Allegory Wrestling,
or
Desolation Island Decoded
by
Harry F. Clark
© 1998
Abstract
The voyage of the Leopard begins as a conventional adventure, but Patrick O'Brian shatters it at every turn, transforming it into an allegorical epic of struggle between overworld and underworld, of fall, underworld passage and redemption. The novel is also a fall for the author, and a turning point of the series.
At the outset Aubrey and Maturin are disgraced personally and professionally. Women, Underworld elements, are defiantly passing state papers. Even the Leopard is flawed, in its sternpost. As the voyage begins, values of the Underworld emerge in the murder of the convict superintendent, Herapath's stowing away, the officers' ludicrous distraction by Wogan's charms and finally the gaol fever, which claims a third of the crew as the Leopard crosses the Line, entering the Underworld.
The Underworld is ruled by a spirit, the dreaded Flying Dutchman, the 74-gun Waakzaamheid. After the medical stop at Recife the Underworld renews its attacks, on board and in the appearance of the Waakzaamheid. Flight in the undermanned, outgunned Leopard is Aubrey's first impulse, but he edges closer for a look, and loses the Dutchman with great difficulty.
As the Leopard finally turns north for the Cape, the Waakzaamheid reappears, blocking its path, and the Dutch captain opens fire as the chase wears on. In these mountainous seas a battle is a duel to the death, and at point-blank range the Dutchman loses his foremast, broaches to and founders; Aubrey has slain the Underworld spirit, but the battle goes on.
The iceberg deals the Leopard a mortal blow, tearing the rudder off the rotten sternpost; the ordeal of pumping and fothering culminates in the flight of Grant and his malcontent party of Underworld elements in the boats, but the Leopard still floats, vindicating Aubrey. After the failure of the jury rudder prevents them from reaching the Crozets, Aubrey turns the Leopard south, racing a gale to safety on Desolation Island.
Desolation holds Maturin's grassy island wildlife sanctuary, Paradise. Aubrey and Maturin recover fully, in details of incident and character that are perfectly symmetric to their initial disgraced state. The women are thoroughly domesticated; the Leopard's bad sternpost is overcome and the rudder repaired. The novel exhausts the sea-epic form; no story can compare with the duel of the two-deckers in the mountainous southern seas, and the harrowing passage to an exotic sanctuary at the bottom of the world.
The underworld passage is a primal motif in religion and one of the oldest themes in literature. Yet in this form one party dies or remains behind in the underworld, imparting tragic insight. In Desolation Island the heroes and their relationships aren't drawn so darkly and don't suffer mortally, which would end the series.
If O'Brian started the novels from pure enjoyment, he falls from the innocence of that intention. Desolation Island, unlike the first four, positively invites a sequel. The great espionage plot which culminates 12 volumes later is introduced. O'Brian loses his innocence and eschews high tragedy, but achieves transcendence of a different sort. By recreating the past so vividly, and achieving such acclaim, O'Brian reminds us of our relationship with the past, and raises questions about the present age.
Allegory Wrestling,
or
Desolation Island Decoded
The voyage of the Leopard in Desolation Island is introduced as a conventional adventure, to assist Governor Bligh at Botany Bay and explore new lands. Patrick O'Brian fractures the conventional story at every turn, transforming it into an allegorical epic of struggle between overworld and underworld, of fall, underworld passage and redemption. The novel is also a fall for the author, and a turning point of the series.
The story begins in the overworld, the northern hemisphere, and culminates near the bottom of the world, in the high antipodes. The story is divided in half by "crossing the line," which occurs very near the center of the book, by page count, just as the Line divides the globe into hemispheres.
Both our heroes are disgraced, and must leave the overworld. Jack is wasting his money on "running-horses," on lavish building, on silver-mining at the behest of a "projector," Kimber, on card-playing with Andrew Wray and other cheats afraid to call him out when he accuses them. Stephen tells Sophie, "Jack must go away, grow used to himself as a man of means, and learn to swim on an even keel when he is ashore." (66) Like Jack's judgment, the steering gear of the Leopard, the stern-post and rudder pintles, is also flawed; its condition emphasizes Jack's trials during the voyage.
Stephen is devastated in love, Diana Villiers having run off to America with Johnson. He is compromised at the Admiralty by the investigation of Diana and Louisa Wogan; he temporarily lost a confidential file, and feels Sir Joseph Blaine, his chief at naval intelligence, may be putting him out to pasture. He has lost a patient and his laudanum habit is becoming critical. Sophie tells Jack "A voyage to Botany Bay would do him all the good in the world," (68) emphasizing their obligations to him, the tonic effect of wombats.
Women are underworld elements, thoroughly subordinated to the masculine overworld, like Sophie and her mother in their domestic sphere. Or they rebel against the overworld, like Diana Villiers and Louisa Wogan, arrested for passing state secrets. Their behavior is defiant; against Wogan "We could have brought any number of capital charges, including attempted murder, since she shot the wig off the messenger's head" while Villiers "stood up for herself amazingly...straight as an arrow, glaring at us like a wild cat, flushed with anger, blackguarding the Home Office man like a trooper." (49-50) Wishing to avoid a trial, the state accepts Wogan's cooperation and sentences her to transportation.
The voyage opens with a very nasty blow in the Channel and the Bay, the Leopard heaving-to for two days, the rats deserting the hold for the cable tier. The first discovery after the storm is that the convicts have "scragged their superintendent." (74) The second discovery is the stowaway, Michael Herapath, whose presence is as singular as the convicts': "a stowaway was most uncommon, indeed unheard of" (75) in a man-of-war. Herapath is aboard through his liaison with Wogan.
The penal presence is described as "A self-sufficient world, with its own stores, its own immediate authorities; one with which he came into contact only through the superintendent, who, with his subordinates, dealt with all problems that might arise." (79) The underworld is incarnate in the forepeak. In the murder and stowaway, the values of the underworld begin to emerge. Jack excoriates himself for failures of judgment about this underworld that have allowed these conditions to develop: "He was extremely depressed: he was conscious of having failed in his duty as far as the forepeak was concerned."
The women aboard are all by definition fallen---Mrs Hoath, the procuress and abortionist, the gypsy, Salubrity Boswell, pregnant, en route to join her husband, and Peggy Barnes, Wogan's maid, transported for infanticide. Jack remarks twice on Wogan's dangerousness, and her first appearance in Stephen's company brings the quarterdeck to a halt: the midshipmen's sextants droop, Babbington slips his pipe into his pocket, the helmsmen bring the ship up half a point, the headsails shiver.
In his letter to Sophie from St Jago in the Cape Verdes, Jack remarks again on the "new fangled stern-post and pintles, which give us some little concern." (124) The St Jago stop abounds in overworld/underworld auguries. There is a saint, Father Gomes, "a man who radiated goodness, obviously much loved and respected." (127) Stephen writes in his diary, "It did me great good to see him, perhaps the third saintly man I have met." (128) There is a diabolical landscape, trod by Jack and Lieutenant Grant: "We fagged over miles and miles of pumice and lava with scarcely a blade of green...we grew very hot and dusty and tired and thirsty." (125) There is also the volcano, Mt Fogo, and its smoky, sulphurous emissions from the underworld.
St Jago is the jumping off-point to the underworld beneath the line, which descent begins with Eve's work. The junior officers have been seduced by Wogan, that "infernal woman," into boring peepholes in the bulkhead of her cabin. This leads to the memorable dressing down of the officers by Jack, his "awful voice" (138) audible to Wogan and Stephen through the poop skylight.
The plague then breaks out. "This was gaol-fever, and gaol-fever of the most virulent kind." (144) The ship's rats are implicated, further confirming the underworld provenance. As the first patients die, the ship enters the doldrums, which have moved farther north than usual this year; the underworld has reached out to grab the ship. Stephen "fumigates the whole ship, section by section, with great quantities of brimstone." (148)
The plague runs its course and the doldrums lift, but the underworld has levied its entrance toll; over a third of the ship's company has been stricken. The Leopard crosses the line "without the least ceremony." (153) Jack weighs Stephen's account of the medicine chest, the recurrent scurvy and the febrility of the convalescents, and reluctantly orders the Leopard into the Brazilian port of Recife.
The stern-post comes in for more critical comment by the carpenters: "Look here at this thorough-piece, Bob. Would you ever of believed that even the Dockyard could pass such a rotten bit of wood?" (157-8)
Recife is a life-giving, edenic, tropical shore, paradise not yet lost, but only glimpsed---the Leopard anchors in the outer road. Stephen procures physic and greenstuff and lands his convalescents with ministering angels, explaining that they "will be nursed not by the hags of Haslar but by Franciscans. Nursing is everything in these cases, and there is a world of difference between the mercenary and the religious." (198)
The underworld is naturally ruled by a spirit: "The Nymph, Captain Fielding, from the Cape for Jamaica with despatches and so home, had run into a Dutch 74, the Waakzaamheid, in a blinding rainstorm just north of the line." (171) This is the only important Dutch combatant in the entire series, the Flying Dutchman, "the specter ship doomed to sail [the seas] forever, [whose] appearance to seaman is believed to signal imminent disaster." This legend was the inspiration for Wagner's opera and figures in the poetry of Coleridge and Walter Scott. (Merriam Webster Encyclopedia of Literature, 442-3)
Stephen has intercepted Wogan's letters to Diana and to the US consul. The Diana letter "struck him with a wholly unexpected force...if the letter contained proof of Diana's guilty mind he thought it would kill him." (162-3) Stephen rises almost inhumanly to the occasion, studies the letter carefully for evidence against her, and copies it for Sir Joseph. Along with Wogan's letter to the consul it will help restore him in naval intelligence.
In the underworld female powers become manifest; Peggy begins infecting the crew with venereal disease; Salubrity Boswell persuades the crew that the ship is jinxed and the bowsprit haunted; and Parson Fisher's chastity wilts before Wogan's charms: "He thinks it would be far more proper for the chaplain to walk her on the poop rather than the surgeon or the surgeon's young man...for all his black coat, that man wants to come to her bed." Jack laments, in a malapropism, "there are only three women aboard, but they might as well be a troop of basilisks...you know, they spread pests by glaring at people." (179)
Stephen deals with this female subversion as smoothly as he has intercepted Wogan's correspondence. He scolds the gypsy, dowses the bowsprit phantom with blue lights and holy water, replies "Venus-Wenus" to Parson Fisher's cry of "Mumbo-Jumbo," (194) puts Peggy behind bars, and takes Herapath under his wing, preparing to use him against Wogan.
When the Waakzaamheid is sighted Jack's first instinct is cautious, sober and correct: "If the Leopard, half manned and with half the Dutchman's weight of metal, can slip past him to the Cape, then she must do so, with her tail between her legs. Ignominious flight is the order of the day." But he succumbs to temptation: "Still, after dinner, with only a few hours of daylight left, I shall edge away and see what I can make of him." (197)
At dusk they bang away with the stern-chasers---"Now, Mr. Burton, we shall have some fun" (203)---and pull the old trick with the lanterns on the raft. "Old Butterbox did everything he could," says Jack. "Now all that remains to him is to make up the southing he has lost...while we stand on for the Cape, having, I trust, bleared the honest burgher's eye...so that at dawn, we may well be a hundred miles apart." (205)
The Flying Dutchman isn't so easily fooled. At dawn, "the Waakzaamheid was...perfectly recognizable...sometimes she looked spectral, unnaturally large, as she bore up, spread her wings, and headed for the Leopard." Jack confesses "I do not know that I have ever seen anything so shocking in all my life as that Dutchman at dawn, sitting between us and the Cape." (206)
In several days and nights of the Leopard is unable to shake the aggressive Dutchman, but one calm, moonless night he makes a fatal mistake with a boat attack. A wind arises, delaying the boats, allowing the Leopard to "[cut] them up most dreadfully with grapeshot at 200 yards." (211)
They finally lose the Dutchman. But the threat of battle has put the fear of God into Parson Fisher: "Ever since then I have reflected on the old adage of never allowing fire near inflammable material." Fisher's companion is Grant; they are in "a state of powerful fear." (213)
Stephen begins preparing his letter to sow havoc among the French intelligence services, to be conveyed to Wogan via Herapath. As he warms to this task, fraught with bloody international consequences, he is interrupted by a summons to the wardroom. Larkin, the master, has murdered Marine Lieutenant Howard in a fit of delirium tremens; the underworld asserts itself against Stephen's omniscient plotting. He comments to Wogan, "Sometimes I feel that this is indeed an unlucky ship. Many of the men say there is a Jonah aboard." (216)
Stephen asks Jack, "So you think we have shaken off the Dutchman? What a persistent fellow he was, to be sure." "And devilish sly, too," replies Jack. "I believe he was in league with the Devil." (217) The next day they meet a British whaler, which has not seen the Waakzaamheid, despite the whalers' customary razor-sharp watch for their prey. Reassured, the Leopard turns north for the Cape.
The Dutchman's final appearance is spectral and malignant in the extreme: "He whipped round, and there in the west-north-west, directly to windward, emerging from a black squall with lurid light behind, he saw the Waakzaamheid, no hanging threat on the far horizon but hull up, not three miles away." (221)
Hawsers to the mastheads, deadlights in the stern cabin, and Jack peers at the Dutchman with his telescope to find the enemy scoping him---wearing a black coat, in contrast to his earlier light blue---as if in mourning. Had they "killed some relative? His boy, perhaps, God forbid." (223)
They fly on through the twilight and the night watches, the wind and the great seas building. "The sun rose on a sea in labor" (228) and the Dutchman is within two miles. The foretopsail splits, another is bent after a cruel struggle, and the Dutchman closes to a thousand yards. But "not even a Spanish four-decker could show her broadside in such a sea." (230)
Jack goes below for Killick's ham sandwiches and coffee. In the darkened cabin a freak shot shatters the deadlights and breaks his coffee cup. The Dutchman has opened up with his bow-chasers, in defiance of naval logic: "in this sea there was no possibility of capture and the Dutch captain's intent could only be to kill. Any engagement must mean the total loss of the first ship to lose a mast or a vital sail and thus the control of her run: the death of every soul aboard her." (231)
With material like Jack's cockiness and the Dutchman's vengefulness, O'Brian turns the encounter between the two-deckers into a trial to the death. The Dutchman closes to point-blank range, they pepper each other with chasers, and "he saw the Dutchman's foremast lurch, lurch again, the stays part, the mast and sail carry away over the bows...he saw the Waakzaamheid...on her beam-ends, broached to. An enormous, momentary turmoil of black hull and white water, flying spars, rigging that streamed wild for a second, and then nothing at all but the great hill of green-grey with foam racing on it. `My God, oh my God, six hundred men.' " (236)
But the underworld immediately strikes back, wounding Jack in the head and leg as if to reduce him to mortal status after this mythic slaying. He cannot think or move with complete facility; Grant and Fisher are greatly encouraged in their doubts and fears, commenting voluoubly on the state of the captain's "intellects," (239) prompting rejoinders from Stephen. Mrs Boswell gives birth to a girl, as Jack predicted, "young Leopardina" (265); the battle with the underworld is still closely joined.
The fog closes in; the ship's bell is muffled; it is rumored that the captain is dying. The collision with the "ice mountain" occurs in spectral conditions. "The ship and everything around her were shrouded deep in fog until an eddy of wind tore it apart} The underworld has inflicted a mortal blow, and exposed the mortal flaw in the ship: "Babbington raced below. `Rudder's beat off, sir,' he reported." (251-2)
The discontent of Grant and his party culminates in the squalid drunkenness and flight to the boats as the water spills over the well and the first fothering-sail parts at the clews; the Leopard's company is cleansed as well, of the weak elements whose doubts and fears have swollen in the underworld. But Jack's judgment is vindicated in mortal circumstances; the next fothering sail holds, the pumps gain, and he turns to the construction of a jury rudder. As the Crozet Islands loom into sight the steering oar is rigged, but it breaks and the ship falls to leeward of the island, now as inaccessible as the moon.
Jack has one card left, the position of Desolation Island given him by the whaler. The Leopard gingerly turns south; the sky is clear and the wind moderate, but the glass is falling; ice islands are about. Land is sighted; Jack girds himself for a final test, as the gale builds. "This rested on him alone, and rarely had he felt more lonely, or more fallible, as he saw the headland advancing toward him, and with it the moment of decision." (279) The race with the oncoming gale to the island is as dramatic as the climax of the chase by the Dutchman; the Leopard crashes through the tide-race, rigging intact, and ghosts along beneath high cliffs while the gale rages above.
This is the greatest of all O'Brian's homecomings and arrivals, to a desolate, exotic sanctuary at the bottom of the world, after epic trials in the great southern ocean, the end of the story, of the passage through the underworld, of the recovery of our heroes from their fallen state, of their regaining...Paradise, Stephen's island in the bay, "unlike most of the islands, which were broken masses of rock, rising sheer, it possessed little in the way of cliffs...a fine park-like extent of many hundred acres, it was scarcely big enough for all the creatures that hurried to it for the breeding season." (290-91) Desolation also has the healing, anti-scorbutic cabbages.
It is the inversion of their debauched state in the overworld. Instead of the probabilities of card games, for mathematical recreations Jack has surveying. He has difficulties with metal again, not lead and silver, but iron: the stern-post "had proved horribly defective...the only way of attaching the rudder was to forge new gudgeons." (295) The arrival of the Yankee whaler with its forge subjects him to the irascible captain rather than Kimber the projector. Jack is determined: "I have my duty to the ship and to the people, particularly the women who may have to winter in her otherwise, with all that wintering means." (306) As in the overworld, women are again thoroughly domesticated, dependent on male gentility. Stephen's medical skills are exchanged for the use of the forge and the new rudder is attached. The Leopard is at last whole, and Jack's trials are over.
The arrival of the whaler also culminates Stephen's recovery. He carefully maneuvers Wogan and Herapath into "escaping" with the whaler, bearing his poisoned letter, whose effects will restore him completely in naval intelligence---"such a letter, from an agent put out to grass!" (248) In the overworld, Stephen was devastated when Diana and Johnson left for America. On Desolation he recoups, sending Diana's double, and a negative of Johnson, to America. Everyone has remarked on Wogan's resemblance to Diana---Blaine, Jack, Stephen himself---"a leopard to Diana's tiger." (95) Where Johnson is a man of affairs, Herapath is a scholar of ancient Chinese.
Desolation Island is the height of O'Brian's form. No sea chase can ever match one through the mountainous seas of the high southern latitudes. No sea epic can exceed this one, conceived in conventional terms, as exploration and service in exotic places, but artfully fractured at every turn: by the inclusion of convicts; by the plague that decimates the crew; by the encounter with the Dutchman, who turns the Leopard south; by the chase eastward past the Cape; by the iceberg; by the failure at the Crozets; all deflected toward refuge and redemption at the bottom of the world.
According to the historian of religious ideas Mircea Eliade, descent and redemption is a primal motif, and it is an ancient theme in literature, figuring in the Sumerian story of Inanna and Dumuzzi, and in the story of Orpheus in Greek mythology. Yet in Eliade's scheme, killing precedes rebirth (Myths, Dreams and Mysteries). Thus Inanna, enraged to find Dumuzzi enjoying himself when she emerges from the underworld, sentences him to spend half his life there. Orpheus disobediently looks backward at Eurydice on their escape from the underworld, and she disappears. Closer to home waters, Moby Dick culminates inexorably in catastrophe, which is required by one kind of transcendence. While Desolation Island hints at this kind, the characters and their relationships are not drawn so darkly, and the heroes do not suffer mortally, which would end the series; we get not catharsis, but a sequel.
Unlike the previous books in the series Desolation Island expressly invites a successor, is not entirely self-contained. O'Brian may have started the series on a lark, but he chose it as his life work. In the collection of essays edited by A.E. Cunningham (Patrick O'Brian: Critical Essays and a Bibliography) O'Brian states, referring to the Aubrey/Maturin novels, "By now there are sixteen of them, and for the last ten or twelve it had been borne in upon me that this is the right kind of writing for a man of my sort." Desolation Island is the fifth, and in it Andrew Wray and his animus against Jack from the cheating incident are introduced, and thereby the great espionage plot around which the series unfolds until the death of von Habachtsthal in The Commodore, the seventeenth. Desolation Island is the hinge of the series, settling its form and accomplishments. O'Brian falls from the innocence of his initial intentions, and eschews high tragedy, but achieves transcendence of a different sort.
As the English critic John Bayley states in his essay in Cunningham's volume, "surface is what matters in good fiction" rather than, say, the "parabolic significance of Captain Ahab" (or allegory wrestling) and O'Brian's distinction is in inventing "a new world...of enchanting fictional surfaces," one marked by "an enthusiasm and love for the setting of the fiction." Charles McGrath in the New Yorker (October 18, 1993) argued that
The Aubrey novels provide all the satisfactions---and limitations---of genre writing...you can count on them to deliver the same pleasures over and over again. But what they almost never do is what truly great literature does---that is, disquiet you or threaten your preconceptions. All the same, there are legions of us who gladly ship out time and again under Captain Aubrey. That's the achievement of these books: they're escape reading in the best sense. They offer a complete immersion in an alternative world.
This new world belongs to the past, obviously. On the jacket of The Hundred Days a reviewer states that "By capturing an age before machine power as well as can be done, O'Brian has been called a delicious counterpoise to the confusing onrush of the information age." O'Brian himself states, "Obviously I have lived much out of the world" and "I cannot write with much conviction about the contemporary scene," but adds that "a tale set in the past may have its particular, time-free value." This painstaking re-creation of the past---of its manners, speech, dress, thought, food, mores---distinguishes O'Brian's work from historical romances; as John Bayley puts it, "the new historicism has created a genuinely authoritative style of fiction."
With this in mind we can consider what it means when a writer of O'Brian's talent chooses the past so decisively, so expertly and eloquently, and achieves such acclaim. The historian Arnold Toynbee, in his olympian fashion, described archaism as a "response of the soul in a time of social disintegration," a "flight of the soul from a present `time of troubles' into the past." (A Study of History, v. 6) This has a malignant aspect, in which the past is evoked in support of regressive social designs in the present. It also has a benign aspect, as nostalgia for community or fellowship or heroism felt to be missing from the present.
The O'Brian phenomenon is one of benign archaism, in my view. O'Brian's sensibility is generally thoughtful and humane---else it wouldn't be so celebrated---yet expressed in an archaic setting. Why think about global warming, or the world economy, when we can ship out with Jack and Stephen? Patrick O'Brian evokes the past with such appeal that he finally reminds us of our present selves, which is greatness in my book.