[In the following essay, Gerson analyzes A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder within the context of postcolonialism, exploring the author's use of a multilayered framework of narratives and readers in his examination of imperialism.]

Critical readers of James De Mille's A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder, written during the 1860s but not published until 1888 and likely left unfinished (Parks, Introduction xx-xxiii), are intrigued with the many textual and philosophical questions posed by this novel. Commentary stimulated by the New Canadian Library edition of 1969 focuses on De Mille's sources, the meaning of his satire, and the placement of this text within the fields of nineteenth-century popular and utopian fiction (see Gerson; Hughes; Keefer; Kilian; Kime; Parks, “Strange”; and Woodcock, “An Absence,” “De Mille”). Later criticism confronts the ironies created by the book's metafictional narrative structure (see Beddoes; Lamont-Stewart; and Wilson) as well as some of the problems posed by the uncertain dates of its composition and completion (see La Bossière; Monk, Gilded; and Woodcock, “Book”). The following discussion builds on these readings by exploring some of the postcolonial dimensions of De Mille's text in a kind of “contrapuntal reading,” to borrow a term from Edward W. Said, tracing in the book two complementary processes: “that of imperialism and that of resistance to it” (Culture 66). My discussion also complicates the question of intentionality. While I do not wish to attribute a 1990s mind-set to a man who died in 1880, I think that De Mille's individual historical position on the margins of several political and economic empires opens his text to concerns about discourses and manifestations of power. It is not farfetched to suggest that references to the suppression of Indigenous peoples, while casually placed within the text, were not penned by De Mille in utter ignorance of their wider implications. When Adam More teaches the Kosekin melodies “created by the genius of the Celtic race” (De Mille 108), he is likely more oblivious than was De Mille to the English appropriation of the culture of conquered Celts. By drawing our attention to De Mille's use of William H. Prescott's History of the Conquest of Mexico as a source for his description of the sacrificial practices of the Kosekin, Wayne Kime likewise invites us to situate A Strange Manuscript within the broader framework of postcolonial analysis (290-93). At the same time, we should not forget De Mille's own caution about “… German commentators who find in the Agamemnon of Aeschylus or the Oedipus of Sophocles or the Hamlet of Shakespeare motives and purposes of which the authors could never have dreamed” (227), a comment teasingly given to Oxenden, the philologist whose literary sensibility is as shallow as his linguistic analysis of the Kosekin language seems impeccable.

De Mille's biography provides ample evidence of his experience of the complexities of national and international political and economic power. Born a New Brunswicker in 1833, he inevitably became a Canadian in 1867, and during his years at Dalhousie College (1865-80) witnessed the decline of the Maritime region within Confederation. In August 1850, just as he turned seventeen, he embarked on a year-long trip to Europe with his older brother. En route, he gathered material—with a special interest in Italy and ancient Rome—that would inform his fiction for three subsequent decades. In addition, he was educated in the United States (at Brown University), and his literary career was shaped by the cultural imperialism of the burgeoning American publishing industry that determined the market, audience, and to a large degree the content of his novels. He was, moreover, an accomplished linguist who must have been aware of the larger historical situations associated with the rise and decline of world languages; and as the author of a textbook on rhetoric, he knew something about the power of discourse itself.

A Strange Manuscript is structured as a frame narrative in which one group of characters—an eclectic assortment of educated Englishmen aboard Lord Featherstone's becalmed yacht—read and comment on the central text, the “strange manuscript” written by British seaman Adam More, which they find floating in a “copper cylinder.” Within More's document, which is written on papyrus and tossed into the sea in the hope that its finder will inform More's father of his son's fate, is enclosed yet another missive. This letter, which More found on the corpse of a shipwrecked sailor who had perished of starvation in Antarctica, situates the surrounding texts within the context of contemporary economics and demographics:

Bristol April 20. 1820.

my darling tom

i writ you these few lines in hast i don like youar gon a walen an in the south sea dont go darlin tom or mebbe ill never se you agin for ave bad drems of you darlin tom an im afraid so don go my darlin tom but come back an take anoth ship for America baby is as wel as ever but mises is pa an as got a new tooth an i think you otnt go a walen o darlin tom …

sea as the wages was i in New York an better go thar an id like to go ther for good for they gives good wages in America. O come back my Darlin tom an take me to America an the baby an weel all live an love an di together

Your loving wife

Polley Reed. (22)

Within More's story, Tom's corpse seems to foreshadow the dire fate awaiting More and his companion, Agnew, adrift in a small boat in unknown Antarctic waters; the letter itself elicits no comment from the gentlemen reading More's manuscript, nor has it received attention from subsequent critics reading De Mille's book. However, from a postcolonial perspective, reading “to include what was once forcibly excluded” (Said, Culture 66-67), this letter occupies a core position in the larger text. Embedded within the book's narrative layers, its placement corresponds to the centrality of the economic imperative that lay at the heart of British imperialism and whose success was contingent upon the toil of poorly educated and usually anonymous workers such as Tom and Polley. Entering De Mille's highly literary text at this nearly illiterate (yet strikingly eloquent) centre, by reading the book through Polley Reed (as her name punningly invites), inverts its hegemonic structure by calling attention to the marginalization of both women and workers in its surrounding narrative layers.

Like Polley's letter, both the novel's frame story and More's manuscript contain specific geographical positionings that situate their respective narratives within the metanarrative of empire. During the winter of 1850, the Falcon, a yacht whose name metonymically identifies the predatory nature of its owner's nationality and class, carries bored Lord Featherstone and “a few congenial friends” from London to “southern latitudes” off the coast of Spain and North Africa (1). En route to the Mediterranean, the cradle of classical European culture and power, the vessel is becalmed “between the Canaries and the Madeira Islands” (1), land belonging respectively to Spain and Portugal, originators of modern European imperialism. Featherstone's opening posture, reclining on deck “in an Indian hammock” (1), identifies him as a direct beneficiary of the British Empire, just as his lisp places him within the line of effete aristocrats targeted by British social satirists since the Renaissance. Within this framework, the opening paragraph of More's account situates his 1843 voyage to more distant southern latitudes, as mate of a ship chartered by the British government to convey convicts to Van Diemen's Land, as a venture directly bolstering the project of empire. More's boat, the Trevelyan, likely named for Sir Charles Trevelyan, an influential career administrator from 1826 to 1865 who laid the foundations of both the education system in British India and the civil service in England, proves to be an appropriately christened vessel for one who will behave like a prototypical imperialist when he encounters an unknown Native society. Representative of More's attitude is his continual reliance on his rifle and pistol to “inspire a little wholesome respect” (31), a reliance De Mille parodies in allowing him an apparently endless supply of ammunition.

As More attempts to explicate the geography of the Antarctic region in which he is trapped, he cites the voyages of Captain James Cook (10) and Sir James Ross (20, 64), two explorers whose connections with Canada may be coincidental, but are scarcely irrelevant. During the Seven Years' War, Cook's charting of the St. Lawrence River facilitated Wolfe's landing at Quebec; Ross spent several decades with expeditions into the Canadian Arctic before turning to the Antarctic in 1839. The very names Cook and Ross, while accurately representing documented European activity in the region of the South Pole up to 1843, also inevitably invoke the globalizing possessiveness of the empire upon which the sun did not set—with a fillip of additional resonance for informed Canadians, among whom must be included the extremely knowledgeable Professor James De Mille.

Aboard Featherstone's becalmed, parodic ship of state floats the essence of empire, composed of wealth (Featherstone), science (Dr. Congreve), and language, the latter divided into philology (Oxenden) and literature (Melick). This selection of readers for More's manuscript supports current postcolonial analyses of knowledge and discourse as the underpinnings of empire; notably absent among Featherstone's companions is any direct representative of government, religion, or the military, the institutions most overtly engaged in the actual enforcement of colonialism. In Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, Mary Louise Pratt examines how the allegedly neutral discourses of science and travel have worked as colonizing strategies, controlling and subduing otherness by the very acts of naming and cataloguing within a Eurocentric system of knowledge. Said, in the first portions of Culture and Imperialism, demonstrates that the English novel, as an “incorporative, quasi-encyclopedic cultural form” (71), has similarly functioned as an instrument of empire, naturalizing imperial political and economic power by giving it a familiar presence within popular narrative conventions. On the yacht, De Mille shows discourses of science in conflict with one another and also with literary criticism, as their fictional representatives fail to agree on the authenticity and meaning of More's text. He thereby interrogates not only the limitations of the discourses themselves but also their power as strategies of containment: “each looked at the other; Melick elevated his eyebrows, and Oxenden shrugged his shoulders; but each seemed unable to find words to express his amazement at the other's stupidity, and so they took refuge in silence” (229).

The parodic subversion of authority represented by this impasse is intensified by the shipboard division between gentlefolk and crew, a telling exemplification of Said's connection between the conventional invisibility of both servants and empire (Culture 63). While Featherstone's employees remain even more anonymous than the corpse of shipwrecked “darling tom,” their necessary presence is obliquely signalled in the sumptuous repasts, “served up by the genius of the French chef whom Lord Featherstone had brought with him” (60), that regularly interrupt the reading of the manuscript and provide occasions for discussion and dispute. “[O]n board the Falcon dinner was the great event of the day” (60), followed by late-night supper (143), breakfast (155), dinner (226), and, finally, as Featherstone's closing words reveal, “It's time for supper” (269) once more. This cycle of consumption, dependent upon anonymous labour and initiated by Congreve's assumption that the cylinder must contain preserved meat (5), articulates the consuming motive of imperial expansion that sends sailors such as Tom and More to distant polar regions, and becomes horrifically realized in the cannibalism of the Kosekin.

As a mid-Victorian fiction authored by a professor of classics, history, and literature who, according to his nephew Lawrence J. Burpee, “was thoroughly familiar with Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and had a good working knowledge of Arabic and Sanskrit” (qtd. in Parks, Introduction xxxiii), A Strange Manuscript participates in the orientalism of its age. The academic orientalism that facilitated European imperialism by establishing “intellectual authority over the Orient within Western culture” (Said, Orientalism 19) flourishes in De Mille's creation of the Kosekin, a people suspiciously familiar to the yacht-bound readers of More's manuscript, those avatars of empire who discern similarities to Hebrew in the Kosekin language and yet resist recognizing echoes of their own values in Kosekin cultural practices. At the same time, frequent manifestations of popular, essentialist assumptions about oriental culture appear in the casual commentary of both the yachtsmen and Adam More. Oxenden impressively links the Kosekin language with Hebrew through his knowledge of philology, yet when the mysterious cylinder is first discovered, this Cambridge scholar speculates that it might contain “the mangled remains of one of the wives of some Moorish pasha” (6). The narrator expands upon this remark: “Were there treasures inside—jewels, or golden ornaments from some Moorish seraglio, or strange coin from far Cathay?” (7). In a similar vein, Featherstone later interrupts serious discussion about the identity of the Kosekin with a casual anti-Semitic jest about Jewish acquisitiveness (152). More, for his part, first finds the Kosekin “not unlike Arabs, but they were entirely destitute of that hardness and austerity which the latter have” (54). To him their language resembles Arabic (77), and he describes their furnishings as “divans and ottomans” (73); this placement of the Kosekin within an Islamic paradigm allows him later to propose polygamy by marrying both Layelah and Almah (180-81), the latter reminding him of “those Oriental beauties whose portraits I had seen in annuals and illustrated books” (75).

More's manuscript is read by the cruisers on the yacht, but it also reads them, as it counterpoints, inverts, and ultimately deconstructs the system of knowledge and understanding underpinning Western vision and practice. As the yachtsmen comment on More's text, its representation of the Kosekin love of poverty ironizes the materialism and accumulation of wealth that allow the very existence of the yacht and its leisured guests. Their attempts to subsume More's experience within their own intellectual order by applying their knowledge of philology, palaeontology, and literary criticism, while simultaneously distancing themselves from Kosekin values, blind them to the similarities between their culture and that of the Kosekin. Textual clues to this mirroring include similar phrasing in both narratives' opening descriptions of becalmed ships, the echo of Melick's name in the Kosekin title “Melek,” the name of the lowest/highest class, and parallel conclusions where all characters seek “rest and food” (269). A number of critics (see Kilian; Watters; and Woodcock, “De Mille”) have pointed out the ironic resemblances between the apparently opposite practices of the wealth-hating, death-loving Kosekin and the Victorian culture that De Mille satirizes through this inversion. Monk takes this analysis one step further when she states that the net effect of the moral complexity evoked by A Strange Manuscript “is to throw into doubt not just western codes of values but the concept of codes of value as such” (“James” 94). It is this question that I wish to pursue. By showing that opposites are not contrary but indeed fundamentally the same, De Mille questions the binary thinking that supports and justifies Western values, including the Western project of imperialism.

Adam More's own name invokes both the first practitioner of imperialism, the biblical Adam naming the animals in the Garden of Eden, and Thomas More, the author of Utopia, the first widely disseminated alternative social vision based on a redistribution of property to emanate from modern Europe. The chapter in which More arrives in the land of the Kosekin is appropriately entitled “The New World,” recalling the attraction of America to Polley Reed. Here he perceives a strange culture in terms of the oppositional values with which his own culture justifies its hegemonic assumptions: the primary of light, “enlightenment,” and life over darkness, ignorance, and death, which in turn supports the absolute hegemony of “we” over “them,” morally cast as the victory of “right” over “wrong.” In this binary vision, value is asserted by the naturalizing of one's own cultural practice. More describes his experience with the Kosekin in terms of a running debate over human nature in which they are labelled “unnatural” (102), while the Kohen and, later, Layelah invoke “human nature” (127, 131, 158, 174) to explain various Kosekin beliefs and customs.

By having both More and the shipboard commentators perceive this new world as directly opposite to their own, De Mille shows them locked into their own limited binary vision. Their only choices are identity or absolute difference; but the latter, De Mille demonstrates, is really sameness. Shaped in terms of hierarchy and inverse materialism, Kosekin society is marked by the same competition for status and power that characterizes European culture: the rich strive to give away their wealth, workers go on strike for “harder work, longer hours, or smaller pay” (137), the power of the paupers is envied, and crime is the frequent resort of those frustrated by their inability to achieve their goals otherwise. Even the chief pauper bemoans “the folly of ambition” (249). An assessment of relationships within Kosekin society reveals that human nature—that is, self-interest—is indeed virtually identical in both worlds.

At the same time, De Mille hints at a truly alternative socioeconomic vision when More tells us that “Secret movements are sometimes set on foot which aim at a redistribution of property and a levelling of all classes, so as to reduce the haughty paupers to the same condition as the mass of the nation” (138). Of the ten “peculiar doctrines” (169) formulated by the radical Kohen Gadol (all phrased negatively, mimicking the repeated “thou shalt notes” of the Ten Commandments), the only one not reiterated by More as being normal in his country is the last: “The paupers should be forced to take a certain amount of wealth, to relieve the necessities of the rich” (169-70). The real opposite of inequality, De Mille implies, is equality. Understanding this notion raises problems that are both conceptual and perceptual, as revealed through the characters' responses to the position of women in Kosekin society. While More keeps asserting the equality of Kosekin women, the shipboard commentators, locked into their notion of opposition, never comment on this aspect of Kosekin life. (Might De Mille be slyly reminding us that the real opposite of patriarchy would be matriarchy?) Moreover, as in Thomas More's Utopia, the situation Adam More describes proves somewhat less equitable than he thinks. While he begins by declaring that “Women and men are in every respect absolutely equal, holding precisely the same offices and doing the same work,” he immediately adds the qualification that “women are a little less fond of death than men, and a little less unwilling to receive gifts” (142). The result is that in the army and navy, women “are usually relegated to the lower ranks, such as officers and generals,” and in marriage “The wives are … universally the rulers of the household, while the husbands have an apparently subordinate, but, to the Kosekin, a more honorable position” (142). Later, his notion of the “perfect liberty” (167) of Kosekin women is upended by the comedy of his distress when Kosekin women “take the initiative” (179, 193) in declaring love:

The fact is, it doesn't do for women to take the initiative—it's not fair. I had stood a good deal among the Kosekin. Their love of darkness, their passion for death, their contempt of riches, their yearning after unrequited love, their human sacrifices, their cannibalism, all had more or less become familiar to me, and I had learned to acquiesce in silence; but now when it came to this … it really was more than a fellow could stand.

(179-80)

De Mille's burlesque of the injured male ego (see also 193-94) climaxes during More's flight with Layelah, when he prefers the vulnerable and submissive “Layelah in distress” to the challenging “Layelah in triumph” (218). Fitting the novel's play with binarism is its depiction of the two major female characters, Almah and Layelah, as physically similar (tall, beautiful, with dark hair contained by a gold band) yet cast as conventional opposing stereotypes: the helpless virgin in need of rescue versus the forward seductress.

Reading More's text, Melick recognizes some similarity between Kosekin individuals and Western Europeans when he cites Milton's Satan—“What matter where, if I be still the same” (227)—to support his view that the text is a satire “exhibiting a new race of men, animated by passions and impulses which are directly the opposite of ours, and yet no nearer happiness than we are” (226). When we consider Melick's comments from a metanarrative perspective, we can see that he articulates the general deconstructive slant of the book in which he and the narrative he is reading are written. What he misses—and what De Mille might want his readers to appreciate (if we allow him sufficient intentionality)—is the comic implosion of binaries posited by Kosekin logic. On several occasions when More attempts to construct oppositional arguments or plans that would allow him to escape his fate, he is countered by the fact that “The Kosekin do not always act … as one would suppose” (240). Distinctions between opposition and similarity collapse when the Kosekin are shown to enact literally some of the cultural dicta that in Western culture function only as rhetorical flourishes. Thus the Kosekin elevation of unrequited love is based on the familiar Western notion that “Love is more than self-denial; it is self-surrender and utter self-abnegation” (132). The Kosekin parody of the Golden Rule, “Everyone is eager to help his neighbor” (189), translates sometimes into murder and sometimes into comedy, as in the absurd struggle at the base of the pyramid in the final scene. During the battle with the sea serpent, More is impressed by the “blind and desperate courage” of “men who thought nothing of life, but flung it away at the command of their chief without dreaming of flight or of hesitation” (90, 91-92). Here, De Mille openly tips his hand in relation to the rhetoric of war, creating a moment of silence in More's narrative as significant as that noted earlier among the shipboard experts analysing his text. The Kohen remarks: “Have you not told me incredible things about your people, among which there were a few that seemed natural and intelligible? Among these was your system of honoring above all men those who procure the death of the largest number. You, with your pretended fear of death, wish to meet it in battle as eagerly as we do, and your most renowned men are those who have sent most to death.” More is tongue-tied: “To this strange remark I had no answer to make” (157).

Silences in all three narrative layers—those of Tom Reed, Adam More, and the yachtsmen—culminate in the final silence of the unfinished book. It ends on parallel high points of imperialism: More and Almah, “all-powerful now” (269), stand on top of the pyramid on which they were to be sacrificed, in control of the mob who had expected their deaths; Featherstone in turn exerts his authority with his closing words, “That's enough for to-day. … It's time for supper” (269). But this success is only temporary: on a basic narrative level, we never receive the remainder of More's own story and therefore never learn about his writing of the manuscript or why his cover letter refers to the land of the Kosekin as a place “from which escape is as impossible as from the grave” (8). More importantly, having unravelled the binarism that supports empire, the text concludes its critique of traditional modes of thinking with its very open-endedness, which counters the expected closure of popular adventure fiction.

The unfinished nature of the text also leaves unresolved the speculations regarding the actual identity of the Kosekin. The linguistic evidence connecting them with the ancient Jews seems irrefutable. Might they be a lost Hebraic colony (if not one of the ten lost tribes)—a colony gone wrong? Ignoring the Kosekin practices of sacrifice and cannibalism, Oxenden attempts to link their thought with world religions that teach that “the chief end of man is to get rid of the curse of life and gain the bliss of Nirvana, or annihilation” (236). But when he speculates that their love of death may result from “the strong spirituality of the Semitic race, carried out … to the ultimate results” (235-36), he also raises questions about the way colonies often carry the paradigms of their parent cultures to unforeseen extremes. The horrors of penal colonies, slavery, and genocide frequently result from the colonial enactment of values implicit in the parent culture, though not necessarily practised at home. The most horrific Kosekin practices similarly enact the self-consumption of Judeo-Christian Europe, which has been deflected into the consumption of others through imperial expansion.

After teaching the Kosekin the “sweet strains” of “Irish and Scottish melodies,” More stops playing his violin when he suddenly realizes that they might “put their own words to them so as to use them at the awful sacrifices” (108). But as De Mille shows by counterpointing layers of texts and readers, recipients always put what they read or hear into their own words to suit their own purposes. His novel thus openly invites the application of various reading strategies. An exploration of its postcolonial dimensions yields a compelling critique of spatial and material aspects of imperialism and, more importantly, of the fundamental values and modes of thinking that uphold it and that it imposes. As a “contrapuntal ensemble,” A Strange Manuscript challenges and deconstructs the binarism that Said shows is essential to Western thought: “it is the case that no identity can ever exist by itself and without an array of opposites, negatives, oppositions: Greeks always require barbarians, and Europeans Africans, Orientals, etc. The opposite is certainly true as well. Even the mammoth engagements in our own time over such essentializations as ‘Islam,’ the ‘West,’ the ‘Orient,’ ‘Japan,’ or ‘Europe’ admit to a particular knowledge and structures of attitude and reference, and those require careful analysis and research” (Culture 52).

Works Cited

Beddoes, Julie. “Inside Out: Finding the Author in James De Mille's A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder.” Signature 3 (1990): 1-12.

De Mille, James. A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder. 1888. Ed. Malcolm Parks. Centre for Editing Early Canadian Texts Series 3. Ottawa: Carleton UP, 1986.

Gerson, Carole. “Three Writers of Victorian Canada.” Canadian Writers and Their Works. Ed. Robert Lecker, Jack David, and Ellen Quigley. Fiction Series 1. Toronto: ECW, 1983. 194-256. 10 vols. to date. 1981-.

Hughes, Kenneth J. “A Strange Manuscript: Source, Satire, a Positive Utopia.” Beginnings: A Critical Anthology. Ed. John Moss. Toronto: NC, 1980. 111-25. Vol. 2 of The Canadian Novel. 2 vols. to date. 1977-.

Keefer, Janice Kulyk. Under Eastern Eyes: A Critical Reading of Maritime Fiction. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1987.

Kilian, Crawford. “The Cheerful Inferno of James De Mille.” Journal of Canadian Fiction 1.3 (1972): 61-67.

Kime, Wayne R. “The American Antecedents of James De Mille's A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder.” Dalhousie Review 55 (1975): 280-306.

La Bossière, Camille R. “The Mysterious End of James De Mille's Unfinished Manuscript.” Essays on Canadian Writing 27 (1983-84): 41-54.

Lamont-Stewart, Linda. “Misreading De Mille's Strange Ms.: Irony and Misdirection.” Essays in Canadian Irony. Ed. Linda Hutcheon. Vol. 3. Working Paper Series 89-W02. Toronto: Roberts Centre for Canadian Studies, 1989. 1-17. 3 vols. 1988-89.

Monk, Patricia. The Gilded Beaver: An Introduction to the Life and Work of James De Mille. Toronto: ECW, 1991.

———. “James De Mille.” Canadian Writers before 1890. Ed. W. H. New. Detroit: Gale, 1990. 92-94. Vol. 99 of Dictionary of Literary Biography. 119 vols. to date. 1978-.

More, Thomas. Utopia. Trans. and ed. H. V. S. Ogden. New York: Appleton, 1949.

Parks, Malcolm. Introduction. De Mille xvii-lix.

———. “Strange to Strangers Only.” Canadian Literature 70 (1976): 61-78.

Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Knopf, 1993.

———. Orientalism. 1978. New York: Vintage, 1979.

Watters, R. E. Introduction. A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder. By James De Mille. New Canadian Library 68. Toronto: McClelland, 1969. vii-xvii.

Wilson, Kenneth C. “The Nutty Professor: Or, James De Mille in the Fun House.” Essays on Canadian Writing 48 (1992-93): 128-49.

Woodcock, George. “An Absence of Utopias.” Editorial. Canadian Literature 42 (1969): 3-5.

———. “Book Notes.” Canadian Notes and Queries 46 (1992): 28.

———. “De Mille and the Utopian Vision.” Journal of Canadian Fiction 2.3 (1973): 174-79.