Casualties of a Voyage, 1601-3

A casualty list:

“A note of the men’s names deceased out of the Dragon.

1 William Thomson. 2 Job Harket. 3 William Allin.

4 Raphe Arden. 5 Christopher Scot. 6 Edward Major.

7 Thomas May. 8 John Pegoune. 9 John Johnson.

10 Philip Salisbury. 11 Edmund Davies. 12 Richard Joanes.

13 Daniell Richardson. 14 John Clackson.15 Robert Poppe.

16 John Webbe. 17 John Humber. 18 William Burrowes.

19 Mathew Perchet. 20 Edward Keall. 21 Nicholas Williams.

22 Peter Bennet. 23 Leonard Nichols. 24 Robert Dame.

25 John Judson. 26 William Barker. 27 William Barret.

28 William Ridge. 29 Ralphe Salter. 30 Jeremy Gaufe.

31 Henry Thickpenny. 32 Henry Brigges. 33 Rice Williams.

34 Martine Topsaile. 35 M. William Bradbanke 36 Richard Androwes.

37 M. Thomas Pullin preacher. 38 Jeames Fullar. 39 William Winter.

40 William Hall. 41 John Hankin. 42 Richard Exame.

43 Robert Hill. 44 John Woodall. 45 John Jeane.

46 Robert Keachinman. 47 Jeames Caverly. 48 John Hope.

49 John Trincall. 50 John Duke.51 Martaine Cornelison.

52 Launslet Taylor. 53 John Settell. 54 William Burrowes.

55 Percevall Stradling. 56 John Harrice. 57 Frauncis Pormoth.

58 Edward Baddiford. 59 Thomas Price. 60 Phillip Goulding.

61 Roger Morrice. 62 Stephen Burdall. 63 Nicholas Ragwood.

64 George Wattes. 65 Myles Berry. 66 William Mounke.”

The list appears with three others in the last pages of this pamphlet:

A TRUE AND LARGE DISCOURSE OF THE VOYAGE OF THE WHOLE FLEETE OF SHIPS SET forth the 20. of Aprill 1601. by the Governours and Assistants of the East Indian Marchants in London, to the East Indies.

WHEREIN IS SET downe the order and manner of their trafficke, the discription of the Countries, the nature of the people and their language, with the names of all the men dead in the Voyage.

AT LONDON Imprinted for Thomas Thorpe, and are to be solde by William Aspley. 1603.

It’s hard to tell why. The other account of the voyage, A LETTER WRITTEN TO THE RIGHT worshipfull the Governours and Assistants of the East Indian Marchants in London; containing the estate of the East Indian Fleete, with the names of the chiefe men of note dead in the Voyage confined itself, as the title makes clear, to just the chief casualties, as they were seen, the ranking ships officers and merchants on board. The full list in this pamphlet includes two men given the honorific ‘Master’, among the ordinary seamen.

They were all embarked on the boat called ‘The Red Dragon’, previously called ‘The Scourge of Malice’ (by its first owner and commissioner, the Earl of Cumberland, who must have been reading too much 1590’s satire). This is an excellent Wikipedia page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Dragon_(1595)

Bought off the Earl, the ship was re-named for this, the first fleet voyage of the East India Company (1601-3). The Red Dragon was a big ship, 600-900 tons, with 38 guns, much larger than the other main ships making up the fleet sent out, Hector (300 tons, whose crew suffered 37 casualties), Ascension (260 tons, 38 casualties), Susan (240 tons, 39 casualties).

The attrition rate on the flagship was lower, because the Commander of the flagship and the whole fleet, Sir James Lancaster, made his men drink lemon juice daily, so that they did not die of scurvy or suffer fatal debilitation by it leading to death. Lancaster’s report on this success was sent to the Admiralty, and promptly shelved and forgotten.

Lancaster, Sir James (1554/5–1618),

http://www.oxforddnb.com.ezproxy01.rhul.ac.uk/view/article/15961?docPos=1

What did they die of, the casualties in this fleet?

Scurvy, dysentery, the calenture, they were lost overboard, or fell fatally, unspecified causes, tropical diseases after reaching their destination (“the countrie is very unwholsome, that almost it may be said of it, as it is said of Malacca, fewe come thether, but eyther loose hide or hayre: heere we lost ten or twelve men out of our ship.”)

Or they were the victims of the grossest negligence:

“The 27. day being Saterday, the lamentablest accident happened, that happened since wee departed England, and thus it was, Maister Winter the Maisters Mate of the Admiral dying, the rest of the Captaines and Maisters went to his burial and according to the order of the sea, there was 2. or 3. great ordinances discharged at his going a shoare, but the maister Gunner of the Admirall being not so carefull as he should have beene, unfortunately killed Maister Brand Captaine of the Ascention and the Boatswaines mate of the same ship, to the great danger of the Maister, his mate and another Marchant who were hurt and besprinckled with the bloud of these massacred men, so these men going to the buriall of another were themselves carryed to their owne graves.”

The Red Dragon (just) and the Hector survived to take part in the second (with Ascension and Susan) and third voyage. For the third voyage, the Red Dragon was commanded by William Keeling:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Keeling

So, it was on this big ship that the purported performances of Hamlet and Richard II took place off Sierra Leone and Sumatra in 1607 and 1608.

This yarn about maritime Shakespeare productions has been comprehensively exploded by Jonathan Bate, who shows that ‘Ambrose Guntio’ was beyond all reasonable doubt a mask for the dread name of J P Collier. Collier removed the relevant pages (for the dates) of Keeling’s surviving diary for the voyage, and left in print under the unlikely alias this tasty and poisoned tit-bit for literary scholarship to rejoice over, all the way up to the third edition Arden Hamlet.

Bate, bless him, simply googled the pseudonym to locate other items published as by ‘Ambrose Guntio’, and found comprehensive and convincing overlap with work the forger published under his own name:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WY6wTq8_Wkk

But the other way to have thought about it was likelihoods. You might have put on a Hamlet on a Cunard liner, or White Star line ship heading for India. But when every day was a battle with storm-damaged ships for crews debilitated by illness, malnutrition,  and dangerous labour, who was going to have the leisure to cast, distribute parts to, costume, commit to memory and play (or even spectate at) a Hamlet?

No doubt the East India Company did get a little better with more experience. But it’s just laughable to think that participants on a most prosperous and lucky voyage would have spare energy for this kind of nonsense. They had preachers on board too, and this first voyage gives us an instance of the more pious sort of performance they would have considered edifying, and we can imagine that events of this general nature were far more likely to have been conducted on the third voyage than a Shakespeare play:

“Before our departure from hence we had a Sermon and a Communion one a Sunday in the forenoone, and afternoone one of our men which was a Jew, was christened and called John, our Generall being his godfather.”

I still do not understand the full casualty list. The other pamphlet, which has less stress on the deaths and dangers, seems a more official sort of publication. I think women whose husbands had gone to sea were allowed to re-marry after three years with no news, so a list of men who hadn’t come back at all, rather than come back and absconded, would have been useful and humane.

It is delivered without reproaches: the East India Company is not condemned, they are new to this risky game too (they still had to work out that arriving in London with a galleon full of pepper would drive down the price of pepper).

The pamphlet reminds me of Donne’s ‘The Storm’ and ‘The Calm’ (though just how literary those poems look in the comparison), and of The Tempest (“wee continued here two monethes and eight dayes, having for the most part every daye fearefull thunder, raine and lightenning, as the like is not heard in our countrey, for they haue many slaine with the thunder which maketh them make hast to gette home before night. The people are very industrious and take great paines, both in setting of Rice which groweth there in great quantytie, so that there is whole stackes thereof, as also in beating and winnowing the same. They weave such thinges as they weare about their bodyes beeing made of the barke of trees. Their houses are but meane, standing halfe a yarde from the ground and covered with leaues, with a hoale at one ende of the same house to creepe in at on their knees. They love Wine exceedingly, with which they will bee very drunke”).

The things those lost men saw - or if they were unlucky on the way out, almost got to see! Elephants with their boy mahouts, the Sultan of Aceh’s damsels dancing in their bracelets and jewels, even mermaids (“The 13. day we saw two Marmaides, and as we judged them, they were Male and Female, because the Mosse of one of their heads was longer then the other, their heades are very round, and their hinder parts are devided like two legges, they say they are signes of stormy weather; and so we found it”). 

If Henry Thickpenny was one of the few to bear the Thickpenny name, as this site below seems to indicate he may have been, maybe he’d had good value for being a Thickpenny:

http://www.surnamedb.com/Surname/Thickpenny

And if Methusalem Mountjoy (dead on the Ascention) had only a short life, it was certainly intense. Everybody on this crazily dangerous voyage deserved a monument somewhere, and the printing press of Thomas Thorpe provided it - it would later produce a more famous memorialisation (of sorts), without a name at all.

"this Monster eating beast"

After a frustrating few weeks with, initially, a failing broadband connection, and then all the chores of getting started with a new ISP, I can at last return to my neglected blog.

I was reading Robert Baron’s An apologie for Paris for rejecting of Juno and Pallas, and presenting of Ate’s golden ball to Venus (1649). This fawning, over-written and highly derivative book re-tells the story of the Judgment of Paris. I was initially interested in how Venus is described, for instance in getting Paris’s full attention with a timely wardrobe malfunction:

“faire Aphrodite approached with a world of winning majesty in her looks; and as the Elixar turneth all things into gold, so the Sunny beames of this illustrious Deities eyes, (whose every motion shot ten thousand Cupids into the hot Phrygians soule) reflecting upon his, soon affected him with her passion, and made him ready to prostrate (without further cunctation) the Ball, with his glowing heart, at her feet. First she slipt downe her loose flower-embroydered mantle, and inriched his gullon eyes with the wealth of her lovely breasts, those nectar running fountaines, as farre excelling those two Pallaces of pleasure which Juno even now promised, as they did the humble colleges that were the mothers of the Capitoll; and before she opened the cherry of her lips, she emparadised him with a winning smile…”

Prior to this, Minerva had told Paris that, if he awarded the ball to her, he would as a reward:

“make a new edition of, and addition to, Arithmeticke, and compleate her with numbers enow to count those many Atomes whose accidentall concourse made this big-bellied earth, and how many minutes have thrust out one another since that accident happened”.

Not exactly tempting, so when Venus offers Paris a ravishingly beautiful partner (Helen of Troy, of course), it’s a done deal that she gets the golden ball. She entices him with these reflections: “Tell me for Loves sake, is it not more lovely to lie intwined in her foulding armes, like a Lilly imprisoned in a Jaile of snow, or Ivory in a band of Alablaster, than to sit muffled in furres like a bedrid Miser?” - where of course Baron is having his goddess quote Shakespeare’s poem about her -

(“Full gently now she takes him by the Hand,
A Lilly prison’d in a Jayl of Snow,
Or Ivory in an Alabaster Band,
So white a Friend ingirts so white a Foe…”)

But Baron writes by assembling poeticisms. A more original expression struck me: I was interested by how Venus “inriched his gullon eyes with the wealth of her lovely breasts”: what does ‘gullon’ mean?

The OED is not immediately helpful, but rooting around with the stem of the word gets you to the animal depicted above in Topsell’s The history of four-footed beasts (1658 edition, p.205), the ‘Gulon’.

Baron is simply transferring the nature of this beast to Paris’s eyes, which are greedy, or gluttonous. But Robert Baron’s prim excursions into erotica lack all interest compared to the ‘gulon’ itself. We call it a wolverine,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolverine

but Topsell’s account of it largely ignores the real animal, and embroiders upon the ‘gulon’ as a signal instance of four-footed beastliness: it has been ordained by God to typify the gluttony of the men in Russia, Lithuania, and other intemperate zones.

In the illustration, the gulon is performing its unpleasant and signature habit of squeezing its fully-gorged body between two closely adjacent trees, so that it excretes copiously (as shown), and is able to resume eating. In case this seems at all implausible, Topsell goes into the details of what happens if the creature can’t find trees close enough together.

This is Topsell's whole entry:

Of the GVLON.

This Beast was not known by the Ancients, but hath been since discovered in the Northern parts of the World, and because of the great voracity thereof, it is called (Gulo) that is, a devourer in imitation of the Germans, who call such devouring creatures Vilsiuss, and the Swedians, Gerff; in Lituania and Muscovia, it is called Rossomokal. It is thought to be engendered by a Hyaena and a Lioness, for in quality it resembleth a Hiaena, and it is the same which is called (Crocuta:) it is a devouring and an unprofitable creature, having sharper teeth then other creatures. Some think it is derived of a Wolf and a Dog, for it is about the bigness of a Dog: it hath the face of a Cat, the body and tail of a Fox; being black of colour: his feet and nails be most sharp, his skin rusty, the hair very sharp, and it feedeth upon dead carkases.

When it hath found a dead carkass he eateth thereof so violently, that his belly standeth out like a bell; then he seeketh for some narrow passage betwixt two trees, and there draweth through his body, by pressing whereof, he driveth out the meat which he had eaten: and being so emptied returneth and devoureth as much as he did before, and goeth again and emptieth himself as in former manner; and so continueth eating and emptying till all be eaten. It may be that God hath ordained such a creature in those Countries, to express the abominable gluttony of the men of that Countrey, that they may know their true deformed nature, and lively ugly figure, represented in this Monster eating beast: for it is the fashion of the Noble men in those parts, to sit from noon till midnight, eating and drinking, and never rise from the table, but to disgorge their stomachs, or ease their bellies: and then return with refreshed appetites to ingurgitate and consume more of Gods creatures: wherein they grow to such a heighth of beastliness, that they lose both sense and reason, and know no difference between head and tail. Such they are in Muscovia, in Lituania, and most shameful of all in Tartaria.

These things are reported by Olaus Magnus, and Mathias Michou; But I would to God that this same (more then beastly intemperate gluttony) had been circumscribed and confined within the limits of those unchristian or heretical-apostatical countries, and had not spread it self and infected our more civil and Christian parts of the World; so should not Nobility, Society, Amity, good fellowship, neighbourhood, and honesty, be ever placed upon drunken or gluttonous companions: or any man be commended for bibbing and sucking in Wine and Beer like a Swine: When in the mean season no spark of grace, or Christianity, appeareth in them: which notwithstanding they take upon them, being herein worse then Beasts, who still reserve the notes of their nature, and preserve their lives; but these lose the markes of humanity, reason, memory and sense, with the conditions of their families, applying themselves to consume both patrimony and pence in this voracity, and forget the Badges of Christians, offering sacrifice to nothing but their bellies. The Church forsaketh them, the spirit accurseth them, the civil world abhorreth them, the Lord condemneth them, the Devil expecteth them, and the fire of Hell it self is prepared for them; and all such devourers of Gods good creature.

To help their digestion, for although the Hiena and Gulon, and some other monsters are subject to this gluttony, yet are there many creatures more in the world, who although they be Beasts and lack reason, yet can they not by any famine, stripes, or provocations be drawn to exceed their natural appetites, or measure in eating or drinking. There are of these Beasts two kindes, distinguished by colour, one black, and the other like a Wolf, they seldom kill a Man, or any live Beasts, but feed upon carrion and dead carkasses, as is before said; yet sometimes when they are hungry, they prey upon Beasts, as Horses, and such like, and then they subtilly ascend up into a tree, and when they see a Beast under the same, they leap down upon him and destroy him. A Bear is afraid to meet them, and unable to match them by reason of their sharp teeth.

This Beast is tamed, and nourished in the Courts of Princes, for no other cause then for an example of incredible voracity. When he hath filled his belly, if he can finde no trees growing so near together, as by sliding betwixt them, he may expel his excrements; then taketh he an Alder-tree, and with his fore-feet rendeth the same asunder, and passeth through the midst of it, for the cause aforesaid. When they are wilde, men kill them with bows and gins, for no other cause than for their skins which are precious and profitable; for they are white spotted, changeably interlined like divers flowers; for which cause the greatest Princes, and richest Nobles use them in garments in the Winter time, such are the Kings of Polonia, Sweveland, Goatland, and the Princes of Germany; neither is their any skin which will sooner take a colour, or more constantly retain it. The outward appearance of the said skin is like to a damaskt garment, and besides this outward part, there is no other memorable thing worthy observation in this ravenous Beast, and therefore in Germany, it is called a four-footed Vulture.

He died with his hand on his Shakespeare

His what?

Reading for a seminar, and for the first time in years, all the shouty poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, and find myself enjoying most the ‘Sundry Fragments and Images’, as they are so much less overpowering (and I concede that I’m a ‘Sundry Fragments’ type of reader).

Then, among the unfinished stuff, I came across a sonnet octave Hopkins wrote about Shakespeare:

In the lodges of the perishable souls
He has his portion. God, who stretch'd apart
Doomsday and death - whose dateless thought must chart
All times at once and span the distant goals,
Sees what his place is; but for us the rolls
Are shut against the canvassing of art.
Something we guess or know; some spirits start
Upwards at once and win their aureoles –

And at this point our poet’s pen faltered to a halt, as if riven by doubt– would Shakespeare in fact have made it to heaven? In Hopkins, heaven is a dismayingly exclusive sort of joint, and GMH did not have the benefit of Gary Taylor arguing Shakespeare’s Catholicism (which would have laid the troubling question to rest).

This reminded me of Boswell affecting to be bothered by the thought that (leaving aside the gloriously resurrected body of the bard himself) Shakespeare’s works might not be available in the here-beyond:

' BOSWELL. 'The hope that we shall see our departed friends again must support the mind.' JOHNSON. 'Why yes, Sir.' BOSWELL. 'There is a strange unwillingness to part with life, independent of serious fears as to futurity. A reverend friend of ours (naming him) tells me, that he feels an uneasiness at the thoughts of leaving his house, his study, his books.' JOHNSON. 'This is foolish in *****. A man need not be uneasy on these grounds; for, as he will retain his consciousness, he may say with the philosopher, Omnia mea mecum porto.' BOSWELL. 'True, Sir: we may carry our books in our heads; but still there is something painful in the thought of leaving for ever what has given us pleasure. I remember, many years ago, when my imagination was warm, and I happened to be in a melancholy mood, it distressed me to think of going into a state of being in which Shakspeare's poetry did not exist. A lady whom I then much admired, a very amiable woman, humoured my fancy, and relieved me by saying, "The first thing you will meet in the other world, will be an elegant copy of Shakspeare's works presented to you."' Dr. Johnson smiled benignantly at this, and did not appear to disapprove of the notion.

I assume that Dr Johnson is amused at Boswell’s affectation, and with the omission in the refined exchange Boswell so guilelessly reports of any thought that Old William himself might be all present and correct beyond the gates of pearl, his anecdotes 'more amusing than Pipit’s experience could provide'.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, managed (it was reported) to pass away with a copy of Shakespeare in his hand. I found an elegy on Tennyson by Hardwicke Drummond Rawnsley, which starts like this, and gets as early as its second stanza to the exciting thought of Alfred and William hob-nobbing, bardically-bonded, among the blessed:

The moonlight lay with glory on his face

About whose bed in grief the nation bowed,

And darkly flew the wild October cloud:

Sobbed the pale morn, and came with faltering pace

As if it feared to lift a dead man's shroud;

And all the streams made lamentation loud.

But such majestic calm was in his look

As seemed to say, 'Why weeping o'er me bend,

Or bid me longer here on earth attend

Whose home is Heaven?' His hand held Shakespeare's book---

Shakespeare, so soon to greet him as a friend!

And so he went companioned, to the end.

“He died with his hand on his Shakespeare, and the moon shining full into the window, and over him”, Queen Victoria noted approvingly, but Christopher Ricks also cites Samuel Butler being waspish about this story: “his friends should have taken it out of the bed when they saw the end was near. It was not necessary to emphasize the fact that the ruling passion for posing was strong with him in death.”

I found at
http://www.alsopreview.com/octavo/fall2004/bielby.htm

a poet called Nicholas Bielby’s effort to complete the unfinished Shakespeare in heaven poem by Hopkins, which he does in another octave, which sounds some of Hopkins’ major chords:

Some plough the earth, their feet of lardy flesh,

In love with earthly waywardness. Dare we

Not know what Incarnation means, not see

Love that breaks every bound? Soiled soil, afresh,

Leaps up in Christ. And those that live the thresh

Of blood and word in creativity,

Pity pied humankind and let it free,

Share Christ at each cross in that singing mesh.

He has fought shy of imagining the beatific bard – which would at least have been fun - and retreats into a generality which seems to suggest that poets are Christ-like, pitying and freeing ordinary humankind even despite their awful lardy feet, and suffering such an agony, the poor dears, in the act of composition.