Vindication

  During her stay in Hull, Mary visited her childhood town of Beverley. Her nostalgia had a jolt. She had changed, while Beverley had remained the same; only, eclipsed by the growth of Hull, it had shrunk into ‘sullen narrowness’, more class-bound than ever in obedience to the ‘fanaticism’ of counter-revolution.

  A cargo vessel was due to sail for Copenhagen in six days. It was not fitted out for passengers, but would have to do since the captain agreed to take her to Arendal (the Norwegian base of the Ellefsens) or Gothenburg (the official destination of the silver ship). So it was that an Englishwoman and a Frenchwoman with a toddler between them went aboard on 16 June. At the last minute, departure was delayed. Marguerite became seasick as the vessel rode at anchor. Fanny, ‘gay as a lark’, began to play with the cabin boy, then became restless when rain kept her below deck. Whenever the ship prepared to sail, the wind changed or dropped. Mary used the delay to write almost daily to Imlay, who sent as many replies, urging her on. For she remained depressed, and was telling him in every way short of explicitness that she felt unfit for so uncertain a journey.

  ‘Now I am going towards the North in search of sunbeams!’ she put it wryly.

  It was a mere fortnight since she had taken the overdose. Though ‘a determination to live’ had revived, she did let mention ‘the secret wish’ that the sea might become her tomb, ‘and that the heart, still so alive to anguish, might there be quieted by death’. Another would have fetched her back, and this is what she hints when she observes, with apparent surprise, how she had improved in London (near Imlay) but was now losing ground at the prospect of leaving her country (Imlay) behind. She lived for his words, and at length persuaded the kindly captain to take her ashore to see if an extra letter had arrived. Her disappointment was unreasonable, for Imlay thought her at sea, but so long as she lingered in England, hope still flickered that he’d come after all. She could not ask it, and Imlay could not–or would not–decode the language of depression.

  Eventually, the ship sailed on 21 June. Winds prevented a landing at Arendal, so they made for Sweden. Not far from Gothenburg, the vessel was becalmed. Mary persuaded the captain, against rules of the sea, to have her rowed to a lighthouse on what was probably the Onsala peninsula. There, Marguerite’s apprehensions were realised when, casting about for inhabitants, they came upon two shaggy men covered in coal. Poor, cowering Marguerite, so far from Paris, implored their return to the ship. Mary insisted they must go on, and Marguerite had no alternative but to follow her back into the boat where Mary begged the sailors–against orders–to row them six miles to the mainland. They did so sturdily, watching their vessel in case it should sail without them. After eight days at sea, Mary stumbled ashore and collapsed on a rock that seemed to heave under her. She struck her head, and was unconscious for a quarter of an hour. The sensation of liquid–blood–running over her eyes brought her round.

  ‘I am not well,’ Mary informed Imlay, ‘and yet you see I cannot die.’

  Set in a land of firs and lakes, and opposite rocky, wooded hillocks in a wavy line against the pale summer sky, eighteenth-century Gothenburg was laid out in the Dutch style with canals and merchants’ houses lining the streets near the harbour. Elias Backman, a good-natured man of thirty-five, invited Mary’s party to stay with his family in the country. Mrs Backman was French, which must have eased Marguerite. Fanny could be with their four little boys, especially the youngest, only a few months older. The pure northern air, the long light of summer nights when Mary could write without a candle, the balm of sleep outdoors, and the kindness of the Backmans, began to restore her. Pink crept back into her cheeks and her body rounded with returning health. Since Backman had lived in France, French must have been their common language over the next twelve days as they reviewed the misfortunes of the silver ship.

  How bad was the damage, Mary would have asked. And what was Backman’s understanding of Ellefsen the thief?

  Captain Peder Ellefsen of the Margrethe came from a family of ironmasters and shipowners whose wealth had been established in the seventeenth century. When his father died at the age of forty-three, after fathering fifteen children, the entire fortune came into the hands of Peder’s proud and beautiful mother. At the time of this story Margrethe was the dominant figure in a leading family who were amongst the founders of the seafaring town of Arendal.

  On about 24 August 1794 Peder had disembarked at an obscure spot called Groos on the southern coast of Norway. He planned to go ahead to Arendal, while the mate, Thomas Coleman, was told to delay a few days, then bring the ship there. With no roads as yet in that remote part of Norway, Peder galloped away through the woods in the long-trailing light. When he reached Arendal, he sold the ship to his mother and stepfather. Then, on 1 September, Coleman duly docked the Margrethe at Sandviga on the island of Hisøy in the channel leading towards the town.

  What happened next is murky: even at the time, it proved difficult to verify conflicting stories. There was Coleman’s story that it was at Sandviga that the crew was ordered ashore, and while the ship was deserted, Captain Ellefsen returned in a boat with four men to carry off the silver. There would have been many convenient hideaways, for the buildings on the shore were propped on poles and hung over the water, serving as warehouses as well as homes.

  Another story, later investigated but unsolved in court, said the silver was ferried by a smuggler called Søren Ploug to Flensburg (on the Schleswig-Holstein coast). Rumours of lost treasure will always fly about, but there’s something convincing in the specificity of Flensburg. In the late eighteenth century Schleswig-Holstein specialised in silverware for the flourishing burghers of Hamburg. Wealth was displayed in silver necklaces cascading across the bosom, candelabra, spoons with ornamental handles, tea-sets, silver hymn books, great clasps for Bibles and waists, and even a silver model of a ship with three masts and sails, all combining an almost filigree craft and opulence.

  Finally, there was the story–lingering in Norwegian folklore–of shipwreck on a rock at Skurvene, near Arendal, of treasure lost overboard, of one silver bar remaining. What emerged eventually from judicial inquiries is that there had indeed been a plan to sink the ship.

  Something in Ellefsen’s plan went wrong, because on 10 September his sale was revoked, followed by fresh moves on his part to detach himself from the ship. On 20 September he signed it over to Coleman, with three witnesses, including Peder’s lawyer. The crew–kept in the dark–were not present at the handover. They were paid part of their wages for a further voyage, and promised the rest if they proved loyal.

  Coleman hung on in Arendal, with talk of contrary winds, for three weeks after he took command. If there was an attempt to sink the ship, this would have been the most likely time. At last Coleman set sail, for Gothenburg he said, on the morning of 10 October, but the ship was damaged by a storm–so the crew said. Planks were damaged, they said, and the ship sprang a leak. Two days later it was back in Norway, slipping into Oksefjorden, near Tvedestrand, halfway between Arendal and Captain Ellefsen’s homeport of Risør. It was a long inlet and deep enough for a sailing ship, though it had to pass through foul water. Then, on the 17th, the Margrethe shifted once more, slipping by rocky, fretted inlets whose entrance was guarded by skerries, small islands, a tightly wooded land shadowed by the serrated edges of firs. The ship lingered a further month at Risør with its chain of outlying islands, dense with brushwood. As the home of Coleman’s former captain, this can’t be a coincidence. It was here the trouble started for the Ellefsens.

  At the end of October, Imlay at last revealed to Backman that the delayed ship had carried a cargo of silver. Backman leapt to action. First, he dispatched trusty Captain Waak, who had finally sailed the other treasure ship, the Rambler, safely to port at Gothenburg at just this time. Waak talked quietly to Coleman as one seaman to another, and this is when Coleman owned that silver–whether some or all, he didn’t say–had been taken ashore in Norway without the crew’s knowledge. As tensions
rose, Ellefsen seems to have pressed Coleman to back him, which Coleman–having told his story–could no longer do.

  The magistrate of Risør cross-questioned Ellefsen about the letter Imlay had given him in Le Havre to convey to Backman. Ellefsen opened the letter, extracted and destroyed the enclosed receipt for the silver, and denied the silver’s existence. He also tried to retrieve a responsible image as captain. On 14 November, he advertised for a lost ship, claiming that the mate had that day ‘escaped with the ship from East Risør harbour’.

  Where did the Margrethe go? This is where Per Nyström lost sight of the ship when he did his pioneering archival searches in the 1970s. Norwegian historian Gunnar Molden has carried these searches a stage further with a series of remarkable discoveries, including the crew’s testimony. It reports two efforts to reach Sweden, coastal pilots not responding to signals, and the ship battling with a torn sail through successive storms. A man is washed overboard and swept away by heaving seas. The hold carries two feet of water, and pumping must go on continuously. Twice, the ship ventures in as close as it dares to the rock-bound land, and twice it goes back out to sea–a half-wrecked vessel divested of its treasure, adrift in the Skagerrak.

  When Mary asked questions, she learnt that ‘Swedish harbours [are] very dangerous…and the help of experience is not often at hand, to enable strange vessels to steer clear of the rocks, which lurk below the water, close to the shore’. It was not uncommon, she heard, that ‘boats are driven far out and lost’.

  There was another danger: the oncoming winter, turning into that worst of winters. Hardening ice in Swedish inlets could have made entry difficult if not impossible, especially where fresh water from rivers enters the ocean. Coleman retreated to south-west Norway where harbours were still open. A badly damaged ship came to land, way off course, at Nye-Hellesund in the parish of Sogne. The crew refused to put to sea again, and the ship was moved further into Hellesund harbour for nearly a month, until mid-December, when it sailed east to Kristiansand. There the Byfogd (Town Magistrate) and the Chief of Police interrogated Coleman. The case at once attracted high-level attention. The magistrate gave his opinion that guilt lay with Ellefsen, not Coleman. Talk in Norway was shocked to find a son of the grand Ellefsens accused of ‘crimes very awful and dishonourable to the Nation, while in charge of the ship’. A document was found in the captain’s quarters. It was in English and vital to the case against Ellefsen: his declaration of 12 August 1794 that ‘the ship belongs to Gilbert Imlay and is his absolute property’.

  ‘How I hate this crooked business!’ Mary Wollstonecraft exclaimed to Imlay on 29 December. At that time he was turning to legal redress. The following month a Royal Commission was set up by Norway’s rulers in Copenhagen to investigate the affair. Peder Ellefsen was arrested, and only released when his mother paid an enormous bail of ten thousand riksdaler (equivalent to more than half the value of the silver).

  In March, when the ice broke up, Backman bought the ship from Imlay. Its imminent departure for Sweden led to a flurry of further judicial inquiries in the town hall of Arendal in the spring of 1795. Without Ellefsen’s receipt for the silver it was impossible to prove it had ever been aboard; then, too, Ellefsen claimed to have ‘mislaid’ Imlay’s instructions to him. In all, sixty-nine witnesses took the stand and their testimonies now cast doubt on Ellefsen’s guilt. Defence lawyers also cast aspersions on one of the two judges appointed by the Royal Commission, a Norwegian called Jacob Wulfsberg. Since he had acted in the past for Backman, Wulfsberg was too biased in Backman’s favour, lawyers said, to be an impartial judge. ‘Who were fooled by whom?’ Gunnar Molden asks. After two centuries that question is suddenly hot with a sense that answers can be found.

  Early in June, at the same time as Mary Wollstonecraft was dispatched to Scandinavia, Captain Waak arrived again in Norway, now to take charge of the Margrethe and sail it to the nearest Swedish port of Strömstad for repairs. This was Mary ’s first destination when she left Gothenburg in July for points north.

  Mary’s journey, ending on the River Elbe near Hamburg, tracks back along the ship’s and treasure’s path. It was their mysterious course that dictated the course of her travels. On 1 July 1795 she suggested to Imlay that he meet her at her final destination at the end of August. This was a critical letter for their future, where Mary asks Imlay to decide what that future was to be. Imlay avoided a direct answer, but urged her on with the prospect of reunion in Hamburg. As usual, he wrote often: Mary’s replies indicate there were at least ten letters from the time she took off for Strömstad. He understood how much her far-flung tasks depended on the comfort and promise of his words.

  From now on the journey would be too arduous for a child. Fanny remained in the Backman home, while Elias accompanied Mary to see his ship at Strömstad. Their journey north took them to inns with feather beds so deep in their wooden frames they seemed to Mary like graves from which she would never emerge. Windows were shut even in summer, as though Swedes could never feel warm. An abundance of wild flowers in the vale of Kvistrum made her reflect that Sweden had been the right country to initiate the study of botany. Linnaeus’s system of binomial classification according to genera and species was the source of the ‘genus’ terms of her own self-making.

  Flowers, alas, failed to compete with the stench of herrings, spread as manure near bleak log homes without paths or gardens, as though all energy had drained into the rudiments of survival through harsh winters. Female servants had to crack the ice in the streams and wash laundry with red and bleeding hands.

  Would male servants ever help? Mary asked.

  The answer was no.

  Approaching Strömstad under heavy skies, she felt a little oppressed by its overhanging rock. This small town, a spa in the eighteenth century, is still a springboard for journeys to Norway, sails bouncing off the hills about the harbour. Rocky islets stretch far out to sea on every side. Here, in the harbour, Mary and Backman would have examined the damage to the ship and assessed the costs of repair. Records of extensive repairs have survived. These were going on from 16 June until 1 September, which is to say they were carried out over Mary’s period in Scandinavia. One of the tasks of ‘Mary Imlay’ was to oversee the sale of a seaworthy ship. It’s on record that ‘Marin Inclay’ was able to finalise the sale of the ship for £250. The repairs cost three times as much, which, if Imlay was liable, explains his need to seek restitution from Ellefsen. Norway, then, was Mary’s next destination.

  Mary and Backman parted on 14 July. Leaving the harbour to cross the Oslo fjord in an open boat, she observed the difficulty of steering amongst a myriad islands. There were no beaches as far as she could see: the waves beat against bare rock. Mary wrapped her cloak about her and lay down on the bottom of the boat when a ‘discourteous wave’ broke her sleep. Larvik, where she landed at three in the afternoon, proved a clean town with a wealth of ironwork. Travellers were so few that townsfolk gathered to stare. The questions in their eyes tempted Mary to adopt Benjamin Franklin’s solution when he had travelled in America: to carry a placard with her name, place of origin and business. Her revolutionised French dress, light, unstructured, yielding to the curves of the body, appeared of particular interest to female starers. The only available transport was a rude one-horse vehicle with a half-drunk driver. As a sailor lumbered up beside her, Mary spied a gentleman emerging from an inn and eyeing her assorted party. She was further disconcerted when the driver cracked his whip for attention, but seeing the gentleman smile, she began to laugh. Off they dashed, at full gallop, with Mary musing ‘whether I can, or cannot obtain the money I am come here about’.

  She had come to negotiate an out-of-court settlement, so her first move was to confer with Judge Wulfsberg, in Tønsberg to the north of Larvik. He had a reputation for solving cases, sometimes with the aid of a disguise, and later became Chief of Police for Christiania (Oslo). He was known too for his efforts to calm disputes–the kind of man Mary respected. As ever, she was d
rawn to benevolent men unlike her thuggish father.

  Wulfsberg advised her in English. Matters must be allowed to move slowly, he warned; she should prepare to make Tønsberg her base for at least a month. Originally, she had intended to go to Arendal; now, Wulfsberg shifted her sights to Risør, where he had set up a further hearing for mid-August. Accordingly, she settled down at a pleasant inn with a view of the sea.

  When Mary came to Tønsberg she still suffered some residue of the night sweats that had laid her low the previous winter. Now, energy surged back as she rode and climbed. Breezes fanned her sleep. Nature was her balm, while ‘employment’ restored her agency. In the course of her rambles, she came upon a stream said to be rich in iron, and walked there each morning, seeking ‘health from the nymph of the fountain’, though her improvement, she believed, came more from air and exercise. She took up rowing to a place where she could swim, the rhythm of the oars keeping time with her memories.

  ‘You have often wondered, my dear friend, at the extreme affection of my nature–but such is the temperature of my soul,’ she reminded Imlay. ‘I must love and admire with warmth or I sink into sadness. Tokens of love which I have received have rapt me in elysium–purifying the heart they enchanted.–My bosom still glows…and if I blush at recollecting past enjoyment, it is the rosy hue of pleasure heightened by modesty.’

  Reason warned that hopes of Imlay could be delusive. Yet without hope, there was nothing to sustain life, and life seemed precious again.

  ‘I cannot bear to think of being no more…nay, it appears to me impossible that I should cease to exist, or that this active, restless spirit, equally alive to joy and sorrow, should only be organised dust,’ she ruminated in the emerging voice of her travel book. ‘Surely something resides…that is not perishable.’ This was the impetus to start what was to be her finest work. Here, at Tønsberg, she ‘turned over a new page in the history of my own heart’.