It is a matter beyond dispute that Trelawny was one whose constitutional fearlessness and unimpeachable honour, in every circumstance of a stirring life, raised him on a pinnacle beyond the reach of detraction. His masterful bearing and unflinching honesty compelled respect wherever he went.

Richard Edgcumbe, who knew Trelawny in old age.

During his earlier years Trelawny knew he was being untruthful and he lived in fear of being found out, but for his later years it is harder to be sure. Even when he talked about his Arab bride Zela and his adventures with de Ruyter, it is doubtful whether he was still conscious that the events he described with such gusto had occurred only in his imagination. Over the decades his romanticism had eaten away at his discriminatory faculties like some slow-working disease until he could no longer distinguish genuine memory from fantasy. He achieved the ultimate triumph of the impostor—he successfully deceived himself.

Yet surely even in his seventies and eighties there were many occasions when Trelawny was repeating his old trick of telling deliberate conscious lies out of a straightforward wish to impress, or bam, or to upstage the rest of the company. The process of self-deception is not instantaneous even in so practised a performer as the old Trelawny, and some of his stories were so tall that it would have taken another lifetime to make them true.

When one of his admirers Richard Edgcumbe remarked that he was surprised that Trelawny's remarkable career had not been written down, Trelawny's eyes flashed and he turned on him. ‘It has been written. Have you not read the Younger Son?” The visitor nodded. ‘Well what more do you want?’ On other occasions, Edgcumbe records, Trelawny loved to expatiate on the many instances of de Ruyter's heroism and fidelity. ‘There never was another like him and never will be’, he said one day, and Edgcumbe noted ‘I knew that he meant it’.

William Michael Rossetti was not as uncritical as Edgcumbe, and Trelawny confided to him that, although the famous privateer really had existed, de Ruyter was not his real name. On another occasion, however, Rossetti noted in his diary, someone asked Trelawny's permission to bring out a new edition of the Younger Son and ‘Trelawny in the course of the evening spoke of his work as not only generally but in detail true’.

At a dinner party he surprised the company by declaring that he had once eaten human flesh (young woman) and had crossed the desert dressed as an Arab Sheik, and he told Joaquin Miller, an admiring visitor from America, that he had circumnavigated the globe and visited California before he was born. He spoke knowingly to him of Captain Morgan and the other pirates of the Spanish Main and, taking Miller aside, ‘with increased mystery whispered that he knew to a dot the very spot where a shipload of gold was buried near the harbour of San Diego’.

Immediately after Shelley's death in July 1822 stories began to circulate that the Don Juan had sunk as a result of being rammed—run down, it was said, by one of the large local fishing vessels with sharp prows known as feluccas. Some people thought that there had simply been an accidental collision and the felucca concerned had perhaps not gone to the rescue through fear of the strict quarantine laws. Other people thought that maybe the ramming had been deliberate, since one of the Leghorn feluccas had been seen to follow the Don Juan out of harbour on the 8th July 1822 but later unexpectedly came back.

By the time the Don Juan was salvaged in September 1822, the theory that she had been rammed was already widespread.¹ Mary Shelley believed it, and it was said to be the opinion of Trelawny, of Roberts who personally superintended the salvage, and of every sailor.² In retrospect it is easy to see how, for the people concerned, this interpretation of events, unlikely though it was, provided a psychologically more satisfactory explanation than the obvious one, and, consciously or unconsciously, they were disposed to favour it. For Trelawny and Roberts, who had played such an important part in the design and construction of the vessel, the simple supposition that the Don Juan sank because she was unseaworthy carried disturbing implications about their own possible share in responsibility for the disaster. As for Mary and the others, the ramming theory appeared more worthy of Shelley's tragedy than any explanation based on his ignorance of the sea, his impetuosity, or his lack of elementary care.³

Trelawny was a vigorous advocate of the ramming theory from an early date and we may be sure that the hundreds of people who heard him tell his Byron and Shelley stories were left in no doubt that this is what had happened. However when he came to write his Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron in 1858, he found that none of the contemporary documents in his possession gave support to the theory. In fact they tended rather in the opposite direction. There were two letters from Daniel Roberts, one addressed to himself, the other to Mary Shelley which he had evidently been lent at the time to read and not returned.⁴ The letter to Mary came first in time. It was written before Roberts had actually seen the Don Juan at close quarters and it is mainly a report of the official inventory which the Italian authorities made at the time. The subsequent letter, addressed to Trelawny himself, contained useful further information about the vessel obtained after she had been brought ashore. But it also contained an implication that Trelawny had been less than scrupulous with regard to some of the stores of the Bolivar, a warning about Trelawny's behaviour with Gabrielle Wright, and much about the state of health of Trelawny's horses.

Although Trelawny was naturally disposed to use the Roberts letters, since they showed him at the centre of events, they clearly would not do as they stood. Omission of embarrassing passages without acknowledgement was well within the conventions of the day, and it was also acceptable to tidy up grammar, spelling, and style. But in the Recollections Trelawny solved the problem by publishing two ‘letters’ whose creative editing would have surprised even such practised distorters of documents as Lady Shelley and Thomas Jefferson Hogg. He cut out all the embarrassing material. He pretended that both letters had been addressed to him—although the fact that he was intended to share the one to Mary Shelley is extenuation. He summarised large parts of the second letter. He cut out a few pieces of evidence that did not support his view of the ramming theory—such as that the gunwhale was stove in ‘in many places’. And he added a new postscript to reinforce the point about the ramming which is his own invention—though it did represent Roberts's later view—and has no authority in either letter:

P.S.—On a close examination of Shelley's boat, we find many of the timbers on the starboard quarter broken, which makes me think for certain, that she must have been run down by some of the feluccas in the squall.

Here the matter rested for nearly twenty years with successive biographers of Shelley quoting the ‘letters’ in good faith. In 1874 however another twist was given to the story. Trelawny's daughter Laetitia, on a visit to Italy, heard a rumour that a few years earlier an old sailor on his death bed had confessed that he was one of the crew of the felucca which did the ramming. They were under the impression, he is reported to have confessed, that Lord Byron was on board with money, but when they struck the little boat, it sank immediately and they lost their booty.

Trelawny was now a very old man but his admirers rallied round to give publicity—proof at last that their hero had been right from the beginning. Rossetti arranged for Laetitia's letter to be published in The Times and Edgcumbe, after talking to Trelawny, contributed another decisive detail that had not been mentioned on any of the intervening fifty-three years.⁵ Trelawny, it was now revealed, had seen oars and spars from the Don Juan on board the returning felucca. Trelawny himself contributed to the controversy quoting his own ‘edited’ version of the Roberts letters in support, and when his book was re-issued in 1878 as the Records he introduced further changes to the ‘letters’.

The river of historical truth was now as clear as the Arno at Pisa on a winter's day. As with all good myths there were now many versions, and the Italian traditions were independent of the English. When Sir Percy Florence Shelley visited Lerici with Lady Shelley, an old sailor fell and kissed his feet. He showed them Shelley's ‘sacred tree’ and told how the poet had visited the sick and all those in trouble. The sailor said he prayed night and morning in front of a picture of Mary—Mary Shelley—and recalled that ‘he was fair, he was beautiful, he was like Jesus Christ. I carried him in my arms through the water’. Lady Shelley tried hard to achieve a visionary experience of the poet whom she had never known by sleeping in his room in the Casa Magni, but she had no success. Nor did a later owner who built a cenotaph in the garden in hopes of obtaining the sacred ashes from Rome.

In 1890 the commander of the port of Viareggio rounded up all the inhabitants who claimed to be able to remember the great events of 1822 and took written statements. A woman of ninety-three said she was an eye-witness and confirmed the exact spot of the cremation as near the Due Fosse (Two Ditches). Some men claimed to have been on board the fishing vessels which salvaged the Don Juan. Another old man—who was not alive in 1822—remembered that as a child the fishermen used to tell him that if he went into the sea, ‘he would be burned like the Englishmen at the Due Fosse’. And at least two said that the English had taken the ashes of Shelley and Williams to England so that they could be brought back to life there.⁶

Trelawny loved to tell of his adventures in Greece and especially of the mountain fortress of Parnassus where, in 1824 and 1825, he had, for the one and only time in his life lived like a Byronic hero. But as the years went by a strange transformation occurred. Odysseus's cave is the Mavre Troupa, on the north side of Parnassus, but there is a much larger and more famous cave on the south side near Delphi called the Corycian Cave which Trelawny never visited but which he had heard of and read about in guidebooks. In an interview to a newspaper reporter in 1860, Trelawny gave a description of Odysseus's cave which shows that he had assimilated the two caves in his mind, into one imaginary cave with all the features of both. He genuinely believed that he himself had lived in the Corycian Cave.⁷

The Corycian Cave is divided into many different grottoes, the length of the first one is two hundred feet and its height forty. [Trelawny' memory is here subdued by guidebook descriptions of the Corycian Cave. ‘A chamber 300 feet long, by nearly 200 wide, and about 40 high in the middle.’ ’Murray's Handbook for Travellers in Greece, 1854. The Mavre Troupa is far smaller.]

The outside light falling on the entrance allowed you to see fully the majestic porch of nature which I often compared with the diverse and decorated architecture of the Gothic cathedrals of Western Europe. [A true memory returns here.]

The first things to strike your eyes were irregular stalactites from an irregular roof of sharp stones [Corcyan Cave again. There are no stalactites in the Mavre Troupa.], with an undulating floor on which babbled a crystal clear spring. [True memory of the Mavre Troupa again creeping in.]

Here we had enough store rooms and chambers or arms, fodder, and living quarters. [Mavre Troupa again.]

At the back of this cave was a large chasm which constitutes the entrance to the second cave of about one hundred feet in length, much darker and making a right angle with the first. This cave is dark and can be walked through with torches, and the more you advance the cooler, the darker and more magnificent it becomes. [There is a small inner cave at the Mavre Troupa but Trelawny has transformed it in his imaginative memory into the large inner cave of the Corycian Cave which he has read about. ‘The second chamber is 100 feet long.’ Murray's Handbook.]

You believe truly that you are walking towards the Kingdom of Pluto towards the hall of the infernal gods.

In the light of the torches, the roof and walls give off opalescent crystals and diffuse colours. Curtains of pillars in careless folds, sculptures, projections, borders, the forms of human heads, created by the tears of the earth and covered with evergreen moss in their folds—the transparent and brilliant furniture amidst which Phoebus once played with the Muses, and Pan danced with the Parnassian Nymphs. [There are no fantastic stalactites or stalagmites in the Mavre Troupa, only one smallish natural arch. All this section is again a transformation of Trelawny's memory of some description of the Corycian Cave that he had read: e.g. ‘The stalactites from the top hang in the most graceful forms the whole length of the roof and fall like drapery down the sides.

The depth of the folds is so vast and the masses thus suspended in the air are so great that the relief and fulness of these natural hangings are as complete as fancy could have wished. They are not like concretions or incrustations mere coverings of the rock, they are the gradual growth of ages, disposed in the most simple and majestic form, and so rich and large as to accord with the size and loftiness of the cave. The stalagmites below and on the sides of the chamber are still more fantastic in their forms than the pendant above, and strike the eye with a fancied resemblance to vast human figures.’ Murray's Handbook]

As the century progressed it was clear that, like Shelley, John Keats was to enjoy the poetic reputation posthumously which had escaped him during his lifetime. Trelawny had never met him, although he played a part in preparing the monument over his grave. At the time of the publication of the Adventures in 1831, however, the story began to take root that Trelawny had known Keats as well as Byron and Shelley, and he was content to let it grow. His name it was even suggested, had been considered as a possible biographer.

The painter Holman Hunt reported in his diary a conversation which took place at Burton Park, Penshurst in 1863:

When I was painting one morning in the park, I saw him approaching. When he was nigh I called out “How do you do Mr Trelawny?” He walked on without answering and coming close threw himself down on the grass behind me. I repeated my salutation. His reply was “I think that is about the most foolish thing one man can say to another.” …

“Besides Byron and Shelley, you knew Keats, tell me what height Keats was, for the idea prevails that he was extremely short and that does not correspond with the character of his head as seen in the cast. From what Keats idly says himself it is inferred he was only five feet.”

“No, he was of reasonable height, about your own” said Trelawny.

“Tell me how the character of his face inspired you” I continued: “He couldn't be called good-looking” he replied “because he was underhung” [that is had a projecting lower jaw.]

“You use the word in an opposite sense to that in which it is sometimes applied to Charles the Fifth and Philip the Second of Spain, or to a bulldog?” I said

“Of course Keats was the very reverse” he grunted “and the defect gave a fragile aspect to him as a man”⁸.

Trelawny had innumerable relics with which he liked to impress visitors. He had original poems, letters, and other manuscripts of Shelley and Byron which he had collected since the great days of 1822-1824 without too close a regard for the proprieties. Jane Williams protested in vain for the return of Williams's Indian journal which Trelawny had been permitted to borrow before his death, and Medwin never got back a number of letters addressed by Shelley to himself which he had imprudently lent to Trelawny for his projected biography in 1829. Some of the manuscripts, though not the ‘edited’ ones, were later presented by Trelawny's daughter Laetitia with nice symmetry to Eton and Oxford, Harrow and Cambridge, the chief places of education associated with the two poets.

On Trelawny's wall hung portraits of two of the women who had meant most to him, Claire Clairmont and Mary Shelley, by the same artist Amelia Curran who had painted the girls and Shelley himself in 1820. Trelawny had been asked by Mary long years before to obtain these pictures for her from Italy—she had no portrait of herself at the age when she was with Shelley—and although he had taken possession of them, he never handed them over. One of Mary's last recorded actions in 1850, shortly before she died, was to write in vain to Trelawny begging him to return her picture.

On the other hand, to people he liked, Trelawny showed his lifelong characteristic generosity. William Michael Rossetti was showered with gifts, books, manuscripts, pictures, and a huge bed fetched specially from Italy in which Shelley was thought to have passed his last night. Rossetti, the Inland Revenue official, discovered to his pleasure and surprise that the corsair regarded him as one of his best friends.

One evening when Rossetti and his brother Dante Gabriel were showing Trelawny their beloved Japanese prints he remarked disingenuously that he had been to Japan in his youth. As a mark of appreciation they decided to make him a present of two fine Japanese swords, but to their horror, he told them a few days later that he had given them away. They were not genuine, Trelawny said, and invited them to admire instead another sword which he said he had personally looted from a Chinese junk. Then there was the sword he liked to show which Byron had given him at Cephalonia with the words ‘Here take this, Tre, and use it either like Childe Harold or Don Juan’. And the dagger which a blind beggar had thoughtfully pressed into his hand at the crisis of the Masi incident at Pisa, in 1822. He was also said to have had ‘various dried heads of pirates, and others among his treasures’ although nobody has recorded actually seeing them, and he apparently had unlimited pieces of charred bone for distribution to favoured admirers of Shelley.

Trelawny's relics like his stories spanned the spectrum from the absolutely genuine to the absolutely bogus with interesting mixtures in the middle.

Notes

1. A copy of the inventory is among the Viareggio official papers. None of these papers discuss the possible cause of the disaster.

2. Mary Shelley Letters, i, p. 197 and i. p, 223.

3. The feeling that great events must somehow have great causes still clings to the Shelley story. I have heard it seriously suggested that Shelley was assassinated by the Austrians and that Lord Byron was implicated.

4. The two originals are in the British Museum Add Mss 52361 having been acquired in 1963. Trelawny's daughter Laetitia made donations from Trelawny's papers to numerous institutions connected with Byron and Shelley and sold some others. She refused absolutely to give access to the papers which she kept. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that she must have been aware of the damage which the revelation of these two particular letters would cause to her father's reputation and deliberately held them back. Since these letters are so important it is worth quoting them in full.

   Pisa Sepr 14th 1822

   My dear Mrs Shelley

   We have got fast hold of the Don Juan at last and she is safe at anchor at Viareggio. She has been got up entire but much damaged from being so long under water. Everything is complete in her and clearly proves she was not upset but I think must have filled by a heavy sea—Contents found are—The 29 Piggs of Iron Ballast (which is complete) Seven sails—Awning, a Trunk containing two hundred + forty five dollars of Tuscany—shirts pantaloons etc etc—7 tea spoons—A second trunk or Valice which was yr husband's containing books & cloathes—all the boys things safe in the fore peak etc—I shall see Ld Byron and arrange for paying the expenses of getting her up—I of all things wish to keep the Boat for remembrance of my good friends. Ld Byron no doubt will sell her by auction and I hope to be able to outbid any that may feel inclined to put up for her—She is as yet in quarantine. I go to her tomorrow morning as I have obtained the papers at Leghorn to give her pratique—you shall have the particulars when everything is arranged—I wrote to stop your Desk—send to Stow for it—remember me to Mrs Williams—believe me yr affectionat freind.

   Daniel-Roberts

   Dr Trelawny

   You must have heard thro' Mrs S. that the Don Juan was found & therefore concluding she would make you acquainted with the contents of that letter of mine, I beg in return you will give her the extracts of this to you. I went to Viareggio after consulting with Ld Byron upon what was most advisable to be done with the fellows who found her—It was agreed to put up everything for sale—the half of the profits for them the other for our friends. On Monday the sale commenced—the only thing knocked down to me was the shell of the boat for 300 livers—The sails where rotten and some of them completely in peices—the rigging all that I saw not worth a Napoleon. The two masts carried away just above board—bowsprit off close to the bows—Two Gaffs good—boomb good, pump good, false stern carried away—the rudder lost, the Gunwhale stove in in many places—the boat half full of a blue mud among which we picked out Cloths of all sorts (mostly rotten) books & spy glass broken/all the bottles of Marsalla Wine (that was bought as a present to the harbour Master at Lerici) were found in the basket—the corks half forced out and the Wine impregnated with Salt Water (perhaps you are acquainted with the wonderful effect that the pressure of Salt Water has upon a full bottle in any depth of water—if so you will not be surprised at the phenomenon). The books I had washed and put into reading order some of them too much rubbed to separate the leaves. In the MSS we found there were two Memorandum books of Shelleys—quite perfect and another not to be separated—the Memo's of Williams quite perfect writen up to the 4th of July, all in Lord B's possession except that of W—I gave that and all the letters a peice of stuff he bought for Jane and all private papers in charge to Hunt as I saw many sworn objurations on Ld B among them—I thought that step most advisable. After paying all expenses and with as damd a set as ever breathed I cleared for our dear friends Widows—101 Dollars 300 livres of Genoa—7 Tea spoons & the books.

   The boat I have here and am consulting Reid about selling her etc but find that it will cost me much money—At all events I will put the hull in condition—paint her and fit her and if I find I get on tolerable cheap I will then rigg and fit her. The ballast I could not afford to buy—but Ld B has found out that you left behind some of his ballast and told me to sell it for him (what a damd close calculating fellow he is) You are so biggoted in his favour that I will not say more—only God defend me from ever having anything to do with him again.

   Now my dear fellow let me enter upon another subject to a Man of your quick comprehension! I need but say “report spreads fast” do not let a few paltry seconds of lust (for it is nothing else) get the better Man of you—farewell

   and believe me
   Your obliged and affectionate friend
   Daniel Roberts

   Shelley's Desk arrived today—I have sent it on to Lord Byron—I hope I have done right.

   18th Septr 1822

   The Rockfort is more and enough for Genoa Willm B—is in the tiller—Ld B told me he should send for the Schooner to Lerici to take him to Genoa as the roads are bad—I rode yr horse Sarzana to Via reggio—he is in good condition—poor Alf looks very bad he had kicked his feet all to peices against the stone stabling—so I ordered them to shoe him again with a light iron. The landlord advised so doing but if you think we have acted wrong return word and I will order the shoes off again. The hoofs stick horribly but there is no appearance of grain. When you have time send me a line DR4

   The texts Trelawny printed in Recollections were:

   Pisa Sept. 1822

   Dear T.

   We have got fast hold of Shelley's boat, and she is now safe at anchor off Via Reggio. Every thing is in her, and clearly proves, that she was not capsized. I think she must have been swamped by a heavy sea; we found in her two trunks, that of Williams, containing money and clothes, and Shelley's filled with books and clothes.

   Yours, very sincerely
   DAN ROBERTS

   Sept 18, 1822

   Dear T

   I consulted Ld. B., on the subject of paying the crews of the felucca employed in getting up the boat. He advised me to sell her by auction, and to give them half the proceeds of the sale. I rode your horse to Via Reggio. On Monday we had the sale, and only realised a trifle more than two hundred dollars.

   The two masts were carried away just above board, the bowspit broken off close to the bows, the gunwhale stove in, and the hull half full of blue clay, out of which we fished clothes books, spyglass, and other raticles. A hamper of wine that Shelley bought at Leghorn, a present for the harbourmaster of Lerici, was spoilt, the corks forced partly out of the bottles and the wine mixed with salt-water. You know, this is effected by the pressure of the cold sea-water.

   We found in the boat two memorandum-books of Shelley's quite perfect, and another damaged, a journal of Williams's quite perfect, written up to the 4th of July. I washed the printed books, some of them were so glued together by the slimy mud, that the leaves could not be separated, most of these things are now in Ld. B's custody. The letters, private papers, and Williams's journal, I left in charge of Hunt as I saw there were many severe remarks on Ld. B.

   Ld. B. has found out that you left at Genoa some of the ballast of the ‘Bolivar', and he asked me to sell it for him. What a damned close calculating fellow he is. You are so bigoted in his favour that I will say no more, only God defend me from ever having anything more to do with him.

   [The postscript quoted in the text p. 185 follows here]

   In the Records Trelawny omitted the references to his being bigoted in favour of Lord Byron which were clearly inappropriate in 1878 however true they might have seemed in 1822 or 1823 when he had been called ‘Lord Byron's jackal'.

5. The controversy took place in The Times and other newspapers in December 1875 and January 1876.

6. Biagi. The full results of his investigations in 1890 are among the official papers at Viareggio.

7. The Corycian Cave was rediscovered by Edward Daniel Clarke who asked the villagers about it, and he was also aware of the Mavre Troupa on the other side of Parnassus. But he himself never visited either. Raikes the first traveller to go to the Corycian Cave published an account of it which was to remain the source for the guidebooks in the nineteenth century. Strangely, the book in which Raikes published his account, Walpole's Travels was virtually the only travel book which Trelawny possessed in 1820. His interest arose no doubt because his uncle John Hawkins, another noted early traveller in Greece, had contributed to the same volume, and possibly because he was considering going to Greece himself with Medwin, Williams, and Shelley at that time.

   Many later accounts of Odysseus and Trelawny have had them living in the Corycian Cave. I am greatly indebted to Mr. A. C. Lascarides for translating the Xemos interview.

8. Holman Hunt.

There are numerous examples of Trelawny's later storytelling and his listeners' comments in the articles and comments by Edgcumbe (which are much the same), the various books by Rossetti, and Miller. See also Brookfield and Carpenter and a few stories collected from primary sources by Massingham.