Caught between Worlds

British Captivity Narratives in Fact and Fiction

Joe Snader

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780813184449
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria inglesa

The captivity narrative has always been a literary genre associated with America. Joe Snader argues, however, that captivity narratives emerged much earlier in Britain, coinciding with European colonial expansion, the development of anthropology, and the rise of liberal political thought. Stories of Europeans held captive in the Middle East, America, Africa, and Southeast Asia appeared in the British press from the late sixteenth through the late eighteenth centuries, and captivity narratives were frequently featured during the early development of the novel. Until the mid-eighteenth century, British examples of the genre outpaced their American cousins in length, frequency of publication, attention to anthropological detail, and subjective complexity. Using both new and canonical texts, Snader shows that foreign captivity was a favorite topic in eighteenth-century Britain. An adaptable and expansive genre, these narratives used set plots and stereotypes originating in Mediterranean power struggles and relocated in a variety of settings, particularly eastern lands. The narratives' rhetorical strategies and cultural assumptions often grew out of centuries of religious strife and coincided with Europe's early modern military ascendancy. Caught Between Worlds presents a broad, rich, and flexible definition of the captivity narrative, placing the American strain in its proper place within the tradition as a whole. Snader, having assembled the first bibliography of British captivity narratives, analyzes both factual texts and a large body of fictional works, revealing the ways they helped define British identity and challenged Britons to rethink the place of their nation in the larger world.

PART I

Narratives of Fact

ONE

Travel, Travail, and the British Captivity Tradition

In 1567, according to the narrative that bears his name, Job Hortop’s quiet life as a powder maker ended when English seamen pressed him to join what would later become known as one of the great Elizabethan voyages of trade and plunder, led by John Hawkins and Francis Drake. The 1590 text that records Hortop’s experiences follows the voyage from Africa to America, as the Englishmen weather storms, seize the ships of other European powers, pursue trade and slavery in Africa, and finally raid some strongholds on the Spanish main. But this account of English glory comes to an end when a difficult battle isolates Hawkins’s ship and leaves the crew hungry, forcing him to strand Hortop and nearly one hundred other volunteers on the Mexican shore. After a brief, violent encounter with some Amerindians, the stranded Englishmen reach a Spanish settlement, where they receive food and lodging but are later forced “to carde wooll among the Indian slaves, which drudgery [they] disdained, and concluded to beat [their] maisters.”¹ Thus begins for Hortop a series of subjugations, accommodations, and rebellions among a variety of Spanish authorities. First he spends two years in a Mexican prison. Then, on a transport ship back to Europe, he briefly inspires the captain’s favor before an escape attempt lands him in the stockades. In Seville he spends one year in prison before escaping, but after recapture he spends another year moldering in an inquisitorial prison, then twelve years rowing a Spanish galley, and finally four years wearing a “cote with S. Andrews crosse” in the “everlasting prison remedilesse” (28–30). He eludes this final pit of extreme degradation through three years’ service as a “drudge” for a Spanish official, and the increased liberty of this service enables him to sneak aboard a Dutch ship and return home to England.

This highly varied and highly ambiguous text foregrounds a number of important problems affecting our recognition of the first English captivity narratives. The most obvious problem is that scholars have sometimes erroneously identified this text as the first account of an Englishman in American captivity, apparently through an interpretive inflation of what Hortop describes as the crew’s “robbery” at the hands of native Mexicans.² If the dedication intimates that Hortop and the other volunteers “were constrained to be set on shore . . . amongst the wilde Indians” (A2r), the text makes clear that the force behind this constraint was not the Indians, but the ship’s empty larder and Hawkins’s decision to abandon his men. Although the natives kill some of the stranded Englishmen and steal their clothing, this narrative sequence includes no details or even intimations of forced detention. Far from capturing the Englishmen, the natives give them directions to the nearest Spanish settlement. Once the Englishmen meet the Spanish, however, Hortop documents his experience as an extended captivity narrative, a sequence of events dominated by images of bodily suffering, occasional instances of comfort or accommodation, and constant efforts to escape. His experiences in a variety of Spanish prisons include many motifs that will later stand as hallmarks of the captivity narrative, whether British or American. He must resist efforts in proselytism, endure the humiliating ritual of an inquisitorial auto da fe, and suffer the rigors of forced labor in what Europeans regarded as one of its most terrible instances, rowing a galley. This portion of his narrative pays especially close attention to details of close quarters, poor clothing and bedding, “hunger, thirst, cold, and stripes” (29). Contact with the Spanish, far more readily than contact with Native Americans, furnished the material of the captivity narrative at this early stage of its development.

But if the label of captivity narrative seems appropriate for some portions of Hortop’s work, the text as a whole is framed according to very different generic formulae, those of the travail narrative. Typical of much travel writing in the early modern period, but especially important in popular chapbooks such as the Hortop narrative, these formulae sit somewhere between our modern conceptions of the separate genres of travel narrative and captivity narrative. Both the generic imprint and the generic ambiguity of the travail narrative are evident in Hortop’s title: The Trauailes of an English Man, Containing His Svndrie Calamities Indured by the Space of Twentie and Odd Yeres in His Absence from His Natiue Countrie; Wherein Is Truly Decyphered the Sundrie Shapes of Wilde Beasts, Birds, Fishes, Foules, Rootes, Plants, &C. With the Description of a Man That Appeared in the Sea, and Also of a Huge Giant Brought from China to the King of Spaine. As the primary generic signal, the word “travail” carried a double meaning, suggesting both the painful labor and the curious adventure of journeys far from home. The word neatly encapsulates the tension that lies at the heart of this particular narrative, as it simultaneously promotes national pride and commiseration in the traveler’s experiences. On the one hand, in keeping with the title’s promises, the text includes much detailed description of alien flora, fauna, and cultural items within its autobiographical framework. To the eyes of twentieth-century readers, these descriptions range from the familiar to the fanciful, from plantains to sea monsters. Advertising itself partially on the basis of such curiosities, organized as autobiographical proof that an Englishman had experienced them, and set within the context of English maritime expansion, the text promotes national pride in the experiential capacities of a single English seaman.

But within this narrative, as in the “travail” narrative more generally, the explicit appeal and implicit pride of the traveler’s experience extend from his discoveries to his tribulations. Hortop opens his narrative by framing his experiences as proof of the fallen, miserable state of humanity, “that man beeing borne of a woman, living but a short time, is replenished with many miseries,” a theological position that he learned to accept “by experience in myselfe, as this present Treatise insuing shall shew” (A3r). Illustrating this proposition throughout this tersely phrased narrative, Hortop’s positivist identifications of charming curiosities alternate with positivist descriptions of abjection and confinement. Within a single sentence, for example, he describes two years of imprisonment in Mexico and a giant skeleton sent as a gift from China to Spain (23). If the text introduces the wonders observed by Hortop rather haphazardly within its loose autobiographical structure, it turns to more formal documentary strategies in treating his imprisonments. His narrative closes with a schematic “Computation of my imprisonment,” a chart tallying the years he spent in various prisons (30–31). Hortop’s text thus seeks a high ranking in the scale of travail literature by formalizing its narrative “account” of an overwhelmingly lengthy and far-flung series of captive “travails.” Within this tally of imprisonments, Hortop’s encounter with the Native Americans does merit inclusion, but only under the heading of “robbery.” Even so, the radically inclusive drive of the travail narrative easily assimilates a violent encounter with Native Americans amidst its vision of global misfortunes and curiosities. The English narrative of American captivity, to the extent that it can be described as a separate genre at all, initially emerges as a curious addition within a narrative system focused on Mediterranean travails.

As the Hortop narrative reveals in a particularly telling manner, the quest for a uniquely American captivity narrative has led scholars to obscure the global range of settings evident within the earliest British captivity narratives. But the Hortop narrative is also important for highlighting other important features of the captivity narrative that scholarship on the American tradition has tended to obscure, most notably the genre’s wide-ranging mixture of rhetorical conventions. On the rare occasions when scholars have discussed accounts of captivity published primarily or exclusively in Britain, they have tended to assimilate such material to what is often described as a fundamental structural unity within the American genre, typified by such famous accounts as Mary Rowlandson’s. In order to reverse this tendency, the current and following chapters focus on the fundamental variety of the previously established British tradition, interpreting the American material as a branch, rather than the central root, within this tradition. Part of this effort involves locating the captivity narrative’s roots in generic features, such as titling conventions, that were originally established in the British press. Instead of replacing an American unity with a British one, these chapters will locate the genre’s roots in a broad range of rhetorical strategies for negotiating an oppositional experience in any foreign land. Thus these chapters will resist the notion of an American captivity genre not only by turning to captivity narratives set in a broader geographical context, but also by arguing that this context calls for a more flexible definition of the captivity genre. As we shall see, the genre’s varied rhetorical strategies often mingled in uneasy juxtaposition rather than in perfect harmony. At bottom, the captivity narrative incorporated a number of discursive conflicts reflecting its involvement in several large-scale, gradual, discordant transformations in the early modern intellectual climate, including the rise of liberal individualism, the creation of a scientific ethnography, and Western Europe’s increased intervention into the affairs of foreign peoples. As the current chapter will show, the most important of these conflicts involved a mismatch between the captive’s personal narration of abject experience and his intellectual mastery of an alien culture.

The captivity genre places a premium on empirical inclusiveness, on capturing a broad range of experience, everything that the captive can remember, everything he or she witnessed or heard reported from other captives, and further, on shaping that material as the full truth about an alien, allegedly archaic people. From the late medieval period through the eighteenth century, captivity narratives provided increasingly detailed and influential sources for Western knowledge of alien cultures. From the late sixteenth to the early eighteenth century, with the steady expansion of British colonialism, captivity narratives attained a prominent place in English writing on the foreign. Such narratives offer a crucial point for understanding enlightenment strategies of representing the allegedly savage on the eve of their systematic implementation within the burgeoning science of anthropology. Many of these narratives employed the lists, hierarchies, and other discursive schema of travel description, and these schema enabled the development of detailed portraits of alien cultures as tyrannical, barbaric, and superstitious foils for the modernity of Western civilization.

In these early efforts to develop systematic forms of cultural description and evaluation, however, British captivity narratives ultimately prove far more ambivalent than systematic, revealing fundamental instabilities within enlightenment strategies for documenting the alien. Published from the early years of British expansion, such narratives offer an early and particularly vivid register of the fundamental conflicts of articulation and authority that Homi K. Bhabha has associated with colonialist discourse in general.³ The captivity genre’s most basic epistemological conflict stems from its claim to mount a generalized cultural description on the experience of a single captive. Even if a captive does not explicitly undermine this epistemological equation by suggesting that his experience ran counter to the ethnographic norm, the extreme violence and strangeness of the captivity experience tends to weaken its potential for dispassionate empiricism. Within the advertising and presentational frameworks of titles and prefatory material, captivity narratives often stress the uniqueness of the captive’s experience and its general ethnographic utility in the same breath. As a result of such conflicts, many narratives resort to complex mechanisms of extratextual authority, such as certifications of the captive’s truthfulness, carefully documented editorial frameworks, and citations of parallel reports from competing ethnographic accounts.

Including reports from other witnesses forms one element within a broader pattern of restless inclusiveness that marks the captivity narrative’s anxious struggles for sales and cultural authority. If we examine captivity narratives set across the globe, the genre reveals both the multiple generic borrowings and the multiple narrative voices that Bakhtin has associated with the novel. As a recent overview of the American narratives has acknowledged, “more often than not the individual captivity narrative constitutes an amalgamation of voices and input, each with its own agenda and design.”⁴ Even more extravagantly inclusive than the American texts, English narratives set in other locations often turn to the generic formulae of the sea journal, the spiritual autobiography, political history, and even, in one case, the picaresque novel. Although some texts rely on first-person narration exclusively, others turn to omnibus narrative structures incorporating multiple autobiographical voices, plural first-person voices, and shifts between first-and third-person narration. The captivity genre’s claims to ethnographic truth thus sit within an uneasy juxtaposition of multiple voices and multiple discursive modes, which blur the boundaries between fact and fiction, and between general and personal accounts of experience.

In tracing the formal outlines and naming conventions of the captivity genre, we must begin with texts produced before the expansion of European colonial power, even before Columbus’s journey to America. Before the westernmost European cultures produced narratives of captivity in foreign lands, the genre’s earliest exemplars came from the pens of central Europeans. These narratives, moreover, resulted not from European colonial expansion but from the early modern spread of Islamic power within eastern Europe, an advance that culminated with the first siege of Vienna in 1529. A particularly early and widely distributed account was that of the Bavarian Johan Schiltberger, whose 1396 capture led to twenty years of travel in Europe, Asia, and Africa before his return produced a narrative that crossed the face of Europe in a dozen editions and countless manuscripts during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.⁵ Another international best-seller was the account of Bartholomew Georgijevic, first published in 1544 and republished in eighteen subsequent editions, including translations into German, French, Dutch, Polish, and English.⁶ In addition to these central Europeans, Italians, Frenchmen, and Englishmen began to produce accounts of Islamic captivity with the increased power of the Turkish navy and the Mediterranean corsairs throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

The early continental narratives employed a variety of naming conventions, but from the sixteenth century they increasingly relied on terms such as “captive,” “slavery,” and “customs.” While the generic imprint of Schiltberger’s title was carried by the keyword Reisen, or travels, Georgijevic’s account appeared in English as The Ofspring of the House of Ottomanno . . . Whereunto is added Bartholomeus Georgieuiz Epitome, of the Customes, Rytes, Ceremonies, and Religion of the Turkes: with the Miserbale Affliction of those Christians, whiche Liue vnder their Captiuitie and Bondage. A similarly generalized ethnographic focus was also paramount in such titles as George of Hungary’s Tractatus de Moribus Turcorum, which resulted from his 1438 capture, and in G.A. Menavino’s Trattato de Costume et Vita di Turchi, printed in 1548.⁷ On the other hand, the experience of captivity itself dominated the title of Alfonso de Dominici’s Trattato della miserie, the patiscono I fideli christiani shiavi de’ Barbari . . . (Rome, 1647), and the experience of a particular captive came to the fore in the anonymous L’Esclave religieux et ses avantures (Paris, 1690). As the shifting patterns of these titles suggest, the early modern era witnessed both a long-standing tendency to exploit the captive’s knowledge of alien cultures and a steadily increasing interest in the experience of captivity itself, culminating with the production of an individuated title at the end of the century.

During the same period, a similarly gradual movement from generalized accounts of captivity to the perspective of a single captive is also evident in another important element within the captivity tradition: a genre recording the experiences of inquisitorial martyrs and captives. Such narratives played a prominent role in Protestant propaganda directed against the various Catholic courts of inquisition from the sixteenth through the nineteenth century. Out of the very different courts operating in various eras and cultures of southern Europe, Protestant polemic imagined a monolithic Inquisition as the ultimate seat of European tyranny, injustice, and torture, the product of a Popish master plot designed to impose a tyrannical ecclesiastic authority on the states and consciousnesses of Europe.⁸ In promoting this myth, British propagandists relied at first on translation and plagiarism of continental histories and martyrologies focused on continental victims. From the mid seventeenth to the late eighteenth century, however, Anglo-American propaganda increasingly relied on lengthy, particularized narratives focused exclusively on the experiences of individual, isolated Britons, such as Katharine Evans and Sarah Chevers (1662), Isaac Martin (1724), and John Coustos (1746). Each of their texts builds an extensive personal narrative from experiences of capture, interrogation, and torture within an inquisitorial court, represented as an alien space, illustrative of a broader cultural division between Britain and southern Europe. This kind of tension between general truth and individual experience, as we shall see, posed a problem for the British captivity tradition from its inception.

Drawing primarily on Middle Eastern and inquisitorial settings, the first flurry of factual English captivity narratives initially developed, at the close of the sixteenth century, in the form of particularly telling episodes within longer travail narratives such as Hortop’s. Organized primarily as a travail narrative, the first factual English captivity narrative, produced by an English author and focused exclusively on the experiences of Englishmen held captive in a foreign land, concerned not America but the Barbary Coas...