T ILL K INZEL Mobility and Autobiography on Land and Sea: Samuel Pepys’s Diary, Daniel Defoe’s The King of Pirates and Mary Lacy’s The Female Shipwright Mobility is a crucial element of autobiographical and pseudo-autobiographical texts. Particularly pseudo-autobiographical texts constantly blur the boundaries between fact and fiction, between reality as perceived and objectified, making authenticating moves that are cancelled out by the texts’ fictions. In this paper, three fairly dissimilar authors will be discussed in order to provide a sketch of the varieties of mobility in the autobiographical mode of writing in the 17 th and 18 th centuries. The diaries of Samuel Pepys can be regarded as a paradigmatically mobile text in so far as the constant movements of Pepys about town provide the counterpoints to his acts of writing at home. Pepys, moving through the city of London in the interests of politics, business, or pleasure, as the case may be, presents to the reader the image of the bustling city itself, constantly evoking an image of mobility. This is extended to his naval interests and the few occasions where Pepys actually travelled on board ship. His naval experience, however, links his life and his life-writing to those who have written autobiographically or pseudoautobiographically about the seafaring element in, and its influence on, British life. In this essay I will look at Daniel Defoe before moving on to a rarely considered text. In order to highlight gender-related issues in connection with mobility, I want to compare and contrast Pepys’s male autobiographical mobility with the later female autobiography of Mary Lacy, who for many years served in the Royal Navy as a woman in men’s clothing, presenting a highly revealing account of the possibilities and constraints of female mobility in early modern seafaring Britain. Questions of fictionality and authenticity, as well as issues of the demarcation of public and private spaces and places, are intimately connected in these texts. Preliminary Considerations I: The Oceanography of Literature In connection with the problem of space it is quite remarkable to note that even though many theories of space are roughly speaking indebted to decon- T ILL K INZEL 112 structive, poststructuralist and postcolonial approaches, 1 there is an increasing awareness among scholars that literature is not merely a self-referential system but in some sense refers to the world and elements of it, albeit in the form of an aesthetic illusion of referring to the world by literary means 2 . Taking as her example the Vierwaldstättersee region in Switzerland, Barbara Piatti has demonstrated with a pathbreaking study on the “geography of literature” what kind of potential the surveying of an area’s literary geography has for the analysis of spatial models in literature. 3 With every text we read we complement the net we throw over the world, thereby creating virtual geographies which are, however, phantastically slanted shadows of a real world. Naval or maritime literature offers an interesting case study for gauging the fruitfulness of the approach called “geography of literature.“ 4 At the same time, the “geography of literature” offers the possibility to survey the limits of the references to the world that are introduced by geographical coordinates. These limits may have to do with the fact that the sea as the deterritorialized space is opposed to the land which can be enclosed in borders both virtually and in fact. The geography of literature has to turn into a kind of oceanography of literature (thalassography). This oceanography of literature has as its object the specific spatial imaginaries of maritime literature. The poetics of the ocean are meant to negotiate the interplay of referentialization and poeticization in maritime literature. The sea has to be considered as a space that has been surveyed in fictions and that fictions continue to survey. And it is most important in connection with the study of mobility, its patterns and irregularities, for the sea as such puts in continual motion the literary characters of maritime literature, both fictional and non-fictional. 5 The opposition and tension of land and sea is the topic of a famous idiosyncratic book by Carl Schmitt. In his Land und Meer. Eine weltgeschichtliche Betrachtung, seiner Tochter Anima erzählt, he presents a ‘world historical’ thesis concerning the relationship of land and sea in the English cultural imagination, even though he does not use this term. Schmitt’s text narrates in a very 1 Cf. the general drift of the Metzler handbook on space in this matter: Raum ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch, ed. Stephan Günzel (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2010). 2 Cf. Ansgar Nünning, “Welten - Weltbilder - Weisen der Welterzeugung: Zum Wissen der Literatur und zur Aufgabe der Literaturwissenschaft,“ Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift 59 (2009): 66. 3 Barbara Piatti, Die Geographie der Literatur. Schauplätze, Handlungsräume, Raumphantasien (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2008), 15-121. 4 Note the distinctions in literary concepts of space concerning geopoetics introduced by Sylvia Sasse, “Poetischer Raum: Chronotopos und Geopoetik,” Raum ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch, ed. Stephan Günzel (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2010), 294-308. 5 This specifically maritime aspect of space and mobility is only marginally present in Raum und Bewegung in der Literatur. Die Literaturwissenschaften und der Spatial Turn, eds. Wolfgang Hallet and Birgit Neumann (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2009). Mobility and Autobiography on Land and Sea 113 lively way the stories of pirates and whale hunters. 6 But the most relevant comment he makes concerns the rise of England as a naval power, a topic that seems to go on spawning books endlessly. Schmitt claims, quite poetically, that under Queen Elizabeth I, the English transformed themselves from a people of shepherds to a sea-roaming nation of privateers, into “children of the sea.” 7 The English made use of the technological achievements of the Portuguese, and maritime literature with its many movements would not have come into existence without the compass and other instruments of navigation. 8 Schmitt 9 The conflict of the colonial powers of Portugal, the Netherlands and England is mirrored in ideological texts in the first half of the 17 th century when the debate about the free or open versus the closed sea was launched - mare liberum or mare clausum. The Dutch philosopher Hugo Grotius defended the freedom of the seas in his 100-page treatise Mare liberum (which was anonymously published in 1609; it consisted of a chapter of a much longer treatise De jure praedae). Grotius provided a philosophical defense of the business interests of the Dutch in the East Asian world region. In this world-historical constellation, ships and the sea quickly became subjects of intense public interest, as N.A.M. Rodger writes, and thus became “symbols of national identity.” draws attention to the close connection of maritime existence, which is, of course, an existence of mobility in the new spatial dimensions of modernity, with the unleashing of technological progress. But how this translates into the description of ships and their spatial capabilities would need to be considered in more detail than is possible here. 10 From the point of view of the scholar of English literature it was important that “[m]any literate and even learned men went to sea themselves, while the literacy of the professional seamen (not only the élite of navigators) was itself improving very rapidly”. 11 6 Carl Schmitt, Land und Meer (Köln-Lövenich: Edition Maschke, 1981). See Claus-Artur Scheier, “Zwischen Land und Meer. Philosophische Bemerkungen zu einer Kulturgeschichte der See ausgehend von Carl Schmitt,” Abhandlungen der Braunschweigischen Wissenschaftlichen Gesellschaft. Band LIV (Braunschweig: 2005), 251-263; Till Kinzel, “Benjamin Disraeli and Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology,” Anglistentag Proceedings Münster 2007, ed. Klaus Stierstorfer (Trier: WVT, 2008), 401-411. 7 Schmitt, 1981, 50. 8 Daniel Defoe, A General History of Pyrates, ed. Manuel Schonhorn (Mineola, New York: Dover, 1999), 177. On the role of technological and logistical achievements of the Portuguese, see also Daniel Damler, Wildes Recht. Zur Pathogenese des Effektivitätsprinzips in der neuzeitlichen Eigentumslehre (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, ²2010), 56-62. 9 Carl Schmitt, Gespräch über die Macht und den Zugang zum Machthaber / Gespräch über den Neuen Raum (Berlin: Akademie, 1994), 55. 10 N.A.M. Rodger, The Safeguard of the Sea. A Naval History of Britain, 660-1649 (New York, London: Norton, 1998), 311. 11 Rodger 1998, 311. T ILL K INZEL 114 The decisive response to Grotius followed in the 1630s with John Selden’s Mare clausum (a text that had in fact been written much earlier). 12 Preliminary Considerations II: Mobile Lives in the 17 th and 18 th Centuries Selden propagated the idea of an English sphere of interest in the waters belonging to England, but this was mainly an argument connected to fishing rights. The following period of maritime conflict and colonial expansion presented the spectacle of the fight between an open sea for all or a closed sea controlled by some. This, of course, would be of crucial significance for the patterns of mobility in all kinds of maritime texts. Pepys provides one of the most famous accounts of a scenario in which both mobility and its constraints become obvious. This account concerns the movements of the King returning from his exile on the continent to England. The king’s mobility is in the focus of some of the early entries in Pepys’s diary in a direct and indirect form. In May 1660, Pepys met the king, Charles II, for the first time - and he met him on board ship. Pepys reports on the 21 st of May 1660 that the King is expected on board every day, and on the 23 rd of May he actually came on board. 13 Where it made me ready to weep to hear the stories that he told of his difficulties that he had passed through. As his travelling four days and three nights on foot, every step up to his knees in dirt, with nothing but a green coat and a pair of country breeches on and a pair of country shoes, that made him so sore all over his feet that he could scarce stir. It was on this occasion that the King related his own adventures of mobility, namely of his escape from Worcester: Yet he was forced to run away from a miller and other company that took them for rogues. […] In another place, at his Inn, the master of the house, as the King was standing with his hands upon the back of a chair by the fire-side, he kneeled down and kissed his hand privately, saying that he would not ask him who he was, but bid God bless him whither he was going. Then the difficulty of getting a boat to get into France, where he was fain to plot with the master thereof to keep his design from the four men and a boy (which was all his ship’s company), and so got to Feckam in France. 14 The King recounts his volatile situation on his escape, being recognized by some of his subjects who do not give him away. The narration presents the King on the move who is also perceived to be on the move - and he tells this 12 See Mónica Brito Vieira, “Mare Liberum vs. Mare Clausum: Grotius, Freitas, and Selden’s Debate on Dominion over the Seas,” Journal of the History of Ideas 64/ 3 (July 2003). 13 Samuel Pepys, The Diary. A New and Complete Transcription, eds. Robert Latham and William Matthews, vol. I (London: Bell & Sons, 1970), 154. 14 Pepys 1970, 156. Mobility and Autobiography on Land and Sea 115 story at the very moment that he is retracing his steps to England. A tale of mobility foreshadows the return to his realm and thus also metaphorically a return to stability. Before the King reaches English land, however, he seems to have experienced a particular restraint on his mobility on board ship that was also noted by Pepys. For Pepys was ordered by his master “to cause the marke to be gilded, and a Crowne and C. R. to be made at the head of the coach table,” 15 How does he describe this event that would, in its way, contribute to another form of mobility, namely Pepys’s upward mobility with the help of Edward Montagu, finally reaching its high point in his career as the chief administrator of the Royal Navy. where the King had obviously “caught his head against a beam,” as the commentary to this diary entry surmises. 16 Pepys’s considerable role in the development of the Royal Navy in the Restoration period is standard knowledge of all naval historians. But Pepys only published one book on the topic during his lifetime, his Memoires Relating to the State of the Royal Navy of England (1690). Pepys achieved his eminent position in the administration of the Navy without any significant qualifications to start with. But he acquired a comprehensive knowledge of all things connected to navy life, which provided the crucial wherewithal for becoming a competent administrator, knowing the precise details of countless problems of logistics. Pepys’s upward mobility and his competent management of navy affairs in turn contributed to the overall mobility of British imperial policies. For it was the Royal Navy, at least according to historian Arthur Herman, 17 which to a large extent created the modern world which laid the foundations for our own post-imperial world after the demise of the British empire. British imperialism as a cultural phenomenon is intimately connected to this organization of the navy that encapsulates the coincidentia oppositorum of movement and fixity, of mobility and stability. Only this combination would ensure the safety of England’s status as a world power, even though one of its initial tasks was nothing less than providing protection and help to the English merchant fleet. 18 Mobility, for Pepys, had many different dimensions. One of these was the power to move other people, to make them move, as he writes on 20 April 1660: “All the morning I was busy to get my window altered and to have my table set as I would have it; which after it was done, I was infinitely pleased 15 Pepys 1970, 159. 16 Cf. C.S. Knighton, Pepys and the Navy (Phoenix Mill: Sutton, 2003); J.D. Davies, Pepys’s Navy: Ships, Men and Warfare, 1649-1689 (Barnsley: Seaforth, 2008). 17 Arthur Herman, To Rule the Waves. How the British Navy Shaped the Modern World (New York: HarperCollins, 2004). 18 See Lawrence James, The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (London: Abacus, 1998), 29; Peter Wende, Das britische Empire. Geschichte eines Weltreiches (München: Beck, ²2009), 75. T ILL K INZEL 116 with it, and also to see what a command I have to have everyone ready to come and go at my command.” 19 Samuel Pepys’s Movements in and out of Town: Upward, Urban, and Naval Mobility Autobiography as a genre is here rather broadly conceived. In my conceptual libertinism I include diaries and pseudo-autobiographies: diaries of the kind Pepys wrote come close to what their authors might have wished to be read as their own account of their lives so that a kind of reader-response oriented genre definition might allow us to read the diaries as autobiography. Certainly the diary entries provide the reader with the chance and necessity to extrapolate some kind of identity - that of Samuel Pepys - as a fixed focalizer through whose eyes we follow the writer’s movements through the city. In fact, autobiography, if not merely a document of internal musings and meditations, in its extreme form bordering on or identical with mysticism, offers images of movements. Autobiography is the record of the movements, in actual existence, through spaces and places that are really there but acquire a particular significance through their descriptions in autobiographical texts. Autobiography comes into being through mobility; mere unchallenged immobility does not trigger the writing of autobiography. Autobiography records movements that provide the external impulse to give the text something like eventfulness. Most particularly, it is the turbulent and boisterous city of London that provides the spatial background for the everyday mobility of Pepys. 20 Up and to the office, where we sat all morning. At noon home to dinner. Then to my office and there waited, thinking to have had Bagwell’s wife come to me about business, that I might have talked with her; but she came not. So I to Whitehall by coach with Mr. Andrews; and there I got his contract for the victualling of Tanger signed and sealed by us there. So that all that business is well over, and I hope to have made a good business of it […]. Thence to W. Joyce and Anthonys to invite them to dinner to meet my aunt James at my house. So home, having called upon Doll, our pretty Change woman, […]. So going home and my coach stopping in Newgate market over against a poulterer’s shop, I took occasion to buy a rabbit; but it proved a deadly old one when I came to eat it - as I did do after an hour’s In the case of Pepys, one can open the diary on almost every page and will find something very much like this, as e.g. on 6 September 1664: 19 Samuel Pepys, The Diary. A Selection, ed. Robert Latham (London: Penguin, 2003), 36. 20 Cf. the background descriptions in Stephen Porter, Pepys’s London: Everyday Life in London 1650-1703 (Stroud: Amberley, 2011). Mobility and Autobiography on Land and Sea 117 being at my office; and after supper, again there till past 11 at night. And so home and to bed. 21 This passage, which is similar to many others in the diary, highlights the two fixed places between which Pepys regularly moves back and forth: his home and his office. In between staying at home and working at the office, he moves about London on various errands, not all of them connected to his duties at the Admiralty. Cynthia Wall 22 succinctly captures the essence of Pepys’s diary entries with regard to the spatial dimensions of London, implicitly including issues of mobility. She writes: “Pepys itemises his spaces, measuring his day through the streets of the city; his routes can be traced from his words. London has a very physical texture in Pepys’s diary […].” Wall speaks of Pepys’s “urban patterns out and about,” highlighting a passage in Pepys’s diary from October 1664 that is “a collage of intersections and interactions: traffic stopping and starting, coaches lost and found, taverns mentioned and entered, patterns of light and dark.” 23 Pepys’s diary consists of a myriad of mini-stories, and many of these mini-stories have to do with mobility and the conditions of mobility. The many spaces through which Pepys moves and the places to which he goes are the referential basis for his mini-stories, but they do not remain completely stable. Pepys’s mobility in the city of London does not just refer to a London that remained unchanged while he was writing his diary. In fact, the city itself was in movement, and most particularly so when the great conflagration of 1666 destroyed vast areas of the city, leaving room for the wholly or partially new construction of places, spaces, buildings and thoroughfares. As Pepys moves through this mobile city his diary tries to keep track of the changes. It is surely no accident that the terms of mobility are so prominent in this passage. Pepys does not, of course, always mention the means of transportation, for he sometimes walks, takes a coach or travels by boat. The image of Pepys conjured up by many diary entries is of someone almost constantly on the move but coming back to the same places again and again. The spreading of the fire and the mobility enforced by it are documented by Pepys in his diary entry of 2 September 1666, from which I quote the following excerpt: So I made myself ready presently, and walked to the Tower and there got upon one of the high places, Sir J. Robinsons little son going up with me; and there I did see the houses at the end of the bridge all on fire, and an infinite great fire on this 21 Pepys 2003, 422. 22 Cynthia Wall, “London and Narration in the Long Eighteenth Century,” The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of London, ed. Lawrence Manley (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011), 108. 23 Wall 2011, 109. T ILL K INZEL 118 and the other side the end of the bridge - which, among other people, did trouble me for poor little Michell and our Sarah on the Bridge. So down, with my heart full of trouble, to the Lieutenant of the Tower, who tells me that it begun this morning in the King’s bakers house in Pudding lane, and that it hath burned down St. Magnes Church and most part of Fishstreete already. So I down to the waterside and there got a boat and through the bridge, and there saw a lamentable fire. Poor Michells house, as far as the Old Swan, already burned that way and the fire running further, that in a very little time got as far as the Stillyard while I was there. Everybody endeavouring to remove their goods, and flinging into the River or bringing them into lighters that lay off. Poor people staying in their houses as long as till the very fire touched them, and then running into boats or clambering from one pair of stair by the waterside to another. An among other things, the poor pigeons I perceive were loath to leave their houses, but hovered about the windows and balconies till they were some of them burned, their wings, and fell down. 24 In this famous passage, mobility and immobility are closely intertwined on various levels. Not only is Pepys moving about the area to better observe the fire; he also stays in some places in order to make his observations. These observations, in their turn, yield further instances of both mobility and immobility. People not wanting to leave the property cling to their place as long as possible before removing their possessions under the immediate threat from the fire. Patterns of mobility thus also turn out to be patterns of immobility for both men and goods. But also the animal world is implicated in this strange scenario, as pigeons show the same tendency not to give up their place of abode until it is, at least in some cases, too late. It is this image that stays with the reader, offering the possibility of a symbolic interpretation of the conflagration. Fictions of Autobiography: Daniel Defoe’s Pirates The close connections between culture and technology as a means to achieve maximum mobility are particularly apparent in the context of English sea literature. For literature of this kind is based on the experiences which are enabled by the technologies of seafaring, but it is also the case that the technologies employed in seafaring ventures and adventures come to light for us in the medium of literature. The focus on autobiographical literature in this essay already indicates that the issue of the authenticity of these texts distinguishes autobiographies from mere fictions which do not claim to be true. But even though actual travel reports and other sources can be regarded as reports on the British sea experience, fictional autobiographies help to create a more comprehensive picture of the seafaring experience in the cultural imaginary. 24 Pepys 2003, 660. Mobility and Autobiography on Land and Sea 119 This cultural imaginary makes the distinction between fiction and nonfiction particularly problematic, as autobiographical texts may either be authentic autobiographies or inauthentic, i.e. fictional autobiographies. This brings us to Daniel Defoe (1660-1731), the versatile journalist and author who was also a long-time student of naval matters and particularly piracy. 25 Though it remains doubtful whether the General History of the Pyrates, published in 1724 under the name of Charles Johnson, was actually written by Defoe, as some scholars claim, 26 Defoe offers his own take on piratical adventures in a number of other texts that offer highly interesting material for the analysis of early modern (fictional) patterns of mobility. Piracy as such depends on mobility, of course, and to understand piratical patterns of mobility would have greatly increased the operational ability of those who wanted to keep piracy under control. 27 Piracy also profited from the opening up of the oceans of the world beginning with the 16 th century. For from then on the open sea, as Michael Kempe 28 The early 18 th century has often been called the Golden Age of piracy, which would appear to be somewhat problematic in light of the often brutal piratical practices. At the time, however, there was a whole range of different forms of piracy (pirates, buccaneers, corsairs, freebooters, privateers) which were sometimes difficult to entangle, even though the laws of nation stipulated that they should not all be treated in the same way. remarks, was transformed into a transnational space of contacts and conflicts to a hitherto unknown degree. 29 For some roamed the seas in possession of official ‘letters of marque,’ but there were also pirates who owned letters of marque issued by non-existent governments or of governments who did not know anything about the existence of the respective letters of marque. Pirates had already been considered as hostis humani generis by Cicero, as enemies of the human species. 30 25 Cf. Maximillian E. Novak, Defoe. Master of Fictions (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000). This notion was widespread in the 17 th and early 18 th centuries but should not be misconstrued as a 26 Wolfgang Riehle, Daniel Defoe (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 2002), 88, accepts the attribution to Defoe. Whether Schonhorn’s attribution of the book to Daniel Defoe is correct is open to doubt (cf. 709-712). Cf. Robert Bohn, Die Piraten (München: Beck, ³2007), 7f. See also Joachim Möller, “Defoes Piratenparadies Libertalia,“ AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 8 (1983): 129-144. 27 On piracy see the succinct introduction by Bohn ³2007; the classic book, to which Carl Schmitt repeatedly draws attention, is: Philip Gosse, The History of Piracy (New York: Dover, 2007). Cf. as well Daniel Heller-Roazen, The Enemy of All. Piracy and the Law of Nations (New York: Zone Books, 2009); and the indispensable volume by Michael Kempe, Fluch der Meere. Piraterie, Völkerrecht und internationale Beziehungen 1500-1800 (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2010). 28 Kempe, 2010, 16. 29 See Kempe 2010. 30 Defoe 1999, 377. T ILL K INZEL 120 proper definition of the pirate but rather as polemical characterization in moral and legal terms. 31 Defoe frequently wrote in the genre of what could be called inauthentic autobiography, a kind of autobiography purporting to be authentic. 32 There are relatively few truly good authors of actually authentic autobiographies connected to the life of the sea. This is most likely due to the fact that only very few people with true literary talent went to sea. Famous authors like Melville and Smollett are merely the exceptions to the rule. Interestingly, even authors of literary talent more often chose the road of fiction than of autobiography in their attempts to depict naval themes in literature. It was the drive towards fictionalization that would come to characterize the English literature of the sea. 33 Daniel Defoe wrote one such fictional autobiography in the rather slim but highly interesting volume called The King of Pirates: Being an Account of the Enterprises of Captain Avery, The Mock King of Madagascar, first published in 1720, reporting on the odyssey and the excursions of crime and rape of pirates from the point of view of a pirate captain. This text can be regarded as a “proleptic sketch“ for Captain Singleton 34 and provides a lively account of the pirates’ movements across the oceans but the most interesting passages are perhaps those that more allude to than describe in detail the rough dealings in which the pirates engaged. These passages systematically refuse to ascribe clear responsibility for piratical atrocities and can be regarded as early examples of unreliable narration. 35 In his text, Defoe draws on the case of the famous or infamous pirate captain Henry Avery, whose life already provided the basis of the 1713 play The Successful Pyrate by someone called Charles Johnson (most probably not the same as the author of the General History of Pyrates). 36 31 Cf., with reference to Matthew Tindall, Kempe 2010, 159; Heller-Roazen 2009, 93-118. Avery’s fictional autobiography as written by Defoe sets out to counter-act the claims made by another (fictive) book purporting to be Avery’s autobiography entitled My Life and Adventures; however, this alleged pseudo-autobiography was not actually known to Defoe’s fictional Avery - he had merely heard a report about it - mobility of news not yet also being a mobility of goods, e.g. of books. Defoe’s Avery thus writes his own account in response to an equally fictitious pre-text which is only present through its curiously emphasized absence; Defoe’s Avery, in fact, corrects what did not really stand in need of correction, thus contributing to the game of literary processes of authentification, inventing a kind of fake intertextuality. There 32 Cf. Philip Edwards, The Story of the Voyage. Sea-Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994), 187. 33 Cf. Edwards 1994, 219. 34 Novak 2000, 580. 35 Cf. Novak 2000, 581-582. 36 Cf. Gosse 2007, 178. Mobility and Autobiography on Land and Sea 121 are many fine touches of irony in The King of Pirates, most particularly when Avery tells the story of a Catholic friar who begs the pirates to return a silver plate because it had been consecrated to the Virgin - “as it happens,” Avery remarks laconically, “he could not persuade us to it.” 37 In this case, the pirates turn out to be immobile; they cannot be moved by theological reasoning or appeals to the sacredness of material objects which, due to this very materiality, also have a completely non-religious significance. But more to the point: in another context, Avery underscores the mobility of moral judgements or norms when he points to possible parallels between empires and pirate communities. St. Augustine had already famously drawn parallels between states and bands of robbers; and early modern scholars of the law of nations such as Grotius had clearly acknowledged the possibility for criminal organisations to turn into lawful communities, thus providing a legal rationale for accepting the existence of pirate republics. 38 If any gang of pirates or buccaneers would go upon their adventuers, and when they had made themselves rich would come and settle with us, we would take them into our protection and give them land to build towns and habitations for themselves - and so in time we might become a great nation, and inhabit the whole island. I told them that the Romans themselves were, at first, no better than such a gang of rovers as we were, and who knew bout our General, Captain Avery, might lay the foundation of as great an empire as they. Avery, disguising his true identity, tells two prisoners how such a state might come into being: 39 It has to be acknowledged that Avery spoke these words in order to deceive the prisoners about their actual strength and ambitions, intending to send forth into the world “rodomontading stories” inducing fear of the pirates among the English and Dutch ships travelling near Madagascar. 40 In addition, the actual possibility of founding any kind of empire was slim, to say the least, due to the decreasing number of men. However, Avery’s argument contains a serious core by pointing to the origins in violence of respectable political communities which can offer the protection or security that plays such an important role in Hobbes’s political philosophy. Hobbes had also considered the possibility of robbers in the state of nature being transformed into acceptable communities, 41 Political empires such as that of the Romans are, at least initially, morally on the same level as pirates and robbers, acquiring legitimacy not by any although these Hobbesian robbers are distinguished from actual pirates by refraining from killing anyone. 37 Daniel Defoe, The King of Pirates, foreword by Peter Ackroyd (London: Hesperus, 2002), 24. 38 Kempe 2010, 237. 39 Defoe 2002, 75. 40 Defoe 2002, 75. 41 Hobbes, De Cive 5.2; Kempe 2010, 236. T ILL K INZEL 122 grand notions of morality and justice but simply by success. This success, though, would have to be based less on mobility than on stability, as the key term ‘settle’ in the quoted passage indicates. The pirates are, however, unable to settle down, so that the first part of The King of Pirates rather aptly ends on a note of mobility, with Avery detailing his travel plans via Constantinople back to the sphere of Christendom. 42 This story of Avery was, however, not exactly the most useful one for Defoe to appropriate and adapt. The well-known fact that documentary evidence on Avery existed kept Defoe from freely indulging in imaginary exploits and thus purely fictional mobility - there were always people who might want to check the true facts of the story against his acts of storytelling. Shortly after publishing The King of Pirates, Defoe therefore made another attempt at the description of piratical mobility in his novel (also purporting to be an autobiography) The Life, Adventures, and Pyracies, of the Famous Captain Singleton from 1720. This novel takes up the game of “authenticating the unauthentic” 43 and has as one of its themes piracy as a form of unscrupulous original accumulation of riches through unproductive means. 44 Defoe’s novel already bears all the traits of the pirate mythology, in which the criminal character of the pirates’ actions becomes clear enough. But there is also ample evidence of the bravery and the naval skills on often completely insufficient vessels. Finally, the pirates in Captain Singleton’s narrative amass precisely those treasures of doubloons and gold peseta that would occupy the imagination of Robert Louis Stevenson and many lesser writers almost two hundred years later, with sustained pop-cultural effects. In the course of his narration, Defoe’s autodiegetic narrator Bob Singleton - who, in fact, composes the whole book as one long autobiographical letter - in the course of his narration attains more and more distance from his loathsome piratical existence; he moves away from being a pirate under the influence of a Quaker who turns out, again and again, to be an interpreter of natural law or natural right when the pirates come into contact with other peoples. Natural law is a conception of law that offers general moral guidance - and particularly so, one would hope, in a world in movement, for the general assumption of natural law is as follows: whereas social and political conditions change all the time and from one territory to the next, the principles of natural law supposedly are immune to change and are true or valid always and everywhere. 45 42 Defoe 2002, 76. But 43 Sutherland in Daniel Defoe, The Life, Adventures and Piracies of the Famous Captain Singleton, introduction by James Sutherland (London: Dent, 1963), v. 44 See on this novel the instructive reading by Oliver Lindner, “Matters of Blood.” Defoe and the Cultures of Violence (Heidelberg: Winter, 2010), 161-191, which focusses on the issue of violence. 45 On Defoe’s views concerning the laws of nature, see Maximillian E. Novak, Defoe and the Nature of Man (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1963). Mobility and Autobiography on Land and Sea 123 would not the pirates offer a prime example of moveable morality, as it were, of moral principles that do not stay the same but change according to the necessities imposed on the pirates by their mobility? In Captain Singleton, we learn at one point that the crew had behaved somewhat too freely towards the women of a settlement on the coast. This was received with some hostility by their husbands, who went on to offer violence to the intruders. The pirates, in their turn, were so enraged about these actions that they were planning to kill all the inhabitants of the settlement. (Being enraged is properly understood as a moral reaction based on a perceived case of injustice.) But before they could do so, it was pointed out to them by William, the Quaker, that under similar conditions they would according to the laws of nature have reacted in the same way. This did in fact reduce the violence, though perhaps not as much as one would have liked to think, for the massacre was then merely kept within certain limits. Natural law, as this case shows, has a real but limited power to move people in their actions - and even pirates as one of the most mobile groups of people can be persuaded to be moved by moral considerations. As there is no fixed authority, such as a Hobbesian state, however, these considerations extend only so far - and one further has to note that even the “laws of nature” do not operate by means of nature alone; they are in need of being brought into mind, of being articulated, by language and reason. Reasoned speech has to come to nature’s aid but cannot guarantee inflexible and immobile moral standards. The lack of moral orientation on the part of the pirates is the mirror image of the pirates’ spatial dislocation and their aimless mobility (roving). Singleton offers the following pertinent evaluation of their situation, a description that is emblematic of the pirates’ life as a life of mobility: “[...] we were as miserable as Nature could well make us to be; for we were upon a Voyage and no Voyage, we were bound some where and no where; for tho’ we knew what we intended to do, we did really not know what we were doing [...].” 46 Pirates such as Captain Singleton, who wants to make the reader believe that he gradually became disaffected with his way of life, had to navigate carefully in various senses. First of all, they had to navigate between the Dutch and the Portuguese, who were at the time fighting over the right to engage in trade in certain areas between Africa and Asia. As there was neither free trade nor free sea at the time, movements had to be carefully considered, since miscalculations in this matter could easily lead to the disruption of the pirates’ (or others’) entire business operations. A major logistical problem for pirates like Bob Singleton consisted in selling off the enormous amounts of nutmegs and cloves in order to amass even more gold than before. Defoe’s novels, and especially the ‘autobiography’ of Captain Singleton, can be read as fictionalizing comments on the conflicts and controversies 46 Defoe 1963, 39. T ILL K INZEL 124 concerning the law of nations in the early modern period of expanding business mobility. This conflict - also taken up much later in a sort of historical novel by Captain Marryat, namely The Phantom Ship - was a quarrel between two notions which have a direct connection to issues of mobility—the free (open) or closed sea. This conflict dating back to the 17 th century was the expression, on the level of legal thinking and/ or propaganda, as the case may be, of the necessity to define spheres of interest and to delimit the acceptable movements of enemy forces and especially merchant fleets on the oceans. Interestingly, the English sided with the notion developed by the Portuguese scholar Freitas, arguing for a mare clausum, whereas the Dutch endorsed the position developed by Hugo Grotius, arguing for a mare liberum, which accorded much better with their trade interests. 47 Gender and Mobility in Naval Contexts: The Female Shipwright and the Lady Tars Within this context of rivalling empires of merchant fleets, the pirates had to adapt their movements so that crucial problems of logistics could be solved, such as the storing of provision, the establishment of safe-havens, and the detection of booty. In a naval context, gender issues become particularly pertinent, as life on board ship is often depicted as an overwhelmingly male space. It may very well be true that much maritime fiction holds few charms for female readers because of the lack of proper female characters over large swathes of storytelling. It therefore seems highly interesting to take a closer look at those texts that actually portray female life within a naval context. Three texts of unequal length stand out: Mary Lacy’s The Female Shipwright, The Female Soldier or The Surprising Life and Adventures of Hannah Snell, and Life and Surprising Adventures of Mary Anne Talbot. As the value of these texts considered as historical sources differs, 48 47 On Grotius and Dutch colonial policies see Daniel Damler, Wildes Recht. Zur Pathogenese des Effektivitätsprinzips in der neuzeitlichen Eigentumslehre (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, ²2010), 74-83. I will here concentrate on the comparatively long text by Mary Lacy that is usually regarded as the most or even the only reliable autobiographical report on female life in the navy. Regardless of the actual truth value of everything she presents in the book, the text offers some intriguing material for the study of gender mobility in the middle of the 18 th century. Mary Lacy’s autobiography was first published in 1773, then at least 48 Cf. Suzanne J. Stark, Female Tars: Women Aboard Ship in the Age of Sail (London: Constable, 1996), 102; 107-110; Hannah Snell et al., The Lady Tars: The Autobiographies of Hannah Snell, Mary Lacy and Mary Ann Talbot (Tucson: Fireship Press, 2008). Mobility and Autobiography on Land and Sea 125 three times reprinted in abridged form in the 19 th century, 49 only to be forgotten until fairly recently. 50 Lacy 51 characterized herself as “being of a roving disposition”: “I never liked to be within doors,” thereby foreshadowing her running away in man’s clothing and establishing personality traits as the presumed cause of her patterns of mobility. It seems, however, that she did not at first plan to join the navy in any capacity whatsoever: “[...] a thought came into my head to dress myself in mens apparel, and set off by myself; but where to go, I did not know, nor what - I was to do when I was gone”. 52 Conclusion: Converging and Diverging Patterns of Mobility Her inclination to leave home sets in motion her desire to decamp at the next best opportunity, for which she prepares by procuring men’s clothing. By doing so she performs her clear knowledge that it is easier to move away from home by crossdressing; after her experiences as a cross-dressed shipwright, however, Lacy, at least according to the account in her autobiography, returns to the normal order of things, leading a life that remains unrecorded. The mobility of her life as a shipwright turns out to lead to the haven of marriage. Samuel Pepys’s diary can be considered as a prime example of autobiography as a record of mobility. Mobility is almost everywhere in Pepys’s diary but also in his environment. The bustling city as well as, to a lesser extent, the sailing ships of the Royal Navy serve as backdrops to a career that can be said to mirror the complex movements on all levels of society - in politics, economics, religion, military strategy - and literature. Defoe extends the realm of autobiography as a recording of self-related movements to fictional or fictionalized accounts of pirates moving about an unstable world as long as they are pirates, but then also trying to move into positions of respectable merchants, or at least “appearing as merchants” 53 49 Stark 1996, 123-124. and selling off their cargoes. Ironically, however, the end of their status as pirates does not signify an end to their mobility. From Isfahan, the King of Pirates contemplates going home through Muscovy, but this experienced pirate is surprisingly wary of the proposed route “by the Caspian Sea and Astrakhan“ due to “the barbarity of the Russians, the dangerous navigation of the Caspian Sea […], the hazard of being robbed by the Tartars on the River Volga […].” Nor was the actual route of travel chosen instead - the 50 One of the most recent reprints of the text by the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich seems to have had limited appeal, as the books were quickly sold off for a bargain. 51 Lacy 2008, 16. 52 Lacy 2008, 18-19. 53 Defoe 2002, 86. T ILL K INZEL 126 road to Constantinople - less dangerous; in fact, the “many sorts of barbarians“ encountered on this journey made Avery consider that he “would run any kind of hazards by sea” before attempting such a journey again. 54 Once having reached Constantinople, where the alleged autobiographer resides at the time of writing, he is still plotting to go somewhere else, to Marseilles, and thence “to some inland town, where, as they have perhaps no notion of the sea, so they will not be inquisitive after us”. 55 Mary Lacy, on the other hand, demonstrates a quite different form of mobility. As a woman she was not predestined for a career in the Royal Navy but by keeping her gender identity hidden she managed to engage in activities that were considered a male domain. Her mobility, however, is arrested once she is recognized as a female. The last pieces of information provided by Mary Lacy in her autobiography all point to stability rather than mobility: First of all, she presents a petition to the Admiralty, receiving a £ 20 annuity “for which, as in gratitude and duty bound, I shall pray for them as long as I live.” The goal of Avery’s mobility would thus seem to be not only the ultimate cancellation of mobility but also the cancellation of all things connected to the prototypically mobile space, the sea. 56 In addition to the stability provided by regular payments of this sort, Lacy also left behind the potentially disruptive cross-dressing behaviour by marrying a Mr. Slade. Again, Lacy emphasizes notions of stability and continuity rather than mobility by referring to “the utmost happiness” of the married state she now enjoys as well as to her “most sanguine hopes of continuance” in this state. 57 Autobiographies and fictional autobiographies as texts of mobility offer a highly rewarding perspective on early modern patterns of mobility, since they dramatize a complex range of different reactions to lives at sea. I do not want to make any claims here about some kind of evolutionary pattern on the basis of the few autobiographical and pseudo-autobiographical texts presented and examined here. The texts should rather be read as instantiations of patterns of mobility in particular settings, acquiring their characteristic features as much by the larger historical context as by the genre specifications to which they adhere. The texts by Pepys, Defoe and Lacy all demonstrate that mobility is a key structural feature of early modern English autobiography. Whereas Pepys is mostly, though not exclusively, concerned with mobility on land, Defoe and Lacy point towards the precipitation of mobility through the cultures of seafaring. What is imaginatively linked to the seascapes and the patterns of mobility in early modernity becomes part of 54 Defoe 2002, 86. 55 Defoe 2002, 87. 56 Lacy 2008, 168. 57 Lacy 2008, 169. Mobility and Autobiography on Land and Sea 127 the national identity of the English. At the same time, however, we should also not forget that despite our current emphasis on mobility some notions and cultural patterns developed in the early modern period were surprisingly stable. T ILL K INZEL 128 Works Cited Bohn, Robert. Die Piraten. München: Beck, 2007. Brito Vieira, Mónica. “Mare Liberum vs. Mare Clausum: Grotius, Freitas, and Selden’s Debate on Dominion over the Seas.” Journal of the History of Ideas 64/ 3 (July 2003): 361-377. Damler, Daniel. Wildes Recht. 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