Snarleyyow ... Illustrated by H. R. Millar. With an introduction by David Hannay

Introduction

BY DAVID HANNAY Pontoon MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited NEW YORK : THE MACMILLAN COMPANY i897 A II rights reserved

INTRODUCTION.

Snarleyyow, the name which has quite displaced in com mon use the original title of The Dog Fiend, was written in 1837. Marryat had published books drawn from his own experience in the service with great rapidity since the appearance of Frank Mildmay in 1829. In 1835 he had published The Pasha of As any Tales, a collection of stories of very different degrees of merit and of origin ality. Some of them dealt with the sea. In 1836 he had returned to the naval novel with Mr. Alidshipman Easy, which competes, in the opinion of some, if not ot all, with Peter Simple, for the honour of being his masterpiece. In the same year, which was a very busy one with him, he turned for a change to the picaresque novel pure and simple, and produced Japhet in search of a Father. The Pirate and the Three Cutters was published before 1836 came to an end.

His next book was a very complete change indeed, for though it had the most direct possible connection with the sea it was not a story, but his laborious adaptation of Sir Home Popham's system of signalling to the use of merchant ships of all nations. Snarleyyow appeared in the same year as the Code of Signals. Both belonged to 1837, and it may be that the story was written, not only because Marryat was, as he candidly confessed not long after this SNARLEYYOW time, ' somewhat in want of money,' but as a relaxation from the really considerable toil of compiling his code. When Marryat turned to a form of work which would be easier than industrious code -making, he would naturally write a sea story, but Snarleyyow differs from its predecessor. It claimed to be an historical novel. Hitherto Marryat had shown little inclination to go back on the history of his own profession.

It is a great pity that his tastes did not lead him in that direction. Here he had the field to himself as completely as when he published Frank Mildmay. The historical novel had never yet dealt with the sea, for very obvious reasons. The writers were not seamen. Since Marryat's day the attempt has been made, but never by a writer who had at once knowledge of the sea and the necessary literary faculty. The only venture which any one could describe as successful without manifest absurdity is Westward Ho ; but although Kingsley's story has romance, eloquence, character, and the spirit of the Elizabethan time, it has not that verisimilitude in the sea adventures which Marryat could have given. It may be pedantic, but I have to confess that the wreck of the Spaniard on the Shutter of Lundy has always jarred upon me, though there is no more ardent admirer of Kingsley's romance.

How on earth did the Spaniard come anywhere near the Shutter of Lundy ? He must have gone down the west coast of Ireland, and how he was to get into the Bristol Channel is one of those things which it is impossible to understand. There is a good theatrical, or, if that sounds too contemptuous, then sentimental, reason for wrecking Soto near the coast of North Devon, but he could by no means have got there at that time, and in those winds. His presence so far out of any possible course is not so much a sacrifice to the necessities of romance as a downright absurdity. The

INTRODUCTION.

wreck is a fine wreck, and the vision of Amyas Leigh is a beautiful piece of eloquence, and yet I cannot help wishing that the galleon had been lost on the Blasket. If Marryat had decided at all hazards to wreck a wicked Spaniard on the Shutter of Lundy, he would have provided some sufficient nautical reason for bringing him there. Marryat could have carried the knowledge of the sea back to the past, and if he had had the necessary general knowledge of the past, and the equally necessary particular knowledge of the antiquities of his own profession, he might have written an historical naval story as good as the second class of Sir Walter's. When he wrote Snarleyyow he seems to have had some such purpose. He probably felt that he had used up, at any rate for the present, the navy of his own times, and he turned to the past for a new field.

Unfortunately he did not possess that knowledge of the old world which was necessary. Mere blunders are of no importance. It is perhaps a small matter that he thought, for instance, that the Duke of Gloucester was the son of William III., and that the king had had many children. Neither need one insist with any emphasis on his mistakes about the history of the navy. ' The Captain stood on the carronade ' is an excellent song, and it does not affect its intrinsic value one jot that there were no carronades in the reign of William III., nor for the next three quarters of a century. Jemmy Ducks of the cutter Yungfrau could by no possibility have sung of any such piece of ordnance. Neither could Mr. Vanslyperken have put on a uniform in order to visit the widow Vandersloosh in the year 1699, and that for the sufficient reason that there were no uniforms to put on for the next half-century.

Sir Walter Scott has played ducks and drakes with the mere vulgar facts of history far more audaciously than this, and he did it on purpose too. X SNARLEYYOW But then Sir Walter had so soaked himself in historical reading, because he liked it, and for his own amusement, that he could contrive to give the atmosphere, and the spirit, even when he turned the dates upside down. Marryat came to the writing of his stories with no such training. He is not to be too severely blamed for this neglect. The history of the English navy has been so utterly neglected that, with the best will in the world, Marryat could learn very little. But he does not appear to have attempted to make himself familiar with what was within his reach. He refers once to Smollett, but seems to have known nothing of Pepys, who was already available in Lord Braybrook's edition.

His researches were obviously confined within very narrow limits, and when he attempted a sea story of the past he did very little more than put back the life ot his own time, mingled here and there with a few stray his torical remarks which have much the air of having been put in for conscience sake. Snarleyyow, properly considered, is hardly entitled to the dignity of an historical novel. It is in reality a fantastic tale which Marryat made up partly, no doubt, out of his reminis cences of the time when he was cruising against smugglers in the Channel, partly, and in a much smaller degree, out of books, but most of all, as the children would say, out of his own head. The Yungfrau is very much such a vessel as the Active which figures in the Three Cutlers, only her crew and the kind of life led in her have undergone a strange transmogrification.

When he got back into the past Marryat seems to have felt that he had his elbows free and could safely let himself go. The crew of the Yungfrau amuse us, but they must first have amused him very much. Short and Coble, and Jemmy Ducks, Jansen the big Dutchman, and Corporal Van Spitter are all in their

INTRODUCTION.

different ways exaggerations of the typical seaman or the typical marine. Corporal Van Spitter is, we are told, a Dutchman, but there is nothing about him beyond his name and his pronunciation which smacks of Holland. He is only the Jolly considered, not in the abstract, but in a particularly big, fat, concrete example — the supporter of the captain, the natural enemy of the sailor, and the spy of the commanding officer. Jemmy Ducks, who thought ' that if they were to sail with the devil, it could not be helped, pay and prize-money would still go on,' is the very type of the sailor who, on one side of his character, is the most utterly reckless of human beings. The talk in the forecastle has nothing of the seventeenth century about it. There would have been no difficulty in Marryat's own time to find sailors who would have conspired in just this way, and for just these reasons, against the captain and the captain's dog, neither, in spite of the march of intellect, would it have been impossible to find men to whom the question whether the dog was a dog or a devil appeared very serious.

I am not very sure that it would be impossible to get together a crew, even in these days, who would listen to Bill Spurey's yarn with as much credulity as the ship's company of the Yungfrau. The men did not believe that the 'dog was a devil, they only thought it possible he might be. Certainly there are plenty of sailors who would be just as delighted as the Yungfrau 's on hearing that Corporal Van Spitter had been sent adrift like a bear in a wash-tub. It is not an historical scene we look at but a picture drawn from the sea life of to-day, when the sailors are collected in the Lust Haus of the widow Vandersloosh. Marryat does not even try to keep up the historical colouring. He must have known that in writing of the year 1699 'l was altogether premature to speak of ' American seamen scrupu- SNARLEYYOW lously neat in their attire and with an air distingue from the superiority of their education, and all of them quiet and sober.' No sober, neat, and distinguished-looking American sailors would have been found in any sailors' dancing and drinking house at that period of the world's history.

But they were commonly to be met in such places when Marryat visited them, and he put the detail down caring very little whether it fitted with his dates. The scene in the Lust Haus is, as a mere picture, one of the best Marryat ever drew. ' The blanket of the night is drawn asunder for a moment ; in full, ruddy, flaming light, these rough tatterdemalions are seen in their boisterous revel ; for the strong pulse of life vindicates its right to gladness even here ; and when the curtain closes, we prolong the action, without effort. The next day, as the last, our Caird and our Balladmongers are singing and soldiering, their " brats and callets " are hawking, begging, cheating ; and some other night, in need combina tions, they will wring from Fate another hour of wassail and good cheer.' The decent, airy, and well-conducted Lust Haus of the widow Vandersloosh was very different from the Ragcastle of 'Poosie Nansie,' but the scene in Marryat's story has its own share of the merits which Carlyle (who was so unjust to Marryat) attributed rightly to the verse of Burns.

This vivid portraiture of the seaman's ways and manners is to be found all through Marryat, but there are two things in Snarleyyow which are not to be met elsewhere in his work equally well done. The first is the practical joking carried to the point when it becomes first gruesome and then almost tragic. The second is the verse. The songs may be left aside for the moment while we consider the practical joking. I can easily conceive of a reader to whom it would be decidedly offensive. There are many to whom

INTRODUCTION.

the persecution of Pallet in Peregrine Pickle and large parts of The Adventures of Roderick Random are merely nauseous. We have got too humane to enjoy, as our fathers would enjoy, horse-play carried over the limit of brutality. If the seeming cruelty spoils the reader's pleasure he had better leave Snarleyyow aside with Peregrine Pickle and the story of Miss Williams. Indeed, if one persists in treating Mr. Vanslyperken, and his old fiend of a mother, and Peter Smallbones, as his fellow human beings, he may, without being too squeamishly sentimental, be at times revolted. There is too much beating with broomsticks, and flogging with the cat and keelhauling and knocking out of eyes. One gets lost in the list of Mr. Vanslyperken's unsuccessful efforts to murder Smallbones, and the no less lengthy string of Smallbones's endeavours to kill Snarleyyow.

And Marryat writes of all these things with an obvious enjoyment which would be actually ghoulish if one could think that the 'tog was a tog,' and that the human beings were human beings. Most fortunately it is not necessary to take them quite so seriously. The dog is not a dog, but only a particularly good personification of the cur. Mr. Vanslyperken is a mannikin moved by a kind of essential spirit of malignity. His mother is a wicked old witch, such as never existed out of a fairy tale. Smallbones is not malignant, it is true, and he is not only very much knocked about, but is for ever endeavouring, not without justification, to kill the dog which is no dog, by methods calculated to shock the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. If we could believe in the reality of the cur and his master their last scene would be too painful to read, and Marryat, who was a kind hearted man, would have found it too painful to write.

The appeal of Vanslyperken, at a moment when the rope is SNARLEYYOW round his neck, on behalf of the miserable cur which has led him into one misfortune after another, would be too horribly pathetic. One's sympathies would be wholly with him, and not, as on all sound principles they ought to be, with the virtuous characters, if one could believe that here was a real son of Adam who could have such a thought at such a time and did not succeed in softening his executioners. ' " One moment — I ask but one moment," cried Vansly perken, much agitated, "only one moment, sir." ' " For what ? " ' "To kiss my poor dog," replied Vanslyperken, bursting into tears. Strange and almost ridiculous as was the appeal, there was a seriousness and pathos in Vanslyperken's words and manner which affected those who were present like a gleam of sunshine.

This one feeling which was unalloyed with baser metal shone upon the close of a worthless and wicked life. Sir Robert nodded his head, and Vanslyperken walked with his rope round his neck over to where the dog was held by Smallbones, bent over the cur, and kissed it again and again. ' "Enough," cried Sir Robert, " bring him back." Cor poral Van Spitter took hold of Vanslyperken by the arm, and dragged him to the other side of the deck. The unfortunate wretch was wholly absorbed in the fate of his cur, who had endeavoured to follow his master. His eyes were fixed upon Snarleyyow, and Snarleyyow's were fixed upon his master; thus they were permitted to remain for a few seconds, when Sir Robert gave the signal. Away went the line of men who had manned the starboard whip, and away went Jemmy Ducks on the larboard side, and at the yardarms of the cutter were suspended the bodies of Vanslyperken and Snarleyyow.'

INTRODUCTION.

But the dog is not a dog, nor Mr. Vanslyperken a real human scoundrel, nor his mother a possible wicked old woman, nor Smallbones a genuine ill-treated 'workus.' They are all puppets in a variation of the Punch and Judy show, which is a very legitimate form of amusement. The blows ring on wood, not on human heads. To find amuse ment in their doings may be childish, but it is perfectly innocent. They form the centre of a lively hurlyburly in which the surrounding personages, male and female, are human, but they themselves are only amusing puppets. Looked at as an adaptation of Punch and Judy, Snarleyyow has very great merits. There is extraordinary ingenuity in the long series of the mutual attempts to kill running through the book. The incidents arise, as it were, naturally and spontaneously, none of them are too long, and throughout the whole there runs an agreeable, and by no means too serious, suggestion of diablerie.

It was a stroke of art in Marryat never to explain exactly how Snarleyyow did come on board the Yungfrau. It does not follow that because the dog was finally hanged he was really a dog, for be it observed he ends with Mr. Vanslyperken, and he may have been a sea-devil after all whose function it was to bring his servant to a bad end. When that was performed he had no further reason to remain. Marryat's gift of verse is shown in his later, not in his earlier work, and indeed is displayed mainly in this book and Poor Jack, which was written three years later. With the exception of the songs of Poor Jack beginning ' Now your father is asleep, maid, listen unto me,' the best of his songs are in Snarleyyow. Their merits have always been acknowledged by good judges. Mr. Henley had the justice to include 'The Captain stood on the carronade' in his Lyra Heroica.

He called the song a brilliant piece of SNARLEYYOW doggerel, which, if we treat it as Mr. Vanslyperken ought not to be treated, and take it too seriously, is unjust. It is not doggerel, but a promotion of the old sailor's song out of doggerel into very fair verse. In point of sheer cleverness it is perhaps not as good as the song of Poll who stood ' at the landing-place that's just below Mount Wyse.' Both hit the tone with extraordinary skill. The sailor can feel the heroic and the pathetic, but he does not express them with that art in avoiding the use of the low term which is desirable in literature. What Marryat had to do was to take the old doggerel model and put it through a strainer which would leave the coarser grains behind. This he did often, but never with a happier hand than in Snarleyyow. CONTENTS

Chapter LV

In which we trust that everything will be arranged to the satisfaction of our readers . . . . • TAGE 5 18 2S 3i 40 6 1 67 107 1 12 121 128 XXV LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS The marriage of Widow Vandersloosh and Corporal Van Spitter ..... Frontispiece Smallbones soon made his appearance, rising from the hatchway like a ghost ..... Smallbones met the animal with his own weapons, attacking him with a frenzied resolution with his teeth It occurred to Mr. Vanslyperken that a little taste of punishment in esse would very much assist the threats of what might be received in posse ..... The dog revenged himself by making his teeth meet more than once through the lanthorn cheek of his master Snarleyyow caught ' Where's Snarleyyow, sir ? — confess ' . The dog became more enraged, and at last sprang out at the foot of the bed, flew at the widow, and bit her in the leg.

Lilly had taken the watch on the beach, and there the little girl remained perched upon a rock . The body half raised itself from its knees, and then toppled over and disappeared down the side of the precipice Smallbones, with a cadaverous face and vacant look, drawls out, ' It's a-blowed out twice, sir, with the wind.' He observed that a very pretty woman dogged him, sometimes walking ahead and looking back, at others dropping astern SNARLEYYOW PAGE 140 They put the corporal into the cart and escorted him up to their huts ...... Corporal Van Spitter, seizing the cur by the neck, hurled him several yards over the cutter's quarter 148 ' Didn't I sew him up in a bread-bag, and didn't he come back just as nothing had happened ?' . . . . 155 ' Vy vill you not sign ?

We all sail hang togeder if de affair be found ' . . . . 161 ' Look here,' cried Moggy, flourishing a knife. ' This is for the cur ; unless you let my Jemmy go, ay and directly too ' 175 Vanslyperken opened the door, and to his amazement there were three swords pointed to his heart 180 Vanslyperken now rose from behind, levelled the pistol at the lad's head, and fired ..... 186 Vanslyperken looked on with surprise, leaning against the bulkhead of the cabin ..... 192 Wilhelmina 203 ' Veil, you are a nice little man ' 207 Jemmy, seizing the young man firmly by the waistband of his trousers, threw him clean over the table 209 ' Sing, or by Heavens I'll shorten your nose ' 228 The corporal again swung round the inanimate body of the dog 236 Down it came upon the dog's tail, which was left on the block 273 The dog, seizing the sow by the ear, made her drop the tail to save her own bacon .... 284 Vanslyperken was held under the pump and drenched for nearly half an hour .... 287 Smallbones plunged the bayonet deep into the wrinkled throat of the old woman 294 His reverence was returned with a grave, if not stern, air, and the king passed him without further notice 30S LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE The boat immediately turning over, the sleeping Smallbones fell into the sea . 316 ' Here's the poor lad who was thrown overboard, madam,' said Nancy, retaining her gravity .... 325 The corporal poured out a glass of beer, and persuaded her to drink it ...... 333 ' Well, well, Mr. Vanslyperken, we shall see ; you may turn up your snivelling nose ' . . . . .341 Piling up their hammocks, they commenced operations . 353 Ramsay put his treasure in the boat, and with Wilhelmina and his whole party made for the cave . . -355 ' Do you call this fighting with women ? ' . . . 374 The plundering mob have been too hasty . . . 387 Vanslyperken bent over the cur and kissed it again and again . 393 The body of Vanslyperken plunged into the wave and disappeared

Chapter I

Introduction of divers parties and a red herring. It was in the month of January 1699, that a one-masted vessel, with black sides, was running along the coast near Beachy Head, at the rate of about five miles per hour. The wind was from the northward and blew keenly, the vessel was under easy sail, and the water was smooth. It was now broad daylight, and the sun rose clear of clouds and vapour ; but he threw out light without heat. The upper parts of the spars, the hammock rails, and the small iron guns which were mounted on the vessel's decks were covered with a white frost. The mr.n at the helm stood muffled up in a thick pea-jacket and mittens, which made his hands appear as large as his feet. His nose was a pug of an intense bluish red, one tint arising from the present cold, and the other from the preventive checks which he had been so long accustomed to take to drive out such an unpleasant intruder.

His grizzled hair waved its locks gently to the wind, and his face was distorted with an immoderate quid of tobacco which protruded his right cheek. This personage was second officer and steersman on board of the vessel, and his name was Obadiah Coble. He had been baptized Obadiah about sixty years before ; that is to say if he had been baptized at all. He stood so motionless at the helm, that you might have imagined him to have been frozen there as he stood, were it not that his eyes occasionally wandered from the compass on the binnacle to the bows of the vessel, and that the breath from his mouth, when it was thrown out into the clear frosty air, formed a smoke like to that from the spout of a half-boiling tea-kettle. The crew belonging to the cutter, for she was a vessel in the service of his Majesty King William the Third, at this b i i. SNARLEYYOW time employed in protecting his Majesty's revenue against the importation of alamodes and lutestrings, were all down below at their breakfasts, with the exception of the steersman and lieutenant-commandant, who now walked the quarter-deck, if so small an extent of plank could be dignified with such a name.

He was a Mr. Cornelius Vanslyperken, a tall, meagre-looking personage, with very narrow shoulders and very small head. Perfectly straight up and down, protruding in no part, he reminded you of some tall parish pump, with a great knob at its top. His face was gaunt, cheeks hollow, nose and chin showing an affection for each other, and evidently lamenting the gulf between them which prevented their meeting. Both appeared to have fretted themselves to the utmost degree of tenuity from disappointment in love : as for the nose, it had a pearly round tear hanging at its tip, as if it wept. The dress of Mr. Vanslyperken was hidden in a greatcoat, which was very long, and buttoned straight down. This greatcoat had two pockets on each side, into which its owner's hands were deeply inserted, and so close did his arms lie to his sides that they appeared nothing more than as would battens nailed to a topsail yard.

The only deviation from the perpendicular was from the insertion of a speaking-trumpet under his left arm, at right angles with his body. It had evidently seen much service, was battered, and the clack japan worn off in most parts of it. As we said before, Mr. Vanslyperken walked his quarter-deck. He was in a brown study, yet looked blue. Six strides brought him to the taffrail of the vessel, six more to the bows, such was the length of his tether — and he turned, and turned again. But there was another personage on the deck, a personage of no small importance, as he was all in all to Mr. Vansly perken, and Mr. Vanslyperken was all in all to him ; moreover, we may say that he is the hero of the tail. This was one of the ugliest and most ill-conditioned curs which had ever been produced : — ugly in colour ; for he was of a dirty yellow, like the paint served out to decorate our men-of-war by his Majesty's dockyards : — ugly in face ; for he had one wall-eye, and was so far under-jawed as to prove that a bull-dog had had some thing to do with his creation : — ugly in shape ; for although larger than a pointer, and strongly built, he was coarse and shambling in his make, with his forelegs bowed out.

His ears SNARLEYYOW and tail had never been docked, which was a pity, as the more you curtailed his proportions, the better looking the cur would have been. But his ears, although not cut, were torn to ribbons by the various encounters with dogs on shore, arising from the acidity of his temper. His tail had lost its hair from an in veterate mange, and reminded you of the same appendage to a rat. Many parts of his body were bared from the same disease. He carried his head and tail low, and had a villainous sour look. To the eye of a casual observer^ there was not one redeeming quality that would warrant his keep ; to those who knew him well, there were a thousand reasons why he should be hanged. He followed his master with the greatest precision and exactitude, walking aft as he walked aft, and walking forward with the same regular motion, turning when his master turned, and moreover, turning in the same direction ; and, like his master, he appeared to be not a little nipped with the cold, and, as well as he, in a state of profound meditation.

The name of this uncouth animal was very appropriate to his appearance, and to his temper. It was Snarleyyow. At last Mr. Vanslyperken gave vent to his pent-up feelings. 1 1 can't, I won't stand this any longer,' muttered the lieutenant, as he took his six strides forward. At this first sound of his master's voice the dog pricked up the remnants of his ears, and they both turned aft. ' She has been now fooling me for six years ' ; and as he concluded this sentence, Mr. Vanslyperken and Snarleyyow had reached the taffrail, and the dog raised his tail to the half-cock. They turned, and Mr. Vanslyperken paused a moment or two, and compressed his thin lips — the dog did the same. ' I will have an answer, by all that's blue ! ' was the ejaculation of the next six strides. The lieutenant stopped again, and the dog looked up in his master's face ; but it appeared as if the current of his master's thoughts was changed, for the current of keen air reminded Mr. Vanslyperken that he had not yet had his breakfast.

The lieutenant leant over the hatchway, took his battered speaking-trumpet from under his arm, and putting it to his mouth, the deck reverberated with, ' Pass the word for Small bones forward.' The dog put himself in a baying attitude, with his forefeet on the coamings of the hatchway, and enforced his master's orders with a deep-toned and measured bow, wow, wow. SNARLEYYOW Smallbones soon made his appearance, rising from the hatchway like a ghost ; a thin, shambling personage, apparently about twenty years old — a pale, cadaverous face, high cheek bones, goggle eyes, with lank hair very thinly sown upon a head, which, like bad soil, would return but a scanty harvest. He looked like Famine's eldest son just arriving to years of discretion. His long lanky legs were pulled so far through his trousers that his bare feet, and half-way up to his knees, were exposed to the chilling blast.