Herein is contained a developing resource of all the Franklinia and The Terror stuff I’ve read over the last year. Part of it is knowledge acquisition due to increasing levels of obsession, and part is research for fanwork stuff (some completed, some not). I’ve read almost all of it, although a few of the books are still on the to-read pile. Bruce jokes about how my dissertation on the Franklin Expedition is coming along, and … in all honesty, the amount of reading I’ve done on this is probably good for an undergraduate dissertation at the very least, and it wasn’t until I made a systematic attempt to catalogue everything that I realized how extensive the reading was. Anyway, I’ve organized it all and am posting it in case anyone finds it useful, and I’ll continue to update it as I acquire more stuff. Enjoy.
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The Voyage of H.M.S. Cornwallis, or, Keep Your Day Job, Commander Fitzjames
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.
Battersby, William. James Fitzjames: The Mystery Man of the Franklin Expedition. Toronto, Dundurn Press, 2010.
[…]
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 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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