Maria and the Admiral

by Rachel Billington

Genres: Historical Fiction

Synopsis

Valparaiso, June 1822. Thomas Cochrane has led the Chilean fleet to victory, and as the news spreads of the country's independence from Spain, a British woman, Maria Graham, watches from her house near Valparaiso Bay. A vivacious and clever young widow, her first thought as she contemplates her compatriot's arrival is that her loneliness has come to an end. Lauded in the press, and admired by Napoleon, Cochrane had long been at odds with the Admiralty, who failed to subdue his outspoken independence. In Maria Graham he meets a woman whose intelligence and spirit of adventure match his own.

Release date: May 10, 2012

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 364

Sample

One



I had thought of starting this story in my last years when my most constant companion was that dear little creature, the leech. Eleven years held captive in bed, or at least bedroom, is enough to try the patience of a saint and I was never that. Nor was I old at that time although, in the 1830s, to reach fifty years of age was old enough. I was famous, however, as a writer. So, looking backwards from age to youth, where should a writer start her story? At a high point of drama, perhaps.

Let me start, then, in a sailing ship attempting to make its way round Cape Horn, the most southerly and terrifying of all land masses. We are in the midst of a dark, boisterous sea, over us a dense, grey, cold sky. The albatross, stormy petrel and pintado are our companions. Below deck an even more dismal scene is being enacted, for both the captain of the ship and his trusty first lieutenant are dangerously, possibly mortally, sick.

I was that captain’s wife and the year was 1822. I had nursed my husband since we’d left Rio de Janeiro a month earlier when he was already ill, and had had scarcely a night’s sleep since then.

The barometer dropped lower and the weather worsened. After a terribly violent gale from the south-west, with snow and hail squalls, the sails were whitened and ice cased the rigging so that the men could not grip and fell to the deck, breaking heads or limbs.

Then there was a short respite. I may be forgiven, I hope, for quoting from my own journal:

I was glad today when the dead-lights were removed, to see the bright, blue, but still boisterous sea, spreading with ample waves curled with snowy tops, in the sunshine; it is many days since we have seen the sun and the white birds flying and chattering, or wrestling on the water, while the ship, like them, sometimes bravely mounts the very top of the wave and sometimes quietly subsides with it … A few minutes after noon, an iceberg was reported on the lee bow …

Soon after that the icy gales were back. The dead-lights were back, turning the cabins into fetid little caves of darkness. Nothing stayed where you put it. Bottles, boxes and plates, if you were fool enough to get them out, danced a mocking jig before hurtling to the floor. I was too experienced a sailor to fear the weather – I trusted the crew to save us from a watery grave. But, for my patients, another kind of death, torrid and pain-racked, beckoned. I did not describe the filthy odours, the disgusting fluids and putrid flesh. Or, worse still, the appeal of desperate eyes.

My journal was published in 1824 by John Murray, that estimable businessman and man of letters, who presented the world with so many travellers’ tales. As a woman I stood out, which made me proud but not popular. Members of the female sex were not expected to be independent. It was always my trouble, although hardly my fault.

After my death I was saddened, although not totally surprised, by an entry in my friend Lord Holland’s journal referring to myself: ‘Her works I have not read, but I believe they are unfeminine and abusive.’ You, who live in another age, cannot be expected to appreciate how easily notoriety can be acquired by any woman of spirit who breaks through the conventions of her time.

It may be clear by now that I am writing this document from beyond the grave. The grave is in Kensal Green Cemetery, London. This was a new and fashionable final destination when I was placed there in 1842. It was a pleasant, countrified place, which I had chosen for myself. Two years later my second husband, Sir Augustus Callcott, joined me. I have to confess, however, that I was surprised at the plainness of the stone slab laid above us – less surprised that it so quickly became derelict, vegetation obscuring the names of those buried therein. There were no children to tend it.

What goes round, comes round, and in 2008 my grave – our grave – became the centre of attention, the moss removed, a plaque applied. There was a little ceremony, the stone slab draped in a Chilean flag – I had not felt so warmed in years. Yet it was strange to be honoured in a country not your own. ‘A Friend of the nation of Chile,’ as the inscription on the plaque reads. Even though the traffic hurtled along Harrow Road, made noisier because a wall around the cemetery had crumbled into ruin, it was a dignified and even moving event, with the distinguished Chilean ambassador reading an encomium. Afterwards my admirers (if I may with modest accuracy call them that) were served drinks and what are now called ‘nibbles’, as if we were goats, in the Dissenters’ Chapel. I was never a Dissenter, of course, but modern life seems to take little care of religious propriety.

Cape Horn, you may know, which we left a page or so ago in turbulence and mortal fear, is, or was in 1822, the difficult and dangerous route to Chile. I am designated for ever a friend to Chile but only because of a noble person who was a friend to me. He, who is the main subject for this book, now lies in far greater state than I in Westminster Abbey.

Yet that ceremony of recognition for my own place in the history of a far-off country (with a descendant of John Murray present as well as other British dignitaries) gave me the idea of writing a true account of my life. Not my whole life, but the part that meant most to me. I did begin a memoir when I was still alive. We are back again to that old, but not very old, lady, sick, bored, lying in bed and dictating the story of her life to her good friend the Hon. Caroline Fox, Lord Holland’s sister. I always had grand connections wherever I found myself, which says more about the power of the intellectual – if merely a woman – than my breeding, although that was not insignificant. In Edinburgh, when scarcely more than a girl, I was known by my peers as ‘philosophy in muslin’. I was proud of the term then, but now I am not so sure for I see they were making fun at my expense.

But I am jumping around in the most addle-pated way, more with the disordered mind of an old person than that of the roving spirit I have become. The sublime poet and freedom fighter Lord Byron (a John Murray author, like myself) was wrong about that.

So we’ll go no more a-roving

So late into the night

Though the heart be still as loving

And the moon be still as bright.

He was a treasured acquaintance but we fell out over a small criticism I ventured. Small criticisms, I sometimes think, are taken hardest. Of course it did not lessen my lifelong admiration for his work.

My dictated memoir is a lively work, or so I thought when I reread it recently. It tells the story of Maria Dundas (‘Maria’ pronounced to rhyme with ‘pariah’), growing up in Papcastle near Cockermouth in Cumberland. My early childhood was happy enough; I was entertained by tales of smugglers, storms and shipwrecks when we were living by the sea, changing to ghosts and witches when we moved inland. We were a naval family so I seldom saw my father, Captain Dundas, until, when I was eight, he swept me away from everything I knew and took me to London. I never saw my beloved mother again – she was an American, who was known as the ‘Virginian Nightingale’ for the place of her birth and the sweetness of her voice.

Instead I was to be the poor relation in my uncle’s house in Richmond and in a school run by the two Miss Brights, daughters of the Reverend Bolingbroke Bright. It has the ring of fiction about it, as recent commentators have noted, the all-but-orphaned child, plain but clever, making her way in a harsh world. I am likened to Jane Eyre, although I consider her a pallid, spiritless type of heroine.

I describe myself as plain but it was more that I had been allowed to run wild and spurned girlish artifice. In later years, when my character was more fixed, several portraits were painted of me which show that my features were strong but not without symmetry and grace. The most masterly is owned by the National Portrait Gallery in London, although if you wish to view it, you will have to persuade the curator to release it from the vaults in South Wimbledon. It was painted in Rome by Sir Thomas Lawrence in 1819. I was there with my first husband, Captain Graham. Sir Thomas, as swift as any to capture a likeness, was bet by our friend, the painter Charles Eastlake, that he could not complete the picture in two hours – and he did, although not the draperies. Even two hours’ doing nothing seemed a dreadful consumer of time to me. You can see the impatient energy in my face. At any rate, it was painted in Eastlake’s studio and he obtained the picture, exchanged for a couple of his elegant Roman landscapes.

My memoir carries my life forward only to 1807. For those who care to read it, my cousin by my second marriage, Rosemary Brunel Gotch, printed the full text in her biography of me published in 1937 and, to this date, the only true biography. Soon that will be a hundred years ago. How time flies when one is dead! Recently something has been published about me called A Literary Biography, which I have to admit appeals to my vanity. It is written by Regina Akel, a clever Chilean lady who has tried, after some research and some invention, to measure the self in my writing with the living self. I leave it to others to judge her success. It is, of course, written from a modern feminist viewpoint.

I hardly like to remember the reasons I gave up dictating my memoir: the bleedings, the fevers, the weakness, shakings, headaches, all the bodily infirmities that lay low even the strongest. You, from the modern age of antibiotics, cannot comprehend such physical sufferings.

But death for me was a well-understood enemy. I had been fighting it tooth and nail since I was diagnosed with consumption more than thirty years earlier. My whole life was an evasion of death. In a little commonplace book I kept when I was twenty-one (held for posterity in the Bodleian Library, Oxford), I record a frightful period of illness near death. When it eventually passed, I wrote a note for myself on 10th August, 1806: ‘May thy returning health be well employed that I may live for ever!’ I make no comment on what I’m doing now!

Death was with me always. So, we are led back by a harsh connection of thought to Cape Horn, to the wild awfulness of Nature at its most despotic and the dying hours, for so they proved to be, of a good and honourable man. My first husband, Captain Thomas Graham, was never a firebrand. I understood that at once from our meeting aboard His Majesty’s ship Cornelia, a 32-gun frigate. He was travelling out to India where he would be assigned a vessel. I was twenty-four years old, and accompanying my father to Bombay where he was appointed commissioner of the Navy. Like any vulgar girl, I knew I must find a husband. Not that I ever admitted to such an ambition in my lifetime. We all have a story at our core that we may disown or admit. It is often about love. Graham had never been my story, nor was Callcott later, although I loved them both as a wife.

I was born for many lives but only one man, and it is our story together that will eventually form the heart of this book.

But first let us flash back to the Captain Graham I met on the way to the subcontinent in 1809. The voyage had unpleasant moments – the first lieutenant of the ship was a pompous fool and I made the mistake of publicly mimicking his ridiculous ways. All the same, the journey gave me a husband. It makes me smile now to think my attentions first settled on another man, Mr Charles Taylor, more obviously educated and attractive than Graham. How kind of the Fates to draw us apart! (I suspect now he wanted a less opinionated wife.) Captain Graham and I dealt so well together that, until his death, we never had a quarrel, although over twelve years we travelled round the world often under the harshest of conditions, with the added disadvantage of my unreliable health.

It was during the years of my marriage that I was first published, by Longman and then by John Murray. The Journal of a Residence in India came out in 1812 and, I can proudly assert, it is one of the earliest records by a woman of life in that fascinating country.

But this is not the story I want to tell. My true story started as we braved Cape Horn and my dear husband, from whom I’d never had a cross word, died in my arms. Is it cruel and as you, in the twenty-first century, would say, ‘inappropriate’ to record my husband’s death as the beginning of my story? I had nursed him as devotedly as any wife and recorded for posterity my feelings as finally all efforts were in vain:

20th April, 1822

Today we made the coast off Chile. From the 3rd of April, it became a register of acute suffering; and, on my part, of alternate hopes and fears through days and nights of darkness and storms, which aggravated the wretchedness of those wretched hours. On the night of the 9th of April, I regularly undressed and went to bed for the first time since we left Rio de Janeiro. All was then over, and I slept long and rested; but I awoke to the consciousness of being alone and a widow, with half the globe between me and my kindred.

Many things very painful occurred. But I had comfort, too. I found sympathy and brotherly help from some, and I was not insensible to the affectionate behaviour of my boys as the midshipmen were called.

Mr Loudon and Mr Kift, the surgeon and assistant surgeon, never left the bedside, and when my strength failed, my cousin Mr Glennie, and Mr Blatchley, two passed midshipmen, did all that friends could do.

But what could any human kindness do for me? My comfort must come from Him who in His own time will ‘wipe off all tears from faces’.

I referred, somewhat theatrically, to my own death. Now I suspect I wrote it, some time after the miserable event, with the intention of wringing the hearts of my readers. But this must be too cynical: I was a widow in the turbulent seas of the South Atlantic, alone in the way the hierarchy of the ship dictates, my only true friend my young cousin Glennie.

We had rounded the Horn at almost the moment Graham’s soul passed – as if the ice had gripped his lungs and, vice-like, stopped his breath – but we still had hundreds of miles to beat our way up the coast with the south-westerlies ever against us. Despotic Nature had done her worst, taken one more innocent victim, but we must continue with the struggle.

Even I, experienced in tragedy and separation, as all sailors’ wives must be, might have been forgiven for allowing misery to overwhelm me. But I had the first lieutenant to nurse and then my dear Glennie fell ill. I was also conscious of my duty in escorting my husband’s body to its final resting place. Many believe that burial at sea was the tradition during the era I describe, and that was often so, particularly after or even during a battle. But in peacetime a captain deserved better. So Graham remained in the stateroom, laid out in his dress uniform with jaw bound and sword at his side, while I made my bed in Glennie’s cabin, on the floor beside him.

The ship moved ever forward, northwards slowly, slowly sailing up the coast of Chile. We had left the icebergs behind and instead saw dark swathes of green forest and red soil. Then I beheld one of the greatest natural wonders of the world: the Andes. How could a heart, even as battered as mine, not be exalted by the sight of this seemingly unlimited range of mountains that followed the coastline, sometimes hardly separated by more than a strip of land, sometimes modestly retreating in a forest of peaks surging eastwards as well as north? At dawn their snowy tips were bathed with rosy pink, in the day they were sun-gilded, as rich as any Inca gold. At dusk they were veiled in a blue haze, which merged into purple or mauve.

The ship sailed on, a bravely moving island in the great expanse of the Pacific Ocean. I stood on the deck, as scrubbed and ordered as when its captain still lived, and contemplated my position. I looked towards the majestic mountain range, in natural beauty and magnitude far beyond human comprehension, and it seemed that the narrow strip of land that ran between sea and mountains was diminished almost to nothing. Yet this was a place of human habitation, the ship’s destination, a country, even now fighting the final battles for independence from the Spanish oppressors.

With my husband lying cold below, I let the warm breeze blow on my face and swivelled my head from mountain range to ocean and back to land again. Above my head, the vast pyramids of sail, stretched taut to catch the slender wind, caused the ropes and masts to creak and moan. The sun sparked off the well-polished brass, and the buttons of a red-coated marine appearing from below.

Around me the seamen went efficiently about their business. Two officers talked not far from me. None looked my way.

‘I am alone,’ I told myself, once, and then again and again. ‘Now that the captain, my husband, is dead, I am nobody. This ship on which I have lived for so many months owes me nothing. When we arrive at the harbour of Valparaíso, I must remove myself, lock, stock and barrel, and live where charity dictates.’

In this way I tried to convince myself of the miserable reality. Yet always in my sight were the magnificent Andes and the unlimited horizon of the Pacific. They told me a different story, a story of new beginnings, of freedom, beauty, inspiration.

My eyes began to hurt with the intensity of my staring. The brightness shimmered across my skin, entered my brain. This was the exhilaration of facing the unknown that explorers will devote their whole lives to experience. At what was the lowest point of my fortunes, I felt a corresponding surge of pure excitement.

I was alone, yes, but that in itself was a challenge and my whole life up to this point had taught me that I had the strength to overcome the odds. I should have turned to my God and, perhaps, in a way, I did, recognising in the great natural beauty with which I was surrounded His all-powerful hand.

Tears filled my eyes, and if the lieutenants had looked in my direction, they would have concluded, with perfect good sense, that they were the tears of a new widow with ‘half the globe between me and my kindred’. Now, nearly two hundred years after that moment, I shall admit that the tears of sadness and nervous dread were mixed with the tears of one who looks into the sun and feels her heart flame up in exhilaration.

Two



The good Doris sailed slowly into Valparaíso’s harbour. A gentle wind blew from behind us; the sun, too, was behind, sinking in rich golden rays that cast long shadows on the ships already moored. There were many, sails reefed, swaying gently on their moorings. The most action came from a multitude of boats darting among their grander cousins. On shore small figures, occasionally illuminated by the sun, moved without haste, a dignified frieze, although they were probably about usual port business at the end of the day. There were buildings, although not as many as there were ships and few of consequence. I picked out a church tower and the outlines of a fort. Above them rose steep cliffs, green-clad in the rifts that divided them into two dozen or more sections and turned a deep crimson in the more rocky parts. Some buildings clung to the lower slopes, and I guessed by shadowy parts that there were also smoother plains.

We were to spend a last night aboard ship but already I could see boats heading our way and suspected there would be those on board who would try, out of the kindliest of motives, to direct my fate one way or the other. But I had known these moments before and was armed against persuasion. As we entered Valparaíso, sun sinking, rosy mountains ahead, I had already decided to remain there. How long I could not predict, but I was certain that my future was in this emerging country rather than in turning tail and fleeing back to England.

Around me all the preparations went on for a ship at anchor. Even if we would not go ashore that evening, news was on its way to us. That evening there were a dozen round the captain’s table, despite the absence of the poor captain and myself. I spent the evening in Glennie’s cabin, stitching my black fustian and merino, adding a ruffle of silk where I deemed it necessary. Judging by the buildings I had seen, there would be little ceremony at Valparaíso but I knew that my almost notorious lack of interest in feminine finery sometimes made me negligent and I did not want to give offence.

The hours of darkness deepened and the voices of the men at table rose, although at intervals hushed respectfully on account of the dead – little goes unheard on a frigate. I shook out my black skirts and packed away the others in my trunk. My journals I put in another, with my paintings and, most important of all, my books. Wherever I have lived or travelled, books have always been my closest friends. Some of these I had used to teach the midshipmen their Latin and French. It was not without dropping a tear that I wrapped up and put away my Froissart and my Cicero, my Chaucer and my Bible. Where and when would I be unpacking them again? Yet despite the tear, despite all my regrets that the life of an estimable man had been cut short, my heart was still pierced by the dart of excitement.

It was in this moody time of reflection, the cabin dark, save one dripping candle, that Mr Dance, the first lieutenant, whom I had nursed on the journey, brought to me a certain Captain Ridgely of the United States Ship Constellation. There were ships of many nationalities in the harbour. Napoleon had died on St Helena a year earlier and there were no wars between European countries, or between Great Britain and America; ships travelled freely to represent their country’s business interests. It was in just such a concern that Graham and I had left Portsmouth for Valparaíso as part of the South Atlantic and Pacific Fleet.

Like many of his compatriots, Captain Ridgely was a kind, straightforward man, although his dark red face, as homely as a sugar beet, told me that he’d not declined the wine we’d brought aboard in Rio. His voice was loud with that not unattractive drawl. ‘The commodore,’ he told me, speaking slowly as if to a halfwit – sober mourning can be confused with a low mental understanding – ‘has offered to delay the sailing of the Constellation so that letters from His Majesty’s Ship Doris may round the Horn in safety.’ Putting his large hands together as if in reverential prayer, he added, ‘If you, madam, wish to return home, we will delay our sailing still further.’

Both men bowed to me and I, indeed, felt duly grateful. But how to explain convincingly to them that I had no wish to return to England? I hesitated, then was struck by the realisation that the same feminine frailty that might lead me to seek the comforts of home might also be a reason to avoid such a long and hazardous voyage so soon after I had just endured one, and under such painful and arduous circumstances.

‘Your commodore is generous, Captain Ridgely,’ I said quietly, although I gazed at him directly in order that he could see I was not prevaricating. ‘But I fear I must decline the offer for I have neither health nor spirits for such a voyage yet.’

Both men blinked doubtfully. I had seen the same suspicious expression on Dance’s face when he watched me listening to a seaman’s tale of love and constancy. Once, I had held in my hand a shining ringlet and Samways, a seaman, apparently rough-hewn as a rock, had sighed to me, ‘One day you must see her – she will look at you. She does not often look, but when she does it pierces to the very soul!’ Later I had informed Dance, of whom I was fond, that he must not raise his eyebrows at me as I listened to such simple confidences: an educated man should not forget that all humans love the same.

I could see he was wondering what I was up to now as I made my excuses to Captain Ridgely on the grounds of ill-health. He knew my independent spirit too well. Yet finally he decided to believe that I had given in to feminine weakness; it flattered both officers’ sense of manliness.

I lowered my eyes modestly and they assured me that they would do everything in their power to arrange for my stay in Valparaíso to be comfortable and restorative. We parted amicably.

But hardly had I nipped the small remains of the candle and substituted another than Dance was back. I had heard the piping and shouting that signifies someone of importance had entered the ship a few minutes earlier.

‘Don Jose Ignacio Zenteno, the governor of Valparaíso, requests your presence. He is in the stateroom.’ The lieutenant had become much more formal and stood more nearly to his gangly height.

Yet when I got to Don Jose (having adjusted my turban and put a black shawl around my shoulders), I saw an unimpressive man, whose swarthiness, long moustaches and gaudy jacket and necktie suggested he was not entirely European. We met in the stateroom, from which Captain Graham’s body had been removed since my last visit. There were bottles of brandy and glasses on the table and the air was thick with alcohol fumes and smoke from cigars and pipes. I tried not to show my discomfort because the governor was bound to be important to my future in Valparaíso.

We sat at a table, Don Jose opposite me with two officials, even shorter than him and clearly unused to the restrictions of formal clothing, each trying vainly to ease his neck collar or waistband, standing behind him. The lieutenant and I sat opposite, with two fine red-coated marines behind us.

We proceeded to all the formalities of respectful wishes to His Great Majesty King George III on the one side and a somewhat more muted admiration of General O’Higgins, the ‘supreme director’ of independent Chile, on ours. At that time Chilean and Spanish politics were not something in which the British government wished to take sides.

Personally, I had always been for independence as I would support the overthrow of oppressors anywhere in the world, including our own country. But I was aboard a British ship and had no wish to cause difficulties. This exchange was carried out in the most curious mixture of languages. Both male parties felt that they knew the other’s tongue and neither was prepared to give ground. I, as it happens, encouraged in my studies by my periodic illness, knew four languages before I was twenty and many more (including Greek and Persian, which I heartily recommend) by the time I reached Chile. Since Graham’s death, I had been studying Spanish, which was like an opening book to me – but of course I kept silent.

At length Don Jose turned to me, his square face lengthening as far as it was able.

‘Señora, Madama, Doña, Milady’ – his English became more and more impenetrable. His message, however, was almost brutally clear. Put into the King’s English, he said, ‘Tomorrow morning, with all due ceremony and respect, the honoured Captain Graham will be carried from the ship and buried in a spot I have appointed within the fortress, out of your sight. This will be carried out with such service as your church demands’ – this was kind as he was, naturally, a papist – ‘and I can promise the attendance of soldiers.’

Using my most gracious Spanish (and enjoying Dance’s schoolboy smile at the governor’s astonishment), I thanked him for his generosity and thoughtfulness. Those of you unused to the ways of the Navy in the early nineteenth century may be surprised by the speed with which my husband was despatched since we had been in the harbour only a few hours. But we had sent a cutter ahead with the news and we were flying our colours half-mast high.

Understanding all this, I confess nevertheless to a momentary sense of weakness. The Doris, which had been my home for a year, would sail away the moment supplies were received and a new captain appointed. My ‘boys’ would go with her, Blatchley, Tunis and Witty, my lieutenants, Dance, Chandler and others. This could be a matter of days or, at most, a few weeks.

Slowly, I made my way to my bed beside Glennie. He was sleeping more peaceably than he had for many nights. I admired his girlish complexion and stroked back the damp curls from his face. He woke and muttered that I should not watch over him. But where else was I to go? Darkness and the fusty close odour of a small cabin combined to depress my spirits. I left the cabin, having determined to say my last farewells to my husband. Instead I found myself heading to the steps that led up to the deck. It was dark and I had brought no candle. I knew the men were not asleep because from the stern of the ship I could hear singing and raised voices. They had not been allowed onshore yet, but clearly some independent soul had procured beer or wine beyond their usual allowance. I even thought I could recognise Samways striking out in his good strong baritone, ‘The Girl I Left Behind Me’.

As my head reached the deck, followed soon after by my body, I realised a group of men were dancing, their bare feet with soles as horny as shoe leather beating on the wooden floor. Again I was swept by nostalgia for this world I was about to leave behind. We might not have battled against an enemy but together we had struggled with natural elements as dangerous as any human. One of the men out there would not be dancing now without my attentions after he has fallen from the trysail mast, breaking his arm and collar bone. But it is amazing what good nursing can do. Our dear surgeon, Mr Loudon, wou