Reading Captain Marryat

Reading the books and studying the life of Captain Frederick Marryat (1792-1848): Napoleonic wars veteran of the Royal Navy, naturalist, inventor, courtier, gentleman, and novelist. A pioneer of nautical fiction. ⚓🌊

[marryat92]

A New Pinned Post

Welcome to my very sporadically updated Captain Marryat blog! Although my limited time and energy means that new posts here are few and far between, I am always happy to talk about Frederick Marryat with anyone, and I encourage you to message me and send asks. Whether you want to discuss Marryat's life and his world, or the characters from his novels, I want to talk to you.

My main blog is @clove-pinks, I'm much more active there. Let's be friends if you love maritime history!

My tag for Marryat critical analysis, and reflections on the experience of reading his works, is 'reading marryat'.

[clove-pinks]

I finished Joseph Rushbrook, or The Poacher by Frederick Marryat, originally published serially in 1841, and it's a good but very atypical work for the author. It's a rare story for adults by Marryat as a mature writer, but almost devoid of maritime themes (or Marryat butting into the narrative to go on a rant, which is a usually a feature, not a bug). In many ways it's characteristic of Marryat, such as his favorite plot device of having poor characters suddenly come into money, but it left me feeling nostalgic for his rougher early novels.

The Poacher is a short book with many twists and turns and reversals of fortune, almost Dickensian in feel, and Marryat has uncharacteristically tight control over the plot. It's so Dickensian there's a weird antisemitic bit where a Jewish woman falls in love with a rando (Christian) character, sending her relatives into a murderous rage. (I guess I should be grateful Marryat didn't feel the need to sprinkle in more antiblack racism). With a lot of aliases used by the hero and other characters, and a few Irish characters from Galway, in many ways it echoes The King's Own—but it has a much happier ending where (almost) everyone survives.

As Marryat novels go, this is one of his stronger entries in terms of objective quality, but it's not a midshipman novel, it's not autobiographical, and it doesn't draw heavily on Marryat's maritime knowledge. In other words it doesn't have much to recommend it unless you're already a Marryat fan or completist. I know that Marryat in later life actually employed a former poacher as one of his gamekeepers (which was not uncommon, akin to hiring a former computer hacker to provide IT security), but The Poacher has very little in the way of actual poaching, or commentary on the privatization of public lands.

[marryat92]

“Man is a free agent,” replied Easy.

“I’ll be shot if a midshipman is,” replied Gascoigne, laughing, “and that you’ll soon find.”

“And yet it was the expectation of finding that equality that I was induced to come to sea.”

“On the first of April, I presume,” replied Gascoigne. “But are you really serious?”

— Frederick Marryat, Mr. Midshipman Easy. Illustration by Leonard Huskinson.

[ganymedian]

You are Frank Mildmay you are 14 or something and you are getting your ass kicked (but it’s okay because you kick ass Harder)

[marryat92]

Jack did not join his ship very willingly, but he had promised the governor to remain in the service and he went on board the evening before she sailed. He had been living so well that he had, at first, a horror of midshipman's fare, but a good appetite seasons every thing, and Jack soon complained that there was not enough.

— Frederick Marryat, Mr. Midshipman Easy

'The Cockpit': illustration by Charles Williams.

[marryat92]

The "Sainte Vierge," for such was the name of the vessel, which smelt most insufferably of gin, and, as our readers may probably have anticipated, was a smuggler, running between Cherbourg and the English coast, soon entered the port, and, having been boarded by the officers of the Douane, (who made a very proper distinction between smuggling from and to their own territories,) came to an anchor close to the mole.

— Frederick Marryat, The King's Own

Old Cherbourg, France, Richard Parkes Bonington (1802–1828)

[marryat92]

It may be surmised that British seamen would refuse to be employed against their country. Some might; but there is no character so devoid of principle as the British sailor and soldier. In Dibdin’s songs, we certainly have another version, “True to his country and king,” etcetera, but I am afraid they do not deserve it: soldiers and sailors are mercenaries; they risk their lives for money; if is their trade to do so; and if they can get higher wages they never consider the justice of the cause, or whom they fight for.

— Frederick Marryat, Diary in America

'The Greenwich Pensioner': c. 1790 print illustrating the lyrics to the song by Charles Dibdin.

[marryat92]

Arrived at Cincinnati. How rapid has been the advance of this western country. [...] It is a beautiful, well built, clean town, reminding you more of Philadelphia than any other city in the Union. Situated on a hill on the banks of the Ohio, it is surrounded by a circular phalanx of other hills; so that look up and down the streets, whichever way you will, your eye reposes upon verdure and forest trees in the distance. The streets have a row of trees on each side, near the curb-stone; and most of the houses have a small frontage, filled with luxuriant flowering shrubs, of which the Althea Frutex is the most abundant. It is, properly speaking, a Yankee city, the majority of its inhabitants coming from the East; but they have intermarried, and blended with the Kentuckians of the opposite shore, a circumstance which is advantageous to the character of both.

— Frederick Marryat, Diary in America (1839)

An 1841 print of Cincinnati, Ohio from one of the surrounding hills to the north (Wikimedia Commons).

[marryat92]

In England, the universal principle which guides every thing, has sunk the lower classes into mere machines; they are worked to excess during the six days in the week, and the utmost possible amount of labour is extracted from them at the lowest possible cost. Amusement is unknown and unthought of during the week days. Unlike the Catholic countries, we have no festival days except Easter and Christmas, in which a man can lay by his work and be merry. If he did, he would not have bread for his children for the day after.

— Frederick Marryat, The Diary of a Blasé (1836), published in England in 1840 as Diary on The Continent

[marryat92]

Marryat sighting in the wild!! At a used book sale today I found Newton Forster for a mere $1 USD.

"Do you own that one?" said my wife. Not only do I have a c. 1898 edition in a set of Marryat's complete works, I have an 1838 copy of Newton Forster with a great illustration of Marryat himself.

Still, it's nice to see a recent edition of a Marryat book, and I liked the bio-blurb on the back (although it dubiously claims that Marryat's captain Lord Cochrane was the inspiration for Jack Aubrey and Horatio Hornblower.)

"Marryat is read today for the absolute authenticity of his works as well as for their wit and humor," declares McBooks Press. Well, no one is reading him for being politically correct.

[marryat92]

A cartoon depicting the US financial Panic of 1837 (LoC). "I have no money, and cannot get any work," the man at left laments, as his children and wife plead for food. Two men at right, holding a landlord's warrant, wonder how they will recover any costs.

Frederick Marryat's 1837 visit to America coincided with this economic downturn, which was very evident when he landed in New York City.

My appearance at New York was very much like bursting into a friend’s house with a merry face when there is a death in it [...] The militia are under arms, as riots are expected. The banks in the country and other towns have followed the example of New York, and thus has General Jackson’s currency bill been repealed without the aid of Congress. Affairs are now at their worst, and now that such is the case, the New Yorkers appear to recover their spirits. One of the newspapers humorously observes—“All Broadway is like unto a new-made widow, and don’t know whether to laugh or cry.”

— Frederick Marryat, Diary in America

[marryat92]

I am looking at some of the sketches of Edward Pelham Brenton, who was Frederick Marryat's captain and commanding officer at the start of the War of 1812. Marryat called him "a scholar and a gentleman. Kind and friendly with his officers, his library was at their disposal."

Christopher Lloyd writes in Captain Marryat and the Old Navy:

It is probable that he exercised a very important influence over Marryat's development... And he is the only man whose help Marryat acknowledges when he was learning to sketch.

You can't blame Brenton for Marryat's amateur art, he was a better artist by far.

Here's HMS Spartan at Quebec, and two Barbadian women by Captain Brenton ("he loved the society of ladies," said Marryat). Capturing the variety of the Atlantic World so often described in Marryat's novels, with their frequent stops in Halifax and the West Indies.

The biggest influence I can see on Frederick Marryat in Brenton's art is his goofy sense of humour, like this caricature drawing called "Bucks of the first kind 1801".

[marryat92]

When we last mentioned Edward Templemore, we stated that he was a lieutenant of the admiral's ship on the West India station, commanding the tender. Now the name of the tender was the Enterprise; and it was singular that she was one of two schooners built at Baltimore, remarkable for their beauty and good qualities: yet how different were their employments! Both had originally been built for the slave-trade: now one hoisted the English pennant, and cruised as the Enterprise; the other threw out the black flag, and scoured the seas as the Avenger.

— Frederick Marryat, The Pirate

Two-masted schooner off Gibraltar, Julius Prömmel, 1834. With her two raked masts, this British schooner has the same lines as a Baltimore clipper.

[marryat92]

I hope everyone is MATURE enough to handle the TERRIFYING REBLOG of Captain Marryat's most famous ghost encounter!

[marryat92]

Happy Halloween! You may have heard of the famous Brown Lady of Raynham Hall (that's allegedly her ghostly image in the photo above), but did you know that ghostbusting Captain Marryat fired a gun at her apparition while investigating the haunting? A true man of action, he wasn't afraid of no ghosts.

[marryat92]

We reached our station, and joined the immortal Nelson but a few hours before that battle in which he lost his life and saved his country. The history of that important day has been so often and so circumstantially related, that I cannot add much more to the stock on hand. I am only astonished, seeing the confusion and invariable variableness of a sea-fight, how so much could be known.

— Frederick Marryat, The Naval Officer (Frank Mildmay)

The Fall of Nelson, Battle of Trafalgar, 21 October 1805 (detail), by Denis Dighton c. 1825

[marryat92]

After the battle of Trafalgar, when England and Europe were indebted for their safety to the British fleet, the navy became popular, and the aristocracy crowded into it. This forwarded still more the melioration of the service, and under the succeeding naval administration, silent, certain, and gradual improvements, both in men, officers, and ships, took place.

— Frederick Marryat, Frank Mildmay (The Naval Officer)

HMS 'Victory' Anchored off the Isle of Wight, by John Wilson Carmichael, 1847.