by A. N. Wilson
Later that day, when I was alone in my room, there was a knock at the door. It was Nally. He said he’d come to say goodbye. He said he knew he had probably gone too far – upset my father by going too far . . . And I was saying – oh God! How could I have been so insensitive – What, Nally? Go too far for what? And he just turned to me and said —I love you, George. I’ve always loved you since you first came aboard the Resolution.
Oh Caroline.
—What did you say?
—I laughed.
She momentarily stopped stroking his stomach. Then after a silence,
—You were very young.
—I laughed, damn it. He walked out of the room. It was simply beyond anything I had ever experienced. Here I was, emotionally much younger than twenty, and I had just read the greatest love-novel ever written – and here was my servant casting himself as Werther and myself as Lotte . . . So I laughed – and I did not know there was so much truth in the parallel between Nally and Werther. A few hours later, there was a terrible shriek. The maids had been upstairs, seeing to the children – but one had gone down to the kitchen to boil a kettle. They found Nally. He had hanged himself from one of the meat-hooks in the scullery.
—Oh my poor dear.
After a very long silence,
—Did you . . . see him?
—I knew, Caroline. When I heard the shriek, I knew that something had happened to Nally. I ran downstairs. Luckily neither my mother nor the children saw him. His face was a terrible colour – blue. I stood on a chair, cut the piece of rope – but he was dead. Of course he was. Men have died and worms have eaten them, but not for love – well, that isn’t true. That’s what Werther is about.
George was doing his best, both in that moment and during those weeks, not to die of love, but this was not how Caroline saw things. When ‘all this’ was over – the French Revolution, the war – then ‘all this’ – their love affair – would be over too – or if not quite over, then part of the background of her friendship with Therese. She tried to make George see that Therese had suffered too, that Therese needed love too, that Therese had found in Huber things which George had been unable to give her. There was no need to make old Professor Heyne unhappy by making his daughter an object of scandal. As far as Heyne, and the academic world, and the French authorities, were concerned – as far as Reinhold was concerned in Halle – George had sent Therese and the children, with the maid and their English guest as escort, into safekeeping in Strassburg. There was no need for them to advertise their unhappiness.
—It hardly suggests, monsieur, a wholehearted belief in the Revolution, if you sent your wife into safekeeping to avoid it.
So, Custine. And when the French General had so spoken, it became impossible to decline his request to go to Paris, with smelly Lux, as Deputés of the Mainz Revolution, to report to the National Assembly.
—It will only be three weeks, George told Caroline.
Both feared this was untrue, although it was the timescale proposed by General Custine.
Before he got into the diligence, George assumed, in front of Lux, and the other dignitaries, that Caroline would observe the proprieties; but she flung her arms around him and said,
—My dear, dear boy.
—You have saved me – you know that. I thought I would live my whole life without—
—Sh, sh. Come back safe. Your babies don’t want you to die in Paris.
Even as they left, the French army was spreading out to occupy the countryside surrounding Mainz while the Prussian and Austrian forces positioned themselves to attack. Mainz had become not merely an occupied town, but a war zone.
Their diligence trundled westwards. Metz–Verdun–Reims. It was almost impossible to take in the change which he had undergone. Days before, he had been naked in bed with Caroline, dwelling in an enchantment. Now, cold, intensely bored by Lux, and very uncomfortable, Deputé Forster was rattling towards Paris. Only when the luggage was stowed, the border crossed, did the reality of it all impinge on his brain: that there could be no turning back. His other friends and contemporaries, who had escaped before the French army arrived, could continue to keep open their options. He no longer had this privilege.
PART SIX
A Lonesome Road
Like one, that on a lonesome road
Doth walk in fear and dread,
And having once turned round, walks on,
And turns no more his head;
Because he knows, a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread.
I
1774
THEY WEIGHED ANCHOR ON THE TENTH DAY OF NOVEMBER, and that was the last time George saw New Zealand. The Resolution headed eastward in a steady gale, at a speed which terrified most men aboard.
—In the last twenty-four hours, roared Cook into the wind, we have run the greatest distance we ever reached in this ship, Dr Forster. One hundred and eighty-three miles!
The statistics seemed more than facts, more than numbers; the journey into cloud and ice once more a cosmic metaphysical struggle between the intellectual courage of the Captain and the scarcely tractable waters, winds, temperatures. He made no attempt to pass the Strait of Magellan when they reached the southernmost tip of South America, taking the south side of Tierra del Fuego and coming through the Strait La Maire, a hazardous passage, during which Cook barely spoke, other than to bellow orders. One small mistake could have wrecked the ship or stranded her aground rocks and ice where the entire crew would certainly have perished. They were punctiliously following sea charts based on Spanish discoveries of the 1580s; and then again, when they changed their course northward, Dr Harley’s Cartography of 1700. By 8th December, the number of petrels, albatrosses and seals visible from the sloop told them they were near land and on the 14th, having passed a flock of penguins, the officer of the watch told the Captain that an island of ice had come into sight. The glimmering light of morning revealed vast mountains of ice covered in snow: a new land. To the south of this newly discovered land were small rocky islands of a dull black. They passed coal-coloured cliffs where thousands of shags were nesting, and where porpoises and seals bobbed in the water. Wherever they went, they gave the islets and coves names – Cumberland Bay, Royal Bay, Cape Charlotte – as though the invoking of those distant German royalties could domesticate the hard black rocks, the winking black waters, the sprouts of coarse grass on guano-splashed black cliffs, the walls of ice and snow. After careful circumnavigation they found the new land to be an island, and Reinhold spoke for all when he suggested to the Captain,
—It would be proper to name this land after the monarch who set on foot our expedition – and whose name ought therefore, so to say, to be celebrated in both hemispheres – tua sectus orbis nomina ducet.
—King’s Land? New Georgia? South Georgia? Ay, sir, it’s proper.
And Captain Cook, on Christmas Day, planted a pole displaying the British flag, formally took possession of those barren rocks – ‘in the name of his Britannic Majesty, and his heirs for ever’.
Of all their three Christmases together, this was the happiest for the Resolutions. In the waters they named Christmas Sound they found enough sustenance to give a splendid feast to every man aboard: mussels, with wild celery which grew abundantly on the rocks, duck, shag, and many upland geese which found themselves boiled, roasted and encased in Pattinson’s excellent short pastry before the dawning of the Nativity. The absence of any human habitation, the impossibility of imagining human beings here, made many of them, not merely George, feel weirdly like the last people left on the planet. As they yelled AMEN to the Christmas collect there was an awesome sadness about the absence of their families. Never had the exclusively male nature of the company felt more truncated, more half finished, more inadequate. When Captain Cook boomed —We pray for our loved ones at home . . . for our wives, our bairns, our sweethearts – a desolation howled in the winds towards the ice-mountains.
It was actually very di
fficult, as they continued their voyage through the frozen waters of the South Atlantic, to know the difference between ice-bound land and frozen ice. South from South Georgia, in latitude 58˚15'S longitude 21˚34'W they found a group of islands which Cook named Sandwich Land, an inhospitable ice-bound pack of rocks which could, he believed, be a promontory of the Terra Australis, the Southern Continent which was the grand object of their exploring. Thick fog and intense cold made further investigation impossible. Snow fell in huge flakes as they sailed eastward in a vain attempt to find the Cape de la Circoncision discovered by Bouvet in 1739.
—It’s a strange thought, said Nally, that the only bodily part of Our Saviour left on this earth He came to redeem is the Saint Prépuce revered in the holy chapel in Paris, La Sainte-Chapelle.
—I’d never really thought about it, said George. Relics mean less to us Protestants than they do to you.
—To the Papists, you mean? Nally laughed. All the same, it’s a strange thought, he said. The little babbie’s toodle-ri-ree. It’s there sure enough bang in the middle of Par-ee.
George felt it impolite to inquire if Nally – that strange mixture of the submissive and the rebellious – actually believed that the relic in question was genuine. Nally himself perhaps felt the subject was exhausted, because he said,
—They stand to attention like a row of dragoons.
Misty as it was, on an icy stretch of rock quarter of a mile distant from the Resolution, they could see a row of penguins erect in a perfectly straight line.
—I didn’t at all mind the penguin we had for dinner on Monday, said Nally, who, while he spoke, was rubbing, half caressing, a pair of George’s boots which did not really need cleaning every single day. But Mr Gilbert went to Pattinson and said they’d mutiny, the lads, if they were asked to eat much more of it.
—I thought it was revolting, said George.
—Ah, but you always need to watch what you eat, young George, and that’s the truth.
Further south, they came to Thule, where Cook named one piece of coast Forster Bay.
As February drifted into March, the Captain began to fear another outbreak of scurvy, and insisted, in his daily harangues, that they try to eat what was set before them. Not only, he insisted, did Pattinson attempt to dress all his dishes in as appetizing a way as possible (a declaration which drew forth satirical groans) but they themselves, every man of them, could take pride in the fact that no ship in the history of seafaring had been out as long as the Resolution with no deaths from scurvy.
—A few weeks, and we shall be at the Cape, and our voyage together will be all but over. I’m proud of you, lads. We have still a few barrels of the Sauer Kraut. Keep eating!
By the beginning of March, the wind came more aft, allowing them to steer a north north-west course directly in the direction of the Cape of Good Hope. On 16th March, in very choppy weather, they saw two vessels flying Dutch colours. They were Indiamen from Bengal. Cook sent officers over in a boat to find news.
The Dutchmen had news of Captain Furneaux and the Adventure. Far from being lost, the other English sloop, with its Captain, had arrived at Cape Town twelve months before with a tale of woe. Furneaux had lost a whole jolly-boat full of his men, who had gone ashore in New Zealand and had been eaten by Maoris. Cook found it difficult to credit, though the Dutch Captain, Cornelius Bosch, was plainly an honest friendly man who came over himself to the Resolution with sugar and Arrack. Cook told his Journal:
I shall make no reflections on this Melancholy affair untill I hear more about it. I must however observe in favour of the New Zealanders that I have allways found them of a Brave, Noble, Open and benevolent disposition . . .
Next morning, after a few calm hours, a westerly wind blew up, and another English ship, which was to windward, bore down on the Resolution. She was a merchant ship that had sailed from China, and her commanding officer, Captain Broadly, came aboard, bringing piles of old newspapers, and taking away with him, when he left, letters from Cook to the Admiralty, announcing their safe arrival in the Cape, and an anxious communication from Reinhold to his wife. The prospect of safety, and the home run, had suddenly filled his mind with anxieties. For years, they had heard nothing of his wife and other children: a series of putative calamities, all the things he might have been worrying about during earlier parts of the voyage, suddenly overcame him.
George could see that the grown-ups were preoccupied, as they prepared to drop anchor at the Cape. He was unable to enter into their preoccupations. He was simply excited to be returning to the Cape, last seen in November ’72, two and a half years earlier. Here, as he remembered, were vast numbers of small petrels, shearwaters, Cape pigeons or pintadas, and two types of albatross – the great white Diomedea exulans, and a large reddish one, which he had not spotted on his previous visit. He longed to be ashore, but there was a day or two, as they approached the coast, before it became possible to haul in for the land.
Before they did so, another English ship, this time an East India Company vessel, came alongside, and Captain Cook gave to Captain Newte, its commanding officer, the greater part of George’s drawings in a portfolio, together with a copy of his own journal and all the log-books.
—And you, Dr Forster – you’ve kept a journal.
—A private journal, Kapitän.
—If it remains private, well and good.
Only later, when they returned to England, did George remember this exchange between the Captain and his father, and reflect upon its import. When they had gone ashore at the Cape, Cook had been horrified to be presented with a copy of Dr John Hawkesworth’s printed account of the first great voyage – with His Majesty’s Bark Endeavour. Hawkesworth had not even been on the voyage, and yet, here he was, stealing Cook’s thunder. Stealing it most certainly was. Cook had stood to make a huge fortune from his account of sailing to Tahiti with Banks to watch the passage of Venus, and his discovery of Botany Bay and New Zealand. Reinhold – when they returned to London – would try to play the same trick, but he would be prevented by the contract he had signed with the Admiralty. This was why George, basing his account on his father’s journals, would write the prodigiously successful A Voyage Round the World in His Britannic Majesty’s Sloop, the Resolution.
By the time he reached his thirties, his father’s cheek, and his own collusion in it, had become incomprehensible to George. Cook was their hero, their deliverer. Why could they not have been content to be his naturalists and illustrators, and to take pride in having played a small role in the great voyage? By the time he wrote his second book on the subject, Cook the Discoverer, he had felt himself to be indulging in pure hero-worship. Nothing, however, about the writing life is pure, and he would be shocked to hear Therese refer to this exercise as ‘not content to cash in once, he’s cashed in twice on his God!’
All that, however, when the young George, who had just turned twenty, arrived at the Cape, lay in the far, the tainted, future. As they glided past the low land of Penguin, or Robben (as the Dutch called it), Island the Captain took his bearings from the Table Mountain which loomed above the coast, and which, by night, was lit with fires. When they had landed, and established themselves in the port, George discovered these fires were lit by shepherds, burning grass, and not, as so many sailors aboard the Resolution had believed, out of kindliness to approaching vessels.
Oh, but it was good to arrive in the Cape and to feast on oranges, and every imaginable variety of fresh fruit! The shore was fronted by forts and warehouses. Behind these, the domestic buildings were arranged in streets on a grid pattern. Reinhold and George were each assigned a bedroom in a comfortable lodging house run by a kind Dutch family. Fresh bread! Chocolate to drink! Exquisite sausages.
—Please, not too much to my son who is inclined always to looseness! urged Reinhold as their plates were heaped with food.
The first day, after a night of deep, comfortable, uninterrupted sleep, George took his sketch-book and a picnic and clambered h
alfway up the Table Mountain. Sitting on a tuft of grass in his shirtsleeves amid a clump of various brightly coloured fynbos – Karoo, Peninsula Sandstone and others – he was joined by two friendly dassies who stared out of their furry faces with puzzlement at the boy and his sketch-book. That morning on Table Mountain, in radiant sunshine – the slopes beneath were thick with pink and orange flowers, the sea was the deepest blue, the air so pure – was one of undiluted euphoria. The happiness was so intense that he even forgot his usual compulsion when out, and alone. He was, indeed, literally ecstatic, standing outside himself and lost in a visual beauty, and an atmosphere, which were celestial. Later in life, when he had lost his faith in an actual Heaven, the recollection of Table Mountain in summer weather made a plausible substitute, and returned to comfort him during those lonely, dismal days, nearly two decades later, in France.
II
1793
Heaven be praised that your wife and children are safe in Switzerland. They at least are away from the madness. It is beyond my comprehension how you could have been carried away by this lunacy. Let us hope, when you have seen for yourself what this Revolution has done – with its massacres of innocents, its obscene Guillotines – that you will come to your senses!
THE LETTER FROM HIS FATHER LAY UPSIDE DOWN ON THE table in front of George, opposite whom sat Citizen Guénot, the representative of the Committee for General Security who saw it as his duty to ‘surveiller’ the German visitors and to read their private correspondence. George hoped that Guénot’s German was not good enough to understand Reinhold’s more tactless apostrophes.