Preservation by Shipwreck: The Memory of William Mackay

Abstract

In 1795 an English East India Company country ship, the Juno, was wrecked in the Bay of Bengal. The buoyancy of her teak cargo arrested her sinking, and her 72 crew and passengers sought refuge in the rigging that protruded above the waves. Three years later her second mate, William Mackay, published his Narrative of the Shipwreck of the Juno, on the Coast of Aracan, describing 23 days aloft and, after a treacherous disembarkation, their arduous trek to a Company station on the Coromandel coast. This article considers the content and legacy of this narrative, contrasting its longevity with less enduring memorials.

Keywords:

• William Mackay
• Juno
• shipwreck narrative
• East India Company
• Byron
• Derozio

In 1767 the Great Cemetery of Kolkata replaced St John's Church as the final resting place of East India Company employees. In a futile attempt to keep death at arm's length, it was situated some distance from headquarters at Fort William and Dalhousie Square. While factors, writers, administrators and military personnel extended the Company's reach across West Bengal and beyond, death had been their constant companion. More than a third of those who travelled east in the service of the Company in the eighteenth century succumbed, a disproportionate number of whom were wives and children.1

The Burial Ground Road, a narrow raised causeway several kilometres long, linked Fort William to the Great Cemetery. On either side were marshy fields and patches of jungle, some of which were wild enough to serve as good tiger-hunting grounds for gentlemen. Coffins were borne aloft on the shoulders of pallbearers down this road, a demanding practice made treacherous during the monsoon when it was often submerged or sections washed away.

The rapid growth of Kolkata in the early twentieth century, and a general Indian indifference to Company history at the time, saw a main road bisect the Great Cemetery into the renamed North and South Park Street Cemeteries. Some of the inscribed marble tablets from the graves that were bulldozed were mounted into the walls of the South Park Street gate house. Most of the epitaphs are detailed genealogies or poetic eulogies. Many speak eloquently and fully of the hills, pastures and mountains of home.

The surviving mausoleums in the South Park Cemetery, with their impressive arches, Roman cupolas and Grecian urns, also announce that home was elsewhere: these Company representatives and their families may have died on the banks of the Hooghly River, far from London, Portsmouth or Edinburgh, but they would rest forever entombed within their heritage.

As you walk out of the noisy river of yellow taxis flowing down Park Street into the gloomy, solemn humidity of the cemetery, you would be forgiven the impression that you have stepped into history. The moss-covered mausoleums and gravestones seem weathered by the centuries. Everywhere you look you can mark the unequal struggle between plant and plaster – seedlings sprout from even the smallest ledges, creepers have forced chunks of cement to the ground, and trees are quietly pushing down walls. At every turn there is a collapsed column, a decapitated monument, an ornate cement urn lying in the long grass. Bickering black crows complete the picture of dank, imperial decline.

In fact all of the graves and monuments have been rebuilt – many more than once – in the last 30 years. In the account of Ash Kapur, the current president of the Association for the Preservation of Historical Cemeteries in India, when the organization was formed in 1978, the burial ground was derelict.2 Many of the mausoleums had collapsed, those with roofs intact housed vagrants and the site, notorious for its population of snakes and feral dogs, was also well known to the police as a place where thieves hid their loot.

On closer observation, the association's efforts are everywhere apparent. There are piles of fresh limestone plaster lying here and there and bamboo scaffolding leans against the walls of several tall tombs. Each structure, you realize, is on a schedule: it has recently been restored or is awaiting reconstruction.

If the graves shed their skin of plaster with such regularity, in what does their authenticity consist? One might assume that each grave's design has been replicated or that, at least, the inscribed marble tablets have endured. But many of the graves, Kapur points out, were damaged beyond repair and, in the absence of detailed records, they proved impossible to reconstruct.3 In many cases rebuilding was extrapolation from ruins.

In addition to the marble tablets mounted into the gate house, over 150 were set into the perimeter wall when the restoration of the graveyard began. Many have since fallen, leaving silent spaces, their shattered fragments mixed into piles of clay chai cups, garbage and limestone.

With the permission of the overseer, I kept a shard of marble I found on a rubbish heap. It is on my desk as I write and bears the inscription ‘deceased 1788’.

The grave of a young ship's captain, William Mackay, has been restored, but its marble tablet was lost. Fortunately the Bengal Obituary, published in 1851, recorded the epitaphs in the Great Cemetery. His read: ‘Sacred to the Memory of Captain William Mackay, who died 27th March 1804, aged 22 years.’ It continued:

This marble would express, the affections of relations and esteem of friends, for him whose characteristics were unaffected worth and manly fortitude, in how eminent a degree, he possessed the latter quality, his interesting narrative of the Ship-wreck of the Juno, will testify to future times.4

Mackay's grave was one of those rebuilt in the first phase of restoration in 1978, funded by a bequest from Indian Aluminum Co. and Dunlop India Ltd. It is an impressive structure: from a rectangular sepulchral base, a monument rises six metres into the overarching trees. It is decorated on two faces with reliefs of anchors and coiled ropes. As in all cases where the original was lost, the epitaph has been replaced with a small, white marble plaque bearing only rank, initial, surname, and birth and death dates. In the case of ‘Capt. W. Mackay 1741–1804’, the date of birth on the marble tablet is incorrect.

When Mackay's original epitaph was composed, his Narrative of the Shipwreck of the Juno, on the Coast of Aracan (1798) had been in circulation for six years, and was being widely read. Nonetheless, a particular faith was entailed in trusting Mackay's memory and reputation to the high seas of popular literature. Although in many respects his shipwreck narrative is unique, it was one of hundreds in circulation. The late eighteenth century was a time of burgeoning print culture and increasing literacy, and shipwreck narratives were a publisher's staple. Prior to the institution of copyright, these narratives were freely revised, expurgated, sensationalized or, in numerous instances, turned to didactic or evangelical ends. Most of these revisions were published in ephemeral forms, and many sank quickly into oblivion.

Rather than setting out Mackay's virtues more conventionally, his epitaph assumes that his Narrative will progress into the future, convening new readerships. Further, it assumes settled and constant interpretation; not only that the tale indeed attests to his ‘unaffected worth and manly fortitude’, but that it will always do so.

How could those who composed Mackay's epitaph have believed it wise to defer his memorialization from marble to print? Have the intervening two centuries made fools of them?

When the sun rose over the Indian Ocean on 21 June 1795, it revealed a most surprising and lamentable scene. Two ship's masts protruded from a rough sea, which broke over a partially submerged quarterdeck, the rest of the hull having sunk beneath the pounding waves. This perverse equilibrium – a ship arrested in the process of sinking – resulted from the buoyancy of her cargo of teak. In the last frantic moments before the hull went under, the crew of English officers and Lascars and a contingent of Malay workmen had climbed the rigging, desperately seeking the temporary safety of the mizzen top. The 72 people cast away aloft would not have thought, in that moment, that the horror had only begun.

The Juno set out from Rangoon to Madras on 29 May 1795. She was transporting Burmese teak across the Bay of Bengal, a cargo essential for the repair of Indiamen in the Company dockyards. In contrast to the grand ships travelling the route between Europe and India, the Juno was a leaky country vessel. She was one of the hundreds of smaller coasting ships essential to the subsidiary operations of the global corporation. She was captained by Alexander Bremner, whose wife, as was not uncommon in country ships, was accompanying him on the voyage.

William Mackay was the young but experienced second mate. According to a biographical note in The Scottish Nation, a multivolume genealogical history published in 1863, he was a member of the Scourie Mackay clan of Lairg.5 He went to sea at 16, having followed his older brother, Hugh, into the Company and then to India. In the estimation of his biographer, ‘Mr Moore’, who is cited in The Scottish Nation, by the time he joined the Juno, Mackay was ‘one of the most skilful navigators of the Indian seas’.6 Unfortunately there is no trace of any biography authored by Mr Moore.

On her first day out the Juno shoaled on a hard sandbank. After efforts at using the anchors to dislodge her, the crew managed to float the ship on the flood tide. There seemed at first to be no material damage to her hull. But on 1 June a gale commenced ‘at S.S.W. with a very high sea, the ship laboured much and very soon sprang a leak’. Incessant pumping was required, which was complicated by the pumps ‘getting frequently out of order by constant hard working’. Also, the sand ballast, commonly used in ships during the eighteenth century, kept choking the pumps' mechanisms. The officers considered returning to Rangoon, but ‘the many dangers attending the making that coast’ made them of the unanimous opinion that they should endeavour to keep the ship ‘clear of the coast of Pegu’.

On the day the gale abated, the Juno seemed to be taking in less water. Pumping was required only once a day. When a leak was discovered along the stern-post, the jolly-boat was despatched and ‘some tarred canvas and oakum [applied] on it, with sheet-lead over all’. The crew were self-congratulatory: they seemed to have averted the risk of catastrophe. But Mackay remarks: ‘We must have been infatuated when we imagined that a piece of canvas, though it might exclude the water in moderate weather, could sufficiently secure such a leak as ours when the ship should come to labour’.7

Mackay's use of ‘infatuation’ is common in eighteenth-century voyage narratives. It refers to a state of bewildered disorientation. Jonathan Lamb, the author of a rich study of Enlightenment selfhood, self-preservation and exploration, argues that mariners commonly fell prey to an ‘ungovernable yet equivocal emotion’ which, on occasion, became ‘pathologically intensified’.8 In this state, they would lurch between ecstatic self-confidence and abject misery, between hubris and self-doubt. Lamb argues that this state of ‘infatuation’ arose from the combined experience of long distance seafaring and entering mare incognitae, in which sailors had ‘no base, no longitude, [and] no system of cognitive mapping’.9 Such infatuation may well have caused the erratic behaviour of Captain James Cook, which culminated in his death and dismemberment in Kealakekua Bay, a tragedy observed from a distance by the young William Bligh who, in the years to come, would be similarly afflicted by periods of radical inconstancy.

A second gale raged from 12 June and the Juno began to take on water at an even faster rate. Most of the pumps ceased to function given the work demanded of them, and by the 16 June, ‘almost exhausted with fatigue and want of rest, we began to entertain serious apprehensions for our safety’. The ship was redirected towards the Coromandel shore in the hope that she could ‘coast it along to Madras, or bear up for Bengal’.

At eight o'clock on 20 June the men came up from below to inform the officers that the water had reached the lower deck. The crew ‘became clamorous for getting out the boats, which we knew could be of no service, as we had only an old jollyboat, and six-oared pinnace, both shattered and leaky’. Instead, following a standard procedure, the mainmast was cut away to lighten the ship. Disastrously it fell within board, smashing into the deck of the labouring ship. In the confusion the crew let the Juno broach and the sea began washing over her decks.

But she did not sink. Saved by her buoyant cargo, she settled uncannily with most of her upper deck a metre or two below the surface of the water, with her mizzen and foremast intact, protruding above the water. ‘All hands scrambled up the rigging to escape instant destruction, moving gradually upwards as each succeeding wave buried them still deeper.’

The tremendous gale continued unabated, ‘the sea running mountains high, the upper deck and upper parts of the hull going to pieces’. The 72 people clinging to the rigging were witnessing the steady destruction of their means of support. Death seemed imminent. Above the noise of the crashing sea Mackay could hear the ‘shrieks of the women and Lascars’. Some of those hanging on for their lives were washed off by the waves. Faced with this terrible prospect others ‘voluntarily yielded to their fate’. Mackay, by his own account, remained calm and began thinking through his options.

We need to pause here. His narrative was written two years after the events it relates. It expresses the composure of memory. The space between a traumatic event and its narration is capacious: into it flow rationalizations, interpretations, justifications and the multiple ways in which we use story-telling to come to terms with our suffering and that of others. While all representations of catastrophe are subsequent to the events they relate and all are more ordered than the immanent apprehension they describe, this is pointedly true in the case of Mackay's Narrative.

Suspended above the submerged ship, Mackay's mind was evidently filled with a congeries of narratives he had read. They mediate his experience of events and also the ways in which he sought to manage – both rhetorically and practically – their excessive, unspeakable nature. He remembers, for instance, ‘Captain Ingelfield's narrative’, in which castaways in an open boat ‘received great benefit from lying down by turns in a blanket which had been previously dipped in the sea’. Consequently Mackay climbs down the mast, dips his flannel waistcoat into the sea and puts it on soaked, proposing that the pores of his skin will absorb sustaining water while the salt would remain on its surface. Many of his companions followed his example and felt ‘refreshed’ as a consequence. Revealing psychological insight, Mackay admits that the practice was perhaps most effective in ‘occupying the mind, and preventing despondency, rather than providing bodily sustenance’.10

Carl Thompson, in the most detailed study of eighteenth-century shipwreck narratives, identifies their inclination to address directly their readers' expectations.11 Like other popular literatures, they addressed a public increasingly well versed in their conventions. Their readers clearly enjoyed the frisson of vicarious abjection they provided and were particularly drawn to the possibility of survival cannibalism. Among the most popular narratives were the few that entailed actual cannibalism, famous among which were the stories of the Peggy (1765), the raft of the Medusa (1816) and the Frances Mary (1826). What is notable, however, is the regularity with which the possibility of cannibalism is discussed in those narratives in which it does not occur.

In order to set aside the question Mackay believed was foremost in his readers' minds, he addressed cannibalism peremptorily when recounting the very first day of their travail: ‘I confess it was my intention, as well as that of the rest, to prolong my existence by the only means that seemed likely to occur, eating the flesh of any whose life might terminate before my own.’ Fortunately, it never came to that.

He makes another revealing concession to his readers' expectations. ‘You will be surprised I do not mention leather; but none of us wore shoes at the time the ship went down.’ It was conventional for castaways, from the seventeenth century on, to chew or even to boil and attempt to eat their leather shoes. This signally unrewarding practice must have been kept alive in anecdote and narrative, for it never did castaways anything but symbolic good.

In the days that followed, the surviving crew set about building a ramshackle raft from the fore yard, sprit sail yard and some small spars. A desperate scramble ensued to get aboard the rickety vessel. This was an age before ‘women and children first’ and before captains were expected to be the last to leave their ships. Captain Bremner was among those who pushed his way forward.

To restore order and prevent the increasingly overloaded raft from sinking, Mackay volunteered to remain in the Juno's rigging, convincing another officer, Mr Ward, to do the same. This was presumably an expression of the ‘manly fortitude’ his eulogists had in mind. The raft headed off, purportedly in the direction of the Arakan coast.

Perhaps more uncanny than the situation of the half-sunk Juno is the fact that two days later, on the morning of 27 June, having utterly lost their bearings and having paddled, and then drifted for miles, the raft approached the wreck on the opposite quarter from which they had set out. Even taking currents into consideration, it is impossible to calculate the odds that two vessels drifting directionless across the Bay of Bengal would encounter one another by chance. Those aboard quit the raft and climbed back into the rigging, joining a decreasing number of starving and exhausted castaways. One can only imagine the thoughts of Mrs Bremner when she was reunited with her husband after she had been left clinging to the rigging when he departed.

Mackay's narrative suggests familiarity with the genre in another respect. As had become conventional in shipwreck narratives, he represents horror metonymically and elaborates ‘affecting scenes’ intended to encourage his readers' moral reflection and to instruct them in the ways of the sympathetic imagination.12

An instance of a metonym is his portrait of a Lascar's corpse. The sailor had died, not far from Mackay's position in the rigging, suspended in the catharpings just under the mizzen top. Despite various efforts no one who was nearby was able to dislodge the body so that it would fall into the sea. It bloated in the hot sun and the stench became ‘intolerable’.

This putrefaction stands out in an otherwise decorous, restrained narrative. It is the only instance where Mackay represents remains explicitly or any details of decomposition. He does so for good reason. First, the Lascar stands for the cadaverization of all those in the rigging. He bears a representational burden: his rotting body combines the castaways' dreadful circumstance and their likely fate. Second, the corpse signals how, in their wretched situation, death had become uncontained and unmanageable. Eighteenth-century sailors, who were routinely subjected to scurvy, dysentery, battle and accident, were on intimate terms with well recognized occupational forms of death. This intimacy, combined with the reactionary superstitions of sailors, meant that they were committed to rituals intended to keep corpses at bay; which ensured that the dead and their spirits would remain submerged beneath the province of the living.13 Burial at sea commonly entailed a corpse being stitched into a weighted canvas shroud and the needle passed through the nose at the last (precautionary) stitch. The Lascar decomposing above the water stands for the failure in shipwreck of a system for organizing the experience of death and its relation to the living.

The most notable ‘affecting scene’ in Mackay's narrative unfolds after the poignant passing of the hallucinated captain in Mrs Bremner's arms. It describes the death of two young crew members, Mr Wade's ‘boy’ (that is, servant) and another youth, and the responses of their respective fathers. Mackay points out that Mr Wade's boy, ‘a stout and healthy lad, died early, and almost without a groan’, whereas the other boy of the same age, who had ‘a less promising appearance, held out longer’. The father of the first to die treated the suffering of his child with relative indifference, saying ‘he could do nothing for him’. The second father, hearing that his son was ailing, hurried down from the foretop, waited for a moment until the waves abated a little, and crawled on all fours along the weather gunwale to his child, who was tied to the mizzen rigging. He carried his son to the only small section of the quarterdeck still above the water – three or four planks – secured him to the rail, and held him above the waves, comforting the boy as he retched convulsively. Whenever it rained, the father would gather water, and pour it into his son's mouth. The two remained thus for three or four days until the son expired. The father lifted his child's body, ‘gazed wistfully at it, and when he could no longer entertain any doubt, watched it in silence till it was carried off by the sea’. Unable to leave his son's place of passing, the father wrapped himself in canvas and lay down, shivering for two days before following his son into death.14

For a modern readership the conviction expressed in the tableau of a man holding the dying boy to his breast, registers as sentimental and its contrast with the indifferent ‘bad father’ as laboured didacticism. In the period in question it was very different.

In his An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), the Enlightenment philosopher John Locke regards the self as constituted in its perceptions.15 First among those perceptions is the cognitive apprehension of the world around us. But cognition is hollow (even potentially dangerous) if we do not identify with – and feel for – others. Since the self is constituted incrementally by its perceptions, it is incumbent upon us to refine, as far as possible, what we think and feel. The highest refinement occurs when our thoughts and emotions are selfless, when they are orientated towards the needs of others. For Locke, and the Moral Sense philosophers who elaborated his ideas, the root of moral apprehension, and ultimately ethics, exists in our capacity for sympathy.

The word ‘sentiment’ only became associated with the negative connotation of ‘sentimentality’ by the end of the eighteenth century. Before then it suggested a rational reflection on human conduct in which a person considered what was right and wrong, and was moved by goodness and repulsed by turpitude. A sentiment combined head and heart. ‘Affecting scenes’, intended to address this combination of intellect and affect, became routine, and then clichés by the nineteenth-century; sentiment in its more august sense was gradually displaced by sentimentality, in the mawkish sense that both words generally carry today.

In Mackay's account the parable of the two fathers suggests that love is an articulate counterpoint to the inchoate cries and lamentations of those stranded in the rigging. Set against the clamorous despair of the fearful, the ‘good father's’ vigil, his mourning and resigned death articulate a moral composure and an unflinching self-abnegation. His own life matters to him altogether less than that of his son.

Struggling to set the scale of the disaster against a counterweight of moral prospect, Mackay is therefore resorting to the conventions of the contemporary shipwreck genre. When a world is torn apart, in what does hope consist? When all is lost what is the best we can be? Faced with the enormity of these questions, Mackay's response is, conventionally, to resort to pathos: a parable of the significance of the sympathetic imagination intended to affect his readers, moving them to clarified insight.

This was in no way artificial, since he did not have belletristic ambitions and never intended his Narrative to be read widely. Its abiding power derives, not from its formal poise or stylistic refinement, but from Mackay's struggle to find words and images to capture an indescribable terror and to come to terms with its imponderable moral implications.

The Juno drifted, half-submerged, for 23 days. Mackay could not remember the last few of these. He recounts only the sounds of agony, the cries of the dying, the pangs of hunger, the daily cycle of excruciating heat and ghastly darkness, and the occasional relief of rainstorms. Of those initially left hanging on for their lives, more than two-thirds succumbed.

On the twenty-third day, one of the Lascars saw land on the horizon. By this stage Mackay was ‘incapable of any acute sensation’ and, fearing the promise of false hope, refused even to acknowledge the possibility. What threatened to be a mirage, though, turned out to be the Arakan coast. All that Mackay could discern was a line of jungle and he feared, as all shipwreck survivors of the eighteenth century did, that, if they landed, they would ‘be torn to pieces by the tygers’.16

Following a dangerous disembarkation from the ship, which had washed onto a treacherous reef, the party set off in the direction of the Company station, which they estimated to be only a few days' distant. Fearing he would fall behind because of his deteriorated condition – and following Mrs Bremner's example – Mackay sought to hire the lascars to carry him on a litter. Much to his irritation, and despite his entreaties, they refused and he berates them through the remainder of the narrative for their insensitivity to his well-being.

Stumbling behind the party, struggling to keep up, a disconsolate Mackay was befriended and assisted by a group of the Arakanese, the so-called ‘Muggs’. His account echoes Matthew 25:35: ‘For I was hungry, and you fed me … Naked and ye clothed me’. The ‘Muggs’ fed him ‘the best victuals’ they had, reassured him of his safety and guided him in a manner that minimized danger from ‘tygers’. A ‘humane stranger’ (the ‘Chief of the Muggs’),17 in a Christ-like gesture, washed Mackay's wounds, and rubbed them with ghee, ‘by which they were soon healed’. ‘I was so much affected with his kindness,’ he recounts, ‘that I could hardly bid him adieu: after recommending me to the blessed Virgin, he hurried me away, that I might arrive before night at a hut two miles further on’. The chief then ran after Mackay, presenting him with a pair of trousers, ‘which he desired me to put on before I reached Ramoo, that my feelings might not be hurt by appearing there without clothes’. Mackay was deeply moved. ‘At this fresh instance of his goodness I burst into tears; I could not thank him: once more we took an affectionate leave of each other, and I pursued my journey in high spirits’.

Refreshed by this profound encounter; Mackay caught up with the party again and continued towards the Company station. They were detained for a brief period by a local zemindar who feared reprisals because the Juno, which was wrecked in his territory, had been plundered. But as soon as Company officials heard of the ship's fate and the whereabouts of its crew, they despatched a boat, which ferried all of the registered employees back to the safety of the station. In a surprising entrepreneurial twist, Mackay immediately set about securing a boat to salvage the wood and copper from the wreck. This he did successfully, selling it back to the Company at ‘a good rate’.18

Only 14 people, including Captain Bremner's wife and her maid, survived the Juno ordeal. We know from The Scottish Nation that Mackay resumed a mariner's life directly. He was despatched by the Company to the Red Sea, now as captain of a brig. His career was to be tragically short-lived. He died in Kolkata, reportedly aged 22, of a liver ailment which his doctors ascribed to the 23 days of deprivation and wretchedness spent in the rigging of the Juno as it drifted in the Bay of Bengal.19

Mackay was haunted by those days on the Juno and delayed the composition of his narrative for two years. ‘When I have attempted it, I generally found myself so much agitated by the painful recollection that I have been unable to proceed.’ At his father's insistence he eventually succeeded in writing his account as a series of letters from Portsmouth in November 1797, when he was on leave from overseas duty. He authorized his father to seek publication only if he thought the narrative worthy. The letters were soon handed to an editor, who collated them, but who otherwise approached the manuscript with an unobtrusive hand. He is satisfied, he tells us in his introduction, ‘that even at the hazard of suffering some inaccuracies to remain, the peculiarities with which the language of the writer is tinctured by his profession and situation ought to be preserved, that it may be an exact image of his mind, and even of his feelings, at the time, and that the slightest suspicion may not be entertained of any addition or misrepresentation of fact’.20

This faith, that an author's apprehension and voice are captured in a work, has been disputed by postmodern philosophy. This manifests itself in the glib citation of Roland Barthes's formulation, ‘the death of the author’.21 He argues that the constitutive role of language, codes and generic conventions, means that individual subjectivity – or the identity of an individual – is not that in which a text expresses itself or within which it coheres.

This reduction of writing to the structures in which its meaning originates has been disputed on different grounds. Michel Foucault, the most persuasive theorist of discursive constructivism, argues that, even if it is the case that subjectivity and discourse derive from systems of differentiation, judgements of composition, reading and critique proceed on the assumption of authorial integrity.22 The ways we make sense of texts is through locating them in an imagined, originating subjectivity. In Foucault's view, it is naive to reject our traditional sense of authorship, as well as the authority we accord experience, particularly suffering, for we proceed on this basis. Given this lingering, assumed presence, Barthes's announcement of the death of the author was premature and arguably more an expression of fashion than argument.

Other philosophers also concerned with the relation between structure and agency, have arrived at less melodramatic conclusions. Michel de Certeau provides an example.23 He argues that we do indeed inhabit structures of meaning, but in their complex possibilities they resemble a city which each of us navigates. Each act of writing entails developing a pathway: selecting elements, combining them, manipulating the options available to us, improvising on a range of possibilities as if on a journey. Agency, in this understanding, may be limited, proscribed and prudential, but it is arguably sufficient to leave the irreducible mark of a human subject in the act of writing.

We read Mackay's memoir, not only for the spectacular details of his preservation, but with the understanding that he himself has survived in it; that the text – entrusted in the first place to the care of his (good) father – bears him into the future.

This claim does not reiterate a naïve metaphysics of presence. We read the Narrative as if the events it recounts cohered in his mind at the time of composition. We are aware that Mackay used the popular literary repertoire as his disposal to make sense of a catastrophic event in his past. Yet he remains vivid in the trace of his navigation.

Since the restoration of Mackay's grave in 1978, the climate and vegetation have continued their work: its plaster is cracking, seedlings have taken root and, near its top, a branch of the tree that provides him shade has etched its way through to the brickwork. Along with the loss of the original epitaph, the scene declaims the futility of trusting memory to writing in stone. Whatever our intentions, the world does its work.

Mackay's grave is in the only named avenue in the cemetery, ‘Derozio Way’. It is named for Henry Louis Derozio (1809–31), a poet, teacher and philosopher buried just a stone's throw from the ship's captain. His biographer, Rosinka Chauduri, describes Derozio as one of the first educationalists to disseminate Western philosophy and learning among the young men of Bengal, and as probably the first to articulate specifically Indian preoccupations in a nineteenth-century English poetic idiom.24 Expressing his cosmopolitan convictions in poetry and prose, he stitched together his versions of India and Europe.

Derozio's commitment to English verse derived signally from his preoccupation with the urbane, controversial George Gordon, Lord Byron, whose influence is conspicuous across his oeuvre. On 26 December 1825, in his most explicit homage to Byron, Derozio published the first of four instalments of Don Juanics in the India Gazette under the nom de plume ‘Juvenis’. They combine into a long, somewhat uneven, poem satirizing Kolkata life. It is based throughout on the metre and structure of Byron's Don Juan.

In the second canto of his mock-heroic epic, Byron recounts his hero's shipwreck. He attributed his portrayal, in part, to his grandfather's shipwreck narrative.25 The Hon. John Byron (‘Foul-Weather Jack’, as he was later known) was a midshipman when the Wager, a supply ship in Anson's Pacific expedition, was wrecked on the Patagonian coast of Chile in April of 1741. He only published his version of events 27 years later in 1768, after he had been a captain for two decades. His account was composed with an earlier narrative to hand: that written by the ship's gunner, John Bulkeley, and her carpenter, John Cummins, with the benign title, A Voyage to the South Seas in the Years 1740–1, published in 1743.26 Although the two narratives generally concur in their representation of events, Philip Edwards points out that Bulkeley's – which is a clipped chronological account in the style of a ship's log – needs to be read as his envisaged defence against the accusations of mutiny which he expected that he, Cummins and the others would face should they reach England.27 Byron, on the other hand, accuses the warrant officers of mutiny, justifying his loyalty to David Cheap (the commander, following Captain Kidd's death), with whom he remained when the crew sailed north in the converted longboat through the Straits of Magellan under Bulkeley's leadership.

Yet apart from Byron senior's narrative, Don Juan incorporates another, rendering Mackay's ‘two fathers’ vignette in four perfectly poised stanzas. They begin:

There were two fathers in this ghastly crew,

And with them their two sons, of whom the one Was more robust and hardy to the view,

But he died early; and when he was gone,

His nearest messmate told his sire, who threw

One glance on him, and said, ‘Heaven's will be done!

I can do nothing,’ and saw him thrown

Into the deep without a tear or groan.

The scene concludes with the ‘good father's’ mourning.

The boy expired—the father held the clay,

And look'd upon it long, and when at last

Death held no doubt, and the dead burthen lay Stiff on his heart, and pulse and hope were past,

He watched it wistfully, until away

Twas borne by the rude wave wherein 'twas cast;

Then he himself sunk down all dumb and shivering,

And gave no sign of life, save his limbs quivering.28

In the midst of Byron's satirical poem, this scene reflects his sincere veneration of compassion. While, elsewhere in Don Juan, he lambasts his contemporaries with parodic flourishes and heaps scorn on despots, here Byron applauds moral acuity. His portrait of the two fathers not only transforms into poetry the sequence of details from Mackay's narrative, it also reiterates its moral logic. The selflessness of the father's mourning and his gentle disposition of his son's corpse stand in counterpoint to all those who act without recognizing our common humanity. In a world torn apart – by wreck, turpitude, corruption, hubris or selfishness – this portrait of the sympathetic imagination is a beacon.

It is impossible to establish whether Derozio knew that he was to be buried close to the original author of a centrepiece in Byron's poem, which he would emulate. His choice of graveyard was a conscious choice to associate in death with the English, but he was probably unaware of this deeper, oblique connection.

While Mackay considers his narrative to be a modest guide to self-preservation during shipwreck, he presents an example of a more subtle survival. Stranded in the mizzen rigging and wandering along the Arakan coast, he remembered a community of writers who had described related extremities. He wove traces of these texts into his account. At the same time, in addressing himself to his readers, he confirms their membership of a constituency with discernible preoccupations. Mackay sees himself engaged in a conversation begun long before. He is an interlocutor, speaking simultaneously of his forebears and to his contemporary public.

His Narrative, in turn, has left a trace of his experience and its archive across other texts. While the ambitions of those who inscribed his tomb, and those of his editor – that Mackay's account would bring future generations into his unmitigated presence – could never be realized, a certain survival has been achieved. Texts travel through time, often half-submerged, bearing aloft the life of the word.

The survival of authors in and through texts is partial and faltering. Mackay's epitaph, for instance, implies that he was only 13 when the Juno was wrecked, which contradicts logic – he could not have been a second mate at that age – as well as the biographical note asserting that he was 16 when he went to sea. Either the epitaph was incorrectly engraved to begin with or it was erroneously transcribed. The biography written by Mr Moore is lost.

The relations among texts amount to a muddle of influence, misinterpretation, error and silence. Yet even these starless journeys of meaning, and the traces of being they leave in their wake, may be more dependable than bricks, plaster or marble.

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Michael Titlestad

Michael Titlestad is an associate professor in the Department of English at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. He is a critic, essayist and editor, concerned primarily with maritime literature.

Notes

1 Keay, The Honourable Company, 162–6. I thank the anonymous referees for their helpful comments and suggestions.

2 Kapur, The South Park Street Cemetery, Calcutta 5th edn (Kolkata, 2009), 8.

3 Ibid., 9.

4 The Bengal Obituary, 88.

5 Anderson, The Scottish Nation, 8.

6 Ibid., 9

7 Extracts from Mackay, Narrative of the Shipwreck of the Juno, 3, 4 and 5.

8 Lamb, Preserving the Self, 9.

9 Ibid., 165.

10 Extracts from Mackay, Narrative of the Shipwreck of the Juno, 5, 6, 7, 9 and 11.

11 Thompson, The Suffering Traveller, 5–11.

12 Extracts from Mackay, Narrative of the Shipwreck of the Juno, 9, 17, 18.

13 D. J. Stewart, ‘Burial at Sea’, 276–85.

14 Extracts from Mackay, Narrative of the Shipwreck of the Juno, 20 and 21.

15 Locke, An Essay on Human Understanding.

16 Extracts from Mackay, Narrative of the Shipwreck of the Juno, 22 and 26.

17 Ibid., 41.

18 Extracts from Mackay, Narrative of the Shipwreck of the Juno, 42 and 54.

19 Anderson, The Scottish Nation, 9.

20 Mackay, Narrative of the Shipwreck of the Juno, 1 and iv.

21 Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, 142–8.

22 Foucault, ‘What is an Author?’, 101–20.

23 de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life.

24 Derozio, Derozio, Poet of India.

25 Byron, The Narrative of the Honourable John Byron.

26 Bulkeley and Cummins, A Voyage to the South Seas.

27 Edwards, The Story of the Voyage; see, in particular, ‘The Wreck of the Wager’, 52–79.

28 Quennell, Byron, 432–3.