The Letter of Marque
A paradise built in hell, with a digression on Gnosticism
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Thomas Cochrane, 10th Earl of Dundonald, Marquess of Maranhão, is the real-life model for Jack Aubrey, not only for his astonishing war record, but for the political scandal in which he was embroiled when he was convicted of taking part in the Great Stock Exchange Fraud of 1814. Like Jack, he maintained his innocence throughout his life; he was permanently embittered by the experience, however, even though he was eventually restored to the Navy List, promoted to rear admiral, and had a distinguished post-Royal Navy career as an admiral fighting for the independence of Chile, Brazil, and Greece. Cochrane was also the model for C.S. Forrester’s Horatio Hornblower, who partakes much more of what one historian has described as Cochrane’s “suspicious and uneasy personality.” It was O’Brian’s genius to divide Cochrane’s character between Jack, the perpetually sunny, good-hearted sea captain, and Stephen, the suspicious and uneasy warrior for the independence of colonized nations.
Both men begin The Letter of Marque in surpassingly uneasy situations, all but fatally wounded in their self-images by the perfidy of Andrew Wray. Captain Aubrey is now Mr. Aubrey, a private citizen in command of the no-longer H.M.S. Surprise, a vessel that has been issued a letter of marque licensing it to take, sink, burn, or destroy the ships of nations with which Britain is at war. Jack’s qualities as a commander mean that he has no problem attracting the ablest seaman afloat, without any need to impress them or accept the leavings of local jails. He no longer has to worry about Naval bureaucracy, or the whims of admirals, or the incompetence of subordinates he did not choose. But these benefits mean nothing to him. Stripped of his identity as a Royal Navy post captain, he is all but dead inside: “It might have been said that Jack Aubrey’s heart had been sealed off, so that he could accept his misfortune without its breaking; and that the sealing-off had turned him into a eunuch as far as emotion was concerned.”
Stephen’s condition is not much better, since Diana left him for his supposed infidelity and took off to Sweden with Jagiello, where she is apparently making a living leading balloon expeditions. His friend Sir Joseph Blaine reluctantly reveals to him a promotional flyer exhibiting his wife’s new profession:
The picture showed a blue balloon among billowing clouds, surrounded by large red birds, perhaps eagles; in the balloon basket a woman with yellow hair and red cheeks, mounted on a blue horse, held out stiff British and Swedish flags: and from the exclamatory text below leapt the name Diana Villiers, three times repeated in capital letters, with points of admiration fore and aft. That was the name he had first known her by, and Diana Villiers was what he usually called her in his own mind, for their marriage aboard a man-of-war, with never a priest in sight, had convinced him no more than it had convinced her.
Stephen is forced to confront the fact that their marriage has been something of a sham. He finds himself once again in the position of the speaker of W.H. Auden’s “The More Loving One”:
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.
In their different ways, both Jack and Stephen are confronted by the “total dark sublime” of a universe seemingly indifferent to their fondest hopes and ideals. Their saving grace lies not only in their being the characters of a loving author, but in the Surprise itself as a near-utopia. To borrow the title of Rebecca Solnit’s book, theirs is a paradise built in hell, an extraordinary community arising from disaster.
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Here in Shelmerston, on the other hand, the Surprise might have been fitting out in Paradise.
The fictional port of Shelmerston provides a number of the ship’s able seamen, many of whom prove to be Sethians, a Gnostic sect with some peculiar notions of theology. Their tenets are helpfully explained by Nathaniel Martin, the one-eyed parson shipping this time not as a man of the cloth but as surgeon’s mate:
Well, sir, they descend from the Valentinian Gnostics, but the descent is so long, remote and obscure that there would be little point in tracing it. In their present form they are small independent communities with I believe no governing body; but it is difficult to be sure of that, since they were in danger of persecution as heretics for so long that they are naturally reserved; and there is still something of the air of a secret society about them. They believe that Cain and Abel were brought into being by angels, whereas Seth, who, as you will recall, was born after Abel’s murder, was the Almighty’s direct pure creation, and not only the ancestor of Abraham and all men now living, but the prototype of our Lord. They have the utmost veneration for him, and believe he watches over Sethians with particular care. But they have little opinion of angels, holding that by their – how shall I express it? – that by their mutual impurities they brought about Noah’s flood. This should have wiped out their descendants, but some crept into the ark; and they, not Seth, are the ancestors of the wicked.
There’s no way to explain gnosticism in a sentence, but I will reduce it as far as I can: in their quest for an ideal theodicy—to justify the ways of God to man—Gnostics believe that the querulous God of the Hebrew Bible, the creator of the material universe, is an evil demiurge, and the real God stands as it were behind the curtain, and it’s our job to get back to Him by means of gnosis or occult knowledge of reality. Now this of course raises the question as to why O’Brian has inserted a fictional gang of Valentinian Gnostics into the novel that brings Jack and Stephen to one of the lowest possible points in their professional and romantic careers. Put another way: what have the Sethians to do with the paradoxical paradise of the Surprise?
The Gnostics believe they live in a fallen world, a world of illusion; so too do Jack and Stephen, who have been forced into a state of spiritual exile—Stephen by his alienation from Diana, Jack by his alienation from the Royal Navy. Stephen, as an intelligence agent, operates with and by occult knowledge—his connections enable him to secure special documents protecting the private man o’ war’s men from impressment, and to a lesser degree protecting Jack from humiliation at the hands of cruel or thoughtless Naval officers. And Jack in his innocence and remarkable luck is a bit like Seth, who extends that luck and innocence to the sailors with whom he has something of a paternal relationship. Outcast from the Navy, and with the Surprise “shorn of pennant, gold lace, Royal Marines, and many other things” Jack is nonetheless determined that “things should still be run man-of-war fashion.” He does rather better than that—the Surprise as privateer turns out to be its most joyful incarnation.
After a remarkably successful mission to capture an American privateer and its many prizes—a mission that puts Jack Aubrey beyond the range of material want—he has a confrontation with the ship’s Sethians, who have painted the name “Seth” on the side of the Surprise. “What in the Devil’s — what in Heaven’s name induced you to paint Seth on the ship’s side?” Jack cannot afford to alienate some of his best men, but neither can he abide this very un-Naval graffito. His solution is rather elegant. Arguing that the name makes the Surprise too recognizable, and thus less effective as a privateer, he tells the Sethians that “The name must go.”
“No, no,” he went on, seeing their lowering and dogged look, “I do not mean it must be scraped out, nor painted out, nor even touched. We will cover it with a piece of fine sailcloth as we did when we were running down to St. Michael’s: then maybe we will paint the sailcloth over in case of foul weather; but the name will still be there. So the influence will still be there. After all, it was there when we were painted blue.”
The Sethians agree to this, as well they might. Is it not entirely in the Gnostic spirit that their sign of enlightened grace be hidden from profane eyes?
One of the more remarkably utopian qualities of the Surprise is the sheer diversity of religions embraced by its remarkably harmonious crew:
“That ship,” observed Martin, “contains a surprising number of beliefs. No doubt others of her size contain as many, but surely not quite so various, for I must confess that although I was prepared for Gnostics, Anabaptists, Sethians, Muggletonians and even those who follow Joanna Southcott, as well as the odd Jew or Mahometan, I was quite taken aback to find we have a Devil-worshipper aboard.”
The Devil-worshipper is the Captain’s cook, a Dasni or Yazidi, who in Martin’s account believes that “God forgave the fallen Satan and restored him to his place. In their view it is therefore the Devil who rules as far as worldly matters are concerned, so it would be a waste of time to worship anyone else.” While this is a gross simplification of actual Yazidism (practitioners have suffered terrible persecution), it does in the context of the novel suggest something of a sly joke on Aubrey’s status as a high-ranking “fallen angel” who will indeed, like his model Cochrane, eventually be restored to his station.
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As for Stephen, he too will be restored to grace after his time in the wilderness, and by mysterious means. Self-medicating with opium to ease his heartbreak over Diana, Stephen does not realize that his Irish servant Padeen has also become addicted, and has been stealing Stephen’s laudanum, topping off the bottle with brandy to conceal the theft. The more Padeen takes, the less real laudanum is in the bottle; as a result, Stephen is unknowingly weaned from his addiction over the course of the novel. This puts him on a different path than the one he followed in The Mauritius Command, where his flight from emotional pain threatened to end his interest in living altogether. In the novel’s last chapters, he heads to Sweden where Diana is living, ostensibly to return to her the Blue Peter, but hoping against hope that she might take him back—that their marriage might resume upon a truer footing. There he acquires a fresh supply of laudanum, and, to prepare with the confrontation with Diana, takes his usual thousand-drop dose—twice.
It very nearly kills him, in the form, significantly, of a fall: climbing a tower near Diana’s home, so as to get a glimpse of the landscape in a form similar to what she sees from her balloon, he loses consciousness and tumbles down the stairs, breaking the bottle in his pocket in the process. He is precipitated into a vivid dream of ballooning with Diana, riding high in the infinite blue, watching her in contemplation of her diamond. When he finally comes to, the real Diana is watching over him, nursing him, caring for him as she’s never done before. But he is still in danger from his overdose. The dream returns as a nightmare:
But now there was this evil balloon again, and now he was living with time in the sense of duration once more, for he knew with dreadful certainty that they had been rising for hours on end, that they were now rising faster still. And as they soared towards this absolute purity of sky so its imminent threat, half-perceived at first, filled him with a horror beyond anything he had known. Diana was wearing her green coat again and at some point she must have turned up the collar, for now its red underneath made a shocking contrast with the extreme pallor of her face, the pinched white of her nose and the frosted blue of her lips. Her face showed no expression – she was, as it were, completely alone – and as she had done before she held her head down, bowed over her lap, where her hands, now more loosely clasped, held the diamond, very like a sliver of this brilliant sky itself.
In spite of this ominous vision of Diana’s death, the end of The Letter of Marque is happy as can be. Diana is infinitely touched, not only by Stephen’s new vulnerability but by the restoration of her diamond, which once again functions as a peculiar symbol of her own personal sovereignty. By restoring it to her, Stephen grants her the agency and personhood that she as an early-nineteenth century woman can otherwise only obtain by feats of derring-do, such as ballooning to dangerous heights or driving her carriage far too fast. He is telling her, in effect, that she can be married to him and still be her own woman. And so, in the novel’s final paragraph, i Stephen’s cabin on the Surprise, she enthusiastically reclaims her domestic title when challenged by a ship’s officer:
‘I am his wife, sir,’ she said, ‘and I beg you will desire the carpenter to sling a cot for me here.’ She pointed, and then bending and peering out of the scuttle she cried, ‘Here they are. Pray let people stand by to help him aboard: he will be lying on a door.’ She urged West out of the cabin and on deck, and there he and the amazed foremast-hands saw a blue and gold coach and four, escorted by a troop of cavalry in mauve coats with silver facings, driving slowly along the quay with their captain and a Swedish officer on the box, their surgeon and his mate leaning out of the windows, and all of them, now joined by the lady on deck, singing Ah tutti contenti saremo cosí, ah tutti contenti saremo, saremo cosí with surprisingly melodious full-throated happiness.
The “total dark sublime” has been postponed a little longer.
