).

None of these commentators were quite as eager as Trotter and Beddoes to blame fiction for weakening the nervous temperament; and given their collaboration on a pneumatic theory of scurvy, as well as the extensive investigation of factitious airs pursued at the Pneumatic Institute under Beddoes’s supervision, especially Davy’s self-experiments with nitrous oxide, it was surprising that novels should have borne the brunt of their disapproval. After all, Beddoes was not only a witness of the effects of nitrous oxide, he enjoyed its magic, along with Coleridge, Southey, and all the others, in a public setting. There on a stage the impulses of pointless pleasure and incipient discomfort were vociferated, uncontrollable impulses set free, personalities split in two, and the unreality of a parallel world penetrated (Jay 2009: 172–73). Next to this incandescent display of sensory and imaginative extravagance, the emotional disturbances incident to the most gullible reading of the worst novel were faint and anodyne. This seems like a whale Trotter and Beddoes could not get out of—a vast gas-inflated volitional malady produced like an evil djinn out of a bag, releasing a catalogue of psychotic symptoms of which scurvy was the enigmatic prototype, and for which nitrous oxide acted as the portable artificial stimulant. Trotter’s inclination to historicize symptoms of nervous disease could never get further than to dream, like Beddoes, that there might be a place in time and space where mental and physical health could remain inviolate.

Since these were matters that preoccupied authors as well as physicians, it might be as well briefly to explore the genres of fiction to which Trotter and Beddoes are alluding, since they seem to identify the popular novel as a major culprit (“a variety of prevalent indispositions … may be caught from a circulating library” [Beddoes 1802: 3.165]). Strongly implied in their judgments therefore is a distinction between the fiction of overexcitement, such as the Gothic romances of Anne Radcliffe, whose popularity was then at its height, and those novels that provide both rational enjoyment and a guide for life by depicting the real occurrences of it—the criterion set out by Samuel Johnson in his fourth Rambler paper (1750) and by Clara Reeve in The Progress of Romance (1785). The division between romance and the novel had been magisterially laid down by William Congreve a hundred years earlier when, in the preface to Incognita: A Novel, he distinguished between modern fictions that “come near us, and represent … Accidents and odd Events, but not such as are wholly unusual or unpresidented” and “Romances [that] are generally composed of … lofty Language, miraculous Contingencies and impossible Performances [which] elevate and surprize the Reader into a giddy Delight” (Congreve 1923: 1.111).

So when Trotter refers to fiction as an irrational enjoyment, he means that it appeals to the imagination and the passions by representing what is not real as if it were. When he says that it conjures up an ideal world, he means that it is like a reverie to the extent that it shuts out the world we commonly cognize, rendering us obedient solely to internal stimuli. When he adds that the relationships shared in this world are romantic and loosely described, he means that they are erotic and conducted under the anarchic licence of what Charlotte Lennox’s Arabella, heroine of The Female Quixote, calls “the Empire of Love.” And when he tells us that the story serves as no guide for conduct, he means that the law of moral consequence plays no part in it, and the events described are governed not by the will and intelligence of the characters nor by the moral tendency of the narrative, but merely by chance and caprice in league with an aroused imagination.

Johnson drew an important division not, as might have been expected, between realist fiction and romance, but between two different types of modern realism. Romance was so improbable that he believed, unlike Hobbes, it had no function except as a trivial amusement, for no one could possibly mistake flying horses and iron men for an imitation of real life. But in some novels, we are given an accurate but indiscriminate picture of the world as it is, where good and bad elements are combined in a single character, and there is no guarantee that a preponderance of virtue will be rewarded with happiness, or of vice with its opposite. The bad example set by such a character, he says, can “take possession of the memory by a kind of violence, and produce effects almost without the intervention of the will” (Rambler 4). He argues that it is not a mirror of the world that fiction ought to supply, but a selective imitation, for “if the world be promiscuously described, I cannot see of what use it can be to read the account.” Mimetic realism on the other hand engages the reader’s mind not as a photograph or moving picture of life as it is lived from moment to moment, but as a set of hypotheses, “mock encounters in the art of necessary defence.” This is how fiction works to defend social norms, Johnson suggests: in presenting a speculative account of risks that will likely be faced in the reader’s future and inviting imaginative participation in figuring how they might best be managed, the author prepares the reader’s imagination as a training ground for real experience. So the most dangerous fiction young people are likely to read does not concern castles, dragons, enchanters, and ladies pent in durance vile; it is a probable reflection of real life from which the conjectural element of self-defense has been removed.

In a recent important essay on fictionality, Catherine Gallagher has shown how intimately Johnson’s brief program for the novel intersected with the psychological developments accompanying the Financial Revolution. Johnson expected novelists not only to honor a contract with the reader regarding the outcome of invented stories (virtue rewarded, vice ending in ignominy) but also to use the form of contract for these mock encounters with danger—what, if I were in that position, would I feel, say, do, and what upshot would I expect?—so that a credible estimate might be made of how a speculative situation might develop over time. Gallagher endorses this judgment: “Readers were invited to make suppositional predictions … to speculate upon the action, entertaining various hypotheses [until it becomes clear that] the reality of the story itself is a kind of suppositional speculation” (Gallagher 2006: 1.346). Author and reader alike were entering into the same imagined relation to the future that governed all transactions in a commercial society and every kind of contractual social engagement, from dancing to marriage. The ur-conjecture out of which all these representations, bargains, properties, identities, experiments, and histories are made is simply this: “What if what I do not know, I did?” Once the bargain is struck or the contract made, life itself is shaped, not merely reflected, in the working out of that hypothesis, and reference to the real is displaced by conjecture—the reader’s own working fiction—as the primary device of edification and social cohesion. The licence given to the reader’s imagination by the novelist is cognate with that empowering every party to a contract in the world of global commerce, “merchants and insurers calculating risks, investors extending credit,” a place where “no enterprise could prosper without some degree of imaginative play” (ibid.).

Despite the limits placed on this sort of contractual reading, it is continuous with the world of calculations and promissory exchanges that Trotter and Beddoes blame for the rise in mental illness. That which makes the novel dangerous in their opinion—the substitution of imagination for cognition—is what makes it useful in Johnson’s and Gallagher’s, with one important proviso—that the will of the reader not be compromised. With the exception of Kames, those discussing the reading of fiction from Johnson to Gallagher refer the suspension of disbelief and the play of imagination to the will. This “temporary half-faith” is what prevents illusion from becoming delusion and keeps reading from becoming what Darwin calls a disease of volition (Coleridge 1930: 200). It preserves an ironic credulity that keeps all that is imagined within the zone of a provisional hypothesis, “What if what I do not know, I did?”

The opposite of this speculation is the radical form of skepticism adopted by Descartes in order to secure himself in the inviolable certainty that he thinks, and that because he thinks, he exists: namely, “What if what I do know, I didn’t?” There is nothing provisional or conditional about such an exercise, because it requires that all forms of empirical cognition be entirely abandoned in favor of an indisputable action of the mind. As Bernard Williams points out, this is a project of pure enquiry whose prize is not knowledge but truth (Williams 1978: 35), and it bears an astonishing similarity to the strategy adopted by Don Quixote on his chivalric quest when he chooses to assign all evidence of an empirical and nonheroic reality to the malice of enchanters, leaving his imagination as the sole warrant of all existent things: a barber’s basin is truly the helmet of Mambrino, a peasant girl on an ass is truly Dulcinea del Toboso, Alonso Quesada is truly Don Quixote de la Mancha, and so on. The exclusion of empirical actuality typical of reverie in its most extreme form is typical also of romance, and this is why Trotter and Beddoes, unlike Johnson, associate the worst kinds of fiction with that genre, so the task ahead is to isolate those features of romance that will loom large in what I shall be identifying as scorbutic fiction.

Up until now, I have distinguished scorbutic reveries as arising from situations that are, as Collins calls them, peculiar in the sense that they are unrelated to any other, uniquely horrible and repellent, or sometimes singularly attractive. Henry James’s definition of romance as a “fantasy of unrelatedness” has frequently been cited, and his characterization of the experience of such dislocation as unknowable has also been useful. The sense of inhabiting a fiction whose plot is unfathomable, so often presented in Gothic romance as the predicament of the heroine (“Her present life appeared like the dream of a distempered imagination, or like one of those frightful fictions, in which the wild genius of the poets sometimes delighted” [Radcliffe 1989: 296–97]), distinguishes the temporality both of romance and scorbutic isolation, where there is no orderly succession of events (“reflection brought only regret, and anticipation terror” [ibid.]), and no community is standing by to offer comfort, advice, or models of behavior.

Nevertheless, romance is remarkable for scenes of colossal confidence, such as Quixote’s grand catalogue of the heroes of the rival armies he conjures out of the dust clouds raised by two flocks of sheep, or his explanation to the Toledan merchants that Dulcinea’s excellence is not to be vouched for by sight or hearsay, but simply by their unlimited faith in the truth of the words in which he praises it. He exemplifies this implicit faith, for while he presents his mistress as the creature of his imagination and his will (“I fancy her to be just such as I would have her”), he worships this idol of his own brain as completely as if it were an existent thing and an extrinsic force, irresistible: “She fights and overcomes in me; I live and breathe in her, holding Life and Being from her” (Cervantes 1991: 1.229, 292). When Lennox’s Arabella lists the duties of constancy governing the knight in love, they soar above standard responsibilities to friends and nation; for she declares it is sometimes proof of the most exalted passion to embrace the cause of one’s enemy, or one’s rival in love, instances of what she, too, calls peculiarity: “It is in that peculiarity … that his generosity consists, for certainly there is nothing extraordinary in fighting for one’s father and one’s country; but when a man has arrived to such pitch of greatness of soul as to neglect those mean and selfish considerations, and, loving virtue in the persons of his enemies, can prefer their glory before his own particular interest, he is then a perfect hero indeed” (Lennox 1973: 229). It is clear that the peculiarity of passionate isolation can sometimes elicit the most shocking acts of independence, all of them familiar to a student of the Empire of Love, where “Love requires an Obedience which is circumscribed by no Laws whatever, and dependent upon nothing but itself” (321).

The words repeated most frequently in this world of confident disorder are “questionless” and “doubtless.” They underwrite a conviction of boundless exceptionality that is summed up in the exclamation of Mme de Lafayette’s heroine in The Princess of Cleves (1678): “In the whole world there is not another case like mine” (Lafayette 1994: 77). It is not an embarrassment but a triumph to be so peculiar and to lack the analogies suitable for such a situation, for the truth is there are none, nor any means of communicating its glory. As Eliza Haywood avers, “There is no greater proof of a vast and elegant passion, than the being incapable of expressing it” (Haywood 2000: 101). The singular and tautologous locutions of romance are heard again when the miseries and ecstasies of voyaging in the South Seas fail to find language adequate to their peculiarity, belonging as they do to a Terra Incognita where may be found, as Peter Heylyn ironically observed of the newly discovered parts of the South Seas, “the Isle of Adamants in Sir Huon of Bordeaux; the Firm Island in the History Amadis de Gaul; the hidden island, and that of the Sage Aliart in Sir Palmerin of England” (Heylyn 1667: 1094). However, the absolute peculiarity of a single and incommunicable situation is not always in itself eligible: some analogy, contradiction, or corroboration is needed if its advantages are to be known.

As compendiously as I can, I shall try to arrange those features of romance it shares with reverie, before embarking on a discussion of fictions associated with, or arising from, an isolation that may be termed scorbutic. First, there is the enclosed space of the imagination in a state of reverie, so well secured from outside impressions that it can figure to itself another world that is entire, self-comprehended, and yielding, as Haywood says, “one great unutterable comprehensive meaning” (Haywood 2000: 122, 89). That is to say, it is not an entity either able or inclined to enter into engagements with others. The topographical equivalent of a reverie is, as Heylyn wittily suggests, an island, like those proliferating over an ocean that Epeli Hau’ofa, inverting the properties of sea and land, has named the “sea of islands.” If all one starts out with is a peninsula, then it behooves aspiring Utopians to cut a breach in the isthmus and make it an island, as Thomas More’s have done. The architectural structure that bears analogy to an island is a prison, which no doubt is why islands were so often chosen as ideal sites for the incarceration of those guilty of heinous crimes or afflicted with the most contagious diseases, such as Norfolk Island and Tasmania in the new convict colony of Australia, and Molokai, where the lepers of Hawai’i endured permanent exile and civil death. Port Arthur is the perfect antitype of Utopia, an island born of an island by having the isthmus sealed, not by water but by a line of savage dogs. So the places most closely allied to reverie are those that insulate corruption or protect innocence. On old maps, the Terra Incognita was sometimes marked with the fancied location of the terrestrial paradise, and navigators arriving at islands in the South Seas were prone to think that they had arrived at it. In Vanuatu, Pedro Fernandez de Quiros held a chivalric and liturgical celebration of the New Jerusalem; and at Tahiti, Cook cautiously noted that men and women went naked without shame and obtained their bread from trees, not the sweat of their brows. Sometimes the symptoms of innocence and corruption were confounded in the one place, for at Tahiti, the arioi, an aristocratic sect of itinerant men and women devoted to theatrical displays and free love, behaved like troubadours in pursuing their own brand of amour courtois, having “enter’d into a resolution of injoying free liberty in love without being troubled or disturbed by its consequences” (Cook 1955: 127–28). The consequences were either infanticide or illegitimacy on a large scale, a common phenomenon in romance where “bastardy was in peculiar reputation” (Dunlop 1816: 1.174).

Illegitimacy is perhaps the most dramatic illustration of a lack of concern about consequences, penetrating not only the action but also the structure and temporality of romance. Doubts about origin and posterity are scarcely ever raised, for it is almost as if birth out of wedlock provides a nondynastic title to positions of greatest power and esteem, a custom honored in the accession of bastards to principal vacancies that are especially numerous after whole fellowships, such as Arthur’s and Charlemagne’s, are obliterated. Galahad, the issue of Lancelot’s enchanted encounter with Elaine le Blank, succeeds in the quest for the Sangraal while his father doesn’t; Isaie le Triste, the illegitimate son of Iseult and Tristan, restores the chivalry of Britain after the deaths of Arthur and Lancelot (1.276). There is a corresponding hierarchy of adultery. Tristan and Iseult, the wife of King Mark, elope to Joyous Garde where they are hosted by Lancelot, vindicator of the pseudoinnocence of Guinevere. When Isaie sets about to reform the abuses of the Round Table, he begins by seducing the niece of King Irion and having an illegitimate son called Mark (of all names) who does the same with the daughter of a Saracen admiral, forming as it were a lineage of fornication and bends sinister (1.286–88). Genealogy and posterity, the past and the future, are both rendered uncertain, allowing the present time to be the medium of an undistracted attention to pure action as knights roam “in quest of adventures for the mere pleasure of achieving them” (1.182). The receptacle of memory is no longer a representation of lived experience but a fog of miraculous contingencies, and the future is a cloud of incalculable events and impossible performances. Those experiences that might have formed the basis of common sense or national history are set aside.

So on the island of time formed out of an everexpanding romantic present moment, the senses are liberated from any duty of comparison or reflection. Each sensation is exquisite in its pain or pleasure because there is nothing like it. “Love creates intolerable torments! Unspeakable joys! Raises us to the highest heaven of happiness or sinks us to the lowest hell of misery” (Haywood 2000: 165). The only way to manage such extremes is by formalizing the moves appropriate to each adventure, turning the phases of seduction into a fantastic but powerfully erotic protocol, or the chaos of war into elaborate repetitions of violence required by the code of the tournament. Every now and then, contingency breaks through these ceremonies of passionate action and returns a scene to its original peculiarity, such as Guinevere’s bed linen so strangely soaked with the blood from Lancelot’s wounded hand, or the arrow shot by sheer accident into his buttock from the bow of a female huntress while he rested by a brook en route for a joust (Malory 1969: 2.438, 418).

The eruption of startling physical actuality into the sealed system of romance signals an alliance between the imagination and the senses that is always important. They are like the scenes of corroboration that prevent scorbutic nostalgia from attenuating, or like the moment of surprise in an experiment that Boyle (from the other side of the spectrum) compared to a passage in romance. In their more extreme form, they produce what seems like a breach in the system, as when it is discovered that the baby Merlin was a demonic implant in the virgin womb of his mother, requiring emergency baptism if the promise of Christian salvation is to remain operative (Dunlop 1816: 1.203). The symmetry of the rituals of love and war must be shadowed and sometimes assaulted by an opposite principle if the energy of the stylized system of seduction or jousting is to be sustained. This is achieved to some degree by the unpredictable outcomes of actions taken regardless of consequences, but more so by what Niklas Luhmann calls the “paradoxicalisation” of romance (Luhmann 1986: 45). This occurs when a contradiction surfaces between the regulations of the code and an irruptive contingency, or between the code of chivalry and the code of love, or between the Christian ideal of the Sangraal and the demonic malice of magicians and enchantresses. When seduction occurs, for instance, there is on both sides of the gender divide a contradiction between the “passivity” of lovers overwhelmed by the irresistible force of passion and the confidence of agents unhindered by doubts or questions. So on the one hand, there is the tableau of the submissive knight on his knees before the yielding or fainting woman—their submission necessarily involuntary and possibly even coerced—and on the other, two consenting parties to the consummation, who desire nothing else than to be doing what they are doing. Regardless of the degree of passivity or agency in the moment of passion, the coupling ought to comprise a knight owing loyalty to his fellowship and a lady under no obligations to another man, yet often this is not the case, and then the contradiction grows more severe. The degree of the anomaly is proportionate to the silence it provokes. All Malory vouchsafes of Guinevere’s liaison with Lancelot is that ancient love and modern love are not the same (Malory 1969: 2.426). Meanwhile Lancelot offers to prove by arms to the satisfaction of Arthur, in spite of all the well-attested accusations to the contrary, “that my lady, Queen Guenever, is a true lady unto your lord as any as is living” (2.477).

Daniel Heller-Roazen sums up this state of affairs in romance, where affirmation and denial, and innocence and sin keep changing places with each other, in the following equation: “x is possible if, and only if, x is impossible” (Heller-Roazen 2003: 108). The equation is installed in so much of the language of romance, despite the unquestionable certainties and doubtless absolutes it proclaims, that the figure of the double negative is often deployed to affirm a thing by denying its opposite (“I do not hate you”), a habit of thought and expression that infects even the language of Clara Reeve’s interlocutors in her Progress of Romance when they say things like, “I have not heard you with insensitivity” (Reeve [1785] 1970: 1.104). When Johnson traveled to the Highlands of Scotland, the closest he ever got a real land of romance, he could speak in little else but litotes: when shown a tree of insignificant size in this largely treeless landscape, but informed proudly that there was a much larger one a few miles away, he recalls, “I was still less delighted to hear that another tree was not to be seen nearer” (Johnson 1971: 10).

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The islands of romance mentioned by Peter Heylyn, combined with the first voyages of European discovery, provide scurvy with its early modern fictions: Amerigo Vespucci is used by Thomas More; Vasco da Gama supplies Camoens and then Milton; Dampier is Lemuel Gulliver’s cousin; while Antonio Pigafetta’s journal of Magellan’s navigation of the Pacific provides the hint for Bacon’s New Atlantis (1627). In many of these utopias, the wretched state of the voyagers forms an extreme contrast with the amenity of the island and the happiness of the islanders. Their neediness contrasts with the health, beauty, and wisdom of the newest of new worlds, a paradise free from any countervailing negative principle, save for that embodied in the unlucky sailors, who are sick, starving, and unlovely. But no matter how the simplicity and abundance of the island is represented, some portion of its admirable economy is going to reveal imperfections analogous to those of its imperfect visitors. The Utopians have their Zapoletes, mercenaries living in the borderlands whom they exploit but would rather see extirpated; the Houyhnmns have their Yahoos, whose labor they command yet whose genocide they perpetually meditate; Henry Neville’s The Isle of Pines contains a dissident sept of Phills, likewise headed for destruction. Inconsistencies like these declare the true illegitimate grounds of alliance between utopian fictions and romance: In both, a self-perpetuating system is held together not by symmetry but by compromised lines of descent, negatives, and reversible propositions. Paradisiacal innocence pursues wisdom whose implications are serpentine; self-denial holds hands with voluptuous pleasure; definitive action is marred by unpredictable consequences; and language is spoilt by equivocations and self-cancellations.

The New Atlantis hews closely to the program of scientific salvation that Hooke borrowed from Bacon and announced in his Micrographia (1665). The innocent fruit of knowledge, he promised, would remove the mortal taste of the primordial forbidden kind. Bacon’s is a fiction of a fellowship of philosophers, inventors, and experimentalists who, having cleared away the rubbish from the doors of perception, now see divine, natural, and artificial knowledge in their true light. But the tale begins with a scorbutic emergency in which sin and scurvy are closely associated. The author and his crew are driven across the Pacific by a storm that leaves them without food or a position—peculiar, you might say. When they spot the verdant island of Bensalem and anchor in its harbor, they report to an official who meets them that they have seventeen sick with scurvy out of their complement of fifty-one, and those “in very ill Case; so that if they were not permitted to land, they ran danger of their lives” (Bacon 2014: 3). The crew is given citrus, “like an Orenge … of colour between Orenge-tawney and Scarlett; which cast a most excellent Odour” (5). More of these oranges are forthcoming, “which (they said) were an assured Remedy for sickness taken at sea. Ther [sic] was given us also a box of small gray, or whitish Pills, which they wished our Sicke should take, one of the Pills, every night, before sleepe; which (they said) would hasten their Recovery” (7). Subject to this impressive antiscorbutic regime, the sick are soon better, “who thought themselves cast into some Divine Poole of Healing, they mended so kindely, and so fast” (8).

After this Bethesda-like miracle, they are told of another that happened in this island of Bensalem twenty years after the death and ascension of Christ: a pillar of light was seen with a wooden ark at its base, a heavenly covenant granting the fortunate inhabitants the knowledge of all things they now possess and celebrate. Shortly afterward, the redemption of the Bensalemites was proclaimed by the prophet Bartholomew. As a result, Bensalem now is “free from all Pollution, or foulenesse. It is the Virgin of the World” (31). The only ripple in the allegorical mirror of all that is “worthy to hold men’s eyes” is, on the one hand, the arrival of people polluted and foul with scurvy, and on the other the travesty of scientific wisdom exhibited in the houses of deceits, where machines capable of mimicking the sensory extravagances of scorbutic prostration, reverie, and a depraved imagination are all to be seen. The sudden accommodation of the sick mariners, despite a prohibition against such incursions, finds an equivalent in the impostures and fictions generated by engines reproducing the ancient imperfections of postlapsarian sense organs. A sort of antiprostheses, these inventions are the opposite of the “helps for the sight” that make remote or small objects perfectly visible and colors prismatically pure; or helps for the ear that make sounds resonant; or helps for the voice that let it be projected whence and whither the speaker chooses; or helps for the nose permitting mixtures of smells to be accurately distinguished. That is to say they are not like the machines invented by Hooke; rather they resemble the catoptrical inventions of the Dutch, in that they are designed not to correct the senses but to fool them, and to restore the sense of an original infirmity—Adam’s poor eyesight for instance—instead of removing it. Since all inventions in Salomon’s House serve a purpose, these must be supposed to stand as a warning, otherwise there is no good reason for their existence. Even so, it is a strange way for the Bensalemites to commemorate the means of their redemption. The narrative of the New Atlantis begins and ends, therefore, with two purges for the taint of scorbutic misrecognition, one that is natural and embodied in the recovered sailors, the other artificial and precariously exemplary, lodged in the houses of deceits.

If the rapid admission of disease into Bensalem is a surprise, even more surprising is the instant application of antiscorbutics. It indicates that this commonwealth of health and innocence, pent in its virgin island and embraced by a doctrine of exceptionalism for almost two millennia, nevertheless shares a history with the fallen world that is remembered and can in fact be detected in everything these people make and do. Doubtless, the remedy dates back three thousand years to the period when Bensalemite navies crossed the world, driving an extensive trade in the Mediterranean two vast oceans away; but that it should be preserved fresh and ready to use now the island has drawn so completely into itself indicates that scurvy is as present to the memories of the inhabitants as the fantastic delusions in the houses of deceits. The innocence of the island is defined at all points by its opposite. A character in Timberlake Wertenbaker’s play Our Country’s Good says, “You have to be careful of words that begin with ‘in’ … innocent ought to be a beautiful word, but it isn’t, it’s full of sorrow. Anguish” (Wertenbaker 2015: 41).

The paradoxes of scientific salvation in the New Atlantis provide, nevertheless, opportunities for corroboration that otherwise would not have been available. Having defined corroboration as the coincidence of an imagined and an experienced thing—Coleridge’s mariner dreaming of drinking and then waking to find his body soaking up rain—we can see that scurvy promotes this sort of doubling every time the invention of a “help” functions as a prop or supplement for an imperfect faculty, making what was wished for appear, and every time the imperfect faculty is reproduced in the distortions of a device of imposture. The contrast between the physical and mental prostration of the sailors and the luxury of their stay in the hospital—“a picture of our Salvation in Heaven … a place where we found nothing but Consolations” (10)—is less subtle, but it serves to show that even pathological fantasies may collaborate with knowledge instead of obliterating it. When the Bensalemites imagine how the story of their island will be received in Europe as a dream, the hypothesis is exactly the same as Bacon’s when he chose to advance the cause of truth in science by means of a fiction of a nonexistent island. It means that “x” and “non-x,” the possible and the impossible, can find grounds or at least intuitions of compatibility. Its promise is heard in the litotes of the senior official who says to his visitors, “Something I may tell you, which I think you will not be unwilling to hear” (157).

Although like the New Atlantis, it deals with a utopia of experimental scientists in a ship under stress of weather with a sick crew that has been driven beyond the limits of the known world, Cavendish’s The Blazing World presents things differently in. The single survivor of the vessel, soon to be the Empress of this icy shore called Paradise, is aware that the pole of the earth is conjoint with the pole of another world (hence the redoubled polar cold that kills the mariners and the “huge pieces of Ice” drifting in the sea, not to mention the bi-polar bears that visit the ship). She is also aware that she has crossed the border between what Alice, falling down her rabbit hole, calls “the antipathies.” The first topics she wishes the scientists of this New World to handle concern the contrary mixtures of such things as snow, icebergs, and amphibians.

The bird-men explain that snow is made of a mixture of water and fire; the fish-men tell her that ice is caused by a salt vapor exhaling from the ocean, condensing into water and then congealing into ice; the worm-men report that they do not know what happens to the saline element when the ice returns to water; the fish-men and the worm-men assure her that there are creatures of a mixed nature, “partly Flesh, and partly Fish,” whose systems of respiration differ and can accommodate various methods of breathing (Cavendish 1994: 139–47). These scientists are themselves chimerae, humans mixed with other species, reporting phenomena as mixed as themselves. They belong to a New World explicitly advertised as a fiction that comes about from fancying the juxtaposition of two antithetic worlds: “a Fiction … made as an Appendix to my Observations upon Experimental Philosophy … having some Sympathy and Coherence with each other … joined together as Two several Worlds, at their Two Poles” (124). So everything in and about these two worlds—one of reason and the other of imagination—is immersed in mixture, from the original conceit of twinned globes to the narrative of the actual business of discovering and explaining what is in them, which itself is modeled on a mixture of three genres of fiction: “romancical,” philosophical, and fantastical.

In many places, Cavendish’s disagreements with Bacon and his disciples refer to coalitions of motion and matter, causing the hybrid manifestations of light, heat, cold, and air; for she has blended Hobbes’s materialism with Locke’s skepticism about the capacities of the human sensorium. So she tells the bear-men to break their telescopes and microscopes, for such machines are “mere deluders” and will never let the eye pierce beyond the surface of things. However, she relents and allows them to be kept not for knowledge but for entertainment, cherished by the bear-men as “our only delight and dear to us as our lives” (142). The machines of knowledge are redefined then as toys, flattering and soothing the senses instead of correcting them—not quite imposture, but certainly not truth. The concession is not anomalous in a world where the limits of reason are shrewdly assessed, and the usefulness of fiction, if only as a recreation of the mind, is justified in the preface of the work itself. There is no ulterior motive in all of this, for if the end of reason is evidence fit for narrow human capacities, the end of fancy is only fiction. And as fiction affirms nothing, it cannot lie.

Addison will attempt some years later the same vindication of aesthetic pleasure that Cavendish is allowing here, especially in the conversation between the Empress and the worm-men, who teach her that color is not an accident lacking being, a mere delusion like the products of optical glasses, for “there is no body without colour, nor no colour without body, for colour, figure, place, magnitude and body, are all but one thing, without any separation or abstraction from each other” (Cavendish 1994: 151). So she corrects the awkward bear-men when they try to tell her that blackness is privation of light: “The Empress replied, that if all colours were made by reflection of light, and that black was as much a colour as any other colour; then certainly they contradicted themselves in saying that black was made by want of reflection” (143). Everywhere in her romance, Cavendish sets out the basis of corroboration, emphasizing the importance of mixture and hybridity to pleasures, which, as Hythloday reports of More’s Utopians, are never to be despised, especially those “that be received by the eares, the eyes, and the nose” (More 1898: 106). So the union of imagination and sensation that makes its way sidelong into Bacon’s fiction of virginal purity and innocence, is here emphasized and plainly enjoyed.

In Henry Neville’s The Isle of Pines, the presentation of a utopian polity set in the South Seas begins like others, with a scorbutic ship, but after that, issues suppressed or only glanced at in the Bacon’s and More’s utopias, but much to the fore in Cavendish’s (e.g., fiction, mixture and hybridity) are very salient and infest not only the unresolved disorders of the island but also the layered narrative structure that conveys it. The first George Pine reports a voyage in which sickness and death overtake some of the crew, followed by a storm that wrecks the five survivors, four women and one man, on an island. Clothes and tools they get from the wreck, fresh food is abundant, and soon all the women are pregnant by Pine. Between them, they bear him forty-seven offspring, who soon multiply into 565, and then into 1789, forming four tribes or families. Three are named after surnames of the first mothers—English, Sparkes, and Trevor—and the fourth is called Phill, after the given name (Philippa) of the black slave from whom it sprang.

His grandson records that Pine’s son, his father, was so outraged by the sexual licence that abounded in the island by his time, particularly among the men, that he went to war to subdue the worst offenders; after a decisive victory, he imposed law upon the rest by means of six commandments in defense of religion, marriage, property, and the state. Evidently the law governing sexual probity was not much regarded, nor for that matter the authority of religion or the safety of the state and property, for the grandson, William Pine, calls upon his visitors, Henry van Sloetten and his company, to help quell an insurrection led by Henry Phill that arises from Phill’s rape of the wife of a senior Trevor. After restoring peace, the visitors leave the island and return to Holland, where van Sloetten expects that some of his readers will refuse to believe his story, accounting it nothing but a fiction. Nevertheless he recommends the island to public notice as a settlement eminently worthy of expansion and development.

There is a set of contradictions lodged in the narrative that make it credible in spite of itself. The reason for the initial lifting of the sanctions against adultery, bigamy, and incest was for the continuity of the population, or so it is strongly urged by William, who says that his father was forced to institute the law against adultery because the descendants of the original Pine “did for wantonness … what my Grand-father was forced to do for necessity” (Neville 2011: 22). But that is not what George the patriarch says, rather that “idleness and fulness of every thing begot in me a desire of enjoying the Women … custome taking away shame (there being none but us) we did it … as our Lusts gave us liberty” (19). The only difference between lust and wantonness in the beginning and what takes place later is the number of people involved. Otherwise, the standing laws against adultery, polygamy, and incest apply to all of them and always did, so that the sins of the many (“whoredoms, incests and adulteries” [22]) are no less odious than those of the few. We don’t hear much from Henry Phill, but doubtless this is the theme of his defiance of authority—an authority, what’s more, too weak to enforce its own sanctions without help from outside.

Everything that is justified in the Isle of Pines by appeal to the rule of necessity, property, religion, and authority is in fact subject to contingency and sin. Of the four women, George was least inclined to sleep with Philippa, the black slave, but when she crept into his bed in the dark to beguile him, he knew who it was, “yet being willing to try the difference, satisfied my self with her” (20). The patriarchal line that descends through the men who call themselves Pine is braided with the matrilineal tribes of the four mothers, a genealogy mightily confounded with the signature of illegitimacy, being composed of the natural children who can be called only by their mothers’ names. That sign is most deeply imprinted on the Phills, who lack even a surname for their grandmother and are all of mixed blood in various proportions. Thus William Pine is the son of Henry Sparkes, who also called himself Pine, usurping a name as an enterprising person might usurp the surname King. This is something Henry Phill clearly means to do, precipitating a political crisis by an act of sexual anarchy that, far from an assault on the principles of the commonwealth, has been responsible for the founding of each tribe on the island.

A series of observations is made on this state of affairs, starting with the grandson who explains why this is not a utopia: “As it is impossible, but that in multitudes disorders will grow, the stronger seeking to oppress the weaker; no tye of Religion being strong enough to chain up the depraved nature of mankinde, even so amongst them mischiefs began to rise, and they soon fell from those good orders prescribed them by my Grandfather” (22). The consolation is at hand, however, for “as the Seed being cast into stinking Dung produceth good and wholesome Corn for the sustentation of mans life, so bad manners produceth good and wholesome laws for the preservation of Humane Society” (23). By accident and indirection, then, you find direction out and, as Mandeville is soon going to explain in his Fable of the Bees (1724), “Good springs up and pullulates from evil.” However, when he asks van Sloetten to intervene in the war against the Phills, William Pine explains that “where the Hedge of Government is once broken down, the most vile bear the greatest rule,” indicating that for every discovery of an alleged principle of order there is a contingency or a vile action ready to ruin it, and that it is the anarchic force of illegitimacy, not dynastic succession, that rules the roost (27). Without a wholesale extirpation, the Phills will rise again and perhaps succeed in seizing the Pinehood of the island—a parallel emergency abridged by Gulliver’s Houyhnhnms, who identify the same bastard seed of insurrection in their guest and order him to swim elsewhere.

The illegitimacy of succession is used by Neville to emphasize the length to which contingency and sin, stemming from a scorbutic landfall, can carry a state whose rule of law is not reinforced by sovereign power. It imitates the “swing” of Sir Kenelm Digby’s bean plant, when he says of its germination, “It follows presently its own swing; and in that little natural body, we may read the fate which hangs over Political ones, when the inferior members … have gotten the power into their hands: for, then every one of them following their impetuous inclinations, the whole is brought into confusion … unless a superiour Architect … come[s] to draw light and order out of that darkness and confusion” (Digby 1669: 21). The natural or bastard condition of the population of the Isle of Pines introduces this identical confusion because the architecture of the law is not strong enough to contain the pressures of natural as opposed to social reproduction, resulting not in a community or even a coherent tribe, but what Hobbes calls a “crowd” or multitude, of which he said: “There will be nothing about which the whole crowd, as a person distinct from every individual, can rightly say, this is mine more than another’s. Nor is there any action which should be attributed to the crowd as their action” (Hobbes 1998: 75–76). Such unresolved disorder provides an analogy not only with the life force of a bean and the moral disorder of romance but also with the activity of imagination in a scorbutic reverie or with the inchoate situation in which scurvy supervenes when knowledge of where, when, and who one is all disappears; or with devices for juggling and deceit when they are not (as always they are in Salomon’s House) strictly subordinate to the pursuit of knowledge; or with the chaotic relativity of dimensions and kinds that turns Gulliver at length into a centaur; or with the experience of that “Bastard of many Parents,” scurvy itself, which partakes of all other maladies in order to leave its victims subject to the incomparable spirals of their own sensations. Through the distorting lens of the actions and testimonies of the three Pines, each compounded by the naiveties of van Sloetten’s narrative and the short commentary of Abraham Keek, it is possible to read The Isle of Pines as the unwitting political testament of the illegitimate energy of the Empire of Love, which is opposed not by innocence but by arbitrary laws backed by weapons. It is Lancelot and Guinevere, Tristram and Iseult, all over again.

As John Scheckter points out, there is a problem of textual as well as political succession in The Isle of Pines, a “full-scale estrangement from known structures of knowledge, as conventions of location and duration break down” (Neville 2011: 34). Samuel Johnson gets a whiff of this disorientation when he reads novels with characters in them such as Tom Jones and Robert Lovelace, figures so equivocally conceived that the colors of right and wrong are confounded in everything they do. They are the creatures of authors who, pleased with this sort of confusion, “instead of helping to settle their boundaries, mix them with so much art, that no common mind is able to disunite them” (Johnson 1791: 1.17). Such characters are the illegitimate offspring (literally in Tom’s case) of an indiscriminate taste and what he calls “promiscuous description” (16), a kind of literary adultery. Now the effect of such license in The Isle of Pines is akin to what we shall observe in The Travels of Hildebrand Bowman (1778) when the career of the Dutch captain John van Trump is found to run so closely parallel to that of the real (as opposed to the fictional) Tobias Furneaux, or when the disease of nyctalopia is defined as the opposite of what in fact it is.

The original Pine says in his testimony that they sailed into the Indian Ocean, where some of the crew died of sickness before the ship, cruising near the island of St. Laurence, was overtaken by a great storm that swept them “out of our own knowledge” and plunged them into darkness until he and the four women were wrecked on the island (Neville 2011: 17). Introducing his own account of how they came across this remarkable document, van Sloetten writes that his ship came into the Indian Ocean near the island of St. Laurence when a violent storm blew up and lasted for a fortnight, during which time many of his men fell sick, and some died, “the Weather being so dark all the while, and the Sea so rough, that we knew not in what place we were,” until suddenly they came across the Isle of Pines (14–15). Whether Pine’s narrative is the counterfeit of this or the other way round, it serves to show that the disorientation caused by the loss of position in space and time includes the uncertainty of authorship and weakness of judgment. Van Sloetten sees his task to proclaim the benefits of a commonwealth whose ruin began in exactly the same way as his own narrative: a scorbutic and ultimately a sinful confusion in which evidence of facts tries for a doctrinaire eminence, only to end up as fiction.

Erasmus Darwin lists all the varieties of reverie under the heading “Insensibility of the mind to the stimuli of external objects” (Darwin 1801: 3.361). The opposite pathology is “Increased Action of the Organs of Sense” and belongs to his fifth genus, Irritation. Yet in scurvy, the two are often compounded. This is the theme of a little known subutopian fantasy that grew out of an event which took place in Grass Cove in Queen Charlotte Sound, on the northern coast of New Zealand’s South Island, in December 1773. In November of that year, the Adventure (sharing a name with Gulliver’s last ship) Tobias Furneaux commander parted company with the Resolution during a storm and was never reunited with her. The vessel anchored at Ship Cove, where the crew had stayed six months earlier trying to recover from a severe outbreak of scurvy. This time they experienced bad weather, suffered problems with spoiled food, and were heading for more problems with scurvy on their way to the Cape, which accounts for Furneaux’s decision to send the cutter to a nearby bay called Grass Cove just before they left in order “to gather wild greens for the Ship’s Company” (Cook 1961: 745). While they were there, the crew of the cutter ran foul of a large body of Maori that attacked, killed, and commenced eating them. Fanny Burney’s brother James discovered the carnage and fetched away two hands, a head, a pair of trousers, a frock “& 6 shoes—no 2 of them being fellows,” a dismal and disturbing repetition of Crusoe’s catalogue of ownerless gear on the shores of his island (752). While they were rowing away, he thought he could hear someone calling from the shore, but got no answer when he shouted back, “& indeed I think it some comfort to reflect that in all probability every man of them must have been killd on the Spot” (ibid.; Fig. 27).

In 1778, William Strahan and Thomas Cadell, publishers of Hawkesworth’s collection of the British voyages of the 1760s and of Cook’s second and third voyages, brought out an anonymous narrative called The Travels of Hildebrand Bowman, “Written by Himself, Who went on shore in the Adventure’s large Cutter at Queen Charlotte’s Sound New Zealand the fatal 17th of December 1773; and escaped being cut off, and devoured, with the rest of the Boat’s crew, by happening to be a-shooting in the woods” (Anon. 1778: titlepage). The alleged eleventh man in the cutter identifies himself as a midshipman aboard the Adventure but so far no one has been credited confidently with the authorship of what is a clever blend of Condillac’s Treatise on the Sensations (1754) with a travesty of stadial theory, for the story begins with his witnessing the slaughter and eating of his colleagues and then follows his escape via various communities, each exhibiting a different sensory specialization until he ends up back in London.

The first and most primitive people Bowman comes across are the Taupinierans, who see very well in the dark and go fishing by swimming underwater and taking their prey in their teeth, like Swift’s Yahoos. The Olfactarians are next, who smell things more keenly than we do and who hunt like dogs with their noses. Then Bowman meets the Auditantes who cannot bear harsh sounds, and afterward the Bonhommicans who have the sixth sense of conscience or moral sense (214), ending up with the Luxo-voluptans whose taste, or palate, is highly refined and devoted to aesthetic and erotic refinements: “We also have [the sense] of Touch or Feeling in as exquisite a degree as human nature is capable of supporting, without turning pleasure into pain; especially in the commerce between the sexes” (267). Bowman’s travels take him from the most primitive sensations to the most sophisticated, from the sharp eyesight that allows the Taupinierans to catch fish in the dark to the luxuries of Mirovolante, the capital of Luxo-volupto, which are clearly recognizable as belonging to modern London, where the great actor Garimond (Garrick) acts in plays by Avonswan, and everyone who can afford it is given over to adultery, scandal, gaming, and masked balls (282). On the way to this dissolute culmination, Bowman has paused in Bonhommica, situated in the land of the aboriginal Auditantes, a community of Elizabethan simplicity and candor apparently settled on the coast of North America; and it is to Bon-hommica that he decides to return at the end of his adventures, having by now discovered the Great Southern Continent, which he thinks ought to be called, after him, Bowmania or Hildebrandia (397).

Fig. 27. Grass Cove, Marlborough Sound, New Zealand. Courtesy of Mark Adams.

Although the author of Hildebrand Bowman has a pretty clear idea of the route of the Adventure and the details of the Grass Cove massacre, he departs (deliberately it seems) from some details, of which the most important from my point of view concern scurvy. He agrees that the cutter was sent to gather scurvy grass and wild greens, but nowhere does he acknowledge the difficulties with spoilt food and scurvy experienced by the Adventure. In fact, he makes a point of praising the shrewdness of the English navigators of the Pacific for lowering the dependence on salt meat by victualing their ships with a variety of foods and by paying close attention to cleanliness and ventilation. The Dutch captain who carries him back to Bonhommica, John van Trump, is presented as different from Furneaux, for although he has had a boat’s crew cut off and eaten by cannibals, his men are scorbutic, and they are hurrying home “before the scurvy … quite disabled them” (379). In fact, the fictional van Trump and the historical Furneaux are exactly alike; so when van Trump asks Bowman about the British antiscorbutic system, “I gave him a fully account of our provisions and management…. I gave the surgeon instructions how the stores were to be managed,” he is claiming an expertise no one on the Adventure possessed. His success is reported as the argument to the ninth chapter: “The Scurvy abates on board the Harlem Frigate, from the use of Malt and other things Moraveres [the Bonhommican skipper] spared them” (397).

At the same time Bowman, makes a strange mistake about nightblindness, often an accompaniment to scurvy caused by the lack of vitamin A, when he says apropos the Taupinierans (who like owls can see at night but are blind in daylight): “I have been told by a learned Physician since my return … that there is a disorder in the eyes (but a very rare one) called nycta lopia, which exactly resembles the sight of this species of people” (63). Although he gets the symptom entirely the wrong way round, Bowman is as fully alive as Trotter to the hyperactivity of the senses that seems always to accompany scurvy; and he is closely attentive to the cultural consequences fostered by each, with keen eyes and noses low in the scale of civility, and ears at the top along with the moral sense, while touch and taste lie somewhere between. The mistake about nyctalopia, which in fact makes the eye blind in poor light, seems to be linked to the overlapping of Bonhommica and Luxo-volupto as virtuous and corrupt versions of Britain, and to the curious mirroring of van Trump and Furneaux as the negative and positive exemplars of ship management, the one running a scorbutic vessel the other a clean one. Every “x” is accompanied by a “non-x”, every affirmation by its negation. This twinning of positive and negative qualities is encouraged, it seems, by the presence of scurvy and the magnified sense-impressions that attend it.

When an alignment is made between scorbutic susceptibility and a utopian experimental or cultural model, fiction has a strange part to play, for while it offers to provide a Baconian mirror of the truth, it is also symptomatic of the opposite. Bacon’s houses of deceits, Cavendish’s frank acknowledgement of having invented a world that does not exist, the curiously improbable repetition of George Pine’s voyage in van Sloetten’s in The Isle of Pines, and Bowman’s manifest falsification of the facts of the voyage of the Adventure are all examples of the real case being misrepresented. Yet the correlation with known facts is not hidden but transposed, so that the falsehood conspires with a truth being told in the wrong way or by the wrong person, allowing room for some sort of veracity to have a place. Thus van Trump is dogged by the same scorbutic emergencies that afflicted the actual voyage of the Adventure, now fictionalized as a ship whose antiscorbutic regime is a model for all others; the fish-men discourse objectively of amphibian creatures in The Blazing World as if they were a singular species. The doublings don’t frame the truth, they mimic its alternation with its opposite, the “non-x” with the “x.”

The author of Hildebrand Bowman was making an addition to a minor genre of voyage literature initiated after Anson’s expedition. Fascinated by the accounts of the postscorbutic delights enjoyed by his men on Juan Fernandez and Tinian, Gabriel Francois Coyer wrote A Supplement to Anson’s Voyage round the World (1752), in which he enlarged fantastically on the pleasures of the island. When the British sailors land, they are conducted by a slender Francophone connoisseur (“the Comptroller of Fashions”) to a province at the center of Juan Fernandez called Frivoland, where they find an extensive variety of curiosities and bibelots, all superficially exquisite and utterly useless. The fruits are made of painted papier âaché, the trees are finely shaped but as brittle as glass, the horses are too frail to bear a rider, and the melodies of the birds are so wonderfully refined they cannot be heard. Trying to imagine what kind of trade might be driven between this distant land and the metropole, Coyer suggests “delicious Romances … Operas fraught with melting Love” (Coyer 1752: 19). Coyer has in his eye no doubt the luscious descriptions Richard Walter provided of the paradise of Juan Fernandez and the mysterious splendors of the deserted island of Tinian, contributing a satirical treatment of the theme of ecstatic pleasure that is common in this branch of fiction. Diderot wrote his Supplement au voyage de Bougainville (1796) to make gentle mockery of Commerson’s and Bougainville’s enthusiasm for the sexual liberty of the Tahitians, and of the eagerness with which a European audience greeted Bougainville’s picture of a Polynesian Venus rising from the sea to stand in resplendent nakedness before men long starved of all the comforts of life. Commerson’s own letter describing the pleasures of this “isle of Cythera” as utopian appeared in an anonymous collection with the confusing title, Supplement au voyage de M. de Bougainville, ou Journal d’un voyage autour du monde fait par MM Banks et Solander (1772). So supplements, usually fictional embroideries of real voyages, could either reinforce or undercut the extravagant memories of scorbutic sailors. Horace Walpole is making supplemental fun of John Byron’s misrecognitions of Patagonian giants in his mock-utopia called, An Account of the Giants lately discovered (1766). But Rousseau was doing the opposite with his Julie, ou la nouvelle Heloise (1761) when he took (like Coyer) Anson’s voyage as a framework. The disappointed lover St. Preux joins the expedition to the South Seas, and when he returns, he explains to Julie that Juan Fernandez is “an asylum to innocence and persecuted love” and that Tinian, even more deserted and more delightful, has tempted him to lead there a life of charming solitude. When he enters her garden, he remembers (rather like Rousseau himself in his reveries) these desert islands: “I thought myself in the most wild and solitary place in nature, and I … cried out in an involuntary fit of enthusiasm, O Tinian! O Juan Fernandez! Eloisa, the world’s end is at your threshold” (Rousseau 1803: 2.132–33).

Bernardin de St. Pierre’s romance Paul and Virginia ([1788] 1819), based on his visit to Mauritius in 1768, might be termed self-supplemental to the extent that it transforms scenes that at first caused the author intense disgust into a paradise where an idyll of young creole love is destroyed by metropolitan meddling. It is also a celebration of the innocence of bastardy: a story with a tendency quite the reverse of Neville’s, but exhibiting strong affinities with Rousseau’s reveries of being gloriously cast away on a desert island. “You are a natural child,” Margaret tells her son, “you have no legitimate father … you have no relation in the world but me” (Bernardin de St. Pierre [1788] 1819: 93). Paul’s skin is dark, he has no second name, but the biological or natural energy that turns Henry Phill into a rapist and a rebel is focused by him lovingly and exclusively on Virginia de la Tour, daughter of a woman disinherited by her rich and ancient family for marrying beneath her rank. They grow up together in an isolated valley of Mauritius amidst trees, flowers, fruits, and birds that charm every sense. Paul’s partner, like Adam’s, is inseparable from the beauty of this natural abundance. He tells her, “Something of you, I know not how, remains for me in the air where you have passed, in the grass where you have been seated. When I come near you, you delight all my senses…. If I only touch you with my finger, my whole frame trembles with pleasure” (68–69). They come to maturity like plants, sensing that infant love is growing into pubescent passion, but not knowing what it is. Their love is inseparable, therefore, from the sensations of what Humboldt called plant geography, such as the exquisitely painful sympathy he himself felt for the Andean waxwood palm, or the softer sensations that Bernardin de St. Pierre enjoyed amidst the wonders of a strawberry flower. It is when she is bathing in a pool Paul built for her that Virginia first feels the full force of her passion for him and her indistinct desire to consummate it, as if she were one of Erasmus Darwin’s flowers in The Botanic Garden:

She saw, reflected through the water upon her naked arms and bosom, the two cocoa-trees which were planted at her birth and that of her brother, and which interwove about her head their green branches and young fruit. She thought of Paul’s friendship, sweeter than the odours, purer than the waters of the fountain, stronger than the intertwining palm-trees, and she sighed. Reflecting on the hour of the night, and the profound solitude, her imagination again grew disordered. Suddenly she flew affrighted from those dangerous shades, and those waters which she fancied hotter than the torrid sun-beam. (74)

[Elle entrevoit dans l’eau, sur les bras nus et sur son sein, les reflèts des deux palmiers plantés à la naissance de son frère et à la sienne, qui entrelacaient au-dessus de sa tête leurs rameaux verts at leurs jeunes cocos. Elle pense à l’amitie de Paul, plus douce que les parfums, plus pure que l’eau des fontaines, plus forte que les palmiers unis, et elle soupire. Elle songe à la nuit, à la solitude, et un feu dévorant la saisit. Aussitot elle sort effrayée de ces dangereux ombrages, et de ces eaux plus brûlantes que les soleils de la zone torride]. (idem 1907: 61)

Here is a version of Ovid’s Salmacis in her pool, or even of the young Yahoo girl in Gulliver’s fourth book, both immersed in water and desiring a man nearby, but Bernardin de St. Pierre has purged the scene of any trace of sin, appetite, or comedy. Even the raw anarchy of Digby’s bean plant, transferred so powerfully to Neville’s island of bastards, is brought to heel by the girl’s gentleness and fright. The serpent in this garden is the agent of Virginia’s great-aunt, M. de la Bourdonnais, who arranges for her transfer to Paris, where she is to be inducted into a social rank from which poor Paul, a natural child in all senses, is entirely excluded. He is disqualified from a natural union by the laws of social succession which, as it turns out, are going to disqualify Virginia, too. The disappointment of the two lovers is spun out through the rest of the story as the perverse intentions of her great-aunt bear their bitter fruit, interfering with the biological swing of natural love first by separation and finally by Virginia’s death at sea, causing Paul to die of grief soon afterward. By the time Mrs. Pexton visited the tomb of the lovers in 1817, the fiction had become history, and the paradisiacal valley a tourist attraction; but it was still faithful to a love rooted in plant life: “They are interred under 2 large trees planted at the time they were born” (Pexton 1817: n.p.).

Innocent love thriving amidst the vegetation of an isolated valley on a distant island is a fictional realization of Rousseau’s and St. Preux’s reveries, and like them, it lays a strong botanical emphasis on the unique flora of the place. Instead of thinking like Sir Joseph Banks and Carl Linnaeus of acclimatizing plants from the New World, or believing like Spenser that stock needed to be restored in metropolitan seed-banks such as his Garden of Adonis, Bernardin de St. Pierre shows his human plants renewing themselves at the periphery of the globe. However, as Diderot explained in his fictional enlargement of Bougainville’s journal, the utopian promise of sexual love liberated from metropolitan restraints and hypocrisies that had fascinated French readers was itself a metropolitan fantasy, a sort of alibi for the promiscuity of the salon romances and for sexual adventures further afield. Commerson, Bernardin de St. Pierre, Kerguelen, and Pierre Poivre seem to have endorsed a cult of free love on Mauritius, closely linked to their botanical interests at the garden of Pamplemousse. Bernardin de St. Pierre had an affair with Poivre’s wife, and Kerguelen learned from Commerson to carry a female companion on voyages of discovery, resulting in the hideous scenes of scorbutic jealousy on the second of the two voyages he made to his twice-discovered island in the Indian Ocean.

However, the real source of negative energy fueling this lyric account of arboreal innocence is to be found in Bernardin de St. Pierre’s first landfall at Mauritius, when he was sick with scurvy on a ship with seven dead and eighty prostrate by the time it made Port Louis. Weary in his mind and “disgusted with everything,” he said the island looked more like a colliery than a paradise. He described encounters with the flora and fauna very remote from the sensuous pleasures of the young lovers:

Not a single flower adorns our meadows…. No plant bears flowers of a pleasant smell, nor is any shrub in the island to be compared to our white thorn. The liannes have not the fragrancy of honeysuckle or ivy. Not one violet in all the woods. As to the trees, they have large whitish trunks, that are bare, except a little kind of nosegay of leaves of a dull green. (Bernardin de St. Pierre 1800: 66)

The grass is full of prickles, some of the trees stink horribly, there is very little birdsong, just the croak of parrots and the shrilling of monkeys; the shrubs are venomous and the fish poisonous. The bark of the mapou tree inflames his throat; there is a pigeon whose flesh throws anyone who eats it into convulsions and a butterfly whose dust will blind you. He concludes, “Every sentiment of humanity is here depraved, nay, I may say extinct” (107). One can only conclude that the romance of Paul and Virginia emerged as a memory that didn’t so much soften the acerbities of his first sensations on Mauritius as transfer their strength into the opposite register, from “x” to “non-x.” Like William Hodges, Bernardin de St. Pierre uses the shapes and colors of a repellent scene of nature for a palimpsest of verdurous warmth; and like the Ancient Mariner, he turns horror into beauty, and then into tragedy. As the melancholy of the forlorn Paul deepens, he ends up feeling the same disgust for the island, now made foul by a hurricane, that distinguished Bernardin de St. Pierre’s first acquaintance with it: “Every thing repulses me” (Bernardin de St. Pierre [1788] 1819: 127).

These switches of value and traverses of passion, so typical of utopian fantasies and their supplemental additions, are extreme in proportion as the intensities of pleasure or aversion ignore the mixture of passions and qualities on which inevitably they are based. For this reason, the sharpness of the division between the positive and the negative passions in Paul and Virginia appeals very powerfully to the imaginations of the first navigators and settlers of Australia. Pausing in the midst of his scorbutic circuit of the continent, Flinders took a walk at Coupang through the estate of the widow of the man who was governor when Bligh landed there: “I could not prevent my ideas from dwelling upon the happiness that a man whose desires were moderate might enjoy in this delightful retreat with the beloved of his heart; for here the summer sun could not scorch, nor was there any dread of winters cold.” Almost immediately, Flinders shakes himself awake and predicts how his fantasy would conclude, “In the end I should fall a sacrifice to surrounding circumstances and become that mere inactive animal, or rather vegetable—a native of Timor” (Flinders 2015: 2.337). The only way the narrator of Paul and Virginia can deal with such violent antinomies is by transcending the senses and their contradictions. At the end of the story, the narrator makes a Cartesian sacrifice of empirical knowledge for a truth more bodiless: “My soul intuitively sees, tastes, hears, touches, what before she could only be made sensible of through the medium of our weak organs” (Bernardin de St. Pierre [1788] 1819: 162). As for Flinders, he returns to his original passion, one that will cost the lives of nine of his men, “that genuine spirit of discovery which contains all danger and inconvenience when put in competition with its gratification … that ethereal fire with which the souls of Columbus and Cook were wont to burn” (Flinders 2015: 2.311–12).

In his Hygeia, Beddoes selects a single example of fiction infected by the debility of exhausted nerves: Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), a narrative sitting as squarely at the center of the history and literature of scurvy as The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. This is what he says about it and its author:

In his Gulliver, where his genius bursts out with such transcendent splendour, it still shines as if surrounded by a halo of malignant dissatisfaction. There is something in different parts of that work, from which the heart recoils…. Cut off from the participation of pleasure, he might serve, envy, and hate his species, till advancing years, perpetually irritating his secret sufferings, plunged him in the madness of misanthropy. Strong evidence … is to be found in the delight he takes in images, “physically impure.” (Beddoes 1802: 3.190)

Evidently, Beddoes believes that Swift’s sexual capacity was disabled by excess, whether culminating in sheer exhaustion or venereal disease he doesn’t say, but he sums it up in suitable romantic terms: “He entered the lists of love with all the flourish of a dauntless champion, but when he had proceeded to a certain point, threw down his arms, and turned his back like a recreant” (191). The “certain point” he indicates is Swift’s own retreat from sexual intimacy when it reached the stage of apparent inevitability—with Esther Vanhomrigh and Esther Johnson, for instance—a démarche emphatically dramatized in Gulliver’s hysterical refusal of sexual intercourse with the Yahoo female in the fourth book and his revulsion when his wife embraces him.

Beddoes reinforces the connections between Swift’s misanthropy and the sinking state of national health in a letter where he imagines how the common level of credibility would be determined under a national regimen of perfect health:

If there should ever be a state of things in which men employed their knowledge and powers for the advantage of their health, and faithful descriptions of such valetudinarians as abound among us, should fall into the hands of the people of those days, they will have as much difficulty in believing in their reality, as we have of the creatures so abominably distorted from humanity in Gulliver’s Travels. (Stock 1811: lxiii)

He may be alluding to the Struldbrugs of the third book, but it is more likely he refers to the Yahoos of the fourth as the limit case of what bad diet, putrefying innards, stench, repulsive physique, and general malignancy is capable of producing by way of metamorphosis from the human into the beast. What he means to assert is not just an analogy but a causal connection between the tendency of nervous disease and the nonhuman images formed by a corrupted imagination, as if the attempt of the misanthrope to picture the vileness of the human species were in fact a self-portrait, the image of a negative Narcissus whose miserable self-love is shown to be as grotesque as it is incredible to anyone enjoying a normal state of body and mind.

So I shall briefly examine the fourth book of Gulliver’s Travels, bearing in mind Trotter’s analysis of the infectious potential of romance and Beddoes’s objections to Swift’s maritime utopia, namely that it originates in the bitterness and frustration incident to a valetudinarian rejection of normal sexuality. Like the other narratives I discuss in this chapter, Gulliver’s fourth book begins with a scorbutic ship entering the South Seas. Now commander of the Adventure, Gulliver loses some of his men to calenture, although he doesn’t specify their symptoms. After their replacements foment a mutiny and imprison their captain, more men die of a sickness that is now inevitably scurvy. Eight months at sea with a couple of short stops on its way to an island off the southern coast of Australia, the Adventure has sailed well within sphere of acute nutritional deficit, where Gulliver’s “Victuals and Drink” could not by any stretch of the imagination have included greens or lemon juice. When marooned by the mutineers on the island of the horses, his sojourn begins with two scenes of misrecognition, each the reverse of the other: creatures later described as examples of “a perfect human figure” are mistaken for animals, and horses are mistaken for metamorphosed humans. Gulliver refers this predicament to a reader who “will easily believe that I did not much like my present Situation” (Swift 1995: 212, 209). It is one that introduces in its most drastic and radical form the sense of foreignness that permeates journal descriptions of these regions (Dampier’s description of the coast of Australia for example, or Bernardin de St. Pierre’s of Mauritius), as well as the “reverse gaze” convention of spy literature, oriental travelers, and it-narratives, where narrators are assumed to be entirely alienated from what they see and describe (Ballaster 2005: 149). But between Gulliver’s entry into the strange world of the island and his emergence from it in an Australian cove, where the Portuguese sailors find him in a coat made of Yahoo skins, flat on his face behind a stone, and trying as hard as he can to be invisible, the reversal of the gaze is complete, with the familiar now as strange as what was truly strange before. They laugh at his speech, which is like the neighing of a horse, and when they talk, Gulliver says, “It appeared to me as monstrous as if a Dog or a Cow should speak, or a Yahoo in Houyhnhnm-Land” (430). It is clear that somewhere along the way to this colossal failure of communication on the shore of a New World, Gulliver has been metamorphosed into something like a horse, bereft of any sense of the necessary mutual antagonism of “x” and “non-x.” The talent he maintained more or less throughout the first three books for negotiating the difference between what is empirically certain and yet conceptually impossible, and for representing the affective frictions precipitated by such miracles, has now been entirely abdicated. It has been replaced by a set of binary oppositions, of which horse and human define the unbridgeable positive and negative poles.

Three real-life reveries, two of them scorbutic, beg comparison with Gulliver’s: Rousseau’s seventh walk, Bernardin de St. Pierre’s landing at Mauritius, and the zoologist Francois Peron’s sudden love of seashells. All of Rousseau’s walks are premised on his isolation from a world that has now become alien to him, his only reliable companions being plants, whose “sweet smells, bright colours and … elegant shapes” vie for his attention (Rousseau 2004: 109). He feels himself isolated not only by the extent of his absorption in these delicious sensations but also by the degree of their disinterestedness. He is not fond of herbs and flowers for their medicinal value, what learned men call “the study of properties.” He looks at them instead as charming accidents, living and dying to themselves, with no providential relevance to human life. This is Rousseau’s refuge, plant life that is aesthetically satisfying without any shred of human utility to justify it. The thicker the congregation of plants, the more perfect his illusion that he has found his desert island, “a sanctuary unknown to the whole universe” (118). This discovery is all a joke because he finds he has pitched his idyll next door to a stocking factory, but the tight association of the noninstrumental intimacy of greenery and flowers with his forgetfulness of himself as a civil person is very similar to Gulliver’s identifying as a horse. Even their gestures, excluding the foreign world of humans, are alike: flat on their faces, pressing themselves into earth so that the alien beings of whom once they were one might never see them again (117).

Bernardin de St. Pierre’s arrival in Mauritius is exactly the reverse of Rousseau’s penetration of the dense and welcoming vegetation of the Alps. He finds all nature there offensive to the senses: “The poison is in the island itself” (Bernardin de St. Pierre 1800: 85). But he has arrived with scurvy, so he brings half the poison with him. In this respect, the parallel with Gulliver is close, whose first sensation on being cast away on his island is disgust, caused by the smell of shit shed by Yahoos from the tree under which he is sheltering. Bernardin de St. Pierre’s discovery that he can hold no fellowship with the plants and birds of Mauritius is his scorbutic contribution to natural history; and Gulliver’s judgment of his own kind, strongly reminiscent of Dampier’s contemptuous description of Aborigines, is no less sweeping an addition to the anthropology of the Southern Ocean: “I never beheld in all my Travels so disagreeable an Animal, or one against which I naturally conceived so strong an Antipathy” (334). Their smell, the color of their skin, the grossness of their sexual parts and proclivities, the rottenness of their food, the malignity etched so vividly in their faces are all revolting, providing sensational examples of creatures utterly foreign to a standard that is yet fully to be embodied in the rational and stoical horses.

Peron’s narrative oscillates between notices of the terrible condition of the crew of the Geographe and his new enthusiasm for shells. Heading for Tasmania with humidity at 97 degrees and their food rotten, they lose Sautier, a botanist, to scurvy; then Hubert, a gunner, followed by Pougens and Courrager, two sailors. Men are drinking their own urine, and twenty-five of them are unable to move; meanwhile, he is adding furiously to his collection of 100,000 specimens, chiefly mollusks, which he has arranged “according to a constant and regular plan embrac[ing] all the details of the exterior organisation of the animal, explain[ing] all its characters in an absolute manner [that] will, in consequence, survive all the revolutions of methods and systems” (Peron 1810: 163, iv). So human chaos is confronted by lucid systematic order in the sphere of seashells.

Four elements are in play in each of these accounts, and disgust defines each of them positively or negatively: these are plants, humans, animals, and shells. Gulliver and Rousseau are disgusted by humans in general; Bernardin de St. Pierre is disgusted by the trees and flowers of a particular island, nor is he overly impressed by its human population; Peron is disgusted by the scurvied ship and impatient with his commander Baudin as well as the animals which used to be the legitimate object of his expertise. Gulliver consoles himself with the company of animals, Rousseau with plants, and Peron with shells, while Bernardin de St. Pierre presently lacks any alternative to Mauritian fauna and flora, although eventually he will come to love what sickened him at first. Of the four, Bernardin de St. Pierre is in the optimum position because his disgust doesn’t oblige him to espouse an alternative endowed with what his previous affiliations have been found to lack—simplicity, charm, fragrance, color, reason, or beauty. In fact, he shows that Rousseau’s love of plants, pursued as recompense for human depravity, is hazardous if disgust is what you are trying avoid. Like Shakespeare of the Sonnets, Bernardin de St. Pierre knows that festering lilies smell far worse than weeds; and like the Ancient Mariner, he knows, too, or at least he doesn’t not know, that slime-born serpents moving on the ooze of a rotten ocean can in a moment change into sleek and exquisite creatures of light. Rousseau has room to laugh at his own metamorphosis, cast away on the edge of a stocking factory, but Peron and Gulliver have none.

Fig. 28. David Jones, Gulliver and the Female Yahoo. © Trustees of the Estate of David Jones.

This is the source of the injustice of Peron’s account insofar as it concerns Baudin; and it is the problem with Gulliver’s fourth book. Both voyagers exhibit the exceptionalism of the landed scorbutic, who is so amazed and disgusted by every face but his own that he chooses another species for company. The confidence of Peron’s embrace of shells, in which, as a zoologist, he can claim little prior expertise, many a time prompts him to desert his colleagues and to ignore his rendezvous with them, as if he had found far finer company. His behavior compares with the decisiveness of Gulliver’s rapid adoption of a finer species than his own, even though he has no secure footing in its norms and can never hope to be its specimen.

If Gulliver’s metamorphosis were complete, and he were a horse writing of humans to horses, or even conjectured horses, then the reversal of familiarity into foreignness and vice versa would make the sort of sense that can be found in Apuleius’s The Golden Ass, David Garnett’s Lady into Fox (1922), or the fable told by La Fontaine of the cat turned lady who still went mousing (La Fontaine 1865). In these examples, the metamorphosis has taken place and the interest of the story lies in what follows. But Gulliver is stranded between the species he admires and the one he detests, making feeble attempts at mimicry and disguise, such as clothes made of Yahoo skin and trotting when he walks. It isn’t until he finds himself giving an account to his master of the cruel treatment of horses in England, only to find he is a liar here and a madman there, that he understands he has no community in either place. The scene with the female Yahoo (Fig. 28) emphasizes Gulliver’s difficulty, for it replays the story of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus in Ovid where the diffident male who refuses the naked female who accosts him in a pool is transformed for his want of gallantry into a mixture of man and woman, neither one thing nor the other, or what Cavendish would call a horse-man (Fig. 15). Gulliver’s status is likewise that of a hybrid whose appeals to either party—the human reader or the master horse—are vain because he will not acknowledge the mixture. He wants to be all horse and nothing of a Yahoo.

The two occasions when his insistence on his singular integrity collapses illustrate what Beddoes takes to be the pathological direction taken by the sexual proclivities of Gulliver and Swift: the encounter with the Yahoo female and his meeting with his wife when he returns to Redriff. In both instances, Gulliver is forced to acknowledge his humanity: of the incident in the river, he confesses, “Now I could no longer deny, that I was a real Yahoo, in every Limb and Feature, since the Females had a natural Propensity to me” (242). And at the domestic reunion, he has to remember what he has done with the female now clasping him to her bosom: “When I began to consider, that by copulating with one of the Yahoo-Species, I had become a Parent of more; it struck me with the utmost Shame, Confusion and Horror” (261). An equilibrium that would have been maintained had Gulliver’s judgments been more provisional has now migrated from his sense of things to the reader’s sense of Gulliver. Instead of the hero exploring his contrary impressions of the Lilliputians and the Brobdingnagians, he himself strikes the reader as a bastard or a centaur, and never more so than when he is insisting on the purity of his language (saying only the thing which is) or his bloodline (incapable of mating out of kind). How far Beddoes is justified in equating Swift’s valetudinarian tendencies with Gulliver’s, it is impossible to say, but within the symptomology of scurvy and reverie, it is possible to see how much of Gulliver’s sense of “outness” has been lost.

Exactly what Beddoes’s idea of a valetudinarian might mean to Trotter becomes clearer when he mentions the two significant alterations to the balance of the mind caused by scurvy. The first is a gloominess that grows extreme and very isolating, “He flies into hiding places from his duty, broods over his own feelings in solitude, and indulges the most gloomy ideas of his safety, as if hypochondriacal;” and then he “not only forgets all [his] old attachments but shews the utmost signs of dislike to those who had been most dear.” The second is the infinite care taken by the victim to deliver at length and in great detail the exact degree and pressure of his sensations, “as earnestly conducted, as we sometimes observe hypochondriacs in relating their feelings, from any ruffle of temper occasioned by … slight causes” (Trotter 1792: 44–45; 1804: 3.364). The valetudinarian, that is to say, is singular in the same way as a scorbutic seaman, a resemblance that extends to Rousseau on his imagined desert island, Gulliver in the land of the Houyhnhnms, and Peron on a shelly beach: each cast away, estranged from all that was familiar, repelled by how strange it now seems. Peron’s love of seashells, like Rousseau’s love of plants, takes the form of a purposeless and interminable accumulation, resembling the exhaustive lists of symptomatic particulars and peculiar sensations compiled by scorbutic hypochondriacs, all given over to contingencies while pretending to assemble the building blocks of some grand taxonomy.

Gulliver’s demonstration has to do almost entirely with the details of his disgust, which he wants to instance, again and again, as proof of his exemption from the filth and corruption of his own kind. Gulliver is not destined to recover (like Bramble and Bernardin de St. Pierre) a sense of familiarity with what belongs to him, he can only stress how gingerly and precisely he must go when he is in its vicinity: “During the first Year I could not endure my Wife or Children in my Presence, the very Smell of them was intolerable: much less could I suffer them to eat in the same Room” (434). Under the authority of an absolute dualism, Gulliver fully realizes and inhabits the hypothesis behind Descartes’s Meditations: “What if what I do know, I didn’t?” But the intended “amendment” he mentions as the purpose of his narrative has nothing to do with truth, any more than the disgust he feels for his spouse has anything to do with her depravity. The whole point of the exercise is aesthetic, designed to mitigate the sensory insult of the smell and the sight of a human: and the sense organ he wishes to neutralize above all others is his nose, and secondarily, his eye. All he wants from his own species is that they not come into his presence. Unlike the Ancient Mariner, for example, Gulliver cannot find his way back from disgust to beauty.

How this affects his language bears on the failure of the ellipse in Gulliver’s case, owing to the absence in his sensations of any twin impulse of repulsion and attraction. He really wants to be operating in a circle with a single center, but when he is thrown into an alien curve, as he is whenever he begins to talk of England and Europe, there is no order or end to his accumulation of horrid examples. Like Dampier and all the other visitors to Australia’s shore, Gulliver enumerates what is not there, but for him it is an absence to be celebrated, not mourned. His negatives define the extent of the amenity of the Houyhnhnm utopia, just as Peron’s shells provide the structure of a grand and immortal system of calcareous nature. Here is the beginning of one of Gulliver’s many lists of foreign iniquities, none of which has any reason to stop: He could go on piling up negatives forever: “Here were no Gibers, Censurers, Backbiters, Pickpockets, Highwaymen, House-breakers, Attorneys, Bawds, Buffoons, Gamesters, Politicisans, Wits Spleneticks, tedious Talkers, Controvertists, Ravishers” (Swift 1995: 250). His attachment to negative statements of a positive case is of course typical of the rhetoric of scorbutic passion, but it infiltrates his prose in a most peculiar way once he is back in England trying to pretend that he can come to terms with his aversions.

There are two examples in his last chapter where litotes gets out of hand because it is being used to enforce what ought to be a clear affirmative. Here is the first: “I am not a little pleased that this Work of mine can possibly meet with no Censurers” (263). Why does he not say, “I am pleased that there is no possibility of meeting censurers of my work”? His attempt to expel all possibility of censure by means of negatives actually weakens the claim, leaving the chance of such a meeting up in the air. Here is the second example: “I dwell the longer upon this Subject from the Desire I have to make the Society of an English Yahoo by any Means not insupportable” (266). Gulliver believes he is making an urgent and unequivocal statement, but somehow he cannot say, “I desire to make supportable the society of a Yahoo by any means.” He finds it equally impossible to say, “I find the company of English Yahoos insupportable.” So what he offers in this farewell to the reader is a modification of the truth according to Houyhnhnms, saying the thing which is, by blending it with his own habit of heaping up negative instances of his ideal commonwealth (“Here were no Gibers, Censurers, Backbiters,” and so on). He chooses to say, very awkwardly it must be confessed, the thing which is not not, or at any rate, not yet. Language itself seems to sidle up and crepitate against sensations that Gulliver had been determined to suppress, installing a “non-x” wherever our centaur-narrator simply wants an “x.” Language, or Swift, or both, are faithful to the double sense of loss and pleasure that drives Ishmael to say that the man who perishes of calenture will sink “no more to rise forever.” But Gulliver, whose professed interest in some sort of amelioration of humans is entirely disingenuous, cannot sustain that kind of elliptical energy.

In a fable ascribed to John Gay, Ay and No are about to fight a duel when Ay says to No, “Why then should Kinsfolks quarrel thus? / For, Two of You make One of Us” (Gay 1974: 2.379). This is a treaty often ratified and sometimes broken in the literature and fiction of scurvy. When it works, the possibility of corroboration grows stronger, that is to say when the passion associated with the lack of something meets and mingles with the passion associated with the supply of it. This can only occur when the link between an imagined satisfaction and the reality of it is sustained, sometimes in good faith and sometimes by subterfuge. What is certain is that a reverie totally sealed off from “outness” and the world at large, such as Gulliver’s is, has no prospect of enjoying the only consummation scurvy affords.

***

In view of the shaping power scurvy has upon the imaginations of those involved in the first discoveries of the Australian coastline and in the early colonization of the hinterland, it would be apt to conclude this chapter, with a look at some of the fiction it produced. In her review of a book called The Bondwoman’s Narrative (2002), a story told in the first person of the life of a female slave who eventually escapes to freedom, Hilary Mantel judged the blend of seeming fact and outright plagiarism of nineteenth-century fiction in the memoir to have been necessary for the author’s psychological survival: “Long before she was free in fact, she had escaped in imagination. She had extracted herself from degrading circumstances and inserted herself into others, more flattering, as a persecuted heroine in a romance” (Mantel 2004: 430). A similar argument is broached in Timberlake Wertenbaker’s play, Our Country’s Good, a play based on the first performance of a play in Australia: George Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer, in 1789, performed by a largely convict cast a year after the First Fleet arrived. Dabby Bryant, a female convict, looks at the company at the end of the dress rehearsal and says, “I saw the whole play, and we all knew our lines, and Mary, you looked so beautiful, and after that I saw Devon and they were shouting bravo, bravo Dabby, hurray, you’ve escaped, you’ve sailed thousands and thousands of miles on the open sea, and you’ve come back to your Devon, bravo Dabby, bravo” (Wertenbaker 2015: 87). Acting in the play is like a dream or a reverie, or like using Bleak House (1853) to report a rainy day in Washington DC, for it can restore everything that is missing from the gross realities of exile and servitude: hope, action, speech, love, community, and applause. The importance of such a fiction does not lie at all in any supplementary fidelity to facts, it disputes them at every point: it turns female into male (Mary as Sylvia becomes a man), the cruel sergeant into the criminal, the criminal into a character with options, the tyrant into a lover, bastards into heroes, evil into good. It covers up anguish with something like innocence. These metamorphoses appealed to the convict players. Richard III and The Poor Soldier were performed in Norfolk Island in 1793, and during 1796, Sydney saw Jane Shore, The Wapping Landlady, and The Revenge (Russell 2011: v.).

Perhaps the most important word in dictionaries of flash language is “fakement” meaning booty, forgery, or deceit. The verb has more extensive meanings: rob, wound, shatter: “fake your slangs” means break your shackles (Vaux 1819: 2.171–72). Put the two together and the insurgent meaning would be something like, “a fiction designed as a breakout from the mind.” The convicts at Port Jackson who walked north to find China, or who set off in small boats for Timor, were performing fakements by refusing to internalize the shocking dreariness of their situation. Forgery exerted the same fascination on Thomas Watling and Joseph Lycett: it was a release from the terrible burden of unrelieved originality. Fanny Davis, a convict who played Alicia in Jane Shore, had been transported for a crime committed while impersonating a man (Russell 2011: 10). Henry Savery, author of one of the first colonial novels (Quintus Servinton [1832]), and Mr. Micawber fashioned between them reverse fakements, the last of Servinton’s many forgeries being a story of his return to England, a free man; while Micawber (possibly happier in his lie) informs his wife he is bound for “a distant country expressly in order that he may be fully understood and appreciated for the first time” (Scheckter 1998: 88, 25).

The model of criminal fiction for criminals, as opposed to the phony providentialism of the Newgate Calendar (1824) and the routine falsehoods retailed at the gallows and then printed as Last Dying Words, was the memoir of Bampfylde Moore Carew, scion of a reputable family in the west of England who joined the fraternity of itinerant gypsy-beggars and made a handsome living by inventing characters, localities, genealogies, and friends that a gullible public found entirely probable. Accounts of his life appeared in 1745 and 1748, linking him to the Stuart cause in the rebellion of 1745. Usually his fiction would include a story of a shipwreck or similar accident (a herd of cows drowned in a flood, for example) accounting for his present destitution, which strangers are only too willing relieve. Each scene is a performance in which the beggar defies the penetration of his audience, so that the parallels between itinerant begging and traveling theater are very close, both relying on techniques of amusement, taking the word in its most extensive sense. Carew is twice transported to the American colonies, and at least twice dresses as a woman to levy his tax of charity on the public. That this is an impost on moral shortfall rather than mere gullibility is a point made by the narrator when he says, “It will be no disgrace to our hero if among [civil hypocrites] he appears polished as the best, and puts on a fresh disguise as often as it suits his conveniency” (Carew 1813: 125). No matter how genially Carew enters into his schemes, he is never deluded into thinking he has anything in common with those he deceives. Like James Hardy Vaux, he appends a dictionary of thieves’ cant to his memoir, as if to emphasize the extent of the cultural division between mendicants and the public, one that Henry Fielding thought honored the former more than the latter (see Lynch 1998: 83–84). However, it leaves him strangely hollow, no more than the sum of his successive roles or fictions, like a knight in romance who is devoted to adventures for adventures’ sake, with no prospect beyond.

A successful fakement requires first of all a hero in despair, destitute of material and psychological props, operating with a blank in the mind as complete as the “vast and unknown country” into which he has been spilled. “ ‘What have you been?’ That question is never asked in the colony” (O’Reilly [1880] 1975: 8). Before an opportunity arises of cultivating the inversions and reversals so typical of convict slang, there is just noise, like the roar heard by John Boyle O’Reilly vibrating from the scorbutic hold of a transport, making “every hatch-mouth a vent of hell,” demons yelling “things even more repulsive than [their] physical appearance” (168, 190). John Mitchel recalled that convict etiquette required everyone “to cram as much brutal obscenity and stupid blasphemy into their common speech as it will hold” (Mitchel 1868: 140). Such eldritch figures, once landed, provoked even in him, who was predisposed to pity, feelings of disgust quite as unequivocal as Gulliver’s: “I gaze on them with horror, as unclean and inhuman monsters” (295).

Mitchel’s fakement during the voyage out on the scurvy-stricken Neptune was to adopt the role of the Ancient Mariner, wantoning with his thirst, “patiently eschewing the black ship liquid and lime-juice, and lustfully eyeing the wealth of sweet water that, ‘kerchiefed in a comely cloud,’ comes this way sailing like a stately ship of Tarshish.” When it obliges, he stands naked in the rain to let his body drink; and when it doesn’t, he quotes, “The very deep did rot, Oh Christ! / That this should be” while thinking “of the mariner who had to bite his arm and suck the blood before he could sing out” (Mitchel 1864: 86–87). It is in the same vein as O’Reilly’s transformation of his hero Moondyne into Wyville, leader of the penological reform movement in London, with generous plans for remodeling the vicious regime of Millbank. Both are loose fantasies indulged in the corners and quiet moments of the convict system, which itself is as total, absolute, and self-sufficient as any system of love or chivalry—“almost too complete,” as Mr. Meekin says in Marcus Clarke’s For the Term of His Natural Life (Clarke 1899: 353).

In order to oppose such a system, a fakement must exploit the condition to which the convict has been reduced. This requires that noise not be silenced or avoided but that it be transformed—for instance, into the kind of instrumental nonsense that keeps communication secret—or as a reorganization of meanings and hierarchies menacing the symmetry of the system. Peter Carey’s Ned Kelly recognizes it in the conversation of Joe Byrne and Aaron Sherrit, “They had a queer and private way of conversing they said THAT PLACE & THAT COVE & THAT THING and only they knew what it meant” (Carey 2000: 222). A character on a Parliamentary committee in Moondyne says, “I begin to realize the meaning of the Antipodes: their common ways are our extraordinary ones—and they don’t seem to have any uncommon ones” (O’Reilly [1880] 1975: 141). That is to say, in a world where nothing is normal, the possibilities of naturalizing the unusual provide fakement with its best opportunities. This is to be understood through the medium of another cant word, “cross.” “Going on the cross” is to defy the law by “cross-work” or “cross doings”; cross-cattle have been stolen by cross-stockmen, now cross-coves, and rebranded: cross-marked. Someone playing the part of a gentleman is a cross-swell.

In Rolf Boldrewood’s Robbery Under Arms (1888), a gang of bushrangers find their way to fakements by going cross-ways, following their elegant captain, Starlight, into adventures that require a high degree of sang froid and violence, and an equal degree of dramatic skill: “as good as a play,” “a fancy-dress ball with real characters,” “like playing at ‘Robinson Crusoe’ only there’s no sea … an Australian Decameron without the naughty stories.” These are the interludes where they are either holed up in their happy valley, or consorting with real swells at the Turon races. Their final fakement is doomed, “He somehow didn’t expect the fakement to turn out well,” but as always, Starlight makes the best of it: “There’s no help for it, Dick. We must play our parts gallantly, as demons of this lower world, or get hissed off the stage” (Boldrewood 1951: 476, 596, 397). The alternative would be the shameful condition of those three convict shepherds Mitchel mistook for Yahoos, who have not only no country but no flair, no bush panache.

In his Jerilderie Letter, Ned Kelly begins to state this alternative, but so vast is the inventory of reasons for it, its antithetic possibility is lost in vituperation: (“[a Man] who has no alternative only to put up with the brutal and cowardly conduct of a parcel of big ugly fat-necked wombat headed big bellied magpie legged narrow hipped splay footed sons of Irish Bailiffs or english landlords which is better known as Officers of Justice or Victorian Police who some calls honest gentlemen but I would like to know what business an honest man would have in the police” [Kelly n.d.: 43]). Kelly would like to know why Irishmen would think it an eligible choice “to serve under a flag and a nation that has destroyed massacreed and murdered their fore fathers” (45). Mitchel has the same complaint, and so does Swift, namely that Britain beggared Ireland then mocked the Irish as stupid and incoherent tatterdemalions. Mitchel sees that if some attitude of resistance doesn’t intervene, the terminus a quo and the terminus ad quem of Irish misery in the convict system is exactly the same: “Starving wretches were transported for stealing vegetables by night” and then starving wretches were flogged for stealing vegetables by night (Mitchel 1864: xvii). The leading architect of the convict system, George Arthur understood its symmetry as an infernal vortex, “a continual circulation of convicts … a natural and unceasing process of classification” (RSCHC 1837: Appendix 1, 55). The nursery of any idea resistant to the system lies not in any nostalgia for a lost home but in the exasperation born of brooding misery: as Darwin might say, the volitional disease of reverie turning into active irritation. This is how it starts: “There is somewhat dreamlike indeed in this life I am leading. My utter loneliness in this populous ship amidst the strange grandeur of the ocean, and for so many days … [makes] all my life … the seeing of the eye only” (Mitchel 1864: 93). Like Molyneux’s newly sighted blind man in Berkeley’s account of it, Mitchel is reduced to “only the empty amusement of seeing, without any other benefit arising from it” (Berkeley 1972: 53). The eye needs corroboration from another source. It is not until he experiences the savage delight of eating oranges in Pernambuco that his vitality finds a focus in exquisite sensation.

For the Term of His Natural Life is the most bitterly extensive of all the convict fictions, drawing largely on the period of George Arthur’s command at the Tasmanian penal colony. The main part of the action takes place in the immediate aftermath of the move from Macquarie Harbour to Port Arthur in 1833, a period chronicled by James Backhouse in his journal—a source liberally cited by Clarke. The hero is introduced to the reader with a curse of bastardy coming out of the mouth of the man he thought was his father. “Silence, bastard … this impostor, who so long has falsely borne my name … shall pack” (Clarke 1899: 3). Arrested soon afterward and wrongly sentenced to transportation, Richard Devine becomes Rufus Dawes the convict, silenced by his father but also by the shame it would bring on his mother were he to speak of his plight; and pack he does, all the way to Australia. On his descent through the successive circles of the systematic convict hell, Dawes loses everything: name, identity, voice, and hope. We often see him overwhelmed, either by the evil noise around him or the cruelty of his guards, falling into a painful reverie. “His faculties of hearing and thinking—both at their highest pitch—seemed to break down … no longer stimulated by outward sounds, his senses seemed to fail him” (54). Sentenced to solitary confinement on Grummet Rock, he suffers a “lethargy of body and brain” that seals him off from all sensations, leaving him haunted by phantoms from the past in a situation that is itself no better than dilirium (109). The birth of Dawes’s one great corroborative idea is preceded by another reverie. He is plunged into it when he sees that Sarah Island has been deserted: “The shock of this discovery almost deprived him of reason…. He struck himself to see if he was not dreaming. He refused to believe his eyesight…. He felt as might have felt that wanderer in the enchanted mountains, who, returning in the morning to look for his companions, found them turned to stone” (122). But then he sees a column of blue smoke that like the shaft of light in the New Atlantis he interprets as a covenant or a blessing.

Although scurvy is silently included in the many scenes of starvation in the novel, it is never mentioned as anything but lethargy and sickness; nevertheless, we assume that these trances in which the senses are alternately roused and blocked are in fact scorbutic. Backhouse’s account of how scurvy developed in Tasmania is closely echoed in Clarke’s narrative. The standard prison diet is the familiar fare of salt meat and flour, with a little tea and sugar. The chain gang is fed porridge and flour with salt meat every other day. On Grummet Island, Dawes has nothing but a small portion of flour for each day. Vegetables are grown only for the officers; and fresh meat is reserved for them and for the dogs at Eaglehawk Neck. So all the conditions for the scorbutic decline of the prisoners recorded by Backhouse and the local surgeons are in place in place for Dawes. Gabbett, the monstrous psychopath whose career shadows Dawes’s, has several times escaped and survived on human flesh, the only fresh food he will have eaten in Tasmania. The great fakement of the tale involves Dawes in two activities that declare their paradoxical descent from his unpleasant father. The elder Devine was a shipbuilder and a victualer, making a fortune out of “measly pork and maggoty biscuit.” His son is about to embark on the building of a boat and the supplying of fresh goat meat for his new community.

At the source of the blue woodsmoke, he finds Julia Vickers, ailing wife of the commandant, Sylvia her daughter, and Lieutenant Maurice Frere, all three marooned by mutineers who seized the boat in which they were sailing for the new settlement. Everyone is hungry, but Dawes is starving. He falls on his knees and croaks the single word, “Food.” Frere roughly denies him any, but Sylvia hands him damper, saying, “Here, poor prisoner, eat!” (145). It is a scene with a long life in convict literature, and here it inaugurates (as it does in Great Expectations [1861] and Jack Maggs [1997]) a fakement within a romance. The focus is Sylvia, the quaint and beautiful child surrounded by the squalor and cruelty of a penal colony, whose imagination has been fed with literature, principally Paul and Virginia, which she is twice found reading, first in English and then in French. Generally, she exhibits the stately confidence of romance heroines, especially when confronted by the awkward attentions of Frere. “I won’t kiss you,” she tells him, “Kiss you indeed! My goodness gracious!” (103). “There are persons,” she informs him later, “who have no Affinity for each other. I have no Affinity for you. I can’t help it, can I?” (145). Like Virginia, she is fond of tableaux, “I am the Queen of the Island … and you are my obedient subjects. Now then, the Queen goes to the Seashore surrounded by her Nymphs. Pray, Sir Eglamour, is the boat ready?” (169–70). Of course, she has an affinity for Dawes and doesn’t demur when he kisses her in the overflow of his gratitude for her addressing him as “Good Mr Dawes.” The bond between them, originating in the pantomime of courtliness, is strengthened as the boatbuilding gets under way, with Dawes definitely in charge. He gets the idea of a coracle from something Sylvia says, and then he imagines how to bring it about. With Frere working as his assistant, he catches the goats he needs for skins, builds the framework of saplings, sheathes and caulks it, and it swims. A by-product of this splendid corroboration of imagination by the advent of a real thing is a plentiful supply of fresh meat. Dawes is Robinson Crusoe and Paul and Sir Eglamour all at once.

Instead of being whisked off to Europe, Sylvia is always going to be living within a few miles of Dawes, but in circumstances so radically different from his she may as well be on the other side of the world. This division is the result of her amnesia, for having fallen into a fever at the outset of the voyage in the coracle, she can remember nothing of the island sojourn and, with the death of her mother, Dawes’s heroism has now no witness except Frere, who steals all the glory for himself, plunging Dawes into a second silence from which he will never emerge. Shortly afterwards, Frere marries a grateful Sylvia. Thus Dawes’s story has been twice stolen from him, first of all in effect by his mother and now again by his tormentor. Thereafter, an evil combination of chance and relentless malice ensures that no one will ever know it. His captivity lasts until the final pages, when he makes his escape in the same boat as Sylvia, only to be overtaken by a hurricane that kills them both. Bernardin de St. Pierre’s drowned Virginia is found clasping Paul’s picture; the corpse of Sylvia lies on the remains of the shattered mainmast fast in the embrace of her dead lover, seen only by the sun as the wreckage drifts out to sea. The fiction enclosing Dawes’s single fakement has been robbed of energy, just as the fakement is robbed of any consequence. There is no paradox, reversal, or transposition capable of wresting the story out of Frere’s hands. In his rage, Dawes later tells the truth, but the logic of the place finds no difficulty in setting that aside as a lie. No one but his author hears or sees him; and that last look at the wreckage through the eye of the sun seems as false a transcendence of the senses as that proclaimed by the narrator at the end of Paul and Virginia. It puts authorship into doubtful territory, as if paradoxicalisation has migrated from the action to the narration, with “x” as Clarke and “-x” as Frere, his semblable.

Dawes and his author are both pessimists, believing that fakements are very seldom corroborated by the realities of the case. Dawes briefly exults in the fertility of his own brain, and then the triumph is over. Most of Robinson Crusoe consists of the repetition of this happy union of idea and fact. He is able to raft ashore his booty from the ship because, “As I imagined it, so it was” (Defoe 1983: 51); and the end of his story, he traps the mutineers because, “I imagin’d it to be as it really was” (264). But Dawes is forced to understand in the end that “he had, by his own act, given himself again to bondage” (Clarke 1899: 173). If Defoe’s novel is about the recovery of the civil contract by the improvement of nature into property, then those of Bernardin de St. Pierre and Rousseau are about its opposite: the restoration of the irenic order of plants and its lenitive effect upon the mind. Clarke finds neither alternative satisfactory. As the vile Frere points out, the prison system is fully supported by nature: “Port Arthur couldn’t have been better if it had been made on purpose … and all up the coast from Tenby to St Helen’s there isn’t a scrap for human beings to make a meal on. The West Coast is worse” (142). The ill accommodation afforded by the land is brought to the perfection of misery by the lash, chained labor, and the management of nutritional deficits. Bernardin de St. Pierre has experienced an inhospitable land and a cruel society, but he has not chosen to represent them simultaneously. Clarke exhibits a world of simultaneous evil, both natural and social: wild streams are poisoned by their own vegetation and a system of justice drives guiltless wretches into despair. Sylvia’s innocence is nothing but a fantastic counterpart to this tangle of evil—really no more than an extended reverie—and even that faint opposition attenuates when, after marriage, all her romantic certitude turns to diffidence and uncertainty.

Peter Carey’s Ned Kelly is a little like Rufus Dawes in terms of narrative resources, not endowed with many and certainly not keen to inherit them. He is under no illusions about how few props for the imagination came out of Ireland aboard the convict ships, only the Banshee, the herald of death. On the Rolla, the Tellicherry, the Rodney, and the Phoebe Dunbar “the BANSHEE sat herself on the bow and combed her hair all the way from Cork to Botany Bay…. It were clear St Brigit had lost her power to bring the milk down from the cow’s horn … but the Banshee were thriving like blackberry in the new climate” (Carey 2000: 99–100). Kelly, therefore, is deeply troubled by cultural imports that conflict with frontier notions of masculinity, such as his father’s cross-dressing, “his broad red beard his strong arms his freckled skin all his manly features buttoned up inside that cursed dress” (19). The wearing of dresses as a gesture of rural resistance is explained in subsequent fakements where Steve Hart, “the horrid thing that had previously worn a dress” (222), plays a part. Hart talks of his heroes Robert Emmett, Thomas Meagher, and Smith O’Brien but, as Kelly acidly notes, “He never seen them men but he were like a girl living in Romances and Histories always thinking of a braver better time” (223). Wearing blackface and a dress, Steve enters the hut like “the Dame in the pantomime” explaining to everyone that he is a son of Sieve, appropriately accoutred: “Its what is done in Ireland … its what is done by the rebels” (309). Although in his own eyes he is a White Boy or a Ribbon Man, to Mary he seems like a Molly, as indeed Ned’s father seemed to Ned when he wore his “cursed dress.” Ned’s plan to make armor from the quarter-inch steel plate stripped from the moldboards of ploughs is to shift the key of defiance decisively from cross-dressing to chivalry. Egged on by Thomas Curnow’s reading of the rousing speech from Henry V (“We would not die in that man’s company / That fears his fellow-to die with us”), Ned accepts the doomed fakement of the fight at Glenrowan, believing perhaps the promise of Shakespeare’s line, “This story shall the good man teach his son.” But it is one formed out of a strangely awkward alliance of history-in-the-making and romance that Curnow appreciates more fully than Kelly and to which he has, possibly, a greater title as author than Carey, for all his dubious motives in faking it. Authorship begins to look possibly like dirty work.

Carey’s earlier convict novel probes more deeply the relation of Australian fakements to metropolitan life by coiling the fiction of Jack Maggs around Dickens’s Great Expectations. Although set at the time when Dickens was still writing his novel, Jack Maggs acts as its supplement, for it is by no means at one with the sentiments or motives of Dickens, which are treated as shabby and opportunist by Carey’s narrative voice. The narrative shell of Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang (2000) resembles that of Jack Maggs inasmuch as authorship is characterized as a rogue activity by a voice not at all times easily distinguished from the author’s own. Oates stands in as close a relation to Carey as he does to Dickens, likewise the character Curnow transforms history into the fakement to which Carey puts his name. The same terrible ambiguity links Maurice Frere to Marcus Clarke. How then do we read the paragraph beginning, “The death of children had always had a profound effect on him … for Tobias had been a poor child … and he was … famously earnest in defence of the child victims of mill and factory owners” (Carey 1997: 130)? I don’t think we are supposed to doubt the profound effect, or the strength, of the appeal abused and dead children make to everyone’s heart and conscience. The only explanation for the callous tone (“famously earnest”) in which this remark is made must lie in the sequel to the scene that is common to these three convict fictions, where a child gives a starved and chained criminal some food: Sylvia handing Dawes the damper; Pip giving Magwitch a pie intended for Christmas dinner; Henry offering Maggs the pig’s trotter he wanted at that moment more desperately than anything else in the world.

The profound effect on the adult is what is important, because it is from that surge of passionate thankfulness—not just for the food but for the recognition of an abandoned person’s humanity—that three parallel fakements grow, as do the three novels recording them. We have seen that Dawes’s fakement is the weakest; but the other two are fueled by sentiments initially powerful and direct, and then over time seasoned with nostalgia and self-pity, which corrupt the original passion and blur its outcome, or at least that is what Carey seems to suggest. Magwitch is so deeply moved by the action of a small boy who commits the first theft of his life to fill the belly of a starving man that he is determined to construct a romance in which the boy will assume the part of hero. Young Henry Phipps gives famished Jack Maggs a pig’s trotter, even holds it so he can chew it because his hands are held close by the chain, and Jack builds a similar fiction in which Henry is quite content to play his part of a spoilt young gentleman as long as there is plenty of money in it. Both convicts break their parole to return to England in order to view their handiwork and to bring it to its consummation, which in both cases is meant to include a sentimental reunion between the generous old varmint and the grateful youth.

An inevitable consequence is that both varmints put themselves in danger of their lives for breaching their parole; but another is that the stories they meant to tell by means of their benefactions have become confounded with others, equally dangerous. No story tangential to these two fakement-fictions entirely belongs to the person of whom it is told, or to the person who tells it. They are like one of Watling’s or Lycett’s paintings. Just as Compeyson tracks Magwitch, so the sinister Partridge has an interest in Maggs, and each is fleshing out a tale intended to bring the quarry to the gallows. Meanwhile, Oates’s various plans for his novel The Death of Maggs is fraught with new dangers for the hero every time the author fiddles with his plot, or unearths by mesmerism a new cache of information from the vessel that never leaks, namely Maggs’s cerebrum. In fact, deaths proliferate as each story collides with another—Compeyson, Magwitch, and Partridge dead, and Oates frequently close to it.

Maggs makes elaborate plans to protect his own secrets from hostile readers, writing them in mirror script in invisible ink, an innovation in penmanship analogous to cant in speech and not unlike the scriptural code used by John Rix in For the Term of His Natural Life that is cracked by Maurice Frere. However, the status of the possession of a secret is badly compromised by the mesmerism, and also by Oates’s empty promise made to Maggs, “All your secrets shall be returned to you” (232). A returned secret is a little like renovated innocence in the New Atlantis. Magwitch has many fewer resources than Maggs, relying for immediate help on Pip and Herbert, but for all his long-term needs, he has been dependent upon Jaggers, the repository of all secrets in Great Expectations and for whom there is no equivalent in Jack Maggs except Tobias Oates, at once author and archive.

Jaggers controls entirely the story of Pip and Estella that is told within the fictional world of Great Expectations; he has controled it ever since Estella was adopted by Miss Havisham; and of course, that secret was the offspring of another concerning her father and her mother in which Jaggers himself played a legal part, brilliantly manipulating a hypothesis that forced a jury to find a woman almost certainly guilty of murder, innocent. So none of these secrets was founded on truth or on respect for the law; they were authorized by the power generated jointly among those who defy it and those who manipulate it, just like the fakements of the Australian convicts into which these lies have been wreathed. In Clarke’s novel, the narrative voice controls a synthesis of three imperfect stories—Dawes’s, Rex’s, and Frere’s—that constitutes the true account, of which none of the three is aware. That is why the eye of the sun looks awfully like the eye of God in the final scene and why there is nothing like Jaggers’s or Oates’s collections of secrets to complicate the dynamic of the action, which becomes increasingly repetitive.

Maggs feels the force of this dynamic when he says of his fakement, quoting Ned Kelly, “It was not what I planned, but such is life” (183). He knows how powerfully the counter-fictions of his adversary are conceived, but even more how brilliantly they are performed, such as the astonishing pantomimic grotesqueries of Sir Spencer Spence, the plague doctor with red lips who places the house in Great Queen Street under quarantine while brandishing two terrifying mock-surgical tools. Maggs’s exit from this pressure on the story he was trying to tell, and indeed from the story itself, is executed in what must be assumed a deliberately spare and perfunctory manner when he goes back to his two children in Australia, “the real Jack Maggs” on the Portsmouth Mail with Mercy Larkin, a women who, like her partner, will never appear in the fiction Tobias Oates is going to publish.

Dickens’s Great Expectations has two alternative endings stemming from the moment when Magwitch imagined, or was imagined imagining, that if he made it rich, he could forge a gentleman out of the little boy who gave him food on the marshes of the Thames estuary. Pip will never marry Estella because she won’t have him; he will marry Estella because they are destined for one another. The third ending is Jaggers’s choice, knowing as he does the advantages of fiction over true history, advantages that have been as horribly abused as the children for whom that abuse of fiction was partly calculated, and it runs as follows: Pip cannot marry Estella because he knows the secret of her birth, which is almost as bad as the secret of his own great expectations, and he can never tell her that he knows it. In the scene where Jaggers confirms Pip’s suspicions about her origins, there is a pantomime as rich in mock-forensics as Sir Spencer Spence’s was in music hall medicine. When he puts a case, like the case in defense of his servant Molly, Estella’s mother, Jaggers demands a jury follow where it leads, or to set up their own instead: “You set up the hypothesis,” he warns them, “You must accept all the consequences of that hypothesis” (Dickens 2008: 360). But now, after prefacing each secret in Estella’s story with the proviso that keeps it speculative (“Put the case … Put the case … Put the case” [377–78]), he says to Pip that no consequences at all should flow from these hypotheses. They must end in silence and inaction because no one, least of all Estella, would benefit from having her secret told. “ ‘Add the case that you had loved her, Pip, and had made her the subject of those “poor dreams” … then I tell you that you had better chop off that bandaged left hand of yours with your bandaged right hand, and then pass the chopper on to Wemmick there, to cut that off, too.’ … Wemmick … gravely touched his lips with his forefinger. I did the same” (379). It is a terrible travesty of the hypothetic work Johnson and Gallagher expect readers to perform in reading novels, “entertaining various hypotheses [until it becomes clear that] the reality of the story itself is a kind of suppositional speculation” (Gallagher 2006: 1.346). Instead of supposing that what you don’t know, you do, the Cartesian alternative is active here and elsewhere in cognate genres, supposing instead that what you do know, you don’t. Then hypothesis fulfills the same function as litotes when Wemmick talks to Pip of Magwitch as “a certain person not altogether of uncolonial pursuits, and not unpossessed of portable property,” one who has been in a distant place “not quite irrespective of government expense” (Dickens 2008: 337). As extravagant instances of legal nicety, this is all very comic, but somewhere in the background, you can hear the whisper of Flinders’s grass; see the endless list of nothings that greeted Dampier’s eye; appreciate the expedience of the alliance forged between Gay’s Ay and No; and detect the outlines of the utopian geography of the not impossible. The language of utopia, Michel de Certeau has argued, is glossolalia, the linguistic equivalent of trompe l’oeil, fooling the ear with the mockery of articulate speech by “ ‘saying’ without saying something.” Glossolalia emerges from sheer noise in the same way that fakements grow out of reveries, moving from “cannot say” to “can say” by way of “can say nothing” (de Certeau 1996: 29–31). It is a very limited achievement and hedged about with negatives, but it offers a faint sound of what otherwise would never have been heard at all.

I will end with a non-Australian scorbutic convict fiction whose moment of corroboration is wonderfully clear, George Orwell’s 1984 (1949). It always comes as a surprise in reading this dystopian nightmare that the Party has carefully planned Winston and Julia’s affair to take place in the seedy, bugridden bedroom above Charrington’s junkshop. There the dissidents make what they think is private love to the accompaniment of the working-class woman singing beneath their window of the chagrin d’amour while she pegs out her washing. Inside this carefully prepared setting that looks so very like a happy accident and so authentically proletarian, Charrington tempts Winston with the bric-a-brac of a past of which everyone is ignorant because it has been remade and erased so many times. But the temptation is cleverly done because each object feeds Winston’s desire to have some empirical support for a history he knows only as nostalgia. Around the little he can remember of his mother and the blank which represents his father, he has assembled sensations and images designed to counteract the worst moments of his loneliness in time and space, which he figures as an underwater forest patrolled by a monster who is himself. He dreams of his mother and his sister sinking beneath the sea, “looking up at him through the green water, hundreds of fathoms down and still sinking” (Orwell 1981: 29), their eyes filled with a deep and complex sorrow. When Charrington offers him a piece of coral set in a hemisphere of heavy lead glass, it is as if he holds the mystery of the undersea in his hand. “The inexhaustibly interesting thing was not the fragment of coral but the interior of the glass itself…. He had the feeling that he could get inside it, and that in fact he was inside it, along with the mahogany bed and the gateleg table, and the clock and the steel engraving and paperweight itself” (120). The glass composes the odds and ends of Charrington’s shop into “a sort of nostalgia, a sort of ancestral memory” (81). This coral ornament is the first thing that is smashed when the thought police invade the room, putting an explosive end to the fragile fantasy it sustained.

Of course such nostalgia has nothing ancestral about it, being entirely a fiction of the State. After his arrest and a savage beating, Winston’s imagination evacuates the marine landscape, coming up through the depths to surface in the interrogation room (192). During this period he is not fed—he sees a fellow-prisoner dying of starvation—and by the time of his release he has lost 25 kilos. The ulcer on his leg has opened up, and as he pulls out Winston’s loose teeth, O’Brien describes his victim’s evidently scorbutic condition: “ ‘Look at the condition you are in … look at that running sore on your leg. Do you know that you stink like a goat? … Your hair is coming out in handfuls Nine, ten, eleven teeth left … and the few you have left are dropping out of your head.’ … He seized one of Winston’s remaining front teeth [and] wrenched the loose tooth out by the roots. ‘You are rotting away,’ he said, ‘you are falling to pieces. What are you? A bag of filth?’ ” (219). At this point, Winston does what he has been doing regularly ever since he was arrested, and what he will do until he dies: he bursts into tears.

The physical symptoms of scurvy and the utterly illusory condition of nostalgia are tied together by two ingenious additions to Charrington’s stage set. One is a fragment of a nursery rhyme recalling the tones and rhythms of London’s church bells: “Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St Clement’s, / You owe me three farthings, say the bells of St Martin’s, / When will you pay me, say the bells of Old Bailey, / When I grow rich, say the bells of Shoreditch.” The other is the song sung by the large woman hanging out the clothes. The immemorial cure of scurvy, the juice of an orange or a lemon, stands in opposition to the emptiness of everything in the nostalgic tableau superintended by Charrington because its truth can be attested by the organs of the bodily senses. Winston’s first tears are like Odysseus’s at the court of Alcinous insofar as they represent the ill of emptiness calling out to be filled. The nursery rhyme was inserted into the scenario for the same reason as the old woman. She sings not of objects of longing, but the sweet pointlessness of the feeling of longing itself: “ ’Twas only an ’opeless fancy” (114). Produced by a machine in a subsection of the music department of the State, the song’s words, dreams, smiles, and tears have no referent except an ersatz passion. Oranges and lemons were intended be of a piece with the whole nostalgic tableau arranged by O’Brien and his subordinates, he even supplies the lines Winston can’t remember, and to this extent, pain is no different from yearning for a home in the past insofar as the State knows exactly what both are like. Not even Winston’s subsequent agony under torture is his own, for O’Brien can describe it to him while inflicting it.

When Winston proposes his seditious erotic passion as resistance to the State, his fakement, he strikes the paradoxical poses of a Lucifer or a Faust: “I hate purity,” he tells his corrupt nymph, knowing that no emotion is pure because “everything was mixed up with fear and hatred” (105). So the erotic cult of corruption is, he believes, a political act. The State responds with an avalanche of factory-made paradoxes, of which doublethink is the formal mode of thought and Newspeak the linguistic vehicle. Although the one seems to accommodate the equality of rival ideas (“War is Peace,” “three is four,” and so on) while the other is awash with surplus negatives such as “unlight” for dark or “undark” for light, it is clear that the purpose of both systems is stark uniformity with the ideology of a totalitarian state, not the volatility of conjoint opposites. Could the word “innocent” ever function in Newspeak? Winston’s embrace of corruption is no different, for with one exception, nothing he can do or imagine is beyond the capacity of the State to anticipate. The exception lies in his memory of the reality of lemons, so sharply different from the homogeneous sweetness of Julia’s chocolate. “I’ve seen oranges,” says Julia, “They’re a kind of round yellow fruit with a thick skin.” Winston can do more than just recall the sight of lemons, “They were so sour that it set your teeth on edge even to smell them” (120). Somewhere in his brain “the empty amusement of seeing, without any other benefit” is complicated by synesthesia, a complexity the State could never compass. The memory of a real food persists, the kind of food that puts an end to lost teeth, falling hair, and a stinking, ulcerous body. Thus Adam’s dream, where corroboration anticipates the act of sin, but also provides the means of salvation:

   Each Tree

Load’n with fairest Fruit, that hung to the Eye

Tempting, stirrd in me a sudden appetite

To pluck and eate; whereat I wak’d, and found

Before mine Eyes all real, as the dream

Had lively shadowd. (Milton 1958: 8, ll. 306–11)