1
William Falconer and the empire of the deep
Siobhan Carroll
âDid Mr. Bowles ever gaze upon the sea?â1 Byron asks in his Letter to [John Murray], on the Rev. W. L. Bowlesâ Strictures on the Life and Writings of Pope (1821). Responding to Bowlesâ (1819) claim that âpoetical beautyâ depended ânot on art, but NATUREâ2 â an assertion that Bowles had illustrated by asking his readers to imagine the unpoetical appearance of a ship â Byron springs to the defense of vessels both literary and maritime, taking as one of his key examples the then-famous work of the âpoet-sailor,â3 William Falconer. In an argument that strikingly illustrates Margaret Cohenâs description of the intertwined history of literary and nautical craft, Byron cites the âinfinite superiorityâ4 of Falconerâs (1762) poem The Shipwreck in order to argue both for the aesthetic value of a human presence in nature and for the role of the artist as more than mere imitator of divine creation. Just as the ocean, without a ship to lend it interest or an artist to study it, would exist merely as a âvast but fatiguing monotony,â so, Byron claims, âin the poem of The Shipwreck⌠the storm,â is interesting only because of âthe vesselâ:5 the ship it represents and, by extension, the poem which represents it. Falconer, Byron declares, was that rare being, a poet-sailor whose work illustrates the points Byron wishes to make regarding art more generally: âhe was a poet, and in the hands of a poet art will not be found less ornamental than nature.â6 By using Falconerâs The Shipwreck to refute Bowlesâ derogatory allusions to a sailorâs art, Byron elevates the art of the poet, and does so in a fashion that makes readily apparent the possible alliance of these two ostensibly disparate âcrafts.â
Falconer was extremely interested in the use to which literature might be put in enabling sailors to navigate national politics. The Shipwreck, his critically acclaimed hybridization of the georgic with the nautical manual, aimed at representing to land-based Britons the concerns of their nautical brethren. In the 1762 version, The Shipwreck âs overt mission was a linguistic one: the poem aimed, through extensive footnotes and a labeled diagram of a ship, to educate Britons in the language of the sea. In his 1764 and 1769 revisions, Falconer made his poemâs ambassadorial ambitions more explicit, including, for example, an appeal for more vigorous prosecution of wreckers, and enhancing, as I will argue in this essay, his poemâs critique of imperialism in response to rising tensions in the American colonies. Popular in its day, The Shipwreck went on to leave a significant footprint in British popular culture: much-loved, oft-cited, and reprinted well into the twentieth century, Falconerâs poem also continued to have a political purchase in later decades and was cited, for example, in nineteenth-century petitions to increase the number of lighthouses in Britain.7
During the last decade, Falconerâs (1762) Shipwreck has attracted the attention of scholars interested in the class politics of Falconerâs poem and the degree to which it illuminates the linguistic politics of nation formation.8 Most recently, Margaret Cohen has positioned Falconerâs poem as a significant anomaly in the evolution of representations of the ocean, a work that attempts to âretain the sea as the theater of craftâ even as it anticipates Romanticismâs conversion of the ocean to a sublime site of artistic inspiration.9 But while these studies have gone some way towards correcting a scholarly perception of Falconerâs poem as merely the bathetic exertions of a minor writer â G.P. Landow, for example, dismissed Falconer in 1982 as a barely competent poet grappling with a subject âtoo large for the poetâs intellectâ10 â many of the political resonances of this influential representation of the sea have been left unexplored. In particular, the poemâs engagement with imperialism has been neglected, an examination of which, I believe, would do much to address Landowâs charge that no âinterpretation commands [Falconerâs] imagination enough to dominate the poem.â11 When Landow writes, of Falconerâs repeated references to âfaithless tides,â that Falconer âdoes not make clear how or with whom the sea could conceivably have broken faith,â12 he omits the significant role that the ocean played in Britainâs national mythology. Falconerâs poem, which depicts the ship Britannia being devoured by the ocean it risked in the pursuit of Indian, African, and American profits, uses the idea of the ocean as a providential guarantor of Britainâs safety to question the wisdom of the nationâs overseas entanglements. Falconerâs ocean is both the space on which maritime empire relies and the space that can undo that empire; in its furious rebellion against British pretensions to maritime sovereignty, the ocean subsumes the unacknowledged discontents of the sailors and colonists on whom Britainâs overseas ambitions rely.
As I shall trace in the following pages, Falconerâs poem evolved from 1762 to 1769 from a work primarily concerned with the formation of a united Britain to a poem that reacts against the prospect of an expanding empire. Reading the various iterations of The Shipwreck alongside Falconerâs 1765 poem The Demagogue reveals, I believe, the degree to which the developing American colonial crisis contributed to Falconerâs increasing pessimism about Britainâs ability to extend its sovereign power across oceanic space and his concern over the price British colonial ambitions would exact from common soldiers and sailors. Like his contemporary, Thomas Paine, who had also come of age at sea during the 1750s, Falconer not only was aware of the vulnerabilities of the much-mythologized Royal Navy, but he also believed that Britons were insulated by their ârecluse situation, surrounded by the sea,â13 from the horrors of colonial warfare. In his later revisions of The Shipwreck, Falconer thus determinedly brings the political interests of his maritime subalterns, as well as their language, to the attention of his land-based countrymen and presciently weaves the specter of American colonial rebellion into his depiction of nautical catastrophe. In reading The Shipwreck as an early transatlantic commentary on the challenges facing Britainâs maintenance of an overseas empire, we can see not only the vexed status that the ocean could hold in popular eighteenth-century poetry but also the degree to which the fusion of literary and maritime âcraftsâ attempted to import the un-national politics of maritime space into the national literary canon.
The language of the sea
Modern critics have been attracted to The Shipwreck because of its use of sea-language. Indeed, from the poemâs first publication in 1762, it was clear that language played an important role in Falconerâs project. Contemporary reviewers noted as much, with the Monthly Review paying homage to Falconerâs successful âversifying [of] his own sea-language,â asking, âWhat other poet would ever have dreamt of reef-tackles, halyards, clue-garnets, buntlines, lashings, lanyards, and fifty other terms equally obnoxious to the soft sing-song of modern poetasters?â14
As the Monthly Review âs list may indicate, Falconerâs extensive use of naval jargon risked overwhelming its readers. In the first edition of The Shipwreck, Falconer clearly anticipates criticism of his poem on that account, but he indicates that the published form of the poem is a compromise between a sailorâs desire to convey maritime experience in its ânativeâ tongue and a poetâs desire to make the poem accessible for a wide range of readers. In the 1762 poemâs advertisement, he apologizes for the extensive framework surrounding the poem, claiming that âit was not his first intention to swell the Work with so many notes.â15 However, after reviewing âthe modern Dictionariesâ and finding them âdeficient in the technical terms expressed there,â16 Falconer decided to define the words himself.
Falconerâs dismissal of âmodern dictionariesâ is aimed not only at the somewhat suspect maritime dictionaries circulating in 1762 but also at works like Samuel Johnsonâs A Dictionary of the English Language (1755), which had notably eschewed the language of the âlaborious and mercantile part of the peopleâ on the grounds that it could not âbe regarded as any part of the durable materials of a language, and therefore must be suffered to perish with other things unworthy of preservation.â17 Like the ocean that spawned it, sailorâs language exemplified the foreign influences and mutability Johnson sought to exclude from the English language, and âthe dialect of navigationâ is therefore, not surprisingly, given as an example in the Preface of one of the dialects excluded from the dictionary. Not only did Johnson deliberately omit nautical jargon from the dictionary, but he also notes that, âin reviewing my collection, I found the word SEA unexemplified.â18 Johnson corrected his âseaâ entry before the dictionaryâs publication, but his lack of attention to a word of such importance to English national mythology not only, as Johnson himself notes, has âthe appearance of negligence,â but it also fits, thematically, with his desire to exclude from the English nation the corrupting, commercial dialects he associates with âcoastsâ and âthe port.â19
In introducing his middle- and upper-class audience to the language of the sea, then, Falconer is working against Johnsonâs strict definition of an English language and is insisting â both implicitly and explicitly â that his readers regard the sailors he describes as representative of the very essence of British identity. Nor is he particularly subtle in this endeavor: the poem depicts the united crewmen of the ship Britannia struggling bravely against the disaster that threatens to overwhelm them. Nevertheless, in the 1762 version of The Shipwreck, Falconer wears his anxiety over the reception of his linguistic project on his sleeve, begging his readers to accept the difficulties his use of naval jargon may create for them and âcensure not severe thâ unvaunted song! / Thoâ jarring sounds the labâring verse prolongâ (80â81). In the next line he makes the class basis of this appeal clear when he also asks his readers not to take umbrage if âterms uncouth should strike thâ offended earâ (82). In asking his readers to tolerate the âuncouthâ terms that load his âlab-ringâ verse with the parlance of nautical work, Falconer signals that he is keenly aware, both of the negative reception that may await his use of nautical terms and of his tenuous status as a âlaboring-class poet.â20
The resounding success of the 1762 edition of The Shipwreck gave Falconer more confidence when it came to using maritime language in the 1764 version of the poem. In the 1764 Shipwreck, readers are asked to avoid censuring the poetâs ânative songâ (58) rather than his laboring verse, a change that not only positions Falconerâs nautical language as having emerged organically from his maritime environment but also implicitly claims the British poetâs naval jargon as ânativeâ â that is to say, British. In this edition, Falconer is also less likely to make apologies for his class status: his verses are now âmeasuredâ (59) rather than âlaboring,â and in his new advertisement, Falconer goes so far as to attack a âSea-Officerâ for being âso ignorant as to mistake the names of the most common things in a shipâ in a âfully inadequateâ21 maritime dictionary.
However, a close reading of the poem also reveals a shift in Falconerâs maritime perspective: if in the 1762 Shipwreck Falconer was primarily concerned with bringing the language of the sea into circulation in national space, in subsequent versions of the poem, he becomes more sympathetic to the anti-mercantile insularity of Johnsonâs vision of Britain. Falconerâs Britain will never be divorced from the sea: like the ship that serves as the protagonist of his poem, the imagined community of British sailors Falconer describes has been built in response to the dangerous oceanic space that defines the nation. But, as tensions rose in the American colonies, and Falconer became more concerned with the price paid by sailors for British imperial expansion, his depiction of the Britannia âs fatal voyage increasingly calls into question the wisdom and ethics of Britainâs pursuit of overseas wealth.
To perish in contagious soils
The political context of Falconerâs changes to The Shipwreck is exemplified in his little-studied 1766 poem The Demagogue, which re-uses some of The Shipwreck âs nautical metaphors in a pointed satire of Wilkes, Pitt, and Churchill. Reading The Demagogue alongside Falconerâs revisions to his most famous poem provides a crucia...