Three: EDWARD JOHN TRELAWNY
About a hundred years ago, on a pleasant summer morning, two young Englishmen came down to the water front of the Italian port of Leghorn, got into a boat, and rowed off to look at the shipping in the bay. The two venturers made an odd pair, for the oarsman was a tall, powerfully built fellow with piercing blue eyes, thick black hair, and the features of an Arab, whilst the other was slender, boyish and yellow-haired, and had innocent blue eyes, and a schoolboy’s innocence of beard.
The first vessel round which they rowed, a Greek trader, displeased them, for she was dirty of deck and sail, but beyond her lay a graceful full-rigged ship flying the Stars and Stripes. At the sight of this fine vessel, the following conversationtook place. It has been set down word by word, for one does not take liberties with the phrases of the great.
“It is but a step,” said the oarsman, “from these ruins of worn-out Greece to the New World; let’s board the American clipper.”
“I had rather not have any more of my hopes and illusions mocked by sad realities,” protested his companion with a smile.
“You must allow,” returned the other, “that that graceful craft was designed by a man who had a poet’s feeling for things beautiful. Come, let us go aboard; the Americans are a free and easy people, and will not consider our visit an intrusion.”
A turn, a few strokes, and the boat approached the American ship. By the gangway, an American salt with a quid of tobacco squirrelled in his cheek, was busy at something or other, and every now and then this honest fellow walked to the rail to spit calmly overside into the historic Mediterranean. While thus pleasantly engaged, he caught sight of the small boat coming alongside, and shouted, “Boat ahoy!” A mate came to the rail.
“May we go aboard?” said the dark, Arab-looking man.
TRELAWNY AS THE OLD SEAMAN IN SIR JOHN E. MILLAIS’S PAINTING “THE NORTHWEST PASSAGE.”
TRELAWNY AS THE OLD SEAMAN IN SIR JOHN E. MILLAIS’S PAINTING “THE NORTHWEST PASSAGE.”
“Wal, I don’t see why not,” answered the American mate, cheerfully and without ceremony.
“You have a beautiful vessel,” said the first speaker, once he had gained the deck. “We have been rowing about looking at the ships, and admiring yours.”
“I do expect now we have our new copper on, she has a look of the brass sarpent,” agreed the American.
“She seems so beautiful,” said the first speaker, “that we have been wishing we might have a vessel like her.”
“Then I calculate you must go to Boston or Baltimore to git one,” replied the ship’s officer. “There’s no one this side the water can do the job. We have our freight all ready and are homeward bound; we have elegant accommodation, and you will be across before your young friend’s beard is ripe for a razor. Come down and take an observation of the state cabin.”
The hospitable seaman now led his guests to the state cabin, and would not let them go till they had drunk a toast under the Star-Spangled Banner to the memory of Washington and the prosperity of the American commonwealth. Peach brandy wasthe drink. The toast concluded, the mate rummaged for a moment in a locker, and then offered his visitors a gift right from an old time sailor’s heart.
“There, gentlemen,” said the sailor. “Guess you don’t see nuthin’ like this in these parts!”
“Plug tobacco,” said the dark man.
“Yes sirree, Mister,” replied the mate. “And real old Virginia cake. Jest you set your teeth in that, Mister,” he continued offering the plug to the fair-haired guest, “and tell me if you’ve tasted anything so good since the big wind.”
The fair-haired visitor, however, refused both the brandy and “the chaw,” but managed to quaff a glass of weak grog to the memory of the first of presidents. The blue eyes gathered a strange fire.
“Washington,” said this other visitor, “as a warrior and a statesman he was righteous in all he did, and unlike all who have lived before or since, he never used his power but for the benefit of his fellow creatures.
He foughtFor truth and freedom, foremost of the brave,Him glory’s idle glances dazzled not;’Twas his ambition generous and great.A life to life’s great end to consecrate.”
He foughtFor truth and freedom, foremost of the brave,Him glory’s idle glances dazzled not;’Twas his ambition generous and great.A life to life’s great end to consecrate.”
He foughtFor truth and freedom, foremost of the brave,Him glory’s idle glances dazzled not;’Twas his ambition generous and great.A life to life’s great end to consecrate.”
He fought
For truth and freedom, foremost of the brave,
Him glory’s idle glances dazzled not;
’Twas his ambition generous and great.
A life to life’s great end to consecrate.”
“Stranger,” said the American, studying the speaker, his shrewd eye bright with honest pleasure, “truer words were never spoken. There is dry rot in all the timbers of the old world, and none of you will do any good till you are docked, refitted and annexed to the new. You must log that song you sang; there ain’t many Britishers will say as much of the man that whipped them, so just set down those lines in the log or it won’t go for nothing.”
A little shy, perhaps, yet glad that his words had given pleasure, the youth with the yellow hair sat down to write. The quill pen made almost no sound; and the faint noises of the harbor,—the voices of sailors heard across the water from other ships, the chuckling of little waves alongside, and the passing of bare feet on the deck overhead,—filled the polite quiet. Yielding to some fancy or inspiration, the visitor did not enter the lines he had quoted, but some others which pleased him even more. This done, the Englishmen parted from their Yankee host, and regained the dust, the street cries, the uniforms, and the hot yellow sun of the old Italian town.
A musing mind pauses to wonder as to what might have been the name of this Yankee ship anchoredin Leghorn bay sometime in 1822. The hospitable mate, “a smart specimen of a Yankee,” who was he? And above all, what became of the ship’s log? Did it vanish from earthly eyes in the stormy tumult and breaking timbers of a wreck, was it tossed away as old rubbish, or does it still lie at the bottom of a sea chest in the piney dark of some attic in New England, an attic whose roof is brushed by elm boughs on windy summer days? Will the little mystery ever be solved? What a log book it would be to possess! For the young man with the crown of mutinous fair hair who wrote the lines and refused the plug tobacco was Shelley, and the Arab-looking oarsman his friend and companion, Edward John Trelawny.
A mysterious fellow, this “good friend Tre” of the piercing eyes. A word from Shelley’s comrade and admirer, Edward Elliker Williams, had served him as an introduction to the Shelley group, and his first visit to them had taken place late one evening while the family was at Pisa. One sees the Italian room in lamplight, a room to which sensible Mary Shelley must have given something of an English air; one hears the English voices through the quiet of provincial Italy. Trelawnyenters, and the surprised Shelleys see a personage who is not at all English-looking; their visitor is a character out of Byronic romance, blazing eyes, pirate brows, bronzed skin and all. He looked like “a young Othello.” The newcomer, for his part, saw a rather bookish family gathered about a bookish young man “habited like a boy in a black jacket and trousers which he seemed to have outgrown”; it is Shelley he sees, reading as always, slender, bent a little, and “extraordinarily juvenile.”
“Is it possible that this mild, beardless boy can be the monster at war with all the world?” thought the young Othello.
While Shelley, as was his custom, went in and out of the room, as silently and strangely as a spirit, Mrs. Shelley asked Trelawny of news from London and Paris,—the new books and the operas, the new bonnets and the new styles, the marriages and the murders. A domestic scene. When Trelawny had gone, they spoke of him. Where had Mr. Williams encountered this remarkable person? In Switzerland. And was he not a sailor? Yes, he had been a sailor, and some said a pirate. A pirate, indeed! He could tell the most wonderful storiesof gory battles on the Java seas, and expeditions to native strongholds in the jungles of Malaysia. Quite a remarkable person, “our friend Tre.”
“Trelawny,” says a distinguished biographer of Byron, “was a liar and a cad.” The judgment is prejudiced and severe. Whatever his faults, the man acted a leading rôle in one of the most romantic episodes in English literary history, and was well liked and respected by the great figures of the play. The world recalls his association with Shelley and Byron, his recovery of Shelley’s body after the storm, and the cremation in classical style he arranged on the sands of Villareggio; it remembers his flight with Byron to the aid of rebellious Greece. A marvellous chapter, but only one of a life romance which is still something of an enigma.
Sailor? Pirate? Byronic stage-player? Let us see.
The known, the traceable, history of Edward John Trelawny begins with his birth in London in 1792, and comes to an abrupt end some seventeen years afterward. His father, Lt. Colonel Charles Trelawny, was a middle aged army officer who had retired to economise his wife’s fortune, the relics ofhis own, and play the rôle of stern, Roman father on the stage of family life. Both family and family name were Cornish, and the boy began life with the heritage of those of Cornish blood, the heritage of an ancient and separate race whose antiquity runs past the pillars of Stonehenge into the dawn of time. There was a Celtic streak in Trelawny; the joy of battle was his, the quickening fire, the strange madness, and even the Celt’s power over the souls of words.
Something darker and far more ancient, however, had fought its way back to life in Trelawny’s veins. The boy was born a warrior, but not a warrior of Celtic Arthur’s kind. The true comrades of his spirit were the heroes of the primitive Gaels, the mighty men whose blood seemed to “run up into their fiery hair,” during the exultation of killing and war.
Fanny Kemble saw Trelawny in his later years during his visit to the United States, and divined the dark side of his inheritance. “Mr. Trelawny’s countenance,” she wrote, “was habitually serene, occasionally sweet in its expression, but sometimes savage with the fierceness of a wild beast.”
When a young savage comes into the world,the problem of how to civilize him usually commands attention, but no one bothered his head about Edward John Trelawny. The savagery of neglected boyhood was allowed to grow wild in the congenial soil of the boy’s obscure and primitive inheritance. It was not a pretty childhood, and the following anecdote preserves its quality.
The Trelawny urchins had an enemy, a tame raven “with ragged wings and a grave antique aspect,” who used to drive them away from some fruits they coveted. This old demon had a trick of rushing at the children with outstretched wings, and though they threw stones, he carried the day. Little Edward John, however, having courage and the warrior instinct, kept up the fight, and presently managed to wound the enemy. Shouting and yelling, the children raced to the gruesome execution, and a final curtain descended on Edward John hanging the horrible blood-stained old mass of feathers in a noose made of a sash borrowed from his little sister!
Spelling lessons were battles. “Spell your name, you young savage,” shouts the Roman father. “Spell, sir?” The boy, becoming confused, misplaces the vowels. At this, the Roman father“arose in wrath, overturned the table, and bruised his shins in an attempt to kick me as I dodged him, and rushed out of the room.”
From the bosom of this peppery homelife, the great, bony, awkward boy was kicked into a school. There he encountered floggings, canings, and hideous practical jokes. The young Cornish Celt with the black hair and the wild blue eyes fought the savagery with savagery. His Roman father countered by handing him over to the Royal Navy. The new life was the school all over again, save that the sea-hazing was more brutal and the practical jokes even more atrocious. A strange trait, that English liking for practical jokes! Then followed a season at Dr. Burney’s Naval Academy at Greenwich, a voyage on a frigate during whose course “Tre” revenged himself on a persecutor by jabbing him with a pen knife, and then a long world cruise on a sloop of war.
Brutalised at home, brutalised at school, brutalised in the Navy, it is a wonder that the young savage remained reasonably human. With the arrival of adolescence a sense of injustice and an urge to rebellion struck root in his mind. Rebellion was his only outlet, and in rebelling, he was most hisprimitive self. For the boy was only primitive, not vicious. Presently he decided that he had had enough, and made up his mind to desert.
The neglected sailor whelp, whom no one had received with affection or troubled to civilise, was now seventeen years old, he stood six feet tall, and was strongly built, though of a certain adolescent gauntness. “My face was bronzed, my hair black, my features perfectly Arab.” The loneliness of adolescence troubled him, his parents’ “hard usage and abandonment” gnawed at his heart; he felt “alienated” from his “family and kindred.” He would follow a new trail, and “seek the love of strangers in the wide world.”
The phrases are almost sentimental, and doubtless reflect genuine feeling, but the young savage was still the young savage in his way of life. Having determined to jump ship, the demon midshipman prepared to pay off an old score. A lieutenant of his ship, a Scotchman, had been nagging him, and “Tre” fell upon the man with the supreme strength which is born of anger. The ship being at Bombay, the encounter took place in a billiard room ashore frequented by naval officers. It was a ferocious business of blows, kicks, bruises, blood, criesand broken teeth. The lieutenant attempted to beg off. Tre’s narrative then continues,—
“‘What,—you white-livered scoundrel? Can no words move you? Then blows shall!’ And I struck him with the hilt of my sword in the mouth, and kicked him, and trampled on him. I tore his coat off and rent it to fragments...” Thus the young savage spoke and fought.
So ends that chapter of Trelawny’s early life which is traceable. A certain use, to be sure, has here been made of his thinly disguised autobiography, but the use has been scrupulous, and the borrowings confined to an incident or two which are accepted as historic. Now comes mystery. After his desertion in Bombay, all trace of him disappears for some seven or eight years. What was he doing all this while, and what regions of the earth and sea were filled with his adventures?
The bronzed young man in his middle twenties, who drifted back to England either in 1815 or ’16, had little to say to his questioners, though there were hints of a lurid career. As always, the mystery fed on mystery. The man’s fine presence, his Oriental features, and his piercing eyes were enough in themselves to inspire interest; little by little themoonlight of romantic imagination gathered him into its beam. His intimate friends, it was whispered, heard blood-curdling tales of piracies as they sat in the chimney corner. Ah,—if “Tre” would only tell the whole story! They waited for it fifteen years.
The account must now anticipate a little, and leap the years to 1830. The summer months are at hand, and Mary Shelley, the poet’s widow, is arranging and correcting an extraordinary manuscript from “our friend Tre.” Sensible Mary Shelley, with fair complexion, her light hair and calm grey eyes,—what did she make of the wild tale in those numberless pages? One sees her at a desk, remedying Trelawny’s frequent deficiencies of spelling, writing “postponed” for “posponed,” and inserting “gs” in all words such as “strength” and “length.” Trelawny treated the letter with a Cornish disdain. The manuscript in the widow’s hands was a novel of adventure which Trelawny insisted was really an account of his own career. First purposing to call the book “A Man’s Life,” he later changed it to “The Adventures of a Younger Son.”
The scene now returns to the billiard room in Bombay, with the Scotch lieutenant lying on thefloor, barely alive. The young savage brandishes the heavy end of a billiard cue he has just broken over his enemy and in true Berseker fashion is about to finish his man, when a voice calms him, and forbids the murder. The speaker who has thus intervened is one De Ruyter, a mysterious adventurer who has made friends with the young savage. In spite of his Dutch name, he is an American, and even claims Boston as his beloved birthplace. The young deserter and this incredible Bostonian now escape to De Ruyter’s ship, an Arab craft almost openly engaged in piracy.
The years that follow find the savage in his element; the tale is one of piracies, pursuits, boardings, battles, pistol shots, stab-wounds and slicings, and blood running bright and stickily through scuppers into waters alive with gathering sharks. There are tiger hunts, fevers, corpses, despairing yells, and sudden deaths numberless as sands of the sea. Having no definite base of operations, the precious pair indulge in grand and petty larceny all through the eastern seas; the scene is now the Indian ocean, now the coast of Celebes, now the inlets of the Philippines. What there is of “love interest” is very slight, and centres about the corsair’sArabian child-wife, Zela, a Byronic heroine who perishes opportunely, and is then cremated on a funeral pyre.
There are three volumes of this fee-fi-fo-fum and manslaughter, the last ending with the return of De Ruyter and his acolyte to Europe, their separation, De Ruyter’s death at sea while in the service of Napoleon, and the resolve of the hero to struggle on for the liberty of “the pallid slaves of Europe.” Cutting a throat, it appeared, was but a whimsey when compared to the guilt of those who continued to consort with the “sycophantic wretches who crouch and crawl and fawn on kings and priests.”...
“Romance can go no farther,” said a contemporary critic in theMilitary Review, “than the actual adventures of the homicidal renegade and corsair, the ‘Younger Son.’”
Time has confirmed this sensible opinion. A more brutal, a more ruthless, a more utterly unfeeling book does not exist in English literature. Save for the rhetoric about the “pallid slaves,” and some Byronic transports over the body of Zela, the story knows less of sympathy than a crocodile. Moreover, it is nowhere amusing. What carries it along,what made it a success in its own time, and has won it a reprint in our own, is its superlative vividness. The picture may be that of a man, shot in the heart, spinning about; it may be the impression of thick resistance which human flesh offers to the hand that stabs;—whatever it may be, image or sensation, it is real, it is true, and it is the unconscious artist who affects us and no mere business of superlative photography. Overlong, chaotic, and ruffianly as it is, the book is no lifeless curiosity of literature.
Such was the existence from which the deserter and adventurer returned to Europe. Were one to swallow the book whole, it might well be imagined that the Trelawny who arrived in London was a proper subject for a gallows. Yet the adventurer who in England took the place that was his by birth as a gentleman’s son was no skull and bones ruffian. There are no stories, no rumours that tell of ruffianism or ruffianly qualities; when this young Arab-featured man called on his neighbours, there were no blanched faces at the windows, or wild whispers to send the ladies upstairs and hide the spoons. Sometimes a good family will unaccountably produce a ruffianly type; the incident is rare,but it is encountered,—but Trelawny was not of these.
The Younger Son who had been born with something dark and ancient in his blood, who had endured a savage and neglected boyhood and adolescence, had returned to England reasonably civilised at least. Such was not the customary result of seven years of piracy!
The explanation is probably a very simple one; the boy savage, the demon midshipman, had grown up. With the arrival of manhood, the fundamental qualities of the man’s character and original mind had broken through the barbarism of his early life.
The streak of Celtic battle savagery he had inherited was still in his veins; he never lost it. Seven years later, while accompanying Byron to the revolt in Greece, he spoke of “the best of all excitement.” The poet showed curiosity. “Fighting,” added Trelawny, and was not guilty of a pose. There were times when he showed a certain cold-blooded streak; the pirate was not touchily fastidious. He had a mind, he was a born observer, and he was nobody’s fool. There is no evidence that he had much imaginative quality. The ideas he had,he clung to emotionally, for they were really emotions in borrowed clothes. His enthusiasm for “Europe’s pallid slaves,” for instance;—what is it but his own transmuted resentment for his own loveless and cruel boyhood,—what was his hatred of “sycophants, priests and kings” but his own hatred of those in authority who had oppressed his youth? He does not appear ever to have arrived at any intellectual understanding of his attitude.
The young man of mystery returned to England with a little money, and presently carried out an anchor to windward. He married, and in a sentence of matchless pathos, lamented his rose-decked chain. He had become “a shackled, care-worn and spirit-broken married man of the civilised west.” There are those who say that the lady was frivolous and wasteful. It probably mattered little, for the adventurer’s relations with his various wives were astoundingly casual; they have something of the kiss and good-bye of the legendary sailor.
The roses of matrimony beginning to lose their petals, the younger son took to escaping on vagabond adventures. The incredible snobbery of contemporary British life, “its mystic castes, coteries,sets and sects, its ... purseproud tuft-hunting and toadying” got on the nerves of this man who had seen life in the raw. Fleeing to Switzerland, he made friends with another wandering Briton, one Mr. Edward Elliker Williams, a half-pay lieutenant of the Eighth Dragoons. Mr. Williams chattered for hours of his marvellous friend, Mr. Percy Shelley, the poet, who had so splendidly defied the ideas and conventions of contemporary Britain. There was a man and a rebel! Expelled from Oxford for atheism, the hero of a romantic elopement at eighteen, the hero of a defiant free union at twenty-one, the contemner and accuser of every dastardly sycophant, king and priest in the solar system. And a poet, sir!
Mr. Shelley the exile,—here was a man for Trelawny of his own unconventional mould. Shelley the rebel. Shelley the Lucifer! He would go to him; the sycophants, kings and so forths had better take care. “I swore to dedicate myself,” said the pirate later, “hand and heart to war, even to the knife, against the triple alliance of hoary headed impostors, their ministers and priests!” How the rhetoric brings before one’s eyes the liberal angerat the Tory reaction following the wild revolutionary years!
Mr. Williams arranged the meeting, and took “our friend Tre” to Pisa. Was “Tre” a little disappointed at the appearance of the exiled Lucifer and poetic arch-scandaliser; had he prepared himself for something robust, defiant and rhetorical, someone quite in his own style? There are times when this emotion seems visible between the lines of Trelawny’s account of the meeting. Whatever the expectation may have been, Shelley won his piratic visitor heart and soul. A young man with an Arab’s thin nose and bronzed cheeks and a young man with great open eyes, a boy’s fresh face and a crown of yellow hair,—the pirate and the scholar rebel—a fantastic alliance!
No wild outcries from British throats, however, disturbed the stout and comfortable Italian padres who stopped in the streets of Pisa to take snuff, and wandered off brushing the specklets of brown dust from their soutanes. IncomprehensibleIngleses! The exiles were all under thirty, they had all made their lives something of an adventure, they were all glad to be alive.
Destiny was preparing strange things.
The younger son, having decided to throw in his lot with the poet’s, remained in Pisa. He liked the group and the environment, though the bookish intellectualism of the Shelleys swept him often enough beyond his depth. Byron, also living in exile, was a familiar figure, and there were rides together out into the country and pauses by the roadside to indulge in the noisy sport of pistol practice.
Shelley read, and hidden away in a little pine wood, wrote poetry; Byron lurked in his huge palace guarded by a growling English bulldog and a squad of chattering retainers captained by a giant Venetian gondolier.
The poets liked the younger son. He was a rebel too, in his way, his piratic career made him interesting, he had good stories to tell, and above all, he was a man of action who could be trusted to do practical things for the impractical. A boat is to be built, Tre will attend to it; a boat is to be sailed, Tre will do that; household goods are to be moved, we must talk with Tre. Affection forms quickly in such an isolated group, and there seems to havebeen a certain affection for piratic Tre, perhaps the first the man had ever known.
As the weather grew hot, Tre advised the Shelleys to go north, and found them a house at Lerici on the Gulf of Shezzia. The place was but a shabby barrack, but it was on the sea, and Shelley rejoiced. In the evenings, the whole population of men, women and children took to the water like ducks, and their shouts of joy filled the house. Shelley and Tre joined in the frolic, but Mary Shelley looked grave, and said it was “improper.” “Hush, Mary,” said the poet, “that insidious word has never been echoed by these woods and rocks; don’t teach it to them.”
The late spring ripened into summer, and with July came the historic tragedy.
Early in the spring a kind of yachtsman’s fever had descended upon the little group. Byron had arranged for the building of a yacht, and Williams had designed a boat for Shelley and the friends at Lerici. In designing the hull, Williams had probably attempted an imitation of the fast American vessels he had seen along the coast; it was a model he did not understand. One Captain Roberts, a sometime British naval officer then living in Italy,had the boat built under his eye at Genoa; she was twenty-four feet long and eight in the beam; she drew four feet of water and was schooner rigged with gaff topsails. Not a boat, this, to fire a sailor’s heart, for the rig needs a crew to run it, and is difficult to handle quickly, especially in a small space. Two English sailors and a ship’s boy had sailed the vessel from Genoa to Lerici. When asked how she sailed, the tars had replied that she was a “ticklish boat to manage,” and that they had “cautioned the gents accordingly.”
Originally christened the “Don Juan,” the fateful vessel was now re-christened the “Ariel.” To give her more stability, Williams filled her with ballast,—a dangerous business, for the vessel was undecked. The designer would hear no criticism of his craft.
“Williams is as touchy about the reputation of his boat as if she were his wife,” grumbled Tre.
Such was the yacht in which Shelley, Williams and the English sailor lad, Charles Vivian, sailed from the port of Leghorn on July the eighth, 1822. The poet had sailed down from Lerici to welcome Leigh Hunt and his family to Italy, and thisfriendly office done, was returning home again by sea.
Two o’clock in the afternoon, haze, July dulness, and almost no wind in the Gulf of Spezzia. Trelawny, busy doing something aboard Byron’s yacht, theBolivar, watched his friends sail away. He had hoped to escort them to sea in Byron’s vessel, but at a last moment difficulty over sailing papers had arisen with the port authorities. The haze was thickening and growing dark, a menacing thunder was rolling nearer; presently theArielvanished from Trelawny’s sight into the leaden gloom.
A squall, needless to say, is a swift business anywhere, but the Mediterranean variety has a certain thunderbolt burst and a drenching vengefulness all its own. On the ships anchored about theBolivar, barefooted seamen were running along the decks preparing their vessels for the squall which moment by moment assumed a more threatening look. Suddenly came rain, and in the rain the wind; the storm blustered through the night.
Trelawny went ashore, and listened all night long to the wind and the beat of the rain. He was restless with anxiety. Everything that there wasof sailor in the man distrusted theAriel, and he knew only too well that Shelley would be of little use in an emergency. The poet would be dreaming or reading a book at the very moment the wind leaped at the sails. The dawn revealed the shipping in the harbour rolling and pitching about under pouring rain; the anxious day ended without news. The following days found Tre searching among the vessels which had been at sea during the storm, questioning sailors, patrolling the coast with the coast guards, and offering rewards.
Presently comes a messenger in some shabby-showy uniform, and an official letter written in Italian. The bodies have been found on the sands, poor, broken bodies of men lost at sea.
“Oh, bitter, bitter gifts of the lord Poseidon,” said the Greeks, remembering the bruised flesh turning in the waves. What was to be done? Tre says that it was decided by “all concerned,” that Shelley should be buried in Rome beside his little son. Before this might be done, however, there were laws and a thousand regulations to be fought through, for Italy was then divided in separate jurisdictions, and, moreover, bodies washed ashorewere regarded by the law as possible victims of the plague. This, of course, was not Shelley’s case, but the law was the law.
It was Tre who found a way out of the difficulty. Was his notion possibly a memory of something he had witnessed in the East? He would cremate the bodies, and send Shelley’s ashes to Rome. It is no injustice to Tre to say that he made his preparations and gathered the funerary material with the business-like directness of an undertaker. He was the man of action as ever, the practical friend who could be trusted to get things done.
He attended to Williams first, and then gathered the forlorn little world of the exiles to see the last of Shelley.
It was a hot August day, and the whitish sands of Villareggio were tremulous with heat. A dead calm lay upon the sea, and save for Byron’s schooner anchored close off shore, the vast gulf revealed no sign of human life. Behind the beach lay a wood of tall, branchless pines, “their dark blue tops packed so close together that no sun could penetrate,” and far away, over the wood rose the marble-crested Apennines. The pyre stood in the open between the wood and the sea. Byron wasthere and Leigh Hunt, a detail of soldiers, a few coast guards, and some Italian great folk who had ridden out in their carriages to watch so unaccountable a proceeding. Following ancient ritual, the exiles poured salt, oil and wine upon the pyre; the little first flames rose yellow towards their hands. A lonely sea bird came circling near, the pyre burnt with little smoke, and thus the body of Shelley dissolved into the air.
Only the heart refused to burn, though in the hottest of the flame. Tre snatched it forth, and burnt his hand so doing. When all was done, and the pyre burnt out, he gathered the ashes together, put them in an oaken box, paid his soldiers, and went off to Rome with his parcel.
A chapter of his life had come to an end. The little group dispersed, Byron remained to quarrel on with the Hunts, the widows went to England. Tre had been a staunch and helpful friend, and Mary Shelley never forgot the debt. She could write later that Trelawny’s conduct “impressed us all with an affectionate regard and a perfect faith in the unalterable goodness of his heart.” She knew that it was good to have a friend.The Gentleman’s Magazine, on hearing of the drowning,had remarked, “Mr. Percy Shelley is a fitter subject for the penitentiary dying speech than a lauding elegy, for a muse of the rope rather than that of the cypress.”
Italy in the autumn, and an empty world. Tre lingered on a year, and found diversion in riding about the countryside. An American-born negro followed him as a groom; the peasants stared at the strange pair galloping by.
Then came a letter from Byron, and life began again with adventure and war.
The Greeks had risen against their Turkish masters, a committee of enthusiastic lovers of liberty had been formed in London to advance the cause, and this committee had persuaded Byron to act as their agent in Greece. From the point of view of what the cant of the day calls publicity, the choice was an excellent one; considered with a harsh and practical eye, it was absurd. This nervous, temperamental artist with the habits and posing mannerisms of a regency beau, this traveller who scarce could walk a hundred yards on his shrunken and deformed feet, yet hid his pain andweakness in a cloak of attitudes,—surely here was no man to manage a horde of wily Levantines all trying to advance their own fortunes, and snatch what they could for themselves of the English subsidy.
Having accepted the task, Byron turned at once to the practical friend. “My dear T,” he wrote, “you must have heard that I am going to Greece. Why do you not come to me? I want your aid, and am exceedingly anxious to see you.”
War and adventure! Trelawny wasted no time in exchanging the vineyards of Italy for Grecian mountain slopes and olive trees. Then came a mistake. He abandoned Byron, and went off to adventure by himself.
Tre had never really liked the noble lord, perhaps because Byron, being a man of the world, had a clearer understanding than Shelley of Trelawny the man and his place in life. A stray letter of Claire Clairmont’s, Byron’s sometime mistress, suggests that Tre secretly cherished resentment for some sharp remark. Whatever the explanation may be of Tre’s hidden attitude, the practical man had no intention of wasting his time with the poet, but left him to his fate. He seems to have forgottenthat he had come to Greece with Byron and at Byron’s invitation and suggestion.
“I well knew that once on shore, Byron would fall back on his old routine of dawdling habits, plotting, planning, shilly-shallying and doing nothing,” he complained. And again, “Could I then longer waste my life in union with such imbecility, amid such scenes as there are here, when there is excitement enough to move the dead?”
The angry phrases make the adventurer’s motives clear and perfectly comprehensible, yet leave the abandonment of the poet a matter for controversy. Byron had called Tre to his side, Tre had accepted with alacrity; there was no solemn engagement, no cant about duties and so on; Trelawny was free to do as he pleased. A meticulous sense of honor might have detained him, but then the finer shades of honor never plagued Trelawny.
Crossing from the island of Cephalonia to the mainland, the free-lance now made his way through the grey mountains and the ravaged country side to the camp of Odysseus, chieftain of Eastern Greece. Tre thought him a man after his own heart, and wrote enthusiastically of his new friend. Of all the feudal leaders of rebellious Greece, thiswas the man! The adventurer’s life began to be worth living, there were ambuscades, descents on villages, attacks on Turkish cavalry, and looting expeditions. He was fighting for liberty, as Shelley would have wished him, but he had no illusions about those “pallid slaves,” the newly liberated Greeks. He quite agreed with Colonel Napier’s famous remark, “My dear Mr. Trelawny, no one should assume any direction in Greek affairs ... without the help of a portable gallows.”
Meanwhile in the mud and malaria of Missolonghi, lived the man whom every feudal chieftain hoped to coax into his hands, the noble Lord Byron, agent in chief of the Greek committee. At Odysseus’ suggestion, Trelawny set out for Missolonghi to plead the chieftain’s cause. He arrived there in the rain, and met dejected stragglers riding away,—the English milord was dead. The fretful, bewildered satirist had perished like a bird caught in a net of dirty twine.
On receipt of this news, Tre gathered together the wreckage of Byron’s entourage of adventurers who had drifted in to fight for the Greeks, and led those who were worth leading to Odysseus. He had now married Tarsitza Kamenou, the chieftain’ssister, and had thus become a member of the family. Presently Odysseus made a kind of truce with the Turks, and Trelawny retired to hold the chieftain’s stronghold, a romantic cave high in the crags of Mount Parnassus. It was while he was in this cave that an English adventurer whom he had befriended tried to assassinate him. Trelawny was dangerously wounded. “Two musket balls,” he wrote, “fired at the distance of two paces, struck me and passed through my frame work and damn near finished me.” With truest chivalry, Tre spared his cowardly assailant, and rescued him from his Greek associates, who wished to do unpleasant things.
Events moved fast. Odysseus, falling into the hands of the Greek loyalists, was adjudged a traitor, and thrown from the Acropolis. Tarsitza bore a daughter, and, this accomplished, disappeared from the scene; some say into a convent. With the help of friends in the British Navy, Tre then escaped from Parnassus to a refuge in the Ionian Isles, and lingered there two or three years watching events. “I do not wish to visit England in my present state of poverty,” he wrote.
Then came the destruction of the Turkish fleetat Navarino in ’27, and a breathing spell of success for the Greeks. In the July of the following year, the adventurer reached Southampton with his little half-Greek daughter in his arms.
With the return from Greece, the great days of adventure are at an end, the rest of Trelawny’s long life is the story of the kind of man the world calls a “character.”
The pause in England was brief, and in 1829 he returned to Italy, took a house in Florence, and busied himself bringing up his little daughter Zela, born to him of his Greek wife, and writing his autobiographical romance. It seems reasonably sure that sometime during these Italian years he proposed to Mary Shelley, but without success; the lady was not exactly a person to be an incident in anybody’s life. The pirate, now a man of forty, then translated his affections to Claire (Jane) Clairmont whom he had met at Lerici in the romantic days. This love affair by letter lasted for long years. Tre was still Tre the corsair and Byronic lover. “Yes, Jane,” he wrote, in a letter full of rhetoric and misspelling,—“much as endurancehas hardened me, I must give you the consolation of knowing that you have inflicted on me indiscribable tortures.”...
This friendship had one unfortunate result; the lady hated Byron and his memory with an all consuming hate, and this poison spread to Trelawny’s mind, making him cruelly hostile to a man he had never understood.
England again, and then a voyage to the United States, the purchase of the freedom of a slave, and a swim in the Niagara River. At Niagara a ferryman muttered that he was all “tuckered out.” “How old are you?” cried Tre as he scrambled up the bank after his wild swim. “Thirty-eight,” replied the ferryman. “Then you are not worth a damn,” shouted the adventurer rudely. “You had better look out for the alms house!”
English society welcomed him back; Shelley was coming into his own, the Byron legend had taken root, the “Adventures of a Younger Son” had been a striking success, and all the English world was anxious to see the last of the great company. Picturesque, dark and Arabic as ever, and possessed of great physical strength, Tre moved among the mirrors, the teacups and the talk, spinning hiswild yarns and blazing out in fine rhetorical damnations of all poppycock and snobbery. After 1846, he retired to Usk in Monmouthshire, married, and busied himself planting, building and teaching scientific husbandry.
The seventies found him the last survivor of the past though Byron’s giant gondolier, the romantic “Tita,” had grown old along with him. The Hercules had come to England, found a place with the Disraelis, and married Mrs. Disraeli’s maid.
Trelawny had now become venerable, grown a white beard, and brought up two sons and a daughter. The little Greek girl had married very happily. “Our friend Tre” was now a fierce, venerable, wild-eyed, magnificent old man full of opinionated notions on many subjects. He had taken to preaching natural living, the virtues of abstemiousness, and the folly of wearing heavy underwear. To the generation of Rossetti and Burne Jones, he was “Captain” Trelawny, the fiery ancient who had been a comrade and friend of the gods.
Joaquin Miller saw him at the Savage Club in London. “On one occasion,” wrote the Californian, “he came in while a winter storm was raging,and he must have been wet all through. But he would not drink with us. His collar was open after the fashion of Walt Whitman, and he had neither overcoat nor umbrella. He stood with his back to the fire, straight and strong as a mast, looked about over us in quiet disdain for a while, then took off his coat, hung it over the back of a chair by the fire, and sat by and watched it drying till the storm abated.” When Miller went to visit him, old Tre “insisted in a most mysterious tone of voice that he had blood from some extinct race of kings in his veins, and that he had in early days been a famous pirate.” At eighty-one, he met undaunted the unconquerable enemy. He rests beside Shelley in Rome.
What a life the great, bony, awkward boy had made for himself, what a quality of courage and defiance it has! The man would have fought the stars in the courses. Being what he was, he had to see life as a struggle, and the best of him lies in the way that he accepted every challenge with a singing joy. The fighting type of human being very often finds a certain robust satisfaction in life, and so it was with Trelawny. Whatever he had done, whatever he had been, life had been gloriouslyworth living under the sun. And is it not strange that the great adventure of this life of struggle and strange lands should have centred about a lamp-lit room in a villa in Italy, and a friendship with the most fragile and the unworldly being of his time?