Cruising Toward Cannibals with Grant Allen

The Cruise of the Albatross;
   or, When was Wednesday the Tenth?
Grant Allen
Boston: Lothrop, 1898

I've never bothered with the stories in The Boy's Own Annual – the pictures are more than enough fun – but I imagine they read something like this very slight Grant Allen novella. Cannibals, slave traders and a powerful thirty-pound brass gun are just a few of its many attractions.

The Cruise of the Albatross begins aboard same with the sighting of a small boat bobbing in the Pacific Ocean.  Ship's captain Julian Braithwaite sets out for the lesser vessel and finds "two white-faced lads, apparently twelve or thirteen years old, dressed in loose blue cotton shirts and European trousers". The pair cling to life, but manage to convey that their missionary parents and siblings are captives of cannibals on the far off island of Tanaki. Barring an act of divine providence or earthly daring-do, all will feature in a feast to take place on "Wednesday the tenth".

Julian is a good man – he once risked his life to free forty or so kanakas from slavery – so it comes as no surprise when he sets course to save the boys' parents. The captain's brother figures they'll arrive just in time:

Jim took out a piece of paper and totted up a few figures carelessly on the back. "We've plenty of coal," he said, "and I reckon we can make nine knots an hour, if comes to a push, even against this head wind. To-day's the sixth; that gives us four clear days still to the good. At nine knots, we can do a run of two hundred and thirty-six knots a day. Four two-hundred-and-thirty-sixes is nine hundred and forty-four, isn't it? Let me see; four sixes is twenty-four, put down four and carry two; four three's is twelve, and two's fourteen; four three's is twelve, and four two's - year that's all right: nine hundred and forty-four, you see, exactly. Well, then look here Julian: unless Tanaki's further off than nine hundred and forty-four nautical miles, - which isn't likely – we ought to be there by twelve o'clock Wednesday, at latest.

Anyone familiar with adventure stories will recognize Jim's calculations as more than mere filler. Time is not only of the essence, it is central to both plot and plot twist. When Was Wednesday the Tenth? – the alternate title – gives away something of the latter. I'll go a bit further and spoil things for the well-read by revealing that the story's twist owes everything to Around the World in Eighty Days.

This is a late Victorian story, complete with heavy, politically incorrect steamer trunks and other musty baggage. Thus, Allen writes about the sensitive European nostril and sharp Polynesian eyes. When ship's boy Nassaline, speculates that the two boys had run away because they feared being eaten by their own kind, Julian responds:

It's my belief, Nassaline, we'll never make a civilized Christian creature of you, in a tall hat, and with a glass in your eye. You ain't cut out for it, somehow. How many times have I explained to you, boy, that Christians never cook and eat their enemies ? They only love them, and blow them up with Gatlinojs or Armstronos – a purely fraternal method of expressing slight differences of international opinion....  

I omitted to have remarked to him (as I might have done) that I hadn't seen such a painful sight before, since I saw the inhabitants of a French village in Lorraine – old men, young girls, and mothers with babies pressed against their breasts – flying, pell-mell, before the sudden onslaught of a hundred and fifty Christian Prussian Uhlans. These little peculiarities of our advanced civilization are best not mentioned to the heathen Polynesian.

Now, I find myself wondering. Would a passage such as this have made it into The Boys' Own Annual, a publication of the Religious Tract Society?

Object: An attractive, slim hardcover in olive green cloth, my copy was purchased for $20 last month from a London, Ontario bookseller. The front free endpaper is signed and dated by a Marion Allen. I've not been able to determine whether this lady was in any related to the author.

Access: Held by most universities, the public libraries serving Toronto and Kingston, the National Gallery of Canada Library, Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, but not Library and Archives Canada.

"An uncommon Allen title", claims one bookseller. Well... not really. More than three dozen can be bought online with Very Good copies going for under ten dollars. The print on demand folks have really moved in on this title, offering all sorts of ugliness at much higher prices.

More Marwood

Like the Oscar Peterson Trio, I get requests. Many come from those seeking information on the great Brian Moore or the tragic Maria Monk, but most concern Harriet Marwood, a woman who never existed. Was the English governess modelled on a real person? When, if ever, did she use a birch? How might I meet such a woman?

The most common query comes from folks hoping for more Harriet Marwood stories. For those with the hunger, I have very good news: the beautiful, brunette disciplinarian exists outside the pages of The English Governess and Harriet Marwood, Governess. We find her first in The Augean Stable, a 124-page, three-act play that Glassco composed in 1954. Unproduced and unpublished, you'll have to consult his papers at Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa to read this alternate, rather polite version of Harriet's romance with Richard Lovel.

Much more accessible is "The Black Helmet". Published in The Fatal Woman (Anansi, 1974) as one of "Three Tales by John Glassco", this is the novella that Glassco struggled with – forever revisiting and revising – for most of his 71 years. Here Harriet is mentioned frequently, if fleetingly, by her former charge, Philip Mairobert. In this passage, our hero recalls the the arrival of the governess at his family's estate in rural Quebec:

Today I will think of her as the person to whom I owed everything, not as a woman I loved – and think of my life here before she came, with no one but those two old servants in the twilight of dotage who were so terrified of me. I must have been like a wild animal then, with those fits of rage – screaming, biting, breaking things, rolling on the floor. I remember almost nothing of that time: it seemed to be mostly walking through these ruined gardens and in the woods where I set my ineffectual little traps for birds and rabbits, hoping to catch them alive. How desolate and wild a life! Yet when mother left to live in Paris for good, and Miss Marwood came, I was furious. I thought I would lose me freedom. Freedom! As if it ever mattered to me.

Well I lost it certainly – the child's freedom to be lonely, bored, idle, frightened. And I found, quite simply, happiness. A week after she arrived I could sleep without nightmares; and I had stopped stammering: I simply hadn't time! As for my rages, I really think she enjoyed them. as if they offered a challenge to her methods and muscles, to the very strength of her arm.

Though The Fatal Woman enjoyed just a single printing – likely 3000 copies – for a good many years it seemed quite common. No more. I note that only five, one a crummy library discard, are currently being offered by online booksellers.

Fans of the governess are advised not to hesitate. Strike now!

Trivial: The author's biography on The Fatal Woman errs in stating that Glassco won "the Governor-General's award [sic] for both poetry and non-fiction." In fact, he received only the former.

I'll step out on a limb here and say that Anansi's mistake is borne of a common misconception that Glassco won a Governor General's award for Memoirs of Montparnasse (his only "non-fiction" book). No Governor General's Award for Non-fiction was awarded for 1970, the year in which it was published.

Incredible, but true... and oddly appropriate.

Not trivial:

Cross-posted in a slightly altered form at A Gentleman of Pleasure – less flippant, more images.

Limited Time, Limited Editions (2/6)

No Man's Meat

Morley Callaghan

Paris: Edward W. Titus at the Sign of the Black Manikin, 1930

"I have had printed of this edition five hundred and twenty-five copies on Verge de Rives, of which five hundred copies for subscribers and twenty-five copies, numbered 501 to 525, for the press. The entire edition is signed by the author. This is no: 165 E.W.T."

I'm pretty sure that this is the first signed, numbered edition I ever bought. At the time I was writing for television – a daytime soap, if you must know – and felt pretty flush with cash. How flush? Well, I plunked down US$125 for this novella from Callaghan's summer in Paris.

It's that old familiar story. A husband and wife entertain a female friend. The guest ends up sleeping with the man to pay off a gambling debt. Everybody is unhappy... until the wife realizes that she's in love with her gal pal and the two run off together. Saturday night, Sunday morning.

The novella didn't appear in Canada until 1978 when Macmillan published it in No Man's Meat & The Enchanted Pimp. Its dust jacket makes for interesting reading:

...when No Man's Meat first appeared in 1931, its frank treatment of perverse sexuality [whoring? bisexuality?] made it unsuitable for a commercial house, and it was privately published in Paris by an avant-garde press. Since then the limited edition of four hundred copies [525, actually] has gained widespread fame by word of mouth. Its early notoriety has been softened by Edmund Wilson's description of the piece as "a small masterpiece", and the original edition as become an underground classic, changing hands for two hundred dollars and more.

Thirty-two years later, there are plenty of copies listed online for US$60 (US$35 without slipcase). How to explain its decline. The internet has certainly played a part, but I think the real blame lies with Macmillan. In making the novella more accessible, the new edition took away much of the mystery – No Man's Meat isn't nearly as risqué or quirky as the title suggests.

Stoddart re-resurrected the novella in 1990, but you'd never know it from their jacket copy, which implies that No Man's Meat is a new work. I believe it was the last book that Callaghan lived to see published.

Note: That's Titus not Tutis.

This:

Not this:

The Final Indignity

Further to yesterday's post:

Monarch was captured and brought to San Francisco in 1889 as part of a publicity stunt for William Randolph Hearst's Examiner, the "Monarch of the Dailies". His first four years in the city were spent in a cramped cage at an amusement park; it wasn't until 1894 that he was lowered into that concrete pit at Golden Gate Park. The bear lived over 22 years in captivity. After he died, Monarch was stuffed and mounted, and became part of a diorama replicating California's flag.

Today, the Bear Flag Republic has no bears, but you can still see Monarch – or what's left of him – at the California Academy of Sciences. Take the kids!

I wonder whether Delaware has a similar display for their flag.

Related posts:
Six More Cinders in the Eye
Magic Mushrooms and Bad, Bad Boys

Six More Cinders in the Eye

It wasn't until reading up on Bannertail that I learned of Japan's attraction to things Seton. This pales beside the idolization of our beloved Anne Shirley, of course, but it is out there... and has been for some time. Manga adaptations go back to the years preceding the Second World War; there's even a biography of the man, illustrated by the very talented Jiro Taniguchi. Anyone looking for further evidence that the Seton name holds weight in Japan need only consider the title of that horrendous cartoon featured in the previous post: Seton Animal Chronicles: Banner the Squirrel. It was just one of three Japanese animated series based on Seton's work.

The first, Seton Animal Chronicles: Jacky the Bearcub, was inspired by Monarch, the Big Bear of Tallac, a novella published by Charles Scribner's Sons in 1904. It's about a... Oh, why not let Seton's images carry the story.

Jacky, a bear cub, is orphaned after a hunter shoots his mother in the brain.

He's adopted by the hunter, who takes delight in his antics.

Jacky's sold to a crazy rancher who keeps him in chains.

He grows into adulthood, escapes, and feasts on lamb.

Shepherds fear Jacky, who they refer to as Monarch.

The hunter who adopted Jacky/Monarch all those years ago fails to capture him.

A second attempt is successful. The bear ends his days in captivity at Golden Gate Park, "seeking forever Freedom's Blue, seeking and raging – raging and seeking – back and forth, forever – in vain."

Monarch – or Jacky, if you prefer – did exist; that's him above. Though Seton took some liberties with the story of his early life, the bear lived his final years in a concrete pit, just as the author describes.

Everything is happier in Seton Animal Chronicles: Jacky the Bearcub because the bear never grows up. His fun filled days are spent with sister Jill, a Native American boy named Lan, and Lan's Grandpa Rocky (best not to dwell upon the incident in which Rocky killed Jacky and Jill's mother).

That third animated Seton series? Well, it appears to have been a grab bag of Seton stories, including a retelling of Monarch, the Big Bear of Tallac. The animation, a touch more sophisticated, depicts the author communing with his cartoon pals.

An aside: Remember that Miami bookseller who was selling all those print on demand copies of Bannertail? Well, he's listed a POD copy of Monarch, the Big Bear of Tallac at US$145.95. "Perfect Condition", he claims. I recommend the 106-year-old first edition, which is readily available for less than US$20.

Related posts:

Magic Mushrooms and Bad, Bad Boys

The Final Indignity

Bought for Its Beauty

The March of the White Guard

Gilbert Parker

New York: Ferro, 1902

Does it not seem appropriate that Gilbert Parker's true first name was Horatio? His was, after all, an Algeresque life. Here we have a man, the son of rural Ontario storekeeper, who rose to become one of England's most powerful MPs. Parker was knighted by Edward VII, received a baronetcy from George V and became a member of the Privy Council; all while penning novels and short stories that made him one of the popular writers of his day.

I don't know that I've ever met anyone who has read anything by Sir Gilbert. Perhaps my great-grandparents did... who knows where their libraries ended up. This copy of The March of the White Guard was purchased seven years ago in a Vancouver bookstore. The price – one dollar – tempted, but what sealed the deal were W.E.B. Starkweather's illustrations. Artwork extends beyond endpapers and plates to elements that decorate each page, making an otherwise bland read an enjoyable experience.

What an anonymous 1902 New York Times review describes as "a stirring tale of life and adventure in the Hudson Bay district" begins hundreds of miles to the west with the receipt of a letter addressed to the Chief Factor of Fort Providence. Rose Lepage writes in desperation that her husband, Varre, has gone missing while exploring the Barren Grounds. Enter contemplative sub-factor Jaspar Hume, who shows considerable character and bravery in agreeing to lead what seems a futile rescue party. The reader's estimation of Hume grows considerably after a lengthy monologue (below), which Hume addresses – uncharacteristically, we're told – to his faithful dog, Jacques.

The next morning Hume sets off with a crew of four misfits: slow Scotsman "Late" Carscallen, Métis Gaspé Toujours, the perpetually grunting Cloud-in-the-Sky and Jeff Hyde, the bully of Fort Providence. Together they are the White Guard; so named for their decision to dress in "white blanket costumes from head to foot".

The modern reader will wonder that this was ever considered appropriate attire for a northern rescue party. Sure enough, the panorama of snow, ice, sun and white blanket costumes overwhelms, bringing on snowblindness, and very nearly felling Hume.

Most of The March of the White Guard takes place north of the 61st parallel during deepest winter, a landscape and time rendered with considerable skill by the appropriately named Mr Starkweather. Strange then, that the cover features five dandelions. Are these in some way meant to represent the five members of the White Guard? Dying weeds shedding seeds? I just don't get it.

Access: Common and cheap, Very Good copies of the 1901 first edition – as above, but with tawny boards – can be had for under US$10.

It's been some time since I criticized the less than reputable online booksellers, and even longer since my last real swipe at print on demand folk. Against the spirit of the season, I offer the following observations.

The cover of the Dodo Press edition features a summertime scene in which two buckskin-wearing men stand in a deciduous forest, while that of Read How You Want reproduces a painting of an unidentified cardinal. Both are just as mysterious as Starkweather's (though I will acknowledge that Parker twice refers to Gaspé Toujours as a "Papist").

Sadly – and inexplicably – the always interesting firm of Tutis Digital Publishing does not include The March of the White Guard amongst its sixteen Parker titles. That said, their cover treatments of Sir Gilbert's other works do not fail to entertain. My favourite is Tutis Classics' Michel and Angele, a historical romance of two Huguenot lovers during the reign of Elizabeth I. (Over at Caustic Cover Critic, JRSM points to the company's use of the same image on a couple of Jack London books.)

Kessinger Publishing always plays it safe by slapping on covers reminiscent of a no name corn flakes box. The company couples The March of the White Guard with The Trespasser, presenting what is, in effect, the eighth volume of the 23-volume Works of Gilbert Parker. For US$65.17, an American bookseller will happily sell you a "Brand New", "Never Used" copy identical to that which Amazon lists for US$21.24.

Merry Christmas, ExtremelyReliable of Richmond, Texas.

Update: Martin W kindly points out that the "unidentified cardinal" on the cover of the Read How You Want edition is actually Pope Innocent X, as painted by Diego Velázquez.