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| Voyages into the Unknown |
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James Fenton
copyright © 2006
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Originally published
in The Guardian
11 March 2006
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Last Voyages
is an excellent collection of exploration narratives, edited
and introduced by Philip Edwards (Oxford published it in 1988).
It brings together numerous accounts of the last voyages of
Thomas Cavendish in 1591-13, Henry Hudson in 1610-11 and Sir
Walter Raleigh in 1617-18. As Edwards points out, this sort
of material (as collected by Hakluyt and Purchas) used to be
part of "English Literature", but fell from fav-our
as the empire broke up, and under the influence of the New Criticism.
Most of it is hardly to be called literature
in any exalted sense of the word. But it takes its character
from its function. Just as a secret journal, such as Pepys's,
written in shorthand, and therefore illegible to most of his
contemporaries, differs from Evelyn's, which was aimed at his
family and descendants, so Raleigh's journal of his last voyage
differs from his letter to key members of court, or his letter
to his wife, or his general "Apology" justifying his
actions, or his final plea to the king.
The same events are covered. The rhetoric changes,
until finally all hope is lost. The condemned man is only concerned
to make a good and honourable end. He asks for the axe, saying
"I pray thee let me see it; dost thou think that I am afraid
of it?" He lets his hand run along the edge of the blade,
and remarks to the sheriff with a smile, "This is a sharp
medicine, but it is a physician for all diseases." Placing
his head on the block, he continues, "So the heart be right,
it is no matter which way the head lieth." Then he forgives
the headsman and is killed.
These early explorers, according to Edwards,
considered the act of writing to be an indispensable part of
making voyages. Hudson, seeking a northern route to China, took
with him Henry Greene, a man who "by his lewd life and
conversation ... had lost the good will of all his friends"
but was valued "because he could write well". This
same Greene organised the mutiny whereby Hudson and several
sick men were put into a shallop and set loose, when hunger
and a fear of Hudson's obsessive nature provoked a rebellion.
The main account of this voyage is by Abacuck
Pricket, and it is awesome material, as the men realise to their
terror that they are going to get stuck in the Arctic winter,
and as they try hunting polar bears among the ice-floes, "there
hung upon the easternmost point many islands of floating ice,
and a bear on one of them which from one to another came towards
us till she was ready to come aboard. But when she saw us look
at her, she cast her head between her hinder legs and then dived
under the ice; and so from one piece to another till she was
out of our reach."
Even when they find signs of human habitation
on land, the effect is unsettling: "We saw some round hills
of stone like grass-cocks, which at the first I took to be the
work of some Christian ... And being night then, I turned off
the uppermost stone and found them hollow within, and full of
fowls hanged by their necks." Something about this Inuit
cold storage system (in the absence of any humans) comes as
a horrible surprise.
The account of the mutiny is a mixture of the
informative and the frustrating. We are told exactly where on
the ship, the Discovery, all the men are sleeping, and how the
mutiny unfolds: clearly a part of the interest is in apportioning
blame, when the case came to court (which it finally did, though
Pricket was acquitted). But the editor warns the reader about
the useless and deadening amount of detail regarding changes
of course. He says: "These confused and confusing details
should be borne with because in their way they are quite eloquent
of the bewilderment, anxiety and frustration of the company
as the ship twisted and turned in uncharted waters, trying to
free herself from ice, looking for the opening that would lead
to warm seas and the spice islands." It is an important
point. Fiction would have seen to it that we understood it more
clearly. The mutineers are in Hudson Bay, but, when an Inuit
with a knife attacks Pricket, he thinks the man's weapon is
of a type they use in Java. He must have believed the Spice
Islands to be not so far away.
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