RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR

by Philip Hoare

  Melville was always romantically drawn to transformation. He saw Billy’s imperfection as ‘an organic hesitancy’, an ambivalence in a story which, like Moby-Dick, is filled with strange undercurrents and digressions. But it was also by way of reassuring the reader that Billy’s fate drew on hard fact: the threat of violent subversion against the leviathanic state and what the true rights of man might be.

  The Great Mutiny of 1797 had shocked Britain with its ‘unbridled and unbounded revolt’, more menacing than all of Napoleon’s armies of the Antichrist. The ordinary sailor had become the enemy within. Off Portsmouth’s Spithead, the crew of Royal George rebelled, demanding better food – vegetables with their beef instead of flour – as well as pensions to Greenwich. These were denied. One admiral, Gardner, was so incensed by the petitions – including one requesting absolute pardon for their actions – that he ‘seized one of the delegates by the collar, and swore that he would have them all hanged, together with every fifth man in the fleet’. The mutineers responded by hoisting the red flag. On London, Marlborough and Minotaur, sailors refused to go to sea; when they raised their guns, their officers opened fire, killing five men and seriously wounding six others.

  By now the unrest had spread to the Thames. The men of HMS Sandwich seized control of their ship at the Nore anchorage, south of Sea Reach, the wild point at which the river became the sea, past which Melville himself would sail, unable to write his journal for the ‘jar & motion’ of the ship. The mutineers’ ringleader was Devon-born Richard Parker, an educated man who had previously challenged his captain to a duel. (He was also a man ominously christened, this Richard Parker, slipping in and out of history, from the fictional Richard Parker of Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, published in 1838, a cabin boy who is eaten by his shipwrecked mates, to the real-life teenaged Richard Parker of Southampton who met the same fate in 1889.)

  Under Parker’s brief leadership, the Nore insurrectionists made avowedly political statements. They demanded the dissolution of Parliament and immediate peace with France. Theirs was a maritime utopia, proposed on the same stretch of sea-river where Frank Harris had offered Wilde his freedom, the shore from which Oscar might have set sail for his own utopia, or where Shelley might have floated his anarchist fleet. Physically achieving what the poets had tried to do with words, the mutineers’ Floating Republic was a direct challenge to the landbound state: they blockaded the venal capital, threatening its lifeblood of trade. The authorities responded by stopping their own food supply.

  The mutiny failed. Parker tried to take the fleet to France, but his supporters deserted him. Arrested, tried, and sentenced to swing from the yardarm, Parker declined a white hood and jumped off before he could be hoisted, breaking his own neck. Far from becoming a martyr like Billy, his body was displayed in a tavern for a week to discourage further dissent.

  But such grim tactics did not seem to be working. As the Nore and Spithead mutinies got under way, the insurrection spread to Parker’s native Devon. In Torbay, two mutineers, William Lee and Thomas Preston, were hanged from the yardarm of Royal Sovereign, signing off their dramatic death letter, ‘We who this morning are doomed to bid adieu to this World … launched into the Gulph of Eternity.’ Their bodies were put into coffins drilled with holes and sunk off Berry Head (only to be later retrieved by Brixham fishermen and respectfully buried on land). And at nearby Plymouth, the third centre of Britain’s maritime power, two sailors on HMS St George were sentenced to death for sodomy. A deputation came to the quarterdeck to ask the captain, Shuldham Peard, to intercede on the condemned men’s behalf. But Peard was warned by two men who slipped into his cabin that the crew were close to mutiny. He had four men court-martialled and hanged that Sunday, despite protests at the profanity. (Nelson said he would have hanged them on Christmas Day.) Ten years later in the same port, William Berry – Billy Berry – described as ‘above six feet high, remarkably well made, and as fine and handsome a man as in the British Navy’, was hanged for sodomy.

  All these bodies paid the price extorted by the state. Melville made no direct reference to such injustices, but his work is full of them; nowhere more so than in the starry innocence of Billy Budd. In the body and soul of the Handsome Sailor, he looks beyond law and the ordinary world, to a place where we might all be set free.

  The manuscript of Billy Budd was found, not in a basket but a bread box – along with Melville’s note to himself, ‘Stay true to the dreams of thy youth’ – thirty years after its author’s death in obscurity in New York. The book was dedicated to Melville’s long-lost English friend Jack Chase, ‘Wherever that great heart may now be, Here on Earth or harbored in Paradise’. And it was left to England to resurrect Billy, as if he were a twentieth-century boy. When it appeared in 1924, the story alerted D.H.Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, E.M.Forster and W.H.Auden to Melville’s startlingly modern writing. In his collection Another Time – published in America in 1940, the same edition which included his hymn to Icarus, ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’ – Auden reimagined Melville. He saw him in those last years, his beard greying, his blue eyes failing, sailing into ‘an extraordinary mildness’. Mindful of his own time, Auden – who owned a shack on Fire Island where, unbeknown to him, the Handsome Sailor had taken shape from the sea – wrote that ‘Evil is unspectacular and always human,’ while goodness ‘has a name like Billy and is almost perfect | But wears a stammer like a decoration’.

  A decade later, in 1950, Benjamin Britten’s Billy Budd appeared during a new era of fear. In New England during the McCarthyite purges, Newton Arvin, the Scarlet Professor who taught Melville to Sylvia Plath at Smith College and whom Truman Capote, his lover, called ‘my Harvard’, would be prosecuted when images of naked men were found in his office. For Britten, as for Forster, his librettist, and Auden, their friend, Melville’s writing was an eternal, subversive response, embodied in the otherness of the sea. His opera subtly altered Melville’s story. Its oppressive setting and impressed men evoked the recent trauma of war and fears of a nuclear world in which terrible new weapons were detonated in remote oceans. As his crew toil and sing ‘We’re all of us lost forever on the endless sea,’ so Starry Vere echoes their words with his own: ‘I have been lost on the infinite sea.’

  Falling and rising and falling again, they’re all lost, these unmothered men and boys, abandoned to their fate like poor beautiful Billy, like Ishmael, like their blue-eyed creator.

  All of them lost forever on the infinite sea.

  STELLAMARIS

  At dawn in Bantry Bay, I dawdle in the still green sea, pushing out from the pontoon, gliding over meadows of weed. It’s a dreamy sensation made anxious only by the organisms with which I share the water. Every now and again I raise my head, looking out for the jellyfish that drift out of the dark like spectral umbrellas, gently opening and closing, luminous in the gloom.

  This summer they’re here in great number, brought by the Gulf Stream to Ireland’s Atlantic coast. Locals tell me their appearance is good news, but large blooms of jellyfish often indicate disruptions elsewhere. Warming waters are sending their predators – such as turtles and ocean sunfish – further north; overfishing and reduced diversity mean that animals which should be eating jellyfish and their spawn are not there. Jellyfish populations expand to fill this gap, and in turn eat the fry of other fish. As fragile as they seem, they are great survivors, like cockroaches. They have outlived all five mass extinctions of the past; they’ve been around for six hundred and fifty million years. Harbingers of a new extinction, one day they may be all that’s left in a simplified sea, the ghosts of what has been.

  I had come down to the harbour as soon as I arrived, almost as though I was ready to leave again. It was early evening and the sun’s heat was just beginning to abate. The sea was even calmer then, as if the day had flattened it down. I stood overlooking the water, wondering if I should get in. Everything felt deep and still. A man in a wetsuit appeared, walking down the boat slope with his children. He
greeted me openly, as everyone does round here, and responded to my enquiry.

  ‘Sure it’s safe enough.’

  His children splashed about at the edge of the slope, not quite ready to leave its security. He didn’t seem eager to get in either. Then I noticed again what I’d noticed at first: his twisted hand, held at an awkward angle to his body like a dog’s injured paw; and I thought, ah, he can’t swim properly. I felt that pathetic ache, the sort of love imperfection demands. I had visions of him flapping about in the water on his side as a sunfish does, so directionless with its odd, floppy dorsal fin.

  Moments later he dived in like an otter, more elegant in the sea than out of it.

  Another man appeared out of his car, tugging on a wetsuit. He asked me to zip it up for him. As I yanked the teeth together tight across his shoulderblades, I thought of Robin Robertson’s poem, in which a selkie shrugs off its skin like neoprene, joins a dance, then slips back into his hide at dawn, leaving with a ‘famous grin’.

  ‘That’s me away.’

  Slowly, I realised there were two or three wetsuited people in the water, gently working their way through it under the soft evening light. On this island, which I was visiting for the first time, having waited all my life to be invited here, swimming was a tradition. My usual tentative, if not secretive approach – expecting someone to tell me off, or ask, ‘Is it cold?’ – was unnecessary. I was among friends, fellow selkies.

  Encouraged by their presence – as if their bodies made the sea safer – I swam out into the dark water, aware of the weeds as they swayed like slimy whips, each trailing tendril coated in white fur and insistent in its attempt to entangle my limbs. The sea was warm, and tasted only slightly salty. It felt old. The water of saints.

  Then my hand brushed one of the jellyfish. I shuddered: it was like feeling a corpse in the water, the great fear of an out-of-hours swimmer. Uncertain of the underwater terrain, I soon swam back, and padded up the slope to join the others. One by one they were returning, all with the same story, their evening swims curtailed by venomous caresses, by tentacles delivering sly pink weals to bare faces and necks.

  I realised I had to come to terms with these gloopy aliens that had parachuted in, falling up instead of down, as lazy as the days were long. I went back to the water morning and night with the tides, greedily storing up luxurious summer swims against the hard winter to come. I tried to forget about the jellyfish.

  One evening I found another family there, a mother and her three children. The kids stood hesitantly on the pontoon, next to a sign which instructed us that swimming or diving from there was forbidden. Come on, I said, as they hovered over the edge, it’s lovely. And braver than I pretended to be, I jumped in.

  You remember some swims for no obvious reason. There’s some conjunction of conditions, of spirit and intuition; the realisation that a place is ready for you, and you are ready for it. That moment, the surrender of no-going-back, the instant of transition, the leaving of one element for another. The sunny evening turned white and green. The rush of bubbles came up like a sheet and I caught a brief glimpse through my naked eyes of the blackness below before I bobbed back up like a bottle.

  Then the kids leapt in too, hollering as they did so, and I thought how much I liked to share the water with children. How they don’t muddy it with rational thoughts and worries. They are up there one minute, and down here the next. No assumptions. Just instinctive shrieks at the shock of the cold, followed by ecstatic shouts.

  Unable to stay away, I was back there at dawn. In the complicit quiet of the morning, with no one about, I undressed on the pontoon and lowered myself in, sliding into the water so as not to disturb its gelatinous spirits. I was becoming reconciled to the jellyfish, even rather fond of their company; they too made the sea seem less lonely. The waves I created lapped the sides of moored boats as I wound my way in and out of the animals’ paths. They moved mindlessly, mantles embedded with corneal flashes of orange and brown. Cloudy as cataracts, they peered unseeingly through the ocean’s skin to the sky; I saw through them like lenses, down into the deep below. Trailing their bridal trains, they were ready to reward my bravery with a tingling stroke.

  They stung me, again and again, each sting less painful for being expected, almost loving, the sensuous water made manifest. Maybe I was on the way to becoming a jellyfish myself, de-evolving, with all this time spent in the water; as if my spine and the other bones that held me upright on land might dissolve, leaving me blissfully at sea, little more than a bit of human zooplankton to be carried out to the open ocean, with no momentum of my own.

  I like the common names of the sea, the way they gather by stories as much as by taxonomy. Jellyfish are no more fish than starfish or shellfish, but it suits us to think of them that way. Someone called these creatures compass jellyfish because their markings resemble a compass rose as seen through the glass dome of a ship’s swinging gimbal. But given their wandering nature, it’s hardly an apt name. Chrysaora hysoscella sounds more mythic – Chrysaor was the son of Poseidon and Medusa, ‘the one with the golden armour’, glowing from within. When he first encountered jellyfish on the Cape, Thoreau thought that they were ‘a tender part of some marine monster, which the storm or some other foe had mangled’. Yet they are inescapably, intrinsically beautiful: to me they resemble elaborate Victorian puddings confected by Mrs Beeton, quivering dishes of aspic turned out of copper moulds for the delectation of well-dressed guests.

  As I watched them at eye level they began to coalesce, summoned by some silent signal like clouds forming and re-forming; as much weather as animals, nebulous medusae. More and more emerged out of the darkness, their pearly colours complemented by another species, their fellow cnidarians: moon jellyfish, Aurelia aurita, canopies flushed with pale mauve and shot through with deeper purple-blue gonad rings, all but flashing with fluorescence, as though powered by an electric current running through the water. In their floral nothingness, they were flowers come to life: hallucinatory, floating out of the end of the world, anodyne yet venomous, born male, becoming female. Gliding by my side, powered by their expanding and contracting bells, they were barely there at all, composed as they are of ninety-eight per cent water, often ending up as sad puddles on the beach to be poked at by passing children whose parents pull them away, anxious that the evaporating blobs might yet retain the power to harm even when reduced to a spat-out wine gum in the sand. Yet these animals are complex products of evolution, their languid tentacles reacting to danger or seeking prey with an extraordinary speed that belies their jellyish nature. And nearer us than we know: they are our common ancestors, in whom nervous systems first evolved.

  As successful as they are, these creatures cannot survive our scrutiny; and they only become more unreal in the exquisite models made by Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka. In 1853, Leopold, who came from a family of Bohemian glassmakers specialising in artificial eyes, was prescribed a sea voyage after suffering the loss of his wife and his father. Sailing to America, his ship became becalmed for two weeks off the Azores. Leopold looked down into the dark sea and saw ‘a flashlike bundle of light beams, as if it is surrounded by thousands of sparks, that form true bundles of fire and of other bright lighting spots, and the seemingly mirrored stars’. This phosphorescence resolved itself into tiny, jellyfish-like siponospheres, whose cousins, Portuguese men o’ war, I have also encountered in those waters, their lurid purple-frilled bladders dangling their venomous colonies like bulging varicose veins.

  Sketching the invertebrates he saw, Leopold returned to recreate these creatures in the medium of which he was a master, passing on to his son Rudolf this passion for turning oceanic organisms into miniature Tiffany lamps. Together they read reports from the Challenger expedition – busy plumbing the world’s oceans – and kept an aquarium in their home in Dresden, stocked with marine animals and plants from Trieste Zoological Station and the famous aquarium merchant, R.T. Smith in Weymouth, England, as well as specimens they gathered t
hemselves.

  The Blaschkas’ extraordinary techniques died with them – even now, no one really knows how they made their delicate, impossibly twisted and shaped models – but their creations have survived, caught in time like insects in amber. My friend Mary once took me to the Harvard Museum of Natural History, promising something amazing. I walked into the gallery to find the Blaschkas’ frozen plants and animals shimmering and glistening in rows under glass vitrines. They had been commuted into immortality, entombed in their own beauty.

  Behind me, Bantry was still asleep. On the shore, there were two pairs of children’s shoes left behind at the water’s edge.

  Pulling myself back onto the pontoon, I dressed as the sun rose. Clouds slipped off the mountains and into the sea as though the land was breathing. I wheeled my bike up to the cemetery, its gravestones so shiny they looked as if they were polished every day. They marched up the hill, these neat slabs, tidier than the town’s sprawling terraces, their black marble reflecting the dark water that they overlooked.

  At the brow stood a cross, high above all the others. In an English churchyard such a monument would have commemorated a war. This memorial was dedicated, not to the lost sons of the Somme or Ypres, but to another generation.

  +

  TO MARK THE

  FAMINE-PITS

  OF

  1846–8

  MAY GOD GIVE REST

  TO THE SOULS OF

  THE FAITHFUL DEPARTED

  The events of those few years happened only two lifetimes ago; my own ancestors left this island because of them. Their consequences are still felt, like the ripples around my body in the water. Held out to sea as a silent reproof, the stone cross is dumb. It cannot tell the real story, even now.