Robert Paltock and the Refashioning of "Inkle and Yarico"

Robert Paltock and the Refashioning Of "Inkle and Yarico"Peter Merchant Robert Paltock's Peter Wilkins, in the novel of the same name (1750), is as resourceful and ingenious a figure as eighteenth-century fiction has to show. One of his feats is to improvise a pair of spectacles out of "old Hat, pieces of Ram's-horn," and "an old crape Hatband."1 This essay, though far luckier in the raw materials dealt it, attempts something similar. It grows out of the need I feel for some new lens through which to view and read Paltock's extraordinary novel. For us, it suggests , the famous eighteenth-century story of Inkle and Yarico might become just such a reading aid. For Paltock himself, this story seems to have functioned as a vital stimulus to invention in the testing interim between his novel's "Introduction"—where some shots which a ship's captain speculatively fires at the sky bring "an elderly Man" mysteriously crashing down into the sea (p. 6)—and the eventual explanation (deferred for fifty-two chapters) of that most memorable of openings. We shall need to have the whole of Paltock's plot before us. Peter Wilkins, it emerges, is the name of the man so strangely shot from die sky in the South Atlantic, and picked up just in time to save him from drowning. When Wilkins then dictates his life-story to "R.S. a Passenger in the Hector," we travel back to his teenage years to learn of his marriage to Patty, his ruin at the hands of a cruel stepfather, and the start of his seafaring career. His subsequent adventures in Africa are only a prelude 1 Robert Paltock, Peter Wilkins, ed. Christopher Bentley, with an introduction by James Grantham Turner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 123-25. References are to this edition. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 9, Number 1, October 1996 38 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION to the drama of shipwreck off Patagonia, and what the novel's titlepage describes as "his wonderful Passage thro' a subterraneous Cavern into a kind of new World." Wilkins finds that he must now make his home on the beautiful uninhabited island of Grandevolet, where all links with the world he knew before are severed. Patty is duly consigned to the past when Wilkins dreams of her death, seeing her as an angelic figure who eludes his embrace (p. 104). But merged with the pain of Patty's passing, as if Wilkins's philosophical "come Life, come Death" (p. 105) at this point comprehended all the extremes of his experience, is the excitement of a fresh beginning. For immediately, in a reversal of the rescue at sea which gives the novel its frame, a loud thump announces that a beautiful female called Youwarkee has just delivered herself into Wilkins's hands by quite unaccountably landing on his roof. When Wilkins finds and saves Youwarkee, he carries her over the threshold (p. 106) as if already aware that she is soon to be his wife. But first they must negotiate a means of communication. Even then, everything Youwarkee can slowly bring Wilkins to understand—that she fell accidentally to earth, having come on a jaunt (or "Swangean") from "the Country of ... Men and Women that fly"—further inflames his curiosity and ours. Necessarily, there are lengthy passages devoted to describing the "Graundee" that serves Youwarkee both as clothing and as means of flight, and to detailing "the Laws, Customs, and Manners" of her native country, Doorpt Swangeanti. When Wilkins, thus briefed, finally travels to Doorpt Swangeanti (on an elaborate flying chair which he himself designs and builds) he is well enough forearmed to make himself a considerable power in the land. He modernizes its industry, thwarts a rebellion against King Georigetti, and—helped by his own translation of the Bible—brings the Swangeantine people to that "rational Knowledge" of God which he has already instilled in Youwarkee (p. 156). In addition to removing "the Misery and Bondage of Idolatry" (p. 247), he proclaims the abolition of slavery. Wilkins by now has transformed the Swangeantine system and also transformed himself—from shipwrecked sailor into beneficent colonial administrator. He only...