Read an Excerpt
INTRODUCTION
In the Beginning
A storm at sea. Waves swelling higher than the ship's deck and wind like an ax chopping off their caps and throwing water at the heavens. So much seawater in the air, it seems it will drown the lightning. The sky pours down "stinking pitch," sulfurous smell, and thunder. A "brave vessel" full of "noble creature[s]" climbing the waves and sliding into the troughs, its seams barely holding together.
So opened Shakespeare's Tempest in a cold London theater in the winter of 1611.
It was a true story. To use today's common language, Shakespeare ripped this scene from the headlines. Only there were no headlines in 1611. Newspapers had not been invented. The first English-language periodical, a weekly broadsheet, was printed ten years later, ironically enough in Dutch-speaking Amsterdam. News of great events circulated the streets of England's towns in more entertaining, less dependable channels: pamphlets, sermons, songs, notices posted in town squares, private letters passed around from one reader to another. And rumor. Buzzing like the crowd noise preceding a play, the cacophonous, often contradictory, sailors' stories seeped up from the docks of London, Southampton, and Plymouth. And plays, even those as fantastical as The Tempest, dramatized the rumors and publicized what was going on in the world.
This story of storm, wreck, and redemption was the talk of England. Although a century had passed since Columbus first crossed the Atlantic, the open sea still preyed on the sailor's psyche in a way that coast-hugging Europeans had never felt. When a storm came on the western ocean, there was no chance of running to harbor. Voyagers were beyond the frontiers of civilization, encroaching on spaces unlit by Christianity, where dark forces reigned. Anything could happen.
At the height of Shakespeare's play, a few noblemen come on deck demanding to speak with the ship's master.
"[Y]ou marre our labour," the boatswain answers. "Keepe your Cabines: you do assist the storme."
The words sound like revolution. At least on the surface, the seaman seems to be a leveler who favors meritocracy over aristocracy.
"You are a Counsellor," the boatswain tells Gonzalgo, "if you can command these Elements to silence ... vse your authoritie: If you cannot ... out of our way I say."
Gonzalgo warns him, "remember whom thou hast aboord."
"None that I loue more than my selfe," replies the sailor. "[W]hat cares these roarers for the name of King?"
Such stuff might embolden the "common sort" to check their supposed "betters." One might think so, until it is remembered that the common sort was not in the play's audience. The Tempest premiered in the elegant, enclosed Blackfriars Theatre. The more democratic and open-air Globe Theatre was always crowded with groundlings, who stood in the pit chewing their sausages. But tickets to the indoor, winterized Blackfriars Theatre were pricier. London's aristocracy sat in their boxes dressed in finery, and the guildsmen and craftsmen and professionals, up to perhaps a thousand patrons, filled the rest of the audience. Rich though they were, they were as eager as any to see onstage what they'd heard about in rumor: what had happened to the Sea Venture.
The players wobble-strut on the stage as if on the heaving and tossing deck of that ship, while the master and boatswain shout instructions into the noise of the wind.
"Take in the toppe-sale!"
At all cost they must keep steerageway. They catch just enough wind to point her bow into those rising seas. If a wave should take them broadside, it might roll the top-heavy ship till the masts kissed the water, and she would not rise again.
"Lay her a hold, a hold, set her two courses off to Sea again, lay her off!"
All labor for naught! The ship does not roll but its very boards come apart, letting in the sea like a sieve. The scene ends with mariners flooding the stage, clothes dripping with salt water, crying in despair and fear: "We split, we split!"
"Farewell my wife, and children," the sailors wail.
"Farewell, brother!"
Elizabethan theater might have skimped on props and sets and special effects when judged by the standards of our own blockbuster action films. It had to rely on the words of the actors to paint the scene. As Shakespeare himself put it, the breath of those who watched the play must fill the ship's sails with wind. But Shakespeare's words! They whipped up gales in the minds of the viewers. The patrons quaked under the shock of thunder and lightning.
A ship full of a hundred and fifty souls split at sea, in the midst of the most terrible storm, and yet every person lived! This was England's most shocking, unbelievable news.
More than a year earlier, on the fifteenth of May, 1609, the Sea Venture set sail from London, the "admiral" of an impressive fleet. The Diamond, the Falcon, the Blessing, the Lion, and the Unity, as well as a pinnace (a shallow-draft boat designed for coastal exploration) too small to be named, sailed behind her, headed to Virginia, the third and by far largest resupply of two-year-old, fledgling Jamestown, England's tiny, rough-hewn, and hungry little campsite, its only toehold on the vast American continent. The flotilla was the largest and most expensive and most promising overseas expedition that England had ever organized, and the six hundred people crowded into the vessels would triple or quadruple the population of the colony. It seemed that all England applauded their departure. "Crowds of London's ever-curious spectators," one historian explains, "lined the river's banks and cheered as the seven ships, sails billowing, flags flying, glided past them on the spring afternoon." Several weeks later, after a stop at Plymouth increased the fleet to nine vessels, they left England's toe, the very westernmost tip of the nation, following the setting sun into the newly charted seas of the vast North Atlantic. Seen from the land's end, they disappeared into oblivion, as if a curtain shut upon them. No one in England would hear from the fleet for ages. No one expected to. Ships that sailed west into the Atlantic reappeared, if they ever did, almost miraculously, many months or even years later.
This time the Atlantic was quiet. Each morning from the second of June to July twenty-third, 1609, the sun rose in a clear sky off the stern, and it chased the squadron all morning long, till in the afternoon and evening the ships chased the setting sun toward Virginia. The seas were calm. It was a relief to Sir George Somers, admiral of the fleet, who did not know what to expect. Previous English expeditions followed the winds south, island-hopping to the Canaries, then the West Indies, and thence to Jamestown. But the Virginia Company had recently scouted a quicker, "more direct line," a northern passage that avoided the Caribbean's hazard of Spanish ships, and Somers followed this unfamiliar route. The month and a half of fair breezes and clear skies seemed to justify the gamble. They made such good time that one of the pinnaces could not keep up. The flagship, the Sea Venture, had to tow it across the Atlantic.
The Sea Venture was a three-hundred-ton merchant ship about a hundred feet long that had been designed to carry English wool to Dutch dyers. It was broad and "chubby," which suited Holland's trade but made it ungainly on the wide Atlantic Ocean. Fore and aft, high superstructures — wooden castles piled in the style of the carrack, the most common type of oceangoing vessel in the sixteenth century — rose above the deck. These structures made such ships top-heavy, and the tall forecastle prevented carracks from sailing very efficiently when facing contrary winds. The Spanish and the English both had fixed the defect by developing the galleon, which lowered the forecastle, but the Sea Venture was built according to the older design. Further harming her balance were the sixteen cannons mounted on the upper deck. Normally these heavy weapons would have been below the open-air deck and above the hold, but that in-between area housed many of the colonists and their gear in tightly crowded makeshift cabins.
The fleet was just over a week's sailing from Virginia when the sunny days disappeared. In the midst of the Atlantic's emptiness, alone in the world, not another human being anywhere for a thousand miles, dark and terrifying clouds sped in from the northeast. It was the front edge of a gale, a storm that blew worse and longer than even the maddest storms in the familiar waters of northern Europe, the Barbary Coast of Africa, the Levant, or the Adriatic.
The fleet was overtaken by a hurricane. Most ships were demasted. They limped into Jamestown one by one, their holds leaky and their supplies sodden and of little use to the colony. All the ships survived save the flagship, the Sea Venture, the biggest and best supplied of them all, containing not only George Somers but also Sir Thomas Gates, the new governor, and the lion's share of provisions. She had disappeared without a trace, swallowed by the storm and presumed to have been swallowed by the sea. So came the news from Virginia. The wives and parents and children of the dead had their mourning. The directors of the Company reckoned their losses. The morale of the nation suffered its blow and moved on.
A year later, a miraculous rumor started to circulate around the docks of England's port cities. Everyone on the Sea Venture had been saved. Had no one drowned? All were plucked somehow from a sinking ship in the middle of a hurricane in the middle of the wide Atlantic. The fantastic story sped through the chattering streets of London.
Shakespeare did not get the story from rumors. He had the most credible source: a narrative letter dozens of pages long and hand-penned by an eyewitness, a survivor of the Sea Venture foundering. It told a harrowing tale of heroic deeds and base mutinies. Written by a gentleman named William Strachey, this remarkable document was, ostensibly, a private missive to some unidentified "Excellent Lady," but it quickly circulated among London's literary crowd in manuscript — as Strachey knew it would — and through the finer houses and government offices of England. Shakespeare read it. The famous playwright was Strachey's friend. They had probably shared drinks at the Mermaid Tavern, if not jokes and jibes. And so at the very end of his career, on the edge of retirement, England's greatest playwright found himself with what we would call today a "scoop": the story of the founding of a brave new world.
EXODUS AND JEREMIAD
We typically think of myths as the superstitions of ancient societies, like the Olympian gods of Greece, Rome's pantheon, the Vikings' Thor, and the faerie people of Ireland. But modern nations need myths too. About fifty years ago, Warren Susman, who described himself as a historian of "the enormous American middle class," explained how myths unify complex modern societies, justify the existing social order, and reinforce basic values. One could hardly imagine a more prosaic people than the American middle class. And yet it, too, uses myth to sanctify communal goals. This is what Joseph Campbell calls the "sociological function" of myth.
The most important modern myths narrate the nation's founding, and in the American consciousness that has meant the Pilgrims. If you studied history at an American high school or in your college days you read any of the half dozen big anthologies of American literature, you will probably contend that the United States of America started at Plymouth Rock. But the Pilgrims' story has not always been our founding myth. Northern states began disseminating the Pilgrim myth right about the time of the Civil War, and the last hundred years have cemented the Pilgrims into the shape of our forefathers. Thanksgiving themes about religious fidelity in the face of ocean storms and winter starvation, about racial generosity and the reward of good harvests, gourds of plenty on outdoor tables heaped with food, go back only to about World War I. About a hundred years ago, the Pilgrims became the myth of our beginning.
Their story is an Exodus.
Take, for example, the 1988 Peanuts version, "The Mayflower Voyagers," which was the first episode in the children's miniseries This Is America, Charlie Brown. Snoopy and Linus and Lucy explain the familiar motifs: persecuted Pilgrims flee from England as the Israelites fled from Egypt; during the Atlantic passage, storms try their faith and endurance; disease and hunger stalk their first winter. The TV program also features the generosity of Native Americans and the racial harmony of the Thanksgiving feast, themes absent and even contradicted by some pre–civil rights era narratives. Underlying all, like a droning rhythm, is the suggestion that the settlers' progress was a series of "miracles," an understated but unequivocal indication that the Pilgrims, and by extension all Americans, are God's chosen people.
The image of a "shining city on a hill" emblemizes this religious explanation of American exceptionalism. Ronald Reagan, borrowing from John F. Kennedy, popularized that image of America in the 1980s. Very reasonably, he imagined the United States to be the land of liberty and opportunity, as compared to the totalitarian regimes behind the Iron Curtain; the Pilgrims walked their gauntlet of trials, Reagan explained, but "that small community ... prospered and ... went on to become a beacon to all the oppressed and poor of the world." The connection between the modern United States and the shining city on a hill goes all the way back to John Winthrop, the Puritan founder of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, who used the image in a sermon he preached on the Arbella as it crossed the Atlantic in 1630. Winthrop struck a bargain: If God would guide the Arbella through its trials and, most especially, if He would spare it from shipwreck, the colonists promised to obey His will, love each other, and avoid "pleasure and profits." Docility, obedience, and keeping to one's appointed place prop up Winthrop's notion of a good society.
Such are the spit and polish on the Puritans' hilltop city. Fidelity. Resistance to corruption. Inoculation against contaminating influences. These are the essence of Exodus. God's people must stay virtuous. They must resist the temptation to worship false gods, like the golden calf that led astray the people of Moses. Though the trials of the desert last forty years, they must stay pure so they might enter and dwell in the Promised Land. And such is the substance of the opening chapters of William Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation, which recount the Pilgrim's exile in Holland. Fear that their own children were falling away from the faith and assimilating to Dutch culture drove the Pilgrims to America, where they might live wholly righteous lives removed from the influences of mammon. Such is the theme as they enter the Promised Land, the land of heathens. They must keep vigilant inside their citadel of faith, lest they break their promise to God. Under this template, becoming Americanized means no more than listening to Squanto explain how to plant corn. God forbid the Pilgrims might learn more from the Indians, for the devil lives in their wild woods, as Nathaniel Hawthorne's Young Goodman Brown reminded us in the nineteenth century.
But the chosen people never keep their faith. They forget. They backslide. They must be reminded. So the inevitable sequel to every Exodus is the Jeremiad. Like the Old Testament prophet, Jeremiah, someone must stand up and harangue the people. The last half of Bradford's narrative, written in the second generation after the Mayflower, warns a backsliding people that they must return to the faith of their fathers. They must abandon the conceits and attractions of a prosperous Massachusetts and conform again to the strict founding dogma.
In 1978, Sacvan Bercovitch first suggested that the Pilgrims' experience defines America. His seminal book, The American Jeremiad, argues that nostalgia for the faith of our fathers, and the disapproval of modern apathy and backsliding, together constitute the characteristic form of American literature. In truth, scholars as far back as the 1930s pioneered this idea that American intellectual history began with the Puritans. James Truslow Adams's hugely influential 1931 history, The Epic of America, popularized the concept of the "American Dream" and held that the Mayflower Compact originated a distinctly American society. "The novel situation of being free from all laws whatever," Adams explained, "faced the Pilgrims even before they landed from the Mayflower ... Some government was needful ... They simply avoided the possible dangers of anarchy or an iron dictator by agreeing to abide by the expressed common will." Following Adams, English professors have told several generations of college students that the Puritans, especially Bradford and Winthrop, are the foundation of the national canon. Their books, exodus tales and jeremiads, have become the sacred texts of the American people.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Marooned"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Joseph Kelly.
Excerpted by permission of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
