Scrapbook (2) — from Old Master to modern Mijnheer

The BBC website noted:

George Stubbs’ kangaroo and dingo paintings get export bar

The UK government has taken steps to keep in the country two oil paintings that gave the 18th Century British public their first chance to see what a kangaroo and a dingo looked like.

A temporary export bar has been placed on the two George Stubbs works, which went on display in London in 1773.

It a Stubbs. It’s charming. It’s beautiful. It’s elegant. It may be The Kangouro from New Holland. Only … it sure ain’t any kangaroo we’ve seen.

Apparently Stubbs was working from a pelt, which he somehow inflated. The head is obviously ‘borrowed’ from a passing rodent (at worst) or deer (at best).

The image on the BBC website was clearly trimmed (and forcibly stamped with the copyright of the Press Association). So Malcolm went looking for a better, and found quite a few. Even the one above, from the Guardian, has lost the creature’s tail.

His rooting also located another delight: a website — The Library of Curiosities — written by Steven de Joode, who seems to be a Dutch bookseller. Only the last eight (as of now) posts are in English, and Malcolm’s Dutch is non-existent. Still, that includes:

From De Bruyn to Pasteur: Early Illustrations of the Kangaroo

This, as the self-explanatory headline has it,  tells the story of the first European encounters with the beast; and how it was depicted. It also a reproduction of a book engraving (inverted left-to-right) taken from the Stubbs.

Missing links

The first is the hoary old Australian joke that Cook, or Banks, or someone spotted kangaroos in the distance, asked a strolling aboriginal what they were, and heard some version of “kangaroo”. Hence the name in English, but not realising that what the aboriginal had meant was, “Bugger me mate. Haven’t a clue.”

The Oxford English Dictionary, in its refined way, repeats that anecdote as:

Etymology:  Stated to have been the name in an Australian Aboriginal language.

Cook and Banks believed it to be the name given to the animal by the aborigenes at Endeavour River, Queensland, and there is later affirmation of its use elsewhere. On the other hand, there are express statements to the contrary (see quots. below), showing that the word, if ever current in this sense, was merely local, or had become obsolete. The common assertion that it really means ‘I don’t understand’ (the supposed reply of the local to his questioner) seems to be of recent origin and lacks confirmation. (See Morris Austral English s.v.)

Then there is the real mystery.

It is well-established that the Dutch reached New Holland/Australia long before Cook: de Joode has that as:

… the fateful voyage of the Dutch merchantman Batavia, wrecked off the coast of Western Australia in 1629. The disaster would lead to mutiny and the massacre of almost half of the crew. This tragedy, however, also resulted in the first European sighting of an Australian marsupial. The Batavia was wrecked on a reef of the Houtman Abrolhos, and on these islands Francisco Pelsaert, commander of the ship, discovered numerous ‘cats’: “creatures of a miraculous form, as big as a hare; the head similar to [that] of a civet cat, the fore-paws are very short, about a finger long.

On the shelves of Redfellow Hovel is a 1977 book by Kenneth Gordon McIntyre, “an Australian lawyer with a lifelong interest in the history of discovery”. The book is The Secret Discovery of Australia: Portuguese Ventures 200 Years Before Captain Cook. It contains a large dose of induction, based on some crude maps of the southern ocean (to which McIntyre applies any manner of abstruse ‘corrections’) .  In particular he argues that Cristovão Mendonça —

a man of superior importance, what we would call a Royal Navy Captain … a man of some birth … a man of considerable prowess [page 241]

— was in and around northern Australia in the 1520s. He lost a set of keys at Geelong in 1522, which were rediscovered in 1847, though —

the keys themselves have been lost, and cannot now be examined … Probably even if the keys could be found, they could only be identified as common European keys, not especially identifiable as Portuguese.

Ummm … pretty thin stuff, don’t you feel?

McIntyre also makes play of the title page of Cornelis de Jode’s Speculum Orbis Terrae:

That dates from 1593. In de Jode’s map of the world, there is a definite lump of land vaguely in the area of Australia. That doesn’t mean, as McIntyre would want, that strange pouched creature in the bottom right quadrant of the title page is a kangaroo.

Finally —

Among Steven de Joode’s other posts (More! More!) is a nice little reflection on —

Why do we collect books? Much ink has been spilled over this question. A well-known attempt at solving the mystery is Muensterberger’s Collecting: An Unruly Passion, a curious study brimming with psychological gobbledygook. According to the author, collecting is nothing more than an attempt to overcome a traumatic experience or to compensate for a loss suffered in early childhood. The collector surrounds himself with “magic objects” allowing him to conquer traumas.

Conclusion:

… books are more than mere (magical) objects: they also have a rational appeal, which is their intellectual content.

What was Malcolm’s traumatic experience?, he wonders.

We’ll weather the weather, whatever the weather

This post is a bit of a rummage round the lumber-room of Malcolm’s mind. Take it as such, or leave it.

Let’s start navigating at the prime meridian

In 1941 Myles na gCopaleen , a.k.a. Brian O’Nolan, published An Béal Bocht. It is to Irish literature as Stella Gibbons’ Cold Comfort Farm had been a decade earlier to the English of-the-earth, earthy stuff.

Alas! Malcolm’s Irish (failed Leaving Certificate) was never up to appreciating the original Irish, and an English translation, magnificently illustrated by Ralph Steadman, only became available in 1996. So for too long, whenever the works of the Great Flann, Myles and Brian came into the conversation, on any mention of An Béal Bocht, Malcolm could but nod sagely, and seek to redirect onto more familiar Dalkey Archive territory.

Flann/ Myles/ Brian was never averse when it came to Épater la bourgeoisie. Thus with An Béal Bocht. Irish officialdom, especially since the ascent to power of Éamon de Valera, was heavily promoting da kulcha  — in this parallel universe, the main ‘Culture’ was agriculture — not for nothing did the Dubliner refer dismissively to ‘culchies’. No Fianna Fáil bun-fight was complete without a flush of Fáinní (those ring lapel-pins to indicate an Irish speaker). Such types were indoctrinated to revere Peig Sayers as the true voice of “real” Ireland, and so inflict her serial miseries on the school-student.

For the record the prevalence of Fáinní in Fianna Fáil has declined in direct proportion to their increase among Sinn Féiners. When Gerry Adams began sporting a Fainne, that was the ultimate no-no! in polite political society.

A bit of plot (Sacs-Béarla version)

It’s always raining torrents in Corkadoragha, home of the first-person narrator Bonaparte O’Coonassa. Corkadoragha is about as impoverished and unreconstructed as anywhere could be in deprived, rocky, drenched Connacht. Or, as the Dalkey Archive edition blurb has it:

The Poor Mouth relates the story of one Bonaparte O’Coonassa, born in a cabin in a fictitious village called Corkadoragha in western Ireland equally renowned for its beauty and the abject poverty of its residents. Potatoes constitute the basis of his family’s daily fare, and they share both bed and board with the sheep and pigs. A scathing satire on the Irish, this work brought down on the author’s head the full wrath of those who saw themselves as the custodians of Irish language and tradition when it was first published in Gaelic in 1941.

Yet it has one natural resource: the Irish spoken in Corkadoragha is regarded as the most perfect in the island. Annually, therefore, Corkadoragha becomes infested with language-revivalists from the city — until the weather and the all-too-”authentic” poverty drive them away again.

Nearer home, and a few points east

A blog-artist of some ability has adopted the persona of ‘Bonaparte O’Coonassa’ — though, to be honest, there cannot be many literary grotesques who don’t have an afterlife on the net. Mr Downey of Romford (where Malcolm was once a borough councillor) has a nice sense of humour, is sound on the things that matter (Nick Griffin is a piece of shit), though is lamentably soft on cats. Nobody is perfect.

Fond of Romford as Malcolm (almost) is, he would usually be visiting Mr Downey blog, and passing by without acknowledgement. However, a wrinkle appeared.

Whale song and Zentz

Riffling through a drawer Malcolm had come across a well-worn key-ring. Beyond decipherment of any text on the plastic tag was a memory source: that New Age coffeehouse/bookshop the Redfellow entourage visited in Cortez, Colorado — back in the summer of 1994.

He recalled that the ambiance was being reinforced by whale song on the muzak channel. That seemed a trifle odd, since Cortez CO is some mean distance from either ocean.

Somehow that recollection triggered another: a song by Bob Zentz of Norfolk, Virginia:

Zentz, as a young man, had served in the US Coast Guard, and this song recalls being on watch. Yes, it’s sheer romanticism; but — one way and another — it persists as a repetitive soundtrack to Malcolm’s life. Here is the lyric is full:

Ocean Station Bravo, North Atlantic Ocean,
Somewhere west of Greenland, somewhere far from home.
Nothing on the radar, nothing on the sonar,
Hove-to and drifting on this ocean all alone.

CGC Sebago, high-endurance cutter,
Ocean station vessel number 42,
Studying the weather, aids to navigation
Plotting ships and aircraft as they come sailing through.

In the middle of the ocean, center of the circle,
There’s nothing but horizon, wind and sea and sky:
This whole world in motion, blowing from the northeast,

Not a hint of sunshine, just the gray clouds running by.

Then the lookout calls the bridge-watch, objects in the water —
Moving surface contacts off the starboard bow:
Plot ‘em on the radar, fire up the sonar
Listen for their echoes, can you hear ‘em now?

Well there’s echoes in my headphones, whale sounds on the speakers,
Filling all the spaces inside CIC:
Songs of loves and travels, songs of generations,
Echoes of the ages in cetacean harmony.

And me, I had to answer, I sang, I talked, I whistled.
Well, I even played the mouthharp through that microphone;
And they returned the favor with chirps and clicks and whistles —
A sound of celebration not so different from our own.

And when the watch was over, it’s out onto the bridge-wing
To view them sounding singers as they sing and sport and play:
Just a pod of humpbacks, farewell flukes a-wavin’,
A memory worth saving as they travelled on their way.
For we’d had a conversation with Leviathan that day.

Skirting the board …

That was somewhere on the periphery of Malcolm’s mind while he was daubing white paint onto bedroom skirting-board.

In a senior moment, he realised he couldn’t quite recall the name of the author: Zing? Zane? Zlotz? So, downstairs and crank up the search-engine.

Weather Station Kurt

One of the bits of serendipity that cropped up came from Mr Downey’s Poor Mouth, which for this post was very rich. One of the themes Mr Downey seems to revisit is “Backwaters of history”, little gems of actuality that have dropped out of consciousness, or only been rediscovered. In this particular post, Mr Downey has the quite remarkable tale of

… the only armed [Nazi] landing anywhere in North America [which] took place in Canada in October 1943 when a U-Boat landed a small party in Northern Labrador to erect an automatic weather station.

It looks as if Mr Downey resurrected this one from wikipedia. It was a good find, makes a good story, and provided Malcolm with a welcome diversion from the glossing task in hand (his knees, in particular, thank Mr Downie). It is a story, in its own way, almost as bizarre as anything in Myles.

J is for sweet Jingoism, that the Tories all think of the first

Here’s the foreshadowing of where Malcolm is heading with this post:

Any pop-ups you get with that hot-link are entirely your own problem. Ms Davidson is already taken (by Saskia Halcrow).

Meanwhile, the headline.

Last Saturday Malcolm trogged across London to Richmond, for Northern Stage and Live Theatre’s Close the Coalhouse Door. It’s currently touring rep theatres (which includes the National, where the production values went on steroids)  across the country; and it’s as good as it was in 1968.

In passing, if there were to be Paradise, some Elysian Fields, Malcolm hopes there to find an ethereal and eternal Richmond Green, on a sunny Spring day, complete with decent pubs (the Cricketers for Greene King, the Prince’s Head for Fullers, the Britannia) and a proper working late Victorian theatre (as above).

But … Jingoism?

Well, Jingo started, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, as:

A conjuror’s call for the appearance of something: the opposite of hey presto!, by which a thing is bidden to be gone. Hence, an exclamation of surprise at the appearance of something. Obs.

It then slithered [By Jingo!] into one of those oath-substitutes that can be decently used in respectable fiction. Then into MacDermott and Hunt’s music-hall song applauding Beaconsfield, in 1878, who had despatched British warships into Turkish waters, to forestall a Russian advance:

We don’t want to fight but by jingo if we do,
We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, and got the money too!
We’ve fought the Bear before and while we’re Britons true
The Russians shall not have Constantinople.

Well, they had to wait a bit, but today Russians and their money are welcome in the Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar. Just look for the multi-language signs, observe the linguistic pecking order, and draw your own conclusions.

With the end of Empire, we haven’t heard “Jingoism” trotted out so often, recently. Malcolm looked, in vain, at the index of Paxman’s book, and found it omitted.

Jingo lives!

The spirit of Jingo, though not the term itself, continues in one particular connection: Anglo-Scottish relations. Even more specifically, in the way the Tory Party treats its  branch-offices in the occupied territories.

Now, don’t get Malcolm wrong here: he is incapable of making a case for Tories of any description. Yet there is a certain “lost puppy” appeal about successive leaders of the Scottish Tories, and the way they have serially been dumped on by Tory Central.

For six years Annabel Goldie struggled to make any kind of advance. She didn’t have much support from across the Border, which — in all truth — might be the best thing to happen to Scottish Tories. In September 2010, the autumn after the spring General Election, there was this:

Scotland on Sunday has learned that, since the general election, senior figures in the UK Conservative Party no longer consult or communicate with their Scottish colleagues.

As a result, Scottish party leaders have been virtually shut out of all decision-making roles and they are no longer invited to top-level strategy and policy meetings.

Indeed, the isolation of the Scottish party has reached such a pitch that Scottish leader Annabel Goldie has not spoken to David Cameron since the election, while SNP First Minister Alex Salmond has held five conversations with the Prime Minister since he took office.

One party insider said the Scottish leadership had been “cast adrift” by Westminster, which had ceded political control of the country to its coalition partner, the Liberal Democrats.

Malcolm blogged that one at the time, since he relished Alex Massie’s gloss on The Most Useless Political Party in Europe. With friends like that (in this case, The Spectator), who needs enemies?

Once is happenstance, twice is circumstance, three times is enemy action

Ah, yes: the wit and wisdom of Auric Goldfinger.

Well, it looks as if Cameron, having happenstanced Goldie, having circumstanced the Ulster Unionists, is now also doing for Goldie’s successor. So to today’s Herald Scotland:

SCOTTISH Tories last night accused David Cameron of undermining the party’s leader north of the Border after the Prime Minister’s U-turn on the independence referendum date.

Despairing MSPs said the party in Scotland was “not even on his radar” and accused Mr Cameron of hanging Scots leader Ruth Davidson “out to dry”.

The angry comments came after the Prime Minister told a reception at the Scotland Office in London on Tuesday night he was not “too fussy” about the timing of the referendum – effectively conceding to the Nationalists’ wish for a vote on separation in the autumn of 2014.

He made his comments even though Ms Davidson has fought to hold the public line that delaying the referendum date for more than two years is unacceptable.

Last night Mr Cameron was accused of having no regard at all for the views of the Scottish party.

One senior MSP told The Herald: “The real significance of this is David Cameron clearly doesn’t think he has done anything wrong because the Scottish Tories are such an irrelevance we are just not on his radar. This was not wilful or deliberate or even careless. It just showed it did not occur to him the view of the Scottish party or its leader might even matter.”

Sweet Jingoism!

“Crooked nose” Cameron has, in effect, sent a gunboat into Scottish territorial waters. Its “friendly fire” has just blown out of the water the Scottish Tories.

It couldn’t happen to a nicer political band of brothers and sisters.

Last word to Alex Glasgow, from the First Act of Coalhouse Door:

A is for Alienation, which made me the man that I am,
B is the Boss, who’s a bastard, a bourgeois who don’t give a damn.

Avast!

Could there be a direct link between Plasticine, Robinson Crusoe and Old Possum?

Steve Connor may have hit on it for today’s Independent.

Perhaps without realising it, by connecting William Dampier (1651-1715) with the new Aardman film.

Somerset by toilets (anag.)

The answer is East Coker:

In my beginning is my end. In succession
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.
Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,
Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth
Which is already flesh, fur, and faeces,
Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.

Dampier

William Dampier was baptised at East Coker (there’s the link!) on 5th September 1651. He had more than a basic education before William Helyar, his guardian, the sugar-baron and Lord of the Manor of East Coker, sent Dampier off to sea. After a voyage on an East Indiaman and service in the Third Dutch War, Dampier was consigned to Helyar’s Jamaican plantation. There Dampier came to punch-ups (something of a life-trait) with the manager; and upped-and-offed to work in the logwood trade (a source of purple dyes) along the Bay of Campeche, Mexico. This was a business run by the baymen, English privateers made unemployed after the Godolphin Treaty with Spain. And so, by short strides, Dampier joined the marauding buccaneers of Tortuga, raiding the Mosquito Coast and Panama.

The long way home

In 1686 he joined Captain Charles Swan’s The Cygnet. Swan went fruitlessly hunting the treasure of the Manila galleon; but Dampier claimed he was motived to see more of the Pacific. Six thousand miles on short rations later, Dampier had navigated The Cygnet to Guam. Understandably, his account of Guam and the Philippines is then frequently concerned with foods — breadfruit, banana, and plantain.

The Cygnet cruised the South China Sea, before arriving as the first English ship to touch New Holland (Australia). Here Dampier was seriously disappointed by King Sound and the Great Sandy Desert. From there to the Nicobars, where Dampier left Swan’s crew, and amazingly reached Sumatra in an outrigger canoe. Despite a dose of dysentery Dampier then spent eighteen months travelling throughout south-east Asia, across modern Vietnam, the Malaysia, and back to India. He again joined the service of the East India Company (as a gunner in Sumatra) before returning to England as the first circumnavigator in a century, bringing with him “Prince Giolo”, a heavily-tatooed Indonesian (who would later expire of smallpox at Oxford).

Back to the day job

Having lost the income from displaying “Prince Giolo”, Dampier went back to sea as second mate on the Dove. The intention was to trade with the West Indies (with a bit of “salvage” on the side). The operation went awry when neither wages nor a letter-of-marque (a licence for privateering) transpired, and mutiny ensued. One of the ships in the flotilla was seized by the mutineers, and sailed off into piratical history as the Fancy under Captain Every (a.k.a. “Long Ben” Avery). Two years later, Every and his few remaining crew were the richest pirates ever, seriously inconveniencing English relations with the Great Mughal, and carrying large rewards on their heads. Two dozen pirates were captured: six of them brought back to London for trial, a final quaff at the Turk’s Head Inn, and a sad end at Execution Dock (Dampier gave evidence in their defence) — Every and his plunder discreetly disappears from the records.

Dampier had spent that interim working out his commitment on the Dove, but sued for back wages back in London. The Admiralty dismissed the case and accepted the ship’s owners argument that he had supported the mutiny.

Fame at last

Curiously that close shave with piracy made Dampier’s success. In 1697 he published his travelogue as A New Voyage Round the World, followed by an annex and “prequel”, Supplement of the New Voyage in 1699. These were duly translated into Dutch, French, and German.He became a celebrity, frequenting the likes of Hans Sloane, Pepys and Evelyn, and members of the Royal Society, receiving a sine-cure at the Customs House, and appearing as a regular expert witness at Board of Trade enquiries. His portrait by Thomas Murray (see top of this post and the National Portrait Gallery) was taken at this time.

HMS Roebuck

In 1699 Dampier was sent by the Admiralty to survey the “southern continent” as captain of what must count as the earliest officially-sponsored voyage of exploration. Unfortunately, Dampier confined himself to the north-west of Australia (thus missing the commercially-interesting bits) and New Guinea. The Roebuck‘s condition deteriorated and, in August 1701, sank at Ascension Island.

Dampier returned to England (again on an East Indiaman), with his botanical specimens (which still survive at Oxford University) to face a court-martial. Lieutenant George Fisher had berated his captain as a pirate and friend of mutineers. Dampier had been infuriated to the point of caning Fisher and clapping him in irons, and was found by the court to be unfit for command. The reputation of Dampier survived this, and he published A Voyage to New Holland in 1703.

Royal patronage and a failure

At the outbreak of the War of the Spanish Succession, Prince George (a Fellow of the Royal Society) presented Dampier to Queen Anne — both as right. George may have the odd American county of his name; but Charles II’s judgement was “I’ve tried him drunk, and I’ve tried him sober, and there’s nothing to the man.” This seems fairly proven in his judgement of Dampier.

As a consequence of the royal connection, Dampier was given command of a two-ship privateering expedition back in the Pacific, coastal raiding and further pursuit of that legendary Manila galleon. The other ship was Captain Charles Pickering in the Cinque-Ports (which had Alexander Selkirk as its sailing-master: bear this detail in mind).

Not much went aright on the voyage: the galleon went unencountered, the pickings were slight, and desertion and mutiny were rife. Dampier was imprisoned by the Spanish. When he returned to England in 1707 he was berated for all the offences that had characterised his time on the Roebuck, and he was in official bad odour as a bully and coward. He was later prosecuted for fraud by the heir to the ship’s owners.

Woodes Rogers

The merchants of Bristol lavishly financed a scheme of a local man, Woodes Rogers (abt. 1679-1732), who had conveniently married the daughter daughter of Admiral Sir William Whetstone, another Bristolian and the commander-in-chief of the West Indies. Two ships, the Duke and the Duchess were fitted out, and crewed by what Rogers called ‘Tinkers, Taylors, Hay-makers, Pedlers, Fiddlers etc.” The famous William Dampier was engaged as master of the Duke.

Success came early: off Tenerife the Duke took a Spanish cargo of wine and brandy. Rounding the Horn in a spectacular storm meant the Duke headed for shelter at Juan Fernandez. Three days later a party went ashore and were greeted by a man “clothed in goatskins”. This was aforesaid Alexander Selkirk, whom Captain Pickering had marooned there in November 1704. This story first appeared in Rogers’s A Cruising Voyage round the World (1712); and fictionalised by Defoe in Robinson Crusoe (1719).

Rogers succeeded where Dampier had failed. His voyage caused mayhem along the coasts of Peru and Chile, pillaging Guayaquil on the island of Puna and in December 1709 he took a Manila galleon, Nuestra Señora de la Encarnación off Baja California:

… after 16 months at sea, two tiny British frigates under the command of Captain Woodes Rogers had finally caught sight of one of the richest prizes afloat  -  the 500-ton Spanish galleon, the Encarnacion, on her way to Acapulco.

The Encarnacion was loaded down with bejewelled snuffboxes, pearls, rich tapestries and priceless china made for the Queen of Spain, as well as laced ivory fans, embroidered silk gowns, more than 1,000 pairs of silk stockings, chests of musk, tons of rare spices and other plunder valued at more than £1 million on the London market — equivalent to several hundred million pounds today. 

The only English casualty was Rogers himself, whose upper jaw was shot away. The far-larger, and prime target, Begonia was engaged on Christmas Day, 1709, but was too formidable for Roger’s small vessels. All told, Rogers pocketed £14,000 from his voyage, which arrived back at Erith in October 1711.

Dampier’s last days

Dampier’s share of Rogers’ loot would posthumously amount to some £1,500 (even though he himself felt he was entitled to considerably more). While Rogers went on to greater things, Dampier retired to live in St Stephens parish, London, both on his considerable fame as a three-times circumnavigator and on his sine-cure at the Customs House. In Gulliver’s Travels (which owed something to Dampier’s own experiences) Swift thought him an honest man, and a good sailor, but a little too positive in his own opinions.

He died in debt, to the tune of £677 17s. 1d.

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.

The greit navie of Norlin Airlann

It sprang from a casual tweet by Eamonn Mallie:

A row has broken out over Ag Minister Michelle Gildernew’s decision to name new Fisheries Protection vessel Banrion Uladh. DUP not happy.

Well, Eamonn, as P.G.Wodehouse might have said, were Blandings and Stormont transposed:

It is never difficult to distinguish between a DUPer with a grievance and a ray of sunshine.

And few can hold a grievance quite so unremittingly.

Yet Malcolm’s eyes are now opened.

Northern Ireland has a navy!

It may not be as large as that of Switzerland, which has no fewer than ten vessels to patrol the international borders on Lake Maggiore and Lake Lugano. Still, it says here:

We have responsibility for sea fisheries, aquaculture and fish health policy; the enforcement of fisheries legislation; the licensing of aquaculture; fishing vessel licensing; the administering of fisheries grant schemes and supporting the operation of the Foyle, Carlingford and Irish Lights Commission (FCILC).

We are based in Dundonald House, Belfast with Fisheries Offices in the three main fishing ports of Ardglass, Kilkeel and Portavogie.

We operate a fisheries protection vessel, the Ken Vickers, to assist with the conservation and protection of fish stocks.

Now the good ship Ken Vickers habitually lies at Bangor, generally bothering nobody except a passing photographer, but providing a cosy refuge for resting gulls. As the geograph.ie site caustically captions a 2004 image:

Although the fishery protection launch “Ken Vickers” is based at Bangor marina it is unusual to see it underway. This was only the second time in ten years.

Changes, though, are afloat. In February of this year the FPV Ken Vickers engaged in international manoevres with the Irish LE Orla and the Scottish FPV Norna out of Campbeltown.

Which leaves some unanswered questions:

• Are Michelle Gildernew, Richard Lochhead (who has four vessels and two aircraft at his behest), and cheesy Brendan Smith (with some real firepower) about to launch a campaign against the English and Welsh littoral, once their forces outnumber the rapidly-reducing “Royal Navy”?
• With which armada will the Welsh naval force, the FPVs Crangowen and (half of the) Aegis sail?
• Or, was this merely the rehearsal for the Anglo-French aircraft carriers project?

House with history for sale

Consider:

… It is one of the last of the wild places of England, a low, far-reaching expanse of grass and reeds and half-submerged meadowlands ending in the great saltings and mud flats and tidal pools near the restless sea.

Tidal creeks and estuaries and the crooked, meandering arms of many little rivers whose mouths lap at the edge of the ocean cut through the sodden land that seems to rise and fall and breathe with the recurrence of the daily tides. It is desolate, utterly lonely, and made lonelier by the calls and cries of the wildfowl that make their homes in the marshlands and saltings—the wildgeese and the gulls, the teal and widgeon, the redshanks and curlews that pick their way through the tidal pools. Of human habitants there are none, and none are seen, with the occasional exception of a wild-fowler or native oyster-fishermen, who still ply a trade already ancient when the Normans came to Hastings.

Omitting the first sentence, that’s the start of Paul Gallico’s delightful little tale of The Snow Goose, originally sub-titled in the Saturday Evening Post and for the 1941 British publication as A Story of Dunkirk.

It’s a story with the power of a legend: the ambiguous relationship of the isolate Philip Rhyader, the girl Fritha, and the Snow Goose, concluding with the self-sacrifice of Dunkirk, and a death of fire and water which seems as archetypical as Beowulf.

Where it goes askew is the opening sentence itself:

The great marsh lies on the Essex coast between the village of Chelmbury and the ancient Saxon oyster-fishing hamlet of Wickaeldroth.

For the purposes of the narrative that invented location (presumably somewhere between the Stour and the Crouch) is necessary to allow Rhyader to take a small boat to Dunkirk.

The actual location, which Gallico attempts to realise, should be the reclaimed Fens where Lincolnshire rubs up alongside Norfolk: the outfall of the River Nene into the Wash. It’s a couple of miles north of Sutton Bridge.

Ironically, except for the “blow-ins” with their 4×4 battlewagons, the area is even more isolated today than it was in later Victorian times. Beeching saw to the Midland and Great Northern Joint Railway in 1965, which carried “coal in, ‘tatos out”: Sutton Bridge had been the junction for the two branches to Wisbech and Spalding.

Peter Scott

The curse of celebrity must fall as hard on the son of a dead national hero as on any aging glamour-star faced with her younger self on late-night TV.

In his early twenties Scott was still trying to escape from his inheritance. He had taken to wild-fowling while at Cambridge. He was already making a mark as an wild-life artist of some quality.

Wildfowlers use a punt. The method is to lie flat in your punt, which is equipped with a terrifying weapon, a punt-gun which can have a gauge of as much as an inch-and-a-half. The punt is gently directed towards a group of wild-fowl. Once close enough, the gun, loaded with what amounts to shrapnel, is discharged. As many ducks or geese as possible are slaughtered and harvested. This is termed a “sport”.

From the Sutton Bridge website:

Peter Scott’s first encounter with the East Bank Lighthouse was in December 1929. He had commissioned a new punt-boat from a punt builder in Cambridge and with two friends, taking it turns, they brought the boat, named Kazarka, Russian for the Red-breasted goose, to an anchorage on Terrington Marsh (between Sutton Bridge and Kings Lynn). Peter Scott, at this time, was a keen wildfowler and after bagging a Pinkfoot each and three Mallards and two curlews, the two friends set out for the punt. Their intention was to take Kazarka round into the River Nene, four miles direct from where they were by road, but three times further by water at low tide. They intended to leave the punt there over Christmas. They also hoped to stalk more wildfowl.

Finding the tide receding at a rapid rate, they only just had enough time to launch the boat on a narrow trickle of water into a narrow, winding creek. The light was beginning to fade and a strong SSE wind was blowing very hard and it was beginning to drizzle. They were very hungry having had nothing to eat since early morning and Peter Scott later described it as madness that they had even decided to attempt to get into the Nene Channel, which they did not know, and in the dark. They hoped the neap tide would enable them to ‘cuff a good many corners’. The alternative was to turn back and sit and wait in the dark and cold before the tide would flood them back onto the marsh.

As they approached the sea they could it was a big tide and after only just having enough time to get their gun from the front of the punt and turning up the ‘hinged coamings’, the huge waves lifted the boat up and water poured off the decks.

Although they could see a marked wreck on their port side (marked on the chart), they couldn’t see the channel. In fact they were actually sailing away from their destination. However, as the last light faded, they came aground on a lee shore and managed to get the sail down and the oars out. Rowing was no good and the tide was still falling, so they poled onto the sandbar, where they managed to reset the sail. During this time, they had drifted and found themselves literally and figuratively in deep water ten feet and with big waves. Peter Scott wrote later that this was his ‘nastiest moment’. They knew that they had to sail on. The chart they used seemed to bear little relation to where they thought they were and what they could see. By this time they were having to bale out the water that was continually being thrown into the boat.

After what seemed like a long time, and with the boat moving reasonably steadily with less water being taken on board, they decided the time had come to swim. Then, at that moment, they saw land ahead and Peter Scott was able to touch bottom with a ten-foot pole. After going ashore and stowing the mast and sail, they decided to go on rather than leave the boat and walk across the mud. Rowing was useless and so was poling, so they walked and pushed the punt but this proved useless because the punt was still taking water on board. In the end Peter sat in the stern baling out water as fast as it came in, while his friend towed using one of the breeching ropes. They ended up in a dead end with shallow water all around. By this time they could see the glow of light from Kings Lynn, Sutton Bridge and Long Sutton, and the points of lights of cars travelling on the main road about four miles away.

Laying down in the punt to get out of the wind and finding a stale ham sandwich, Peter and his companion drifted off to sleep. They awoke to find the tide beginning to flow, which enabled them to get back into the channel. The tide had subsided and after passing a series of beacons they knew they must be in the right channel. As it straightened they saw the ‘old lighthouses’ and heard geese not far off. They secured the boat and managed to climb up the mud slope and walked along the bank to the lighthouse relieved to be on dry land again. One of the cottagers gave them milk and they set off again to walk the three miles to Sutton Bridge, where they hired a car to take them ten miles to Lynn.

There were many visits to the Terrington and Holbeach Marshes and Peter Scott had been trying for some time to lease the disused lighthouse on the east bank of the Nene. In 1933 he applied for, and was granted, a lease for a rent of £5 per year. The lighthouse was still in use as a ‘hailing post’ for HM Customs and Exercise. There were two customs officers stationed at Sutton Bridge and one of them would arrive half an hour before high water and using a megaphone would hail any ship entering or leaving the river. Half an hour after high water, he would return to Sutton Bridge.

So Scott came to occupy the East Bank “lighthouse”, with Charlie, who grubbed an existence collecting mussels and samphire (not, as the Daily Mail spectacularly misrepresented, “camphor”) living in the basement, and a couple of coastguards daily in his kitchen.

Out of that came Scott’s first (and hugely-popular) book, Morning Flight, followed by Wild Chorus, with his own illustrations.

At some stage, Scott told his mate Gallico of the snow-goose that wintered at the East Bank lighthouse. Then, at the outbreak of War, Scott was off to serve in the RNVR, first in destroyers, then commanding the flotilla of steam gun-boats patrolling the south-east coast.

Scott, however, did illustrations for what Malcolm still regards as the “standard” edition, in which the girl Fritha is derived from Scott’s first wife, Elizabeth Jane Howard.

Perverts of a certain age would rightly recall Jenny Agutter doing the part, opposite Richard Harris, directed by Patrick Garland:

A (slight) family connection

Malcolm’s dear, dead Dad served his time as a locomotive fitter in LMS Sheffield Brightside. As was the norm of those hard early-1930s, once an apprentice completed his “time”, he was “out on the stones”. So, by then a cricketing constable in the Met Police, Dad was deemed ripe to be (hostilities only) an engineroom artificer (and later a petty officer) running three high-octane Packard engines on MTBs.

Thus he found himself at Newhaven, where Scott’s flotilla also was based.

What Dad never forgot were the painted “naked ladies” with which Scott redecorated his cabin.

Resurrection

Neglected and deserted, the East Bank “lighthouse”, passed by due lot into the hands of Anglian Water, fell into dereliction. It was then bought by an acquaintance of Scott’s, Commander David Joel (himself an author and artist), who waged a constant battle with the elements and the exposed position reclaiming and restoring the building:

I wanted to do it up in Scott’s honour,’ he says. ‘But it was totally derelict.’

Over the years, Cmdr Joel says he has spent £250,000. Just bringing electricity to the lighthouse in the mid-Eighties cost £24,000.

Last winter was especially punishing: sea spray penetrated the walls, causing lumps of render to fall off, costing thousands to repair.

It was deemed unnecessary to illuminate the entrance to the Nene years ago, but Cmdr Joel voluntarily keeps the lamp burning at night.

A caveat

Strictly, the two structures each side of the Nene channel were not “lighthouses”. The “lantern”, 35 feet up, has two windows facing north and south. They were built as sea-marks, and supposedly to a design by John Rennie:

Rennie was primarily a hydraulics engineer, and much of his career was spent in adding to or altering commercial harbours and docks … He completed the drainage works in the Lincolnshire fens commenced by his father and, in conjunction with Telford, constructed the Nene outfall near Wisbech (1826–31). He also restored the harbour of Boston (Lincolnshire) in 1827–8 and made various improvements on the Welland.

To Market!

Recently the East Bank Lighthouse has come onto the market, and because of its distinguished connection has made it to the national property pages: the Mail, the Telegraph and the Independent have all featured it.

Savills in Norwich are pushing it for all they are worth: currently that’s £385,000, down from the original asking price of £435,000. Malcolm has a yen, but not the loose cash … however, East Anglian property prices are heading in just the one direction.

Two matching delights

Malcolm’s weekend (and continuing) read is Ian W. Toll’s Six Frigates: he has just reached the hotting up of the War of 1812-15, which provides the conclusion of the book, and which (apart from episodes at sea) was largely an American debâcle.

It should not surprise that Malcolm should turn to this, after a reading career which had CS Forester at its beginning, and Patrick O’Brian later on, and a bent towards history throughout. Toll’s book, leaving aside the usual encomiums on the blurb, should share shelf space with the best.

The story of How Piracy, War and British Supremacy at Sea gave Birth to the Wold’s Most Powerful Navy (Toll’s overlong, but helpful sub-title) would be interesting in itself, but he is equally strong on the politicking and machinations that went with it. The two factions in early American politics, the Federalists and the Republicans, took opposing views on the development of an American navy. Here is Toll on the origins of this dichotomy:

Congress was not yet [in 1794] divided along formal party lines. The very concept of a political party had not yet become respectable. But the ideological schism that lay beneath the party system had already opened, and every member knew it. Individual senators and congressmen were lining up behind one or the other of the two dominating personalities in Washington’s cabinet, Secretary of State Jefferson and Treasury Secretary Hamilton, who cordially hated each other and took the opposite sides of every important issue that came before the president. The followers of Hamilton called themselves “Federalists”, a term that had its origins in the constitutional debates. The followers of Jefferson were beginning to get comfortable with the term “Republicans” and in time they would embrace it as a party label.

… Madison and the Republicans argued that a navy was hopelessly unaffordable to a nation still groaning under the weight of its Revolutionary War debts. Once started, they warned, a navy would become a self-feeding organism, demanding greater and greater sums as it grew.

If only every historical event were described so cogently, thinks Malcolm, as he admires a piece of simple explication.

Behind that debate about the need for a navy lay another issue: what was the nascent United States to become? Was it a continental concept, entire of itself, or a trading nation, taking part in the doings of the western world? Two centuries on that, seems a no-brainer, but Malcolm sees in this the seeds of the continuing wrestling of the American conscience: intervention or isolation?

So, as Toll shows, the decision was closely fought:

The Republicans had objected to the cost of building a navy, but what did they have to say about the cost of not building one? Protecting the sea-lanes, argued the Federalists, was in the entire nation’s interest… The Federalists’ second thrust was a rousing appeal to national honor.

And so, on 10th March 1794:

an Act to Provide a Naval Armament passed by a margin of 50-39… The act authorized the War Office either to buy or build six frigates. Four would be rated for 44 guns and two for 36 guns.

Toll gives full credit to the shipbuilder from Philadelphia, Joshua Humphreys, for what came out of this decision:

The frigate Humphreys envisioned would be powerful enough to overwhelm a lone enemy cruiser because of her unusually heavy battery of 24-pounder long guns, weapons that had been known to drive a ball through two feet of solid oak planking at a range of 1,000 yards. When pitted against a battleship, the American frigate would enjoy one of the most important advantages that any warship can ever have: the option to either fight or flee, to outrun or outgun.

The original intention of building the frigates was to counter the depredations of North African pirates on American shipping through the Mediterranean:

but Humphreys was thinking of the potential for a confrontation with one of the warring powers of Europe.

Prescient, indeed.

Malcolm would not wish to spoil Toll’s book for a reader any further than this. It is a fine achievement, marrying naval tactics with political shenanigans, full of detail, and not a little sensation (in which the figure of Stephen Decatur largely figures). Believe Malcolm in this: this book comes highly recommended, not just for historians either.

And in one way, this is living history. One can still walk the decks of the USS Constitution, the oldest warship anywhere still in commission, moored — afloat, unlike Nelson’s Victory — at Charlestown, just opposite Boston’s North End where she was launched in 1797. And one can note, in passing, the monogram of George III on one of the 24-pounder guns (of which the Queen of England commented, in 1976, “We really must talk to the Secretary of State about these foreign arms sales”).

Toll’s book feeds into another that Malcolm has mentioned previously: Frederick C. Leiner’s The End of Barbary Terror, subtitled, again helpfully, America’s 1815 War against the Pirates of North Africa. This, as one American Conservative ultra has unkindly remarked, describes “America’s last successful mid-East war”, and, of course, features Decatur as a central figure.

And the cherry on the top…

Malcolm has a tendency to read to music. His penchant is to set iTunes to shuffle mood, turning pages with one hand and using the other to advance the remote past those acres of grot. And, right in the middle of Toll’s description of a sea-battle, up came the voice of Stan Rogers. There are few better songs in the modern folk repertoire better than Barrett’s Privateers.

Another example of Malcolm’s delight in synchronicity.