[In the following essay, Adams argues that Cooper's sea novels generally take place in a sort of middle ground between the shore and the sea—a neutral area that metaphorically represents the hero's inner conflict between authority and personal liberation.]

Cooper's sea novels generally blur the traditional distinction in maritime literature between sea and shore. The dichotomy persists in Cooper's works between the shore as a realm of conflict and the sea as one of resolution between, as W. H. Auden puts it in The Enchaféd Flood, a state of “disorder” and a world of harmony, where change and turmoil are “not merely at the service of order, but inextricably intertwined, indeed identical with it.”¹ But most of the action in a typical Cooper narrative takes place somewhere between these two worlds. In The Pilot (1824) the central conflicts and resolutions occur in shallow water. The political struggle is settled among the treacherous rocks and shoals of the “Ripples,” while the parallel domestic discord finds a happy ending in Colonel Howard's death scene aboard a ship at anchor in a safe harbor. In The Red Rover (1827), similarly, almost half the narrative is devoted to the hero's efforts to get out of Newport harbor, while the events of The Water-Witch (1830) and The Wing-and-Wing (1842) take place almost exclusively in the harbors of New York and Naples respectively.

Cooper's sea novels are, that is, most often set in a “neutral ground,” to adopt the controlling image of The Spy (1821). That novel concerns the “neutral ground” between the British and American forces in revolutionary Westchester but evokes more broadly a moral “neutral ground” in which struggle the forces of law and lawlessness, justice and anarchy, principle and brute strength.² The metaphor is useful for reading the sea fiction as well, for if Cooper's nautical works are loosely structured by the “classic” dualism of maritime literature, they more pointedly describe the hero's struggle to resolve a conflict existing in the “neutral ground” of his own uncommitted spirit. The middle ground between sea and shore serves as a moral stage on which the central drama of the fiction is enacted: the hero's effort to reconcile the claims of self with the prerogatives of the various structures of authority that condition individual freedom. The most important “neutral ground” in the sea fiction is, in short, the inner arena of conflict between authority and identity.³

It is important to note that the resolution of this conflict has most often a neoclassical cast; the novels generally stress a conception of identity in which the private self is meaningful only within the context provided by legitimate authority. The Byronic strain in many of Cooper's captains is strong, and his wavering heroes are often powerfully drawn by—to quote Thomas Philbrick's description of the ocean in the early novels—a “way of life unfettered by artificial restrictions and stripped of the security of an ordered society.”⁴ But the resolutions of the majority of the sea novels, like the resolutions of the heroes' inner conflicts, most often imply a rejection of the rhetoric of liberation that characterizes The Corsair. The emotional energy generated in sea stories by the idea of rebellion accounts for the power of their most effective scenes and characters, but to stress the novels' romantic strain without acknowledging their persistent conservatism is to misrepresent them.

Cooper's sea amply illustrates this point of view. It is often a “free state of nature,” a “lawless jungle in which strength and craft are the only sanctions.”⁵ It inevitably draws rebels who exalt the prerogatives of the liberated self over the claims of legitimate authority. The Red Rover is perhaps the most remarkable of these heroes. But the ocean in Cooper's fiction is indeed a “neutral ground,” since immanent in this “lawless” realm, and often obscured by its tempestuous splendor, is a moral order—a world of law—that represents the spiritual conditions imposed on those who sail his ocean. The imperative for a Cooper hero is to properly interpret the world; whether the central symbol is the ocean or the forest, his duty is to find law where others see chaos, to discern order where others see waste, to see harmony where others find only a threatening force to be subdued or destroyed. If the churning foam provides characters like the Red Rover or Admiral Bluewater of The Two Admirals (1842) a reflection of their own “romantic celebration of wild freedom”⁶ in both public and private spheres, the same ocean offers those who see more clearly a vision of the inner laws that move the world.

The ocean is most evidently a place of law in Cooper's later sea fictions. There, the language of law—which in the novels written in the 1840s is often inseparable from religious rhetoric—dominates the maritime descriptions. As the narrator says in The Two Admirals, at sea man lives and works in the “immediate presence of the power of God” and knows first-hand not only “His earthly magnificance” but the divine “laws” embedded in His tempestuous splendor.⁷ “Ships and sea have their laws,” claims good Admiral Oakes, “just the same as the planets in the heavens” (p. 363). The Sea-Lions (1849), with its explicit theological context, provides an especially powerful argument for the presence of order beneath the churning foam. Stephen Stimson, the last in a line of homespun nautical philosophers that begins with Tom Coffin of The Pilot, speaks continually of the ocean's sacred architecture. Stimson hovers at Roswell's elbow, pouring into the captain's ear his faith that the “finger of divine Providence” controls the sea and all who sail on it. The success of the Sag Harbor sealers is due not to luck, as Gardiner would have it, but to the “sartain laws” that govern life at sea.

Stephen's simple creed is often advanced by the narrator of The Sea-Lions in language that suggests a more complex faith. At several points, the narrative is interrupted by pedagogical explanations of certain natural wonders. For instance, scientific discussions are provided of the physics behind the apparently random movements of icebergs (p. 255), the cause of the terrifying waves that seem to rise of their own will in a calm antarctic sea (p. 310), and the astronomical rationale for the puzzling seasonal fluctuations at the South Pole (pp. 347-49). The obvious effect is to both retain and rationalize the sublime. The awe and terror inspired by these natural phenomena is strongly felt, but the iron law behind the sea's apparent caprice is even more powerfully understood. Randomness, like luck, is merely an illusion, though one which may blind ignorant seamen.

This frequently repeated idea strongly suggests that the law of the sea is fundamentally a matter of interpretation. The sea presents an appearance that is strictly “incomprehensible,” since to understand all of its laws would be to understand God Himself. But the insistence on human “humility” in The Sea-Lions does not render this incomprehensibility absolute. The “secret laws” (p. 9) behind the sublime mask may, slowly and by degrees, be more and more clearly perceived by mere mortals. Mankind's ability to read the sea accurately is augmented by any number of epistemological tools: “induction, science, [and] revelation” all provide keys to God's “secret laws.” Incomprehension, superstition, and terror represent a failure of vision, a confusion of appearance with reality.

This connection between law and proper interpretation is evident enough in the novels of the 1840s but is equally a concern in earlier novels. Indeed, the theme is handled in the earlier sea stories with much more art and philosophical subtlety than in the dogmatic novels of the final period. Perhaps The Water-Witch (1830) offers the most adroit exposition of this theme. In part, Water-Witch is about the contrast between superstition and true knowledge. In this sense, the novel anticipates the theme of the rationalized sublime in The Sea-Lions; events are described that suggest the operation of the irrational or occult, only to be explained later in terms of firm natural law. The fantastical aspect of the book has been justly condemned from the time of its publication, and even Cooper recognized in the introduction he wrote for the novel in 1850 that the “ideal” element was a failure (p. vi). But the effect of introducing and then rationalizing the “ideal” is, again, to demonstrate the importance of reading the “incomprehensible” universe to get at its laws. The ship's amazing escape from the cove (pp. 220-21), the seeming metamorphosis of the Water-Witch into the Stately Pine, and the Skimmer's miraculous navigation of Hell-Gate (p. 377) are conscientiously explained in terms of submarine topography, the physics of fog and current, and the conventions of ship navigation. The sailors' failure to perceive the order behind the mystery makes them bewitched followers of the Skimmer's flag but poor masters either of their own lives or of the watery world around them.

The device of the “sea-green lady” explicitly links the theme of reading with the law of the sea. The ship's apparently animated figure-head is the central symbol of the novel, and its most important function is to represent the connection between law and the ocean. The lady is clearly identified with the water: she wears “drapery” of a “sea-green tint, as if it had imbibed a hue from the element beneath,” and her hair is like seaweed, “dishevelled” and “rich” (p. 44). She is just as clearly, though, a symbol of the law the ship sails under. The Skimmer's smuggling operation violates Queen Anne's laws in the name of the higher law of individual liberty and free trade. The codebook of the Skimmer's law is the great tome that the “seagreen lady” holds in her outstretched arms. The book, which the Skimmer consults in times of crisis, contains primarily passages from Shakespeare's plays, the significance of which are interpreted to the crew to give them courage in their dangerous work. The passages, like the ocean, are at first mysterious and even disturbing, opaque to the common seamen and to the landsmen who read them. But the Skimmer is able to see through their obscurity to the truth that warrants their inclusion in the lady's book. When Ludlow, the obtuse English officer, dismisses the lady's law as mere “superstition,” saying that he has “read the book, and can make but little of its meaning,” the Skimmer gives him a significant hint: “Then read again. 'Tis by many reaches that the leeward vessel gains upon the wind” (p. 177).

This point is emphasized in the song the Skimmer sings to his “sea-green lady” just after his conversation with Ludlow:

                                                                      Lady of mine!
More light and swift than thou, none thread the sea,
With surer keel, or steadier on its path;
We brave each waste of ocean-mystery,
And laugh to hear the howling tempest's wrath;
                                                                      For we are thine!
                                                                      My brigantine!
Trust to the mystic power that points thy way,
Trust to the eye that pierces from afar,
Trust the red meteors that around thee play,
And feerless trust the green-lady's star;
                                                  Thou bark divine!

(p. 179)

That is, the key to real knowledge is to “trust” both lady and the sea she symbolizes since each conceals behind “ocean-mystery” a “mystic power” as steady as the “stars.” The ocean, to “the eye that pierces” the “howling tempest's wrath,” is a place of beauty because it is ultimately a place of law.

The hero of such a world must evidently be a man of law or, more precisely, a man who understands the law beneath the waves and can ally the law of the sea with the law of his character. Cooper's nautical heroes are challenged to subdue, both within themselves and in their world, the impulse to lawlessness, to the “wild freedom” that nature and the human spirit offer along with the possibility of submission to the authority of Stimson's “sartain laws.” Their allegiance to the principle of legitimate order allows them to survive inner and outer anarchy and establish through their legal authority both a coherent character and a meaningful order in the moral and political world. In the deepest sense, their struggle is to forge an identity through law.

The Red Rover is typical. The action revolves around the relationship between the charming but insidious Rover and the earnest but conflicted Wilder. At its core, this relationship is a struggle between a false legal hero—a man who claims a legal authority for his actions but is in fact ruled by his lawless impulses—and a true man of law. The true hero's task is primarily to “read” correctly the world and thus realize his most profound self. The novel turns on Wilder's effort to fuse law, perception, and identity into a comprehensible moral structure. His struggle does not at all gainsay the emotional and imaginative appeal of rejecting the “artificial restrictions” of an “ordered society.” Indeed, Wilder's evident and protracted ambivalence about his allegiance to the Rover emphasizes the seductiveness of the pirate's rebellious spirit. But he must make a deliberate choice in the face of this ambivalence: He must make a reasoned commitment to a structuring context within which a coherent and constructive identity can be maintained.⁸

The reasons for the Rover's strong appeal have been well described by Thomas Philbrick in his landmark study of American sea fiction. Philbrick uses Red Rover as a primary case study to elucidate his Byronic interpretation of Cooper's early sea fiction. He says he chose to center his discussion on this book because it is “the best integrated expression of the extreme romanticism which characterizes Cooper's early treatment of maritime life.” The Rover is a “noble outcast,” the “aloof and inscrutable superman, the passionate guilt-ridden sufferer.” His wildness of character “exalts” values of “independence, daring, and honor.”⁹ There is no doubt that the Rover is a deeply attractive character; the powerful hold he has on Wilder's spirit for most of the novel is felt as well by every reader.¹⁰ But this argument understates the extent to which the Rover's “independence” is mere egotism. The Rover's law originates in, and answers to, the pirate's despotic self. Although he occasionally hints that his career is consecrated to a higher law, and although the novel's conclusion provides a clumsy vindication for this engaging pirate by picturing him a hero of the Revolution, the Rover's law derives principally from its author's whims. A careful reading of the language and imagery describing the Rover indicates that any evocation in this novel of the Byronic hero is ironic. Rather than a celebration of the Rover and his deeds, the novel offers a dark parody of Byron's “noble outcast,” a meretricious “superman” whose faith in himself as the sole legitimate lawgiver rests less on his adherence to a private sense of justice than on an imperious egotism.¹¹

As John McWilliams has pointed out, the Rover is introduced as a lawyer, but not just any sort of lawyer.¹² The Rover's initial avatar is described in some detail, including his “deep red face,” his hair, which falls “about his temples in rich, glossy, and exuberant curls,” his “voluptuous” eyes, his green frock, and the “small whip” with which, “he cut[s] the air with … the utmost indifference …” (p. 40). He is, clearly, a conventional picture of the devil. The introduction of the Dolphin's commander as a demonic attorney suggests a theme that Melville would address in rather more grand terms in Moby-Dick, the image of the captain as lawgiver, albeit of a false and destructive law.¹³ As the pirate tells Wilder early in the action, “there are no courts to protect” men at sea, so he must play King and Court with a power that may seem “a little unlimited” to a newcomer.

In fact, the Rover goes well beyond the disciplinary exigencies of life at sea. His roguish charm in the opening chapters belies the fact that he is a tyrant, and one of the most devilish sort. Though he refers frequently to the ship's “law” by which he governs, he rules the Dolphin through a private reign of terror. He employs numerous spies and agents provocateurs among his crew (p. 352), augmenting his men's sense of his authority as a malevolent omniscience: “An eye that was not seen was believed to be ever on them, and an invisible hand was thought to be at all times ready to strike or reward” (p. 345). His law is plainly “illegitimate,” a “despotic power” (p. 428) held intact by the arsenal of “muskets, blunderbusses, pistols, sabres, half-pikes, etc.” that “ornaments” the captain's cabin (pp. 117-18).¹⁴

This violence is necessary since, as the “Father Neptune” episode makes clear, the ship's order is quite precarious: The “lawless” crewmen that follow the Rover are always on the edge of mutiny and await only a momentary lapse in their Captain's vigilance to rebel (p. 337). But the intrinsic disorder of the ship's political sphere simply reflects the lawlessness of the pirate's soul. If on Cooper's ocean one's perception of the sea is a function of one's identity—if his seagoing men of law invariably “read” for the law beneath the “ocean-mystery”—the Rover's vision of the water indicates an unquiet eye. Where Wilder consistently sees the eternal geometry beneath the ocean's fury (p. 257), the Rover perceives only a “wild and fickle element” (p. 367). When the captain of this lawless vessel looks at the waves, he sees a world “not more unstable than” his violent crew (p. 419). The Rover several times frightens the innocents aboard by the “fearful contrariety of passions that could reveal themselves in the same individual, under so very different and so dangerous forms” (p. 375). He is, indeed, just a little mad.

If the Byronic hero is evoked in this and similar passages, the effect is not to glorify the pirate's rebelliousness but rather to dramatize the “dangerous” element beneath the Rover's alluring exterior. The Rover's cabin clearly illustrates this point. The room is strongly reminiscent of Poe's interiors and similarly “afford[s] no bad illustration of the character of its occupant” (p. 91). The room is a “singular admixture” of articles, including a lamp and mahogany table evidently of European origin, velvet and silk upholstery from Asia, and an odd jumble of other “peculiar” items. In short, “caprice” rather than “propriety” is the principle of the place. Again, if the Rover's Oriental exoticism alludes to Byron's interiors,¹⁵ the language of the description more clearly deprecates the “occupant's” inability to create order. This reading is confirmed by the Rover's conversation with Wilder after he ushers the latter into his “citadel.” He draws Wilder's attention first to a pile of forged and otherwise “stretched” commissions, which he uses at will to create false identities for himself and his ship as they pursue their trade. Then he leads the young man to a flag locker containing the emblems of dozens of nations under which he has plundered his victims. He opens and furls flags and commissions with a wicked nonchalance, until it is clear that the Rover is a man without identity, that beneath the successive masks he displays to Wilder there is no coherent self.¹⁶

The conventional justification of the Rover's lawlessness—that he is a man ahead of his time, and that his crimes will be absolved by the Revolution foreshadowed by his “personal war” against the British¹⁷—has been questioned by several of Cooper's best readers. As James Grossman says, when “in the end … the Rover redeems himself by dying on the American side, … it is of course the reader's and not the pirate's morality that is being redeemed. We need some excuse for liking a gentlemanly villain. …”¹⁸ McWilliams similarly refuses to take the Revolutionary excuse seriously when he argues that the Rover is not so much a “wronged libertarian” as an example of “excessive individual[ism].”¹⁹ Indeed, the emptiness of the Revolutionary rationale is exposed when the Rover tells Wilder that he began his piratical trade after he killed a man who “dared to couple the name of [America] with an epithet” too vulgar to repeat (p. 355). This is a strange patriotism; an “epithet,” vulgar or not, hardly justifies murder and a career of indiscriminate plunder. The Rover's “ghastly smile” as he explains his grotesque sense of justice suggests another of Cooper's false patriots, Ralph in Lionel Lincoln. Like Ralph's, the Rover's relationship to the Revolution is that of an evil shade. His resistance is only a rejection of authority, an affirmation of an egotistic lawlessness thinly masked by Revolutionary rhetoric. And, like Ralph's passion, the Rover's cynicism must be purged by the legitimate Revolution, the one that rebels in the name of higher law.

The Rover's lawful foil is, of course, Henry Wilder. Wilder bears the weight of the Revolution's redemption in this novel; his mastery of the Rover in light of his eventual identity as a hero of the American cause reveals that his part in the moral drama of Red Rover is to lay the foundation for the Revolution by quelling the anarchic impulses that might threaten its integrity. Wilder is throughout the novel trying to preserve the integrity both of his own character and of the law he represents against the Rover's assault. From their first meeting, it is clear that Wilder and the Rover are doubles and that Wilder's struggle in this book is to subdue the Rover within himself in order to achieve a coherent identity. That is, Wilder, like Lionel, is the moral touchstone of his novel—he is the “one who knows how to distinguish between shadow and substance” (p. 185)—and it is the drama of his contention with the devil within himself and without that is finally the subject of the novel.

The grip of the Rover's lawlessness on Wilder's spirit is in fact portrayed in Mephistophelean images. The scene in which Wilder subscribes to the ship's articles dramatizes this theme effectively. The articles, which each member of the crew must sign as a condition of service, create a rather one-sided “compact” (p. 511) between the captain and his crew. Although none of the specific terms of the law are provided, the code evidently reflects its author's harsh command. Wilder remarks that the Dolphin's “regulations” are more than “firm”; he has “never found such rigid rules, even in” the Royal Navy (p. 118). That the “compact” is merely an extension of the Rover's personal “despotism” is clear from the description of Wilder's endorsement of the law. For instance, immediately after Wilder pledges his obedience, the Rover several times refers to his new lieutenant as “mine” or, more pointedly, “my acquisition” (p. 106). Alone in his cabin after Wilder has left, the Rover's response to his purchase is a Satanic mingling of pride and guilt.

The Rover arrested his step, as the other disappeared, and stood for more than a minute in an attitude of high and self-gratulating triumph. He was exulting in his success. But though his intelligent face betrayed the satisfaction of the inward man, it … would not have been difficult for a close observer to detect a shade of regret in the lightings of his seductive smile, or in the momentary flashes of his changeful eye.

(p. 108)

The law to which Wilder assents is indistinguishable from the Rover's personal control of his spirit. As he tells Wilder later, “I angled for you as the fisherman plays with the trout” (p. 348), and in signing the ship's register the young lieutenant is as surely held captive by the Rover as when the motley lawyer traps him in the Newport tower (p. 73). Significantly, the Rover's ship is first disguised in Newport harbor as a slaver. The Rover's law is a dark oppression, stripping others of their individuality and defining them purely in relation to his imperial will.

As a man of law, Wilder must resist the Rover's “unholy” influence. Wilder's dilemma is illustrated by the clearest use in this novel of the “neutral ground” between sea and shore. A narrative sequence that extends over several chapters describes Wilder's effort to clear Newport harbor, to gain, metaphorically, the lawful order of the sea. As Wilder delicately navigates the Caroline past the disguised Dolphin, it becomes evident that his situation is delicate in more than a nautical sense. He is supposed to be working for the Rover, sailing the Caroline to an unscheduled rendezvous with the pirate on the high seas. As a gentleman, though, he feels compelled to protect Gertrude and Mrs. Wyllis from the possible depredations of the Rover's crew. As he glides past the Rover's exposed guns, he is at once anxious to pass unmolested and attentive for any signal from the “slaver” that he should stop and allow a boarding. Yet the awkwardness of his position in the narrative only reflects his deeper moral conflict. Wilder's effort to tiptoe past the Rover is a test of his authority over his ship, most conspicuously, but, most significantly, over himself:

As each successive order issued from his own lips, our adventurer turned his eye with increasing interest to ascertain whether he would be permitted to execute it; … never did he feel certain that he was left to the sole management of the Caroline. …

(p. 207)

His integrity, as a legal authority and as an individual, is threatened by his new association with the Rover. The danger to which Wilder's submission to the Dolphin's law exposes him is made plain when, even as he maneuvers to pass the slaver, he abruptly dismisses the Newport pilot, ordering his men to tumble the stricken harborman into a boat. This event is strongly emphasized: Wilder's behavior is condemned as “lawless,” and the narrative pauses clumsily as the legal consequences of the action are detailed, including the pilot's remedies and Wilder's liability if anything should happen (p. 208).

In this scene and elsewhere, Wilder is exhilarated by his flight from the law. His “eagerness” as he helps the Rover outrun the very British cruiser on which he is (in his true identity) the first officer—the ship which is, significantly, commanded by Captain Bignall, the legitimate figure of authority who rivals the Rover for Wilder's allegiance throughout—stems from the temporary unanimity of spirit Wilder feels between himself, the Rover, and the “lawless” crew. Like Oliver Edwards, when he illegally pursues the deer in the lake with Natty and John in The Pioneers, Wilder is filled with a sense of freedom and self-realization. But, as in The Pioneers, the realization here is specious. Rather than discovering himself in the Rover's service, Wilder is, as the ocean chase amply illustrates, divided against himself; his private compulsion wrenches him temporarily out of the complex of social and historical relationships by which he is inevitably defined. When he flees from Bignall's vessel, Wilder is evidently fleeing from himself, from the public identity apart from which he is incomprehensible.

The novel's final chapters, featuring Wilder's trial by the Rover's crew, offer a climax of the public and private conflict between the forces of law and lawlessness on which the novel is built. When Wilder's subterfuge is discovered, the Dolphin's crew institutes a hearing to determine the spy's fate. Their tribunal, crude as it is, and vengeful as its justice may be, is provided for under the compact that Wilder signed when he first came aboard. Like everything about the false law that rules the Dolphin, the trial is a sinister parody of the forms of civil justice. The “ancient laws” of piratical honor are invoked, and the buccaneers appoint themselves Wilder's rightful judges, the “sole ministers of mercy” aboard (pp. 496-97). Of course, Wilder is found guilty of treason against the ship's law, but before the sentence of death can be carried out, the Rover experiences a change of heart. Guided by his affection for Wilder, the Rover decides to save the young man's life by exercising his sovereign power to annul the law by which the trial is conducted. Mounting the poop to stand by Wilder, and addressing the assembled crew on the deck below, the Rover makes a speech in language familiar to an American ear:

“Years have united us by a common fortune,” he said: “We have long been submissive to the same laws. … But the covenant is now ended. I take back my pledge, and give you your faiths. … The compact ceases, and our laws are ended. Such was the condition of the service”

(p. 511)

His termination of the compact is a critical event in the novel's thematic structure, for it provides the only context within which the Rover's participation in the Revolution may be said to coherently conclude his story. The pirate's nationalistic professions are, until this point, seriously undercut by their use as rationalizations for a profitable life of plunder. But the revocation of the ship's compact creates a new public and private order that makes his role as a patriot morally credible. This is his first genuine act of law in the narrative. His repeal of his “self-enacted laws” (p. 497) makes possible, symbolically at least, the creation of a new law to replace the old, false covenant. The allusion to Jefferson's Declaration in the Rover's speech is ironic, but only half so, since the pirate's abdication from the poop deck foreshadows the impending repudiation of the legal slavery of the colonial system. The Rover's personal act of nullification provides, figuratively, the sine qua non of constitutional government. In this novel, even a democracy of thieves is preferable to a criminal despotism, since it represents an indispensable step toward a legitimate policy. Similarly, the Rover's dissolution of the covenant is the sine qua non of his moral salvation. If his honor is redeemed by his participation in the Revolution twenty years later, this redemption is comprehensible only in the context of his repudiation of false law. In order for him to be considered a hero—a man of true law, a man of the new order destined to replace a corrupt authority—he must first turn his back on the lawless world he governs.²⁰

But if the dissolution of the compact creates the conditions by which he can ultimately ransom his character, the Rover's first truly legal act more conspicuously permits Wilder to achieve a genuine self-realization. When he journeys at the end of the book from the Dolphin to the Dart, and resumes his lieutenancy aboard the royal cruiser, Wilder consolidates his identity in several ways. He learns, in one of Cooper's less convincing recognition scenes, that he is in fact Mrs. Wyllis' nephew and thus an appropriate suitor for the hand of the demure Gertrude. Like Edwards at the end of The Pioneers, he discovers in a moment his past, present, and future; his incoherent identity is suddenly given a full meaning established by social status and familial bonds. But just as importantly, his farewell to the Dolphin also represents his personal liberation from the lawlessness to which he had nearly succumbed in the Rover's service. He returns to his ship a stronger character for his brush with anarchy. When he resumes his legal identity at Bignall's side, his faith in law has matured from a mindless obedience to rules into a commitment founded on a deep knowledge that its alternative is unacceptable. Even more, though, his new awareness of the fundamental lawlessness of despotism has prepared him for his greatest role, his acceptance a quarter-century later of a command in the Continental Navy. After his experience on the Dolphin, he is equipped to be a warrior for a law that derives its authority not from force but from its ability to foster, in both the personal and political spheres, full identity.

The hero's names before and after his symbolic rebirth emphasize the link between the personal and legal resolutions. The name “Wilder,” it turns out, was only adopted for the time that he was a spy on the Rover's vessel. His name on the Dart's register is “Henry Ark.” In passing from “Wilder” to “Ark,” the young man leaves behind the “wild” element in himself and subscribes with renewed faith to a true covenant, a legitimate “ark” on which to found the future.

The nationalistic strain in the novel's resolution—the intimate connection between the resolution of the personal drama and the development of an American identity—reflects clearly the biographical and historical circumstances of the book's composition. The Red Rover is, significantly, the first of Cooper's novels written entirely in Europe. He began the tale in Paris in April, 1827, and finished it that autumn at St. Ouen, where he had installed his family in a thirty-room chateau on the Seine. Since his arrival in Paris the previous year, Cooper had been studying closely European politics, those of the French capital in particular. The Bourbons were back on the throne in 1827, but the conditions for their final removal in the Revolution of 1830 were quickly developing. Cooper, with his characteristic insight into the larger issues informing political events, linked the hardening antagonism in France between the ancien regime and the Liberals to the struggle throughout Europe between those trying to consolidate the reforms of the great Revolutions of the previous forty years and those doing their best to return the continent to a pre-Revolutionary state. He put the matter in a letter to Peter Jay:

The whole of this quarter of the world is divided into two great parties. … One side is struggling to reap the advantages of the revolutions, and the other to arrest them. Of course the latter class is composed of all those who are in possession of power and emoluments, as things are at present, aided by those who have lost by the struggle.²¹

The close connection between the French and American revolutions, and Cooper's friendship with Lafayette while in Paris, naturally led him to think of his own nation in light of this European strife. The Bourbons' reactionism represented an assault on the deepest values of the revolutionary age, and thus the very values on which America in the 1820s and 1830s so self-consciously staked its national identity.²² Cooper's acute awareness of his role as the preëminent American novelist of his day, and as such his responsibility as a sort of guardian of American values,²³ prompted a return in Red Rover to the subject of the American Revolution, and particularly the crucial period leading up to the War, in order to remind his countrymen of the purposes of that strife.

The Revolution had been the subject of three of Cooper's first five books, and the point had been generally the same in each: to establish the conditions of a legitimate national authority, in which the claims of law and self could be balanced to achieve full public and private identity. The point is made again in the Rover's character, which combines two threats to republican identity, each of which France had experienced in the wake of its Revolution. The pirate's oppressive authority on the Dolphin alludes to the danger posed by the desperate efforts of the Bourbons and their kind to regain the full power of the monarchy. On the other hand, his charismatic power—seductive, though equally oppressive—raises a spectre that would increasingly haunt Cooper's fiction after his return to America: the danger presented to the integrity of the private self and the public order by the anarchy of excessive individualism. The Rover is, in terms of Cooper's European experience, a sinister blend of the very different threats to rational liberty embodied by Robespierre and Charles X.

Significantly, Cooper turns in this monitory effort to the sea. The ocean in Rover represents a place where liberation and law meet, a place where the republican concept of full identity can be nurtured. Wilder's growth into a sense of self as part of a web of rights and obligations within an historical community takes place in a “neutral ground” in which the individual is given shape by the “sartain laws” that Stephen Stimson describes in The Sea-Lions. In Cooper's later fiction, of course, this “neutral ground” is effectively closed, and the prerogatives of authority prevail over the claims of identity. In novels like The Two Admirals and The Wing-and-Wing, Cooper's well-documented anger at the compromise of the republican sense of self by the forces of undisciplined self-interest is manifested by a more sympathetic treatment of the captain's power than in Rover.²⁴ The sea novels of the 1840s offer images of the ship's commander drawn in language that celebrates authority. The captain is typically the ship's “soul,” its omnipotent and omniscient “mind” or “master spirit,” whose firm law provides the best guarantee of both personal identity and public order. But in 1827, and as a resident of a country the promise of whose Revolution had been compromised by forces thankfully absent from America, Cooper could still believe strongly enough in the American experiment, and in the American self, to hope that the “neutral ground” of his ocean might provide a useful reminder to his countrymen of the conditions for the birth of a just nation.

Notes

1. W. H. Auden, The Enchafed Flood; or, the Romantic Iconography of the Sea (New York: Random House, Inc., 1950), pp. 8-9.

2. See John P. McWilliams, Political Justice in a Republic: James Fenimore Cooper's America (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1972). The significance of the “neutral ground” in Cooper's political fiction is a central theme in McWilliams' study.

3. See H. Daniel Peck's discussion of the conflict between “authority and freedom” in relation to the “middle hero” in “A Repossession of America: The Revolution in Cooper's Trilogy of Nautical Romances,” SR [The Sewanee Review], 15 (1976), 597-98.

4. Thomas Philbrick, James Fenimore Cooper and the Development of American Sea Fiction (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1961), p. 71.

5. Philbrick, p. 71.

6. Philbrick, p. 71.

7. James Fenimore Cooper, The Two Admirals, in Cooper's Novels, 32 vols. (New York: W. A. Townsend and Co., 1859), vol. 27, p. 550. All parenthetical page references to Cooper's novels in this essay are to this, the “Darley,” edition.

8. Peck notes the “balance” in the novel between the Rover's “reckless, lawless power” and Wilder's commitment to “civilization and law,” although he does not develop the conflict within Wilder between these forces (“A Repossession of America,” p. 598).

9. Philbrick, pp. ix, 61, 207.

10. The Rover's powerful personal attractiveness has been discussed more recently in Michael Paul Rogin's introductory essay on Melville and The Red Rover in Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman Melville (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1985), pp. 3-11.

11. Peck similarly views the Rover's Byronic element as evidence of the “dangerous” element in the pirate's character, although he does not argue that Cooper's evocation of Byron is ironic. Peck describes the pirate as “a most attractive but highly threatening Byronic hero,” a “Satanic” character who “acts out the dark side of his nature fully” (“Repossession,” pp. 597-98).

12. McWilliams, p. 66.

13. See Herman Melville's faint praise of The Red Rover in Literary World, 6 (March, 1850), 277.

14. Philbrick notes the Rover's “extraordinary fortifications” in a similar context, although for a different purpose (p. 71).

15. Philbrick, p. 62.

16. See Kay House, Cooper's Americans (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1965), p. 196. House notes that the Dolphin has “no real identity” but does not apply her analysis to the Rover's character.

17. Thomas Philbrick argues, for instance, that the Rover is only perceived as a criminal because he is a man out of time, a prophet of American nationhood, an “outlawed visionary who alone perceives the drift of history” (p. 56). His lawlessness is thus merely a “private war of Independence,” which will be vindicated by the eruption of the Revolution a quarter of a century after the events of the novel.

18. James Grossman, James Fenimore Cooper (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1949), p. 59.

19. McWilliams, p. 65.

20. For a different view of the Rover's renunciation of authority, see Daniel Peck's assertion that despite the Rover's discovery of “a lawful context for his rebellious nature” through his participation in the Revolution, the “power” of the Rover's character insures that “The Red Rover remains Cooper's most unqualified celebration of the revolutionary spirit” (“Repossession,” pp. 598-99). Parallel to this argument is Peck's description of the novel as a “celebration of the terrible sublime, a region of absolute moral and spatial freedom,” in A World By Itself: The Pastoral Moment in Cooper's Fiction (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1977), p. 144.

21. Letters and Journals of James Fenimore Cooper, ed. James F. Beard (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1960-1968), I, 418.

22. For excellent discussions of the uses to which Cooper's America put the Revolution in its effort to articulate its identity in the midst of the dramatic changes wrought by industrialization, immigration, and Jacksonian politics, see Michael Kammen, A Season of Youth: The American Revolution and the Historical Imagination (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1978), and Fred Somkin, Unquiet Eagle: Memory and Desire in the Idea of American Freedom, 1815-1860 (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1967).

23. See Stephen Railton, Fenimore Cooper: A Study of His Life and Imagination (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1978), pp. 3-4, 63-64. In this context, Lafayette's charge to Cooper when asking him to write what would become the ill-fated “Letter to General Lafayette” during the Finance Controversy is relevant: “It belongs to you,” the General told the most famous American writer of his day, to write “in vindication of republican institutions” (quoted in Letters and Journals, II, 187).

24. For Cooper's most cogent description of this tendency of American culture, see The American Democrat (1838; rpt. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, Inc., n. d.), especially (though not exclusively) the sections entitled “On the Disadvantages of Democracy” (pp. 80-87) and “On Individuality” (pp. 231-33).