SOURCE: “Dread Neptune's Wild Unsocial Sea: The Sea in American Literature Before 1820,” in James Fenimore Cooper and the Development of American Sea Fiction, Harvard University Press, 1961, pp. 1-41.

[In the following essay from his landmark study, Philbrick offers a detailed overview of the development of American sea fiction, providing a comprehensive survey of early works in the genre by both British and American writers.]

During the first half of the nineteenth century the sea occupied much the same place in the imaginations of many Americans that the continental frontier was to fill after 1850. The sea exerted the same appeal to the individual: it offered adventure, quick profit, the chance to start anew, and freedom from the restraints and obligations of society. The same national values were attached to the sea: it represented the arena of past glories, the training ground of the national character, and the field on which wealth and power were to be won for the country.

This concept did not spring full-blown in the national consciousness. Rather, it grew out of the cumulative effect of the history of maritime enterprise in colonial America; the naval victories of the Revolution, the undeclared naval war with France, and the war with the Barbary States; the steady expansion of American trade throughout the world in the early years of the new republic; and above all the astounding naval successes of the War of 1812, which seemed to indicate unmistakably the road by which the national aspirations of America were to be achieved. In the words of one popular literary magazine in 1813, “the glorious achievements of our navy” had “kindled a new and holy spirit of nationality, and enabled the humblest citizen among us boldly to say to the world that he too has a country.” It now became the duty of American literature to keep the flame of maritime nationalism burning brightly, for, the magazine proclaimed, “poetry can have no higher office among us than to embalm, in its purest essence, these brilliant deeds of heroism; to reflect, in all their lustre, the images of great and glorious triumphs; to familiarize the national mind to acts of high and generous heroism; and thus, by preserving the lofty tone of its patriotism, make the remembrance of the old become the cause of future victories.”¹

Not all of the future victories at sea were to be won in war. With the end of hostilities in 1815 the country entered what has aptly been called the golden age of American shipping, a period of thirty-five years during which American seamen came to challenge and even to displace the British hegemony of many of the most important areas of maritime activity. To the West Indian, Baltic, and Mediterranean trades, established in colonial days, and the Northwest and Canton trades, first explored in the 1780's, were added new ventures. Massachusetts vessels carried spices from the Fiji Islands, Madagascar, and Zanzibar, rubber from Brazil, sandalwood from Hawaii, and hides from California in exchange for nails, firearms, blankets, rum, and even that most abundant of Yankee commodities, ice, which, cut from Fresh Pond in Cambridge and Walden in Concord, enabled the priest of Brahma to drink at Thoreau's well. In 1816 a group of merchants in New York organized the famous Black Ball Line of packets with such success that by the late 1830's, when Cooper was creating the packet Montauk to serve as the fictional stage of his novel Homeward Bound and Melville was getting his first taste of the sea as a green hand on board a Liverpool packet, the United States completely dominated the passenger trade between New York and England.

The more prosaic elements of American maritime life displayed an equally remarkable vitality. By the 1840's the American whaling fleet comprised more than three quarters of the world's total. The deep-sea fisheries of Maine and Massachusetts, the traditional school of American seamen, enlarged to the point that in 1850 the tonnage of the American fishing fleet was over five times greater than it had been in 1815, while in the same period the flotillas of schooners, brigs, and barks that ferried cotton, sugar, lumber, coal, and granite between the ports of the Atlantic coast quadrupled in tonnage. In response to the demand from all quarters for more efficient vessels, American shipyards were developing the succession of designs that culminated in the 1840's in the perfection of the fast and beautiful clipper ship.

2

It was inevitable that this wide and varied maritime activity should find expression in the literature of a people seeking to create a national identity, for, in the first half of the nineteenth century, the ocean seemed to be as much America's peculiar domain as it had been England's in the preceding century. But if the introduction of the sea to American literature appears inevitable from the perspective of history, it seemed a difficult and doubtful venture to those who first undertook the experiment.

When American writers turned to the literature of eighteenth-century England in search of precedents and prototypes to guide their attempt to shape native maritime materials to the uses of fiction, they found little that answered their immediate needs. In the eyes of Cooper and his contemporaries, British nautical literature was dominated by the figure of Tobias Smollett, who had made extensive use of naval characters and settings in his novels Roderick Random (1748), Peregrine Pickle (1751), and The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves (1760-1761). But Smollett's work was severely limited in scope. In the first place, he employed nautical materials only incidentally: the scenes aboard H. M. S. Thunder, rich in vivid detail though they are, represent only one in the seemingly endless series of locales to which Roderick Random's wanderings take him; characters like Commodore Trunnion and Tom Pipes are of interest, not so much as seamen, but rather as two particularly colorful specimens in Smollett's collection of eccentric variants of the human species. Moreover, Smollett restricted his nautical sketching to the life of the Royal Navy. His emphasis is on the traditions of the service, on the workings of a massive organization that dominates and sometimes crushes its individual members, on the pressures and restraints to which men crowded between the decks of a man-of-war are subjected by the daily routine of naval discipline. That emphasis was appropriate to a people whose interest was focused on their huge navy as the prime instrument of national power and to an age which, committed to the values and attitudes of neoclassicism, regarded man primarily as a product and component part of the machinery of society. But American writers in the early years of the nineteenth century were addressing a nation whose naval traditions, in so far as it possessed them at all, centered on the daring exploits of heroic individuals rather than on the long history of an institution that had built and defended an empire. They addressed, too, an audience whose political philosophy was based on the value and importance of the individual, and whose literary taste was shaped by the romantic concern with external nature; man's relation to society was no longer the all-engrossing object of concern.

Smollett's most serious limitation, however, was his tone. True to the neoclassical dictum that heroism is incompatible with the realistic treatment of familiar materials, he consistently viewed the life of the forecastle and the waterfront from a satirical stance. The noblest qualities he allows his nautical characters are the dog-like fidelity of a Lieutenant Bowling or the childlike simplicity of a Tom Pipes. The stereotype that Smollett prepared for the sailor of fiction proved as durable as it was entertaining. The frank, openhearted and openhanded tar whose fun-loving temper buoys him up in his sea of hard knocks and whose salt-encrusted speech and briny eccentricities of manner separate him from the landsman (and very nearly from the entire human race) came to walk the decks of many an American fictional ship. But clearly the stereotype had outlived its usefulness for major characters; whenever the occasion called for a demonstration of the ennobling effects of long association with the sublimities of wild nature or for a democratic assertion of the common seaman's capacity for heroism, it had to be discarded.

Smollett's handling of the sea and the ship was still less useful as a pattern for American writers. Sharing the neoclassical distaste for the wild, primitive aspects of nature, he gave scant attention to the ocean, allowing it to hold the narrative foreground only in moments of storm. But for Smollett there was no suggestion of sublimity in a wind-swept sea; it was chaos returned again, a scene of desolate, inhuman violence that could evoke only terror and astonishment. Nor was the ship the embodiment of grace and the symbol of freedom that it was to be to the early Cooper. Rather, it was the microcosm of a corrupt society, a pesthouse suffused by the stench of putrid stores, a prison whose inmates were tormented by fleas and floggings and governed by malice and incompetence.

For the most part, the nautical novel in England during the first half of the nineteenth century retained the pattern established by Smollett. By the time the main stream of romanticism swept into prose fiction, Trafalgar had been fought, and England turned her attention to the consolidation of her empire and the industrialization of her economy. The front rank of British novelists relinquished the sea to a succession of retired naval officers, Marryat, Chamier, Howard, and their imitators, who, between 1829 and 1848, recalled their youthful days of service in picaresque novel after picaresque novel. If, as Cooper believed, these productions were prompted by the success of his own early nautical romances, they almost invariably turned to Smollett rather than to him for their substance and tone.

The work of Frederick Marryat, the best known of the group, is representative. In taking the scapegrace and the poor devil to sea in novels like Midshipman Easy (1836), Marryat's technique was to expand and multiply the naval episode of Smollett until it engrossed the major portion of the book. The result is a narrative that focuses its attention not on the seaman, the ship, or the ocean as such, but on the British naval service, an institution which is viewed both as a legitimate outgrowth and a necessary segment of society. In the loving concentration on the traditions, manners, and techniques of the Royal Navy, the individual retreats to the background, and the sea and the ship function only as the habitations, local and general, of the institution. Although Marryat's tone lacks the note of outrage that had converted Smollett's man-of-war into a chamber of horrors, it still does not permit his treatment of maritime life to move in the direction of the ideal. No less antiheroic and antisentimental than Smollett's, Marryat's tone is distinguished only by a cynical flippancy which so diminishes his characters that the reader is tempted to share his usually complacent acceptance of the more brutal forms of naval discipline as the proper means of governing the human animal.

If British novelists were content to follow in Smollett's wake, their American counterparts in the first half of the nineteenth century felt compelled to take a different tack. The American writer might not be fully conscious of the basis of his sense of the inadequacy of Smollett's work for his own purposes, but he could justify his experiments by regarding Smollett's treatment of nautical materials as so perfect of its kind that any further use of it could not go beyond mere imitation. As Cooper surveyed, at the end of his career, his own first attempts at the novel of the sea, he recalled that “Smollett had obtained so much success as a writer of nautical tales, that it probably required a new course should be steered in order to enable the succeeding adventurer in this branch of literature to meet with any favor.” “This difficulty,” he continued, with a sideways glance at his British competitors, “was fully felt when this book [The Red Rover (1827)] was originally written, and probably has as much force to-day as it had then, though nearly a quarter of a century has intervened.”²

Where, then, could Cooper and his American contemporaries turn for precedents offering alternatives to the satirical realism of Smollett's approach to maritime life? One possible line of development, shunned for the most part by Cooper but adopted by some American writers of short fiction, was indicated by English songs and comic drama of the later eighteenth century: the sailor could be sentimentalized, transformed into a curly-locked, graceful lad whose heart beat true for his Susan, his Nancy, or whatever sweet girl he had left behind him at the dockside in Portsmouth. The seaman had been a familiar figure on the English stage since Congreve created Ben Legend in Love for Love (1695), but throughout most of the first half of the century the stage sailor remained, like Ben Legend himself, a sea monster, a rough, hearty caricature of the kind Smollett introduced to prose fiction. In the latter half of the century, however, the sentimentality that was sweeping through English and continental literature at last began to color the treatment of maritime life. Although Smollett's tar remained the dominant type, in a few dramatic productions like Isaac Bickerstaffe's operetta Thomas and Sally; or, The Sailor's Return (1760) and in the immensely popular sea songs of Charles Dibdin the sailor underwent a significant modification. The frankness and simplicity of Smollett's characters were retained, but instead of emphasizing the seaman's grotesque eccentricity of manner and outlook, the new sentimentalism suggested that the sailor might be capable of feelings broader and more universal than his well-known fondness for piping winds, roaring seas, and flowing cans. It was now discovered that even the seaman might have a mother, a truelove, or a wife and children; that a very young sailor might feel the pangs of homesickness, and that a very old sailor might know the hardships of poverty, loneliness, and disability. If the sentimental situations in which the seaman was cast tended to make him merely pretty or merely pathetic, they at least reunited him with the rest of the human race and, in so doing, offered his feelings and concerns as subjects worthy of serious attention.

But sentimentalism, in itself, had the effect of diminishing the capacity of maritime life to evoke a sense of wonder, the central response of the romantic imagination to the sea and its affairs. Writing at the peak of romanticism in America, Cooper and his contemporaries necessarily viewed the sea from a perspective vastly different from that of their British predecessors. Their aesthetic theory placed its highest premium on the sublime; what was needed was a treatment of the ocean which would not recoil in revulsion from desolation and danger but which would interpret immense power and sweeping distance as positive values, relishing them for the feelings of awe and transcendence they called forth. Their social theory stressed the significance of man's natural environment and emphasized the attainment of freedom and individuality as his highest aims; what was needed was a conception of the ship which, by seizing on the qualities of grace and mobility, would suggest its service as an escape from the corrupting distortions and oppressive restrictions of civilized society or which, by focusing on its responsiveness and treating it as an extension of the will and strength of its crew, would lend it the aura of an epic weapon, another bow of Odysseus with which the seaman could do battle with his elemental antagonist. Obviously, neither the satirized nor the sentimentalized sailor was fitted to the titanic environment in which the romantic imagination placed him. The seaman must be a figure ennobled by his lifelong association and struggle with nature at its most sublime. He must possess courage and intelligence worthy of the stoutly built and delicately tuned ship he sailed. In sum, he must be elevated to heroism.

If the main body of British nautical literature fell short of meeting the requirements of the romantic conception of maritime life, its periphery gave some suggestion of how the fictional treatment of the sea might be infused with wonder, sublimity, and heroism. Until Daniel Defoe turned shipwreck, island survival, and piracy into matters of prosaic reality in Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Captain Singleton (1720), the sea had long served literature as an arena of marvels. In the old romances and the imaginary voyages of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the ocean, shadowy and unknown, was a setting perfectly adapted to a blurring of the borderline between probability and pure fantasy. Once embarked, the reader could expect encounters with diabolical pirates or with females disguised as sailors in an attempt to elude the attentions of amorous captains, miraculous escapes from shipwrecks, remarkable reunions of lovers long separated by wind and wave, and all the other stock motifs which the Elizabethan romance had inherited from its classical ancestors. He could expect to be carried to lands and peoples only slightly more exotic than those described in the early voyage literature which was to engross the romantic imagination of Coleridge. He could expect, too, in many of the moral tracts and pious chapbooks of the period, to view the voyage as a symbolic reflection of and commentary on man's passage through life.

The imaginative intensity and range of this older approach to nautical materials must have exerted a strong appeal to those Americans who were familiar with it, as Cooper's fondness for one embodiment of it, Shakespeare's The Tempest, testifies. But in the early decades of the nineteenth century when, as we have seen, American merchant shipping was scouring the globe in search of markets and commodities, when the American whaling industry was making even the most remote islands of the South Seas items of daily report in newspapers, and when exploring expeditions were probing the mysteries of the polar ends of the earth, the sea could no longer be taken for granted as a source of ready-made wonder. The age of romanticism was also the age of science; if readers wanted marvels, they wanted them firmly embedded in specific detail, detail that would be convincing in its fullness, precision, and authenticity. Smollett had given the general public a sense of the sounds, smells, and sights of shipboard life. Now, when the public appetite for realistic detail was being stimulated still more by the increasing relevance of the sea to American life, it would be impossible to return to the generalized characters and settings of the old romances. The problem for Cooper's age was the finding of means to intensify the impression of immediacy and authenticity that Smollett's technique gave and, at the same time, to establish and maintain a tone of high, heroic seriousness.

By the canons of orthodox eighteenth-century literary theory, the combination of nautical terminology, necessary for accurate and meaningful description, and the exalted tone of serious poetry, the tone demanded by the romantic conception of the sea, was an impermissible violation of decorum. Censuring Dryden's use of nautical terms in Annus Mirabilis, Samuel Johnson enunciated the accepted doctrine: “It is a general rule in poetry that all appropriated terms of art should be sunk in general expressions, because poetry is to speak an universal language. This rule is still stronger with regard to arts not liberal or confined to few, and therefore far removed from common knowledge; and of this kind certainly is technical navigation.” “Yet,” he went on, “Dryden was of opinion that a sea-fight ought to be described in the nautical language.” After quoting a passage stippled with words like oakum, seam, and mallet, Dr. Johnson settled the matter with quiet finality: “I suppose there is not one term which every reader does not wish away.”³

Indecorous though such terms might be, William Falconer, both a poet and a seaman, had used them freely in his long poetic study of maritime life, The Shipwreck (1762), a work that enjoyed great popularity during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in his own country and in America. If Falconer's blend of neoclassical stock phrases and concrete nautical terminology seems incongruous to the modern ear, contemporary critics were delighted by the innovation, for “who, except a poetical Sailor, the nursling of Apollo, educated by Neptune, would ever have thought of versifying his own sea-language? what other Poet would ever have dreamt of reef-tackles, hall-yards, clue-garnets, bunt-lines, lashings, lann-yards, and fifty other terms equally obnoxious to the soft sing-song of modern Poetasters?”⁴ Falconer's precedent could well have given Cooper some comfort when, in writing his first sea novel, The Pilot (1824), he was embarrassed by the discovery that, although his aim was to “avoid technicalities, in order to be poetic … the subject imperiously required a minuteness of detail to render it intelligible.”⁵

But Falconer's innovation had been almost exclusively a matter of diction. He laid the linguistic groundwork necessary for voicing the romantic concept of the sea, but his own view of maritime life reflects the eighteenth-century preoccupation with man as a product of civilization. Although he occasionally gives glimpses of the beauty of the ship and the sublimity of the ocean, Falconer concentrates his attention on seamanship as a highly developed and intricate technology, on the crew as the coordinated practitioners of that technology, and on the ship as the complex system of mechanisms they operate. The ocean, always something detached and distinct from man, is the object to which the technology is applied, a kind of raw material which can be turned to some good use by the efforts of human reason and science. As yet, literature had not taken the great step prerequisite to the creation of the sea novel as distinct from the novel which, like Roderick Random, makes extensive use of nautical materials; it had not moved the sea itself to the center of the stage, finding in it the focus of interest and significance.

By 1823, when Cooper found himself engaged in the task of originating just such a novel, the attitudes necessary for the concentration of interest and significance in the sea itself had received full and authoritative expression in the poetry of Lord Byron. The extreme romanticism of Canto IV of Childe Harold (1818) offered a startling alternative to the man-centered approach to maritime life that constituted the eighteenth-century norm. Confronted by the ocean, man dwindles to insignificance in Byron's eyes; the sea scorns his feeble strength and sends him, “shivering … and howling, to his Gods.” But the ocean is more than an embodiment of mere natural force; its vastness and awesome beauty make it the very emblem of divinity:

Dark-heaving—boundless, endless, and sublime—
The image of Eternity—the throne
Of the Invisible.

The only proper response of man to the ocean is transcendental contemplation, a contemplation that permits him to escape from his selfhood and wallow in the infinite, as Harold steals

From all I may be, or have been before,
To mingle with the Universe, and feel
What I can ne'er express—yet can not all conceal.(6)

In England, as we have seen, Byron's voice was to be little heeded by the naval novelists who, encouraged by the success of The Pilot, translated their years of service into the materials of fiction. But in America during the first two decades in which Cooper and his contemporaries explored the fictional uses of the sea, in an America surrounded on one side by a virgin continent and, on the other, by the wilderness of the sea, in an America where, long delayed by provincial isolation, the onslaught of romanticism came with especial force and intensity, Byron's note was to set the key.

From a literary point of view, the British interest in the sea during the eighteenth century, grounded, like that of the American public after 1815, in the excitement engendered by swift commercial and naval expansion, seems premature and abortive. Without the techniques and attitudes of romanticism it could produce only the naval episodes of Smollett, the sailors (salty or sentimental) of the playwrights, and the nautical verse of Falconer and Dibdin. Romanticism, in full flood when American interest in the sea reached its height, permitted a more imaginative, more sensitive, more symbolic, and, at the same time, more realistic conception of maritime life than any that the boundaries of eighteenth-century aesthetics could encompass. It offered a new perception of and response to nature; it manifested a simultaneous concern for the humbly familiar and the strangely exotic; and it invited a union of the awesome and the beautiful in the sublime. By the conclusion of the Napoleonic wars, however, England had turned her attention from the sea. It is significant, perhaps, that the only major British novelist before Conrad to attempt the extensive use of nautical materials was Sir Walter Scott, whose novel The Pirate (1822), as Cooper took pains to point out, failed to exploit those materials because of its author's ignorance of their true nature. But in the United States the sea was fresh, meaningful, and above all clearly relevant to the effort to establish a national identity: material fit for the ablest pens. The extraordinary quantity and, at times, high quality of American sea fiction in the first half of the nineteenth century can be accounted for only by the happy coincidence of an extensive and enthusiastic popular interest in maritime life and the availability of the values and perceptions of romanticism.

But appropriate though the time and place may have been for the successful fictional use of nautical materials, the resources of those materials were not to be tested with anything approaching completeness before the appearance of The Pilot in 1824. Several forces combined to retard the thorough exploitation of the sea as a literary subject in America: one of the more important was sheer inertia, the general feebleness and timidity of all literary activity in the years immediately following the Revolution. More than that, however, Americans were slow to realize the significance of the sea in their past history, their present condition, and their future prospects. The Jeffersonian emphasis on agrarianism and minimization of commerce for a time diverted the attention of Americans from the ocean; only the steady clamor of maritime growth and naval victory forced the American imagination to look seaward for profit, adventure, and glory. The early experiments that paved the way for the successful literary treatment of the sea by Cooper and his contemporaries rarely attained intrinsic artistic value. Nevertheless, they are significant as gauges of the growth of popular interest in the sea and as attempts to test and refine the means of expressing that interest.

3

The pioneer in the adaptation of American nautical materials to the uses of literature was Philip Freneau, the first in the important line of American writers who combined literary ability with a firm, practical knowledge of maritime life. Freneau, who throughout his life oscillated between the world of words as a journalist and the world of action as the master of a vessel in the West Indian trade, chose the sea as the major subject of his verse, a genre of literature he pursued with persistence, though with uneven results. Freneau's lines, whether of doggerel or of poetry, reflect almost every aspect of American maritime history from 1776 through the War of 1812: the victories of Jones and Barney in the Revolution, the opening of the China trade in 1784, the attacks on American shipping by England and France during the Napoleonic Wars, and the naval battles of 1812. At least fifty of his compositions focus on the sea, and marine allusions and images enter into many more. Taken as a whole, Freneau's sea verse represents the most substantial use of nautical materials by an American writer before the publication of The Pilot.

Unlike his contemporaries, Freneau did not restrict his treatment of maritime life to the reportorial broadside ballad or the sailor's song of the type perfected by Charles Dibdin. Ballads like “Barney's Invitation” and “On the Capture of the Guerrière” testify to Freneau's ability to compose rollicking lines filled with smoke, shot, and hearty oaths, but more important to the evolution of the literary treatment of the sea was his continued effort to utilize nautical subjects in serious poetry. Thus, The British Prison Ship (1781) represents the first major attempt since Falconer's Shipwreck to conduct a narrative of marine incidents in verse. Time and again in such poems as “The Hurricane,” “Lines Written at Sea,” and “A Midnight Storm in the Gulph Stream” Freneau tried to capture the sound, smell, appearance, and meaning of the ocean in thoughtful descriptive verse, while in poems like “The Argonaut” and “The Nautical Rendezvous” he explored the motives and nature of men who go to sea.

In adapting maritime materials to serious poetry, Freneau kept close to the path indicated by Falconer. The first canto of The British Prison Ship contains the established anomalous mixture of abstract, latinate diction, conventional personifications, and elaborate periphrases with nautical terms that are Anglo-Saxon, colloquial, and specific. Ships are “the train / That fly with wings of canvas o'er the main,” as “every sail its various tribute pays.” Yet nautical terminology gives precision and flavor to Freneau's description of the onrush of a volley of naval gunfire:

Another blast, as fatal in its aim,
Wing'd by destruction, through our rigging came,
And whistling tunes from hell upon its way,
Shrouds, stays, and braces tore at once away,
Sails, blocks, and oars in scatter'd fragments fly.(7)

The fusion of disparate kinds of diction that runs through all Freneau's serious nautical poetry offers an interesting linguistic parallel to his strangely ambivalent attitude toward seamen and the sea. Only once, in his characterization of Bryan O'Bluster, “a mate of a schooner, bespatter'd with tar,” in “Slender's Journey,” did he let Smollett's stereotype control his conception of the sailor. Bryan fits the pattern neatly: although “his life was sustained by the virtues of grog,” “to see a mean fellow, lord how it would fret him.”⁸ Like Commodore Trunnion and Tom Pipes, Bryan is less remarkable for his efficiency at sea than for his ludicrousness on land as he stumbles about, bawling nautical commands in a desperate attempt to cope with the alien world of roads and towns and carriages. Freneau's usual characterization is, if less amusing, more thoughtful. At times he views seamen through a captain's eyes as “swearing beasts / Who heaven and hell defy.”⁹ But more often admiration for this defiant courage of “the nervous race”

Who will support through every blast,
The shatter'd ship, the falling mast(10)

becomes uppermost. The sailors of Freneau's more serious verses are not mere brutes or clowns; their courage redeems them and raises them to a stature that dimly foreshadows the dignity of a Long Tom Coffin or a Jack Chase.

Freneau's admiration for the ship is strong and consistent. To him the ship is the perfect union of utility and beauty, “capacious of the freight,” and yet “a stately fabric,” “form'd, dispos'd, and order'd” in every part. The beauty of the ship becomes particularly apparent in the interplay of tensions, the dance of color and light, and the momentum of the vessel under sail, images which Freneau's blend of conventional poetic diction and technical terminology can convey with surprising effectiveness:

Too soon the Seaman's glance, extending wide,
Far distant in the east a ship espy'd,
Her lofty masts stood bending to the gale,
Close to the wind was brac'd each shivering sail;
Next from the deck we saw the approaching foe,
Her spangled bottom seem'd in flames to glow
When to the winds she bow'd in dreadful haste
And her lee-guns lay delug'd in the waste.(11)

In Freneau's verse, however, this lively grace and stately symmetry are not unalloyed values, for they serve to tempt man to sea; thus the old sailor Ralph was first lured from the comfort, society, and security of the land:

With masts so trim, and sails as white as snow,
          The painted barque deceived me from the land,
Pleased, on her sea-beat decks I wished to go,
          Mingling my labours with her hardy band;
To reef the sail, to guide the foaming prow
          As far as winds can waft, or oceans flow.(12)

If the beauty of the ship is sinister, then, it is because the sea itself is in some sense evil.

Freneau's conception of the sea is neither clear-cut nor simple. His view is not that of the eighteenth century, which, as we have noticed, saw the ocean as a destructive element that could be exploited for utilitarian purposes by the intelligence and energy of man; nor is it that of the romantics, who reveled in the power and vastness of the sea and viewed it as the emblem of sublimity and freedom. Freneau is fascinated by the sea, but this fascination stems less from its beauty than from its awful power and immensity. Whatever beauty the ocean may have is vitiated by its loneliness: “the glow of the stars, and the breath of the wind / Are lost!—for they bring not the scent of the land!”¹³ “Dread Neptune's wild unsocial sea” is not only lonely but monotonous:

Seas and skies are scenes that tire
When nothing more is to admire;
Soon we wish the land again,
Nature's variegated scene.(14)

Worse than loneliness, worse than monotony, is the constant threat of death on the ocean, “that inlet to eternity.” Freneau's verse is filled with striking images of death at sea, where too often beauty serves only as the mask of horror:

Though now this vast expanse appear
With glassy surface, calm and clear;
Be not deceiv'd—'tis but a show,
For many a corpse is laid below.(15)

“The Argonaut,” Freneau's most successful nautical poem, stresses the pathos and terror of the seaman's grave, unmarked and insecure:

          When conquered by the loud tempestuous main,
On him no mourners in procession wait,
          Nor do the sisters of the harp complain.—
On coral beds and deluged sands they sleep,
          Who sink in storms, and mingle with the deep.
'Tis folly all—and who can truly tell
          What storms disturb the bosom of that main,
What ravenous fish in those dark climates dwell
          That feast on men …”(16)

The essential significance of the ocean to man, then, lies in its capacity to demonstrate human impotence before the majestic might of nature. In the storm “skill and science both must fall,” for God, not man, controls the sea:

How feeble are the strongest hands,
          How weak all human efforts prove!—
He who obeys, and who commands
          Must await a mandate from above.(17)

The reward of maritime life is an awareness of a truth that Freneau's English contemporary George Crabbe phrased succinctly: confronted by the ocean, “Man must endure—let us submit and pray.” Yet, at the same time, Freneau derives a kind of stoical delight from the contemplation of an almost inevitably disastrous encounter with superhuman power, for the sea can serve as the supreme proving ground of courage, endurance, and resignation. With Captain Jones he invites man to put himself to the test:

If thou has courage to despise
The various changes of the skies,
To disregard the ocean's rage,
Unmov'd when hostile ships engage,
Come from thy forest, and with me
Learn what it is to go to sea.(18)

In this conception of the voyage as ordeal, Freneau returned to the traditional center of efforts of the human imagination to read the meaning of maritime experience; the voyager becomes the type of all mankind in confrontation with the ultimate realities of life, realities that at once display man's capacity for nobility and lay bare his essential frailty.

4

It is no cause for wonder that Freneau, whose response to the ocean was compounded of this curious mixture of aversion and fascination, expressed an uncertain view of the maritime destiny of America. His subscription to the Jeffersonian doctrine of agrarianism further checked whatever interest he felt in the expansion of American naval and commercial power. In his writings on the subject he consistently minimized the place that the sea was to hold in his country's future; yet, at the same time, he could not restrain his admiration for the men who dare the hardships and terrors of the ocean:

To every clime, through every sea
The bold adventurer steers;
In bounding barque, through each degree
His country's produce bears.—
How far more blest to stay at home
Than thus on Neptune's wastes to roam,
Where fervors melt, or frosts congeal—
Ah ye! with toils and hardships worn,
Condemn'd to face the briny foam;
Ah! from such fatal projects turn
The wave dividing keel.

Although the blessings of life at home seem pale indeed in the midst of this song of “the bold adventurer” and his “bounding barque” with its “wave dividing keel,” the fact that they are mentioned at all in this context separates Freneau sharply from his Federalist contemporaries.¹⁹

Even in his verse on the War of 1812, a war which Freneau supported with all his energies, the expression of maritime nationalism is subdued. Freneau is content to preserve the status quo; America's aim is “our trade to restore as it stood once before.” His most extravagant boast is that the American navy is equal in some respects to that of the British. He assures his readers that “our hearts are as great / As the best in the enemy's fleet.” American officers have mastered the techniques of maneuvering fleets; on Lake Erie they “show'd the old brag” that “we, too, could advance in a line.”²⁰ Bravado of this sort seems the epitome of restraint in comparison to the claims and prophecies of Freneau's fellow ballad writers. One of these pictured the heavenly Thrones, Angels, and Principalities assigning the Atlantic to Columbia with these words:

No more shall Albion rule the waves,
For you the broad Atlantic heaves,
          And own[s] your proud control!
For you she visits every shore,
Wafts India's treasures, Afric's ore,
          And wealth from pole to pole!(21)

Another envisioned a still wider domain:

Columbia's eagle flag shall fly all fearless o'er the
          flood,
To every friendly name, a dove—to foes—a bird of
          blood.
We'll bear the blessings of our land where'er a wave
          can flow.(22)

To Edwin Holland of Charleston the naval victories of 1812 clearly demonstrated that the ocean was “the region of Glory, / Where Fortune has destin'd Columbia to reign,”²³ and they inspired Benjamin Allen of New York to pen Columbia's Naval Triumphs, 1302 lines of heroic couplets in commemoration of Hull, Bainbridge, Perry, and their colleagues. Even the future author of “The Old Oaken Bucket” submerged sentiment in patriotic frenzy and joined the chorus:

Huzza, huzza, huzza, huzza, huzza, boys,
Free is our soil, and the ocean shall be free;
Our tars, shall Mars, protect beneath our stars,
And Freedom's Eagle hover o'er the sea.(24)

The popularity of sea ballads in the years following 1812 was nothing new, but their American authorship and nationalistic content were. Before 1812 the overwhelming majority of popular naval songs were of British origin.²⁵ The author of A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts deplored this situation and, in issuing a call for the production of American sea songs, summed up neatly both the nationalistic function of such songs and the formula by which they are concocted:

The English naval muse, which I presume must be a Mermaid, half woman and half fish, has, by her simple, and half the time nonsensical songs, done more for the British flag than all her gunnery or naval discipline and tactics. This inspiration of the tenth muse, with libations of grog, have actually made the English believe that they were invincible on the ocean, and what is still more extraordinary the French and Spaniards were made to believe it also … Is not this business of national songs a subject of some importance? Love and Patriotism, daring amplification, with here and there a dash of the supernatural, are all that is requisite in forming this national band of naval music … For want of native compositions, we had sung British songs until we had imbibed their spirit, and the feelings and sentiments imbibed in our youth are apt to stick to us through life. It is high time we had new songs put in our mouths.²⁶

But by 1816, when it was first published, this complaint was fast becoming obsolete. Although Americans still clung to the comic and sentimental sea songs of Bickerstaffe and Dibdin, their mouths were amply provided with patriotic naval ballads of a thoroughly American character.²⁷

5

The drama, as well as verse, reflected the growing hold of the sea on the American imagination in the years before The Pilot appeared. English plays containing nautical characters or naval settings had long been popular. Ben Legend first greeted a New York audience in 1750 when Congreve's Love for Love was played at the Nassau Street Theater. In 1767 Smollett's nautical farce The Reprisal enjoyed four performances on the Philadelphia stage. But the two outstanding successes seem to have been Bickerstaffe's operetta Thomas and Sally, which was produced seven times in Philadelphia between 1766 and 1799, and Cross's comedy The Purse; or, The Benevolent Tar, which received eight productions in the same city between January 1795 and January 1797.²⁸

Although no Freneau arose among American playwrights to challenge English supremacy in the nautical drama, the productions of plays written by Americans and having American marine characters and settings steadily increased in number. As in verse, the connection between American nautical drama and the history of American maritime growth is close and strong. The earliest American nautical drama on record, “The American Citizen,” produced in New York on February 3, 1787, celebrated the achievement of the Empress of China, the first ship to fly the American flag in Chinese waters.²⁹ The difficulties with the North African corsairs inspired a spate of plays and musical entertainments that were quick to exploit a situation which afforded a convenient opportunity to combine nautical characters, exotic settings, and nationalistic themes. Although many of these productions are no longer extant, enough survive to provide a clear picture of the genre. James Ellison's The American Captive (1812) is a representative example. Ellison stresses his nationalistic intentions, pointing out that “the Drama embraces a subject which is calculated to awaken the feelings of the American reader, as it depicts some of the sufferings to which our sea-faring brethren were exposed prior to the conclusion of the treaties with the Barbary powers,” but “as the Drama is of a national cast, party reflections are studiously avoided, and such sentiments introduced as will be congenial with the feelings of every lover of his country.” Into the setting of palms and palaces bursts Jack Binnacle, an American sailor now enslaved by the Moslems. Jack is a regular-built Dibdin tar; he cheers his comrades with sentiments as bogus as the lingo in which they are phrased: “But never mind, my boys, let the storm blow high or low, the true sons of Neptune never flinch. We'll weather the cape yet, my hearties.” This speech is followed, of course, by a rousing sea song. Jack is the perfect vehicle for the author's nationalism, for, like his English prototypes, he is all patriotism: as he assures his captors, “hang me at the yard arm, if I hadn't rather fight 'till my heart-strings snap, than be tributary to any nation.” Jack may be a tiger in battle, but, true to the stereotype, he is a lamb in love, for “you must know that the heart of a sailor, though invincible when attack'd by his country's foe, is at once overcome when assail'd by the sparkling eyes of a pretty girl!” Jack's patriotic exhortations are capped by the glorious naval spectacle which concludes the play; as two midshipmen sing a duet descriptive of the bombardment of Tripoli, stage directions indicate a scene that must have challenged the ingenuity of any producer:

A distant view of Tripoli by moon-light. The American fleet drawn up in a line of battle before the city … On signal from the Commodore's ship several bomb-ketches weigh anchor and stand in for the city … Several Tripoline corsairs come out and attack them … Several boats blow up … Several bastions open fire on the ketches, which is returned by the American frigates.³⁰

Meanwhile, other and better playwrights were experimenting with a more realistic portrayal of nautical characters and life. A. B. Lindsley's Love and Friendship, written, according to the author's prefatory note, in 1807, is a conventional sentimental comedy that is saved from insipidity by the inclusion of lively and convincing marine elements. It is true that Jack Hardweather, the servant and companion of the hero, resembles closely the traditional old salt of the stage; his speech is heavily interlarded with oaths and nautical metaphors, but at least he neither sings nor falls in love. Like Binnacle, he is a rampant patriot, but he does not studiously avoid partisan politics. Appropriately enough, Hardweather is an enemy of Jefferson's isolationism and jealousy of the navy. And appropriately, too, his nationalism is at its height when he is feeling his liquor: “So to the devil we kick all non-non-importa-tation acts, drydocks, gun boats, Carter's mountain, and protect ourselves like men, by fortifying our har-harbors and building seventy fours and frigates to keep a look-out ahead for our enemies and foul weather, my boys!”³¹

But the character of Hardweather is not the only nautical element in Love and Friendship. Much of the action takes place along the waterfront of Charleston, South Carolina, a major port in the early nineteenth century and a natural setting for the introduction of Captain Horner, master of the coasting schooner Peggy, and his hand Jonathan. In the speeches of Jonathan life aboard “the ole Peggy” is sketched lightly but with rare realism:

I and capun Horner sails in a scheuner … Why sometimes I acts cook, steward, cabin boy, sailor, mate, and bottle washer, for matter 'f that, for there's on'y four on us aboard on her; I and the Prentuss, and cousin Bill, and capun Horner; so when 'e's ashore I plays the skipper.

Informal as this arrangement may seem, Horner's discipline is severe: as Jonathan tells us, “I spose I may's well go aboard then for sartan for ell be tarnation mad 'f 'e finds out I on'y been ashore a while, and kick up hell and leetle Tomy.” The Peggy's accommodations are limited, for, as Jonathan frankly informs some prospective passengers, “you won't want for nothen at all on'y what we aynt got—and that's every thing, that's confurbal.”³² In these few lines Lindsley thus outlines his portrait of a humble yet important aspect of American maritime life. Freneau, at one time the skipper of a coaster plying between New York and Charleston, could have vouched for its authenticity.

Such experiments in the credible depiction of seamen and shipboard life on the stage were soon abandoned, as dramatists rallied to the cause of nationalism at the outbreak of the War of 1812. Like their colleagues the verse writers, with each naval victory they hammered home to the American public the importance of the sea to the national past, present, and future. In plays, pageants, and musical extravaganzas they recounted the prowess of the navy in the Revolution, the Tripolitan War, and the present conflict, and emphasized again and again the doctrine that the sea was the prime source of future national power. The victory of the Constitution over the Guerrière (August 19, 1812) was hailed in New York by Dunlap's Yankee Chronology on September 7, in Philadelphia by “The Constitution; or, American Tars Triumphant” on September 28, and in Boston by “The Constitution and the Guerrière” on October 2.³³ Similar productions commemorated each succeeding naval battle throughout the remainder of the war.

Although the vast majority of these effusions have not survived, sufficient evidence remains to indicate their nature. Most of them were not plays but “olios”: hodge-podges of orchestral music, songs, recitations, and pantomimes, all played against elaborate scenery. An advertisement in the Baltimore Federal Gazette (October 1, 1813) describes an olio which was presented on the same bill with Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer and the comic opera “The Heroes of the Lakes” (itself commemorative of the battle of Lake Erie):

On this evening the curtain will rise to a national air and discover (for the first time here) an entire new drop scene representing a splendid temple. In the centre a Rostral Column commemorative of the first seven naval victories achieved by the navy of the United States. The whole painted by Mr. Worrell and assistants, expressly for the occasion. After the play a monody on the late Capt. Lawrence and Lieut. Burroughs, to be spoken by Mrs. Mason. Between the play and the opera will be exhibited a grand naval transparency painted by Mr. Jefferson. The genius of America is seen seated on a rock upon the borders of a lake, presenting to an infant figure of Fame, illustrative of the growing splendor of our naval band a portrait of the youthful hero Commodore Perry. In the perspective a distant view of the enemy's captured fleet at the moment of its being taken possession of by its valiant conqueror and surmounted by our national flag.³⁴

William Dunlap's Yankee Chronology, one of the few of these ephemeral productions that was published, is a less pretentious but equally patriotic piece. This short “musical interlude” opens with a dialogue on a street in New York; Ben Bundle, a young member of the crew of the Constitution, which has just returned from her victory over the Guerrière, describes the feat to his father Old Bundle and a friend, O'Blunder, with both spirit and technical precision. On the nineteenth of August, as Ben and his shipmates “were cruising in latitude 41, 42 north, longitude 55, 33 west, at 2 p.m. a sail hove in sight to the southward—all hands ahoy to make sail—and before you'd say peas, we had her under top sails, stay-sails, and top ga'nt-sails. Oh! twould have done your heart good to see how she made the sea foam, while every sail swelled like the hearts of her crew at sight of the bragging tyrants of the ocean.” Ben, unlike the conventional sailor of eighteenth-century literature, is not treated satirically, nor is he sentimentalized as was Dunlap's earlier sailor Jack Bowlin in Fraternal Discord, first performed in 1800. His use of technical terms suggests his professional ability, and his heroic descriptions of his ship and her crew lend him a certain dignity as a participant in the battle. Significantly, too, Dunlap's sailor is not exploited as a source of humor. Rather, by a device that Cooper was to employ in The Red Rover and Jack Tier, the nautical ignorance of Old Bundle and O'Blunder provides the comedy, feeble though it is:

Ben. We reefed our top-sails, hauled in our courses, and sent down the royals.

Bund. That's right, Ben, down with the royals!—thats an old yankee trick! …

Ben. She blazed away like a barn a fire—we stuck to her like true yankee tars—every shot told—

O'Blun. What did they say, Ben?³⁵

This hilarious exchange is followed by the rousing title song, which celebrates both the victories of the Revolution and the recent triumph over the Guerrière.

The production of reportorial pieces like Yankee Chronology naturally declined with the end of the war. But by that time the writers of prose fiction in America were demonstrating their growing interest in maritime subjects and their increasing ability to adopt such subjects to the themes and forms of literature.

6

The earliest American example of the extensive use of nautical elements in prose fiction is a strange little volume entitled The History of Constantius and Pulchera; or, Constancy Rewarded, an anonymous chapbook first published in 1794 in Boston. Significantly, in the light of the early sea novels of Cooper, the author of Constantius and Pulchera eschewed the pattern of satirical realism established by Smollett and harked back to the still more antique conventions of the romance. Into this tale of the American Revolution he injected nearly the whole catalogue of stock incidents found in classical and Elizabethan romances: abduction aboard ship; shipwreck and miraculous rescue; the assumption of a masculine disguise by the heroine; and a series of sudden separations and remarkable reunions. As several critics have pointed out, the resulting conglomeration of incident is extravagant to the point of absurdity.³⁶ The hero is snatched from the arms of the heroine by an English press gang on the banks of the Delaware. Forced by her father to embark for France with a wealthy suitor, the heroine rejoins her lover when the British ship in which he is serving captures her vessel. But shipwreck separates the pair once again. After miraculously floating ashore on a hatch, the heroine is picked up by a privateer from New York. Just before her rescuers are captured by an English sloop of war, the heroine dresses herself as a lieutenant, a disguise which she successfully maintains throughout still another shipwreck, another rescue by an American privateer, another capture by a British cruiser, imprisonment at Halifax, and a final sequence of escape, capture, and rescue which leaves the reader winded and the heroine at Bordeaux, reunited at last with her lover.

But in spite of all this prolonged and violent nautical action, the author of Constantius and Pulchera gives almost no sense of the presence of the ship, the sailor, or the sea. He makes little attempt to characterize the hero and heroine, let alone the officers and crews of his vessels. The ships, never named or described, are differentiated only by mention of their nationality and an occasional reference to their general type. The sea itself serves only as a setting that makes possible extravagant adventure, for the author neither indicates any attitude toward it nor attempts to describe it except in storms. Even in those descriptions of storms, he fails to cut through the pattern of convention to the creation of a sense of reality. Rather, the storms of Constantius and Pulchera follow a formula as old as the Aeneid: “a most beautifully serene day” is suddenly obscured by “a prodigiously black cloud” accompanied by raging winds and mountainous waves; amid the “dreadful peals of thunder” are heard the “fruitless cries and lamentations” of the seamen as the rigging and spars begin to break up; at last the shock of contact with a shoal is felt, and the sea makes its “fatal inroad.”³⁷

Conventional though the action and description of the book are, the author has made some attempt to particularize his story by embedding it in a historical setting. The threat of the press gang in Philadelphia during the British occupation, the details of the prison at Halifax, and the inclusion of the privateer from Salem in “Essex County, Massachusetts State,” all incongrously concrete and specific details in the midst of this stylized and shadowy tale, are tentative efforts of the author to link his romance with the historical reality of an important era in the development of maritime America; as such, they anticipate the method which Cooper, using many of the same conventions, was to follow in his early sea romances.

In sharp contrast to the methods and intent of the author of Constantius and Pulchera, Royall Tyler's picaresque novel The Algerine Captive (1797) ignores the conventions of romance and, following the precedents of Defoe and Smollett, attempts to cast an aura of credibility over the narration of nautical adventure. Purporting to be the record of the experiences of its narrator, Dr. Updike Underhill, Tyler's novel is characterized by a quantity of reportorial detail and a tone of factual statement that are so convincing that at least one contemporary English reviewer mistook the book for a narrative of actual events.³⁸ Although most of the peregrinations of Dr. Underhill are by water, maritime material appears infrequently; when it does, however, it is treated with effective realism. Tyler makes good use of his knowledge of nautical technicalities and eye for detail in his descriptions of ships. A certain Moslem vessel, for example, is strangely rigged, “having two masts, a large square main sail, another of equal size, seized by the middle of a mainyard to her foremast, and, what the sailors call, a shoulder of mutton sail abaft.” Underhill's ship outruns an Algerine rover by “putting out all her light sails, being well provided with [r]ing sail, scudding sails, water sails, and driver.”³⁹ In its stress on technical precision and authenticity, The Algerine Captive emphasizes what was to become a major concern of Cooper, a staunch admirer of Tyler's novel.

Another aspect of The Algerine Captive looks forward to Melville, rather than to Cooper. Just as Smollett in Roderick Random had emphasized above all the sordidness and brutality of shipboard life, so Tyler reserves his most extensive and compelling treatment of the ship and seamen for the ironically named slaver Sympathy:

[The] wretched Africans were transported in herds aboard ship, and immediately precipitated between decks, where a strong chain, attached to a staple in the lower deck, was rivetted to the bar … then the men were chained in pairs, and also handcuffed, and two sailors guarded every twenty: while the women and children were tied together in pairs with ropes, and obliged to supply the men with provisions, and the slush bucket; or, if the young were released, it was only to gratify the brutal lust of the sailors … The eve after we had received the slaves on board, all hands were piped on deck, and ordered to assist in manufacturing and knotting cat o'nine tails, the application of which, I was informed, was always necessary to bring the slaves to their appetite … In vain were the men beaten. They refused to taste one mouthful; and, I believe, would have died under the operation, if the ingenious cruelty of the clerk … had not suggested the plan of whipping the women and children in sight of the men; assuring the men they should be tormented until all had eaten.⁴⁰

In this passage and others like it, then, Tyler became the first writer after Smollett to unite the fictional treatment of the sea with the cause of humanitarianism. With the exception of William Leggett and Nathaniel Ames, no American writer of sea fiction before Melville followed Tyler's example.

Like the playwrights who dealt with the North African corsairs, Tyler sounds the trumpet of nationalism in decrying the destruction of American shipping and the enslavement of American citizens. But Tyler was no chauvinist; his praises of American liberty are always qualified by the irony of their conjunction with his description of the American slave trade. He makes repeated references to the growth and prosperity of the American merchant marine, but it is the English “who seem formed for the command of the sea.” Tyler's attitude toward the payment of tribute to the Barbary States typifies the cautious practicality of his nationalism. In her present state of weakness America is justified in following the example of the European maritime countries by “concluding, what some uninformed men may esteem, a humiliating, and too dearly purchased peace with these free booters.” But Tyler offers hope for the future assertion of our national power. In the stirring plea for national unity that concludes the book, the author exhorts his readers to “perceive the necessity for uniting our federal strength to enforce a due respect among other nations.”⁴¹ It is apparent that the history of Dr. Underhill is designed not only to entertain the reader, but, by appealing to his pride in the potential physical and moral greatness of his country, to show him the evils of dissension among factions and sections and of hypocritical indifference to the national ideals.

With the publication of Constantius and Pulchera and The Algerine Captive, American novelists had essayed both of the conventional approaches to the fictional treatment of maritime life: the nautical romance, the heir to the extravagant devices of classical and Elizabethan fiction, and the pseudovoyage, the offspring of Defoe's concern for verisimilitude. But in the tentative and exploratory works of sea fiction that appeared in America before 1823, neither convention established even a temporary supremacy. Thus the nationalistic spirit of the War of 1812, a major stimulus to the literary use of American nautical materials, could find expression in both Waterhouse's Journal of a Young Man (1816), an account so convincing and so full of circumstantial detail that the reader hesitates to accept it as fiction, and The Champions of Freedom (1816), Samuel Woodworth's romance of the preposterous career of George Washington Willoughby, a child of nature who is guided along the paths of national duty by the Mysterious Chief, the personification of the American ideal. Although its nautical material is less extensive, The Champions of Freedom is the more interesting of the two, because it directly anticipates in its general intent the early historical romances of Cooper. In Woodworth's novel the historical elements of the tale move from the shadowy background of Constantius and Pulchera to a position at the front of the stage. That this shift of emphasis was not entirely of Woodworth's volition⁴² is reflected in the flabby structure of the book. As the hero, an officer in the American army, dashes from one amatory or military engagement to another, the progress of the war in other quarters is reported to him and the reader by letters from friends who happen to be serving conveniently in the Constitution or with Macdonough's squadron on Lake Champlain. Throughout the book, however, Woodworth maintains a steady effort to create a nationalistic frame of heroic proportions within which his characters play out their stories. In Woodworth's eyes the battles of the present war merge with the triumphs of the Revolution to form one continuous pageant of the growing glory and power of America. Not content to let historical events speak for themselves, he tries to symbolize this glory and power in the figure of the Mysterious Chief. Although the Chief, who asks the hero to “think of me as an allegory,” is indeed an absurd and clumsy device, he represents an important attempt to give literary expression to the idea that there is such a thing as an American history and that this history serves to indicate the route by which the nation is to achieve a glorious destiny.

In the adoption of nautical material to the demands of fiction, however, The Champions of Freedom represents no significant advance. Although the hero meets Bainbridge, Decatur, and Perry, no report of their conversation is given. A seaman makes an appearance in the person of William O'Hara, an Irishman who, having escaped from the English frigate Macedonian in which he was forced to serve, enlists in the American navy. But aside from a good coat of tan and the occasional use of a few conventional nautical metaphors, O'Hara seems totally uninfluenced by his profession. The descriptions of naval battles in the letters of the hero's seagoing friends are chiefly concerned with the statistical detail of numbers involved and casualties. Occasionally, however, a correspondent pauses to comment on the implications of a victory like that of the Hornet:

The sinking of the British sloop of war Peacock … in fifteen minutes, will fill England with amazement and dismay … [It] is a circumstance so extraordinary, that it impresses the minds of our countrymen with an exultation mixed with solemnity! Is it merely our prowess—or is it the finger of Heaven pointing to the path of our future glory?⁴³

In response to the stimulus of the victories of 1812, the novel thus had joined with the drama and verse in echoing and strengthening the new awareness of the significance of the sea in the American past and future. But the fiction of the war has little intrinsic worth; its slight and occasional literary values are submerged under the double burden of reportorial detail and jingoistic sentiment.

An event far more remote than the war prompted Charles Lenox Sargent to write The Life of Alexander Smith (1819), the most successful extended treatment of nautical subjects in American prose fiction before the appearance of The Pilot. The bulk of Sargent's little known pseudovoyage pertains to the theme of island survival, but, unlike Robinson Crusoe, it is steadily informed by a concern and admiration for the seaman as such. Based on the history of the mutineers of the Bounty, The Life of Alexander Smith is noteworthy in that it gives a full-length portrait of a seaman who is neither a landsman in nautical clothing nor a stereotyped caricature. More than that, the portrait is painted against a vivid and detailed background of American maritime activity in the closing years of the eighteenth century.

The subject of Sargent's novel is Alexander Smith, the mutineer of the Bounty who, under the name of Jack Adams, became the patriarch of Pitcairn Island. Purporting to be an autobiography written for the benefit of Smith's descendants, the book is an imaginative extrapolation of the few known facts of Smith's life. Significantly, Sargent converts Smith into an American;⁴⁴ he is, in fact, the paragon of Yankee seamanship. Like the author, he is a native of Gloucester, Massachusetts. After receiving his early training in the art of the sailor as a member of the Grand Banks fishing fleet, Smith ships on a Gloucester schooner for Bristol, England, and there joins a brig bound for Bombay. Abandoned on an island near Madagascar, he turns the habitual ingenuity and skill of the Yankee seaman to good advantage: he builds a vessel on the model of the Chebacco boats of his home port and in it manages to reach civilization. Upon his return to the United States he embarks on a ship engaged to hunt seals on the islands off Chile and to trade for furs with the Indians of the Northwest Coast. Left with a sealing party on St. Felix Island for the winter, Smith is forced once again to rely on his own resourcefulness for survival when all but one of his companions are drowned. At last his vessel returns to pick him up and heads for the vicinity of Nootka Sound. Smith, tiring of his shipmates and eager for new adventure, persuades the captain to put him ashore so that he may sojourn with the Indians. When the Indians set him to work constructing a boat for the chief, he decides to seek an easier berth. He steals the vessel he has built, reaches Tinian, journeys to England, and signs on as an able seaman aboard the Bounty. From this point on, the plot closely follows the accepted version of the mutiny and of the settlement of Pitcairn, with one important deviation. According to Sargent's story, the settlement is not plunged into a bloodbath of violence; rather, Smith and Christian establish from the start a happy and prosperous community. Sargent accounts for Smith's assertion to later visitors that he is the sole surviving white man as a device to protect Christian and the others, who are hiding in the hills, from punishment by the British authorities.⁴⁵

In attempting to link the Bounty incident with America and to portray that most important of all early American maritime ventures, the Northwest trade, Sargent was forced to do violence to the facts of history, for no American vessels were engaged in the Northwest trade before 1788.⁴⁶ Although the chronology of Sargent's book is hazy, Smith's service aboard the Northwest trader must have occurred before December 23, 1787, the date the Bounty sailed from Spithead. But in spite of this anachronism and the extravagant improbability of the experiences assigned to Smith, Sargent's novel impresses the reader by its quiet, convincing tone of authenticity. In part this effect results from the inclusion of a great amount of accurate detail, detail which makes Smith's exploits credible and their exotic settings real.⁴⁷ But the authenticity of Alexander Smith springs from more than the verisimilitude produced by a factual background. It is partially the result of Sargent's ability to maintain a diction and syntax appropriate to a literate seaman like Smith; the language of the book is idiomatic and natural, never the impossible jargon of the stage sailor nor the stilted, colorless speech of the typical ideal character. It results, too, from the inclusion of information concerning local customs and habits, information that ties the story to a particular time and place; it is hard to imagine a detail which suggests more richly or economically the Gloucester of the late eighteenth century than Smith's recollection that “as soon as I could haul a brick into the garret window from the ground … I was strong enough to haul codfish out of the water.” Above all, Sargent's novel is convincing because it is grounded on a perceptive understanding of the motives and nature of man; just as readily as we accept Taji's motives for leaving the Arcturion in Melville's Mardi, we are satisfied by Smith's reasons for his desire to shake off his shipmates and live with the Indians:

On this voyage we were put on short allowances of every thing. The captain and officers had become soured and morose; and the case was very evident, we had lived too long together, and were heartily tired of the voyage, and each other … Sooner than live in hot water continually, with such a quarrelsome and disaffected set, I preferred taking my chance on shore among savages.⁴⁸

Sargent's achievement, then, was twofold. In adapting the materials of American maritime life to the pseudo-voyage, he sketched a panorama of American seamen and their activities that was not surpassed before the appearance of Cooper's Afloat and Ashore. Equally important, Sargent was the first novelist, British or American, to treat a nautical character fully and seriously. Smith, unlike Defoe's Crusoe or Captain Singleton, is not only a thorough seaman; he is invested with dignity and a capacity for heroic action. The very nature of Sargent's purpose and material dictated such a characterization. If Smith was to represent the Yankee sailor par excellence, he must not be diminished by satire or softened by sentiment. Moreover, the known facts of Smith's actual accomplishments enforce respect; no stage sailor could become the patriarch of Pitcairn.

As yet, however, American writers apart from Freneau had expressed little of the romantic feeling for the sea and the ship that Cooper was to bring to the novel. The first evidence of the full impact of romanticism on the image of the sea in American literature came in a brief sketch by Washington Irving. “The Voyage,” contained in the first number of The Sketch Book (1819), is important not only for its priority, but for the dominant influence it was to exert for many years on the tone and content of the American short sea story. In Irving's sketch the sea is no longer entirely divorced from humanity; it is no longer merely an impersonal force against which man pits his courage, strength, and wit to achieve utilitarian ends, nor is it primarily a revelation of the power of a wrathful God. In Irving's eyes, as in Byron's, the sea assumes a new significance through its effect on the human imagination and emotions; it becomes an aesthetic object to be savored for the capacity of its beauty to delight, its immensity to awe, and its danger to excite. Irving's reveries at the maintop, anticipating those of the dreamy romantic at the masthead of Melville's Pequod, exemplify the new cultivation of wonder:

There was a delicious sensation of mingled security and awe with which I looked down, from my giddy height, on the monsters of the deep at their uncouth gambols … My imagination would conjure up all that I had heard or read of the watery world beneath me: of the finny herds that roam its fathomless valleys; of the shapeless monsters that lurk among the very foundations of the earth, and those wild phantasms that swell the tales of fishermen and sailors.

In his description of a storm, too, Irving's emphasis is subjective. One ingredient of the formulaic storm of classical and Elizabethan romance is the representation of the fright of the sailors. But in Irving's account the emotional effect of the storm is not merely one of several equally important elements; it dominates the passage. Adjectives such as “terrible,” “awful,” and “frightful” receive heavy stress. The presence of the observer is held before the reader's consciousness by the reiteration of the verb “seemed”: the clouds “seemed rent asunder” by the lightning, the thunder “seemed echoed and prolonged by the mountain waves,” that the ship remained upright “seemed miraculous,” the waves “seemed ready to overwhelm her.” And in each of these phrases the hyperbolic imagination of the observer intensifies the force of the storm. The concluding sentence of the passage illustrates this new interplay of the human imagination and natural force in its full development:

As I heard the waves rushing along the side of the ship, and roaring in my very ear, it seemed as if death were raging round this floating prison, seeking for its prey: the mere starting of a nail—the yawning of a seam, might give him entrance.⁴⁹

The sea is no longer a detached background against which characters act, a mere natural fact, but a force in which they are immediately and totally involved.

In retrospect, it seems inevitable that the growing significance of the sea in American life, the availability of the precedents of British nautical literature, and the gradual accumulation of successful experiments in the literary use of native nautical materials would lead to the appearance of the fully developed sea novel in the United States by the end of the nineteenth century. But the combination of interests and abilities that such a work demanded was a rare one indeed: a love of the sea and an understanding of its importance; a direct acquaintance with maritime life; an awareness of the unexplored potentialities of the novel as a literary form; and an eagerness to innovate. Perhaps it was less a matter of inevitability than of good fortune that a writer possessing the necessary qualities was at hand in the person of James Fenimore Cooper.

Notes

1. Port Folio, 3rd ser., 2:115 (1813).

2. The Red Rover, p. vii. This and all subsequent quotations of the final prefaces and texts of the novels are from the Townsend edition of Cooper's Novels, 32 vols, (New York, 1859-1861).

3. Samuel Johnson, Lives of the English Poets, ed. G. B. Hill (Oxford, 1905), I, 433.

4. [William Kenrick], rev. of The Shipwreck in Monthly Review, 27:198 (1762).

5. Gleanings in Europe, ed. Robert E. Spiller (New York, 1928-1930), II, 8.

6. Childe Harold, Canto IV, stanzas 178, 180, 183. All quotations of Byron's poetry are from The Poetical Works of Lord Byron, ed. Ernest H. Coleridge (London, 1905).

7. Poems of Philip Freneau, ed. Fred Lewis Pattee (Princeton, 1902), II, 24.

8. Ibid., II, 342-345.

9. “On the Crew of a Certain Vessel,” Poems of Philip Freneau, II, 317.

10. “The Nautical Rendezvous,” Poems of Philip Freneau, III, 243.

11. “The British Prison Ship,” Poems of Philip Freneau, II, 20-21.

12. “The Argonaut,” Poems of Philip Freneau, II, 128.

13. “Lines Written at Sea,” Poems of Philip Freneau, III, 232.

14. “To a Lady Remarkably Fond of Sleep,” The Last Poems of Philip Freneau, ed. Lewis Leary (New Brunswick, N. J., 1945), p. 88.

15. “Captain Jones's Invitation,” Poems of Philip Freneau, I, 291.

16. Poems of Philip Freneau, II, 129.

17. “A Midnight Storm in the Gulph Stream,” Last Poems, p. 86.

18. “Captain Jones's Invitation,” Poems of Philip Freneau, I, 292.

19. “Commerce,” Poems of Philip Freneau, III, 220. Contrast, for example, Timothy Dwight's prophecy of America's future naval and commercial supremacy in his song “Columbia,” first published in the American Museum, 1:484-485 (1787):

    Thy fleets to all regions thy pow'r shall display,
    The nations admire, and the ocean obey;
    Each shore to thy glory its tribute unfold,
    And the east and the south yield their spices and gold.

    In David Humphreys' eyes, too, the future of America lay on the sea. In his “Poem on the Happiness of America,” American Museum, 1:252 (1787), Humphreys pointed to the inevitable greatness of his country as a sea power:

    Where lives the nation fraught with such resource,
    Such vast materials for a naval force?
    Where grow so rife, the iron, masts, and spars,
    The hemp, the timber and the daring tars?
    Where gallant youths, inur'd to heat and cold,
    Thro' ev'ry zone, more hardy, strong, and bold?

20. “On the Launching of the … Independence,” Poems of Philip Freneau, III, 374-375.

21. From a broadside in the Isaiah Thomas Collection of Ballads, reprinted in American Naval Songs and Ballads, ed. Robert W. Neeser (New Haven, 1938), pp. 48-50.

22. “The Freedom of the Seas,” a song added to William Dunlap's Yankee Chronology (New York, 1812), pp. 13-14.

23. “The Pillar of Glory,” first printed in Port Folio, 3rd ser., 2:552 (1813).

24. Samuel Woodworth, Poems, Odes, Songs, and Other Metrical Effusions (New York, 1818), p. 135. The lines are from “Victory No. 5. Hornet and Peacock,” one of seven ballads which Woodworth wrote to commemorate the naval victories of the War of 1812.

25. For example, the Philadelphia Songster (Philadelphia, 1805), a typical song book of its period, contains thirty-five sea songs, only one of which, Susanna Rowson's “America, Commerce and Freedom,” utilizes American materials; the place names and allusions of three others have been Americanized.

26. Benjamin Waterhouse, “A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts,” Magazine of History with Notes and Queries, 5:292-293 (1911-1912).

27. The Isaiah Thomas Collection of Ballads in the library of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass., provides a convenient cross section of American taste in sea songs at the height of the War of 1812. Of the 349 songs in the collection approximately fifty are American naval ballads. A slightly smaller number, about forty, are English sea songs.

28. See Joseph N. Ireland, Records of the New York Stage, from 1750 to 1860 (New York, 1866), I, 4; Thomas C. Pollock, The Philadelphia Theatre in the Eighteenth Century (Philadelphia, 1933), pp. 417, 420.

29. See T. Allston Brown, A History of the New York Stage (New York, 1903), I, 8. The sailor had made a still earlier appearance in the American drama when the author of The Motley Assembly (1779), probably Mercy Warren, introduced the character of Captain Careless, “an honest young sea-captain.”

30. The American Captive; or Siege of Tripoli (Boston, 1812), pp. 3, 17, 19, 37, 47-48.

31. Love and Friendship; or, Yankee Notions (New York, 1809), p. 39. “Carter's mountain” apparently refers to some kind of block ship or floating battery.

32. Ibid., pp. 40, 57. As his name indicates, Jonathan is a stage Yankee, just as much a stereotype as the stage sailor. Like Hardweather, however, Jonathan does not completely conform to the mold. Although he speaks in a comic New England dialect, he is not merely a hayseed, for his speech and the experience it suggests show the influence of salt water. Moreover, his greenness and awkwardness are less the result of provincialism than of youth.

33. See Arthur H. Quinn, A History of the American Drama: From the Beginning to the Civil War (New York, 1923), pp. 427, 462; Reese D. James, Old Drury of Philadelphia (Philadelphia, 1932), p. 116.

34. Quoted in James, Old Drury of Philadelphia, pp. 137-138.

35. Yankee Chronology; or, Huzza for the Constitution! (New York, 1812), pp. 7-8.

36. See, for example, Arthur H. Quinn, American Fiction: An Historical and Critical Survey (New York, 1936), p. 23; Alexander Cowie, The Rise of the American Novel (New York, 1948), p. 30. In Literature and American Life (Boston, 1936), pp. 195-196, Percy H. Boynton suggests that Constantius and Pulchera may have been intended as a parody of contemporary prose romances. Whatever the intention of the author may have been, the publishing history of the book seems to indicate that its readers regarded it as a serious narrative. It is hard to imagine that a book considered to be only a literary burlesque would have enjoyed at least eleven printings between 1794 and 1834 in such communities as Suffield, Conn., Leominster, Mass., and Concord, N.H.; see Lyle H. Wright, American Fiction: 1774-1850, rev. ed. (San Marino, 1948), pp. 128-129.

37. History of Lorenzo and Virginia; or, Virtue Rewarded (Concord, N.H., 1834), pp. 19-21. The names of the protagonists were altered in this latest edition of Constantius and Pulchera; see Wright, American Fiction: 1774-1850, p. 129. In The Sailor in English Fiction and Drama: 1500-1800 (New York, 1931), p. 48, Harold F. Watson lists the ingredients of the formulaic storm of romance: “The chief elements are (1) good weather; (2) sudden wind and mountainous waves; (3) darkness and a figure of speech suggesting a struggle; (4) deafening noise; (5) fright of the sailors; (6) destruction of rigging, mast, or oars; (7) wreck of the ship. These do not always appear in the same order but are nearly always found together.”

38. See Evert A. and George L. Duyckinck, Cyclopaedia of American Literature (New York, 1856), I, 416.

39. The Algerine Captive; or, The Life and Adventures of Doctor Updike Underhill (Walpole, N.H., 1797), I, 209, 206.

40. Ibid., I, 196-199.

41. Ibid., II, 101, 116, 241.

42. In their preface to Woodworth's Poems, Odes, Songs, p. x, Abraham Asten and Matthias Lopez describe the pressures to which Woodworth was subjected: “In writing the Champions of Freedom, the author was confined, by the conditions of his engagement with the publisher, within a compass circumscribed by the latter. By these conditions he was compelled to connect fiction with truth; and, at all events, to give a complete and accurate account of the late war, however much the history of his hero and heroine might suffer in consequence.”

43. Samuel Woodworth, The Champions of Freedom; or, The Mysterious Chief (New York, 1847), p. 82.

44. The little evidence that exists suggests that Smith was a native of London; at least both Captain Mayhew Folger and Sir Thomas Staines, commanders of the first two vessels to visit Pitcairn after the arrival of the mutineers, believed him to be English. See the record of Folger's visit in Amasa Delano, A Narrative of Voyages and Travels (Boston, 1817), pp. 141-142, and Staines's report to the Admiralty of his stay at Pitcairn, reprinted in The Saga of the Bounty, ed. Irvin Anthony (New York, 1935), pp. 354-356.

45. Attempts to devise a more satisfying ending to the Bounty incident than the accepted version provides continue to be made; according to Cuthbert Wilkinson in The Wake of the Bounty (London, 1953), Christian left Pitcairn about 1795 and with the aid of William Wordsworth took up secret residence in England where he served as the model for Coleridge's ancient mariner and lived out his remaining days in happiness.

46. See Hubert H. Bancroft, History of the Pacific States of North America (San Francisco, 1884), XXII, 358; F. W. Howay, “Early Days of the Maritime Fur Trade on the Northwest Coast,” Canadian Historical Review, 4:27 (1923).

47. Sargent may have drawn on literary sources for some of this detail: Robinson Crusoe is an obvious parallel; Delano's Voyages, published two years before Alexander Smith, includes a detailed description of St. Felix Island (pp. 354-355), an account of the marooning of Alexander Selkirk on Juan Fernandez (pp. 308-309), and a lengthy discussion of the Bounty affair (chaps. 5-6); and Richard Alsop's very popular Narrative of the Adventures and Sufferings of John R. Jewitt (1815) is a rich source of information about life among the Northwest Indians. Due allowance must be made for the possibility of Sargent's personal familiarity with his material; according to Emma W. and Charles S. Sargent, Epes Sargent of Gloucester (Boston, 1923), p. 23, he “was a sea captain in the East India mercantile service,” and his book may be in part “an account of his own career.”

48. The Life of Alexander Smith (Boston, 1819), pp. 9, 94.

49. [Washington Irving], The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. No. 1 (New York, 1819), pp. 14, 20. Contrast Irving's description with that of a very similar storm encountered by the narrator on a voyage to Tunis on board a Moslem vessel in Tyler's Algerine Captive (II, 235): “A tremendous storm arose, and the gale struck us with such violence, that our sails were instantly flittered into rags. We could not shew a yard of canvass, and were obliged to scud under bare poles. The night was excessively dark; and to increase our distress, our ballast shifted and we were obliged to cut away our masts by the board, to save us from foundering. The vessel righted, but being strong and light, and the hatchways well secured, our captain was only fearful of being driven on some Christian coast.” One suspects that, together with the creation of verisimilitude, a primary purpose of Tyler's account is to permit the inclusion of his ironical inversion of the conventional fear of shipwreck on a heathen coast. At any rate, the narrator's view of the sea is clearly detached and objectified.

Works Cited

[Allen, Benjamin], Columbia's Naval Triumphs (New York: Inskeep and Bradford, 1813).

[Alsop, Richard], Narrative of the Adventures and Sufferings of John R. Jewitt (New York: no publ., 1815).

American Naval Songs and Ballads, ed. Robert W. Neeser (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1938).

Bancroft, Hubert H., History of the Pacific States of North America (San Francisco: History Co., 1884), vol. 22.

Boynton, Percy H., Literature and American Life (Boston: Ginn, 1936).

Brown, T. Allston, A History of the New York Stage (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1903), vol. 1.

Byron, George Gordon, Lord, The Poetical Works, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge (London: Murray, 1905).

Cooper, James Fenimore, The Pilot, 5th ed., 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Carey and Lea, 1832).

——— The Red Rover, new ed., 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Carey, Lea and Blanchard, 1836).

Delano, Amasa, A Narrative of Voyages and Travels, in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres (Boston: House, 1817).

Dunlap, W[illiam], Yankee Chronology; or, Huzza for the Constitution! (New York: Longworth, 1812).

Duyckinck, Evert A. and George L., Cyclopaedia of American Literature, 2 vols. (New York: Scribner, 1856).

Ellison, James, The American Captive, or Siege of Tripoli (Boston: Belcher, 1812).

Freneau, Philip, The Last Poems, ed. Lewis Leary (New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers University Press, 1945).

——— Poems, ed. Fred Lewis Pattee, 3 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Library, 1902).

Ireland, Joseph N., Records of the New York Stage, from 1750 to 1860 (New York: Morrell, 1866), vol. 1.

Irving, Washington, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. No. 1 (New York: Van Winkle, 1819).

James, Reese D., Old Drury of Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1932).

Johnson, Samuel, Lives of the English Poets, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905).

Lindsley, A. B., Love and Friendship; or, Yankee Notions (New York: Longworth, 1809).

Pollock, Thomas Clark, The Philadelphia Theatre in the Eighteenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1933).

Quinn, Arthur Hobson, American Fiction: An Historical and Critical Survey (New York: Appleton-Century, 1936).

——— A History of the American Drama: From the Beginning to the Civil War (New York: Harper, 1923).

[Sargent, Charles Lenox], The Life of Alexander Smith, Captain of the Island of Pitcairn, One of the Mutineers on Board His Majesty's Ship Bounty, Commanded by Lieut Wm. Bligh (Boston: Goss, 1819).

Sargent, Emma W., and Charles S. Sargent, Epes Sargent of Gloucester and His Descendants (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1923).

Scott, Sir Walter, The Pirate (London: Dent, 1907).

[Tyler, Royall], The Algerine Captive; or, The Life and Adventures of Doctor Updike Underhill, 2 vols. (Walpole, N. H.: Carlisle, 1797).

Waterhouse, Benjamin, “A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts,” Magazine of History with Notes and Queries, 5:199-470 (1911-1912).

Woodworth, Samuel, The Champions of Freedom; or, The Mysterious Chief (New York: Graham, 1847).

———The Poems, Odes, Songs, and Other Metrical Effusions, of Samuel Woodworth (New York: Asten and Lopez, 1818).

Wright, Lyle H., American Fiction, 1774-1850: A Contribution toward a Bibliography, rev. ed. (San Marino: Huntington Library Publications, 1948).