Johanna S. Wisthaler - "By Water to the Columbian Exposition"

James Boswell - "Boswell's Correspondence with the Honourable Andrew Erskine, and His Journal of a Tour to Corsica"

Paul Heyse - "Andrea Delfin"

Arthur J. Rees - "The Hand in the Dark"

Annual Bibliography of Commonwealth Literature 2007
This paper argues that discourses of love in Ghanaian market literature for youth offer a view into complex negotiations of agency and empowerment. Drawing on Deborah Durham's notion of youth as "social `shifters'" and Francis Nyamnjoh's conception of the "interconnectedness" of agency, I take Ghanaian market literature as one specific case of how African literature for youth foregrounds questions of continuity and change as African societies enter into increasingly complex global relations. In this literature for youth, received notions of love, often constructed out of impressions from American pop and hip hop music, carry new notions of agency that compete with existing "domesticated" forms. Authors like Ike Tandoh and Evelyn Tay employ discourses of love to offer youth alternative avenues for empowerment in a context of socio-economic disenfranchizement. In a creative process of "straddling", this writing both reveals and reproduces the contradictions that obtain in youth configurations of agency.

Short Studies on Great Subjects

J >> James Anthony Froude >> Short Studies on Great Subjects




It was, therefore, with no little interest that we heard of the
formation of a society which was to employ itself, as we understood, in
republishing in accessible form some, if not all, of the invaluable
records compiled or composed by Richard Hakluyt. Books, like everything
else, have their appointed death-day; the souls of them, unless they be
found worthy of a second birth in a new body, perish with the paper in
which they lived; and the early folio Hakluyts, not from their own want
of merit, but from our neglect of them, were expiring of old age. The
five-volume quarto edition, published in 1811, so little people then
cared for the exploits of their ancestors, consisted but of 270 copies.
It was intended for no more than for curious antiquaries, or for the
great libraries, where it could be consulted as a book of reference; and
among a people, the greater part of whom had never heard Hakluyt's name,
the editors are scarcely to be blamed if it never so much as occurred to
them that general readers would care to have the book within their
reach.

And yet those five volumes may be called the Prose Epic of the modern
English nation. They contain the heroic tales of the exploits of the
great men in whom the new era was inaugurated; not mythic, like the
Iliads and the Eddas, but plain broad narratives of substantial facts,
which rival legend in interest and grandeur. What the old epics were to
the royally or nobly born, this modern epic is to the common people. We
have no longer kings or princes for chief actors, to whom the heroism
like the dominion of the world had in time past been confined. But, as
it was in the days of the Apostles, when a few poor fishermen from an
obscure lake in Palestine assumed, under the Divine mission, the
spiritual authority over mankind, so, in the days of our own Elizabeth,
the seamen from the banks of the Thames and the Avon, the Plym and the
Dart, self-taught and self-directed, with no impulse but what was
beating in their own royal hearts, went out across the unknown seas
fighting, discovering, colonising, and graved out the channels, paving
them at last with their bones, through which the commerce and enterprise
of England has flowed out over all the world. We can conceive nothing,
not the songs of Homer himself, which would be read among us with more
enthusiastic interest than these plain massive tales; and a people's
edition of them in these days, when the writings of Ainsworth and Eugene
Sue circulate in tens of thousands, would perhaps be the most blessed
antidote which could be bestowed upon us. The heroes themselves were the
men of the people--the Joneses, the Smiths, the Davises, the Drakes; and
no courtly pen, with the one exception of Raleigh, lent its polish or
its varnish to set them off. In most cases the captain himself, or his
clerk or servant, or some unknown gentleman volunteer, sat down and
chronicled the voyage which he had shared; and thus inorganically arose
a collection of writings which, with all their simplicity, are for
nothing more striking than for the high moral beauty, warmed with
natural feeling, which displays itself through all their pages. With us,
the sailor is scarcely himself beyond his quarter-deck. If he is
distinguished in his profession, he is professional merely; or if he is
more than that, he owes it not to his work as a sailor, but to
independent domestic culture. With them, their profession was the school
of their nature, a high moral education which most brought out what was
most nobly human in them; and the wonders of earth, and air, and sea,
and sky, were a real intelligible language in which they heard Almighty
God speaking to them.

That such hopes of what might be accomplished by the Hakluyt Society
should in some measure be disappointed, is only what might naturally be
anticipated of all very sanguine expectation. Cheap editions are
expensive editions to the publisher; and historical societies, from a
necessity which appears to encumber all corporate English action,
rarely fail to do their work expensively and infelicitously. Yet, after
all allowances and deductions, we cannot reconcile ourselves to the
mortification of having found but one volume in the series to be even
tolerably edited, and that one to be edited by a gentleman to whom
England is but an adopted country--Sir Robert Schomburgk. Raleigh's
'Conquest of Guiana,' with Sir Robert's sketch of Raleigh's history and
character, form in everything but its cost a very model of an excellent
volume. For the remaining editors,[V] we are obliged to say that they
have exerted themselves successfully to paralyse whatever interest was
reviving in Hakluyt, and to consign their own volumes to the same
obscurity to which time and accident were consigning the earlier
editions. Very little which was really noteworthy escaped the industry
of Hakluyt himself, and we looked to find reprints of the most
remarkable of the stories which were to be found in his collection. The
editors began unfortunately with proposing to continue the work where he
had left it, and to produce narratives hitherto unpublished of other
voyages of inferior interest, or not of English origin. Better thoughts
appear to have occurred to them in the course of the work; but their
evil destiny overtook them before their thoughts could get themselves
executed. We opened one volume with eagerness, bearing the title of
'Voyages to the North-west,' in hope of finding our old friends Davis
and Frobisher. We found a vast unnecessary Editor's Preface: and instead
of the voyages themselves, which with their picturesqueness and moral
beauty shine among the fairest jewels in the diamond mine of Hakluyt, we
encountered an analysis and digest of their results, which Milton was
called in to justify in an inappropriate quotation. It is much as if
they had undertaken to edit 'Bacon's Essays,' and had retailed what they
conceived to be the substance of them in their own language; strangely
failing to see that the real value of the actions or the thoughts of
remarkable men does not lie in the material result which can be gathered
from them, but in the heart and soul of the actors or speakers
themselves. Consider what Homer's 'Odyssey' would be, reduced into an
analysis.

The editor of the 'Letters of Columbus' apologises for the rudeness of
the old seaman's phraseology. Columbus, he tells us, was not so great a
master of the pen as of the art of navigation. We are to make excuses
for him. We are put on our guard, and warned not to be offended, before
we are introduced to the sublime record of sufferings under which a man
of the highest order was staggering towards the end of his earthly
calamities; although the inarticulate fragments in which his thought
breaks out from him, are strokes of natural art by the side of which
literary pathos is poor and meaningless.

And even in the subjects which they select they are pursued by the same
curious fatality. Why is Drake to be best known, or to be only known, in
his last voyage? Why pass over the success, and endeavour to immortalise
the failure? When Drake climbed the tree in Panama, and saw both oceans,
and vowed that he would sail a ship in the Pacific; when he crawled out
upon the cliffs of Terra del Fuego, and leaned his head over the
southernmost angle of the world; when he scored a furrow round the globe
with his keel, and received the homage of the barbarians of the
antipodes in the name of the Virgin Queen, he was another man from what
he had become after twenty years of court life and intrigue, and Spanish
fighting and gold-hunting. There is a tragic solemnity in his end, if we
take it as the last act of his career; but it is his life, not his
death, which we desire--not what he failed to do, but what he did.

But every bad has a worse below it, and more offensive than all these is
the editor of Hawkins's 'Voyage to the South Sea.' The narrative is
striking in itself; not one of the best, but very good; and, as it is
republished complete, we can fortunately read it through, carefully
shutting off Captain Bethune's notes with one hand, and we shall then
find in it the same beauty which breathes in the tone of all the
writings of the period.

It is a record of misfortune, but of misfortune which did no dishonour
to him who sunk under it; and there is a melancholy dignity in the style
in which Hawkins tells his story, which seems to say, that though he had
been defeated, and had never again an opportunity of winning back his
lost laurels, he respects himself still for the heart with which he
endured a shame which would have broken a smaller man. It would have
required no large exertion of editorial self-denial to have abstained
from marring the pages with puns of which 'Punch' would be ashamed, and
with the vulgar affectation of patronage with which the sea captain of
the nineteenth century condescends to criticise and approve of his
half-barbarous precursor. And what excuse can we find for such an
offence as this which follows. The war of freedom of the Araucan Indians
is the most gallant episode in the history of the New World. The
Spaniards themselves were not behindhand in acknowledging the chivalry
before which they quailed, and, after many years of ineffectual efforts,
they gave up a conflict which they never afterwards resumed; leaving the
Araucans alone, of all the American races with which they came in
contact, a liberty which they were unable to tear from them. It is a
subject for an epic poem; and whatever admiration is due to the heroism
of a brave people whom no inequality of strength could appal and no
defeats could crush, these poor Indians have a right to demand of us.
The story of the war was well known in Europe; Hawkins, in coasting the
western shores of South America, fell in with them, and the finest
passage in his book is the relation of one of the incidents of the
war:--

An Indian captain was taken prisoner by the Spaniards, and for that
he was of name, and known to have done his devoir against them, they
cut off his hands, thereby intending to disenable him to fight any
more against them. But he, returning home, desirous to revenge this
injury, to maintain his liberty, with the reputation of his nation,
and to help to banish the Spaniard, with his tongue intreated and
incited them to persevere in their accustomed valour and reputation,
abasing the enemy and advancing his nation; condemning their
contraries of cowardliness, and confirming it by the cruelty used
with him and other his companions in their mishaps; showing them his
arms without hands, and naming his brethren whose half feet they had
cut off, because they might be unable to sit on horseback; with
force arguing that if they feared them not, they would not have used
so great inhumanity--for fear produceth cruelty, the companion of
cowardice. Thus encouraged he them to fight for their lives, limbs,
and liberty, choosing rather to die an honourable death fighting,
than to live in servitude as fruitless members of the commonwealth.
Thus using the office of a sergeant-major, and having loaden his two
stumps with bundles of arrows, he succoured them who, in the
succeeding battle had their store wasted; and changing himself from
place to place, animated and encouraged his countrymen with such
comfortable persuasions, as it is reported and credibly believed,
that he did more good with his words and presence, without striking
a stroke, than a great part of the army did with fighting to the
utmost.

It is an action which may take its place by the side of the myth of
Mucius Scaevola, or the real exploit of that brother of the poet
AEschylus, who, when the Persians were flying from Marathon, clung to a
ship till both his hands were hewn away, and then seized it with his
teeth, leaving his name as a portent even in the splendid calendar of
Athenian heroes. Captain Bethune, without call or need, making his
notes, merely, as he tells us, from the suggestions of his own mind as
he revised the proof-sheets, informs us, at the bottom of the page, that
'it reminds him of the familiar lines--

For Widdrington I needs must wail,
As one in doleful dumps;
For when his legs were smitten off,
He fought upon his stumps.'

It must not avail him, that he has but quoted from the ballad of Chevy
Chase. It is the most deformed stanza[W] of the modern deformed version
which was composed in the eclipse of heart and taste, on the restoration
of the Stuarts; and if such verses could then pass for serious poetry,
they have ceased to sound in any ear as other than a burlesque; the
associations which they arouse are only absurd, and they could only have
continued to ring in his memory through their ludicrous doggrel.

When to these offences of the Society we add, that in the long laboured
appendices and introductions, which fill up valuable space, which
increase the expense of the edition, and into reading which many readers
are, no doubt, betrayed, we have found nothing which assists the
understanding of the stories which they are supposed to illustrate--when
we have declared that we have found what is most uncommon passed
without notice, and what is most trite and familiar encumbered with
comment--we have unpacked our hearts of the bitterness which these
volumes have aroused in us, and can now take our leave of them and go on
with our more grateful subject.

Elizabeth, whose despotism was as peremptory as that of the
Plantagenets, and whose ideas of the English constitution were limited
in the highest degree, was, notwithstanding, more beloved by her
subjects than any sovereign before or since. It was because,
substantially, she was the people's sovereign; because it was given to
her to conduct the outgrowth of the national life through its crisis of
change, and the weight of her great mind and her great place were thrown
on the people's side. She was able to paralyse the dying efforts with
which, if a Stuart had been on the throne, the representatives of an
effete system might have made the struggle a deadly one; and the history
of England is not the history of France, because the resolution of one
person held the Reformation firm till it had rooted itself in the heart
of the nation, and could not be again overthrown. The Catholic faith was
no longer able to furnish standing ground on which the English or any
other nation could live a manly and a godly life. Feudalism, as a social
organisation, was not any more a system under which their energies could
have scope to move. Thenceforward, not the Catholic Church, but any man
to whom God had given a heart to feel and a voice to speak, was to be
the teacher to whom men were to listen; and great actions were not to
remain the privilege of the families of the Norman nobles, but were to
be laid within the reach of the poorest plebeian who had the stuff in
him to perform them. Alone, of all the sovereigns in Europe, Elizabeth
saw the change which had passed over the world. She saw it, and saw it
in faith, and accepted it. The England of the Catholic Hierarchy and the
Norman Baron, was to cast its shell and to become the England of free
thought and commerce and manufacture, which was to plough the ocean with
its navies, and sow its colonies over the globe; and the first
appearance of these enormous forces and the light of the earliest
achievements of the new era shines through the forty years of the reign
of Elizabeth with a grandeur which, when once its history is written,
will be seen to be among the most sublime phenomena which the earth as
yet has witnessed. The work was not of her creation; the heart of the
whole English nation was stirred to its depths; and Elizabeth's place
was to recognise, to love, to foster, and to guide. The Government
originated nothing; at such a time it was neither necessary nor
desirable that it should do so; but wherever expensive enterprises were
on foot which promised ultimate good, and doubtful immediate profit, we
never fail to find among the lists of contributors the Queen's Majesty,
Burghley, Leicester, Walsingham. Never chary of her presence, for
Elizabeth could afford to condescend, when ships were fitting for
distant voyages in the river, the queen would go down in her barge and
inspect. Frobisher, who was but a poor sailor adventurer, sees her wave
her handkerchief to him from the Greenwich Palace windows, and he brings
her home a narwhal's horn for a present. She honoured her people, and
her people loved her; and the result was that, with no cost to the
Government, she saw them scattering the fleets of the Spaniards,
planting America with colonies, and exploring the most distant seas.
Either for honour or for expectation of profit, or from that unconscious
necessity by which a great people, like a great man, will do what is
right, and must do it at the right time, whoever had the means to
furnish a ship, and whoever had the talent to command one, laid their
abilities together and went out to pioneer, and to conquer, and take
possession, in the name of the Queen of the Sea. There was no nation so
remote but what some one or other was found ready to undertake an
expedition there, in the hope of opening a trade; and, let them go where
they would, they were sure of Elizabeth's countenance. We find letters
written by her, for the benefit of nameless adventurers, to every
potentate of whom she had ever heard--to the Emperors of China, Japan,
and India, the Grand Duke of Russia, the Grand Turk, the Persian
'Sofee,' and other unheard-of Asiatic and African princes; whatever was
to be done in England, or by Englishmen, Elizabeth assisted when she
could, and admired when she could not. The springs of great actions are
always difficult to analyse--impossible to analyse perfectly--possible
to analyse only very proximately; and the force by which a man throws a
good action out of himself is invisible and mystical, like that which
brings out the blossom and the fruit upon the tree. The motives which
we find men urging for their enterprises seem often insufficient to have
prompted them to so large a daring. They did what they did from the
great unrest in them which made them do it, and what it was may be best
measured by the results in the present England and America.

Nevertheless, there was enough in the state of the world, and in the
position of England, to have furnished abundance of conscious motive,
and to have stirred the drowsiest minister of routine.

Among material occasions for exertion, the population began to outgrow
the employment, and there was a necessity for plantations to serve as an
outlet. Men who, under happier circumstances, might have led decent
lives, and done good service, were now driven by want to desperate
courses--'witness,' as Richard Hakluyt says, 'twenty tall fellows hanged
last Rochester assizes for small robberies;' and there is an admirable
paper addressed to the Privy Council by Christopher Carlile,
Walsingham's son-in-law, pointing out the possible openings to be made
in or through such plantations for home produce and manufacture.

Far below all such prudential economics and mercantile ambitions,
however, lay a chivalrous enthusiasm which in these dull days we can
hardly, without an effort, realise. The life-and-death wrestle between
the Reformation and the old religion had settled in the last quarter of
the sixteenth century into a permanent struggle between England and
Spain. France was disabled. All the help which Elizabeth could spare
barely enabled the Netherlands to defend themselves. Protestantism, if
it conquered, must conquer on another field; and by the circumstances of
the time the championship of the Reformed faith fell to the English
sailors. The sword of Spain was forged in the gold-mines of Peru; the
legions of Alva were only to be disarmed by intercepting the gold ships
on their passage; and, inspired by an enthusiasm like that which four
centuries before had precipitated the chivalry of Europe upon the East,
the same spirit which in its present degeneracy covers our bays and
rivers with pleasure yachts, then fitted out armed privateers, to sweep
the Atlantic, and plunder and destroy Spanish ships wherever they could
meet them.

Thus, from a combination of causes, the whole force and energy of the
age was directed towards the sea. The wide excitement, and the greatness
of the interests at stake, raised even common men above themselves; and
people who in ordinary times would have been no more than mere seamen,
or mere money-making merchants, appear before us with a largeness and
greatness of heart and mind in which their duties to God and their
country are alike clearly and broadly seen and felt to be paramount to
every other.

Ordinary English traders we find fighting Spanish war ships in behalf of
the Protestant faith. The cruisers of the Spanish Main were full of
generous eagerness for the conversion of the savage nations to
Christianity. And what is even more surprising, sites for colonisation
were examined and scrutinised by such men in a lofty statesmanlike
spirit, and a ready insight was displayed by them into the indirect
effects of a wisely-extended commerce on every highest human interest.

Again, in the conflict with the Spaniards, there was a further feeling,
a feeling of genuine chivalry, which was spurring on the English, and
one which must be well understood and well remembered, if men like
Drake, and Hawkins, and Raleigh are to be tolerably understood. One of
the English Reviews, a short time ago, was much amused with a story of
Drake having excommunicated a petty officer as a punishment for some
moral offence; the reviewer not being able to see in Drake, as a man,
anything more than a highly brave and successful buccaneer, whose
pretences to religion might rank with the devotion of an Italian bandit
to the Madonna. And so Hawkins, and even Raleigh, are regarded by
superficial persons, who see only such outward circumstances of their
history as correspond with their own impressions. The high nature of
these men, and the high objects which they pursued, will only rise out
and become visible to us as we can throw ourselves back into their times
and teach our hearts to feel as they felt. We do not find in the
language of the voyagers themselves, or of those who lent them their
help at home, any of that weak watery talk of 'protection of
aborigines,' which, as soon as it is translated into fact, becomes the
most active policy for their destruction, soul and body. But the stories
of the dealings of the Spaniards with the conquered Indians, which were
widely known in England, seem to have affected all classes of people,
not with pious passive horror, but with a genuine human indignation. A
thousand anecdotes in detail we find scattered up and down the pages of
Hakluyt, who, with a view to make them known, translated Peter Martyr's
letters; and each commonest sailor-boy who had heard these stories from
his childhood among the tales of his father's fireside, had longed to be
a man, that he might go out and become the avenger of a gallant and
suffering people. A high mission, undertaken with a generous heart,
seldom fails to make those worthy of it to whom it is given; and it was
a point of honour, if of nothing more, among the English sailors, to do
no discredit by their conduct to the greatness of their cause. The high
courtesy, the chivalry of the Spanish nobles, so conspicuous in their
dealings with their European rivals, either failed to touch them in
their dealings with uncultivated idolators, or the high temper of the
aristocracy was unable to restrain or to influence the masses of the
soldiers. It would be as ungenerous as it would be untrue, to charge
upon their religion the grievous actions of men who called themselves
the armed missionaries of Catholicism, when the Catholic priests and
bishops were the loudest in the indignation with which they denounced
them. But we are obliged to charge upon it that slow and subtle
influence so inevitably exercised by any religion which is divorced from
life, and converted into a thing of form, or creed, or ceremony, or
system--which could permit the same men to be extravagant in a sincere
devotion to the Queen of Heaven, whose entire lower nature, unsubdued
and unaffected, was given up to thirst of gold, and plunder, and
sensuality. If religion does not make men more humane than they would be
without it, it makes them fatally less so; and it is to be feared that
the spirit of the Pilgrim Fathers, which had oscillated to the other
extreme, and had again crystallised into a formal antinomian fanaticism,
reproduced the same fatal results as those in which the Spaniards had
set them their unworthy precedent. But the Elizabethan navigators, full
for the most part with large kindness, wisdom, gentleness, and beauty,
bear names untainted, as far as we know, with a single crime against the
savages of America; and the name of England was as famous in the Indian
seas as that of Spain was infamous. On the banks of the Oronoko there
was remembered for a hundred years the noble captain who had come there
from the great queen beyond the seas; and Raleigh speaks the language of
the heart of his country, when he urges the English statesmen to
colonise Guiana, and exults in the glorious hope of driving the white
marauder into the Pacific, and restoring the Incas to the throne of
Peru.

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