Making Babies in the South Seas

This is a short argument in favor of the proposition that under emotional pressure things—literal things—change so drastically that they can no longer be represented in a factual account. Indeed it becomes a question whether their metamorphosis will fit any narrative framework. My chief example is James Cook, whose bizarre actions in the months before his death have presented problems for all his biographers, most recently Anne Salmond and Nicholas Thomas. His extravagances occurred most often because things belonging to his ship went missing. Cook's attempts to recover them, or in some way supply their loss, were fraught with difficulties, not least the difficulty of saying exactly what had happened to them and to him. Cook's legacy is observable in a number of European stories of the South Seas told the next century, where the transformation and accumulation of things overwhelm the narrative. It is still with us as a narrative challenge no one seems sure of meeting.

I begin with a maritime fable from the twentieth century devoted to this transformation. In Richard Hughes's pirate story A High Wind in Jamaica (1929), the mysterious death of a ship's captain becomes entangled in the problems of owning things and providing them with a narrative history. In this strangely incoherent tale of a group of children on the Spanish Main, ships are taken, their holds rifled, and, as a result, things and people are "changed," as the children put it. Dimly aware of the importance of maintaining the integrity of property, two of the children—sisters Rachel and Emily—readily own the truth of owning things. Rachel collects oakum, mop-heads, marlinspikes, and bits of rag, calling them her "babies" and placing these around the ship, appropriating the windlass or the bosun's chair, for example, as their "beds" and "houses." Emily owns things by setting loose strings of words—"a sort of narrative noise" (184), as the narrator calls it—and so prepares herself for the arrival of real narrative substance. Neither she nor her sister succeeds in owning anything, however, for things keep getting lost or escaping in a manner that is not (at least from their point of view) accountable. In one instance, the marlinspike falls out of Rachel's grasp while she is nursing it in the rigging and wounds Emily in the leg. While Emily is recovering, a knife comes into her hands which later stabs and kills a tied-up Dutch skipper, an event that remains unexplained in the narrative.

Describing Rachel and her collection of babies, the narrator says: "To parody Hobbes, she claimed as her own whatever she had mixed her imagination with; and the greater part of her time was spent in angry or tearful assertions of her property-rights" (Hughes 156). It is not Hobbes, of course, but Locke who makes this claim for property obtained by labor. However, Hobbes does acknowledge the enormous power imagination may wield over things, and he also demonstrates how fictions breeding in the mind may conspire to build utopias, romances, pantheons, and lies in which objects acquire an agency of their own.

From a naval standpoint in the eighteenth century, narratives were formed out of inventories of property. In his three voyages to the Pacific, Cook was responsible for everything on his ship: naval stores, food and drink, trade goods, astronomical equipment, and weapons. Before he could be paid upon his return, over sixty accounts had to be accepted by the Navy Board; and these accounts formed only part of the required account of the voyage. Cook's instructions directed him:

You are, by all opportunities to send to our Secretary, for our information, Accounts of your Proceedings, and Copies of the Surveys and Drawings you shall have made; and upon your arrival in England, you are immediately to repair to this Office in order to lay before us a full Account of your Proceedings in the whole course of your Voyage; taking care before you leave the Sleep to demand from the Officers & Petty Officers the Log Books & Journals they may have kept, & to seal them...