The Isle of Pines, 1668

Henry Neville's Uncertain Utopia

John Scheckter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781409435846
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317026884
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

A short fiction of shipwreck and discovery written by the politician Henry Neville (1620-1694), The Isle of Pines is only beginning to draw critical attention, and until now no scholarly edition of the work has appeared. In the first full-length study of The Isle of Pines, supported by the first fully critical edition, John Scheckter discloses how Neville's work offers a critique of scientific discourse, enacts complicated engagements of race and gender, and interrogates the methods and consequences of European exploration. The volume offers a new critical model for applying post-colonial and postmodern examination strategies to an early modern work. Scheckter argues that the structure and publication history of the fiction, with its separate, unreliable narrators, along with its several topics-shipwreck survival, the founding of a new society, the initial phases of European colonization-are imbued with the sense of uncertainty that permeated the era.

Chapter 1
“Which Copy hereafter followeth”: Editions and Procedures

The earliest and most enduring descriptions of The Isle of Pines concern its lightness and its sexual content. Anthony à Wood calls it a “meer sham or piece of Drollery” (2.918), and his phrase is quoted twice by Hollis. In the twentieth century, Baker says that Dryden’s comic reference “shows in what light Nevile’s fiction struck his contemporaries” (160), while Henderson notes “a certain fantastic air” in the work, which was received “with a certain amount of levity” (xii).1 These views come from a reading of Part One alone, without the instability brought on by Part Two, and, more than that, from a reading that avoids the complex speculations within Neville’s sparse language.

The Isle of Pines that we read is not the one that first appeared. To encounter the text in the original order, we would have to read the Pine narration with no knowledge of the sequel to come, and then arrive at the Van Sloetton narration with an understanding of what had previously passed on the island. The examples mentioned earlier, in which copies of Part One and Part Two are bound serially, clearly respond to this problem of textual succession; in any case, they recognize that the reading path of a text is an important and sometimes contentious matter. Coming upon the original Isle of Pines and A New and Further Discovery in the order of publication activates a scale of narrative authority: Pine is replaced by Van Sloetton as the authoritative voice, the more recent and more reasonable observer, the one who can relocate Pine’s experience by bringing the story back to a world we know and publishing it. Because we more closely identify with the Dutch values and methods than with the exotic mores of the island, Part One becomes a curiosity, but this goes entirely against the direction Neville takes by declining to write a strict sequel and instead creating an entirely new context for narrative expansion. Certainly Van Sloetton claims factual authority, and as readers we tend to give it to him, but those activities are themselves part of the paradigm of observation and reportage that Neville takes great pains to challenge.2

By enfolding Part One within Part Two in the Combined Version, Neville ensures that the Pine narration is not shouted down by Van Sloetton’s commentary; each section establishes its own authority of voice and material, without seeking permission of the other to speak. In his text, Van Sloetton reports that the Pine narration has already been published, and that his own copy of that work has been “surreptiously taken out of my hands” (14). Indeed, the National Union Catalogue entry for A New and Further Discovery catches Neville’s textual play: “numbers 7–8 omitted in paging.” That is, page 6, which ends the first section of Van Sloetton’s narration, faces page 9, which begins the second section. The omission, of course, exactly corresponds with the stolen Part One. The theft is important in two ways: first, if a text can be stolen, the redactor can scarcely be said to control it; second, as readers, we not only learn of the loss but witness it spatially in the pagination. Further, the Pine narration that Van Sloetten (renamed) restores in the Combined Version is correctly described as different from the stolen earlier version (i.e., the original publication of Part One). The restoration, he tells us in a newly added phrase, is a “true Copy” which corrects some “circumſtances wherein that relation is defective” (14). However conventional, the claim of greater truthfulness is actually undermined by Van Sloetten’s admission that he has changed the text. Without the stolen first version, his claimed improvement remains unverifiable, and instead emphasizes “the slippage between author and word, or authority and possession, that increases with the text’s passage through various stages from reproduction to distribution” (Flint 214).3 Along with outright theft, then, we are reminded of the many activities which a narrator may “surreptiously” perform, pushing overboard the ideal of a truly authoritative text or an entirely truthful one.

Enfolding the Pine narration within the Van Sloetten story changes the way that information is encountered, undercutting claims of authority and succession: feedback between the two versions allows information to accumulate without being subordinated or overwritten, reinforcing observational uncertainty and limitation by resembling or taking on the “analogical form” of a travel text in multiple voices (Scott 211). We learn the details of Part One in the same place and manner as Van Sloetten, and thus know that he cannot claim to “own” the island story. We see his acquiring of information as a process, not an accomplished event—and a process that occurs, we must note, only because it is enabled by its subjects, the islanders. Once our identification with Van Sloetten is destabilized, many of his observations and conclusion seem ironized, if not discredited, by hasty or erroneous assumptions. Upon such knowledge, of course, Europe will build empires; it is useful, then, to see Neville questioning the epistemological basis of acquisition and possession at this early point in the imperial age.

Van Sloetten’s retrieval of the text Van Sloetton lost is an important event, as the frontispiece of the Combined Version demonstrates: “the Dutch ſhip taking the writing” is the only scene of Part Two shown in the engraving. Within his scientific and commercial realm, Van Sloetten’s trustworthiness will be judged by the quality of the information he delivers, so that he cannot subsume the Pine narration but must actually work to sustain its integrity. As modern readers, we tend to grant authority to Van Sloetten because he performs critical functions that we value highly, drawing the singular story into the global context of his voyage. On the other hand, when Van Sloetten describes himself as “more a Seaman then a Scholler” (14), he not only strikes a conventional pose, but in Neville’s playful language points to qualities of unreliability and inadvertence that will undermine claims of authority and procedural certainty. Ultimately, the two synoptic narrations cannot be resolved by our choosing to read one as more truthful than the other. Thus, Neville embeds instructions for a flexible, multivalent reading of his Combined Version in a demonstration of the great Commonwealth principle that absolute authority is more vulnerable than governance through a system of responsive relationships.4 Neville’s use of multiple voices dismisses the totalizing or subjugating claims of a single narrative authority, as movement and feedback between the juxtaposed parts wonderfully creates “a space for resistance where there was no space” (Oliver 114). The conversation between the narratives subverts a master reading, but encourages an ongoing, contingent arrangement of proximate data which foregoes, perhaps, resolution and finality. This invitation is particularly clear where incidents are repeated from Part One to Part Two or doubled within the part. The two storm scenes, for example, demonstrate how extreme experience confuses perception and destabilizes claims of veracity.

The storms create the space of aftermath: the island is where people continue to live after such an experience. Reading the Combined Version, we first encounter what is in fact a later storm, the one that carries Van Sloetten to the island. In the context of the whole voyage, this storm presents a navigational crisis, confirming the inherent risks in the European program of exploration and commerce. All the same, early modern readers accustomed to narrative structures within that program, whether in fiction, travel writing, or memoir, would recognize another level here, an allusive parallel in which physical crises—the various storms, captivities, and illnesses—point toward “a breakdown, as it were, in signification” (L. Davis 149). Clustering Neville’s few references to God, the storms present a zone of forces beyond human control, even beyond human recording—the voyagers lose track of time as well as location. If this is so, however, if potentials for transformation lie within the experience, Van Sloetten acknowledges them only briefly. At this point, sailing on, he does not need—or cannot see—a chance to rethink how voyages and encounters are made.

The Combined Version reopens this lost opportunity as another storm scene creates feedback between the two narrations. Internally, we move from the more assured to the more challenging response to a storm, and are prompted now to view both events in terms of content and context; where these vary, we can shift from one version to the other to gain perspective. “At the least, the very existence of two versions of the same events is likely to aggravate the dilemma of quantitative completeness” (McKeon 103), but, more than that, the second storm in the Combined Version—actually the earlier one, of course—confirms the depth of inherent possibilities ignored in the first. This scene is more drawn out and furious, and produces larger crises: shipwreck, abandonment, the death of almost everyone. The result is full-scale estrangement from known structures of knowledge, as conventions of location and duration break down. Because the characters survive but cannot return, they must move to different planes of those indicators, coming to new senses of what it means to be somewhere, to live a lifetime in such a place. Following catastrophe, opportunities for change can be recognized and accepted, as the past can be transcended by adaptation to new situations. While much of this development seems as practical as Van Sloetten’s response, the circumstances are not. There can be no referral to established social structures, for example, where we have a bookkeeper who has no accounts to keep, two maidservants who have no lady to mind, a teenaged daughter who is no longer anyone’s child, and a slave whose owner has vanished.5

Hollis and Ford

Neville’s utopia issues so many invitations for interpretation that surveying the various editions of The Isle of Pines reveals not only textual decisions but particular intentions and positionings of the work. For Thomas Hollis in the 1760s, the purpose of editing is modernization, which carries his writing out of the contentious and insecure seventeenth century, characterized by the sloppiness and poor quality of pamphlet printing, into the enlightened regularity and progressivism of the eighteenth, modeled by uniformity and fine materials. At the core of the project, these introduced production values intend to distance the text from its original context (Kelley, “Considerations” 51), re-placing the work amid an achieved regularity of spelling and punctuation—still a classroom value, of course—to demonstrate happily that what was disorderly in Neville’s age could be brought under control in Hollis’s. In this sense, Hollis’s Isle of Pines is twice fortunate. It is regulated both internally, through applied conventions of style, and externally, as part of a multi-volume uniform edition among the more than 30 publications that “had Hollis’s full or partial backing over a period of ten or twelve years” (Bond 88) before his death in 1774.6 Hollis’s production of Neville began with the political dialogue Plato Redivivus (1681). In 1764, when he consulted the printer Andrew Millar about a modernized edition, he learned that another printer, James Dodsley, had a remainder of 300 copies of an edition by Joseph Spence (Blackburne 265). Instead of rendering Dodsley’s stock worthless, Hollis had Millar buy it for 15 pounds. He stripped Spence’s introduction, wrote his own, and paid Millar another 20 pounds to distribute the composite as a new edition.7 Assuming that Hollis’s appropriation falls on the generous side, as his gesture to Dodsley suggests, it turns questions of textual authenticity and editorial curation into public issues: presumably, regularization is seen as such a normal task that the editor is understood to enact group values rather than personal choices, and the new text pertains to the society, not the individual. Proprietary claims are still asserted within this context, to be sure, as the new Plato is bound in Hollis’s favorite presentation, red morocco with gold stamps of Britannia and a liberty cap.

The 1768 edition of The Isle of Pines and The Parliament of Ladies (1647), printed by Thomas Cadell, appears in the same binding.8 The works are literally part of a larger extratextual project, as matters of font, paper type, and mise-en-page respect Dodsley’s earlier choices for Plato Redivivus. As much as the physical details indicate about modernization as an editorial goal, even more is revealed when we return to Hollis’s massive footnote. The note, we have seen, constructs a historical discourse by placing Neville within a period that includes Violet and Locke. In this “distinctively modern form of narrative architecture” (Grafton 33), the reader does not simply follow the story but engages hermeneutics as well, by recognizing synchronic claims of attention within the narrated space. As with the typographical enfolding of the parts, annotation offers

a way of speaking in two voices at once, or of ballasting or modifying or even bombarding with exceptions its own discourse without interrupting it. It is a step in the direction of discontinuity: of organizing blocks of discourse simultaneously in space rather than consecutively in time. (Kenner 40)

With The Isle of Pines, the counterdiscourse goes even farther. Although Hollis does not acknowledge Neville’s Part Two, his footnote effectively does the same thing, inscribing a new and differently voiced response to Part One. Both Neville, through Van Sloetten and Keek, and Hollis, through Violet and Locke, bring The Isle of Pines into the respective present; both reengage a world of politics, history, and science that Part One claims to have left behind. The addition of material thus represents a way of “addressing a larger, extratextual world in an effort to relate this text to other texts, to negotiate the middle ground between this author and other authors, between this author and the reader” (Benstock 204). Powerfully redirecting Part One, the sequels emphasize that several discursive positions may be occupied at any particular moment.

Modern study of The Isle of Pines begins with Worthington Chauncey Ford in 1920. Although not widely distributed, Ford’s work is invaluable: it reprints the Combined Version for the first time in two and a half centuries, it offers a useful classification of variants, and it states explicitly the commitments of its scholarship (admitting freely that it does not reach its goal).9 Ford’s edition, based upon a copy in the John Carter Brown Library, is careful and exact, but incorporates the common flaws of facsimile publication. Facsimile cannot acknowledge the evolution of the text or variations within the edition, though both of these matters have enough importance with The Isle of Pines to frustrate the notion of authoritative text in general. Then, too, there are passages where the Combined Version is inferior to the earlier Part One and Part Two, which the facsimile cannot correct. For example, Pine gives thanks in the Combined Version for his waterproof “Tinder-hox” (18) and laments that most of the food washed ashore was ruined by “the last water” (18). Careful as he is, Ford also allows a few errors—“dipſatched” for “diſpatched” (28)—and makes some changes which affect accurate interpretation. He shows the Dutch “hoiſting” sail instead of Neville’s more specifically maritime “hoiſing” (27, 28, 29) in all copies.10 His survivors are “over wacht” on their first night ashore, a change from the original “overwatcht” or “over watcht” (18); accuracy here is important because the passage, as we will see, indicates the black woman’s status among the group. The facsimile closes the many line spaces in the second section of Part Two; while these may originate in “casting off,” the printer’s typographical arr...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Preface: “Into the Long Boat”
• Introduction: “The Queens Royal Licence”
• A Critical Text of The Isle of Pines
• 1 “Which Copy hereafter followeth”: Editions and Procedures
• 2 “If hereafter any Should come and find them out”: Translations, Paratexts, and Ghosts
• 3 “I Shall enquire more particularly”: Veracity, Uncertainty, and Narrative Structure
• 4 “A great help to one another”: Gender, Race, and the New Society
• 5 “The Countrey being thus Settled”: The Development of Indigenous Culture
• 6 “The strange effects of Powder”: Anglo-Indigenes and European Encounter
• Appendix A: Texts of The Isle of Pines
• Appendix B: Notes on the Text
• Works Cited
• Index