Collaborating in Open Boats: Dickens, Collins, Franklin, and Bligh

Therefore, as a means of beguiling the time and inspiring hope, I gave them the best summary in my power of Bligh’s voyage of more than three thousand miles, in an open boat, after the Mutiny of the Bounty, and of the wonderful preservation of that boat’s crew. They listened throughout with great interest, and I concluded by telling them, that, in my opinion, the happiest circumstance in the whole narrative was, that Bligh, who was no delicate man either, had solemnly placed it on record therein that he was sure and certain that under no conceivable circumstances whatever, would that emaciated party who had gone through all the pains of famine, have preyed on one another. I cannot describe the visible relief which this spread through the boat, and how the tear stood in every eye. From that time I was as well convinced as Bligh himself that there was no danger, and that this phantom, at any rate, did not haunt us.

Now, it was a part of Bligh’s experience that when the people in his boat were most cast down, nothing did them so much good as hearing a story told by one of their number. When I mentioned that, I saw that it struck the general attention as much as it did my own, for I had not thought of it until I came to it in my summary.

— Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, The Wreck of the Golden Mary (143)

The Wreck of the Golden Mary (1856) was the seventh of Charles Dickens’s Christmas numbers, the supplements of stories by several contributors, which went out each December from 1850 with an issue of his journal, Household Words. The narrative framing the stories for 1856 tells of how the survivors of a ship wrecked en route to the California Gold Rush of 1849 maintain order and morale by collaborating in storytelling. The overtaxed captain eventually sinks into unconsciousness, yielding both the command of the lifeboat, and the first person narrative, to his inferior but adequate mate. This collapse occurs shortly after the passage above in which he cites the notorious William Bligh as an authority on cannibalism and on storytelling. This was the story Dickens devised for his first published collaboration with Wilkie Collins. Between them, they provided the shipwreck narrative as a frame, within which the stories of the other four contributors appeared (see Lohrli 236, 256).

It was the first time Dickens had yielded to another writer part of the narrative frame by which he directed readers’ responses to the contributions to the Christmas numbers. To validate this new collaborative enterprise, he invoked the collective moral authority of the British seafaring community in a story told by two seamen. “I am the Captain of the Golden Mary: Mr. Collins is the Mate,” he told Angela Burdett-Coutts (Letters 8: 231). At the same time, this was one of several writings in which Dickens rebutted a charge of cannibalism recently brought against an elite group from that community by asserting the incomparable gifts for leadership, fidelity, and self-sacrifice found among British Tars. The link between the two defenses, the rebuttal of cannibalism and the justification of collaboration, is consolidated in the insistence on storytelling as a powerful prevention against cannibalism, with the citation of Bligh as authority: “[T]he example of Bligh and his men, when they were adrift like us, was of unspeakable importance in keeping up our spirits” (151).¹ The Wreck of the Golden Mary is thus engaged in a complex double operation, defending the reputation of British Tars by invoking them as the strongest possible example of collective moral authority to justify an adventure in collaboration.

I

The collaboration of Dickens, at the height of his powers, with Collins, a junior and still relatively unknown writer, is one of the most remarkable instances of literary collaboration. It was a collaboration first imagined in nautical terms, drawing on popular constructions of the British Tar to present him both as a model for collaboration and as an exemplar to civil society. Within the...