by Sten Nadolny
The clerk at the Navy Office assumed a pained expression when John told him he wanted to go on voyages of discovery or none at all.
‘But everything’s been discovered,’ said the man. ‘We just have to watch over it.’
‘I can wait,’ John said brightly.
He had confidence in the future. Hadn’t he been lying on a battlefield with paralysed legs barely a year ago? He had got away then – how, no one could say – and he wasn’t dead or mad or even lame. He didn’t know how that had come about, but it gave him courage. Now, too, his chances were slight. Might not something inexplicable happen to him again?
He delivered his account of Matthew’s compass correction and decided to go to Lincolnshire. He told Dr Brown and a few others how they could reach him there. Then he said his farewells.
The mail-coach stood ready in front of the Saracen’s Head in Snow Hill. It was five o’clock in the afternoon.
‘Spilsby?’ asked the coachman. ‘That must be a slow place.’ John found his judgment about the insolence of coachmen confirmed. But then he learned that the remark had not been directed at him. Every place was called slow if mail-coaches rarely went there.
John rode outside to save money. He noted with pleasure that he was no longer afraid of falling off. So fifteen years at sea had not been in vain.
John viewed the moonlit night from the roof of the coach. He observed many sturdy church towers with notched crowns growing smaller and smaller in the distance as they passed from hill to hill, and farms bunching up together fearfully.
One could see the plight of the villages two miles off, first by the badly patched roofs, then by the broken windows. Crop failures during this and the previous year – there was no money.
All at once he saw why the night was so unnaturally bright: a fire was burning. Somewhere to the east, in the direction of Ely, it burned in at least three places. What was happening in this land? John was a sailor. He didn’t count on grasping everything at once. But one could feel ill at ease in the country after so many years.
He already knew from letters what to expect at home: new faces, lack of money, and worried reports. In 1807, Thomas, the eldest, had taken his life, because the family fortune had run through his fingers in financial speculations. Six years ago Grandfather had died; Mother in the year following. Father now lived in a farmhouse outside the village, cared for by one of his daughters.
The horizon was dark again. John admitted to himself that he felt cold.
They reached Boston in the early forenoon. Here John heard some news. There were ‘Luddites’ about. These were unemployed men who painted their faces black at night and smashed the mechanical looms to pieces. And in Horncastle there was now supposed to be a navigable canal to Sleaford and even a library.
From Stickford on, the road became steadily worse. John rode inside for the final stretch. His heart was beating. He got off in Keal and, carrying his luggage, walked towards Old Bolingbroke, where his father lived. If he was still alive.
Some distance away he saw a figure standing on the side of the road, swaying, leaning on a cane. The man seemed to correct each movement after it was made. He was more preoccupied with that procedure than with anything else going on around him. That’s the way Father looked now.
He recognised John only by his voice, for he could see almost nothing. ‘I’m tired,’ he complained. Time, strength, everything dissolves of its own accord, not to speak of money. John asked whether he should support or lead him. He then held out his arm to his father in the way one would proffer it to a lady. Elaborately, the father apologised for his slowness. John studied his father’s hand, which had so many bumps, stains, and veins; he passed his fingers over it. The old man was a little surprised.
John talked of the cool weather and of his journey. He named Huntington; he named Peterborough. Father liked to hear the familiar names and was grateful when the words came out clearly, one by one. Just before they got to the door he turned to John and peered closely at his face. ‘Now you’re here,’ he said. ‘What do you reckon on doing now?’
PART III
Franklin’s Domain
11
His Own Mind and the Ideas of Others
In front of the White Hart Inn in Spilsby a coach arrived, and John asked about letters.
No letter from Dr Brown; no work. Only Eleanor Porden had written a long letter, for she loved to write.
John postponed reading it until a better day.
A great deal had changed in Spilsby. And old Ayscough no longer waited for coaches and travellers. John found his gravestone near the tower of St James’s. The shepherd had been convicted of arson a few months before and had been sent to Botany Bay. He had set fire to three large barns on the estate. Why had he done that? A pity for him.
And Tom Barker, walking through the forest, had been robbed and killed by a highwayman. He had probably defended himself. But what sort of a person enjoys killing an apothecary?
The Lound family no longer lived in Ing Ming. The story goes that they had flitted during the night away from the village. Their destination had been Sheffield, the coal city, where the steam pumps were nodding. There was said to be work there now. Nobody had heard anything of Sherard.
John went back to Bolingbroke and thought grimly: I can wait.
For a fee of one pound, ten shillings and sixpence he joined the First Reading Society of Horncastle. It was a great deal of money, but there were almost eight hundred books which could be borrowed, and John wanted to make use of his waiting-time. With Cook’s travel guides, he climbed on the mail-coach to Louth. He wanted to talk with Dr Orme at length about the North Pole.
But Dr Orme was dead. During the previous year, in good health, he had suddenly collapsed. In the church John found a tablet enumerating all his academic and ecclesiastical titles. There were so many – only first letters could be chiselled into the slab.
For some time now his successor had lived on Breakneck Lane. He handed John a parcel wrapped in thin leather and tied and sealed many times with the address: ‘John Franklin, Lieutenant, Royal Navy, for his eyes only.’ The schoolmaster surmised, ‘It’ll be a Bible.’ He invited John to sit down and look at it, but he declined. He preferred to go back to the cemetery, for he wanted to be by himself when he read Dr Orme’s message.
The parcel contained two manuscripts. One of them was entitled
The Origin of the Individual
through Speed
OR:
Observations for Distinct Time Senses
which GOD
Planted within each Individual
as Represented in an Outstanding Example
The other manuscript bore the title
Treatise concerning Useful Arrangements
Appropriate for Creating Images of Movements
for the Sluggish Eye
Useful for Edification and
Instruction and
For the Prophesy of the Word
Of THE LORD.
The accompanying letter read only: ‘Dear John, Please read these two notebooks. I would like your opinion. Regards,’ signature – that was all. There was nothing in it to weep about. It sounded so sprightly and brief – the letter-writer had not counted on death. John inspected the writings immediately, as if Dr Orme were waiting for a quick answer.
The first manuscript described him, John, without naming him, referring to ‘Pupil F’. He felt a little uneasy and didn’t know why. He immediately turned to the second treatise, especially since it contained colorful sketches. It also seemed to him that in these ‘Useful Arrangements’ the sentences were much shorter than in the ‘Origin of the Individual’.
John hid the manuscripts from his sister and others in the house. He didn’t want anyone to study Dr Orme’s thoughts before he knew them himself.
He went down to the river to read them. There was a castle ruin in Bolingbroke where a king had been born a long time ago. John spent the entire day sitting at the base w
all of the collapsed porter’s lodge. Cows and a goat were grazing by the river. Now and then gadflies buzzed him: John let them bite him and read on.
The most important of the useful arrangements Dr Orme was writing about was called the ‘picture rotor’. That was an apparatus into which a big book was clamped. With the help of a powerful mechanism, the pages were turned in sequence at lightning speed. A picture was drawn on every page, each only slightly different from its predecessor. And so, if all the pages passed by the eye within a few seconds, the illusion of a single, moving picture was created. Dr Orme held that this deception of the senses took place not only in slow people but in everyone. He had to know this; undoubtedly he had tried it out on his quick housekeeper. John decided to speak to her about it. But where was the equipment? Sold? Taken apart or stored in an attic in Breakneck Lane? This new idea caught John’s imagination. He’d go to Louth again tomorrow. Dr Orme had also suggested a further way to make this idea useful. With a magic lantern he wanted to transfer the picture produced by the book optically and to project it on to the wall of a darkened room. In this way, a number of people could watch an entire story in moving pictures while being comfortably seated. They would comprehend how one event emerged from another even without words and could participate in an event without getting into danger or making mistakes.
John’s mind was completely captivated by Dr Orme’s inventive spirit, especially since some of the problems had not yet been solved.
For example, a veritably stupendous number of pages was needed to tell longer stories in this pictorial way. Several artists would probably have to draw the images for such a picture rotor, taking many months. Moreover, the larger number of pages required for this purpose involved a technical difficulty: one had to be able to clamp several volumes into the machine so that the next one would start without delay when the preceding one ended. A third obstacle was the optical transmission. Dr Orme doubted whether there were sources of light strong enough for proper illumination.
As to the light, John did not foresee a problem. Modern lighthouses could beam their rays for miles ahead with silver concave mirrors – something which could also be used in an indoor hall. The real obstacle seemed to him the artists. He couldn’t imagine a William Westall drawing the same landscape a thousand times, each with only a very slight variation. He would paint each picture with different sentiments and moods. Clearly, the artists were the weakest point.
Dr Orme had proposed representing sublime moments in English history, if possible, nothing warlike, but rather portraits of a peaceful and orderly national life ‘as in a moving panorama’. He thought of pictures of reconciliation and communal prayer, of the happy homecoming of a ship, of instances of nobility and of a gentle spirit encouraging imitation. Divine miracles, on the other hand, were to be excluded. The Feeding of the Five Thousand or the Healing of the Lepers would not be suitable topics, for to show them would mean imitating God.
It had grown dark. John mused about the Feeding of the Five Thousand, packed up his notebooks, and wandered back. He almost got lost, so deeply did he brood over what he had read. He would have liked to talk this over with Sherard Lound.
Just before falling asleep, he started up once more.
‘Printing machines,’ he murmured. ‘Special printing machines which print the same thing a thousand times and still can take care of the changes.’ But where would he find the money? With that he fell asleep.
In Louth, neither the housekeeper nor the schoolmaster knew anything about Dr Orme’s experiments. Nor was there any more equipment. What had been found in the way of metal and wooden parts, cranks and screws, had been sold to sundry craftsmen. And in the writings he had left behind, nothing had surfaced which pointed towards the picture rotor. Deep in thought, John rode home again. An idea he couldn’t realise for lack of money was a poor pastime. Besides, under certain circumstances something like this might keep him away from the North Pole, and that was out of the question.
But he didn’t want to be idle during this waiting-time. Something respectable had to be found, if at all possible something which also brought in money.
The villagers and squires now treated him with respect, largely because of his tall stature and the scar on his forehead. If he asked anyone to repeat what had been said he was no longer mocked and left standing but heard first an apology, then the repetition.
The country was actually pleasant for a grown man.
However, John wanted to make one more attempt. A possible patron for the picture rotor among the members of the Reading Society was the apothecary Beesley, a tender-hearted herb-collector, well-to-do and of a passionate nature. He was devoted to English history, and he listened carefully to John’s report about the invention.
‘A good idea. I wonder if it works.’ But something seemed to disturb him. ‘Tell me, Mr Franklin, how did Dr Orme get this idea of picturing history? The spirit of history can’t be caught in pictures.’
John feared that Mr Beesley was right.
‘History, seriously pursued, belongs in the realm of uncertainty.
A picture is a certainty.’ Assertions setting up contraries always sounded right at first blush, at least to John’s ears. But he didn’t want to give in without a fight. Therefore, he spoke urgently of the betterment of mankind by good example. ‘To improve mankind?’ answered the other. ‘Only three things can do that: the study of the past, a healthy way of life in nature, and medicine in the case of illness. Nothing else improves anyone. It’s only politics and diversion.’
It became clear to John that he could not impress the apothecary. Should he tell him about the North Pole? But he could predict the kind of answer he would get. He therefore spoke only very little about himself. Beesley was pleased and paternal.
‘In the study of history, slowness is an advantage. The scholar decelerates the fast-moving events of past days until his mind can fathom them. Then, however, he can demonstrate to the rashest king how he should have acted in battle.’
John was perplexed. The apothecary was not joking, he hoped. Altogether there was something impenetrable and removed about him.
Soon all that changed. He suddenly became so eager that John was prepared to think of him again as an honest man.
‘Not three miles from here. Englishmen against Englishmen. And even today their bones come to light in the fields of Winceby when they are ploughed. Flowers grow there which are different from anywhere else. That’s what I mean, Mr Franklin, this feeling. To know what can happen on a spot of earth in the course of centuries. It expands one’s perspective, one’s entire person.’
John knew what moved the apothecary and he respected it.
‘Breadth of horizon,’ Beesley explained, ‘is the highest aim that can be reached by man.’
John tried to think of this from the angle of spheric trigonometry, but Beesley had long since moved on.
‘I’m working on a history of Lincolnshire with particular reference to the nobility,’ he continued. ‘There are genealogies to pursue, chronicles to read, records of ownership to examine, and one must imagine oneself in the skin of persons in high places. Will you help?’
When he was talking, Beesley’s chin hopped up and down like a mouse in a trap: it interfered with listening. John hesitated.
‘History is intercourse with greatness and duration. It allows us to rise above time.’
‘But I’m a sailor,’ John demurred.
‘And where is your ship?’
John considered. There were so few activities in which slowness was a virtue. Rising above time – that was tempting. But he couldn’t earn any money with it.
John was noticing at last that he was unemployed and felt useless. Never had he imagined that he of all people would be bored. But this waiting was different from any waiting in the past. He used to have an occupation, an objective – and now it didn’t go any further. Again and again he wrote to London, but except for meaningless promises there was no reply.
Reading increased the thirst for action instead of dampening it. He had learned how to join mind and body on a ship; he had become a good officer and was stronger than he had ever been before or would ever be again. Would any employment turn up for him now? Half-pay – that was not only something cut in half but really nothing, without sense. It was threatening, especially at night, when he lay awake like a live, sad picture rotor.
Flora Reed, a preacher’s widow, was known to be a radical. She owned Robert Owen’s tract New View of Society and quoted from it in arguments with Beesley the apothecary.
John sat with Mrs Reed in the Fighting Cocks Inn in Horncastle all afternoon. She was pleasant and respectful. He had trouble only with what she said.
She could not be won over to the moving pictures because she found that, as she put it, ‘Hunger and want can be grasped without artificial means. Simple truth is sufficient for all who can hear and read. Whoever can’t do that, Mr Franklin, won’t be made any wiser by your gadget.’ Something about that was not quite logical.
Now she had small beer and cake brought in. John was glad of the interruption, for listening was strenuous. Mrs Reed’s voice was soft, and even when she became agitated its volume did not increase, only her lisp. Her hair was smooth and black. Her eyes flashed when they recognised danger.
‘The wide horizon? Did Mr Beesley say that? I take it he came to history from collecting herbs. Mr Franklin, the horizon lies right here in front of us, not behind us. It’s always where it doesn’t go any farther, isn’t that right?’ As a navigator, John had objections, but he didn’t want to hurt Mrs Reed’s feelings. She had kept on talking. ‘Think of the corn laws! France has a good harvest in its barns; it could help with the overflow. No one should have to go hungry.’