The Life And Adventures of John Nicol, Mariner. Tim Flannery

Читать онлайн книгу.

The Life And Adventures of John Nicol, Mariner - Tim  Flannery


Скачать книгу

      

alt

      Contents

      Introduction by Tim Flannery

      A Most Interesting Character by John Howell

      The Life and Adventures of John Nicol, Mariner

      Service of John Nicol

      Index

alt

alt

       Map of the world as Nicol would have

alt

      known it, showing some of his journeys.

alt

      JOHN NICOL

      MARINER, AGE 67

       Introduction

      by Tim Flannery

      JOHN NICOL TWICE circled the globe, in the process visiting all six habitable continents. He fought American revolutionaries and Napoleon’s navy, was in Hawaii when Cook’s murderers were still young, in Port Jackson when Sydney consisted of about a thousand souls, and in the West Indies when African slaves were beginning to experiment with the music which would become blues and jazz. In short, as he roamed the world in the late eighteenth century, he saw the modern age in its infancy.

      Howell’s other inventions included ‘a reliable salve for the ringworm’ and a method for the fabrication of false teeth. Transport also intrigued him. He invented a flying machine (the testing of which, from the roof of an old tannery, cost him a broken leg), and a sort of prototype submarine. This latter nearly led to fratricide, for John encouraged an unwilling brother to enter the ‘large model of a fish’ for its test run on the River Leith. The brother refused, however, and John took his place. A contemporary account reports that:

      Howell’s other great interest lay in the exploits of military men and adventurers. He published five books, three of which concerned such people. The first, Journal of a Soldier of the 71st, or Glasgow Regiment was followed by The Life and Adventures of John Nicole Mariner and, finally, The Life of Alexander Alexander Written by Himself. Howell’s method seems to have consisted of befriending old soldiers and sailors, then spending months writing down or editing their life stories. One wonders whether they moved into his house for the duration. Whatever the case, Howell’s motives were noble ones, for he signed over royalties to his adoptees, and endeavoured to use their stories to obtain for them their well deserved pensions.

      Howell’s 1822 edition of The Life and Adventures of John Nicol, Mariner is a modest little book, measuring just sixteen centimetres by ten. Its only illustration is a simple drawing of Nicol himself—in all probability placed there to evoke the reader’s pity. It shows the weatherbeaten and wistful countenance of one who has seen much of life. The book’s rarity now suggests that the print run was small. Its only republication occurred in 1937 when Cassell issued an edition ‘embellished with numerous original designs’ by Gordon Grant, and with a foreword and afterword by Laing, who claims that Life and Adventures is the earliest reminiscence by an ordinary sailor that ‘has any claim to permanence as literature’. The book, he says, ‘acquainted me … with a distinct personality I should have felt far the poorer for not having known, and from time to time I have sought him out again, in his book, with the same pleasure I should take in looking up an old friend.’

      John Nicol had ‘seen more of the world than most persons in Edinburgh, perhaps in Britain’ according to Howell, yet throughout his life he seems to have remained almost unworldly. This may stem from the fact that, like many seamen, he led a largely sheltered life. While at sea, his domestic and financial arrangements were made for him. Decisions were made by others, and there was little time for romance with all its complications. In these ways, going to sea was akin to joining a religious order.

      Nicol was not a sailor of the rum, sodomy and the lash school. When he first went to sea he read his Bible daily and it troubled his conscience that he lost the habit. He was shy, did not drink heavily and was appalled by foul language. At times one wonders how this good and simple man mixed it with the recurrent brutality of life at sea.

      Nicol’s naivety shows through nowhere more clearly than in his first romance. After meeting a young woman on a coach journey he feels ‘something uncommon arise in [his] breast’. After a number of efforts, he ‘summonsed the resolution to take her hand in mine; I pressed it gently, she drew faintly back’. With little more encouragement than that, Nicol decides upon marriage and, were it not for a recalcitrant prospective father-in-law, may have succeeded in his designs. He was equally ‘at sea’ with the most important female in his life, a convict girl named Sarah Whitlam who became his great love. Yet time has shown that his assessment of Sarah Whitlam was hardly an accurate one.


Скачать книгу