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Autobiographic Sketches

T >> Thomas de Quincey >> Autobiographic Sketches




I have said that he would not have appeared to any capturing ship as
standing in the situation of prisoner amongst the pirates, nor was he
such in the sense of being confined. He moved about, when on board
ship, in freedom; but he was watched, never trusted on shore, unless
under very peculiar circumstances; and tolerated at all only because
one accomplishment made him indispensable to the prosperity of the
ship. Amongst the various parts of nautical skill communicated to my
brother by his first fatherly captain, was the management of
chronometers. Several had been captured, some of the highest value,
in the many prizes, European or American. My brother happened to be
perfect in the skill of managing them; and, fortunately for him, no
other person amongst them had that skill, even in its lowest degree.
To this one qualification, therefore, (and ultimately to this only,)
he was indebted for, both safety and freedom; since, though he might
have been spared in the first moments of carnage from other
considerations, there is little doubt that, in some one of the
innumerable brawls which followed through the years of his captivity,
he would have fallen a sacrifice to hasty impulses of anger or
wantonness, had not his safety been made an object of interest and
vigilance to those in command, and to all who assumed any care for the
general welfare. Much, therefore, it was that he owed to this
accomplishment. Still, there is no good thing without its alloy; and
this great blessing brought along with it something worse than a dull
duty--the necessity, in fact, of facing fears and trials to which the
sailor's heart is preeminently sensible. All sailors, it is notorious,
are superstitious; partly, I suppose, from looking out so much upon
the wilderness of waves, empty of all human life; for mighty solitudes
are generally fear-haunted and fear-peopled; such, for instance, as
the solitudes of forests, where, in the absence of human forms and
ordinary human sounds, are discerned forms more dusky and vague, not
referred by the eye to any known type, and sounds imperfectly
intelligible. And, therefore, are all German coal burners, woodcutters,
&c., superstitious. Now, the sea is often peopled, amidst its ravings,
with what seem innumerable human voices--such voices, or as ominous,
as what were heard by Kubla Khan--"ancestral voices prophesying war;"
oftentimes laughter mixes, from a distance, (seeming to come also from
distant times, as well as distant places,) with the uproar of waters;
and doubtless shapes of fear, or shapes of beauty not less awful, are
at times seen upon the waves by the diseased eye of the sailor, in
other cases besides the somewhat rare one of calenture. This vast
solitude of the sea being taken, therefore, as one condition of the
superstitious fear found so commonly among sailors, a second may be
the perilous insecurity of their own lives, or (if the lives of sailors,
after all, by means of large immunities from danger in other shapes
are _not_ so insecure as is supposed, though, by the way, it is enough
for this result that to themselves they seem so) yet, at all events,
the insecurity of the ships in which they sail. In such a case, in the
case of battle, and in others where the empire of chance seems absolute,
there the temptation is greatest to dally with supernatural oracles
and supernatural means of consulting them. Finally, the interruption
habitually of all ordinary avenues to information about the fate of
their dearest relatives; the consequent agitation which must often
possess those who are reëntering upon home waters; and the sudden
burst, upon stepping ashore, of heart-shaking news in long accumulated
arrears,--these are circumstances which dispose the mind to look out
for relief towards signs and omens as one way of breaking the shock
by dim anticipations. Rats leaving a vessel destined to sink, although
the political application of it as a name of reproach is purely modern,
must be ranked among the oldest of omens; and perhaps the most
sober-minded of men might have leave to be moved with any augury of
an ancient traditional order, such as had won faith for centuries,
applied to a fate so interesting as that of the ship to which he was
on the point of committing himself. Other causes might be assigned,
causative of nautical superstition, and tending to feed it. But enough.
It is well known that the whole family of sailors _is_ superstitious.
My brother, poor Pink, (this was an old household name which he retained
amongst us from an incident of his childhood,) was so in an immoderate
degree. Being a great reader, (in fact, he had read every thing in his
mother tongue that was of general interest,) he was pretty well aware
how general was the ridicule attached in our times to the subject of
ghosts. But this--nor the reverence he yielded otherwise to some of
those writers who had joined in that ridicule--any more had unsettled
his faith in their existence than the submission of a sailor in a
religious sense to his spiritual counsellor upon the false and
fraudulent pleasures of luxury can ever disturb his remembrance of the
virtues lodged in rum or tobacco. His own unconquerable, unanswerable
experience, the blank realities of pleasure and pain, put to flight
all arguments whatsoever that anchor only in his understanding. Pink
used, in arguing the case with me, to admit that ghosts might be
questionable realities in our hemisphere; but "it's a different thing
to the _suthard_ of the line." And then he would go on to tell me of
his own fearful experience; in particular of one many times renewed,
and investigated to no purpose by parties of men communicating from
a distance upon a system of concerted signals, in one of the Gallapagos
Islands. These islands, which were visited, and I think described, by
Dampier, and therefore must have been an asylum to the buccaneers and
flibustiers [5] in the latter part of the seventeenth century, were so
still to their more desperate successors, the pirates, at the beginning
of the nineteenth; and for the same reason--the facilities they offer
(rare in those seas) for procuring wood and water. Hither, then, the
black flag often resorted; and here, amidst these romantic solitudes,--
islands untenanted by man,--oftentimes it lay furled up for weeks
together; rapine and murder had rest for a season, and the bloody cutlass
slept within its scabbard. When this happened, and when it became known
beforehand that it _would_ happen, a tent was pitched on shore for my
brother, and the chronometers were transported thither for the period of
their stay.

The island selected for this purpose, amongst the many equally open
to their choice, might, according to circumstances, be that which
offered the best anchorage, or that from which the reëmbarkation was
easiest, or that which allowed the readiest access to wood and water.
But for some, or all these advantages, the particular island most
generally honored by the piratical custom and "good will" was one known
to American navigators as "The Woodcutter's Island." There was some
old tradition--and I know not but it was a tradition dating from the
times of Dampier--that a Spaniard or an Indian settler in this island
(relying, perhaps, too entirely upon the protection of perfect solitude)
had been murdered in pure wantonness by some of the lawless rovers who
frequented this solitary archipelago. Whether it were from some peculiar
atrocity of bad faith in the act, or from the sanctity of the man, or
the deep solitude of the island, or with a view to the peculiar
edification of mariners in these semi-Christian seas, so, however, it
was, and attested by generations of sea vagabonds, (for most of the
armed roamers in these ocean Zaaras at one time were of a suspicious
order,) that every night, duly as the sun went down and the twilight
began to prevail, a sound arose--audible to other islands, and to every
ship lying quietly at anchor in that neighborhood--of a woodcutter's
axe. Sturdy were the blows, and steady the succession in which they
followed: some even fancied they could hear that sort of groaning
respiration which is made by men who use an axe, or by those who in
towns ply the "three-man beetle" of Falstaff, as paviers; echoes they
certainly heard of every blow, from the profound woods and the sylvan
precipices on the margin of the shores; which, however, should rather
indicate that the sounds were _not_ supernatural, since, if a visual
object, falling under hyper-physical or cata-physical laws, loses its
shadow, by parity of argument, an audible object, in the same
circumstances, should lose its echo. But this was the story; and amongst
sailors there is as little variety of versions in telling any true sea
story as there is in a log book, or in "The Flying Dutchman:"
_literatim_ fidelity is, with a sailor, a point at once of religious
faith and worldly honor. The close of the story was--that after,
suppose, ten or twelve minutes of hacking and hewing, a horrid crash
was heard, announcing that the tree, if tree it were, that never yet
was made visible to daylight search, had yielded to the old woodman's
persecution. It was exactly the crash, so familiar to many ears on
board the neighboring vessels, which expresses the harsh tearing asunder
of the fibres, caused by the weight of the trunk in falling; beginning
slowly, increasing rapidly, and terminating in one rush of rending.
This over,--one tree felled "towards his winter store,"--there was an
interval; man must have rest; and the old woodman, after working for
more than a century, must want repose. Time enough to begin again after
a quarter of an hour's relaxation. Sure enough, in that space of time,
again began, in the words of Comus, "the wonted roar amid the woods."
Again the blows became quicker, as the catastrophe drew nearer; again
the final crash resounded; and again the mighty echoes travelled through
the solitary forests, and were taken up by all the islands near and
far, like Joanna's laugh amongst the Westmoreland hills, to the
astonishment of the silent ocean. Yet, wherefore should the ocean be
astonished?--he that had heard this nightly tumult, by all accounts,
for more than a century. My brother, however, poor Pink, _was_
astonished, in good earnest, being, in that respect, of the _genus
attonitorum_; and as often as the gentlemen pirates steered their
course for the Gallapagos, he would sink in spirit before the trials
he might be summoned to face. No second person was ever put on shore
with Pink, lest poor Pink and he might become jovial over the liquor,
and the chronometers be broken or neglected; for a considerable quantity
of spirits was necessarily landed, as well as of provisions, because
sometimes a sudden change of weather, or the sudden appearance of a
suspicious sail, might draw the ship off the island for a fortnight.
My brother could have pleaded his fears without shame; but he had a
character to maintain with the sailors: he was respected equally for
his seamanship and his shipmanship. [6] By the way, when it is
considered that one half of a sailor's professional science refers him
to the stars, (though it is true the other half refers him to the sails
and shrouds of a ship,) just as, in geodesical operations, one part
is referred to heaven and one to earth, when this is considered, another
argument arises for the superstition of sailors, so far as it is
astrological. They who know (but know the _oti_ without knowing
the _dia ti_) that the stars have much to do in guiding their
own movements, which are yet so far from the stars, and, to all
appearance, so little connected with them, may be excused for supposing
that the stars are connected astrologically with human destinies. But
this by the way. The sailors, looking to Pink's double skill, and to
his experience on shore, (more astonishing than all beside, being
experience gathered amongst ghosts,) expressed an admiration which,
to one who was also a sailor, had too genial a sound to be sacrificed,
if it could be maintained at any price. Therefore it was that Pink
still clung, in spite of his terrors, to his shore appointment. But
hard was his trial; and many a time has he described to me one effect
of it, when too long continued, or combined with darkness too intense.
The woodcutter would begin his operations soon after the sun had set;
but uniformly, at that time, his noise was less. Three hours after
sunset it had increased; and generally at midnight it was greatest,
but not always. Sometimes the case varied thus far: that it greatly
increased towards three or four o'clock in the morning; and, as the
sound grew louder, and thereby seemed to draw nearer, poor Pink's
ghostly panic grew insupportable; and he absolutely crept from his
pavilion, and its luxurious comforts, to a point of rock--a
promontory--about half a mile off, from which he could see the ship.
The mere sight of a human abode, though an abode of ruffians, comforted
his panic. With the approach of daylight, the mysterious sounds ceased.
Cockcrow there happened to be none, in those islands of the Gallapagos,
or none in that particular island; though many cocks are heard crowing
in the woods of America, and these, perhaps, might be caught by
spiritual senses; or the woodcutter may be supposed, upon Hamlet's
principle, either scenting the morning air, or catching the sounds of
Christian matin bells, from some dim convent, in the depth of American
forests. However, so it was; the woodcutter's axe began to intermit
about the earliest approach of dawn; and, as light strengthened, it
ceased entirely. At nine, ten, or eleven o'clock in the forenoon the
whole appeared to have been a delusion; but towards sunset it revived
in credit; during twilight it strengthened; and, very soon afterwards,
superstitious panic was again seated on her throne. Such were the
fluctuations of the case. Meantime, Pink, sitting on his promontory
in early dawn, and consoling his terrors by looking away from the
mighty woods to the tranquil ship, on board of which (in spite of her
secret black flag) the whole crew, murderers and all, were sleeping
peacefully--he, a beautiful English boy, chased away to the antipodes
from one early home by his sense of wounded honor, and from his
immediate home by superstitious fear, recalled to my mind an image and
a situation that had been beautifully sketched by Miss Bannerman in
"Basil," one of the striking (though, to rapid readers, somewhat
unintelligible) metrical tales published early in this century, entitled
"Tales of Superstition and Chivalry." Basil is a "rude sea boy,"
desolate and neglected from infancy, but with feelings profound from
nature, and fed by solitude. He dwells alone in a rocky cave; but, in
consequence of some supernatural terrors connected with a murder,
arising in some way (not very clearly made out) to trouble the repose
of his home, he leaves it in horror, and rushes in the gray dawn to
the seaside rocks; seated on which, he draws a sort of consolation for
his terrors, or of sympathy with his wounded heart, from that mimicry
of life which goes on forever amongst the raving waves.

From the Gallapagos, Pink went often to Juan (or, as he chose to call
it, after Dampier and others, _John_) Fernandez. Very lately, (December,
1837,) the newspapers of America informed us, and the story was current
for full nine days, that this fair island had been swallowed up by an
earthquake; or, at least, that in some way or other it had disappeared.
Had that story proved true, one pleasant bower would have perished,
raised by Pink as a memorial expression of his youthful feelings either
towards De Foe, or his visionary creature, Robinson Crusoe--but rather,
perhaps, towards the substantial Alexander Selkirk; for it was raised
on some spot known or reputed by tradition to have been one of those
most occupied as a home by Selkirk. I say, "rather towards Alexander
Selkirk;" for there is a difficulty to the judgment in associating
Robinson Crusoe with this lovely island of the Pacific, and a difficulty
even to the fancy. _Why_, it is hard to guess, or through what perverse
contradiction to the facts, De Foe chose to place the shipwreck of
Robinson Crusoe upon the _eastern_ side of the American continent.
Now, not only was this in direct opposition to the realities of the
case upon which he built, as first reported (I believe) by Woodes
Rogers, from the log book of the Duke and Duchess,--(a privateer fitted
out, to the best of my remembrance, by the Bristol merchants, two or
three years before the peace of Utrecht,) and so far the mind of any
man acquainted with these circumstances was staggered, in attempting
to associate this eastern wreck of Crusoe with this western island,--but
a worse obstacle than that, because a moral one, is this, that, by
thus perversely transferring the scene from the Pacific to the Atlantic,
De Foe has transferred it from a quiet and sequestered to a populous
and troubled sea,--the Fleet Street or Cheapside of the navigating
world, the great throughfare of nations,--and thus has prejudiced the
moral sense and the fancy against his fiction still more inevitably
than his judgment, and in a way that was perfectly needless; for the
change brought along with it no shadow of compensation.

My brother's wild adventures amongst these desperate sea rovers were
afterwards communicated in long letters to a female relative; and,
even as letters, apart from the fearful burden of their contents, I
can bear witness that they had very extraordinary merit. This, in fact,
was the happy result of writing from his heart; feeling profoundly
what he communicated, and anticipating the profoundest sympathy with
all that he uttered from her whom he addressed. A man of business, who
opened some of these letters, in his character of agent for my brother's
five guardians, and who had not any special interest in the affair,
assured me that, throughout the whole course of his life, he had never
read any thing so affecting, from the facts they contained, and from
the sentiments which they expressed; above all, the yearning for that
England which he remembered as the land of his youthful pleasures, but
also of his youthful degradations. Three of the guardians were present
at the reading of these letters, and were all affected to tears,
not-withstanding they had been irritated to the uttermost by the course
which both myself and my brother had pursued--a course which seemed
to argue some defect of judgment, or of reasonable kindness, in
themselves. These letters, I hope, are still preserved, though they
have been long removed from my control. Thinking of them, and their
extraordinary merit, I have often been led to believe that every post
town (and many times in the course of a month) carries out numbers of
beautifully-written letters, and more from women than from men; not
that men are to be supposed less capable of writing good letters,--and,
in fact, amongst all the celebrated letter writers of past or present
times, a large overbalance happens to have been men,--but that more
frequently women write from their hearts; and the very same cause
operates to make female letters good which operated at one period to
make the diction of Roman ladies more pure than that of orators or
professional cultivators of the Roman language--and which, at another
period, in the Byzantine court, operated to preserve the purity of the
mother idiom within the nurseries and the female drawing rooms of the
palace, whilst it was corrupted in the forensic standards and the
academic--in the standards of the pulpit and the throne.

With respect to Pink's yearning for England, that had been partially
gratified in some part of his long exile: twice, as we learned long
afterwards, he had landed in England; but such was his haughty adherence
to his purpose, and such his consequent terror of being discovered
and reclaimed by his guardians, that he never attempted to communicate
with any of his brothers or sisters. There he was wrong; me they should
have cut to pieces before I would have betrayed him. I, like him, had
been an obstinate recusant to what I viewed as unjust pretensions of
authority; and, having been the first to raise the standard of revolt,
had been taxed by my guardians with having seduced Pink by my example.
But that was untrue; Pink acted for himself. However, he could know
little of all this; and he traversed England twice, without making an
overture towards any communication with his friends. Two circumstances
of these journeys he used to mention; both were from the port of London
(for he never contemplated London but as a port) to Liverpool; or,
thus far I may be wrong, that one of the two might be (in the return
order) from Liverpool to London. On the first of these journeys, his
route lay through Coventry; on the other, through Oxford and Birmingham.
In neither case had he started with much money; and he was going to
have retired from the coach at the place of supping on the first night,
(the journey then occupying two entire days and two entire nights,)
when the passengers insisted on paying for him: that was a tribute to
his beauty--not yet extinct. He mentioned this part of his adventures
somewhat shyly, whilst going over them with a sailor's literal accuracy;
though, as a record belonging to what he viewed as childish years, he
had ceased to care about it. On the other journey his experience was
different, but equally testified to the spirit of kindness that is
every where abroad. He had no money, on this occasion, that could
purchase even a momentary lift by a stage coach: as a pedestrian, he
had travelled down to Oxford, occupying two days in the fifty-four or
fifty-six miles which then measured the road from London, and sleeping
in a farmer's barn, without leave asked. Wearied and depressed in
spirits, he had reached Oxford, hopeless of any aid, and with a deadly
shame at the thought of asking it. But, somewhere in the High
Street,--and, according to his very accurate sailor's description of
that noble street, it must have been about the entrance of All Souls'
College,--he met a gentleman, a gownsman, who (at the very moment of
turning into the college gate) looked at Pink earnestly, and then gave
him a guinea, saying at the time, "I know what it is to be in your
situation. You are a schoolboy, and you have run away from your school.
Well, I was once in your situation, and I pity you." The kind gownsman,
who wore a velvet cap with a silk gown, and must, therefore, have been
what in Oxford is called a gentleman commoner, gave him an address at
some college or other, (Magdalen, he fancied, in after years,) where
he instructed him to call before he quitted Oxford. Had Pink done this,
and had he frankly communicated his whole story, very probably he would
have received, not assistance merely, but the best advice for guiding
his future motions. His reason for not keeping the appointment was
simply that he was nervously shy, and, above all things, jealous of
being entrapped by insidious kindness into revelations that might prove
dangerously circumstantial. Oxford had a mayor; Oxford had a
corporation; Oxford had Greek Testaments past all counting; and so,
remembering past experiences, Pink held it to be the wisest counsel
that he should pursue his route on foot to Liverpool. That guinea,
however, he used to say, saved him from despair.

One circumstance affected me in this part of Pink's story. I was a
student in Oxford at that time. By comparing dates, there was no doubt
whatever that I, who held my guardians in abhorrence, and, above all
things, admired my brother for his conduct, might have rescued him at
this point of his youthful trials, four years before the fortunate
catastrophe of his case, from the calamities which awaited him. This
is felt generally to be the most distressing form of human
blindness--the case when accident brings two fraternal hearts, yearning
for reunion, into almost touching neighborhood, and then, in a moment
after, by the difference, perhaps, of three inches in space, or three
seconds in time, will separate them again, unconscious of their brief
neighborhood, perhaps forever. In the present case, however, it may
be doubted whether this unconscious rencontre and unconscious parting
in Oxford ought to be viewed as a misfortune. Pink, it is true, endured
years of suffering, four, at least, that might have been saved by this
seasonable rencontre; but, on the other hand, by travelling through
his misfortunes with unabated spirit, and to their natural end, he won
experience and distinctions that else he would have missed. His further
history was briefly this:--

Somewhere in the River of Plate he had effected his escape from the
pirates; and a long time after, in 1807, I believe, (I write without
books to consult,) he joined the storming party of the English at Monte
Video. Here he happened fortunately to fall under the eye of Sir Home
Popham; and Sir Home forthwith rated my brother as a midshipman on
board his own ship, which was at that time, I think, a fifty-gun
ship--the Diadem. Thus, by merits of the most appropriate kind, and
without one particle of interest, my brother passed into the royal
navy. His nautical accomplishments were now of the utmost importance
to him; and, as often as he shifted his ship, which (to say the truth)
was far too often,--for his temper was fickle and delighting in
change,--so often these accomplishments were made the basis of very
earnest eulogy. I have read a vast heap of certificates vouching for
Pink's qualifications as a sailor in the highest terms, and from
several of the most distinguished officers in the service. Early in
his career as a midshipman, he suffered a mortifying interruption of
the active life which had long since become essential to his comfort.
He had contrived to get appointed on board a fire ship, the Prometheus,
(chiefly with a wish to enlarge his experience by this variety of naval
warfare,) at the time of the last Copenhagen expedition, and he obtained
his wish; for the Prometheus had a very distinguished station assigned
her on the great night of bombardment, and from her decks, I believe,
was made almost the first effectual trial of the Congreve rockets.
Soon after the Danish capital had fallen, and whilst the Prometheus
was still cruising in the Baltic, Pink, in company with the purser of
his ship, landed on the coast of Jutland, for the purpose of a morning's
sporting. It seems strange that this should have been allowed upon a
hostile shore; and perhaps it was _not_ allowed, but might have been
a thoughtless abuse of some other mission shorewards. So it was,
unfortunately; and one at least of the two sailors had reason to rue
the sporting of that day for eighteen long months of captivity. They
were perfectly unacquainted with the localities, but conceived
themselves able at any time to make good their retreat to the boat,
by means of fleet heels, and arms sufficient to deal with any opposition
of the sort they apprehended. Venturing, however, too far into the
country, they became suddenly aware of certain sentinels, posted
expressly for the benefit of chance English visitors. These men did
not pursue, but they did worse, for they fired signal shots; and, by
the time our two thoughtless Jack tars had reached the shore, they saw
a detachment of Danish cavalry trotting their horses pretty coolly
down in a direction for the boat. Feeling confident of their power to
keep ahead of the pursuit, the sailors amused themselves with various
sallies of nautical wit; and Pink, in particular, was just telling
them to present his dutiful respects to the crown prince, and assure
him that, but for this lubberly interruption, he trusted to have
improved his royal dinner by a brace of birds, when--O sight of blank
confusion!--all at once they became aware that between themselves and
their boat lay a perfect network of streams, deep watery holes,
requiring both time and local knowledge to unravel. The purser hit
upon a course which enabled him to regain the boat; but I am not sure
whether he also was not captured. Poor Pink _was_, at all events; and,
through seventeen or eighteen months, bewailed this boyish imprudence.
At the end of that time there was an exchange of prisoners, and he
was again serving on board various and splendid frigates. Wyborg, in
Jutland, was the seat of his Danish captivity; and such was the
amiableness of the Danish character, that, except for the loss of his
time, to one who was aspiring to distinction and professional honor,
none of the prisoners who were on parole could have had much reason
for complaint. The street mob, excusably irritated with England at
that time, (for, without entering on the question of right or of
expedience as regarded that war, it is notorious that such arguments
as we had for our unannounced hostilities could not be pleaded openly
by the English cabinet, for fear of compromising our private friend
and informant, the King of Sweden,) the mob, therefore, were rough in
their treatment of the British prisoners: at night, they would pelt
them with stones; and here and there some honest burgher, who might
have suffered grievously in his property, or in the person of his
nearest friends, by the ruin inflicted upon the Danish commercial
shipping, or by the dreadful havoc made in Zealand, would show something
of the same bitter spirit. But the great body of the richer and more
educated inhabitants showed the most hospitable attention to all who
justified that sort of notice by their conduct. And their remembrance
of these English friendships was not fugitive; for, through long years
after my brother's death, I used to receive letters, written in the
Danish, (a language which I had attained in the course of my studies,
and which I have since endeavored to turn to account in a public
journal, for some useful purposes of research,) from young men as well
as women in Jutland--letters couched in the most friendly terms, and
recalling to his remembrance scenes and incidents which sufficiently
proved the terms of fraternal affection upon which he had lived amongst
these public enemies; and some of them I have preserved to this day,
as memorials that do honor, on different considerations, to both parties
alike. [7]

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