Was this the real Stephen Maturin?

Portrait of A.B.Granville, by Alexander Craig (c.1840), from Wellcome Library

Some years ago, I belonged to a History of Medicine online discussion group.  Every few months, a query would arrive from a newbie asking what was the disease once known as the marthambles – and the questioner would immediately be outed as a Patrick O’Brien tragic, for it is one of many ailments successfully treated by Stephen Maturin in O’Brian’s highly popular Aubrey/Maturin novels, set in the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic War.  The problem is, marthambles doesn’t exist.  Sometimes a historical novelist is allowed – whisper it quietly – to make things up!

I first encountered Patrick O’Brian’s novels in the late 1970s.  I was working in the Public Record Office in London (now the National Archives) on naval records for my PhD, and the archivist who helped me mentioned O’Brian, who was working on the same records for his latest novel.

Thanks to my conversation with the PRO archivist, I know how well researched those books are.  Real historical characters appear throughout. Robert Farquhar, for instance, who becomes Governor of Mauritius in The Mauritius Command (1977), is certainly a real person: he was the consul at Ambon when John Macarthur visited there in 1802, and I’ve been writing the biography of his cousin, Walter Stevenson Davidson, for too many years.

I’m not a great reader of historical fiction and I haven’t read the whole O’Brian series, but some of my nearest and dearest are fans, and you can pick up a lot through marital osmosis.  So I know the rough outline of the characters and stories.

Stephen Maturin is a half Catalan revolutionary on the run from the authorities when he encounters Captain Jack Aubrey at the British naval base at Port Mahon, on Minorca.  A skilled doctor, he becomes a ship’s surgeon in the Royal Navy.  He performs many surgical miracles, but he is also a scientist, curious about the new discoveries in botany and physics, a linguist and a spy.

Stephen Maturin is no doubt a composite of many medical men who served in the Royal Navy, both during and after the Napoleonic Wars.  Ships surgeons generally had a reputation for drunken incompetence, but many were caring, educated men – though not many fitted as many adventures into their careers as Maturin.

It’s tempting to look for possible models, so may I offer for consideration Exhibit A:

Augustus Bozzi was born in Milan in 1783.  His father’s family was connected to the Bonapartes of Corsica, while his maternal grandmother was English.  He studied medicine at the University of Pavia, and was briefly imprisoned for his republicanism.  After he graduated, he travelled in a theatre troupe, singing and playing the guitar.  In Corfu he met William R. Hamilton, an attaché to Lord Elgin, the British ambassador in Constantinople, and travelled with him in Greece, where together they oversaw the removal of the Elgin marbles from Athens.

Bozzi joined the medical service of the Turkish navy, before transferring to the Royal Navy.  He worked on various ships in the Mediterranean, the West Indies and South America, where he met Simon Bolivar.  In 1811 he carried documents from Bolivar to Sir Robert Peel in London.  During this time he suffered from – and treated himself for – both malaria and yellow fever.  He married an Englishwoman, and adopted his English grandmother’s name, Granville.  Brought up Catholic, he converted to Anglicanism.

Bozzi Granville finally retired from the navy in 1813.  His old friend William Hamilton’s brother was the brother-in-law of Robert Farquhar, the Governor of Mauritius, and Robert’s father, Sir Walter Farquhar, was the Prince Regent’s physician.  With various letters of introduction, these connections gave him entrée into the medical establishment.  On Sir Walter’s advice, he studied at La Maternité in Paris, before setting himself up as a specialist physician in women’s diseases in London.

Irtyersenu, from the press release of the Royal Society, 1 October 2009

Granville was a man of science.  He was friendly with the chemist John Dalton, and for many years was the secretary to the Royal Institution.  In 1825 he conducted the first autopsy on an Egyptian mummy, Irtyersenu, a woman of about 50.  Like the good gynaecologist he was, he identified her cause of death as an ovarian tumour, though recently Irtyersenu has been re-examined, and she is now thought to have died of tuberculosis.

We will never know how Stephen Maturin’s life might have ended – but Augustus Bozzi Granville lived a long and fruitful life.  He died in 1868, leaving a 2 volume autobiography which is the basis for almost everything we know about his life before he settled in England.  It is a thoroughly entertaining book – and very likely, I suspect, a work of historical fiction as vividly creative as anything that Patrick O’Brian ever wrote.

Further reading:
A. B. Granville, Autobiography of A. B. Granville, ed. P. B. Granville, 2 vols. (1874)

W.B.Howell, ‘Augustus Bozzi Granville – Journeyman Physician’, in Canadian Medical Association Journal, December 19 1931, pp. 719-25.

Helen D. Donoghue, Oona Y.-C. Lee, David E. Minnikin, Gurdyal S. Besra, John H. Taylor, and Mark Spigelman, ‘Tuberculosis in Dr Granville’s mummy: a molecular re-examination of the earliest known Egyptian mummy to be scientifically examined and given a medical diagnosis’, in Proceedings of the Royal Society of Biological Sciences, January 7 2010; 277(1678): 51–56.

Ornella Moscucci, ‘Granville, Augustus Bozzi (1783–1872)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com.ezproxy.library.uq.edu.au/view/article/11299, accessed 25 Nov 2011]

The Patrick O’Brian Mapping Project

The President and the Barmaid

And I spent my soul in kisses, crushed upon your scarlet mouth,

Oh! My red-lipped, sun-browned sweetheart, dark-eyed daughter of the south.

With all the kissing and cuddling that’s been going on lately between Barack Obama and Julia Gillard, maybe it’s time to quote the words of another American President with a thing for Australian women.

I have heard several times in the last week that until LBJ came to Harold Holt’s funeral in 1967, no American President had visited Australia.  The truth is, Australia is a long way from the rest of the world.  Henry Kissinger is supposed to have said (though I can’t find hard evidence) that he had never visited Australia, because he had never been on the way to Antarctica.  So it is not surprising that world leaders didn’t visit Australia before the era of fast air travel.  Nowadays, of course, they all find an excuse to come, especially during the northern winter.

But in fact, one American President spent a considerable time in Australia and left his mark on it.

Hoover stamp, 1965, from Wikimedia

Herbert Hoover arrived in Kalgoorlie as a young geologist straight out of Stanford University, in 1897.  Hoover worked for a British mining company, Bewick, Moreing & Co, who sent him to the Western Australian goldfields as a manager.  Kalgoorlie was a rough mining town – some would say it still is.  Because of its isolation, miners needed long pockets, so most mining was in the hands of companies with capital, rather than individuals.

One of Hoover’s jobs was to scout out new prospects for his employers.  One likely investment was a small gold mine in the desert begun by 3 Welshmen.  They had acquired a mining licence for the site, but didn’t have enough capital to develop the mine.  He persuaded Bewick, Moreing & Co to buy the mine and put him in charge.  Sons of Gwalia (Latin for Wales) became one of Australia’s most lucrative gold mines.

Sons of Gwalia Mine, Mount Leonora, c. 1921

The 1890s was a depressed decade, and Hoover ran a tough management regime.  He cut wages and increased hours.  He also raised ethnic tensions in the workforce by employing immigrant Italians – ‘the rivalry between them and the [other] workers is no small benefit’, he wrote, because it made united action more difficult.  This was a very American tactic, not often used in Australia.

During his years in Kalgoorlie, Hoover allegedly wrote a poem to a Kalgoorlie barmaid.  The Australian Dictionary of Biography doubts the story, and so does William J. Coughlin (2000).  Such a shame – the poem is quite gloriously awful, but apparently can’t be traced any earlier than 1933.

Hoover worked in Western Australia for 2 years, then returned to America to marry Lou Henry, who also graduated in geology from Stanford, in 1899.  They left the next day for China, where Hoover continued to work for Bewick, Moreing & Co, travelling widely, but based in Tianjin.  He visited the company’s Australian mines again in 1905.

Barack Obama’s visit to Australia, and his speech to the Australian Parliament, were all about America’s attitude to China today.  [see Rory Medcalf, ‘Buildup Down Under’, in Foreign Policy, 17 November 2011]

Obama is one of the first American Presidents with an Asia-Pacific background: he was born in Hawaii and spent part of his childhood in Indonesia.  But in fact he follows in the footsteps of Herbert Hoover, who went to university in San Francisco, and spent years working in Australia and China.  Hoover and his wife learned Mandarin while living in China, and apparently used it as their private language in the White House, to keep their conversations secret from the servants.

Unfortunately, Hoover’s name is now ineradicably associated with the onset of the 1929 depression.  Let’s hope, for all our sakes, that’s not the case for Barack Obama.  Obama apparently speaks Indonesian, too.  I’m not sure, though, that our very own Daughter of Gwalia speaks Welsh – let alone Mandarin.

Note: I’ve written before about Australia’s relations with China and America – here.

William J. Coughlin, ‘Into the Outback: How the young Herbert Hoover made his name – and fortune – in Australia’, Stanford Magazine, 2000.

Sea Dragons

I’ve only seen one once.  I was staying with friends on Vancouver Island.  They took me to a marina in Victoria, where you buy fish scraps to feed to the seals hanging round the jetties.  Then we saw him, hiding under the boardwalk, darting out to snatch bits of fish and retreating to his shelter.  A sea otter, faster than the seals, but much the same sleek, streamlined body shape, with a thick, glossy fur coat which very nearly led to their extinction.

Sea otter off the Alaskan coast, photo by Jenni Metcalfe

Nobody really knows how many sea otters there originally were, but they stretched from Japan, via the Kamchatka Peninsula and the Aleutian Islands across to Alaska, British Columbia and down the Californian coastline.  By 1911, when Japan, Russia, Britain and the United States, signed a treaty giving them protection, there were only about 1000 to 2000 left.

Sea Otter distribution, map by Christophe Cagé, 2006 (Wikimedia Commons)

In the days of Polartec® and Thermolactyl®, we are barely aware of just how wonderful it must have been to wear fur for its most basic characteristic, warmth.  People who live in cold climates rely on warm clothing, which can take many forms.  Woollen cloth was important, and unwashed wool, with the lanolin still in it, could be knitted into waterproof sweaters or socks.  Multiple layers of cloth were quilted with feathers or down.

But nothing beats fur for its combination of warmth and lightness – and it has always been expensive.  The skins and furs of domestic or semi-domestic animals – sheep, rabbit, squirrel, cat (sorry, moggy owners) – were a by-product of farming, and satisfied the lowered end of the market, but the warmest and costliest furs come from wild animals, especially those from Arctic regions who develop of thick winter coat.

These animals were trapped, not farmed.  As the numbers of furry animals dropped across Eurasia, fur trappers turned to other polar regions, North America from the 17^th century, and various islands and coastlines in the far south where seals came ashore to breed.  In many places, the harvesting of these animals involved cooperation between indigenous peoples and the European traders.

For centuries the global fur trade was huge.  But why should the sea otter, Enhydra lutris, the largest member of the weasel family, but still a relatively small mammal, compared with – say – a fox or a seal, have been hunted so rapaciously?

The problem is that clothes are not just clothes.  They are markers of status as well, and fur, more than most things, has long been coveted not just for its warmth, but because of its meaning.  Furs are highly desirable, so people will do a lot to acquire them: the saying used to be, ‘girls get minks the same way minks get minks’.  And not all furs are equal – mink has a higher status than rabbit, even if you call it lapin, as the furriers do.  Just as with food, where an Anglo-Saxon animal becomes a French meat – pig/pork, ox/beef, calf/veal – the same thing happens with furs.  A damsel dressed in miniver sounds much more posh than a woman wearing stoat.

Sea otter furs had a particular value to the Chinese.  During the 18^th century, European and American traders visited Canton to buy tea.  Unfortunately they had few commodities that the Chinese were interested in taking in exchange, so usually they had to buy their tea with silver.  They were always on the lookout for new goods that might appeal.  Amongst the most successful were various exotic maritime items including shark fin, bêche-de-mer and tortoise shell.

First the Russians, then the British, Americans and French, discovered during the 18^th century that the Chinese liked sea otter skins – and their fate was sealed.  But why?

The Manchu dynasty came from Manchuria, and they brought with them a fashion for wearing furs, which spread even to warmer, southerly areas such as Canton [now Guangzhou].  The Chinese Repository (1835) reported that the Chinese wore fur-lined garments made from ‘cat, fox, deer, otter, seal, rabbit, hare, beaver, leopard, and others’, some so precious that they were handed down from father to son.

Many societies strictly control what each class in society can wear through sumptuary laws.  In ancient Rome, for instance, only citizens could wear a toga, and there were further rules about whether, and to what degree, it was dyed purple.  In Britain only royalty and members of the House of Lords are supposed to wear ermine (the winter coat of stoats).

In China sumptuary laws controlled the wearing of particular furs.  There were strict rules about who could wear what.  The hoi polloi could only wear sheep and goats skin, while other ranks could wear more exotic furs.

At the time that the Manchus first brought in these laws, nobody had heard of the sea otter.  When Russians first brought sea otter pelts to trade in the early 18^th century, the Chinese had no local name for them, and called them ‘sea dragons’.  Their uncategorised status made them uniquely profitable, because there was no restriction on who could wear their fur.  For the nouveaux riches, trying to bend the rules in a hierarchical society, sea otter pelts gave them the opportunity to dress more sumptuously than the sumptuary laws allowed – and they were willing to pay, making these pelts particularly profitable for the fur traders.

Furs traded into Canton, from Chinese Repository, 1835

And so the sea otters were hunted almost to extinction. Enhydra lutris is what is called a keystone species, vital to the wider ecology.  They eat sea urchins, mussels and starfish, which feed on the kelp beds of the North Pacific, and without them, the kelp forests were nearly wiped out too.  From 1911, when hunting stopped, until the present day, their numbers have been recovering, but they are still listed as endangered.

They are also amongst the cutest animals I have ever seen.  But then, Australians used to hunt koalas, too.

Mother Sea Otter with pup at Morro Rock, Feb. 12, 2007 - photo by Mike Baird, bairdphotos.com

Medieval Fur and Leather Names

Violators, Victims and Vigilantes

The Western Australian government is about to introduce controversial legislation to let parents know about convicted child sex offenders who may live nearby.  Queensland is struggling to a way to deal with offenders who have served their time, but can’t be reintegrated into the community.  We are all troubled, one way or another, by people who are sexually aroused by children.  And the state struggles to find ways to deal with such people, to appease community outrage while treating them appropriately within the law.

The problem isn’t new, but definitions of childhood have changed greatly since the days when midshipmen went into battle at 10 and girls routinely married as soon as they reached puberty. The age of consent in England was 12 until 1885, when it was raised to 16 because of public concern about young girls being sold into brothels.  [See W.T. Stead, ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’ from The Pall Mall Gazette]

David Cox, Girl in a Pinafore, c. 1800. In Yale Center for British Art, Yale Digital Commons

The first recorded case in Australia of the sexual assault of the child came to court in Sydney in September 1789, when Henry Wright, a private in the Marines in his early 30s, was tried for the rape of Elizabeth Chapman, aged 8.  The details of the case are here [R. v. Wright, 1789], a sad story told through the evidence of a fairly shambolic court case.  Elizabeth Chapman was visiting one of the sergeants’ wives ‘to drink tea’.  Henry Wright led her away from the settlement to Cockle Bay, where he molested her, ‘hurt her very much’, and threatened to smash her legs if she resisted.  Another little girl, Mary Ann Wright, presumably Henry’s daughter, was present at the time.  We can only assume that for her such events were not unusual.

Like so many children, Elizabeth said nothing afterwards, and it was only when her mother found her daughter’s bloodstained bedding and questioned her, that the story came out.  Elizabeth said that she was frightened that her mother would beat her because she had been warned not to have anything to do with Wright.

Jane Chapman was wary because she ‘had heard he had the character of doing such things with children’.  A court would never allow such prejudicial evidence these days – though as it happens, Jane Chapman was right to be concerned.  Henry Wright was a repeat offender.

The man in charge of the court was David Collins, deputy judge advocate and lieutenant governor of the colony of New South Wales.  He was a thoughtful, educated man, but he had no legal training.  He was careful in some matters of law.  For instance he asked Elizabeth whether she understood the meaning of an oath, before he accepted her evidence – a problem for the prosecution even today, because a child’s evidence is often hard to evaluate and sometimes discounted.

Henry Wright was found guilty.  Collins sentenced him to death, but then added a recommendation for mercy.  In his Account of the English Colony of New South Wales (1798) he explained that:

This was an offence that did not seem to require an immediate example; the chastity of the female part of the settlement had never been so rigid, as to drive men to so desperate an act; and it was believed that beside the wretch in question there was not in the colony a man of any description who would have attempted it.

The first part of this quote has become notorious amongst social historians of early New South Wales.  It has even become a book title: Their chastity was not too rigid: leisure times in early Australia (Cunes, 1979).  But it is the second part of his statement that I find interesting.

Collins was preoccupied with deterrence.  The following November a woman was hanged for breaking into a hut to steal clothes, and this sentence was carried out. In the desperate settlement, stealing food or clothing was evidently seen as more wicked than the rape of a child – or perhaps thieves were more likely to be deterred from their wicked ways by the threat of harsh punishment.

Henry Wright didn’t hang.  Instead, Governor Phillip did what state and religious authorities have done so often in similar situations, he offloaded the problem on to somewhere else.  Wright was sent to Norfolk Island, with his unfortunate wife and children, to spend the rest of his life there.

There, in July 1791, he assaulted 10-year-old Elizabeth Gregory.  If David Collins’ court in Sydney was amateurish, Major Robert Ross on Norfolk Island ran a truly weird system.  The population was tiny, and Ross tried to involve the whole community in the legal process in very unorthodox ways.  (Alan Atkinson discusses this very interestingly in The Europeans in Australia (1997).)

Henry Wright was found guilty of attempted rape, and was sentenced to ‘run the gauntlet’.  The idea probably came from the Navy, where this was a punishment for theft.  The victim had to run between 2 rows of people who could hit him with – well, the rules vary, but probably with sticks or cudgels, not edged weapons.  Ross ordered every adult man and woman on the island, convict or free, to take part in this act of communal punishment.  According to Lieutenant Ralph Clark in his diary, on ‘Munday 18^th’,

Punished Heny. Wright  by making him Run the Gantlet throu all the men and women in her[e] for attempting to deflour Elizt. Gregory a Girl of a bout ten Years of Age … he is to undergoe the Same punishment at Port Jackson when his Back is well

Further punishment took place on 2 August, and Henry Wright survived.  Despite everything, he received a conditional pardon on 13 September 1796.

In 1807, Governor Bligh closed down Norfolk Island, and moved everyone to New Norfolk, near Hobart, and he disappears from the record, but a Mary Ann Wright is buried in St David’s Cemetery, in Hobart.  She died aged 63, on 13 April 1846.  If this is the right Mary Ann, this would make her 6 at the time of Elizabeth Chapman’s rape.

We worry these days about lynch mobs, and vigilantes getting hold of the names of pedophiles.  Imagine then, what it was like for Wright to run the gauntlet on Norfolk Island, in a tiny community with no escape.  Imagine what it was like for his wife, who petitioned to be allowed to return to Sydney with her children.  Imagine too what this public act of collective violence and vilification did to the community as a whole.

How should such sex offenders be treated?  There seems no easy answer.  David Collins’ leniency put Elizabeth Gregory at risk.  Robert Ross’s solution was to hand over punishment to the community – or rather, to the mob.  This savagery probably appeals to today’s shock jocks – but do we really want to encourage such unrestrained violence, or allow the state to abdicate its authority in this way?

Family Papers

The artist Norman Lindsay (1879-1969) had 3 sons, Jack, (1900-1990), Raymond (1903-1960) and Philip (1906-1958).  They were brought up in Brisbane by their mother, and went to the Brisbane Grammar School.  During 1920 and 1921, 14-year-old Philip produced a series of handmade, handwritten, illustrated magazines, which he called Artistic Temperament.

I’m not usually involved in what you might call the ‘front end’ of the historical process, the acquisition of the original manuscripts and documents on which our work as historians depends.  But last week I handed over a collection of Philip Lindsay’s manuscripts, the 5 volumes of Artistic Temperament, plus two other items, a school exercise book with his early stories and poems, and a 20 page hand bound play script, ‘Pierette: A Tragedy in 3 Acts’, illustrated by his brother Raymond.

These documents came into my family through my great aunt Emmie, and make me sad to think that I never really knew her.  She was my grandfather’s older sister, a tall, thin woman.  Her nose was partly burned away by radium as a result of the reckless treatment of doctors who used it to treat anything and everything during the 1920s.

As a child, I found her rather scary, but when she died, she left me her jewellery collection, a mixture of treasures and tourist souvenirs that don’t make much sense without the stories that should go with them.  Amongst the collection is a gold brooch, or badge, engraved AJA.  She received this to mark 50 years membership of the Australian Journalists Association.  She was clearly quite a woman.

Emma Powell was the first woman journalist in Brisbane.  She began work for the Brisbane Telegraph in 1907, where she met Firmin McKinnon, later editor of the Brisbane Courier.  They married in 1912 and became leading lights in the Brisbane literary world.  Somewhere in this cultural scene, Emmie must have befriended Philip Lindsay, who entrusted her with this collection of his work.  She had no children of her own, and Philip was a troubled boy.  His parents had long lived apart and in January 1920, Norman divorced his reluctant wife to marry his long time mistress, and artist’s model, Rose Soady.

Firmin McKinnon died in 1954 and Emmie in 1965.  At some point, she gave Philip Lindsay’s papers to my uncle Tony Powell.  He taught German at the University of Queensland, and when he and my aunt died, my cousins gave some of his books to the Languages School.  An eagle-eyed staff member there found these papers in a shoebox.

Tony offered the papers to various libraries and galleries during the 1990s, but no one was interested in ‘juvenilia’.  They are now.  The State Library of Queensland already has a Lindsay collection, so they will fit in well.

It is striking how much these youthful efforts reflect Philip’s later career as an historical novelist.  His first novel was about the pirate Henry Morgan, and the pirates are already here, as are Tudor kings and queens, and ideas of medieval chivalry and honour.  Norman’s influence is there in his interest in Norse mythology and Nietzsche, as well as in his misogyny (forgivable in a 14-year old boy, less so in the father).

I’m glad these stories and poems have been rediscovered.  I hope they reach a wider audience through the State Library of Queensland.  As always, the library has too much to do, and too little to do it with, but they hope to have the collection catalogued and available later next year.