Life And Adventures of John Nicol, Mariner , livre ebook

Contents

Introduction by Tim Flannery

A Most Interesting Character by John Howell

The Life and Adventures of John Nicol, Mariner

Service of John Nicol

Index






Map of the world as Nicol would have



known it, showing some of his journeys .



JOHN NICOL
MARINER, AGE 67
Introduction
by Tim Flannery
J OHN N ICOL TWICE circled the globe, in the process visiting all six habitable continents. He fought American revolutionaries and Napoleon’s navy, was in Hawaii when Cook’s murderers were still young, in Port Jackson when Sydney consisted of about a thousand souls, and in the West Indies when African slaves were beginning to experiment with the music which would become blues and jazz. In short, as he roamed the world in the late eighteenth century, he saw the modern age in its infancy.
The world John Nicol records is not one of admirals, governors and high officials, for he was by his own admission a simple ‘bungs’ an ‘unlettered’ cooper. He describes a world seen from below decks; a world peopled by slaves, convicts and Chinese barbers, many of whom Nicol counted among his friends. As such, his story is an extreme rarity. People like Nicol usually lacked the means to have their adventures recorded, and publishers were largely uninterested in such autobiographies. Indeed, a significant fraction of Nicol’s compatriots would not even have lived to tell their stories. When he sailed, mortality rates of 15 per cent per annum were not looked upon as especially bad, yet Nicol survived twenty-five years at sea. 1
The story of how this book came into existence is almost as remarkable as the one Nicol himself tells. Picture yourself in a street in Edinburgh with the freezing winter of 1822 just beginning to relax its grip. An old derelict totters feebly along, picking tiny fragments of coal from between the icy cobbles. These he places in the pocket of an old apron tied round his waist. They will be used to light a small fire, over which he will crouch, trying to fight off the chill. As he searches for his coals, the old man is approached by a ‘very strange person’ and so begins the encounter which, after a long and happenstance history, places this book in your hands today. 2
The ‘very strange person’ was John Howell, who was to record and edit Nicol’s work. Even in nineteenth-century Scotland Howell was an anomaly. He described himself as a ‘polyartist’. Although a bookbinder by trade, he was an inveterate inventor and tinkerer by nature. The most enduring of his contrivances is the ‘plough’, a device used by bookbinders well into the present century. Alexander Laing, who gave some biographical notes on Howell, remarked of this invention that ‘many a careless binder has ruined good books by too exuberant cropping [with it].’ 3
Howell’s other inventions included ‘a reliable salve for the ringworm’ and a method for the fabrication of false teeth. Transport also intrigued him. He invented a flying machine (the testing of which, from the roof of an old tannery, cost him a broken leg), and a sort of prototype submarine. This latter nearly led to fratricide, for John encouraged an unwilling brother to enter the ‘large model of a fish’ for its test run on the River Leith. The brother refused, however, and John took his place. A contemporary account reports that:

Scarcely had the fish entered the water when it capsized: the keel turning upwards, and poor John was submerged. Sounds of an alarming kind were heard to issue from the belly of the fish, and no time was lost in dragging it to the bank, when the inventor was liberated from his perilous position; but it took nearly half an hour before ‘suspended animation’ was fully restored. 4
Howell’s other great interest lay in the exploits of military men and adventurers. He published five books, three of which concerned such people. The first, Journal of a Soldier of the 71st, or Glasgow Regiment was followed by The Life and Adventures of John Nicole Mariner and, finally, The Life of Alexander Alexander Written by Himself. Howell’s method seems to have consisted of befriending old soldiers and sailors, then spending months writing down or editing their life stories. One wonders whether they moved into his house for the duration. Whatever the case, Howell’s motives were noble ones, for he signed over royalties to his adoptees, and endeavoured to use their stories to obtain for them their well deserved pensions.
Howell’s 1822 edition of The Life and Adventures of John Nicol, Mariner is a modest little book, measuring just sixteen centimetres by ten. Its only illustration is a simple drawing of Nicol himself in all probability placed there to evoke the reader’s pity. It shows the weatherbeaten and wistful countenance of one who has seen much of life. The book’s rarity now suggests that the print run was small. Its only republication occurred in 1937 when Cassell issued an edition ‘embellished with numerous original designs’ by Gordon Grant, and with a foreword and afterword by Laing, who claims that Life and Adventures is the earliest reminiscence by an ordinary sailor that ‘has any claim to permanence as literature’. The book, he says, ‘acquainted me … with a distinct personality I should have felt far the poorer for not having known, and from time to time I have sought him out again, in his book, with the same pleasure I should take in looking up an old friend.’
John Nicol had ‘seen more of the world than most persons in Edinburgh, perhaps in Britain’ according to Howell, yet throughout his life he seems to have remained almost unworldly. This may stem from the fact that, like many seamen, he led a largely sheltered life. While at sea, his domestic and financial arrangements were made for him. Decisions were made by others, and there was little time for romance with all its complications. In these ways, going to sea was akin to joining a religious order.
Nicol was not a sailor of the rum, sodomy and the lash school. When he first went to sea he read his Bible daily and it troubled his conscience that he lost the habit. He was shy, did not drink heavily and was appalled by foul language. At times one wonders how this good and simple man mixed it with the recurrent brutality of life at sea.
Nicol’s naivety shows through nowhere more clearly than in his first romance. After meeting a young woman on a coach journey he feels ‘something uncommon arise in [his] breast’. After a number of efforts, he ‘summonsed the resolution to take her hand in mine; I pressed it gently, she drew faintly back’. With little more encouragement than that, Nicol decides upon marriage and, were it not for a recalcitrant prospective father-in-law, may have succeeded in his designs. He was equally ‘at sea’ with the most important female in his life, a convict girl named Sarah Whitlam who became his great love. Yet time has shown that his assessment of Sarah Whitlam was hardly an accurate one.
Given the editorial role Howell played, one wonders how much of The Life and Adventures of John Nicol, Mariner represents his input, for the beauty of the language sometimes makes the reader doubt whether it could be the work of an unlettered cooper. Laing speculates that Howell’s influence on the book’s style and content was minor. He notes that the two works published by Howell alone ( An Essay upon the War Galleys of the Ancients and The Life and Adventures of Alexander Selkirk ) ‘lack the passages of terse grandeur which lifts Nicol’s story, from time to time, to the level of great English prose’. 5 Howell was also a great respecter of facts, and is unlikely to have tampered with the subjects of Nicol’s work. Nicol himself says that he will make his story as interesting as is in his power, ‘consistent with truth’; its detail is in itself a guide to its authenticity. He remembers, for instance, how Chinese washer women kept a pig in ‘a cage-like box fixed to the stern of their sampan.’ On the Falkland Islands the geese he saw were ‘very pretty, spreckled like a partridge.’
There is something very special about Nicol’s prose, with its attention to minute detail, recalled decades after the events occurred. Perhaps this derives from Nicol’s style, which is clearly in the great oral storytelling tradition of the sea, owing more to the long tradition of the storytelling bards than to the written prose of his contemporaries. The natural rhythm and pattern of such language is a powerful aid to memory. The stories, told over and over, become ever more refined and compelling. Nicol even draws a picture of himself as raconteur, late in his life, when he takes a boat to London to attempt to gain his pension: ‘I was at sea again … I had always a crowd round me listening to my accounts of the former voyages that I had made … I was very happy.’ From such stories has come this vivid and romantic tale of travel to the hidden corners of the world.
A large part of the fascination of Nicol’s book lies in his service as steward aboard the Lady Juliana transport which, as part of the second fleet, brought over two hundred female convicts to Australia in 1790. The logbook of the Lady Juliana is long lost, so Nicol’s account is the main source of information for the voyage. 6 His time aboard the Lady Juliana (which he recollects as the Lady Julian ) was formative, for Nicol fell in love with a convict girl named Sarah Whitlam. She was his first real love, and Nicol ‘courted her for a week and upwards, and would have married her on the spot had there been a clergyman on board’. She was, he said, ‘as kind and true a creature as ever lived’. Before the voyage was out she bore him a son, John.
On the evening of 3 June 1790 the Lady Juliana entered Port Jackson after almost a year at sea. Nicol records how the landing was ‘almost to our sorrow’. He knew his time with Sarah was running out. But it was a special moment, for that evening John Nicol and Watkin Tench the great chronicler of the