Month: March 2019

The Voyage of H.M.S. Cornwallis, or, Keep Your Day Job, Commander Fitzjames

Karin Leave a comment

In his biography of James Fitzjames, William Battersby writes:

Barrow tried to encourage [Fitzjames] to write a book about the Chinese War. Fitzjames had already written a huge 10,000-word poem, “The Cruise of the Cornwallis”[sic], which described the war in verse. It seems to have been written in stages and perhaps was originally recited over dinner for the amusement of his brother officers. After the war it was published anonymously in the Nautical Magazine, where it can be found still to the general bemusement of its occasional reader. Fitzjames was a fine poet, but this was not his best literary work.
[…]
He published the poem anonymously and chose “Tom Bowline” as his pseudonym. At the time “Tom Bowline” was a generic name for a sailor, like “Jack Tar” is and “Tommy Atkins” would become for British soldiers.

Battersby, William. James Fitzjames: The Mystery Man of the Franklin Expedition. Toronto, Dundurn Press, 2010.

Battersby observes as well that there were other potential angles to the pseudonym: the expression “on a bowline” which “had the meaning that a ship was sailing as close as possible to the wind”; as well, the Royal Navy’s slang dictionary also lists “Tom Bowline” as a name sometimes given to illegitimate children born as a result of “scenes of debauchery” on the gun decks back in the days when sex workers would be brought aboard ship to entertain the sailors in port. (See also Suzanne J. Stark’s Female Tars: Women Aboard Ship in the Age of Sail for more on this subject.) Given Fitzjames’s own illegitimacy, it’s tempting to see a multi-layered joke that’s not entirely a joke in his choice of nom de plume.

Anyway, back in December when I was banging around the internet doing research for the fics I wrote for the 2018 Yuletide fic exchange, I practically tripped over the first canto whilst digging through the HathiTrust archive of The Nautical Magazine and Naval Chronicle. I picked through the rest of the archive and managed to cobble together a PDF of the raw scans of the entire blessed thing, and between then and now have run that PDF through some OCR software, then edited the resulting output into something readable. Because I’m stubborn like that.

I’m going to have to take Battersby’s word as to the rest of Fitzjames’s poetical output. This is … let’s call it an historical curiosity. It’s rather amateur and sometimes clever, sometimes funny in a dad-joke sort of way (I am never going to recover from “My-cow”), but there’s also no getting around the fact that it glorifies a truly shitty war (for details of exactly how shitty it was, see also a book that I’m currently in the middle of: Stephen R. Platt’s Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China’s Last Golden Age, reviewed in the NY Times here), and the cheerily jingoistic content and tone are going to be pretty off-putting to the modern reader, if not outright offensive. It is, nevertheless, fascinating, and to his credit I don’t think Fitzjames took himself all that seriously in writing it. If I had more time and energy, I’d properly annotate all of the references to people, ships, and events, but as I’m not an academic anymore and that time and energy is decidedly lacking, that project will have to wait.

Here’s the whole thing. Hopefully it won’t break WordPress. Enjoy.

ETA: A more prosaic contemporary account of the events narrated by Fitzjames may be found here, with a mention of his being wounded here.

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How the Franklin Expedition ruined Charles Dickens’s marriage

Karin

Yes, it’s a clickbait headline. No, I’m not sorry. Because history is fucking weird sometimes, and here’s how.

(I’m posting this in honor of The Terror Appreciation Week on Tumblr. Apologies for not sticking closely to the daily themes; I hope no one minds that I’m using this as an opportunity to dump some interesting historical tidbits I’ve picked up over the last year.)

Recently the world of Victorian scholarship had a small stir over letters from Edward Dutton Cook, a friend late in life of Catherine, Charles Dickens’s wife. She confided much about her life with Dickens to Cook, particularly this bit which is what’s really got people going (my emphasis):

he discovered at last that she had outgrown his liking. She had borne ten children and had lost many of her good looks, was growing old, in fact. He even tried to shut her up in a lunatic asylum, poor thing! But bad as the law is in regard to proof of insanity he could not quite wrest it to his purpose.

More details in the Times Literary Supplement and via the University of York.

Dickens’s marriage seems to have been pretty well on the rocks by the time he became infatuated with actress Ellen Ternan (and you can read a fascinating account of how the scandal “went viral” in this paper by Patrick Leary). But how he met her is the bit that’s of interest to the Franklinologist.

The play The Frozen Deep came about in 1856. It was written by Wilkie Collins, but Dickens had his hands deep in the production (he and his daughters played some of the roles), and it was written in reaction to the findings of John Rae’s expedition in search of Franklin. As all we Franklin nuts know well: in 1854, Rae had submitted a report to the Admiralty stating that:

From the mutilated state of many of the corpses and the contents of the kettles it is evident that our wretched countrymen had been driven to the last resource—cannibalism—as a means of prolonging existence.

And instead of keeping his report confidential, the Admiralty made it public.

Reaction was swift and horrified, and Dickens put Rae and his Inuit sources on blast. He wrote articles insisting that no good Christian Englishman would have stooped to such depravity and also went full-bore racist, insinuating that the Inuit probably killed and ate the explorers themselves. Highlights:

We believe every savage to be in his heart covetous, treacherous, and cruel; and we have yet to learn what knowledge the white man — lost, houseless, shipless, apparently forgotten by his race, plainly famine-stricken, weak, frozen, helpless, and dying — has of the gentleness of Esquimaux nature. […] We submit that the memory of the lost Arctic voyagers is placed, by reason and experience, high above the taint of this so easily-allowed connection; and that the noble conduct and example of such men, and of their own great leader himself, under similar endurances, belies it, and outweighs by the weight of the whole universe the chatter of a gross handful of uncivilised people, with domesticity of blood and blubber.

And so: The Frozen Deep, a play penned by Collins under Dickens’s heavy guidance. In it, a young woman fears her fiancé has been lost in an Arctic expedition, and there’s a doomy Scots nursemaid (possibly a dig at Rae, a Scotsman) who pronounces all manner of gloomy portents—“who goes about the house like an ominous enchantress, muttering of awful visions which come to her from ‘the land o’ ice and snaw’” as a review describes it. There were a few private and semi-public performances in 1857, followed by a production at the Manchester Free Trade Hall as a benefit for the widow of Douglas William Jerrold. Dickens decided a couple of the performers (in roles originally played by his daughters) should be replaced by professionals … including a Mrs. Francis Ternan and her daughters Mary and Ellen.

And thus did Ellen Ternan enter Dickens’s life. Probably the Dickens marriage was at a point where any sufficiently strong motive would have occasioned the separation that ended it, but his infatuation with her does seem to have been the proverbial camel-breaking straw. And all thanks to Dickens’s upset about the Franklin Expedition.

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