Captain Marryat and Sea Adventure

By the time that Charles Dickens had published A Holiday Romance (1868), the stock features of sea adventure stories were so well-known that his nine-year-old character, the would-be writer Robin Redforth, can tell the adventures of one Captain Boldheart and his encounters with cannibals, pirates, and worst of all, the Latin Grammar Master (who gets boiled in a pot by the cannibals). As Harvey Darton suggested, Redforth probably subscribed to The Boys of England, a magazine whose aim was to enthrall the youthful male reader with "wild and wonderful but healthy fiction."¹ This wild and wonderful fiction invariably included bold adventurous sea captains who battled bloodthirsty pirates led by a villainous and infernal chief, rescued helpless maidens in the thrall of the pirate chief, and triumphantly discovered buried treasure. James Barrie and Robert Louis Stevenson, authors of classic sea adventure stories, both admit that they had devoured "penny-dreadfuls" and that they especially preferred to read about pirates in their goriest form. The children in Kenneth Grahame's The Golden Age (1895 and Dream Days (1898) reveal that they had also appropriated the conventions of sea adventure stories when they reenact the quest of the Argonauts and when they desperately exclaim that what they want is "blood and plenty of it." Where did these conventions originate?

What Wallace Stevens called "the everhooded and tragic-gestured sea," the savage source with its power, mystery, and, to human consciousness at least, apparent will of its own, has inspired a range of literature from the earliest times to the present—from ephemeral popular works to enduring classics, and from the first great classic of sea literature, Homer's Odyssey, in Paula Fox's excellent contemporary novel for children, The Slave Dancer. In the eighteenth century the sea became a powerful setting for Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, the model for so many subsequent Robinsonnades and other sea adventures.

Edwin M. Hall provides a useful working definition of the sea adventure story: "it is a fictional prose narrative of which at least half takes place on shipboard and in which the handling of the ship is important to the plot."² Hall argues that James Fenimore Cooper invented the genre with the publication of The Pilot (1824). If Cooper invented it, however, Captain Frederick Marryat (1792-1848) not only set a high standard of accuracy in writing nautical fiction, but also, popularized the sea story as a form of adventure and romance.

Captain Marryat had himself led an impressive and romantic life at sea: he ran away to sea at the age of fourteen, engaged in over fifty naval battles, and guarded Napoleon at the Island of St. Helena, eventually bringing news of the fallen hero's death back to England.³ Having read The Swiss Family Robinson (English trans., 1814) to his children, Marryat was angered by this novel's nautical and geographical errors, a central reason why he undertook the writing of Masterman Ready.

This novel recounts the adventures of the Seagrave family, who are deserted after a shipwreck by everyone save the faithful old seaman Ready, a black nanny called Juno, and the family dog. Unfortunately, Marryat's consciousness of his child audience results in unpleasantly overt preaching. Every event is an occasion for Mr. Seagrave to expand upon self-evident morals; he exclaims after a storm, for example, "See, my child, the wreck and devastation which are here. See how the pride of man is humbled before the elements of the great Jehovah."⁴

The novel is further weakened by the stereotyped characterizations of children, a practice stemming from well-established traditions of the moral tale. William is the grave and intelligent older son, who listens to his elders, obeys them, and stays out of trouble. He is loathsomely good, pious, and self-sacrificing. The younger boy, Tommy, is totally depraved; he thinks only of bodily gratification, ignores advice from his elders, and finally brings disaster on everyone. He is even responsible for the death of the good and faithful Ready.

From Peter Pan by James Barrie.

Illustrated by Alice Woodward...