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‘Dead to the World, and Almost to Ourselves’: William Mackay's Narrative of the Shipwreck of the Juno (1798)
Abstract
This article considers William Mackay's 1789 narrative of the wreck of the East India Company ship, Juno, in the light of recent studies of the genre of shipwreck narrative by Blackmore, Lamb and Thompson. It reads the narrative as reflecting the dynamics of symbolic abdication experienced by survivors during such catastrophes, but proceeds to identify Mackay's efforts to discover, in the language of sentiment that was so central to the eighteenth-century episteme, a rhetorical means to imagine the preservation of a threatened (existential and social) selfhood. The article is also centrally concerned with the intertextuality of Mackay's narrative, and its dissemination into a variety of works in the century following its publication.
This article examines the illustrated pamphlet Ongeluckige voyagie, van’t schip Batavia (Unlucky voyage of the ship Batavia ) and its representation of a 1629 shipwreck off the coast of western Australia, followed by mutiny and the massacre of many survivors. The pamphlet was published in Amsterdam in 1647, and included fifteen (six full-page) fine copper engravings. It was very popular, helping to shape a new genre of shipwreck narrative and expressing the preoccupations of contemporary visual culture. The pamphlet’s illustrations translated new conceptualisations of space emerging from the period’s unique collaboration between cartography and art into popular form within a booming Dutch print culture. Through innovative techniques of montage and vignette these engraved images conveyed the narrative’s drama and affirmed principles of morality, honour, and order. While the era’s spectacular violence now seems very far away, these historical images effectively communicate the contemporary relish of the disaster to modern audiences. This “earliest of Australian books” is sometimes offered as an alternative Australian foundation myth, and the Batavia disaster continues to grow in cultural significance. Now as then, these illustrations provide a vivid counterpoint to its audience’s comfortable lives.
This article analyses four accounts of mutinies and wrecks of Dutch East India Company ships: those of the
Nieuw Hoorn, Batavia, Blydorp
and
Nijenburg
. These stories can be read as worst-case survival manuals, which support the Company’s discourse of discipline. They advise readers that the best option in the event of disaster is to obey the officers’ orders and the Company’s rules, linking this advice to moral and religious ideas of endurance and divine providence that were common in the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. The accounts also link shipboard spatial protocols with proper social order. The stories present the Indies as a dangerous physical and moral testing ground, from which the ship provides a vital protective barrier, but only if the crew acts with disciplined solidarity and shows seamanlike virtues of cohesion and perseverance. Disorder among the crew, especially the breaching of spatial boundaries between officers and men, invites the dangers of the Indies to penetrate the safe space of the ship. Such breaches threaten all the boundaries on which the lives of the ship and crew depend: between the ship and the sea, between moral and immoral behaviour, and between Europeans and the non-European world. Where spatial boundaries break down, the stories show chaos and calamity following. Where the stories have ‘happy endings’, these are brought about by the re-establishment of proper spatial and social hierarchies.
This book explores the romance that can attach to the notion of suffering in travel, and the importance of the persona of 'suffering traveller' in the Romantic self-fashioning of figures, such as Wordsworth and Byron. It considers how the Romantics sought to differentiate themselves from other contemporary tourists by following alternative models and alternative travel 'scripts' in both their travel and their travel writing. Rejecting more conventional roles, such as those of the picturesque tourist and the Grand Tourist, the Romantic traveller's anti-tourism leads to an emphasis on authenticity, adventure, and misadventure in the travel experience. Prioritizing such experiences, Romantic travellers often drew their models and their travel 'scripts' from sub-genres of contemporary travel writing, such as the shipwreck narrative, the exploration narrative, the captivity narrative, and the mountaineering narrative. This study accordingly considers the diverse reasons (touching variously upon some of the major philosophical, theological, and political issues of the day) why Romantic travellers and writers were so drawn to this literature of misadventure. It then treats Wordsworth and Byron as especially influential examples of this tendency in Romanticism. It shows them to be figures who often sought - not only in writing but also in action, in the course of their own travelling - to re-enact such misadventures, and to script both their travels and their personae as travellers according to scenes and situations found in these 'misadventurous' branches of travel writing. © Carl Thompson 2007. All rights reserved.
MLQ: Modern Language Quarterly 63.4 (2002) 546-549
Jonathan Lamb has written a rich, engaging, and wide-ranging book that describes both the variety of strategies for preserving the self in eighteenth-century voyages to the South Seas and the core significance of self-preservation in eighteenth-century British literature, philosophy, and culture. Implicit here is a departure from the postcolonial readings of travel narratives offered most prominently by Mary Louise Pratt, who has interpreted such work as part of the Enlightenment project to create vast archives of knowledge by mapping the world, recording languages, describing inhabitants, and cataloging plants and animals. For Pratt, while the voyagers themselves often saw their own stories as "anti-conquest" narratives—that is, as projects of discovery rather than of domination—the creation of knowledge itself constituted a form of colonialism. Through close reading of the journals reporting these voyages, as well as through literature, philosophy, and other documents, however, Lamb finds more chaos than reason in these projects. Voyagers go mad with scurvy; they hallucinate, mutiny, "go native"; they fail to communicate; they gamble away their entire compensation; they void contracts. While for Lamb these voyages certainly took place in the context of Enlightenment ambition, the experience in many cases degenerated into gothic uncertainty.
Lamb begins with a survey of philosophical theories of the self, paying special attention to Hobbes, Locke, Mandeville, and Shaftesbury; he shows "how the grounds of conflict between the self and civil society form a set of anxieties about the pleasure of traveling to strange places, and about the method of communicating it" (25). Throughout Preserving the Self Lamb explores how literary and philosophical reflections on the self invoke travel in general and to the South Seas in particular; he also shows, however, how travelers themselves constantly negotiated threats to their senses of selfhood. Lamb uses the term selfin part to distinguish his project from a study of subjectivity: rather than bring psychoanalytic theories of the subject to bear on this problem, he investigates how people in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries conceived of and articulated the problem of selfhood, which in his reading becomes inseparable from the problem of self-preservation. Many philosophers linked self-preservation to some kind of division: for Hobbes, functioning in the social world demanded a "represented and a representative self" (29); for Locke, "the right to what is literally one's own is disembodied and vindicated in laws and contracts that detach the self from its incorporated part in an exchange for money" (27); Mandeville, arguing against Shaftesbury's view of "the unity of the self as the continuity of its natural and civil sides" (30), relied on "Hobbes's division between a natural and an artificial self" (31). Mandeville, however, also described the mysterious gap between these two selves as a "terra incognita"; like many writers, he found parallels between the exploration of the world and the exploration of the self. What occupies much of this book, then, are the ways that this "terra incognita, the unmapped space of the world and mind, is a habitat of monsters that are the vehicles of an extravagant self-assertion whose only narrative form is romance" (41).
Just as chivalric romance was invented by commercial people in mercantile centers, not in feudal courts, so eighteenth-century narrative romance emerged from the levels of "fantasy in the metropolitan embrace of the whole world" (54, 50). With the inherent difficulty of demonstrating any of their truth claims, travel narratives served as a kind of romance, producing wonder rather than facts. This was partly a result of the homesickness and scurvy-induced emotional instability of the voyagers themselves: "The reason that the terra incognita was so often represented as a utopia or a paradise owed less to the long literary tradition that had located immortal commonwealths in the New World and the South Seas . . . than to this pathological state of the nerves, keyed up to overreact to any stimulus after long voyages" (125). Lamb shows how the British exploration of the South Seas changed the...
Burials at sea were common during the Age of Sail (the fifteenth through nineteenth centuries). While much is known about the history and structure of the burial at sea ritual, scholars have not yet explored its function as a rite of passage. This paper examines the burial at sea service as it was practiced aboard English and American vessels during the Age of Sail. Although it would have been easy to dispose of a body at sea by simply dropping it over the side, sailors considered it their duty to conduct a formal burial service. Proper burial, it was believed, was needed to prevent the deceased mariner from becoming one of the unquiet spirits of the deep. Thus, the chief function of the burial at sea service was to separate the dead from the living and place the spirit in the afterlife so that it would not return to haunt the ship. The restless nature of the sea, however, prevented it from being turned into a permanent barrier between the living and the dead. Even after being properly buried, the ghosts of dead mariners sometimes returned to haunt their former shipmates.
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