To die this way

The British soldier and general, Sir John Moore, died 200 years ago today, hit by a cannonball at the important Battle of La Coruña, Spain, during the Peninsular War. After being hit, he reputedly told a colleague that he had always wanted ‘to die this way’. His battlefield funeral is celebrated in a famous poem by Charles Wolfe which ends ‘We carved not a line, and we raised not a stone, But we left him alone with his glory.’ In fact, glory would have to wait, for back home Moore’s strategy in Spain was heavily criticised. However, a century later, Moore’s diaries were found and published, and these helped to re-establish his reputation as a great soldier.

Moore was born in Glasgow in 1761, the son of a doctor. While still a boy, he was taken on a grand tour of Europe, which included two years of schooling in Geneva, before joining the British Army in 1776. He fought in the American War of Independence, returning to Britain in 1783 and becoming a Member of Parliament the following year. In 1787 he was appointed a Major, and subsequently led campaigns in Corsica, the West Indies, Ireland, the Netherlands and Egypt. Back in Britain, in 1803, he established an innovative training regime that produced the country’s first permanent light infantry regiments. According to Encyclopaedia Britannica, he earned a reputation as one of the greatest trainers of infantrymen in military history.

In 1808, Moore was put in charge of the British forces in the Iberian peninsula with orders to remove the French from Spain. However, when Napoleon’s forces cut off the British escape route to Portugal, Moore decided to head for the Spanish ports of La Coruña and Vigo, from where he calculated his troops could sail to safety. He, himself, however, was killed there at La Coruña on 16 January 1809, exactly two hundred years ago today. Initially, Moore’s strategy was heavily criticised in Britain, but later it was established that he had, in fact, extricated his men from Napoleon’s trap, forced the French to divert badly needed troops from Portugal, and thus delayed France’s conquest of Spain for a year.

According to Wikipedia, Moore’s last words were: ‘I hope the people of England will be satisfied! I hope my country will do me justice!’ He was buried secretly at midnight wrapped in a military cloak in the ramparts of the town. Later, though, a monument was built over his grave. The funeral is remembered in Wolfe’s poem, The Burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna. Here are the first two and the last two verses.

NOT a drum was heard, not a funeral note,
As his corse to the rampart we hurried;
Not a soldier discharged his farewell shot
O’er the grave where our hero we buried.

We buried him darkly at dead of night,
The sods with our bayonets turning,
By the struggling moonbeam's misty light
And the lanthorn dimly burning.

. . .

But half of our heavy task was done
When the clock struck the hour for retiring;
And we heard the distant and random gun
That the foe was sullenly firing.

Slowly and sadly we laid him down,
From the field of his fame fresh and gory;
We carved not a line, and we raised not a stone,
But we left him alone with his glory.

Nearly a century after his death, a copy of Moore’s diary was found in the papers of Sir William Napier, in the handwriting of Moore’s niece, Lady Napier. Sir John Frederick Maurice, a soldier and military writer, edited the papers which were then published in two volumes, by Edward Arnold, in 1904 - The Diary of Sir John Moore. However, the volumes contain much more than the diary, since Maurice provides his own, at times extensive, analysis and commentary. The New York Times has an archived review, dating from March 1904, which itself draws on a review in The Daily News. It is worth quoting a paragraph.

‘There has been great contention over Moore, owing to the bitterness of partisan feeling in England. . .  To attack him. . .was supposed to be the duty of every good Tory, and, as usual, historian after historian has repeated the blunders and calumnies of those who have gone before. This diary, which brings to light much that was not known before will clear away many misconceptions and do justice to the memory of a brilliant soldier, who, but for his untimely death at the age of forty-eight, might have had a career equal to that of Wellington himself.’

Both volumes of the diary are available online at Internet Archive (volume 1, volume 2). Here is how Maurice writes about Moore’s death:

‘It was in that moment of triumph that Moore was struck down. It is a picture for a great artist. Horse and rider as Charles Napier has described them. The rider watching eagerly the advance of his zealous battalions, whose arms, renewed throughout from the stores of Corunna, were driving the French before them much as men armed with modern weapons drive before them troops with old-fashioned muskets . . . Triumph everywhere! visible to the keen eyes that knew war so well as to take in at a glance how not only was the French army tactically in his hand, but that their weapons, rusty with the long march through the mountain snows, their ammunition failing, his troops amply supplied, the enemy would soon be an unarmed crowd!

Moore - his whole mind centred on the coming vindication of his long patience, on the triumphal accomplishment of an impossible task, hampered by those who could not understand him - sees before him the prize for which he has waited so long. A cannonball carries away his left shoulder and part of the collar-bone, leaving the arm hanging by the flesh. The violence of the stroke threw him off his horse on his back. Not a muscle of his face altered, nor did a sigh betray the least sensation of pain. . . He was carried in a blanket to the rear, refusing to allow Hardinge to remove his sword, which was obviously inconveniencing him . . . He made the soldiers turn him around frequently to view the battle. He said to his old friend Anderson - ‘Anderson, you know that I have always wished to die this way.’

As for Moore’s diary, there are no extracts in Maurice’s volumes taken from the months preceding his death. However, here is an interesting extract from the summer of 1808, just prior to Moore’s departure to take command in the Iberian Peninsular. (Sir Arthur Wellesley is, of course, the Duke of Wellington, who rose to prominence later in the Peninsular War.)

‘I understand that several of the Cabinet have taken a personal dislike to me, though I seldom have seen them, and they can know nothing of me. They wish to hold up Sir Arthur Wellesley, and had intended to give him the command of the whole force in Spain and Portugal. He is the youngest of the lieutenant-generals made the other day, and the King and Duke of York objected to him. This provoked them, and, added to their general dislike, had led them to endeavour to mortify me by placing me in a station similar to Sir Arthur. Though they were forced to approve what I had done in Sweden, yet it was against the grain, for I took no trouble to conceal the ignorance which had sent us there, when they should have known from the character of the King and the weakness of his force that it was impossible for anything to be done. Upon leaving Lord Castlereagh I set out for Portsmouth, and arrived on Wednesday evening, the 20th, having stopped at my brother Frank’s, and afterwards with my mother. I found the fleet just come in from the Downs. I was occupied in getting everything ready to proceed, when, on the 23rd, a King’s messenger brought me a letter from Lord Castlereagh, evidently with a view to irritate me, in the hope that I would answer it intemperately, and give them an excuse to recall me from this service, for, as senior to Sir Arthur, though there are many others his seniors, they think I shall be particularly in his way. I, however, have disappointed them; for I sent them a very calm answer, in which I give them a wipe which they will feel but cannot resent. I sent at the same time copies of both letters to Colonel Gordon for the Duke of York, together with a narrative of everything that has passed since my return to England. I am in hopes now to be allowed quietly to go on the service, on which I am ordered, without further molestation.’

Plotkin’s Berlin; Carano’s Stalag

Two diaries of Americans in Germany before and during the Second World War have just been published by US university presses. One is by Abraham Plotkin, a Russian immigrant of Jewish origin, who returned to Europe to live for a few months in Berlin when the Nazis were just coming to prominence. And the other is by Steve Carano, a prisoner of war in the infamous Stalag 17 camp.

University of Illinois Press has just published, for the first time, a diary written by Abraham Plotkin, a member of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, who went to live in Berlin between November 1932 and May 1933. According to listings by Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk, An American in Hitler’s Berlin was first published in paperback late last year, but is due for hardback publication in the UK today. It is edited by Catherine Collomp and Bruno Groppo.

There is not much information about Plotkin on the internet. According to Mendele, a forum for Yiddish Literature and Yiddish Language, he was born in 1892 in Russia, and died in May 1988 in Los Angeles. He wrote a number of articles for the Jewish Daily Forward in 1933, presumably after his return from Berlin. There’s a little more about his activities in 1933 on the KC Labor website.

The diary provides, University of Illinois Press says, ‘a firsthand account of the Weimar Republic’s final months and the early rise of Nazi power in Germany’ and ‘focuses on the German working class, the labor movement, and the plight of German Jews’. Compared to the writings of other American observers of the Third Reich, it adds, Plotkin’s diary is ‘unique in style, scope, themes, and time span’ because it is attentive to socioeconomic factors, and provides ‘an alternative view from the left’, one that stems from his access to key German union and socialist leaders.

A few extracts of An American in Hitler’s Berlin are available to read on Amazon’s website. Here is part of the first entry.

25 October 1932
‘Off at last. Don’t know what I am heading for. I probably would have changed my mind about going if some occult wisdom had given me foresight. Here is to prayer that my hindsight will prove to be as exciting as my lack of foresight.

This is my second sea voyage . . . The first one was thirty years ago. The year McKinley was shot. I came to the shores of the land that became my native land with wonder and dreams and the vague hopes of a child. Or was it a sense of escape from the dark shadows of terror that hovered over Czarist Russia. The ghetto in old Russia then was neither picturesque nor pleasant. Those qualities of the ghetto, I suspect were discovered in America. Now I am going back. What for? I hardly know. Perhaps I am going so as to escape the humdrum of everyday city life in my own country. Perhaps my eyes have gotten tired of seeing the forms and people and things. I don’t really know. I mean that if I have any motive in going it’s stuck deep down in me, so far down that as yet I haven’t see either sight or sound of it. Perhaps later when and if I become aware of it I’ll feel as silly as I look. One never can really tell how foolish one is.’

Also today in the UK, according to Amazon.co.uk’s listings, The University of Arkansas Press is publishing Not without Honor: The Nazi POW Journal of Steve Carano (in the US publication was last October - Amazon.com). The editor is Kay Sloan and there is a foreword by Lewis H. Carlson. The book not only tells Carano’s story but weaves in the stories of two other POWs, John C. Bitzer and Bill Blackmon. According to the publisher, Carano records air battles and escape attempts, and ‘the journal reads like a thriller’. Some pages can be previewed at Googlebooks.

Here is a quote about the book from The University of Arkansas Press: ‘On a cold December day in 1943, Claudio ‘Steve’ Carano’s B-17 bomber was shot down over the Dutch coast on the return flight to England. This marked the beginning of his eighteen-month incarceration in Stalag 17 b, the camp made famous in the Billy Wilder film and in the television show Hogan’s Heroes. During his confinement Carano secretly kept a journal in his Red Cross blank book, filling it with meticulously penned entries and illustrations. It takes the reader deep behind the notorious wire fence surrounding the prison and into the world where men clung to their humanity through humor, faith, camaraderie, daily rituals, and even art.’

The Keeling Islands

The discovery of the Cocos (or Keeling) Islands in the Indian Ocean 400 years ago is generally attributed to William Keeling, a British sea captain. Keeling kept a diary of his voyages and this includes entries from January 1609, exactly four centuries ago. Unfortunately, he made no particular record of sighting the Cocos. Another diarist and assistant to Charles Darwin aboard HMS Beagle, Syms Covington, however, did mention the islands.

The Cocos, which is now a territory of Australia, consists of two low-lying atolls and twenty-seven coral islands about halfway between Australia and Sri Lanka. Keeling is thought to have been the first to discover them in 1609; but they remained uninhabited until the early part of 19th century, when private owners (the Clunies-Ross family) transported slaves there to work on coconut plantations. The islands were annexed by the British Empire in 1857, but then, in 1886, Queen Victoria granted them to the Clunies-Ross family in perpetuity.

An important telegraph station on one of the islands, which provided a communication link between Britain and Australia/NZ, meant the Cocos were drawn into both World Wars. After the fall of Singapore in 1942, they were administered from Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). In 1955, their administration was passed to the Australian government, but it was not until 1978 that it obliged the Clunies-Ross family, which had still been enjoying feudal rule, to give up ownership. Today, there are about 500 inhabitants, coconuts are still their main cash crop, but tourism is becoming a significant industry. Wikipedia has more, as does the Cocos Keeling Islands website.

Not much is known about William Keeling, a British sea captain. According to Wikipedia, he commanded the Susanna on the second East India Company voyage in 1604, and he commanded the Red Dragon on the third voyage of 1607. It was during this journey, while returning home from Java, that he discovered the Cocos (Keeling) Islands in 1609. Later, he was put in command of Cowes Castle, on the Isle of Wight, where he died in 1620.

Keeling’s journal is contained in Volume VIII of A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels by Robert Kerr (freely available at Project Gutenberg or Internet Archive). There is no mention of the Cocos in the journal, but here are two paragraphs from Kerr’s introduction, which explain (by reference to another set of travel writing - Astley’s Collection) how Keeling’s journal came to be rather fragmentary.

‘In this voyage three ships were employed, with about 310 men; the Dragon, admiral, Captain Keeling, who was chief commander or general; the Hector, vice-admiral, commanded by Captain William Hawkins; and the Consent, Captain David Middleton. The relation of the voyage, as appears from its title in Purchas, was written by Keeling, the chief commander or general, or, as he would now be called, the commodore: But, by a side-note, Purchas informs us, that he had abbreviated the narrative from the journals written at sea, by Captains Keeling and Hawkins, which were very voluminous, occupying a hundred sheets of paper, and that he had only retained the most necessary observations for sea and land affairs.

The editor of Astley’s Collection observes, ‘That this narrative is written very obscurely, in an abrupt, uncouth style, which he thinks Purchas ought to have reformed when abridging it. The author seems to have kept no regular journal, but only to have entered such things from time to time as seemed most material. In many places it consists only of loose imperfect hints, thrown together without connection, and often referring to things not mentioned before. Possibly these defects may have been owing to Purchas, in order to abbreviate the journal; and indeed, whether from want of care or judgment, he spoiled almost every thing he abridged. It contains, however, many valuable nautical remarks, and many particulars respecting the conduct of the Dutch, who now began to lord it in India, which may atone for its defects. If the dryness of some of the details may disgust any of our readers, we hope they will consider that our design is to give a series of the English Voyages; and in so doing to steer equally between the two extremes of redundance and imperfection.’ ’

And here are a couple of paragraphs from Kerr’s journal itself, dating from January 1609, exactly 400 years ago. They are taken from section 4 -  Voyage of the Hector to Banda, with Occurrences there - and although tedious in style are also interesting for the details.

‘About one in the morning of the 1st January, 1609, we weighed anchor, and with an off-shore wind got round the east point, three leagues E.N.E. from our former anchorage. Thence easterly to another point other three leagues, a very long shoal with very little water extending between the two, to avoid which it is good to steer halfway between Java and the isles of Tonda, which are five leagues distant. East from the second point is the isle of Tanara, so close to the shore that it cannot be distinguished from any distance. From the second to the third point, are four leagues E.S.E. and one and a half mile off that point N. by W. is the isle of Lackee, between which and the point is only one and a half fathoms water, according to report. We rode all night in six fathoms, having the isle east of us a league. Weighing on the 4th, we steered within half a league of Lackee in seven or eight fathoms; from the isle to the west point of Jackatra being E.S.E. four leagues. There is a dangerous sand off the west point of Jackatra, wherefore it is good to keep nearer the island opposite that point.

The 8th I went to Jackatra, and anchored far out. The king sent his sabander to desire powder and match, and I sent him 30 pounds of powder and a roll of match. I bought of them a Portuguese boy, given by the Hollanders to their king, but who refused to apostatize from Christianity, and paid for him 45 dollars. We have seen thirty or forty islands since leaving Bantam. The 10th we made sail from Jackatra. There is a sunken island even with the water, about two leagues W. by N. from the east point of Jackatra, which we left to larboard, going between it and the easter island. The two points forming Jackatra bay bear E.S.E. and W.N.W. four leagues distant, the eastermost island being in a straight line between both points. At noon on the 11th we were ten leagues N.E. from the east point of Jackatra. The 12th at noon, we were two leagues S.W. by S. from an island, having sailed thirty leagues E. by S. The 15th we came near Madura, contrary to my expectation, whence I suppose that the island of Java is not so long as it is laid down in the charts, or else that we had found a current setting to the east. The 18th we were near the islands of  Nossaseres or Nussasira, which were N. by W. a league from us, in lat. 5 deg. 30’ S. The 21st, in the forenoon, we saw Celebes; but we could not fetch Macassar. Coming to anchor, we parted our cable and lost an anchor. The 4th February we saw Bourro. The 5th I held a council to consider what was best to be done, as the wind did not serve for the Moluccas, when it was concluded to go for Banda. We saw Amboyna E. by N. from Bourro, twelve leagues. The 6th we saw the high land of Banda, in my opinion 25 leagues E. by S. 1/2 S. from the eastern part of Amboyna.’

Two and a quarter centuries later, in 1836, Charles Darwin passed by the Cocos, during the second voyage of HMS Beagle, and his assistant, Syms Covington, gives a colourful description of the islands in his journal. (This is also freely available online at the Australian Science Archives Project.)

‘Anchored in the Basin, Keeling or Cocos Islands April 1st, after having a heavy breeze the last two or three days of our passage. The Islands ARE all very low; the beaches appear to be the highest. AND the highest I should suppose not more than twelve to fifteen feet high; all coral, about forty in number, the largest not more than ten miles long. The islands are complete forests of cocoa nut trees; if not for THE trees, the land would be seen FROM but a very short distance. ONE can wade from one island to another when the tide is low, to nearly all except THE entrance to THE Basin, which Basin is formed by the islands being as placed to form a circle. The Basin IS about twelve miles across. ONE cannot go far in with A ship; we anchored in seven or eight fathom OF water; coral bottom with white sand, the water always being clear. Beautiful branches of coral can be seen from the ship’s side, the fish constantly passing and repassing amongst the coral, has a most beautiful effect, etc.

An Englishman and HIS family, with about sixty or seventy Mulattos from the Cape of Good Hope, live on one of the islands. Captain Ross, the governor, is now absent at the Cape. Plenty of poultry (A Chinese breed) and turtles, the latter of which the ship was supplied during our stay: two per day, each about A hundred fifty pounds IN weight. Also hogs, sugar cane and bananas (the latter I never saw); tobacco, planted here, produces well. I believe the coffee plant was also tried but never saw it. THERE ARE two sorts of indigenous fruit AND plenty OF watermelon, ALSO maiz. The water is very brackish and for which one is obliged to dig wells; THE WATER LEVEL rises and falls with the tide although IT IS some distance from THE beach, and THEY WERE obliged to dig until they came to a number OF stones, under which springs the water.

A lake (lagoon) IS on the largest island. In the small lagoons or pools on reefs are immense numbers of small fish of different species, and of the most brilliant colours and shapes I ever saw or fancy could paint. Here are great numbers A green fish, THE coral eater. Here also are land crabs, very curious and very strong in claws. THEY are eaten by the inhabitants. Here, I should suppose is one of the largest shells in the world, sort of clam shell, WHICH would take a very strong man to lift one with the animal in. The largest is about nine feet long. Different sorts OF SHELL AS WELL, leopard shells, etc. Great quantities of bêche-de-mer, WHICH is like A large, black English slug only about ten times the size, are dried here for the Indies.

Only one genus of land bird here, viz. the land rail, indigenous to THESE islands. A great many sea birds and very tame, as to let you come close to the them or within a yard or two. THEY build their nests on the trees close to beach. On this Island were great numbers of the land rail, about several houses. The Java sparrow WAS brought here.

On Sunday the 3rd of April was caught a shark eight feet long, which put a stop to our bathing, which before was at every evening by moonlight. It is excessively hot. When sitting still the sweat is constantly dropping off the body.

Outside of THE Basin, round the islands at seven tenths of a mile from THE beach, soundings 100 fathoms; a mile out, no bottom. AT THE southernmost part of basin a channel is cut through coral for the boats, and stakes drove in different places to mark the channel. Even then, you are very apt to run foul of or branches of coral. WE had a pilot in the boat.’

Ordinary people

Naomi Mitchison, a prolific Scottish writer and activist, died ten years ago today aged 101. She wrote almost as many books as she lived years, including one based on the diaries she kept for the social research organisation, Mass Observation, during the war. This gives a wonderful picture of Mitchison’s upper-class world, though one very much coloured by her liberal concerns.

Naomi Haldane was born in 1897 in Edinburgh, to a wealthy family, and educated at Dragon School and St Anne’s College, Oxford. During the war, she married Dick Mitchison, and after it, they both became Fabian Labour campaigners. He was elected to Parliament, later being elevated to the House of Lords. Until the 1930s, the Mitchisons lived in Hammersmith, London, entertaining, among others, a wide circle of literary friends. They had seven children, though one died at birth and another of meningitis when still young.

In the late 1930s, the family moved to Carradale in Argyll, where she lived for the rest of her life. Soon after, at the request of the social research organisation, Mass Observation, Naomi began to keep a diary. She travelled often and widely, both before and after the war, and, in the 1960s, was adopted as an honourary adviser by the Bakgatha tribe in Botswana. She was a lively activist, always campaigning on political and social issues, particularly family planning. She was also interested in gardening and archaeology, and was very much committed to her local area.

Naomi’s main occupation, though, was always writing. Her first novel, The Conquered, was published in 1923, and other novels, such as The Corn King and The Blood of the Martyrs, followed in the 1930s. All in all, she wrote nearly 100 books, including biographies, essays, fiction, poetry and some well-respected and entertaining memoirs. Excerpts from her early diaries are contained in the biography The Nine Lives of Naomi Mitchison, but there’s also a full book of the diary entries made for Mass Observation - Among You Taking Notes... The Wartime Diary of Naomi Mitchison, 1939-1945 - edited by Dorothy Sheridan and first published by Victor Gollancz in 1985 (but more recently by Phoenix Press).

Mitchison died 10 years ago today, on 11 January 1999, aged 101. The Guardian website has an obituary, and also an appreciation of her by Neal Ascherson who wrote: ‘She was wise, having lived through much personal turmoil, and brave: somebody who lived out her feminism in days when love and freedom could carry grim penalties. . . If intelligent people shouted long and loud enough at governments, she believed, truth would prevail. She often did prevail. For the rest of us not raised in an age of reason, it is harder.’ Further information can be found at Wikipedia, and at The Diary Junction.

Mass Observation, which was founded in 1937, recruited a team of observers and a large panel of volunteer writers so as to study the everyday lives of ordinary people in Britain. This work continued through the war and until the early 1950s, but was taken up again in the 1980s. It still continues today in the care of the University of Sussex. Some of the diary entries from the original project have been published in anthologies, but at least two diarists have had their war diaries published separately. One of these is Naomi Mitchison (another is Nella Last). Here is the very first entry from Mitchison’s book, Among You Taking Notes, which gives an impression of her liberal tendencies, and also of her privileged life.

1 September 1939
‘Woke from nightmare to realise that at least it hadn’t happened yet: so until after breakfast. Got the news at 10:30. Two of the boys had been out all night herring fishing so were asleep still; the others came in and listened. At the end Dick said ‘That’s torn it’. Thought I had better at once return the cups and saucers borrowed from the [Women’s Rural Institute] and the school urn, and see what news there was of children to be evacuated. Felt a bit sick. Went into the garden, and saw Willie, very white; he had been listening to Hitler ‘working them up’ - Willie himself conducts a choir. Talked a little to him and James Downie, all felt it had got to come now. We talked of the ordinary people in Germany and tried to hope this would mean the end of privilege everywhere. So to the stables; Lachie was filling up the car, so I waited talking to Eddie and Taggie, both of them curiously without enmity towards Germany; we discussed ploughing up the fields for potatoes, and they argued as to whether they would bear two crops in succession and I said I hoped they wouldn’t have to. Taggie talked about his young brother who is a C. O. said ‘They’ll shoot him before he goes’ and then ‘It’s no free country where they can do that’. I said I thought it important that there should be some real pacifists in any community, and they agreed; I said I would do what I could for the boy. Both agree that the ordinary people in Germany don’t want this. Lachie brought the car back; I said ‘Bad news’, and he soberly said ‘Aye’.’

Four cafes a night

‘The cafe routine. After work, or trying to write or paint, you come to a cafe looking for people you know. Preferably with someone, or at least with a definite rendez-vous. . . One should go to several cafes - average: four - in an evening.’ So wrote Susan Sontag in her diary, exactly 50 years ago today. A first collection of her diary entries has just been published in the US, and is set for publication in the UK in January.

Susan was born in New York City in 1933 to Jack Rosenblatt and Mildred Jacobsen, both Jewish Americans. Her father ran a fur trading business in China, where he died of tuberculosis when Susan was five. Seven years later, her mother remarried, to Nathan Sontag whose surname Susan took. She studied philosophy and literature at the University of Chicago, but also spent time at Harvard, Oxford and the Sorbonne. When only 17, she married Philip Rieff, and they had one son, David, before divorcing in 1958.

After teaching philosophy at Columbia University for a while, Sontag began to focus exclusively on writing. She produced several novels (and plays), starting with The Benefactor in 1963, and ending with The Volcano Lover in 1992 and In America in 1999. She also wrote and directed several films. However, it was as an essayist that she is probably best remembered.

Against Interpretation, published in 1966, helped establish her reputation as a ‘dark lady of American letters’ (according to the neoconservative theorist Norman Podhoretz), and in 1977, she wrote a ground-breaking essay called On Photography. Over the next two or three decades, she wrote widely on photography, as well as about novels, film, the media and illness. She was also a busy human rights activist, and served, from 1987 to 1989, as president of the American Center of PEN, the international writers’ organization. She died on 28 December 2004, four years ago yesterday.

Sontag was also a diarist, and her son, David Rieff, a writer on international issues, has been preparing the diaries for publication. A first volume published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux - Reborn: Early Diaries, 1947-1964 - came out in the US a few weeks ago (see Amazon.com) and is due for publication by Hamish Hamilton in the UK on 1 January (see Amazon.co.uk).

According to the publisher’s blurb, Reborn is ‘a kaleidoscopic self-portrait of one of America’s greatest writers and intellectuals, teeming with Sontag’s voracious curiosity and appetite for life’. The Independent, previewing the book last November, says it unveils ‘an intimate portrait of her early life and her much talked-about sexuality’. And it quotes one passage from when she was still only 15: ‘I am very young, and perhaps the most disturbing aspects of my ambitions will be outgrown . . . so now I feel I have lesbian tendencies (how reluctantly I write this).’

The Independent also quoted Rieff on the difficulties he had had with publishing such frank and personal material: ‘It was a difficult decision for me to make and my reasons are that I didn’t have much choice given the fact that she chose to sell the papers to the University of California. So later, down the line, editions of it would inevitably be published, so I would rather do it myself . . . I certainly made every effort in the editing not to cut anything on the basis of my being uncomfortable with it, and not to cut anything my mother might have preferred the world not to know.’

A generous helping of Sontag’s diary extracts can be found on the New York Times website, which published an article about her diary-writing more than two years ago. It says her interest in traditional journal-keeping - with dated entries and considered sentences - was ‘episodic’. There are outbreaks of diary writing, it explains, though more typical are lists (movies seen, books to read etc.). Although sometimes in her life she traces every detail of her private life with anxious care, it adds, at other times close relationships seem hardly to have been recorded.

Of particular note is this comment: ‘Seen in the light of her accomplishments and celebrity, Sontag’s life seems to have an admirable coherence. Her public persona was durable and unmistakably hers. But in the journals, the effort of it appears again and again: the reworking of the life and ideas, the total concentration, along with the excitement she felt when things were finally going well. She often meditates on this constant self-construction, and indeed some aspects of her life - the mixing of high and low culture, the sexual enthusiasm, the passionate intellectualism - would become, beginning in the 1960s, hallmarks of the Downtown life.’

Here are a few extracts from the diaries, starting with one written exactly 50 years ago today.

29 December 1958, Paris
‘St. Germain des Prés. Not the same as Greenwich Village, exactly. For one thing, expatriates (Americans, Italians, English, South Americans, Germans) in Paris have a different role + self-feeling than provincials (e.g. kids from Chicago, the West Coast, the South) who come to New York. No rupture of national identification, and mal-identification. Same language. One can always go home. And, anyway, the majority of Villagers are New Yorkers - internal, even municipal, expatriates.

The cafe routine. After work, or trying to write or paint, you come to a cafe looking for people you know. Preferably with someone, or at least with a definite rendez-vous. . . One should go to several cafes - average: four - in an evening.

Also, in New York (Greenwich Village) there’s the shared comedy of being Jewish. That’s missing, too, from this bohemia. Not so heimlich. In Greenwich Village, the Italians - the proletarian background against which deracinated Jews + provincials stage their intellectual and sexual virtuosity - are picturesque but pretty harmless. Here, turbulent marauding Arabs.’

31 December 1958
‘On Keeping a Journal. Superficial to understand the journal as just a receptacle for one’s private, secret thoughts - like a confidante who is deaf, dumb and illiterate. In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could to any person; I create myself.

The journal is a vehicle for my sense of selfhood. It represents me as emotionally and spiritually independent. Therefore (alas) it does not simply record my actual, daily life but rather - in many cases - offers an alternative to it.

There is often a contradiction between the meaning of our actions toward a person and what we say we feel toward that person in a journal. But this does not mean that what we do is shallow, and only what we confess to ourselves is deep. Confessions, I mean sincere confessions of course, can be more shallow than actions. . .

Nothing prevents me from being a writer except laziness. A good writer.

Why is writing important? Mainly, out of egotism, I suppose. Because I want to be that persona, a writer, and not because there is something I must say. Yet why not that too? With a little ego-building - such as the fait accompli this journal provides - I shall win through to the confidence that I have something to say, that should be said.

My ‘I’ is puny, cautious, too sane. Good writers are roaring egotists, even to the point of fatuity. Sane men, critics, correct them - but their sanity is parasitic on the creative fatuity of genius.’

Right and wrong in poetry

Hanazono, the 95th emperor of Japan, began his reign 700 years ago today (according to Wikipedia’s 28 December listing). However, after only 10 years he abdicated, and focused his attention on religious and literary matters. He also wrote a diary. Although there is very little information about him or his diary in English, there are a couple of extracts from the diary online, and these demonstrate a keen interest in music and poetry.

According to Wikipedia, Tomihito-shinnō was born on 14 August 1297, and died on 2 December 1348. He was the fourth son of the 92nd Emperor Fushimi, and belonged to the Jimyōin-tō branch of the Imperial Family. He became Emperor Hanazono on 28 December 1308 after the abdication of his second cousin, the Emperor Go-Nijō. (Of course, such dates from so long ago can only be tied down to the Gregorian calendar with much approximation.)

During Hanazono’s reign, both his brother and father, the retired-Emperor Fushimi, are said to have exerted influence as cloistered emperors. And the reign was marked by negotiations with another family line that claimed the throne and the Bakufu (military). An agreement to alternate the throne every 10 years between the two lines (the so-called Bumpō Agreement) was broken by Emperor Go-Daigo, Hanzono’s second cousin, who took over when Hanazono abdicated in 1318.

In 1335, Hanazono became a Buddhist monk of the Zen sect. He was considered very religious, never failing to miss prayers to the Amitabha Buddha. He was also literate, and is said to have excelled at tanka, a kind of poetry. He left behind a diary, Wikipedia says, called Hanazono Tennō Shinki (Imperial Chronicles of the Flower Garden Temple). There is very little information about this diary online and in English, but a couple of books, viewable on Googlebooks, use short extracts.

Sacred Gardens and Landscapes: Ritual and Agency by Michel Conan says this: ‘Emperor Hanazono describes in his diary an imperial progress in the fourth month of 1320; on this occasion, when the imperial party boarded two boats and played music in them under the moonlight, as the parties rowed around the lake, he observes that ‘the sounds of the wind and string instruments and the water’s voice from the waterfall filled our ears’. ’

Another quote from Hanazono Tennō Shinki can be found in Buddhas and Kami in Japan: Honji Suijaku as a Combinatory Paradigm, edited by Mark Teeuwen and Fabio Rambelli. However, it comes (slightly modified) from another book Kyogoku Tamekane: Poetry and Politics in Late Kamakura Japan by Robert N Huey.

‘Ordinary people do not understand these religious truths. Tameyo, who claims the main descent from Shunzei and Teika, has no idea of such things. They just made no impression on him. He jealously holds to the six modes of poetry and cannot see the true meaning of the art. Yet most of the world follows him, and the true Way of Poetry is gradually being abandoned . . . In recent years I have met with the holy man of Sōko and learned the tenets of religion. I have also met with Shinsō Hōnin and heard doctrines of Tendai. I have perused the Five Classics and have come to understand the doctrine of Confucianism. With this knowledge I have thought anew about the Way of Poetry. Truly the distinction between right and wrong in poetry is like that between heaven and earth.’

Emily Brontë peels apples

Emily Brontë, author of Wuthering Heights one of the classics of British 19th century literature, died 160 years ago today aged only 30. There is no evidence that she kept a diary or journal, however she did write four diary-like pieces in collaboration with her sister Anne, and these, in fact are the only pieces of autobiographical writing that Emily left behind. All of them are freely available online - and very domestic they are too.

Emily was born on 30 July 1818 at Thornton near Bradford in Yorkshire, the fifth of six children. In 1820, the family moved to Haworth, also in Yorkshire, where Emily’s father was curate. The following year, Emily’s mother died, and her sister joined the household. The children were sent away to school at various times during their lives, but when at home they encouraged each other in imaginative games and writing. Emily worked for a while as a governess, and taught the piano. In 1842, she and two surviving sisters travelled to Brussels to improve their French, with the idea of starting a school on their return. But that plan never came to fruition. A year or two later, though, they published an edition of their poetry under pseudonyms (Ellis for Emily, Currer for Charlotte, and Acton for Anne).

In 1847, Emily published her only novel, Wuthering Heights. Although now considered a classic of English literature, Wikipedia says, it met with mixed reviews initially, ‘with many horrified by the stark depictions of mental and physical cruelty’. Oddly, Wikipedia’s entry on Wuthering Heights is much longer that the one on Emily. In September 1848, Emily caught a cold at the funeral of her brother, and this led to tuberculosis. She refused medical help and died 19 December 1848, 160 years ago today.

There are no records of Emily Brontë ever having kept a diary. However, there are four autobiographical pieces which seem to have been written as one-off diary entries. Two of them were written with her sister, Anne, in 1834 and 1837, and signed together - these are referred to as Diary Papers. And two were written by Emily on her birthdays in 1841 and 1845, and these are referred to both as Diary Papers and Birthday Papers. They can all be found online, for example at the website of the Brooklyn College English Department, and in several biographies, such as Emily Brontë by Lyn Pykett, published by Rowman & Littlefield, in 1989 (viewable at Googlebooks). The British Library has a photograph of the 1837 Diary Paper and some further information.

Pykett says, of the 1834 fragment, that it hardly suggests ‘the sixteen-year-old Emily is undergoing a stormy adolescence’ and instead offers ‘a sufficiently mundane impression of the daily life of the Haworth Parsonage’. Moreover, she adds, Emily’s ‘tenuous grasp of spelling and punctuation’ only adds to ‘the general impression of rather happy-go-lucky chaos’ in a ‘scene of female industry’.

Here is the 1834 Diary Paper, dated 24 November.

‘I fed Rainbow, Diamond Snowflake Jasper pheasant (alias) this morning Branwell went down to Mr. Driver’s and brought news that Sir Robert Peel was going to be invited to stand for Leeds Anne and I have been peeling apples for Charlotte to make us an apple pudding and for Aunt nuts and apples Charlotte said she made puddings perfectly and she was of a quick but limited intellect. Taby said just now Come Anne pilloputate (i.e. pill a potato) Aunt has come into the kitchen just now and said where are your feet Anne Anne answered On the floor Aunt papa opened the parlour door and gave Branwell a letter saying here Branwell read this and show it to your Aunt and Charlotte - The Gondals are discovering the interior of Gaaldine Sally Mosley is washing in the back kitchen

It is past Twelve o’clock Anne and I have not tidied ourselves, done our bedwork or done our lessons and we want to go out to play we are going to have for Dinner Boiled Beef, Turnips, potatoes and applepudding. The Kitchin is in a very untidy state Anne and I have not done our music exercise which consists of b major Taby said on my putting a pen in her face Ya pitter pottering there instead of pilling a potate I answered O Dear, O Dear, O dear I will directly with that I get up, take a knife and begin pilling (finished) pilling the potatoes papa going to walk Mr. Sunderland expected.

Anne and I say I wonder what we shall be like and what we shall be and where we shall be if all goes on well in the year 1874 - in which year I shall be in my 54th year Anne will be going in her 55th year Branwell will be going in his 58th year And Charlotte in her 59th year hoping we shall all be well at that time we close our paper’

1798 - year of woe

Mary Leadbeater, an Irish poet and diarist, was born 250 years ago this month. Her diary, published as The Annals of Ballitore, provides a literary but graphic account of the Irish Rebellion of 1798, as well as an incredibly moving account of the death of her own daughter - ‘so beautiful, so engaging, so beloved’ - which is reproduced below. 

Born in December 1758 (the exact date is not known), Mary Shackleton was the daughter of the schoolmaster in Ballitore, a village in County Kildare founded by the Quakers in the 1700s. She travelled to London with her father in 1784, where they paid several visits to Edmund Burke’s town house, and where she met Sir Joshua Reynolds and George Crabbe. In 1791, she married William Leadbeater, a former pupil and teacher at her father’s school, and they settled in Ballitore. More biographical information can be found at Wikipedia, The Diary Junction, and Library Ireland.

Mary Leadbeater’s first published work, Extracts and Original Anecdotes for the Improvement of Youth, appeared anonymously in 1794, but she went on to publish collections of poems and several books - Her Cottage Dialogues and The Landlord’s Friend for example - which are considered to provide insight into the domestic and communal life of rural Ireland at the time. She is best remembered, though, for her diary, which she began aged only 11, and which she continued writing until a few years before her death in 1826. Extracts from this, entitled The Annals of Ballitore, were published in the first volume of The Leadbeater Papers in 1862. The full text can be read online at Internet Archive or Googlebooks.

Her first hand account of the Irish Rebellion in 1798 is particularly harrowing. Ballitore was occupied first by yeoman and soldiers and them by insurgents. The Leadbeaters themselves narrowly escaped death, but they then suffered the death of their daughter. Here is a longish extract from the Annals, dated almost exactly 210 years ago, the last weeks of 1798, in which Mary Leadbeater writes about her daughter’s dying.

‘A general rebuilding of the ruined houses now took place, but even this work was in a great measure carried on by plunder. The stately trees of Ballitore were often missed in the morning, and we could hear at night the sound of their being felled and the creaking of the cars which took them away. Desolation threatened in various shapes - the darkness of the winter nights was illumined by the fires of the houses burnt by the insurgents, and fatal was their vengeance. One man whom they thought they had killed and had thrown into a ditch, pulling down part of the bank upon him, was not fatally injured, struggled out of his grave, ran naked to Baltinglass, and convicted his intended murderers. A large burial moved through Ballitore with a kind of indignant solemnity. It was that of a young man who had been hanged, and whose father, on his son’s being apprehended, put an end to his own life. Such were the tragedies with which we were surrounded, and with which we had grown shockingly familiar.

Thus were we circumstanced when a sore domestic calamity seemed to fill up the measure of our sufferings. We thought we had a little respite from our foes, and we were once more assembled in peace around Mary and Anne’s fireside, when our dear little Jane was trusted by me with a wax taper to go up stairs alone. The staircase was short, and her grandmother was in her own room with her attendant. I was not used to be so incautious, and the thought crossed my mind, ‘Is it safe?’ A distinct voice seemed to reply, ‘The child is so steady;’ and all recollection of her left me till I heard her shrieks. Then the truth flashed upon me, and I accused myself of having murdered my child! She had gone into another room than her grandmother’s, and had laid down the taper; it caught her clothes, and the flames were not easily extinguished. A kind of convulsion stiffened her for a moment; the burns though extensive were but skin-deep, and those around us assured us she was in no danger. Alas, we were not aware that the fright she got had stopped the circulation of the blood. 0! why were we not aware of it? Let this be remembered by others, and may no one else experience the distress caused by our error.

The dear child soon ceased to complain of pain, kissed all those about her, and was cheerful, yet all night was thirsty, wakeful, and cold, with but little pulse. In the morning her whole form and sweet countenance underwent a momentary revolution which I cannot describe. We had sent to Athy for a doctor, but he said nothing could be done. Meantime, unconscious that she was leaving us, the dear innocent got her book and her work into her bed, and repeated her little verses, spoke with her usual courtesy to all around her, and, happy in her short life, closed her eyes never more to open them, just twenty-four hours after the accident happened. We who had lost our darling child of four years old felt deeply the deprivation, and struggled hard to submit to the will of Him who gives and takes away.

My grief was aggravated by self-accusation. I beheld my little cherub lie as in a placid sleep, her bloom not quite gone. I listened to those who desired me to reflect on the many fathers of families who lay buried in ditches, slaughtered in the prime of manhood and of usefulness; and to the widow who with tears reminded me that I had still my husband! I reflected how, a brief time ago, his precious life had seemed near departing, and I strove to extract consolation from the genuine sympathy bestowed by our friends; yet I thought no sympathy reached my heart so fully as once when I raised my eyes from contemplating the lovely remains of my child, and met those of a poor neighbour woman fastened upon me in silence, large tears streaming down her cheeks, her countenance filled with the deepest concern. She was a coarse-featured, strong, rough woman, and had forborne any expression by words of what she felt.

Our Jane was borne from our sight; the grave closed upon her for ever; her little playfellows bedecked it with flowers, and wept for their lost companion, while their schoolmistress and her husband mourned as for a favourite grandchild. Even in this season of universal dismay the loss of this dear child was very generally deplored; she was so beautiful, so engaging, so beloved - not like a thing of earth. So ended the year 1798. Oh! year of woe!

That year, that eventful year, which to me began with the fulness of joy, I saw depart laden with deep and piercing sorrow. Thus trouble takes its rounds; but ‘shall we receive good at the hand of the Lord, and shall we not also receive evil?’

We were almost prepared to congratulate our precious child on her escape, and to think that her timid nature might have been terrified into imbecility, when, shortly after her death, the robbers paid us another visit, breaking in the windows in the solemn midnight, and scaring us out of our quiet slumbers to behold armed men in our very chambers. They discovered what we strove to conceal, for their search was very strict, and they took whatever suited their purposes; but withal treated us with civility and respect.’

A pope’s view of Mussolini

The diaries of Papa Giovanni XXIII (Pope John XXIII) are being published in full next week, but only in Italian. According to press reports, these show his views about Benito Mussolini wavered much over time. An edited version of his spiritual diary in English has been available for over 40 years, since just after his death in 1963; and more recently some prophetic statements, said to come from the pope’s diaries, have been quoted widely on the internet.

There is no shortage of information about Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli on the internet. Try Wikipedia, The Vatican, or Time Magazine (which carried an archive article on him dating from his inauguration as pope in 1958). He was born at Sotto il Monte, Bergamo, the fourth child in a large religious family of sharecroppers, and entered the Bergamo seminary when only 11, which is where he began to make spiritual diary notes, a practice he continued throughout his life. He was ordained in 1904 as a priest and was soon appointed secretary to the bishop of Bergamo. From 1915, Roncalli served as a military chaplain, and in 1920 was made director of the Italian organisation for the support of foreign missions. In 1925 he was ordained bishop.

Pope Pius XI brought him in to the Vatican’s diplomatic service and, thereafter, he served in Bulgaria, where he remained until 1935, Greece and Turkey (1935-1944), and France (1944-1953). During the last months of the war and after peace was achieved he aided prisoners of war and helped to normalise the ecclesiastical organisation in France. In 1953, he was created a cardinal and sent to Venice as Patriarch. Five years later, he was elected pope, and took the name John XXIII. Although his pontificate lasted only five years, he is considered to have been one of the most popular popes of modern times (due, it is said, to his personal warmth, good humour and kindness), and to have begun a new era of openness in the Roman Catholic Church.

An edited version of his spiritual diary was published in 1965 - Journal of the Soul. The Diary Junction gives links to websites with some extracts. Here is one of ten resolutions he committed to his diary in 1897 while still a teenager: ‘At table, whether speaking or eating, I will never be greedy or immoderate; I will always find an opportunity for a little mortification; as regards the drinking of wine I will be more than moderate, because in wine lies the same danger as in women: ‘Wine and women lead intelligent men astray.’

More recently, several websites have carried a number of supposed extracts from the pope’s diaries. Here is what Morgana’s Observatory says: ‘The following article has been published by various sources on the Internet, including Insight Magazine. I have not found this ‘diary’ mentioned anywhere but on the WWW. It is republished here for general interest only. Its authenticity is strongly in doubt. The dusty, leather-bound diary containing handwritten predictions was found by a Vatican cleaning woman who was sorting through boxes stacked in a seldom used storage room. . . Father DeAngelo, now 73 years old has agreed to release some of the diary entries made between February of 1959 and April of 1963. The scrawled messages reveal a frightened and excited Pontiff who decided to keep his meetings with Christ and the Madonna a secret.’ And here is one of the prophecies:

6 March 1961
‘Just when I thought my heavenly visits were over, the Madonna comes to me once again. She seems tired of the heartache she must share with me. My heart aches to see him hurting so. The news, again foreboding. In the early 1990s there will be a period of deadly natural disasters. She says paradise will be struck by powerful winds and wails, while killer floods and violent earthquakes will shatter man’s dwellings. By the middle of the decade, regional skirmishes will develop into full-fledged conflicts. As the casualties mount, world-wide famine will strike. The devastation will be like none ever seen, especially throughout Africa where millions will perish.’

Now, though, Pope John XXIII’s diaries are being published in full (though I doubt they include the prophecies!). A grand launch is taking place next Tuesday at Oratorio del Gonfalone in Rome, presided over by some eminent doctors and professors, including Prof Valerio Onida, President of ‘Fondazione per le scienze religiose di Bologna’ which is publishing the diaries: I Diari di A.G. Roncalli - Giovanni XXIII. According to the foundation’s website, though, the ‘Edizione Nazionale’ of Roncalli’s diaries are being published in many volumes, the first of which seems to have appeared in 2004. Perhaps, therefore, the big event on Tuesday is to celebrate publication of the final volumes.

In any case, this week Times Online ran an article about the diaries being ‘published in full’. It says they confirm Roncalli regarded Mussolini, Italy’s Fascist dictator, as a man who had ‘committed errors’ but who had, nonetheless, brought Italy ‘great benefits’. The article carries several quotes, presumably translated by the article’s author, Richard Owen in Rome. (It is not clear, though, whether all these quotes come from the volumes actually being published next week.)

1924
‘In my conscience as a priest and a Christian, I do not feel I can vote for the Fascists. Of one thing I am certain: the salvation of Italy cannot come from Mussolini, even though he may be gifted. His goals may perhaps be good and correct, but the means he uses to realise them are wicked and contrary to the Gospel.’

1936
‘A hidden force is guiding [Mussolini] and protecting Italy.’

July 1943
‘The gravest news of the day is the withdrawal of Mussolini from power. . . The Duce’s gesture is I believe an act of wisdom which does him honour. No, I will not throw stones at him. For him too, sic transit gloria mundi. But the great good which he did for Italy remains. His withdrawal is an expiation for some of his sins. Dominus parcat illi (May the Lord have mercy on him).’

After the war, though, Owen writes, Roncalli described Mussolini’s dictatorship as an ‘immense calamity’ which had brought ‘great sorrow to the Italian people’.

The people of Pemba

Four centuries ago today, an explorer and sailor named Robert Coverte was landing on the island of Pemba, part of the Zanzibar archipelago off the east coast of Africa. A few days later, some of his crew were to be murdered there. Nevertheless, he wrote in his diary that the people of Pemba ‘seeme to bee louing and kind’.

Not much is known about Coverte, other than what can be deduced from his diary first published in 1612 with a very lengthy title (as copied from the British Library catalogue): A True and almost Incredible Report of an Englishman, that, being cast away in the good ship called the Assention in Cambaya the farthest part of the East Indies, trauelled by land through many vnknowne kingdomes, and great cities. With a particular description of all those kingdomes, cities, and people. As also a relation of their commodities and manner of traffique, and at what seasons of the yeere they are most in vse. Faithfully related. With a discouery of a great emperour called the Great Mogoll, a prince not till now known to our English nation.

An American rare book dealer, William Reese Company, is offering a copy of the second edition, published in 1614, for sale at $25,000. Its website provides what little information there is about Coverte. He and his men, it says, left Plymouth in March 1607 and were among the first Englishmen to see the Cape of Good Hope, arriving there in July 1608. Coverte eventually reached Gujarat, where his ship ran aground while approaching Surat. Not granted permission to remain in Surat, the crew departed to various destinations, but Coverte and others set out for the Moghul Court at Agra, arriving there in December 1609. They left in January 1610 and made their way back to the Levant travelling by way of Kandahar, Esfahan, and Baghdad. They reached Aleppo a year later, and then sailed to England, arriving the following April.

The entire text of the 1612 Incredible Report can be read at Early English Books Online. Here, through, are some entries taken from a copy of Coverte’s journal privately printed in Philadelphia in 1931 - see Googlebooks. It has an introduction and notes by Boies Penrose (a lawyer and politician) who said the narrative was ‘vigorous’ and ‘one of the best examples of a travel journal that the period produced.’ The following extracts date from December 1608, starting with one from exactly 400 years ago today.

‘The tenth day of December about two or three of the Clock in the morning, and the Moone shiny, we espied on a sudden low land with high trees growing by the shore side, we being not a league form the shore, so that if we had not espied the trees, we should haue thought the land to haue been a shadow of the Moone, and so might haue run ourselues on shore, and cast our selues away with ship and goods but it was Gods good prouidence thus to defend us from so great and eminent danger, whose name be blessed and praised now euermore.

This was the island of Pemba, which we tooke to be Zinzabar, untill by one of the people of the Countrey we found it to be Pemba. At the sight of this low Iland - after we plainely perceiued it, wee presently tackt about and set from the shore till day and then we tackt about againe to the shore side, and neering along the shore side for a harbour to ancor in, wee sent Pinnis in the meane time, to the shore withe the Gang onlie and master Elmore to seeke for a conuenient watering place, wee keeping our course till our Pinnis came to the shore side. Then two or three people of the Iland demanded in the Portugall language what we were, and one of our men made answer, that we were Englishmen.

Then they demanded againe what we had to doe there, in regard the King of Portugall was King of that Iland: wee replied, that wee knew not so much, neither came we thither for any euill intent whatsoeuer, but only to water, and would giue them satisfaction, for any other thing we should haue of them. Then it drew towards night, and our man came aboard and acquainted the whole Company with this their parly on shore.’

‘The 19 day our Long-boat went a shore in the morning verie early, to fill our Caske with water . . . they gaue the watchword and sounded a horne, and presently set upon our men at the watering place and slew Iohn Harrington, the boat-swaines man, and wounded Robert Buckler. Master Ellmores man very sore, with 8 or 10 seurall wounds, and had killed him, but we discharged a Musket or two, which (as it seemed) hurt some of them; for then they retired and cried out: and so (though weake and faint) he did at length recouer our boat. Also two or three more of our men by creeping, and lying close in the ditch, untill they espied our, got also safe aboard, and then counting our men, we only missed Edward Churchman, and Iohn Harrington, that was slaine: and so comming aboard, we certified the company of all our proceedings on shoare; and our surgeon dressed Robert Buckler; and after, did his best for his cure and recouery of his health. . .’

‘The twentieth day in the morning we went on shoare . . . we found Iohn Harrington dead and starke naked, whome we buried at another Iland, hard by the main Iland. . . The naturall people of the Iland Pemba, seeme to bee louing and kind: for they made signes to me and others, at our first comming, to beware of our throats cutting: which we tooke no heede or notice of, untill this their treachery put in minde thereof againe.’

1st Duke of Albemarle

George Monck, 1st Duke of Albemarle, was born 400 years ago today. He was an English soldier and a key player in the restoration of Charles II. He was not a diarist (as far as I know) but Samuel Pepys mentioned him often in his diary, and called him ‘a dull fellow’. He didn’t, however, lead a dull life.

Monck was born on 6 December 1608, near Torrington in Devon, into a respectable family but one suffering from money problems. He became a soldier, fighting with the Dutch against the Spaniards from 1629 to 1638, and earned himself a reputation as a leader. He distinguished himself further by suppressing a rebellion in Ireland, before returning to England to fight for King Charles I against the Parliamentarians. He was imprisoned for two years in the Tower of London. Then, from 1646, he sided with the Parliamentarians for whom he went to Ireland to fight against the rebels there.

Subsequently, Oliver Cromwell sent him to Scotland where he fought (with Cromwell) at the important Battle of Dunbar. Monck was then made commander-in-chief in Scotland, and completed the subjugation of the country. In 1652, he was appointed one of three generals at sea fighting in the First Anglo-Dutch War. On his return, he married Anne Clarges, and went back to Scotland, to beat down a Royalist insurrection. At Cromwell’s request, he remained there as governor.

During the confusion which followed Cromwell’s death in September 1658, Monck at first supported Cromwell’s son and successor Richard, but did not oppose the overthrow of the Protectorate and the recall of the ‘Rump’ of the Long Parliament. The Rump was forcefully dissolved by General John Lambert, but Monck refused to recognise the new military regime and led an army from Scotland in early 1660 against Lambert.

When the new Convention Parliament was elected, it quickly invited Charles II to return to England as king. For his services in contributing to a peaceful restoration of the monarchy, Monck was made Duke of Albemarle and a Knight of the Garter, and was awarded a large annual pension. He returned to sea and battle once more, in 1666 commanding the English fleet in the Second Anglo-Dutch War, but died in 1670.

Samuel Pepys, who worked for the Navy Board, was a regular visitor at the Duke’s house during 1665, for business and society. Here are a few of Pepys’s diary entries from November that year (taken from The Diary of Samuel Pepys website).

12 November 1665
‘. . . After dinner I by water to the Duke of Albemarle, and there had a little discourse and business with him, chiefly to receive his commands about pilotts to be got for our Hambro’ ships, going now at this time of the year convoy to the merchant ships, that have lain at great pain and charge, some three, some four months at Harwich for a convoy. They hope here the plague will be less this weeke. . .’

14 November 1665
‘. . . and down I went to Greenwich to my office, and there sat busy till noon, and so home to dinner, and thence to the office again, and by and by to the Duke of Albemarle’s by water late, where I find he had remembered that I had appointed to come to him this day about money, which I excused not doing sooner; but I see, a dull fellow, as he is, do sometimes remember what another thinks he mindeth not. My business was about getting money of the East India Company; but, Lord! to see how the Duke himself magnifies himself in what he had done with the Company; and my Lord Craven what the King could have done without my Lord Duke, and a deale of stir, but most mightily what a brave fellow I am. Back by water, it raining hard, and so to the office, and stopped my going, as I intended, to the buoy of the Nore, and great reason I had to rejoice at it, for it proved the night of as great a storme as was almost ever remembered. . .’

22 November 1665
‘Up, and by water to the Duke of Albemarle, and there did some little business, but most to shew myself, and mightily I am yet in his and Lord Craven’s books, and thence to the Swan and there drank and so down to the bridge, and so to the Change, where spoke with many people, and about a great deale of business, which kept me late. I heard this day that Mr. Harrington is not dead of the plague, as we believed, at which I was very glad, but most of all, to hear that the plague is come very low; that is, the whole under 1,000, and the plague 600 and odd: and great hopes of a further decrease, because of this day’s being a very exceeding hard frost, and continues freezing. . .’

27 November 1665
‘Up, and being to go to wait on the Duke of Albemarle, who is to go out of towne to Oxford to-morrow, and I being unwilling to go by water, it being bitter cold, walked it with my landlady’s little boy Christopher to Lambeth, it being a very fine walke and calling at half the way and drank, and so to the Duke of Albemarle, who is visited by every body against his going; and mighty kind to me: and upon my desiring his grace to give me his kind word to the Duke of Yorke, if any occasion there were of speaking of me, he told me he had reason to do so; for there had been nothing done in the Navy without me. His going, I hear, is upon putting the sea business into order, and, as some say, and people of his owne family, that he is agog to go to sea himself the next year. Here I met with a letter from Sir G. Carteret, who is come to Cranborne, that he will be here this afternoon and desires me to be with him. So the Duke would have me dine with him. So it being not dinner time, I to the Swan, and there found Sarah all alone in the house. So away to the Duke of Albemarle again, and there to dinner, he most exceeding kind to me to the observation of all that are there. . .’

The first aerial explorer

Sir George Hubert Wilkins, one of the most successful and versatile of 20th century explorers, died exactly 50 years ago today. He was not only a pioneer in aviation and aerial photography, but he was also the first person to show submarines could operate under the polar ice cap. Although there are no published editions of his diaries, two recent biographical books rely on them extensively.

Wilkins was born in 1888 in South Australia, the thirteenth (!) child of a farmer. He studied engineering at South Australian School of Mines and Industries, then followed an interest in photography and cinematography before sailing to England in 1908 to work for Gaumont Film Company. Subsequently, as a newspaper reporter and cameraman, he learned to fly and began experimenting with aerial photography. In 1912, he worked as a war correspondent in the Balkans, but in 1913 he joined an expedition to the Arctic - led by the Canadian Vilhjaalmur Stefansson - which lasted until 1916.

In the latter years of the First World War, Wilkins was appointed as an official war photographer, a job that placed him in combat areas, and which led him into taking heroic action on at least two occasions - for which he was awarded a military cross and bar. After the war, he took part in two Antarctic expeditions (one as a naturalist with Shackleton); and then took on a project for the British Museum to study the fauna and tribal life of North Australia.

By 1926, Wilkins was testing the feasibility of air exploration in unknown Arctic regions of Alaska. In 1928, he and copilot Carl Ben Eielson pioneered cross-Arctic aviation by making the first ever flight across the Arctic - from Alaska to Spitsbergen, north of Norway. The New York Times called it ‘the greatest flight in history’; and, because of it, Wilkins was knighted in the UK. Moreover, as is well noted in biographies, he met his future wife while celebrating in New York.

South-Pole.com explains that later the same year Wilkins was back in the Antarctic, with Eielson, making the first ever exploratory flight in the area on 20 December (1928). Wilkins wrote in his diary, ‘For the first time in history, new land was being discovered from the air’; and ‘We had left at 8:30 in the morning, had covered 1300 miles - nearly a thousand of it over unknown territory - and had returned in time to cover the plane with a storm hood, go to the HEKTORIA, bathe and dress and sit down at eight o’clock to dinner as usual in the comfort of the ship’s wardroom.’

Three years on, Wilkins led a failed attempt to take a submarine - one he supposedly bought for a dollar and named Nautilus - beneath the ice to the North Pole. But the old ship broke down, endangering its crew and earning Wilkins some adverse publicity. Despite the failure, however, he did show that submarines were capable of operating beneath the polar ice cap. South-Pole.com says this was Wilkins’s last individual and private expedition, and that, thereafter, he accepted a post as manager to his friend and supporter, US millionaire Lincoln Ellsworth. During the Second World War, Wilkins worked for the US government, though he never relinquished his Australian citizenship. He died exactly 50 years ago today, on 3o November 1958.

The World Adventurer website concludes an article on Wilkins by saying this: ‘Despite his impressive list of firsts and pioneering adventures, the proudly patriotic Sir Hubert Wilkins remains sadly overlooked by a country that so reveres its heroes. In the end, it was the US who took his ashes to the North Pole aboard the submarine USS Skate on 17 March 1959.’ That said, however, there is lots of information about Wilkins on the internet: Wikipedia’s article includes links to other resources; Hipwell International Production Services hosts a site with lots of photographs; and the Government of South Australia has a history/culture website also with photographs.

None of these latter three websites, though, has any information about the diaries Wilkins kept. In fact, a collection of his diaries are housed in the Stefansson Collection, Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, some handwritten (in difficult script) and some typed. Wilkins, himself, did consider a book based on them, but never completed it. They remained unused for half a century until Stuart Jenness interpreted them for his book - The Making of an Explorer: George Hubert Wilkins and the Canadian Arctic Expedition 1913-1916 - published by McGill-Queen’s University Press in 2005.

Another book - Simon Nasht’s The Last Explorer: Hubert Wilkins, Hero of the Great Age of Polar Exploration published by Arcade Publishing in 2006 - also quotes extensively from Wilkins’s diaries. Much of it can be viewed at Googlebooks, including this quote from Wilkins’s diary about the Nautilus expedition: ‘Without exception, the others in the vessel wanted to immediately turn back; to make no further attempt to go into the ice this year. To do so would be to admit complete failure. As commander of the expedition I ordered the trials to continue . . . I am determined the vessel will go under the ice and that as many experiments as possible will be made.’

On 25 August 1931, Nasht explains in the book, Wilkins sent a dispatch, printed in the New York American and other Hearst papers (Hearst being his main sponsor), telling the world they were ‘about 350 miles from the North Pole’. It was an exaggeration by 200 miles, and, although he later corrected the claim, the mistake ‘was used against him by those who claimed the expedition was little more than a publicity stunt’.

Nevertheless, this was one extraordinary man, as South-Pole.com says, and an official biography should list his career as ‘war correspondent, polar explorer, naturalist, geographer, climatologist, aviator, author, balloonist, war hero, reporter, secret agent, submariner and navigator’.

Isherwood giving thanks

It’s Thanksgiving Day in the United States. Exactly 50 years ago, the British-born writer, Christopher Isherwood, who had taken American citizenship by then, wrote in his diary about being thankful - thankful for being alive, having just crashed a car while drunk; and thankful for the sweetness of Don, his partner of five years, a young man all of 30 years his junior.

Isherwood was born in Cheshire, UK, the son of an army officer killed in the First World War. He studied at Cambridge, but did not take a degree. Thereafter, he earned a living as a private tutor. His first novel, All the Conspirators, was published in 1928. He spent several years teaching in Germany, a period which provided the material for his best-known novels, such as Mr Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin. During the 1930s, Isherwood collaborated with an old school friend, W H Auden, in three verse dramas. In 1938, the two of them went to China and jointly published Journey to a War.

From 1939, Isherwood settled in California, still working as a teacher but also as a script writer for Hollywood films. The Second World War inspired him to become a pacifist, and during the conflict, he worked at a Quaker hostel with refugees from Europe. He also began to follow the religious philosophy of Vedãnta, and write tracts. Several other novels followed, although Isherwood was never prolific. In 1953, he met and fell in love with a teenager, Don Bachardy, 30 years his junior, who would become an artist, and with whom he would have a relationship for the rest of his life. From 1959 to 1966, Isherwood taught at various US universities. By the 1970s, partly because of his autobiographical novels, he had become a leading spokesman for gay rights. He died in 1986.

Isherwood’s first diary dates back to 1949, and was published by Random House: The Condor and the Cows: A South American Travel-Diary. It tells of a journey Isherwood undertook with his lover Bill Caskey, at the behest of RandoM House, during 1947 through Columbia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and Argentina. University of Minnesota Press brought out a new edition in 2003 which includes additional photographs by Caskey and a new foreword by Jeffrey Meyers. The diary is said to be ‘unsentimental, rich, and wonderfully rendered’ - see Amazon.co.uk. However, The Review of Arts, Literature, Philosophy and the Humanities (RALPH), finds nothing commendable about the book: Isherwood was ‘too lazy to make the most of what could have been a true adventure into the depths of South America’, and his writing was ‘by rote - I did this, I saw that’.

A first and very substantial edition (over 1,000 pages) of Isherwood’s main diaries were not published until 10 years after his death, in 1996 - Diaries: Volume One 1939-1960 - by HarperCollins and Methuen. The promotional material on Amazon.com says that Isherwood ‘put at least as much of his genius in his diaries as he did in his writings intended for immediate publication’, and that the diaries ‘are beautifully written, gossipy, and indispensable for anyone who cares about writing, the creative process, and gay history’. There appears to be no sign yet of a second volume.

Wikipedia and the Christopher Isherwood Foundation website provide biographies of Isherwood, and The Diary Junction gives a few links to online information about, and quotes from, his diaries. But here, to coincide with Thanksgiving Day in the US, is an extract (taken from Diaries: Volume One 1939-1960) dated exactly 50 years ago today.

27 November 1958
‘What I chiefly have to give thanks for, this Thanksgiving, is that I’m still alive. The night before yesterday, bored after a long, long evening . . , and somewhat though not really drunk, I fell asleep at the wheel driving home and ran smash into a parked car. I guess I was knocked out. I remember nothing - until there was this very furious man, the owner of the parked car, yelling at me that he’d like to bash me to pulp - ‘And I’d do it too,’ he said, ‘if you hadn’t got blood on your face already.’ I had, as a matter of fact, hit the steering wheel, which was twisted up, cut myself between the eyes, bruised both eyes, maybe broken my nose, cut one knee and maybe hurt some ribs. The furious man . . . was eagerly expecting my arrest on a drunk, driving charge. But the police were very nice and sent me home in a taxi after I’d been fixed up at an emergency dressing station.

The other think to be thankful for is that Don and I have finished the rough draft of our play The Monsters, also the day before yesterday. We are cautiously starting the rewrite.
Don has hit a new high of sweetness. He is very happy about the play.’