10 July: Boreham on Frederick Marryat

The Tales A Sailor Tells
The art of spinning a yarn is one of the time-honoured traditions of the sea. Every sailor recognises it as an integral part of his maritime craft. As with everything else, some do it better than others, and, since the world began, no sailor has done it quite as skilfully as Capt. Frederick Marryat, whose birthday we mark today.

He could write the stories of the sea so attractively as to make a huge fortune out of his novels, and in the process he set a standard of excellence that has been both the inspiration and the despair of subsequent writers.

Fortune favoured him from the first. His boyhood was spent in a period of naval splendour. He was six when Nelson destroyed the French fleet at the Battle of the Nile; he was nine at the time of the Battle of the Baltic; and he was 13 when, in a blaze of glory, his hero laid down his life in the epic victory of Trafalgar. The boy, who had been straining at the leash during this era of tense excitement, joined the Navy at 14, and, in the career that followed, saw as much action, faced as many dangers, and experienced as many thrills as any man could possibly desire.

He was exceedingly popular as a midshipman and as a commander. He was decorated for conspicuous bravery; he invented an ingenious code of signals; he kept watch over Napoleon at St. Helena; and on his retirement from the sea, was honoured by the King with the Companionship of the Bath.

It should not be difficult for any man whose mind was stored with such a galaxy of stirring and momentous memories to write a few tales of adventure. Marryat found it fairly easy. He reeled off book after book, revelling in the wealth and in the fame that his successes laid at his feet.

Advantage Of Breaking Virgin Soil
His literary triumph can be accounted for on two grounds. To begin with, he struck a new vein. The romance of the sea can be effectively unfolded only by a sailor, and few sailors have very much patience with their pens. Marryat was the exception. At the age of 37, after 23 years in the Navy, he made up his mind to pour his experiences into paper. He wrote "Frank Mildmay." The initials, be it noted, are his own. Because of this, everybody jumped to the conclusion that the book was really his autobiography. The assumption embarrassed him, for he had attributed to his hero vices to which he himself had never stooped. He indignantly assured his friends that, if he had been guilty of such misdemeanours, he would at least have had the decency to keep quiet about it.

The second reason for his success lay in the fact that, whether Frank Mildmay was, or was not, a venture in self-portraiture, his own life-story, afloat and ashore, was so colourful and adventurous as to supply him with all the incidents that he could possibly desire. He had but to ransack his own memory and his pages became as vivid as a gallery of paintings.

In spite of the brilliance of his achievement, however, Marryat was not a happy man. Like many distinguished authors, he was eccentric. He was absurdly fastidious in matters of personal appearance. He would allow nothing but white china on his breakfast table. He had 16 clocks in different parts of the house, and he flew into a violent passion if one of them struck while the others were silent. The chiming and striking of the entire battery of chronometers had to synchronise with mathematical exactitude, or his anger knew no bounds. An intensely passionate man, he was choleric, querulous, and petulant to the last degree.

Man Of Fierce Enmities, Fast Friendships
He became intimate with princes of the blood and peers of the realm, but he invariably shattered the friendship in a fit of temper, on one occasion breaking a blood vessel in his insensate fury. He quarrelled with his wife, herself by no means sweet-tempered, after 11 children had been born to them, and then turned his back upon her for ever. "He was quick to take offence," his daughter admits in the course of her eulogy, "and it was difficult to say with whom he was friends and with whom he wasn't." Notwithstanding the enormous cheques he received for his manuscripts, he violently abused his publishers. "I, who have provided everything," he wrote, "receive a mere pittance, while you, who merely supply the shop in which the books are sold, receive the lion's share. It is downright slavery. I am Sinbad the Sailor, and you are the Old Man of the Sea clinging to my back."

Yet, peppery and overbearing as Marryat undoubtedly was, there must have been a kindlier and more engaging side to his vitriolic personality. He made a few friends—Dickens among them—and fastened them to himself with hoops of steel. They became wonderfully fond of him.

In his chapters on the friendships of Dickens, Forster gives pride of place to Marryat. Dickens, he tells us, was never so boisterously happy as when romping with children, and he goes on to say that, in this respect, Capt. Marryat was his only serious rival. Marryat, Forster says, displayed a frantic delight in dancing with the youngsters. He was, he adds, as fond of their frolics and enjoyments as it became so thoroughly good-hearted a man to be. And the biographer concludes his tribute with the remarkable assertion that, if a list were drawn up of the friends whom Dickens most loved, the name of Frederick Marryat would stand first.

In this more attractive setting we may take leave of him. He died very suddenly at the age of 56, leaving Dickens, who was 20 years younger, incalculably enriched by all that his sailor friend had taught him.

F W Boreham

Image: F Marryat