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REMAKING HISTORY

Remaking History considers the ways that historical fictions of all kinds enable a
complex engagement with the past. Popular historical texts, including films,
television and novels, along with cultural phenomena such as superheroes and
vampires, broker relationships to ‘history’, while also enabling audiences to
understand the ways in which the past is written, structured and ordered.
Jerome de Groot uses examples from contemporary popular culture to show
the relationship between fiction and history in two key ways. Firstly, the texts
pedagogically contribute to the historical imaginary and secondly, they allow
reflection upon how the past is constructed as ‘history’. In doing so, they provide
an accessible and engaging means to critique, conceptualize and reject the processes
of historical representation. The book looks at the use of the past in fiction from
sources including Mad Men, Downton Abbey and Howard Brenton’s Anne Boleyn,
along with the work of directors such as Terrence Malick, Quentin Tarantino and
Martin Scorsese, to show that fictional representations enable a comprehension of
the fundamental strangeness of the past and the ways in which this foreign, exotic
other is constructed.
Drawing from popular films, novels and TV series of recent years, and engaging
with key thinkers from Marx to Derrida, Remaking History is a must for all students
interested in the meaning that history has for fiction, and vice versa.

Jerome de Groot is Senior Lecturer at the University of Manchester. He is

the author of The Historical Novel (2009), Consuming History (2008), and Royalist
Identities (Palgrave, 2004).
This page intentionally left blank
REMAKING
HISTORY
The past in contemporary
historical fictions

Jerome de Groot
First published 2016
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2016 Jerome de Groot
The right of Jerome de Groot to be identified as author of this work has been
asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,
or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying
and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification
and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
De Groot, Jerome, 1975–
Remaking history: the past in contemporary historical fictions /
Jerome de Groot.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Historical fiction – History and criticism. 2. Literature and history.
3. History in literature. I. Title.
PN3441.D44 2015
809.3′81 – dc23
2015003903

ISBN: 978-0-415-85877-9 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-415-85878-6 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-69339-2 (ebk)

Typeset in Bembo and Stone Sans

by Florence Production Ltd, Stoodleigh, Devon, UK
This one’s for Ariadne
This page intentionally left blank
CONTENTS

Acknowledgements xi
Permissions xiii

Introduction: Perverting history 1

Part I: Ethics, politics, and nationalism 11

1 Reading and ethics 13

Trusting the historical novel 13
Wolf Hall and the ‘double effect’ of historical fiction 22
Historical fiction and ethics 30
War, blood, guts: Combat and violence in mass-market novels 37

2 Challenging national histories 49

Discussion and origins: Jimmy’s Hall 51
Disrupting pioneer myths: The Western 53
This Is England 61
Mad Men and the illusions of History 70

Part II: Haunting, ghostliness, and the undead 87

3 The materiality of the past 89

Smoking, pastness, and memory in historical film and television 91
viii Contents

Pursuing smoke 99
Smoking in Mad Men 103
Rings as things and non-things 105
Remnants and mourning 108

4 The problem of time and the return of the dead 117

Horrible history 120
Shuffling into history: Zombies 124
Humanness and temporality: The vampire 129
Modern times 132
Time and magic and narrative: Hugo 139

Part III: Pleasure, affect, and performance 149

5 Pleasure and desire 151

Enjoying popular history 151
Downton Abbey, escapism, and passivity 153
Costume and the self-conscious pleasure of the text 159
Misery programming 162
Laughing at the past 166
Lost in Austen, the gaze, and the pleasures of the text 170
Historical exploitation 174

6 Performance and affect 189

The Red Riding Trilogy, smoke, ethics, and performance 192
Anne Boleyn, drag history, and the body of the past 204
Hunger: Authenticity and abjection 211

Conclusions 223

Index 229
FIGURES

2.1 Meek’s Cutoff 59

2.2 This Is England ’88, Episode 1 67
2.3 Stephen Graham in This Is England 69
2.4 Falling man from the opening sequence of Mad Men 78
2.5 Final logo of the opening sequence of Mad Men 79
3.1 Smoking in Hunger 96
3.2 A Single Man 97
5.1 The Tudors publicity shot 177
5.2 Fighting and muscles in Spartacus 178
6.1 Red Riding: 1983 194
6.2 Red Riding: 1983 196
6.3 Red Riding: 1983 196
6.4 Red Riding: 1980 202
6.5 Miranda Raison in Anne Boleyn (2010) 206
6.6 Sands collapses, Hunger 218
This page intentionally left blank
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Sande Cohen, Robert Burns, Alun Munslow, and Robert Rosenstone all com-
mented generously on the project at various stages, and I thank them for their
time, advice, and enthusiasm. Thomas Cauvin looked at the Introduction and helped
greatly with its development. James Stanley, Andrew Moor, and Olivia de Groot
all read chapters and made excellent suggestions for changes. I have spent much
time discussing ideas with Sue Chaplin. I’d like to thank Stewart Mottram, Jennie
Chapman, and Jo Metcalf, and the Department of English at the University of
Hull, who kind of persuaded me to write this book after I gave a seminar there.
I’ve given portions of this paper at seminars and conferences in University College
Cork, Bishopsgate, Northumbria University, the Open University, and the
University of Ulster, and I would like to thank all those who invited me to speak
and listened and asked questions. I’ve talked about this with Kaye Mitchell, Anke
Bernau, Kier Waddington, Robert Eaglestone, Christopher Vardy, Kate Byrne,
Sarah Dunant, Marnie Hughes-Warrington, Emma Darwin, Chris de Groot, Lucy
Munro, Ben Harker, Emily Weygang, Kate Graham, Emma Darwin, and Sally
O’Reilly, so thanks to them all.
Part of the discussion about this book has taken place outside the UK, and this
is something I am very excited about, but also something that often depends on
the goodwill, generosity, intellectual engagement, and language skills of others.
Thanks to Ian Christie and Veronika Klusáková for the great welcome and
discussion at Olomouc. Thanks also to Vera Dubina and Andrei Zorin for a
wonderful time in Moscow and some great insights. I should thank Yuri, Rosa,
and Katya for a great afternoon in Delicatessen discussing ideas, and to Irina
Prokhorova and the team at the New Literary Observer for stimulating times at
Memorial and afterwards. Thanks also to Daniela Fleiß and Angela Schwarz at
Siegen. Barbara Korte and Sylvia Paletschek were great hosts in Freiburg.
As ever, the team at Routledge has been excellent. Thanks to Eve Setch,
Catherine Aitken, Paul Brotherston, and Amy Welmers. Thanks to my colleagues
xii Acknowledgements

in the Division of English, American Studies and Creative Writing at the University
of Manchester and also in SALC, particularly to Amanda Mathews, for keeping
me smiling. I pay tribute, as ever, to Jeremy Maule and James Knowles, who taught
me very little about popular history but a lot about thinking and writing.
I would not be able to do any of this without Sharon, and her love keeps me
keeping on. The book is dedicated to my niece Ariadne/Hairy Bad Knees, with
much affection and love.
PERMISSIONS

Sections of Chapter 1 are reprinted from ‘“Who would want to believe that, except
in the service of the bleakest realism?” Historical fiction and ethics’, in Emily
Sutherland and Tony Gibbons (eds), Integrity in Historical Research (London and New
York: Routledge, 2011), pp. 13–28, with permission.
Sections of Chapter 3 are reprinted from ‘“Perpetually dividing and suturing
the past and present”: Mad Men and the illusions of history’, Rethinking History:
The Journal of Theory and Practice 15: 2 (2011), 269–87, with permission.
The section of Chapter 3 on Sarah Waters is reprinted from ‘“Something new
and a bit startling”: Sarah Waters and the historical novel’, in Kaye Mitchell (ed.),
Sarah Waters (London: Continuum, 2013), pp. 56–70, with permission.
Sections of Chapter 4 are reprinted from ‘Afterword’, in Barbara Korte and
Sylvia Paletschek (eds), Popular History Now and Then (Bielefeld: transcript, 2012),
pp. 281–95, with permission.
Sections of Chapter 5 are reprinted from ‘Invitation to historians’, Rethinking
History: The Journal of Theory and Practice 18: 4 (2014), 599–612, with permission.
Excerpts from Anne Boleyn copyright © Howard Brenton 2010, published by
Nick Hern Books (www.nickhernbooks.co.uk).
This page intentionally left blank
INTRODUCTION
Perverting history

This book considers how the past and imaginative art are bound up in the praxis
termed historical fiction. It looks at the ways in which the past, and the
contemporary relationship to it, is represented. Further, it investigates the processes
by which historical fictions broker this relationship and articulate for a sense of
historicity and also of historiography. The relationship between ‘history’ and
‘fiction’ is a strange, complex one that requires constant attention, and Remaking
History seeks to demonstrate how these uncanny qualities are fundamental to the
purpose and the effect of the texts. Those creating such fictions have sometimes
discussed this aspect of their work. When justifying writing about the case of Peter
Sutcliffe, known as the Yorkshire Ripper, the novelist David Peace considered the
ethics of fictionalizing horrific events:

Perhaps novels and their fictions are, perversely, the more ‘honest’ way to
try to understand and write about the past [. . .] a novel will always, already
be a work of fiction and thus can never claim to be the whole truth and
nothing but the truth.1

Peace argues that his particular form of narrating the past – the novel – achieves
something beyond the scope or the aim of mainstream historical discourse. He
suggests that fiction is not inherently the wrong mode for an investigation of the
past. For Peace, novels are a particular way to ‘try to understand and write’ pastness,
modulating comprehension as well as being a process of textualizing events. Yet
the rationalist epistemological models that have become socially acceptable for
engaging with the past (those apparatuses often termed History) continue to
maintain a hold over the vocabulary of enquiry and the imagining of how to think
about past events.2 In Peace’s view fictions attain a simpler kind of truth-telling
in their fragmented manifestation, or at least strive sincerely while acknowledging
2 Introduction: Perverting history

their inability to comprehend. In his striking conjunction of honesty and perversity

might be found the power and the strangeness inherent in historical fictions of
all kinds. The combination of a term of distortion and diversion with the seem-
ingly true figures the disavowing, inverting move that such works often enact. In
particular, the sense inherent in the word ‘perversely’ that historical fictions might
be wrongly right, against rationality, and, as Peace suggests, a way from ‘the whole
truth’ is extremely resonant. Fictions challenge, ‘pervert’, critique, and queer a
normative, straightforward, linear, self-proscribing History. They are entities that
are interested in mocking and undermining such a way of analysing the past, while
suggesting instead a set of very strange templates for a type of understanding that
does not neatly fit with perceived notions of the ‘historical’.3
Any historical imaginary that can hold within itself Abraham Lincoln: Vampire
Slayer (Timur Bekmambetov, 2012), Ali Smith’s How to Be Both (2014), Spartacus
(Starz, 2010–13), Downton Abbey (ITV, 2010–) and 12 Years a Slave (Steve
McQueen, 2013) is more complex than has been hitherto described.4 These
fictions might be (and have been) criticized – and often, by extension, disregarded
– as excessive, unrealistic, sensationalist, experimental, pulp, cheap, or popular. Yet
they also open up discursive spaces where ideas about the past, desire, time, horror,
nationhood, identity, chaos, legitimacy, and historical authority are debated. Such
discussion is as much configured by the excessive, unrealistic, sensationalist, pulp,
cheap, popular aspect of such texts as their ‘historical engagement’, and these diverse
elements contribute to the historical imaginary that they enable and resource. These
texts allow a culture to think in new ways about what historical engagement, and
the writing of the past, might actually be, and to rethink the terms of historical
understanding. They contribute to the historical imaginary, both in their diegetic
content and also in the modes of narrativization, knowing, and articulation that
they deploy. Fundamental to the purpose of these works are just the qualities that
are often disregarded – their fictive elements, that is, their ‘perversity’, in contrast
to the rationalism expected of true historical engagement.5
This book, then, argues that historical fictions of all kinds – but specifically novels,
films, TV shows – do work that needs to be understood and studied in more depth
than hitherto.6 Their conjunctions of honesty and perversity should be analysed
and interrogated. Remaking History looks at anglophone film, television, and novels
concerned with the past over the last decade or so, to demonstrate the still
unacknowledged contribution that they make to the way that society comprehends
and narrativizes the past. The book seeks to understand the kinds of epistemological
position that these fictions enable and suggest. Its central contention is that these
historical fictions have two key effects. First, they contribute to the historical
imaginary, having an almost pedagogical aspect in allowing a culture to ‘understand’
past moments. Second, and most importantly for the book’s purpose, they allow
reflection upon the representational processes of ‘history’. They provide a means
to critique, conceptualize, engage with, and reject the processes of representation
or narrativization. These works provide the audience with a historiographical toolkit
that allows them to remark upon the discourse of ‘making’ history. This is not to
 Introduction: Perverting history 3

suggest that popular historical fictions simply mimic ‘mainstream’ models, but that
they provide positions of their own, which can be discerned and, to an extent,
described. As Marnie Hughes-Warrington has argued about historical film:

Historical film studies is thus no longer simply about reading and analysing
films [. . .] What makes a film historical, I believe, is its location in a
timebound network of discussions – more or less explicit – on what history
is and what it is for. On this definition any film may be historical because
it is viewed as offering indexical markers – on-screen phenomena seen as
capturing or connected with past phenomena – or because it suggests
something about how and why histories are made.7

This book, then, considers fictional engagement with ‘how and why histories
are made’. It is uncommon still for scholarship to look seriously at the ways in
which historical fictions might work, other than to analyse their representation of
the past.8 Yet, as will become clear, what is presented in these fictions is not ‘history’
but modes of knowing the past. They are ways of exploring and engaging that are
fundamentally fictional, while generally using the realist mode to suggest rational
truthfulness of some kind.
Historical fictions may not be Public History and are probably not History.9 In
fact, using the terms ‘history’ and ‘historical’ at all might be problematic. Yet these
texts engage with tropes of pastness and, in doing so, articulate a historiographical
sensibility.10 Most importantly, they are, for the most part, identified as ‘historical’
or part of a set of recognized historicized aesthetic models. In some ways, research
into historical fiction of this type has been hamstrung by the ‘historical’ descriptor.
There is a presumed binary relationship between history and fiction (with ‘fiction’
invariably being the lesser partner).11 Seemingly, historical fiction seeks to contribute
to mainstream historical knowledge, as it represents the past in the present according
to certain key rules, most often by the use of evidence, realism, and a seriousness
of tone. Historical fictions are texts that suggest an experience of a ‘past’ that cannot
and does not exist, insofar as it is fictional and the past is irretrievable. Manifestly,
the term ‘historical fiction’ is not something definable and comprehensible. This
paradoxical, contradictory phrase is unstable, while striving for clarity, a character-
istic that might be descriptive of historical fictions themselves. The phrase –
‘historical fiction’ (or replace fiction with ‘film’, ‘TV’, ‘novel’, ‘game’, and the
like) – is inherently contradictory (or a tautology, insofar as all history is fiction).
Simply put, research into historical fiction has been bedevilled by an overriding
concern about the historicalness of such work. Developing from this, the concern
of this present work is to assume that historical fictions are unstable, but to think
about how the fictional element of the relationship inflects the historical – not the
other way around, which is often the case in studies of this kind. What do the
strategies of fictionalizing – from addresses to emotion to shifts in narrative
technique – suggest about modes of knowing? If it is possible to trouble the terms
‘historical’ and ‘fiction’, how might they challenge each other when yoked
4 Introduction: Perverting history

together? If history is fiction – which is not a new, or a particularly bold, claim –

what does that mean for fiction, rather than history, and the fictive knowing of the
past? Does fiction – with all its messiness, disorder, range, and strangeness – have
a traceable historical effect of any description?
Robert Rosenstone argued this several years ago in an extremely suggestive
section of his seminal History on Film/Film on History. Suggesting that film might
be ‘a new form of historical thinking’, he asserts:

The history film not only challenges traditional History, but helps return us
to a kind of ground zero, a sense that we can never really know the past,
but can only continually play with it, reconfigure, and try to make meaning
out of the traces it has left behind.12

Rosenstone’s claim here is radical, placing the historical film as a critique of

‘traditional’ forms of knowledge.13 The historical film, in his account, explicitly
challenges ‘History’. It reinterprets and answers this monolithic, ‘traditional History’
by offering new interpretations of what ‘evidence’ there is. It lets an audience think
differently. However, he also argues further that such texts allow the audience to
know differently, or, at least, to become aware of the structures of knowing that
are being worked through. There is something generous in this account, the way
that film aids (‘helps’) a reconstructed sense of how the past and history relate to
one another. These texts add to our understanding and appreciation of
pastness. Historical film invokes, through a number of elements – texture, form,
content – a relationship to the past, as well as a representation of that past. By
foregrounding self-consciousness about the mode of creating ‘history’, such film
does historiographical work and undertakes something valuable at the level of
epistemology.
Despite its gesture to healing, Rosenstone’s historiographical articulation
emphasizes ambiguity and absence. There is something melancholic in this known
lack of knowledge. Rosenstone’s invocation of ‘ground zero’ here is a strange
moment of uncanniness in his writing that underlines this valedictory tone. The
apocalyptic sense of ‘ground zero’ as the location directly underneath a nuclear
explosion, and, moreover, its use as a phrase in targeting and bombing warfare of
all kinds, and, thence, its being representative of the increasing use of military jargon
in standard discourse (along with ‘recruit’ and ‘deploy’, for instance), all point to
a very deliberate placing of the phrase here. Of course, it also invokes the traumas
of 9/11 and very clearly is meant to stand here as a way of considering apocalypse,
revelation, the relationship of the body to the past and of the revenants of trauma.
This echo of 9/11 is used to speak plainly of the revelatory, destructive quality
that history film might have, something that might strip away great effacing
structures and supposed false idols. Rosenstone also uses it to suggest that a kind
of post-Enlightenment rhetoric of historical ‘knowing’ has taken ‘us’ away from
the unknown actuality, has drawn ‘us’ from the starting place of the not-known.14
The movement (‘return us to’) both is to the past itself (the return of the historical
 Introduction: Perverting history 5

consciousness to a purer state of some kind) and also depends to a certain extent
on a sense of temporal linearity. He illustrates a return from a fruitless journey to
the source, the beginning again (the moment of 0 in accounts of past events).
Rosenstone’s diction is key, and its significance is worth teasing out. He makes
a binary of ‘sense’ and ‘know’, rendering the effect of the history film as something
affective (sensory), in opposition to a discourse that strives for rational understanding
and comprehension (knowing). Instead, he argues, ‘we [. . .] continually play’ with
the past. Play is used in several senses here – toy, move, compete – but is primarily
suggesting a kind of Derridean jouissance, something ludic and possibly (un)serious
in an engagement with pastness, which is picked up again in the term ‘trace’. Again,
this is put in parallel with rationalizing terms – ‘reconfigure’ is particularly
technocratic, a language suited to computing, electronics, or cartography. Knowing
is contrasted with a not-knowing articulated as ‘play’, something that is not simply
the reflected other of knowledge, but a different thing altogether. Making meaning,
remodelling and reshaping, playing and shifting – for Rosenstone, this is the essence
of the history film and, in particular, its implicit critique of ‘traditional History’.
Knowing the past is impossible. The history film allows this to be seen and, by
utilizing emotions and imaginative affect, brings comfort of a kind and a new
perspective. It presents a new way of knowing, one that is contradictory and un-
rational. This perspective might be bleak, as not knowing the past renders the present
differently. A very modern sense of historio-solitariness might be invoked here.
This is maybe why the 9/11 reference is used – a sadness about the return to a
nothingness, a fragmentation of human relationships inherent here in the
undermining of this knowledge system, the violent birthing of a new world order.
It also invokes a sense of the possibly traumatic relationship between historical
knowledge and fictional knowledge. ‘History’ gives identity, agency, future,
temporal order, nationhood; historical fiction might replace this with something,
but its undermining of totalizing models of knowledge leaves people very much
alone. Without ‘History’, all a society has are ‘traces’, made into various collages
to mimic an order it cannot believe in.
Remaking History is interested in this latter element of Rosenstone’s thinking.
Rather than being concerned solely with how historical fictions of various types
render pastness – their accuracy, their politics, the way that they adapt or translate
– the book proposes to examine how these fictions provide ways of knowing and
engaging with the past. Of necessity, owing to space but also with some polemic
purpose, the book reads ‘historical fictions’ as in some ways homogeneous – that
is, it is important to be aware of the local generic and formal detail of a text, but
in some ways their action might be generalized within a wider arc of popular
historiography.15 This is a problematic assertion, but, in the chapters that follow,
it becomes obvious that each and every ‘text’ approaches the past differently, and
so any kind of generalization, even within discussions of the same ‘kind’ of work,
will miss some of the key formal, generic, or precisely local elements. A precise
typology is yet to be written and may be impossible – and, to an extent, undesirable,
insofar as it would attempt to impose a template upon an anarchic, fragmented,
6 Introduction: Perverting history

and wilful set of texts. The point here is that it is key to look at the various ways
that the past has been translated into the present (and the present into the past),
in order to discern how historiographic ideas circulate and are modulated in the
cultural imagination – that is, to understand their epistemological consequence.
It is necessary to look on novels, or films, or plays, or games, or TV series, not as
poor versions of history, nor within a binary wherein they are at the margins of
a centrifugal historical culture, nor as parasites on ‘proper’ historical knowledge
and practice, but as establishing modes of historical awareness, engagement,
narrativization, and comprehension. Hayden White argued this in 1966:

It is the same notion of objectivity that binds historians to an uncritical use

of the chronological framework for their narratives. When historians try to
relate their ‘findings’ about the ‘facts’ in what they call an ‘artistic’ manner,
they uniformly eschew the techniques of literary representation which Joyce,
Yeats, and Ibsen have contributed to modern culture. There have been no
significant attempts at surrealistic, expressionistic, or existentialist historiog-
raphy in this century (except by novelists and poets themselves) for all of the
vaunted ‘artistry’ of the historians of modern times. It is almost as if the
historians believed that the sole possible form of historical narration was that
used in the English novel as it had developed by the late nineteenth century.16

White’s point here is to undermine the realist mode in historical expression.

His sense of the English novel as essentially a bourgeois form articulating a colonial
panopticonism through its tropes of narrative authenticity and omnipresent – though
diegetically absent – authorial voice is used to attack historical writing as similarly
beholden to its own authority. This attack on the representational strategies of
realism is essentially a desire to disestablish the normative tropes of historical
discourse, and to demonstrate mainstream historiography as essentially one structure
of knowing, among many others, that has attempted to authenticate its own
centrality.17 What is key here, though, is White’s slightly off-the-cuff articulation
of different types of historiography as practised by poets and novelists – ‘surrealistic,
expressionistic, or existentialist’. In attempting to make realistic historical narrative
cede its centrality in the historical imagination, White demonstrates that multiple
other types of historiographical writing and engagement exist away from the ‘centre’.
These historiographical others are hidden in plain sight within culture, but ‘History’
has rarely acknowledged them, argues White. Since he wrote this, there have been
numerous challenges to the centrality of certain historical discourses, and, in
particular, the idea of historical narrative has been roundly critiqued, but the
imaginative historiographic imaginary he describes has been largely ignored.18 It is
the sense of the artistic or fictional historiographical model as other to mainstream
history that this book explores, working this idea through various motifs in order
to try to discern how and why imaginative history might work.
Considering the ethics of historicizing, the historiographer Frank Ankersmit
reflects upon the strange status of the historical text:
 Introduction: Perverting history 7

[a] representation of the past in much the same way that a work of art is a
representation of what it depicts [. . .] we have the discipline of history in
order to avail ourselves of these representations of the past that may best
function as a textual substitute for the actual, but absent, past.19

‘History’ creates versions of the past, ‘textual substitutes’ for something that is not
there, absent, unfilled, chaotic, empty. These are the consolations that the ‘discipline
of history’ provides. It is a way of putting something in place of a missing, errant
alterity-other-past. Ankersmit’s comparison to art is instructive. Much as art often
works by and through pointing out its own artfulness, the lag between the real
and the representation, so historical texts are fundamentally expressive of the
misrecognition they entail, the disjunction between then and now. All historical
texts enact a desire for truth that is leavened with a fundamental understanding
that it is not there; there is nothing innately real in an encounter with it. ‘History’
is the attempt at reconciling the unseen other of the past with contemporary
fractured identity; as in all attempts at such psychic healing of trauma, it is doomed
to failure.
If ‘History’ is a representation of this unachievable alterity, historiography
articulates the ways in which this illustrative process has been made to work and
the rules of engagement. It is a tool enabling the comprehension – or at least some
appreciation – of the discourses, concerns, and issues involved in articulating ‘history’
or translating pastness. Historiography analyses the discipline of history and looks
at the methodologies inherent in the writing, production, and creation of historical
‘knowledge’. Historiography is the set of tools that the discipline of history is
articulated through, ordered, or organized by. Historiography suggests, debates,
theorizes about, and presents the ways in which historians grapple with ‘truth’,
subjectivity, ethics, and otherness in their practice and approach. Epistemology,
language, indeterminism are all discussed and conceptualized, worked through,
reflected upon. Historiography provides a means of describing the problems
inherent in historical representation.
Ankersmit’s comments, however, as with much historiographical writing,
are concerned with auditing the practice of academic or professional History.
Discussions about ethics, epistemology, and historiography still tend to make the
figure of the historian central in undertaking a narrative/account/storytelling/
rendering/translation of the past.20 Scholarly work regularly ignores the contribution
to the historical imaginary and to popular historiography of the swathe of films,
television, and books representing and versioning the past. It is unusual to come
across work that seeks to comprehend the historical and historiographical work being
done by textual iterations outside the academy. Yet, in the contemporary anglo-
phone world, the ways in which individuals encounter time, the past, ‘history’,
and memory mostly fall outside an academic or professional framework. Indeed,
in popular culture, the professional historian is at best one of a range of voices
contributing to an awareness of things that happened in the past. Historical fictions
engage with the processes that Ankersmit is outlining here, demonstrating a
8 Introduction: Perverting history

concern with the processes of historicization – that is, a historiographical sensibility.

Understanding how this works is the task of Remaking History. The book does not
seek a template or to taxonomize. Instead, it is an attempt at demonstrating the
multitude of ways that the past is engaged with.
Remaking History takes into account a wide number of television series, films,
and novels. In approaching the ways in which historical fictions work, the book
considers several key ideas: ethics, nationalism, the body, affect, emotion, pleasure,
terror, death, time, and materiality. It is broadly organized into three thematic
parts. Part I (Chapters 1 and 2) focuses on ethics, politics, and nationalism. There is
a consideration of the historical novel as a form of ethical reading of the past, and
a set of arguments relating to nationalism and film. Part II (Chapters 3 and 4) analyses
haunting, ghostliness, and the undead. The insubstantiality of the past in the present
is key here, and the ways that historical fictions stage the encounter with this absence
are analysed. Part III (Chapters 5 and 6), on pleasure, affect, and performance,
approaches the physical through consideration of the uncanny power of historical
fictions, their ability (and need) to provoke some kind of physical reaction in their
audiences, from terror to desire.
In Hamlet, Hamlet, stunned at the performance of the Player King, asks ‘What’s
Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba,/That he should weep for her?’ (Hamlet, II, ii,
563–4). This acknowledgement of the seen/unseen gap between past event
and present performance is inherent in all historical fictions. The internalized,
syncopated relationship between then and now (‘or he to Hecuba’), not necessarily
linear but in tension, argues that performance of pastness can have emotive,
physical, bodily power and affect in the present (he weeps). Yet, while acknow-
ledging the weft of authenticity, an audience similarly sees its falseness (Hamlet’s
assertion of his own ‘real’ emotion). The popular historical text can express a physical
connection – the body of the actor, weeping – but it cannot be real. In this self-
denying fictiveness, this corporeal ethereality, this ability to reconcile the abstract
and the physical, might be discerned the working of popular historical fictions.
The representation of the past enfranchises the viewer by showing and revealing,
by staging the internal historiographic debate of each text. An audience can see
the joins. Fundamental to the encounter with the historical text is the desire for
a wholeness of representation that understands that the text is fundamentally a
representation. This book attempts to understand further how and why these texts
work, in order to understand this encounter more fully.

Notes
1 David Peace, ‘Why the Yorkshire Ripper?’, Daily Beast, 7 March 2010; available
online at: www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2010/03/07/why-the-yorkshire-ripper.html
(accessed 25 November 2014). On Peace more generally, see Katy Shaw, David Peace:
Texts and Contexts (Brighton, UK: Sussex Academic Press, 2010).
2 On the wide-ranging discussion of the place and influence of History in culture, see, for
instance: Martin Davies, Imprisoned by History (London and New York: Routledge, 2012);
Sande Cohen, History out of Joint (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005);
Marnie Hughes-Warrington, Revisionist Histories (London and New York: Routledge,
 Introduction: Perverting history 9

2012); Jorma Kalela, Making History (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2011); and Keith Jenkins,
At the Limits of History (London and New York: Routledge, 2009). A good overview
of recent work in History and Theory is Ludmilla Jordanova, ‘What’s in a Name?
Historians and Theory’, English Historical Review, 126:523 (2011), 1456–77.
3 On the relationship between culture and history, see, for instance: Raphael Samuel,
Theatres of Memory (London: Verso, 1994); Beverley Southgate, History Meets Fiction
(Harlow, UK: Pearson, 2009); Jerome de Groot, Consuming History (London and New
York: Routledge, 2008); and Alexander Macfie, ed., The Fiction of History (London and
New York: Routledge, 2014). The key debate in the UK on this relationship, particularly
as it regards the idea of ‘heritage’, was during the late 1980s; see: Patrick Wright, On
Living in an Old Country (London: Verso, 1985); David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign
Country (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Robert Hewison, The
Heritage Industry: Britain in a Climate of Decline (London: Methuen, 1987); and Samuel,
op. cit. Greatly useful in this area, if slightly at an angle to this work, is Frank Ankersmit,
‘Truth in History and Literature’, Narrative, 18:1 (2010), 29–50.
4 Not to mention less ‘mainstream’ fictive media, such as games, adverts, documentary/
docudrama, re-enactment and the like; see: de Groot, Consuming History. This present
book does not have the capacity to cover the whole range of articulations.
5 As Gil Bartholeyns argues:
The debate has focused on the distinction between the ‘authenticity’ of the past and
the historicity of the representation. Yet these aspects are in no way opposed. Instead,
they maintain a fundamental connection between the impossibility of representing
history and the possibility of making it live.
(‘Representation of the Past in Films: Between Historicity
and Authenticity’, Diogenes, 48:1 (2000), 31–47)
6 This is to build on the excellent work already undertaken by Robert Rosenstone, History
on Film/Film on History (London: Pearson Longman, 2006); Marnie Hughes-Warrington,
History Goes to the Movies (London and New York: Routledge, 2006); Ann Gray and
Erin Bell, History on Television (London and New York: Routledge, 2013); Andrew
Higson, English Heritage, English Cinema (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2003);
Kate Mitchell and Nicola Parsons, eds, Reading Historical Fiction (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2013); David Cannadine, ed., History and the Media (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2007); Amy Holdsworth, Television, Memory and Nostalgia (Basingstoke, UK:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); and other books cited throughout the following chapters.
7 Marnie Hughes-Warrington, History Goes to the Movies, p. 191.
8 However, a great example of analysis of the praxis of popular historical texts is the work
of Rebecca Schneider, Theatre and History (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012)
and Performing Remains (New York and London: Routledge, 2012).
9 On the relationship between ‘public’ and ‘popular’ history, see: Paul Ashton and Hilda
Kean, eds, People and Their Pasts: Public History Today (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2009); Jerome de Groot, ed., Public and Popular History (London and New
York: Routledge, 2012); and Stefan Berger, Chris Lorenz, and Billie Melman, eds,
Popularizing National Pasts (London and New York: Routledge, 2012).
10 On historiography in general, see: Robert Burns, ed., Historiography (London and New
York: Routledge, 2005); Aviezer Tucker, ed., A Companion to the Philosophy of History
and Historiography (Abingdon, UK: Blackwell, 2009); and, more widely, Hayden White,
Metahistory (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975).
11 This has been generally discussed in work relating to the historical novel; see, for instance:
Richard Maxwell, The Historical Novel in Europe, 1650–1950 (Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press, 2009); and Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural
Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991).
12 Rosenstone, History on Film/Film on History, pp. 163–4.
13 Rosenstone’s thought is carefully analysed in Jonathan Stubbs, Historical Film: A Critical
Introduction (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), pp. 46–52.
10 Introduction: Perverting history

14 In this, he echoes Foucault’s ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’ in Donald F. Bouchard,

ed., Language, Counter-memory, Practice, trans. Donald F. Bouchard, Sherry Simon (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), pp. 139–64.
15 See Ludmilla Jordanova’s discussion of historical ‘genres’ here: History in Practice (London:
Bloomsbury, 2006), particularly pp. 152–5.
16 Hayden White, ‘The Burden of History’, History and Theory, 5:2 (1966), 111–34 (p. 127).
On this, see: David Leeson, ‘Cutting Through History: Hayden White, William S.
Burroughs, and Surrealistic Battle Narration’, Left History, 10:1 (2005), 13–43. On White
and history as discourse (of which fiction is just one part), see: Tropics of Discourse
(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978).
17 See White’s essay on the historical novel, ‘Introduction: Historical Fiction, Fictional
History, and Historical Reality’, Rethinking History, 9:2–3 (2005), 147–57.
18 See, for instance, Alun Munslow, Narrative and History (London and New York:
Routledge, 2007), and Southgate, History Meets Fiction.
19 ‘In Praise of Subjectivity’, in David Carr, Thomas R. Flynn, and Rudolf A. Makkreel,
eds, The Ethics of History (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2004), pp. 3–28
(p. 8).
20 See, for instance: Edith Wyschogrod, An Ethics of Remembering: History, Heterology, and
the Nameless Others (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1998); and Howard
Marchitello, ed., What Happens to History: The Renewal of Ethics in Contemporary Thought
(London and New York: Routledge, 2000).
PART I

Ethics, politics, and

nationalism
This page intentionally left blank
1
READING AND ETHICS

Trusting the historical novel

This chapter considers the historical novel as emblematic of historical fictions in
general. It opens with a general discussion of ideas relating to the form, as a way
of outlining some of the key ideas the book as a whole will grapple with. The
chapter therefore uses the well-established example of the historical novel genre
to demonstrate some fundamental issues relating to historical fictions more widely.
In particular, it suggests that the historical novel allows the writer to meditate upon
society’s strange relationship with the alterity of the past. Hilary Mantel’s intro-
ductory ‘Note’ to The Giant, O’Brien – a book obsessed with the telling of stories
– neatly demonstrates this central conceit. In this opening explanatory comment,
commonplace in the form, she outlines the explicit intellectual and ethical challenge
the historical novel presents to an audience: ‘This is not a true story, though it is
based on one’.1 How do readers confront the commonplace, definitional
conundrum that historical fictions cleave to fact and authenticity, even as they point
out their own falsehood? The narrator of Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion puts it
in similarly disarming fashion: ‘I’m telling you stories. Trust me’.2 Fiction disavows
the fact and ordering associated culturally with ‘history’. In Mantel’s combination
of self-conscious untruth (the recounting of narrative) and an appeal to trust lies
the aesthetics of historical fiction, constantly striving for a ‘reality’ while acutely
aware of fiction. The contract made with the audience is one of trust, the reader
or viewer allowing the untruths that are being presented. The reader acknowledges
their fictive quality while, at some level, ‘believing’ in the realism and authenticity
of the text.
Mantel’s confident assertion is part of her paratextual outlining of the ‘latitude’
she has taken in writing her novel (‘Note’, sig. A6v). It is not true, she says, but
gestures towards something that is. The logic of the sentence seems to suggest that,
although this is not a true story, the historical record is itself, at best, a kind of
14 Ethics, politics, and nationalism

accurate narrative: ‘though it is based on one [ie. a true story]’. Mantel’s note is
the first text that a reader encounters after a self-conscious epigraph from George
Macbeth’s poem The Cleaver Garden: ‘But then,/All crib from skulls and bones
who push the pen./Readers crave bodies. We’re the resurrection men’ (sig. A5r).
Taken together, these paratextual moments frame the novel. The Macbeth citation
reminds the reader that the historical novelist deals in reclaiming those who are
often long dead, resurrecting bodies from the past and breathing false fictional life
into them. The ‘Note’ points out to a reader just some of the moments at which
the author has deviated from the record. The reader, then, is signalled, not once
but twice, before they even read a word of fictional historical story, that this is a
wrought, created, false thing that they are encountering, part of some unholy ritual
of raising dusty bodies (specifically, ‘skulls and bones’ and ‘bodies’, not ghosts).
As this example shows, historical novels clearly invite the reader to reflect upon
the ways in which ‘history’ is told to them. They have a double effect, a kind of
unsettling uncanniness, which seeks to enable an awareness of the wroughtness of
both ‘history’ and ‘fiction’.3 Historical novels present something that looks like a
past that readers think they know. They are often read within a nexus of enter-
tainment, imaginative journeying, and pedagogy, as audiences turn to them to find
out about eras and understand particular periods. This means that they contribute
powerfully to the historical imaginary, and, hence, it is important to understand
their own historiographic positions and aesthetic strategies.4 Historical novels par-
ticipate in a semi-serious game of authenticity and research, deploying tropes of
realism and mimesis, while weaving fictional narrative. The realistic heft is what is
looked for in the novels – reviewers regularly emphasize the authenticity, the affective
impact, of historical fiction (it smells right, it feels right, the snap and tang of the
past are communicated effectively).5 A.N. Wilson writes of Hilary Mantel: ‘Here,
perhaps, we touch upon what makes historical fiction successful. I have no idea
whether Mantel’s More is a fair picture but because her novel is so realistic, I am
prepared to believe her’.6 Belief, here, is associated with stylistic realism, predicated
upon a set of representational tropes that are agreed to be authentic rather than ‘fair’.
The realist aesthetic in historical fiction, as elsewhere, is innately conservative and
complex.7 Yet, simultaneously, the reader is aware, as is the writer, that the ‘realist’
work they are reading is a narrative, incomplete, unfinished, unable to communicate
anything other than a contemporary construction of an unknown, untouchable, lost,
dead world.8 Fiction undermines the totalizing effects of historical representation
and points out that what is known is always partial, always a representation. Sensing
this, historical novelists seek solace in authenticity and fiction simultaneously – citing
their extreme research, at the same time as they distance themselves from ‘reality’.
The historical novel, therefore, sits at a peculiar angle to its creator, who generally
disavows its reality while asserting its diegetic wholeness, authenticity, and truth.
As a form, it raises questions about the virtue of representation and the choices made
by both author and reader in interrogating and understanding the world.
Historical novels are diverse, strange things that contain a multitude of often-
contradictory ideas about memory, ethics, history, and identity. They enact an
 Reading and ethics 15

exploration of truth, authenticity, epistemology, and historiography. Keith Jenkins

points out how much historiographical theory, over the past few decades, has sought
to assert the textuality of representations of the past, demonstrating that works of
‘history’ are merely imaginative assertions: ‘For texts are not cognitive, empirical,
epistemological entities, but speculative, propositional invitations to imagine the
past ad infinitum’.9 In this light, the historical novel can be seen as simply one
more way of conceptualizing the past, an epistemological exercise in ‘imagining’.10
Michel de Certeau, among others, thought that fiction was ‘the repressed other
of historical discourse’; this was, claims Hayden White, because ‘historical discourse
wages everything on the true, while fictional discourse is interested in the real –
which it approaches by way of an effort to fill out the domain of the possible or
imaginable’.11 De Certeau famously argued that, ‘the past is the fiction of the
present’, outlining a view of historiography that suggested its relationship to the
enaction of power structures.12 In contrast, the potentiality of the historical novel
to imagine, albeit aesthetically, to speculate and construct, is the point of writing
about the past: ‘the human effort to represent, imagine and think the world in its
totality, both actual and possible, both real and imagined, both known and only
experienced’ (p. 147). Fiction is able to hypothesize, to imagine, to guess. What
is compelling for White about the historical novel is that it inhabits and manages
the ‘borderlands between a chaotic or entropic historical reality [. . .] and the orderly
and domesticated versions of that reality provided by professional historians’ (p.
152). The key aspect of this particular historiographical intervention is the self-
consciousness that Mantel artfully deploys. By brokering a relationship between
‘real’ and ‘fiction’ that is constantly in a state of flux and, further, by pointing out
the epistemological gap inherent in representing the past (in fiction or ‘history’)
through such self-conscious (and generically fundamental) motifs, historical novels
undertake sophisticated conceptual work.
Furthermore, historical novels force the reader into a temporal disjuncture. They
demand a shifting of imaginative time and, most particularly, a recognition of
temporal otherness. Georg Lukács argued that the historical novel reminds the reader
of their historicity and the possibility of otherness, death, and age. He posits the
‘invention’ of a sense of historicalness, a feeling post-revolution of the continuation
and development of history as something non-static: ‘Hence the concrete
possibilities for men to comprehend their own existence as something historically
conditioned, for them to see in history something which deeply affects their daily
lives and immediately concerns them’.13 Nietzsche appreciated Scott for the same
reasons, as Richard Maxwell illustrates: ‘he is historian because he is subject to history,
and capable of externalizing his subjection’.14 Lukács demonstrated that the historical
novel inaugurates a revolutionary possibility through the imposition of a sense of
pastness that might hold within it a sense of futurity. In its reminder of the individual
as part of something that might be called history/past/timeliness/historicity, and in
its creation of a dynamic timeline and imaginative space of potentiality within the
representation of history, the historical novel fragments and fractures the reader’s
relationship with that history. The historicity that is inaugurated is not linear, but
16 Ethics, politics, and nationalism

dynamic and simultaneous. In a recent overview of the historical novel as a

‘widespread [. . .] mutation’, Perry Anderson outlines Frederic Jameson’s account
of the form. For Jameson, the ‘exaggerated inventions of a fabulous and non-existent
past (and future)’ exhibited by the historical novel is intended to:

rattle at the bars of our extinct sense of history, unsettle the emptiness of our
temporal historicity, and try convulsively to reawaken the dormant existential
sense of time by way of the strong medicine of lies and impossible fables,
the electro-shock of repeated doses of the unreal and the unbelievable.15

Hence, historical novels can critique the hegemonic structure of a totalizing,

explaining history. They challenge a deeply ideological sense of temporal identity,
challenging hegemonic structures of knowing the now. The strategies inherent in
knowing, enacting, and constructing official versions of history are laid bare by
the effects of historical novels which attempt to hold within them the actuality
and the authority of history, but always, always know, deep down, that they are
fabrications. The past as presented in historical novels is an enactment, a recreation,
a performance of pastness; it is a mimicking of a dominant discourse that enables
the consideration of other multiplicities of identity and behaviour. In many ways,
the popular historical text, whether it be film or television or book, is the other
of the archive, the dissident, illegitimate reflection of the official, with playful
inversion and misrecognition inherent in its being. Where the archive or the library
is memory, the popular text is mismemory and misquotation.
The translation of the past into a recognizable, readable present demands a set
of formal procedures and aesthetic assumptions that are particularly disconcerting,
accruing around the illusion of authenticity. To use thoughts on linguistic transla-
tion, this involves ‘the appearance . . . that the translation is not in fact a translation,
but the “original”’.16 Somehow, the historical novel must look like it is the original.
This is the authentic fallacy. The illusion of this translation is key to the effect of
the historical novel. Realism in historical novels – and historical fictions more
generally – consists of aesthetic strategies designed to persuade an audience of the
veracity of the representation. The fictions cleave to a particular set of evidentiary
tropes gathered from governing discourses of authenticity. The past is filtered and
reordered for a readership in the present by the gatekeeper novelist. Translation is
inherently violent, and bringing the past into the present through these fictional
means is problematic.17 The ethics of translating and transporting the past into the
now are complex, and meditated upon by historical novelists. The explanation of,
the discussion of, the representation of, the other that is the past leads the writer
into strange areas, and the provocation to the historical novelist is how to balance,
understand, and conceptualize this; how to demonstrate, in their presentation of
the past, that they understand the alienness and unknowability of that past.18
The essential relativism and reflection that link historical fiction and ontological
temporal experience are expressed thoughtfully by John Fowles in his 1986 book
A Maggot:
 Reading and ethics 17

[She cries] the small tears of one who knows herself without choice. Her
time has little power of seeing people other than they are in outward; which
applies even to how they see themselves, labelled and categorized by
circumstance and fate.19

At first glance, this seems to argue for historical relativism – the audience are not
like them – of the kind that Fowles deploys regularly to rebut Marxist views of
history in his earlier The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969). Yet the affective moment
here (the emotional, resonant echo of pastness) is counterpointed by Fowles’s
assertion of mutual incomprehension, when he continues:

To us such a world would seem abominably prescribed, with personal

destiny fixed to an intolerable degree, totalitarian in its essence; while to its
chained humans our present lives would seem incredibly fluid, mobile, rich
in free will [. . .] and above all anarchically, if not insanely, driven by self-
esteem and self-interest.
(p. 55)

They were, the reader is, neither is correct; both are simply nodes in the river of
history – which has the appearance of continual flow in one direction, but has
great fluidity, eddies of strangeness, and huge inertia at points. The past is obscene,
but so is the present, and, in this moment of disavowal, Fowles interrogates the
historicity of the reader, challenging them to realize that they are part of a chaos
that society attempts to frame as ‘history’.
Another key moment of self-consciousness in Fowles’s text comes much later,
where he is attempting again to account for historical difference:

We should do better to imagine a world where, once again, a sense of self

barely exists; or most often where it does, is repressed; where most are still
like John Lee, more characters written by someone else than free individuals
in our comprehension of the adjective and the noun.
(p. 392)

Fowles reaches for the metaphor of textuality to try to explain a life without
interiority in the modern sense. What is different is identity, and, particularly, the
way in which our modern lives are fundamentally equated to language (‘free
individuals’ = adjective + noun). Modern people have become archivized, able
only to express themselves – and, strikingly, their freedom – through words, rather
than more bodily, less cerebral (or selfish) existence. That said, Fowles illustrates
the loss of – the absence of – self by using language (‘repressed’) that plays with
modern articulations. This is a moment of address to the reader, a stern injunc-
tion regarding the ways in which they might understand, not just the text, but
also the context of the text, or the world of the text. The modern reader – whoever
that is, wherever they are – is to understand by not understanding, or by seeking
18 Ethics, politics, and nationalism

to depress or repress their own sense of what a person should be or how they
should act.
Hilary Mantel argues that, in writing about the past, the novelist spends much
time avoiding the rawness that it contains, suggestive of the sublimity of history:

A relation of past events brings you up against events and mentalities that,
should you choose to describe them, would bring you to the borders of what
your readers could bear. The danger you have to negotiate is not the
dimpled coyness of the past – it is its obscenity.20

So, the past is obscene, something inexpressible and incomprehensible to modern

sensibilities. Mantel’s insight about ameliorating the unrecognizable otherness of
the past – the ‘obscenity’ of history that cannot be spoken, that might be controlled
or smoothed over by the art of the novelist – highlights an interesting point in
conceptualization of the relationship between history and fiction. The past is a
foreign country, literally other, and full of horror and problematic chaos. The
novelist and the historian both seek to disavow this horror and negotiate a
relationship between then and now. However, this simply points out more clearly
the otherness of the past.
This ‘obscenity’ is akin to the way that postmodern historiographers have
characterized the sublimity of history: that is, that which is chaotic and terrifying
and that works, in tandem with echoes of the traumatic rupturing from that past
through the imposition of language and signification on the subject, to disavow
identity of any real, true, innate kind.21 Amy Elias outlines the effect that the
encounter with the historical sublime has on the novelist:

The postmodern turn on history, at base an assertion of the sublimity of

History, is from this view a desire for meaning that paradoxically insists on
an incomplete answer to ‘Why?’ It is an ongoing negotiation with the chaos
of history that continually strives towards completion and fulfilment, towards
final knowledge, and is continually thrown back from the barrier of language
and culture. Thus what I call ‘metahistorical romance’ to some extent repeats
the contemporary debate about history in historiography.22

That is, the historical novel reflects the concerns of a philosophy of history that
seeks to outline the fragmented, the incomplete, the deferred, and the lack at the
centre of History and historical discourse. The movement enacted is towards the
completeness of the past, while constantly being undermined by the knowledge
of the impossibility of this encounter. The historical novel plays a role in com-
municating the indeterminacy and unknowability of history to the reader and
through culture to society as a whole. The alterity of the historical novel and
its ability to ‘open up new life narratives and alternative relations to time and space’
(despite – simultaneous with – its often innate conservatism) – brings it, therefore,
within the compass of the suite of texts, ideas, theories, and positions that have
 Reading and ethics 19

been thought to destabilize discourses of dominance.23 The historical novel

demonstrates the sublimity of history because it subverts the legitimacy of main-
stream ways of thinking about the past. The historical novel enacts the ‘ongoing
negotiation with the chaos of history’ within popular culture and enables an
awareness in the readership of the fragmentary, tentative, fragile nature of their
relationship with the past.
Yet Mantel also sees the action of writing about the past (or remembering it)
as somehow regenerative or like a kind of imaginative resurrection. While visiting
Ralph Sadleir’s Tudor house, she is overcome with emotion in an extraordinary
moment of uncanniness:

It was then that the shock of the past reached out and jabbed me in the ribs.
They were as alive as I am; why can’t I touch them? Grieved, I had to stuff
my fingers in my mouth, fish out my handkerchief, and do what a novelist
has to do: unfreeze antique feeling, unlock the emotion stored and packed
tight in paper, brick and stone.24

Mantel has an affective response to the physical evidence of the past, and it
upsets her. She figures historical fiction here as something that allows a kind of
grieving, indeed, is an aspect of her mourning. It translates her sadness and allows
her to communicate her emotions. Rather than rationalize her response – to try
to control her tears – she blocks them and gets on with her ‘work’. The ‘shock
of the past’ is the comprehension of herself in the ‘now’ (in history) and, hence,
the proleptic understanding of her own death. Mantel strives to ignore this by
translating the experience into prose, controlling it through fiction. ‘History’ has
given her ‘paper, brick and stone’, but the historical novelist resists this typological
definition, looking to find that which has been stored and packed away by that
superficial controlling structure. On the one hand, then, this event seems to clarify
the difference between a textual (physically structuring) History and the ‘emotion’
(sense, empathy, comprehension) communicated somehow by the novelist.
Mantel and the others cited here create a binary between History and historical
fiction, suggesting that their practice disrupts the rational, taxonomizing structure
of a totalizing – but empty – way of translating the past into the present. At the
same time, Mantel also demonstrates how historical fiction itself describes and
controls her own affective response to the past. She is forced to comprehend her
own historicity, but her action as a translator of the emotion of the past turns her
away from that feeling. She uses her professional, workmanlike approach as a way
of ignoring the trauma of her encounter with the rawness of history, the ‘shock
of the past’. Historical fiction, then, might be a way of both acknowledging the
powerful emotions experienced in the past – a way of communicating a more
embodied, material, human pastness – while similarly attempting to smooth over
this ‘shock’, to disavow the effect and affect that the past might have upon those
in the present if not properly, formally controlled. The historical novel works to
render history present and, hence, to flatten time, to make the past contemporary.
20 Ethics, politics, and nationalism

This transhistorical impetus ensures that a reader might not necessarily see their
historicity in the way that Mantel did – it might be smoothed out, the past othered
into a consoling fiction, but, through those representational strategies, understood
and comprehended, disciplined and controlled.
Crucially, Mantel the novelist here seeks out the affective in the material – the
‘emotion stored and packed tight in paper, brick and stone’. The emotional
resonance of the material elements of the past is an elegant way of thinking about
the actions of a historical fiction, and yet Mantel is clearly only ‘unlocking’, rather
than creating; she acts as a conduit (and translator). The past is there as a spectre,
unseen but not disappeared. The emotions that are part of the fabric of the past
are as much ‘history’ as the writings, walls, or gardens of the house; the novelist
accesses the past through this, though, adding the heft of flesh to the bodily frame
of history. Furthermore, what history (in the shape of the heritage site, the text of
the museum) tells us is that the past is dead – leading Mantel to grieve – and this
is the ‘shock of the past’. In Mantel’s reading, then, what the historical novelist
does is to overcome this – not to disavow it, or ignore or repress it, but to allow
for some kind of affective relationship between then and now that ‘normal’ history
cannot accomplish. The traumatic moment of historical understanding – the
recognition of death and disappearance as marking out the past and our relation
to it – is constantly attended to and only partially reconciled or repressed through
the comforting actions of fiction (all types of fiction, including the ones that societies
tell themselves, disguised as ‘history’). Historical fiction inflects the historical or
archival record through consideration of the personal, the individual, the unwritten,
the unseen, the unheard and unsaid.
Mantel highlights something about the oxymoronic corporeal spectrality of the
encounter with the past: physical and conceptual, ghostly and frozen. This sense of
the actuality and the materiality of the past, somehow linked with place, but
nostalgically, mournfully, tragically distanced from us – a sense of frail mortality and
chronological specificity, a self-conscious historicity – suggests that the encounter
with the past is what makes us human, and the desire to somehow raise the dead
is what brings us to historical fiction. As Alessandro Manzoni argues, the historical
novelist offers ‘not just the bare bones of history, but something richer, more
complete. In a way you want him to put the flesh back on the skeleton that is
history’.25 The historical novel reinserts the human and the bodily back into the
historical narrative. Manzoni, though, argues further: it makes the past richer and
more complete, rendering what was unsaid said, and what was not seen visible; the
historical novelist, though, caters to the whims of the reader – ‘you want him to
put the flesh back’ on to the dry, unbodily structure of the past that history has
given us. J.G. Farrell similarly argues that, ‘History leaves so much out [. . .]
everything to do with the senses, for instance. And it leaves out the most important
thing of all: the detail of what being alive is like’.26 For Farrell, historical fictions
can create an affective and empathic connection that ‘History’ cannot. History is a
cold description compared with the richness and human detail of a fiction; in Farrell’s
conceptualization, historical fiction has something profoundly authentic to say about
 Reading and ethics 21

the past through its concern with what ‘History’ might consider lost and irrelevant
ephemera – sensual impression. The historical novel reinserts the human back into
the past, through touch and body and emotion, placing the reader there and making
the past richer and more comprehensible as a consequence. This articulation of the
historical fiction writer’s craft suggests both a physical translocation and also what
Manzoni argued differentiated them from historians, the ability to conjure the
physical. This sense of the material and the resurrectionary is key to understanding
fictional writing about the past, as is the sense of richness and completion that the
historical novel brings: a kind of satisfaction that replaces the tentative fragility of
historical discourse. Readers enjoy historical novels: that is why they sell.
Similarly, the affective relationship of the participant to the past demonstrates
that readers desire completion and coherence, while understanding their impos-
sibility. They ask, ‘Why can’t I touch them?’, demanding resolution and the
ability to circumvent or cross the abyss between then and now. But, despite their
privileged access to the emotional booty of the past, historical novelists cannot cross
the gap, cannot touch the dead. Instead, they present rewrites of an imagined past,
creating an affective relationship or engagement with a past that didn’t exist, that
never existed, that could not – de facto, fundamentally, by default – have happened.
It is a past in suspension, somehow – it is possible, but impossible, probable, but
never the case. The tension between the bones of fact and the fictional flesh
can be problematic, as Leon Garfield argues: ‘Often you have to suppress what
you actually know, and do it in a way that doesn’t seem as though you’re doing
it, and you can only do that, I find, by being very subjective in your writing’.27
In this, the historical novel writer acknowledges the innate fictionality of what
they are doing and how it suffuses everything, even the so-called ‘facts’. This kind
of fiction is predicated upon an absence, a gap, which is deferred, but nonetheless
acknowledged constantly. In its turn, this unspoken – or relatively unindicated –
truism about historical fiction overlaps into fiction more generally, as something
that has an emptiness about it. Historical writing is a spectral projection on to the
past, something that addresses the gaps at the heart of epistemology, but simply
covers them up with more comforting absences. Rewriting pastness, intervening
in the fictive struggle to remember, the translation and revoicing of history in
uncanny and ultimately queer ways: these are what the historical novelist participates
in. The memory act of writing historical fiction is sincere but not possible and, in
its self-defeating moment, presents a doubling of history, a ‘playing’ of historicalness
for emotive, affective appreciation (and to keep a readership from fearing death).
Mantel points to the crucial, emotional power of history over the individual,
something that most historians find problematic. Deploying the potential affect of
the past on and in the present is what historical novelists do, rather than investigating
its effects, which they leave to historians.
Finally, historical fictions reflect upon the haunting of the present by the past.
They enact a kind of haunting. They voice ghosts within the now, echoes and
revenants. Importantly, those ghosts and echoes are imagined rather than ‘real’,
part of an aesthetic economy rather than materially real. These voices are fictional.
22 Ethics, politics, and nationalism

The intervention of the fictional past into the ‘actual’ present is a dislocating move,
disrupting the now. Historical ‘sensibility’ might be defined as the empathic, material
relationship to the past that such fictions can provoke, the encounter with ghosts
that are not real, the affective engagement with a fictional past. Historical ‘sensibility’
might describe the brokering of binaries by texts – the reconciling of sense/intellect,
physical/rational, emotion/thought through the working of the imagination and
the aesthetically embodied engagement with fiction.
To bring these theoretical issues into practical focus, this chapter moves on to
consider several key novels. The sections argue that historical fiction enables a reader
to reflect upon the nature of historical representation itself, highlighting the ways
in which the past is communicated to the present. The historical novel also enables
a consideration of ethics, form, and historiographical engagement. The chapter,
therefore, seeks to demonstrate the central contention of this book; that is, that
historical texts undertake historiographical work. As Hsu-Ming Teo has written,
‘If historical fiction is not always history [. . .] it is always historiography’.28 The
chapter comes early in the book as it demonstrates how historical texts concep-
tualize and attempt to control the way in which they are engaged with, compre-
hended, and understood. The chapter looks at two key literary fiction writers –
Hilary Mantel and Ian McEwan – before working through similar models in more
pulpy, conservative, mass-market fiction. In particular, the chapter considers the
double effect of such writing – shifting between authenticity and fiction – and the
ethical consequences for popular historiography of the novel form. So, these texts
debate the reader’s engagement with the past by meditating upon memory,
narrative, fiction, lying, truth, and realism. The self-consciousness of the historical
novel, demonstrated in the example from The Giant, O’Brien, suggests precise modes
of reading. Furthermore, in Ian McEwan’s Atonement, the reader is shown the
conscious way a text manipulates the reader in order to present a particular version
of the past. It is key, then, to pay attention to the moments when popular historical
fiction dramatizes textual reception itself. Therefore, the remainder of the chapter
looks at reading, the figuration of the reader (and author), and the construction of
evidence and the archive. These books represent historiographical interventions at
the same time as they stage moments of reading and engaging with the past, imagin-
ing responses and creating imaginative communities. These paratexual and diegetic
moments of the novels show how historical texts conceptualize and attempt to
articulate and construct an imagined reader, a community of engagement. They
help the reader know how to use the text. At the same time, the gaps in knowledge
foregrounded by the novel form provoke a discussion of ethics in rendering the
past in the present. Consideration of this allows the chapter to draw conclusions
about the potentiality of the text to provide a historiographic intervention.

Wolf Hall and the ‘double effect’ of historical fiction

These issues relating to obscenity, haunting, fictive doubleness, and the iterations
of memory, in addition to a keen sense of the ways in which the novel might
 Reading and ethics 23

meditate upon the actions and representations of ‘history’, are uppermost through-
out Mantel’s most celebrated work. Her 2009 multiple-prize-winning novel, Wolf
Hall, negotiates these particular ideas in a very self-conscious fashion. Wolf Hall
tracks several key years in the life of Thomas Cromwell (specifically 1521–35),
narrating events, both domestic and national, from his own particular point of view,
in a deeply complex, third-person narrative style.29 The treatment of ghosts, affect,
repetition, memory, and a personal and deeply felt relationship with the past
demonstrates a narrative self-consciousness about the historical fictional mode. Wolf
Hall is a very self-aware book, written by an author who has thought deeply about
the problems inherent in writing historical novels, and the issues it raises are clearly
applicable to the genre as a whole. Particularly, this is the ability of the novel form
to broker the relationship between ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’ and to ensure that the reader
is aware of (but simultaneously unmindful of) the ‘double effect’ it creates.
The sense of imaginative possibility and doubleness in narrative construction is
key to historical fiction and outlined in Mantel’s articulation of her relationship
with her readership in the ‘Author’s note’ to her 1992 novel A Place of Greater
Safety. Initially, she points out the indeterminability of the past: ‘This is a novel
about the French Revolution. Almost all the characters in it are real people and
it is closely tied to historical facts – as far as those facts are agreed, which isn’t really
very far’.30 Her work, then, is an intervention into a debate that has very few ‘agreed’
terms of reference. Following Keith Jenkins, these are imaginative iterations and
speculations. She continues:

I am very conscious that a novel is a cooperative effort, a joint venture

between writer and reader. I purvey my own version of events, but facts
change according to your viewpoint. Of course, my characters did not have
the blessing of hindsight; they lived from day to day, as best they could.
I am not trying to persuade my reader to view events in a particular way,
or to draw any particular lessons from them. I have tried to write a novel
that gives the reader scope to change opinions, change sympathies: a book
that one can think and live inside.
(p. x)

This sense of a collaborative approach, of enabling a reader to be self-aware and

participant in the fiction, is the key historiographical intervention the genre makes.
Meaning is created between novelist and reader, and, hence, any ‘output’
historiographically will be considered some kind of collaboration. Mantel’s
comments here instruct the reader to suspect the text. To her, the novel is not an
act of persuasion or pedagogy, but a space for debate and thought that comments
upon the action of constructing a historical narrative.
Wolf Hall meditates on how fiction and reality might be combined into a narrative,
and the effect this might have on a reader or an audience. The relationship between
art and ‘life’ and the dynamic between a (possibly) idealized memory and the ‘true’
reality are outlined in Cromwell’s description of the Thomas More family portrait:
24 Ethics, politics, and nationalism

Entering the house, you meet the family hanging up. You see them painted
life-size before you meet them in the flesh; and More, conscious of the double
effect it makes, pauses, to let you survey them, to take them in [. . .] Master
Holbein has grouped them under his gaze, and fixed them for ever: as long
as no moth consumes, no flame or mould or blight.31

The More family portrait does not exist (a sketch is all that survives), and so
the final sentence here is an in-joke, a reference to the seeming (but illusory) power
of fictions to outlive their subject. The picture, a piece of evidence in a historical
account, despite being a work of art, is rerendered within this fictional narrative.
The ‘double effect’ is an uncanny, almost uncomfortable, moment, as the ‘real’
and the ‘wrought’ stand together in the same room. The image is clearly,
consciously made (‘grouped’, ‘fixed’), but also mimicking reality (‘life-size’); the
portrait is the double of the real, breathing family. It reflects them, but the viewer
is evidently aware of the disjunction between real and painted. The portrait is of
a past moment that doubles, echoes, mimics the bodies of the family in the ‘now’;
it contributes to their meaning and, taken together, has an effect and an affect,
moves the viewer in some way. Mantel’s (and Cromwell’s) uncanniness, here and
throughout the novel, is pre-Freud – ghosts, doubles, echoes, all ‘live’, but do not
necessarily work to disorientate or even to invade the now and confuse it. They
are flat, renderings with little perspective. The ‘double effect’ of historical fiction
– the recognition of something that once existed and its difference from the artistic
rendering – is used precisely to indicate chronological and temporal difference.
This history does not mingle in the now and disrupt it, but is a flat, uninflected
recollection. In this vein, Mantel meditates upon the strange act of creating
‘historical fiction’ and what it might mean.
The character of Thomas More is one of the most revisionist things about the
text.32 More is a vicious, ruthless, hideous figure here, not the saintly martyr of
common imagination. A clear contrast is made throughout between Cromwell
(generally seen in historical fiction as the more Machiavellian figure) and More,
enacting the revisionism at the heart of the book, keen to resurrect Cromwell’s
character from the opprobrium of popular history.33 More is the foolish but nasty
dreamer, missing the point; Cromwell is the realist, interested in statehood, nation,
accounts (through them, a kind of modernity), and a seemingly recognizable secular
sensibility. In many ways, Wolf Hall uses religion to communicate the ‘obscenity’
of the past, focusing in its later sections on oppression and martyrdom. Cromwell
recounts at length the burning of a Loller woman (p. 355). Yet the account is itself
a memory, one that viscerally affects him (p. 352). He remains at the body, interested
in why the bones will not burn, until the Loller’s friends arrive to pray for her.
One anoints Cromwell’s hand with ‘a smear of mud and grit, fat and ash’ (p. 357).
He is marked by this violence, unable to comprehend it properly – either the reason
for it or the faith needed to suffer so for one’s faith. The account concludes with
Cromwell’s self-consciousness:
 Reading and ethics 25

Now, when he thinks back on this, he wonders at his own faulty memory.
He has never forgotten the woman, whose last remnants he carried away as
a greasy smudge on his own skin, but why is it that his life as a child doesn’t
seem to fit, one bit with the next?
(p. 357)

Cromwell’s childhood memory casts the person recollecting as an uncompre-

hending witness, one marked by the past but unable to understand it, both
revolted by, and inured to, the violence inherent in that past. He remembers key
emotive scenes, but has no sense of an overview or coherent development; his
own ‘history’ is fragmented, awkward, something that returns to him unbidden
sometimes. So, diegetically, the novel foregrounds reflection upon the past, while
rendering the ‘historical’ a violent, strange, and unfamiliar place.
Wolf Hall opens with a ‘Cast of characters’, followed by a set of family trees
(‘The Tudors’, pp. ix–xiii, and ‘The Yorkist Claimants’, pp. xiv–xv). Each character
is described, in terms of both their position or employment and their situation
(geographically or in familial terms). Although many of them are ‘real’, they
are here presented to the reader as a ‘cast’, a set of characters presenting an
entertainment, mere ciphers or representations or lifelike echoes of ‘reality’. The
family trees present textual evidence for relationships, seemingly demonstrating a
formulaic and inflexible, ‘true’ past. These paratexts yoke a theatrical performative
element to dynastic politics. As in The Giant, O’Brien, such elements are crucial
to the way that the book is framed, and they present a pedagogical intervention.
The paratexts combine the obviously fictional with the seemingly factual. They
suggest the way the book might be used, and its meta-historiographic intervention.
There are also two epigraphs, one from Vitruvius’s description of theatrical
architecture in De Architectura and one cast list from the poet John Skelton’s political
morality play Magnificence (c.1520). Taken as a whole, then, the paratexts present
to the reader numerous key conceptual templates for interpreting what follows:
truth and evidence, the combination of performance and aristocratic setting, advice
writing, early modern and Renaissance classicism, and the inflexible positivism of
the ‘family’ tree and its relation to Tudor political life. The Vitruvius epigraph
demonstrates a clear self-consciousness about genre. It concerns the correct stage
dressing for ‘three kinds of scenes, one called the tragic, second the comic, third
the satyric’ (p. xvii). This is how each type of literary production might be framed,
made to look (visually) correct. The epigraph recalls Cromwell’s narrative concern
with the arrangement of rooms and scenes (not least, his interest in the Thomas
More family portrait), suggesting his own stage-managing of events, but it also
suggests the reader consider the ways that the tropes of genre are being deployed.
Particularly, Vitruvius is interested in tragedy, which is contrasted to the ‘ordinary
dwellings’ of comedy (p. xvii). Tragedy is something that is obviously wrought,
‘delineated with columns, pediments, statues and other objects suited to kings’
(p. xvii), populated with artefacts to signify gravitas. What follows, as the novel,
is a combination of comic and tragic, a text obsessed with making the grand and
26 Ethics, politics, and nationalism

what has often been reified as excessive and glorious into something familiar and
domestic, something that is recognizable.
Wolf Hall domesticates Cromwell and Henry, reminding the reader that they
were real, solid human beings by returning to the details of normality and the
minutiae of everyday life. This most public of historical events is also, simultaneously,
exceptionally private. This relationship between public life and the domestic is one
of the reasons for the keen interest in the Boleyn years by novelists.34 Throughout
Wolf Hall, the public actions of figures are read through their private characters
and thoughts. This is history that returns the body of the historical subject to the
story, history from behind the scenes; it is interested in the way that:

The fate of peoples is made like this, two men in small rooms. Forget the
coronations, the conclaves of cardinals, the pomp and processions. This is
how the world changes: a counter pushed across a table, a pen stroke that
alters the force of a phrase, a woman’s sigh as she passes and leaves on the
air a trail of orange flower or rosewater; her hand pulling close the bed curtain,
the discreet sigh of flesh against flesh.
(p. 61)

History, here, is in the detail, the unseen minutiae of normal life. It combines
the textual with the bodily material, physical objects (counters) with smells. Linear,
narrative moments (‘the pomp and processions’) are mere window-dressing for
the real significance of human relationships that can, ultimately, rarely be redis-
covered – they can only be reimagined. As Colin Burrow argued in his review of
the novel:

Mantel’s chief method is to pick out tableaux vivants from the historical record
– which she has worked over with great care – and then to suggest that they
have an inward aspect which is completely unlike the version presented in
history books. The result is less a historical novel than an alternative history
novel. It constructs a story about the inner life of Cromwell which runs in
parallel to scenes and pictures that we thought we knew. She works
particularly well with witnesses like Cavendish, who are both extremely vivid
and slightly unreliable. Such sources enable her to suggest that history, even
when witnessed first-hand, can mingle fact and mythology: that gossip,
misunderstanding, anecdote and deliberate distortion play a part in the
processes of living as well as in the process of recording.35

This self-conscious conjunction of ‘history’ and the novelization of history, the

rendering of the work of historicizing obvious to the reader, is key to the novel’s
‘double effect’. It presents us with a familiar history, a set of characters and stories
and events that are almost excessively well known. Simultaneously, Mantel allows
the unseen, the unheard, the unclaimed to permeate. This might be characterized
as a relationship between ‘history’ and ‘the historical’ as representational modes.
 Reading and ethics 27

Chapter II of Part Two is entitled ‘An Occult History of Britain. 1521–29’ and
covers a range of legends, myths, and suggestions. Although Cromwell is a
rationalist, concerned with exorcizing the foolishness of superstition, he recognizes
the importance of symbols, stories, and legendary narratives (as in Wolsey’s
description of Melusine and the fact that Eleanor Talbot was descended from a
swan; pp. 95–6). Occult means unseen, under the surface, behind comprehension,
out of human understanding – the idea of ‘occult history’ invokes myth and mystic
ways of thinking about the world (suggesting, further, something unseen that
controls or might shape and order events). Yet occult also means secret and hitherto
unseen, something that might be revealed by the right person (in this way, David
Peace writes ‘occulted’ histories of the 1970s and 1980s).36 The opening of ‘An
Occult History’ discusses Brutus, Aeneas, the giants of old England, before moving
to the diegetic contemporary and the rueful reflection that all these narratives might
be complicated by the domestic, the emotional, the bodily, the female: ‘Beneath
every history, another history’ (p. 66). This is the ‘occulted’ story of Britain, the
story that is not told because it is not comprehensible by mere dry, evidence-based
‘history’. The past is a layer or collage of stories, and what the astute reader of the
past does is to focus on particular elements in order to comprehend the present.
The story of this woman, who is irrelevant to the grand progression of kings and
heroes, will become crucial. Dynastic positivism will be broken by the interjection
of a woman’s body, and the rejection of another’s. Wolsey will need to understand
the personal history of Boleyn in order to (while failing to) attempt to comprehend
and shape the future. There is always another ‘history’ underneath, waiting to be
shown. Mantel’s style here is able to consider the future and the past simultaneously
– before moving to a kind of present: ‘The lady appeared at court at the Christmas
of 1521, dancing in a yellow dress. She was – what? – about twenty years old’
(p. 66). This combining of exactitude with seeming and interrogative vagueness
articulates the mode of the historical novel, embedding the dancing body of Boleyn
into the narrative factuality of date, age, situation, time. The interrelationship
between ‘real’ history and ‘fictional’, between fact and body, enables this uninflected
‘double effect’, something that works unconsciously at a level beneath assertion,
constantly alerting the reader to the speciousness of what they are reading.
Mantel’s novel is obsessed with ghosts, echoes, and the seemingly physical
remnants of the past in the present. This is characteristic of the historical novel
form’s desire to conceptualize its own engagement with a variety of non-official
pasts. For Mantel, the encounter with the past is often intertwined with ontological
unreality of one kind or another: ‘He will remember his first sight of the open
sea: a grey wrinkled vastness, like the residue of a dream’. Cromwell regularly sees
figures from the past, converses with those from his memory (his father, his dead
wife, and so on). On All Hallows Day 1529, his grief takes over:

Now it threatens to capsize him. He doesn’t believe that the dead come back;
but that doesn’t stop him from feeling the brush of their fingertips, wingtips,
against his shoulder. Since last night they have been less individual forms
28 Ethics, politics, and nationalism

and faces than a solid aggregated mass, their flesh slapping and jostling together,
their texture dense like sea creatures, their faces sick with an undersea sheen.
(pp. 154–5)

The dead seemingly return to challenge his rational contemporaneity. He attempts

to ignore them, the physical consciousness of them. This section articulates a
particular relationship to pastness. Although ghosts do not exist in rational modernity,
the audience is aware of their presence in the action of reading this novel about dead
people. Those in the past are indistinct until given articulation of a kind by a novelist,
brought into focus. Such an awareness of the past also has an affective, emotional
iteration. Cromwell holds his wife’s prayer book in his hand, and weeps.37 The novel
attempts to explain, through this stylistic work, the mediation and shift from a society
in which ghosts, haunting, mystical moments of the dead were commonplace
through to a post-Restoration Protestant rationality that sceptically ignored the idea
of such things as purgatory and concentrated on what could inductively be proven.
At this level, then, the gestures towards ghosts and the spirit world in the novel are
thematically and historiographically crucial, showing the movement from one
sensibility to another. This interest in pre-modern hauntings and ghosts reflects recent
literary and scholarly work in the field.38 Yet the invocation of the ghostly and the
haunting of the past in the present also demands a self-consciousness on the part of
the reader about the ways in which they themselves engage with, understand (or
misunderstand), and recognize the past. Dramatizing the relationship between the
affect of memory and the rationality of telling the past is key to the novel’s own effect
upon its readership. Again, it is possible to discern this type of novel seeking to
construct its readership and conceptualizing the way that they might engage with
the past or reflect upon their ways of encountering past events.
The novel also focuses on the relationships between fathers and sons, on the
materiality of ancestry, lineage, and wills. At the moment that Cromwell realizes
he has not made his will, he is accosted: ‘He takes Rafe’s arm. On his left side, a
hand touches his: fingers without flesh. A ghost walks: Arthur, studious and pale.
King Henry, he thinks, you raised him; now you put him down’ (p. 147). These
are studiously not the ghostly revenants of Gothic writing, echoes of transgressions
and misdeeds, but an attempt at communicating a historical sensibility. Yet, at the
same time, the return of the dead throughout Wolf Hall comments upon the novel’s
own re-presentation or re-animation of these figures, both achingly normal and
similarly other and haunting. Again, the motif enacted by the paratexts – the
combination of echoes or revenants in figures performed and the factuality of
dynastic outline – seems a keynote of the text. This is the ‘double effect’, the jolting,
uncanny conjunction of real and fictional. Once the will has been made (and
transcribed in full; p. 148), its legality is made strange by the knowledge that it
will echo in a disembodied fashion throughout subsequent centuries; it will stand
(as a ‘testament’, as a witness, as part of textual evidence) for the absent Cromwell,
give him voice. Yet it is transcribed in a fictional context and made ‘double’ by
the way the character ‘Cromwell’ considers and interprets it.
 Reading and ethics 29

The ghosts that Cromwell encounters are, seemingly, a consequence of the

way in which he remembers. In Italy, he learns to create a memory house. This kind
of memory system, with peculiar images imagined in familiar settings, was very
common in medieval and early modern society.39 The reference gives the repre-
sentation of Cromwell’s memory a kind of historical heft (it is generally historically
accurate as a practice), as well as demonstrating the way in which his very rational
memorial technique means he creates fictional, artistic representations in his head.
It means that Cromwell sees memories, suggests that the ghosts he encounters are
merely part of his rational memorial system, rather than an actual haunting. This is
a self-conscious moment again, betraying a concern with highlighting how memory
works, how recall can be constructed through systems. Ghosts, according to
Cromwell’s, are simply unconsciously recalled remnants of memory, almost an
automatic reaction to a place. His diegetic contemporary consciousness of a place is
filled with memories, but these are flat, administrative memories somehow, without
emotion necessarily, simple aides-memoires constructed by his rational mind.
Memory here is replaced with recollection, the ability to know something; it becomes
a rationalizing system for ordering and comprehending (and, for Cromwell, for
mastering) the chaotic world. It does not have real, affective meaning in the present.
Cromwell is the ultimate administrator, constantly seeking order through
organization (particularly of domestic arrangements, of households). He sees figures
and administration as beautifully utilitarian: ‘The page of an accounts book is there
for your use, like a love poem. It’s not there for you to nod and then dismiss it;
it’s there to open your heart to possibility’ (p. 365). His function is to bring order
where there was superstition and chaos, something that he achieves domestically
and nationally. Hence, his facility with languages, a mastery over structures that
describe and contain the world. His version of memory might seem particularly
alien to a contemporary reader. It constructs the past as a series of images that are
to be arranged – albeit in a weird, fictional cavalcade – for the humanistic, peda-
gogic purpose of furthering his own cause, for bettering himself. Yet Cromwell’s
memory system, which allows him to recall all but the vagaries of life, often ensures
that these memories are emotionally problematic and disrupt his rational view of
the world. The memory system is referred to during his emotional outburst in
front of Cavendish, again combining the practical technique of recollection with
ghostliness: ‘But he is crying again. The ghosts are gathering, he feels cold, his
position is irretrievable. In Italy he learned a memory system, so he can remember
everything: every stage of how he got here’ (p. 156). Although Cromwell attempts
to control the past, to ensure that it simply does his bidding and becomes another
expedient set of knowledge for him (like language), its unbidden invasion into the
present leads to an emotional response. His kind of memory, so intense it means
that no location is empty of ghosts, seems monstrous: ‘he can remember everything’
(my emphasis), a kind of fable-like curse on the ultimate technocratic Renaissance
man applying the scientific techniques of recall to control and order the world.
What is needed is some kind of filter; otherwise, the chaos of the past threatens
to flood the fragile present and destroy it utterly.
30 Ethics, politics, and nationalism

Historical fiction and ethics

In writing about her novelistic practice, Hilary Mantel considers the ways in which
history and fiction relate in terms of their shared uncertainty:

The past is not dead ground, and to traverse it is not a sterile exercise. History
is always changing behind us, and the past changes a little every time we
retell it. The most scrupulous historian is an unreliable narrator [. . .] Once
this is understood, the trade of the historical novelist doesn’t seem so
reprehensible or dubious; the only requirement is for conjecture to be
plausible and grounded in the best facts one can get.40

Mantel explicitly equates the historian and the novelist, both deploying
epistemological models to communicate something about the past, both as
important as each other.41 The key is the idea of the ‘plausible’ and how this works
on a readership. The relationship between ‘plausible’ and ‘grounded’ is the crucial
aspect, inherently unstable and unique in every instance. The relationship between
then and now is subtly dynamic, reliant on a shifting set of relationships. The way
in which the past is understood and represented is as much reliant on the here and
now as on historical events. Mantel’s careful choice of the word ‘trade’
professionalizes the writer of historical fiction, grounds them in a rational-world
pursuit. Given that these comments come in her first published essay after her first
Booker Prize victory, Mantel very clearly aligns the writer of historical fiction –
the wordsmith, tradesperson – within an economic nexus with novel as commodity.
The raw materials of the past are turned into fiction through the labour of the
writer, and all that was solid melts into air. What Mantel points out, quite
fundamentally, is that the writer of historical fiction continually works with
unclean (non-sterile) materials, and they have volatility and an affective impact that
must be considered carefully. The choices inherent in writing about the past are
unavoidably ethical in nature, from the mode of composition to the ways in which
characters speak, but, in making such choices, the historical novelist merely echoes
the moral and ethical decisions undertaken by all those who would tell ‘history’.
As has been suggested, the historical mode in most cultural representation, and
particularly the novel form, is realist: that is, it is written in a style that addresses
a kind of imagined authenticity.42 The style and tone are generally buttressed by
a series of statements and paratextual apparatuses that support the ‘realism’ and
therefore address a kind of truth that the texts make. Yet historical novelists, as
James Forrester admits, ‘lie deliberately about the past’, and in doing so they engage
in an ethical discussion with their readers about the nature of representation and
the relationship between aesthetics, formal conventions, historiography, and
‘truth’.43 Books that explicitly represent the past fictionally are therefore forced to
negotiate a very complex set of aesthetic, ethical, and representational parameters,
while accounting for authenticity and understanding the strangeness and physical
foreignness that constitute the fundamental definition of the alterity called the past.
The representation of the otherness of the past necessitates a writing practice that
 Reading and ethics 31

is keenly attuned to the moral, ethical, historiographical, and political issues that
are at stake. The unknowability of the past challenges the reader, and the writer,
to deal with the consequences of attempting to order that which eschews such
control. The historical novel also asks that a reader confront the affective horror
of that past. Historiographical theory relating to ethics and epistemology often places
the historian central in rendering the past in the present.44 Yet to write historical
fiction, this section will argue, is to engage in an ethical mediation and demands
an aesthetic and epistemological sophistication that is often missed by critics of the
genre. This ethical complexity in fictionalizing history is recognized by Peter
Middleton and Tim Woods: ‘The distance between epistemology and ontology,
or historical knowledge and literary fiction could be negotiated only by some kind
of moral practice, although a morality of tradition or universalising precepts is
insufficient for the textual conditions of late modernity’.45 Echoing J. Hillis Miller’s
attempt at reconciling the ethical work of literature, they argue that the line between
fiction and fact demands an ethics of representation, albeit one that might be
corrupted or problematized by the conditions of postmodernity.46 Representing
the past demands a ‘kind of moral practice’, that is, an approach that understands
the relationship between knowledge and experience, between the rational and the
bodily. Through their ambivalent term ‘negotiated’, Middleton and Woods suggest
the attenuated way in which historical fictions both point a direction and engage
in some form of dialogue. They suggest a ‘moral practice’ in writing about the
past, in brokering the relationship between ‘epistemology and ontology’.
When questioned about ethics, authenticity, and their duty to history, writers
of historical fiction demonstrate a range of responses and diversity of opinion.
The genre-wide phenomenon of the ‘historical note’, discussed throughout this
chapter, demonstrates that they all have a position on the issues. The ‘historical
note’ and its paratextual kin illustrate the writers’ need to situate their ethical
standpoint and to outline how they relate to history, their sense of responsibility
to the past, and how they articulate something fictive out of source material that
cleaves to a kind of truth. Sarah Waters argues:

I don’t think novels should misrepresent history, unless it’s for some obvious
serious or playful purpose (though this suggests that we can represent history
accurately – something I’m not sure we can do; in fact, I’ve always been
fascinated by the ways in which historical fiction continually reinvents the
past). I think we have a duty to take history seriously – not simply to use it
as a backdrop or for the purposes of nostalgia. This, for me, means writing
a fiction with, hopefully, something meaningful to say about the social and
cultural forces at work in the period I’m writing about.47

Waters, here, makes several key assertions. First, she, like most of her peers, seeks
not to misrepresent. This implies that history itself – the set of ideas, sources,
evidence, and narratives that ‘tell’ the past – is not already a misrepresentation.
That said, she acutely points to the fact that the disconnection inherent in fiction
32 Ethics, politics, and nationalism

– that novelists can’t ‘represent history accurately’ – creates a space for reinvention.
Her points about nostalgia and the seriousness of the craft of historical fiction
demonstrate a clear engagement and a politicized desire to lay bare the workings
of the past. She demonstrates a concern that historical fictions have purpose and
political heft. In Waters’ view, historical novelists have a very active duty to history,
but, similarly, they have a political and moral duty to the present, through the
choices they make in representing the past. This impetus to represent the past as
dynamic and affective, while eschewing nostalgia, argues an understanding of the
historical novelist’s project as something that has virtue and value, and, most
importantly, ethical significance.
One of the most important recent examples of the historical novel’s engagement
with a ‘moral practice’ and the questionable ethics of writing about the past,
Atonement (2001) is Ian McEwan’s second historical novel after The Innocent
(1990).48 It is a very self-conscious intervention into the genre. The novel is
stylistically indebted to a range of writers, from Virginia Woolf to Elizabeth
Bowen, and, in its two sections, it inhabits classic locales of the later twentieth-
century English fictive historical tradition – namely the country house and the
Second World War.49 It is also a novel that is self-aware enough to play games
with the readers and, in so doing, highlights some of the really problematic – but
fundamental – issues accruing around historical fiction and the ethics of representing
the past.50 It demonstrates another way a text might engage with its readership and
attempt to steer engagement. Atonement enables an understanding of the mechanics
of fictionally representing the past as much as it is a case study of how novels
themselves engage with their readers.
Most problematically, Atonement entered into debates regarding ethics and the
past through the controversies associated with McEwan’s alleged plagiarism.
McEwan was accused by various newspapers of borrowing too liberally from one
of his source texts, Lucilla Andrews’ memoir No Time for Romance from 1977, a
book he acknowledged in his concluding historical note. McEwan, in a defence
of his use of Andrews’ book, articulated a very austere line on authenticity and,
in doing so, underlined a particular sense of the novelist’s duty to the past:

The writer of a historical novel may resent his dependence on the written
record, on memoirs and eyewitness accounts, in other words on other writers,
but there is no escape: Dunkirk or a wartime hospital can be novelistically
realized, but they cannot be re-invented.51

Everything is textual in McEwan’s version of the ways in which the past is written
as fiction; the words of those who were there become the groundwork for the
contemporary writer. The reaction to the accusations that McEwan should have
made his debt to Andrews more explicit ranged from editorials defending the right
of the historical novelist to use the work of others (‘That, I find myself thinking,
is what novelists do when they choose to take on historical subject matter: research
is the name for this work’) to various letters from eminent writers around the
world.52 The novelist Thomas Pynchon wrote to The Daily Telegraph:
 Reading and ethics 33

Unless we were actually there, we must turn to people who were, or to

letters, contemporary reporting, the Internet until, with luck, we can begin
to make a few things of our own up. To discover in the course of research
some engaging detail we know can be put into a story where it will do some
good can hardly be classed as a felonious act – it is simply what we do.53

What this case and these writers’ passionate interventions point out is that
writing historical novels is not the same, fundamentally, as writing contemporary
novels, and that there are numerous historiographical, ethical, and aesthetic issues
involved in the undertaking. Historical novels are judged in a different way, too,
and read differently, directly because of the form’s invocation of these issues. The
protagonist of Atonement claims that, ‘No one will care what events and which
individuals were misrepresented to make a novel’, but she is evidently incorrect
in her assumption.54
Atonement takes place during the 1930s and the 1940s and concerns the Tallis
family and, in particular, the actions of the youngest daughter, Briony. In 1934,
England is sweltering in the heat of a long, dry summer. Briony Tallis, a dreamy,
bookish 13-year-old with a penchant for writing and acting in her own plays and
psychodramas, sees her sister and Robbie Turner, son of the housekeeper, during
a moment of sexual tension and, through a series of errors, becomes convinced
that Robbie has raped her sister. Robbie, mainly on the malicious and false testimony
of Briony, is convicted of sexual assault on another girl and imprisoned. He is released
into the army and meets Briony again, during the war, when she seeks out her
sister to apologize and attempt to make right what she has done. He is angry with
her but tasks her to record, in letter and oath, her revised story. The revision of
the record must be undertaken textually and legally. The letter that she will write
will allow her forgiveness, as she calmly reflects: ‘She knew what was required of
her. Not simply a letter, but a new draft, an atonement, and she was ready to begin’
(p. 349). Her action of righting the wrongs of the past will allow her to reconcile
herself to the present.
Or, rather, that is what she tells the reader. The novel then moves to a short
coda in which it becomes clear that Briony is a novelist, and the novel has been
her own act of textual, fictional atonement. Not only is she a novelist, she is a
writer of historical fiction. Briony visits the Imperial War Museum for the last
time to say her farewells, as she has been writing a novel of the war. In fact, she
has written her last novel, a revision of a drafted book she wrote in 1940 to outline
what actually happened that night in 1935, revising it through her life, but never
able to finish or publish it for legal reasons:

I put it all there as a matter of historical record. But as a matter of legal reality,
so various editors have told me over the years, my forensic memoir could
never be published while my fellow criminals were alive.
(p. 370)
34 Ethics, politics, and nationalism

She claims that her work is ‘a matter of historical record’, a document that – in
its intersection with the law – has the status of a deposition. The law makes
something false, despite its ‘truth’. The law here creates inaccuracy in the historical
record – or, rather, protects the lies that have been told – but also articulates what
the historical novelist is allowed to write about, and what they are not. As
Cormack argues, ‘If it is postmodern, it is not postmodernism of the playful
celebratory type. At the end of the novel both Briony Tallis, our narrator, and we,
her readers, are profoundly troubled by the uncertainties we face’.55
In atoning for her sins – confessing in print – Briony also seeks to make things
better for those whom she betrayed. Therefore, although the crime itself is
truthfully represented – if that is possible, from such a dissembling, problematic
narrator – what follows is fiction. Rather than account for what actually happens
to her sister and Robbie, she writes an account – the account that the reader has
just been reading – rooted in historical accuracy (‘the letters the lovers wrote are
in the archives of the War Museum’) but completely fantastical:

The preceding drafts were pitiless. But now I can no longer think what
purpose would be served if, say, I tried to persuade my reader, by direct or
indirect means, that Robbie Turner died of septicaemia at Bray Dunes on
1 June 1940, or that Cecilia was killed in September [1940].
(p. 370)

Briony’s comments here, although self-serving, bring up numerous ethical issues

associated with historical fiction. She points out the movement of the historical
novel to romance, towards reconciliation and conclusion; in effect, to order in the
face of the fragmentary nature of knowledge about the past:

How could that constitute an ending? What sense or hope or satisfaction

could a reader draw from such an account? Who would want to believe that
they never met again, never fulfilled their love? Who would want to believe
that, except in the service of the bleakest realism?
(p. 371)

In particular, the historical novelist fudges the actuality of death, substituting

instead a comforting fiction that draws the sting of the past, disavows its trauma.
Although the form is realist, it might seem to eschew the ‘bleakest realism’, that
is, to see the sublimity of the past or to comprehend the unfeeling chaos of history.
Attempting to narrativize (adding an ‘ending’) is associated here with a ‘sense of
hope or satisfaction’. Turning away from a kind of reality – the actuality of the
past – is something a reader is presumed to wish for; it is what the form demands.
But, furthermore, the past itself is bleak and real, something that the contemporary
reader may wish to avoid. The reality of the past is found in the pitiless archive;
the novel is an attempt at ignoring that actuality.
 Reading and ethics 35

In Briony’s formulation, the historical novelist imposes order upon the chaos
of the past, turning horror into narrative. In doing so, they make choices to change,
manipulate, or misrepresent, to a greater or lesser extent, while attempting to ground
their account in reality. The dynamic here is awkward, to say the least – being
able to reconcile this need to augment and sculpt the past in ways that it refuses
to be directed with a commitment to representing that past somehow truthfully
argues a fundamental dissonance at the heart of historical fiction. Every single
historical novel is an ethical negotiation on the part of the author, and each writer
more or less acknowledges this. However, this negotiation and the very action of
choosing how to represent the past, the values at stake in articulating that past, and
the continual knowledge that the past is never going to be fully, accurately realized
– these are the concerns of the historian as much as of the novelist, and the ethical
struggles of historical fiction in representing the past in themselves articulate a
historiographical verity.
Briony dates her manuscript ‘London 1999’, and the final section of the novel
is dated ‘1999’; given the book’s publication in 2001, there is a minor doubling
of historical narrative here, a similar effect to that of Sebastian Faulks’s Birdsong
(1993), which has sections from 1910–18 and 1979. What seems to be the
‘contemporary’ or the ‘now’ of the novel is not, further warping the view of the
reader. Briony’s testimony is already historical, past, and its effects – if it has any
– are neutralized further by this fact. The coda itself is followed by McEwan’s
‘Acknowledgements’, which begin with him thanking the Imperial War Museum
and also recording his indebtedness to several books, principally No Time for Romance,
by Lucilla Andrews. The rawness of this – the moment of the fictional historical
novelist concluding their fictional history, followed by the actual historical novelist
– adds the compounding effect of the paratextual elements.56 More than most
historical novels, this one presses the nose of the reader in its own artificiality, but,
in doing so, it merely points out the fact that all historical fictions are tissues of
lies that misrepresent and misappropriate.
Briony has vascular dementia – a disorder affecting the memory – which means
that:

The little failures of memory that dog us all beyond a certain point will
become more noticeable, more debilitating, until the time will come when
I won’t notice them because I will have lost the ability to comprehend
anything at all.
(p. 354)

Consciousness – life – is dependent on memory and the ability to keep it in

place and order, to sustain its relationship to the present. Without this, Briony
expects to become ‘just a dim old biddy in a chair, knowing nothing, expecting
nothing’ (p. 354). Memory is everything in neurological terms – language, selfhood,
and consciousness. Without it to create the dynamic then–now and to provide
language, the body is an empty shell, with no purpose or agency. She will no longer
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
The Project Gutenberg eBook of Siirtolaisen
elämän vaiheet; Haaksirikon jälkeen
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States
and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it
under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
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you are located before using this eBook.

Title: Siirtolaisen elämän vaiheet; Haaksirikon jälkeen

Kaksi kertomusta Austraaliasta

Author: Karl Listner

Friedrich Gerstäcker

Translator: Alexander Ramstedt

Release date: April 23, 2024 [eBook #73451]

Language: Finnish

Original publication: Jyväskylä: Weilin ja Göös, 1875

Credits: Juhani Kärkkäinen and Tapio Riikonen

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SIIRTOLAISEN

ELÄMÄN VAIHEET; HAAKSIRIKON JÄLKEEN ***
SIIRTOLAISEN ELÄMÄN VAIHEET; HAAKSIRIKON JÄLKEEN

Kaksi kertomusta Austraaliasta

Kertonut

KARL LISTNER ja FRIEDRICH GERSTÄCKER

Suomensi A. R—st

Jyväskylässä, Weilin ja Göös’in kirjapainossa ja kustantama, 1875.

SISÄLLYS:

I. Siirtolaisen elämän vaiheet

II. haaksirikon jälkeen
1. Parkaasi.
2. Raittiin veden etsiminen.
3. Tappelu villien kanssa.
4. Venheen vartiat.
5. Partiokunta.
I.

SIIRTOLAISEN ELÄMÄN VAIHEET

Kirj. Kaarle Listner

Lokakuun 19 p. 1857 laski laiva Ohio Bremenin rannasta

väljemmälle vedelle ankkuriin. Siinä oli 150 matkustajaa,
suurimmaksi osaksi nuorta väkeä, jotka olivat keräytyneet ympäri
Saksanmaata, voidakseen kaukaisessa Austraaliassa hankkia
itselleen kodon ja koetella onneansa. Laivaväkeä oli 18 henkeä,
lastina oli suurimmaksi osaksi viiniä, väkeviä juomia ynnä sikaria ja
oli laiva määrätty menemään Adelaide'n kaupunkiin etelä-
Austraaliassa. Katteini, pöyhkeä, mutta kunnollinen merimies, tuli
laivaan, luki meidän nimemme, tarkasti laivansa miehet ja kaski
pitämään kaikki varuilla, koska laiva nousuveden tultua lähtisi
purjehtimaan.

Tämä oli meille kaikille tärkeä hetki. Edessämme oli vanha rakas
isänmaamme, josta meidän nyt piti erota. Laskeva aurinko kultasi
vielä kerran, ehkäpä meidän nähden viimisen kerran, sen kukkulat ja
vuoret, laaksoihin laskeutuivat hämärän varjot ja hitaasti ilmestyivät
tähdet taivaalle, nekin ikäänkuin hymyillyksensä meille viimisen
surullisen jäähyväisensä. Laiva pyöri ankkurinsa ympäri ja ainoastaan
veden loriseminen ja laivavahdin askeleet kannella häiritsivät
hiljaisuutta tänä iltana, joka meille oli viimeinen vanhassa
isänmaassamme. Edessämme oli neljä tuhatta maantieteellistä
penikulmaa, jotka meidän oli kulottava ja tänä jäähyväishetkenä
lähetti moni rukouksen Hänelle, jonka kädessä onnemme ja
onnettomuutemme, elämämme ja kuolemamme olivat.

Ennen päivän koittoa seuraavana aamuna nostettiin ankkuri. Sitä

tehdessä lauloivat merimiehet iloisen laulun, myötätuuli täytti purjeet
ja upea kuin joutsen kulki laiva Weser-virtaa myöten alas
vaaleanvihreään, vahtoisaan Pohjanmereen. Kiikarilla voi vielä nähdä
maata, joka kohta kuitenki katosi näkymättömiin.

Merta kulkevien pahin vaiva meritauti alkaa samalla kun laivakin

rupeaa heilumaan ja ilmoittaikse päänkivistyksellä, tuimeltamisella ja
oksennuksella. Harvaan matkustajaan tämä tauti on tarttumatta ja
useammat sairastavat sitä monta viikkoa, siksi kun ruumis tottuu
laivan keinumiseen; kuitenki oli meillä laivassa matkustajia, erittäinki
naisia, joita tauti koko matkan vaivasi. Tätä vastaan ei ole mitään
parannuskeinoa ja paras aina on niin paljon kuin mahdollista liikkua
kannella kuin myös peseytyä merivedellä ynnä juoda sitä, ja on se
keino tehnyt minulle ja monelle muulle paljo hyötyä.

Laivassa saatava ruoka ei tyydytä ja erittäinki ei meistä tahtoneet

maistaa ne kovat korput, nimeltä "ankkuripuut", joita kävi syöminen
ainoastaan siten, että ne vedessä liotettiin. Muuta keinoa ei
kuitenkaan ole, kuin mukautua tähän, josta Humboldt'kin jo sanoo:
"Se, joka polun tai maantien puutteessa täytyy meritse matkustaa, ei
saa valittaa sen vastuksia ja vaivaloisuuksia."

Merimatkustuksen yksitoikkoisuus ja ikävyys tulee erittäin

tuntuvaksi ja usein tuskalliseksikin, kun kova ilma tahi tyyni tulee.
Tyvenellä ilmalla on tasainen meri ison peilin kalttainen, laiva pysyy
paikallaan, purjeet riippuvat velttoina mastoissa ja tämä paikalla
pysyminen nulostuttaa mielen. Mutta toisenlaiseksi muuttuu
laivamiesten ja matkustajain luonto, kun tuuli puhaltaa purjeisin,
laiva kulkee kolme tahi neljä penikulmaa tunnissa, kun vesi vaahtoaa
kokassa ja se vako, jonka laiva kyntää suolaiseen aaltoon, kirkkaalla
näkyy penikulman pitkältä.

Matkustajain askaroimisella tällä pitkällä matkalla oli ainoastaan

tarkoituksena lyhentää aikaa ja poistaa ikävää. Luettiin, soitettiin ja
tarkastettiin vesilintuja, jotka kiertelivät laivan ympäri; suuruutensa
ja nopean lentonsa puolesta oli albatrossi erittäin merkillinen. Tämä
lintu, jota etenkin tapasimme Atlantin valtameressä, on likemmä 10
jalkaa yhdestä siivennenästä toiseen ja on erittäin huokea pyytää; se
näkyi enimmiten elävän laivasta viskatuista ruo'an jätteistä. Me
pyysimme lintua siten, että heitimme sille koukkuun kiinnitetyn
lihapalan.

Jalon näyn tarjosi aina auringon nousu ja lasku; viehättävän

ihanaa oli se päiväntasaajan alla ja tropiikien seuduilla, jossa pilvet
muodostivat kaikenmoisia muotoja ja haamuja. Erittäinki mieltä
hurmauttava oli auringon lasku.

Kun laivat kohtaavat toisiansa, tervehtivät he lippujen mastoon

vetämisellä ja likenevät toisiaan niin paljon, että puhetorven kautta
voivat keskustella. Tavallisimmat kysymykset ovat: "mistä tuletta?
mikin? mitä uutisia? mimmoinen tuuli ja ilma teillä on ollut?"
Tämmöiset ja monet muut kysymykset vastataan joko samalla
tavalla tahi merkkein kautta yhtä nopeasti kuin ne tehdäänkin.

Auringon laskettua, alkaa kummallinen näky, sillä koko merenpinta

loistaa himmeällä valolla. Syytä tähän kummalliseen ilmiöön ei vielä
varmaan tiedetä; luultavasti syntyy se lukemattomista infusioni-
eläimistä, jotka elävät meressä. Usein näyttää koko meri
juhlavalkeilla koristetuksi; miljoonia pieniä tulisoittoja tanssii ja loikkii
veden pinnalla, kalat näkyvät selvästi kirkkaan, pyrstöntapaisen
juoman läpi, jonka ne jättävät jälkeensä ja laivan perästä näyttää
jäävän tulinen tie. Kuinka suloinen onkaan semmoinen hiljainen
kuuvalo-yö katsottuna kannelta? Kuinka sopiva ylentämään mieltä
Hänen puoleensa, joka on luonut meren ja kaikki, mitä siinä on;
kuinka tarpeellinen herättämään katsojaa tutkimaan itseään ja
kulunutta elämäänsä! Uneksien katselee silmä avarata kuun
valkaisemaa merta, hartaasti kuuntelee korva vanhan päivettyneen
laivamiehen kertomuksia, ajatukset rientävät ennakolta odotettuun
maahan ja lentävät takaisin rakkaasen isänmaahan, jonka lauluja
liikutetuilla, kotikipeillä sydämillä rupeamme laulamaan.

Tähän saakka olimme saaneet iloita hyvästä tuulesta ja suloisesta

ilmasta; Europa oli takanamme ja iloisesti kiikkui laiva Atlantin
valtameren aalloilla. Ilmapuntari alkoi laskea, semmoisia vesilintuja,
joita siihen saakka emme olleet nähneet, lenteli levottomina
mastojen ympäri, vesi alkoi paisua, kaukaa kuului kolkko ulvonto ja
kohina, joka aina yltyi kovemmaksi, komppassi väänsiin neulallaan
vavisten, vanhat ja kokeneet laivamiehet etsivät myrskyvaatteensa ja
katteini tarkasti jylhänä mustia pilviä, jotka kokoontuivat ylitsemme:
katseli myrskyn enteitä!
 Katteinin käskyt täytettiin nopeasti, kaikki purjeet käärittiin ja
myrskypurje, joka on niin tarpeellinen laivan ohjaamisessa, vedettiin
etumastiin. Kaksi kokeneinta laivamiestä menivät perärattaasen, sillä
se pieni ruoteli on ainoa ase tätä pelättävää väkivaltaista vihollista
vastaan; tämän hoitamisessa on laivan joko onni tahi onnettomuus,
yksi ainoa viallinen kierros vaikuttaa, että aallot heittävät laivan
kumoon. Kaikki irtonainen tavara sidottiin nuorilla kiini, kannen
luukut sulettiin ja siten järjestettyinä odotettiin lähestyvää vihollista.

Marraskuun 2 päivän aamuna oli meillä semmoinen näytelmä, jota

ei kukaan unhoita, joka sen näki. Ei mikään maalarin pensseli, ei
mikään kynä taida osapuillekaan kertoa, mitä me tänä aamuna
näimme. Myrskyn raivoaminen, kun se ulvomalla vinkuen mastien ja
nuorien välitse puserti niistä kummallisia, surullisia ääniä, aina
syvimmästä bassoäänestä vienoimpaan ilmaharpun suhinaan,
valtameren möyrinä, kun sen aallot kohosivat korkeiden vuoriharjuin
kaltaisiksi ja semmoisina ryntäsivät vastatusten ja kovalla rytinällä
murtuivat hajallensa antaaksensa tilaa toisille, laivan surkea ruske ja
tutina, kun se vapisi perustuksiinsa saakka, — kaikkea tätä ei voi
sanoilla selittää ja ainoastaan sillä, joka itse on tämmöisessä
myrskyssä ollut, on käsitys tästä jalosta luonnon ilmiöstä.

Ja silloin kun se raivokas suolainen vesi rynnisti vastaamme ja

huumaavalla pauhinalla vyöri vaikeroivan laivan yli, kun aukko aukon
perästä ilmestyi nielemään sitä, silloin näin selvästi, mikä ääretön ero
oli Jumalan ja ihmisen, Luojan ja luodun välillä, silloin tunsin
syvemmin kuin koskaan ennen tomun lapsen voimattomuuden
korkean ja kaikkivaltiaan maailman hallitsian rinnalla.

Myrsky raivosi muutamia päiviä, se vei meiltä monta purjetta ja

osan laivan laidoitusta; kun katteini seuraavana päivänä otti
keskipäiväkorkeuden, huomasi hän pelolla laivan siirtyneen 300
penikulmaa oikealta suunnaltaan.

Matkamme suloisimman osan vietimme tropiikien alla.

Yhtämyötäinen tuuli lievitti kuumuuden auringosta, joka oli
pystysuoraan päällämme, tummansininen, pilvetön taivas kuvastui
mereen ja hupaista oli senlisäksi katsella lentokaloja, jotka laumoissa
kohosivat merestä ja usein läjittäin putosivat laivan kannelle. Nämä
kalat ovat sillin kaltaisia, ehkä vähä pienempiä kuin nämä. Ilmassa
käyttävät ne pitkiä eviänsä siipinä, kuitenkin ainoastaan niin kauvan
kun ne ovat märkinä. Eväin kuivettua putoaa kala jälleen veteen.

Taivas ja sen omituisuudet saavat näiden leveysasteiden alla

toisen muodon. Muutamien minuuttien perästä, sitte kun aurinko,
tummansinisenä pallona, on painunut mereen muuttuu päivä yöksi.
Hämärätä ei täällä ole. Pohjaisella taivaan rannalla häviävät
vähitellen ne vanhastaan tutut tähtitarhat ja niiden sijaan ilmestyy
uusia.

Matkaa jatkaessa oli meillä seurana hai-kalojaa ja tulimme

tilaisuuteen pyytääkin yhden semmoisen. Läskipalanen kiinnitettiin
nuorassa olevaan koukkuun ja heitettiin mereen; kala laskeusi
selälleen ja nieli tämän onnettoman syötin. Nyt tarvittiin kaikkein
laivamiesten yhteiset voimat vahvalla köydellä vetämään riiviötä
kannelle. Muutaman tunnin jäykän vastarinnan kanssa taisteltua oli
kala kaikkein riemuksi laivalla ja tehtiin ensin vahingoittumattomaksi
siten, että hakattiin siltä pää ja pyrstö. Sitten taisi kukin tyydyttää
uteliaisuuttaan ja katsella petoa. Se oli 18 jalkaa pitkä, vaan ikä,
asiantuntevain laivamiesten mukaan, ei vielä korkea. Saalista emme
voineet käyttää hyödyksemme; sillä liha ei kelpaa ravinnoksi ja
traania keittää siitä ei ollut tilaa. Siis kala hakattiin palasiksi ja
heitettiin mereen.

Joulukuun 3 päivänä kulimme päiväntasaajan yli. Vanha tunnettu

tapa laivalla vaatii, että kaikki laivamiehet, jotka ensi kerran
purjehtivat päiväntasaajan yli, saavat merikasteen. Tämä omituinen
juhla on hupainen poikkeus yksitoikkoisessa laiva-elämässä ja vaikka
laivamiesten vehkeet tässä tilaisuudessa usein tuntuvat törkeiltä, oli
meille kuitenkin suuri huvitus saada nähdä ja ottaa osaa tässä
kummallisessa kasteentoimituksessa.

Kaikki kastetta toimittavat laivamiehet olivat naamoittaneet

itsensä, esitellen Ahtia ja hänen seuralaisiansa. Juhlakulussa käytyä
kannen ympäri, jolloin vanhan savutorven ja muiden kummallisten
koneiden avulla tarkastettiin aurinkoa, kokoonnuttiin keskellä laivaa
olevan vedellä täytetyn ammeen ympäri; tämän yli oli pantu lauta,
jolle kastettava istutettiin. Nyt alkoi tutkinto. "Kuinka kauan tarvitsisit
aikaa, purjehtiaksesi maan ympäri?" kysyi Ahti ja samalla kun kysytty
aukaisi suunsa vastatuksensa, pyyhki yksi laivamies hänen näköänsä
liisteri-sutilla ja toinen tervasutilla. Tämä toimitus uudistettiin niin
usein, kuin mies oli tuntematon tervasta ja liisteristä. Silloin
temmastiin lauta odottamatta hänen altansa ja ympäriseisovain
nauruksi putosi hän vedellä täytettyyn astiaan. Vasta sitte kun hän
oli luvannut riittävän lunastusrahan päästettiin hän ammeesta, jolloin
jonkun toisen täytyi taas istuutua laudalle ja kärsiä sama menettelö.

Kun vasta-alkuiset laivamiehet olivat kärsineet tämän vähemmän

miellyttävän toimituksen, alkoi yleinen kaste. Mastoista kaasivat
laivamiehet äärettömät vesitulvat päällemme, kaikki kiulut ja ämpärit
olivat toimituksessa ja jokainen koetteli saada itselleen ämpärin
kaataaksensa sen suolaisen sisällön toisen päälle. Ei vaimoja eikä
lapsiakaan säästetty; useimmat antautuivat mielellään tämän kylvyn
alaisiksi, sillä vesi oli lämmintä ja lämpömittari katveessa näytti 45
pykälää Cels.

Kun laivamiehet olivat saaneet veronsa matkustajilta ja siten

voittaneet oikean tarkoituksensa kasteella, laulettiin, soitettiin ja
tanssittiin, katteini piti huolta tarpeellisista juomista ja siten kului
päivä iloisesti. Iltapuoleen heitettiin mereen Ahdin kunniaksi palava
pikitynnyri ja tällä oli merikasteen iloinen juhla loppunut.

Kun olimme lähellä Brasiiliaa, näimme hätälipulla varustetun

laivan. Se laski meitä kohti ja kun oli puolen penikulman päässä,
irtautui siitä vene, jolla katteini ja kuus laivanmiestä sen väestöä
sousi luoksemme. He olivat espanialaisia, jotka, tullen Etelämeren-
saarista, olivat kärsineet haaksirikon Magelhaen'in salmessa;
ainoastaan kuus-viikkoisen lakkaamattoman pumppaamisen kautta
olivat estäneet laivaansa uppoamasta. Nyt olivat suuressa hädässä,
sillä merivesi oli kastellut ja pilannut heidän ruokavaransa, niin että
katteinimme mielellään heidän pyynnöstään antoi heille verestä
ruokaa. Vielä keräsimme heille tupakkia ja sikaria, joiden puutteessa
kauan olivat olleet ja näimme sitte heidän laskevan likimäiseen
satamaan Rio Janeiroon, sitte kun sydämellisesti kiittäen olivat
ottaneet meiltä jäähyväiset.

Joulun aikana purjehdimme Hyvän Toivon-niemen ympäri ja

laskimme aina 56:teen eteläiseen leveysasteesen saakka
voidaksemme käyttää pohjaista myötätuulta hyväksemme. Täällä oli
kylmää ja myrskyistä; kuitenki oli meillä paljo huvittavia esineitä
tarkasteltavina. Meren syvyydestä sukelsi pinnalle valaskaloja,
suihkuten vettä korkealle ilmaan, suuri joukko niemikyyhkysiä ja
vesilintuja, joista monta pyydettiin, liiteli ympäri laivaa. Eräänä
aamuna näimme kummastuksella pitkän ja leveän veripunaisen
juotin vedessä vetäytyvän idästä länteen. Kun ei kukaan voinut
selittää syytä tähän ilmiöön, laskettiin ämpäri mereen ja vedettiin
taas ylös täytettynä tällä punertavalla nesteellä. Silloin huomattiin
tähän väriin olevan syynä lukematon joukko pieniä mato-eläimiä.
Jalo oli näky-ala eteläisellä taivaan rannalla. Siellä näkyi suuria
jäävuoria, jotka paistoivat ja välkkyivät priljantin kaltaisina auringon
säteissä. Kun palaus matkallani purjehdin Kap Hornin ympäri sain
hyvin läheltä ihmetellä Etelä-jäämeren jaloja näky-aloja, sillä 57:nen
eteläisen leveysasteen kohdalla ympäröivät jäävuoret tykkänään
laivamme, joten etenki öillä olimme vaarassa törmätä niiden kanssa
yhteen. Jäävuoret, usein mahdottoman suuret, muodostuvat jos
jonkin muotoisiksi. Usein olivat vanhain linna-jäännösten kaltaisia,
varustettuina torneilla ja harjoilla, toiset taas ovat pyramidi-maisia;
mutta laivoille vaarallisimmat ovat kuitenki pyöreät ja raskaat
jääköntät, jotka joko ei ollenkaan näy tahi ainoastaan vähän
kohoavat vedestä ja joita juuri senvuoksi on vaikea välttää.

Hyvän Toivon-niemi ja Kap Horn ovat vaarallisimpia paikkoja

meriläisille ja harvoin näiden Afrikan ja Amerikan niemien ympäri
purjehditaan ettei myrskyt raivoa, jotka ovat vaarallisemmat
kulkevien jäälohkareiden tähden.

Hupainen on havaita sitä ilma-alan muutosta, jonka huomaa

purjehtiessa puolen maapallon ympäri. Siten näin neljän kuukauden
ajalla matkatessani Melbourne'sta Lontoosen kolme talvea. Sade-
aika, Austraalian talvi, loppui silloin kun Elokuun keskipalkoilla
purjehdin Melbourne'sta, Syyskuun loppupuolella olin
jäävyöhykkeessä Kap Horn'in kohdalla ja kolmannen talven näin
Joulukuussa kotitienoollani.
 Pitkän ja vaivaloisen matkustuksen perästä, sitte kun olimme
purjehtineet 110 päivää, kuului vihoviimein Helmikuun 5 päivänä
iloinen huuto; "maa! maa!"

Kolumbus ei liene ollut onnellisempi, kun hän Amerikan löysi, vanki

ei taida enemmän iloita, kun hänelle äkkiarvaamatta vapauden portit
avataan, kuin minä, koska laivatykkien pauke todisti tämän iloisen
sanoman. Kaikki ryntäsivät kannelle tervehtimään ja omin silmin
näkemään sitä odotettua maata, mielihalujemme ja toivojemme
päämaalia. Alussa näytti maa vaan taivaan rannalta kohoavalta
pilvellä, vaan alkoi näkyä selvemmin, mitä lähemmäksi tultiin. Vesi
muuttui aina vaalean vihreämmäksi, kohta kulimme ensimäisen
majakan sivu, ja kun ei luotsia näkynyt, antoi katteini laskea laivan
ankkuriin kauniissa lahdekkeessa Adelaide'n lähellä. Seuraavana
aamuna tuli odotettu luotsi, höyrylaiva otti meidät peräänsä ja vai
muutamassa tunnissa Port Adelaide'n satamaan.

Englantilaiset virkamiehet tulivat kannelle myötätuotuja tavaroita

katsastamaan ja kun lopullisesti lääkäri oli tutkinut terveydentilamme
ja selittänyt sen tyydyttäväksi, sai kukin mennä mihin tahtoi.

Muutamien kumppanieni kanssa virkistettyä itseäni voimallisella

englantilaisella aamiaisella teeveden, häränpaistin ja vehnäleivän
kanssa, ajoimme rautatietä kahdeksan penikulman päässä olevaan
Adelaide'en, etelä-Austraalian pääkaupunkiin.

Vaan kuinka hirveästi huomasimmekaan pettyneiksi, kun vihriäin

ja hymyileväin niittyjen sijassa näimme auringon polttaman
hietakorven! Kuinka kukistuivatkaan kerrassaan kaikki ne
tuulentuvat, joita matkalla olimme rakentaneet, kun meille
kaupungissa ilmoitettiin, että kultakaivokset suurimmaksi osaksi
olivat hylätyt ja että nyt elon korjattua oli vaikea saada työtä, kuin
myös, että suuri joukko työtöntä väkeä kuljeskeli pitkin kaupungin
katuja! Näiden ilmoitusten totuutta täytyi meidän, vaikka vasten
mieltämmekin, uskoa, sillä kaikissa katujen nurkissa näimme
joukottain työtä hakevia henkilöitä seisovan joutilaina.

Silloin en vielä tietänyt, että vaikka kaupungissa on työvoimia

yllinkyllin, on siitä puute maan sisällä ja että useammat, vaikka
huonossakin varallisuuden tilassa ovat, ennen nauttivat mukavampaa
elämää kaupungissa kuin maalla, jossa tosin saa paljon kärsiä
puutteita, vaan jossa varmaan myös on paljoa onnellisempi olo.

Vasta-tullutta peijaavat ja pettävät kaikella tavoin ei ainoastaan

ulkomaalaiset, joiden kieltä ei ymmärrä, vaan myös omat
maamiehet, siten, että liianki usein lähenevät häntä, antavat neuvoja
ja ovat olevinaan ystäviä niin kauan kuin ovat saaneet häneltä hänen
rahansa. Nämä surullisesti mainiot petturit ovat vastatulleen
vaarallisimmat viholliset; ja missä voipikaan saaliin himoisen
roistoväen kokeilla olla parempi ala kuin kultamaassa?

Monenmoisia kokeita saapi vastatullut tehdä voidakseen ansaita

ylläpitonsa. Sata kertaa koettelee hän; vaan nämä kokeet eivät
onnistu, kun alituiseen tehdään sama ikävä kysymys: "taidatteko
puhua englannin kieltä?" — "En". — "Menkää sitte ja oppikaa sitä, ja
kun taidatte haastaa kieltä, niin tulkaa uudestaan kysymään."

Myös ilma-alalla on paha vaikutus vieraasen. Aurinko, johon hän ei

ole tottunut, polttaa häntä ja kuumat saamum-tuulet, tullen
sisämaasta, vaivaavat häntä tuomallaan hienolla hiekalla, nostaen
lämpömittarin 50:teen asteesen Celsiusta, kuumuuteen, jota tuskin
voi kärsiä. Senlisäksi lentelee tuhottomasti kärpäsiä ja moskiittoja,
jotka ovat suurena maanvaivana. Ja kumma kyllä, täytyy vastatulian
kärsiä näiltä kaikkein enimmän. Turhat kokeet vapautua näistä ja
hiki, joka kaikkialta ruumiista pusertuu, muuttavat onnettoman
melkein toivottomaksi ja usein tulee hän siihen uskoon, että kaikki
vastahakoisuudet ovat yhdistyneet, tehdäkseen hänen oloansa
vieraassa maassa mitä vaivaloisemmaksi.

Näissä sisällisissä ja ulkonaisissa tuskissa, näissä surullisissa

toiveissa; elämän pidon alituisessa taistelossa näkee hän viimisen
rahansa menevän ja huomaa lopullisesti olevansa vieraassa maassa,
tuhatmääriä penikulmia kotitienoostaan, rahatta, ystävittä, kaikitta
toiveitta raha-ansioon, vierasten ihmisten seassa, joiden kieltä ei
ymmärrä!

Semmoinen oli minun ensi-aikani siinä kiitetyssä ja toivotussa

Austraalian kultamaassa. Mielikuvituksen viehättävät kuvat ja
vaaran-alaisuus, joka nuoruuden i'ässä ollen mielellään yhdistyy
ajatukseen vieraista maista, katosivat näistä ensimäisistä kokeista ja
paljas elämän todellisuus kovine vaatimuksineen tuli niiden sijaan.

Sitkeällä kärsivällisyydellä ja kestävyydellä pysytteleikse vasta-

tullut niissä tienoin, joissa hän ensin astui maalle, niin kauan, kuin
tuntee maan polttavan allansa; sitte vasta hän koneellisesti etsii
matkalaukkunsa mennäksensä eteenpäin. Minullekin tuli tämmöinen
hetki ja nyt oli valittavanani joko kääntyä kulta-laaksoihin,
kuparikaivannoihin tahi hakea onneani maan sisällä olevissa suurissa
lammasmoisioissa.

Sitte kun kaikki kokeet kaupungissa saada jonkinmoista työ-

ansiota olivat huonosti onnistuneet, päätin muutamien ystävien
keralla matkustaa 100 penikulman päässä oleviin kuparikaivannoihin,
joissa sanottiin aina olevan työtä. Panimme siis päällemme maan
tavallisen puvun, johon kuuluu englantilaisesta nahasta tehdyt
valkoiset housut, punanen tahi sininen paita ynnä leveälaitainen
hattu, jota paitsi varustimme itsemme sängyn asemesta olevalla
villapeitteellä, joka kokoonkäärittynä riippui olkapäillä ja kannatti
toisessa päässään teevesipannun ja juoma-pikarin. Näin
varustettuna käänsimme Adelaide'lle selkämme. Ensi alussa meni tie
viljellyn maan läpi vehnävainioineen ja viinamäkinoen. Vehnä ja
viinarypäleet höystyvät täällä hyvin ja erittäin ovat saksalaiset
ansiollisesti edistäneet jälkimäistä. Tällä kansakunnalla on Adelaide'n
läheisyydessä omat kylänsä kirkkoineen ja saksalaisina kouluineen;
he elävät siellä hyvin onnellisina ja tyytyväisinä. Maa on
hedelmällinen ja ulostekoja on joko vähän tahi ei ollenkaan.

Austraalian ilman-ala sallii matkustajan maata koko yönsä paljaan

taivaan kannen alla ja tuhannet tekevät sen suurimman osan
elämästänsä. Samoin myös mekin vaelluksellamme. Kun iltasella
olimme löytäneet sopivan paikan, jossa oli puita ja vettä, tehtiin
valkea ja keitettiin teevesi. Yksinkertaisen illallisen jälkeen otti yksi
seurastamme kitaran ja me lauloimme vanhan isänmaallisen laulun.
Päämme päällä suhisivat kunnia-arvoisten gummipuiden latvat ja
niiden läpi katseli vanha, rakas kuu meitä. Villikoirain ulvonta ja
lähellä olevan Etelämeren kohina vaivuttivat meidät viimein unehen,
me uneksuimme kotitienoosta ja entisistä onnellisista ajoista!

Kun eräänä päivänä menimme muutaman ravintolan sivu, luultiin

meitä kierteleviksi soittoniekoiksi ja käskettiin astumaan sisälle. Siellä
oli kemut. Paljo herroja ja rouvasväkeä oli ko'ossa, jotka ahkerasti
joivat viiniä, olutta ja brandy'ä ynnä nostivat hurraahuutoja vanhan
Englannin kunniaksi. Vanha irlantilainen soitti viulua, jota näissä
tiloissa ei koskaan saa puuttua ja meitä pakoitettiin säestämään.
Tarpeellisten koneiden puutteessa lyötiin rumpua erään läkki-astian
pohjalle, paperilla kääritty kampa oli räikkätorvena ja ystäväni teki
soittokunnan täydelliseksi kitarallansa. Vanha viulunsoittaja oli
kapellimestari; sitte kun hän muutaman kerran oli tyhjentänyt lasinsa
meidän muistoksemme alkoi soitto ja tanssi. Koska tässä ei vaadittu
niin paljon äänien sointuisuutta, vaan enemmän tahtiin menevätä
rätinää, päättyi esittelömme kaikkein mieliksi. Seura ei antanut meitä
olla minkään puutteessa ja niinpä vietimme iloisen illan. Kun
seuraavana aamuna olisimme ottaneet jäähyväiset
kapellimestariltamme, makasi hän vielä pöydän alla sikeässä unessa.

Iltana ennen kuin pääsimme perille, yhdyimme ensi kerran

syntyperäisten asukasten kanssa. Kun näitä ensi kerran näkee,
herättää se pelkoa ja kauhua. Heitä lähetessämme nousi muutamia
näistä puoli-alastomista olennoista makaavasta asennosta seisoalle,
vaan kaikki muut istuivat tulen ääressä ja kerjäsivät tupakkaa
niinhyvin miehet kuin naiset. Täytettyä heidän pyyntönsä, osoittivat
he erästä kengurua, jota parastaikaa hiilillä paistettiin, ja kehoittivat
meitä viittauksilla syömään siitä. Me täytimme pyyntönsä; kuitenki
oli makumme liian sivistynyt voidaksemme nauttia tätä ruokalajia.

Tänä iltana oli täysikuu, jota tapausta mustat ihmiset juhlana

pitävät. Siten saimme olla läsnä tässä heidän Korrobere-nimisessä
juhlassaan. Miehet maalaavat ruumiillensa kaikenlaisia kuvia ja
koristavat pitkät, vanukkeiset tukkansa punamaalilla ja linnunsulilla;
vaimot muodostavat piirin ja sill'aikaa kun miehet sen sisällä pitävät
villiä tanssiansa, lyövät he tahtia, jonka mukaan laulavatkin.
Hupaista oli nähdä näitä villin erämaan lapsia luonnontilassaan,
varustettuina keihäillä ja nuijilla, joita miehet heiluttivat ikään kuin
olisivat olleet sodassa, sill'aikaa kun vaimot, tämän villin sotaleikin
innostamina, usein ulvoivat niin kauheasti ja hirvittävästi että
pelästyen luulimme olevamme kadotuksen syvyydessä.
 Tultuamme matkan perille, otimme asuntomme eräässä
englantilaisessa ravintolassa, josta seuraavana aamuna astuimme
kaivannon konttuoriin työtä tiedustamaan. Työnjohtaja tervehti
ystävällisesti hymyillen, kun meitä katseli. Hän taisi nähdä, ettemme
vielä paljon kuokkaa ja lapioa olleet käyttäneet. Koska hän ei voinut
meitä ymmärtää, käski hän meidän hakea jonkun maamiehen
tulkiksi; pitkällisen hakemisen ja kysymisen perästä onnistuikin
meidän löytää erään vuorityömiehen kotoisin Harzista ja tämä
seurasi meitä, Nyt meidät kirjoitettiin työmiesluetteloon, meille
annettiin lapiot ja kohta aloimme kuparimalmia kärryillä kulettaa
huuhtomalaitokseen. Jos huuhdottu malmi oli köyhää, pantiin se
sulatusuuniin, jota vastoin runsas-aineinen malmi sulattamatonna
säkeissä vietiin Englantiin.

Tämä rikas ja voittoa antava kuparikaivos oli perustettu osakkeille

ja tässä työskenteli minun aikanani yli tuhannen ihmisen kaikista
maista ja kaikista kansan-luokista. Työ-aika oli joka päivä 9 tuntia;
työ oli jotenkin helppoa ja työn-antajain ynnä työmiesten väli oli
vapaampi ja parempi kuin Europassa. Kun iltasella kokoonnuimme
teepöydän ääreen, ei kukaan olisi voinut luulla meidän olevan
tavallisia työmiehiä. Eräs vanha kunnian-arvoinen englantilainen,
joka oli ollut harjoitteleva lääkäri, vaan onnettomuuksien kautta
joutunut rappiotilaan, oli puheenjohtajamme ja niinkuin tavallista on
englantilaisten aterioilla, että joku määrätty henkilö jakelee lihan, ei
hänkään antanut kenenkään tätä tointa itseltään riistää. Aina
näyttäytyi hän pöydässä puettuna mustaan takkiin ja valkoiseen
huiviin, piti vilkasta keskustelua vireellä ja tutki iltaruo'an jälestä
latinalaisia ja kreekkalaisia kirjailleitansa, jota vastoin minä käytin
joutohetkeni englannin kielen oppimiseen, jossa edistyinkin siinä
määrässä, että välttävästi sitä taisin puhua, kun muutaman
kuukauden perästä läksin tästä paikasta.
 Suuret edut ovat niillä, jotka kotimaassaan ovat oppineet jotakin
käsityötä, niinkuin rauta- ja puusepillä, kirvesmiehillä, leipureilla,
teurastajilla ja maanviljeliöillä; näitä tässä maassa etsitään ja ne
voivatkin ansaita paljo rahaa. Useimmat maahan muuttavat henkilöt
eivät kuitenkaan taida mitään käsityötä erittäin, vaan ryhtyvät
kaikkeen, mistä luulevat jotakin ansaitsevansa. Nämä henkilöt saavat
alituista tointa erittäinki Austraalian isoissa lammasmoisioissa ja
karjakartanoissa, joissa minäkin isomman osan siellä-olo-aikaani olen
viettänyt. Karjataloin hallussa on suurin osa maata ja alkavat ne
niiltä tienoin, missä maanviljelys loppuu. Satamääriä penikulmia
ulottuu niitä maan sisälle ja ovat ikäänkuin etuvartioita sivistyksen ja
erämaan rajalla. Kauempana ei valko-ihoisilla ole maata; siellä
puollustaa erämaan poika yksinään oikeuksiaan ja kotitienoitaan.

Suurimmilla lammasmoisioilla on yli sadantuhannen lampaan ja

sitä paitsi paljo sarvikarjaa ja hevosia. Nämä laumat ovat, laitumien
laadun suhteen, jaetut karjoihin, joissa on tuhannesta
kolmeentuhanteen eläimeen ja itsekullakin karjalla on oma
pääpaimenensa. Runsaan ruohonkasvun ja laitumen suuruuden
suhteen olisi paimenella helppo työ, jos hän ei tarvitseisi valvoa
karjaa villikoirilta, jotka muutamissa osissa maata suurissa parvissa
sitä hätyyttelevät. Vieläkin pahempi vihollinen on hänellä, jos
karjalaitumensa on enemmän maan sisällä; siellä villi-ihmiset
hyökkäävät karjaan, jota usein pahoin raatelevat, ei säästäen
ihmistäkään. Semmoisissa paikoin ei yks paimen riitä, vaan suojelee
silloin monta aseella hyvästi varustettua miestä karjaa.

Paimenen asunto on pieni mökki, usein kahdenkymmenen

penikulman päässä lampaiden omistajan asunnosta. Hänen
elämänsä, ehkä yksinäinen, on kuitenki suruton ja paimenien seassa
näkee monta sivistynyttä, usein oppineitakin henkilöitä ja onnellisia
perheenisiä. Pyynnöstään saavat he sanomalehtiä ja kirjoja ja
paimen voipi ansaita vuosittain 400 ja 500 talaria (1572 ja 1965
suomen markkaa). Austraalian paimenen täytyy osata teurastaa ja
leipoa, keittää, ratsastaa ja ajaa, vaan erittäin tarpeellinen on hänen
tuntea kompassia ja ympäri olevia tienoita, jos ei tahdo eksyä.
Tuskin voipi ajatella, kuinka helposti tämä tapahtuu ynnä kuinka
avuttomaksi ja onnettomaksi ainakin alussa itsensä tuntee tässä
erämaassa, näillä aavoilla ja loppumattomilla heinälakeuksilla, joilla
silmä turhaan hakee paikkaa, jota tuntisi.

Kerran kun taas matkustin Adelaide'n ja Melbourne'n välillä, otin

eräänä aamuna jäähyväiset vierasvaraiselta skotlantilaiselta
isännältäni, jatkaakseni matkaa viimeksi mainittuun kaupunkiin.
Hyväntahtoisesti neuvottiin minua jonkun matkan päässä
poikkeemaan syrjätielle, jonka kautta matka lyhentyisi muutamalla
penikulmalla ja kuitenkin olisin oikealla tolalla. Tämä hyvää
tarkoittava neuvo oli tienoita tuntemattomalle mieletön; sen ovat
monet saaneet hengellään maksaa ja olisi sillä minunki suhteeni ollut
surullisimmat seuraukset, jos ei armollinen sallimus olisi ohjannut
askeleitani.

Austraalian sisällä ei löydy todellisia maanteitä, vaan ainoastaan

kapeita ajoteitä, jotka, kulkien yhdestä pysäyspaikasta toiseen, ovat
kymmenestä kolmeenkymmeneen penikulmaan toisistaan. Nämä
huonot tiet huuhtoo sade-ajan vesitulvat tuntemattomiksi ja tämä
vuoden-aika oli käsissä.

Useita päiviä oli rajusti satanut, raskaat, tummat pilvet peittivät

taivaan ja usein sain pitkiä matkoja vedessä kaahlata. Kulin
eteenpäin; vaan kun usean tunnin kuluttua en voinut löytää
etsimääni tietä, luulin kau'an sitten kulkeneeni sen ylitse ja käännyin
takaisin, päästäkseni edes viimiseen yökorttieriini, ett'en olisi
tarvinnut viettää yötäni aukealla kedolla; sillä sade tuli rajummaksi ja
putosi virtana taivaasta. Nopein askelin kiiruhdin eteenpäin,
voidakseni ennenkuin yö saavutti, päästä katoksen alle; silloin tulin
odottamatta polulle, jota seurasin siinä suloisessa luulossa, että sitä
myöten pääsisin jonkun paimenen asunnolle. Mutta kauhukseni
päättyikin se erään ison heteikön rannalle, jolla ympäri-olevat
härkäin ja hevosten luut muistuttivat minua erään saksalais-
siirtolaisen varoitusta, ett'ei pidä seurata tämmöisiä polkuja, koska
ne eksyttävät matkustajaa. Kesän ajalla, kun joet ja purot usein
kuivavat ja vesi alkaa puuttua, kulkee karja viiskymmentä ja satukin
englannin penikulmaa yks toisensa perästä heteikön vesille. Sinne
tultua, heittäytyvät janoiset eläimet kärsimättömyydellä puoleksi
kuivuneihin lantaisin, painuvat syvästi mutaan, heittäen joukottain
henkensä.

Päivä loppui ja yön varjot alkoivat peittää maisemia. Kaikin voimin

koittelin huutaa, että ehkä joku kotia palaava paimen kuulisi minua;
ainoastaan joukko säikkyneitä papu-kaijoja kohosi ilmaan rääkyen,
vaan muutoin oli kaikki hiljaa. Siinä luulossa, että olin eksynyt, tulin
nyt ihka varmaksi.

Pidin itseäni tässä erämaassa kadotettuna ihmisenä ja kaikki ne

hirvittävät kuvaukset, joista niin usein olin lukenut ja kuullut
kerrottavan, näyttivät vieläkin kauheimmilla. Läpimärkänä ja
väsyneenä istuuduin kaatuneelle puulle viettääkseni tässä yötä, vaan
nyt alkoi vatsakin vaatia veroansa. Nälän ensimäiset ahdistukset ovat
kovimmat. Ne palaavat säännöllisesti ja päättyvät heikkoudella ja
pyörtymisellä. Jalat eivät tahdo kannattaa ruumista,
välinpitämättömyys ja velttous, jotka ovat nälkään kuolemisen
ensimäiset tunnusmerkit alkavat tuntua; useita kertoja koittelee
kärsivä eksynyt nousta jaloilleen, vaan hän, viimisten voimain
loputtua, kaatuu maahan ja tainnuksissa olo ainaiseksi sulkee hänen
silmänsä. Silloin kaarneet ja korppikotkat tappelevat villikoirain
kanssa saaliista ja kuukausien, ehkäpä vasta vuosien kuluttua
löydetään vaalenneet luut, joiden johdolla sanomalehdet kertovat
uusista uhreista, joita Austraalian erämaa on ottanut.

Muutamia kertoja nukahdin, suloiset mielenkuvaelmat alkoivat

ilveitään, asettaen muun muassa eteeni ruokapöydän monine
herkkuineen; halukkaasti istuin sen ääreen, vaan kylmyys puistatti ja
herätti minut samalla armottomasti. Milloin taas uneksuin makaavani
lämpimällä vuoteella; suloisesti siinä kääntelin ja vääntelin itseäni,
vaan silloin taas putosin oksaltani ja huomasin makaavani märällä
maalla.

Viimeinki koitti toivottu päivä. Sade oli lakannut, auringon

kultasäteet ennustivat kaunista päivää; uuden elämän tunsin
virtaavan jäsenissäni, uuden toivon sydämessäni. Rauhoitin
valittavaa vatsaani tupakkapiipulla, ja, puhaltaessani pienet
tupakkapilvet kirkkaasen ilmaan, mietin mihin suuntaan olisi paras
lähteä. Olin monesti kuullut että ne, jotka eksyvät, useinki päivän
kierreltyä lopullisesti tulevat lähtöpaikkaan ja ettei minulle näin
kävisi, päätin seurata vaan yhtä suuntaa. Vaan minkä suunnan
valitsisin? Kun siitä muutoin en voinut soveltua itse kanssani, päätin
onnen antaa määrätä sen.

Ensin kuitenki rukoilin Jumalalta apua, sillä onnellinen on se

ihminen, joka tietää, että hänellä on ystävä ylähällä. Ainoastaan
korkeampi voima taisi minut saattaa tästä erämaan labyrintistä ja
tähän voimaan luottaen kirjoitinkin neljälle paperilapulle ilmasuunnat
pohjoinen, etelä, itä ja länsi, kiersin ne torvelle, heitin lakkiini ja
vedin yhden. Länsi oli se ilmansuunta, jota arvan mukaan piti
seuraamani ja niin päätinkin tehdä, niin kauan kun jalkani
kannattaisivat.

Voidakseni helpommin ja nopeammin kävellä, otin ainoastaan

tärkeimmät tavarani myötä ja läksin siis auringon ja kompassin
osoittamaa suuntaa astumaan. Joku lakkaamaton levottomuus
pakoitti minua kulkemaan rajusti ja harvoin levähdinkään. Niin tulin
suurelle gummipuita kasvavalle lakeudelle. Semmoiset metsät eivät
ole tiheitä, koska vesakoita puuttuu ja niissä taitaakin sentähden
nähdä pitkät matkat eteensä. Suuria kenguru-laumoja juoksi
sivuitseni, Emiu, Austraalian kamelikurki pärähti lentoon
läheisyydessäni ja villit härät ja hevoset seisahtuivat vähän matkan
päähän katselemaan minua suurilla silmillä. Löysin muutamia
syötäviä juuria ja pesällisen linnunpoikasia, jotka söin; illan tultua
tein tulen, leikkasin nuorta ruohoa ja keitin sen, virkistääkseni itseäni
lämpimällä ruo'alla. Kuitenki tunsin selvästi voimani vähenevän ja
uudestaan alkoi alakuloisuus ja pelko minua vaivata. Ei unikaan
virkistänyt. Kolmas päivä valkeni ja töin tuskin taisin nousta
seisomaan. Pyörrytys ja tähän saakka tuntematon raukeaminen
hervostuttivat jäseneni, kuumetaudin oireet polttivat otsaani, ja,
tuntien kuoleman lähestyvän, täytyi minun itsekseni myöntää loppuni
olevan varman, jos en nopeammin onnistunut päästä tästä
erämaasta. Huomasin, että siitä saakka kuin olin eksynyt, olin
vaeltanut ainakin viiskymmentä englannin penikulmaa ja ei vieläkään
näkynyt yhtään ihmisasunnon jälkeä. Nousin vähäiselle kukkulalle;
vaan jos katsoin mihin hyvänsä, en missään nähnyt apua, en
missään pelastusta. Olinko sivistyneiden ihmisten rajain sisällä, tahi
olinko jo ainaiseksi tullut niiden ylitse? Veikö tieni minut johonkin
vierasvaraiseen paikkaan tahi oliko kova osani määrännyt minut,
hyljättynä maailmalta, vetämään viimiset hengenvetoni tässä
erämaassa? En tietänyt sitä.

Eräs velvollisuus, oli minun vielä täytettävä: jättää jälkeenjääville

tiedon surullisesta kohtalostani. Kirjoitin muistikirjaani saksan ja
englannin kielillä nimeni ja kotopaikkani, pyytäen sitä, joka ehkä
löysi sen, julkaisemaan nämä muistoonpanot, jonka tähden hänelle
testamentteerasin vähäisen omaisuuteni, kymmenen englannin
puntaa (250 suom. mkk.). Sitä paitsi kaversin nimeni juomamaljan
pohjaan ja, pidettyäni iltarukouksen, kääriydyin peitteesen
makaamaan ruvetakseni.

Taisi olla aamu-yö, kun kaukaa kuulin kukon laulun. Nousin ylös
siinä luulossa, että olin uneksinut. Mutta vielä kerran kaikui korviini
nuo vanhat tutut äänet, jotka nyt tuntuivat soitolta toisesta
maailmasta. Olin siis ihmisten läheisyydessä ja samalla pelastettukin.
Muutaman tunnin kuluttua saavuin erään englantilaisen
lammasmoisiolle, jossa taas taisin saada takaisin entiset voimani.
Kuitenki täytyi minun olla siten varova, etten ensi päivinä nauttinut
muuta kuin maitoa ja leipää.

Matka siitä talosta, jossa olin saanut sen onnettoman neuvon,

englantilaisen luo, oli vähän päälle kolmenkymmenen englannin
penikulman. Jos silloin olisin, kun arpa määräsi kohtaloni, lähtenyt
joko pohjoiseen tahi etelään, olisin varmaan kuollut, sillä
jälkimäisessä tapauksessa olisin kahdeksankymmentä penikulmaa
käytyäni tullut meren rannalle ja edellisessä tapauksessa olisin tullut
silloin vielä tuntemattomaan erämaahan.

*****
 Lammasmoisioin vilkkain aika on lampaiden keritseminen. Se alkaa
sade-ajan loputtua Syyskuun alkupäivinä ja loppuu lämpimän ajan
tultua Joulukuun alussa. Silloin on elämä vireätä näillä muutoin
yksinäisillä ja hiljaisilla alueilla. Työmieslaumoja tulee ja lähtee
jalkasin ja ratsain, kauppamiehiä saapuu rikkaasti kuormitetuilla
vaunuilla, tarjoten tavaroitaan; silloin teurastetaan ja leivotaan ja
kaikki herkkupalat, jotka lammasmoisio voi tarjota, peittävät
ylellisesti katetut pöydät. Kaikilta haaroilta tulevat paimenet
karjoineen antamaan ne keritä. Jos vettä on likitienoilla, tapahtuu
ensin yleinen peseminen, jonka jälestä lampaat ajetaan suurien
aitauksien sisälle, joissa keritseminen toimitetaan. Jos tarpeellinen
määrä keritseviä henkilöitä on, alkaa työ. Jokaisella on lammas
edessään ja toinen koittelee voittaa toisensa nopeudessa ja
kätevyydessä, joten harjaantunut henkilö taitaa päivässä keritä sata
lammasta. Leikattu villapeite, joka on yhtenä levynä, pannaan
pöydälle, jossa se, lyhyemmän villan siitä eroitettua, kierretään
torvelle ja lasketaan painon alle. Villapakat viedään likimäiseen
satamaan härkien vetämällä suurilla kaksipyöräisillä kärryillä.

*****

Kun se ilmoitus levisi, että rikkaita kulta-aloja oli löydetty, päätin

minäkin niillä koitella onneani. Kahdeksassa päivässä vei minut eräs
höyrylaiva Port Chalmers'in satamaan Uudella Seelannilla, josta
usean englantilaisen seurassa jatkoin matkaa 80 englannin
penikulman päässä oleville kulta-aloille. Kulkujoukko oli
kansainvaelluksen näköinen, kaikilta haaroilta virtaili ihmisiä Jalkasin,
ratsain ja vaunuilla, ihmisiä kaikenlaisista kansakunnista,
eurooppalaisesta vaaleankeltaiseen kiinalaiseen ja kuparinkarvaiseen
uusi-seelantilaiseen. Perille tultua näimme jo noin 10,000 ihmistä
olevan täydessä työssä.
 Kulta-ala oli korkeiden vuorien ympäröimä pitkä laakso, jonka
viertemillä kullankaivajain asunnot ja teltit olivat sijoitetut. Mekin
koittelimme niin pian kuin mahdollista sijoittaa itseämme tälle
rinteelle; mutta ensin kuitenki hankimme 10 talarin maksua vastaan,
jokaiselle välttämättömän, luvan maata kaivaa, joka lupa sitte kestää
koko vuoden. Siten saimme laillisen oikeuden kullanetsimiseen
kahdentoista neliöjalan suoranaisella maapalalla.

Paalutettua maa-osamme, rakensimme teltin ja kalvoimme sen

ympärille syvät haudat. Sitte vasta alkoi kullankaivaminen. Tultua
kahden jalan syvyydelle kohtasi meitä liuskakiventapainen
maakerros, jonka seassa kulta oli hienoissa liuskoissa ja jyvissä.
Tämä liuskakivikerros tarkoin raavittiin ja pestiin pelti-astioissa, joten
kaikki keveämmät osat huuhdottiin pois ja raskas kulta putosi
pohjalle.

Käytännössä on kolme erilaista kullankaivu-keinoa. Ensimäistä

keinoa käytetään silloin, kun kulta on ylimäisessä maakerroksessa ja
siten itsekurikin saatavana. Se aika, jolloin, niinkuin Kaliforniassa,
saatiin kultaa joen hiekasta, tahi, niinkuin Austraaliassa, löydettiin
maan pinnalta, on aikoja sitte mennyt. Yleisesti kaivetaan nyt 20
jalan syvyisiä kuoppia ja tämä kullansaanti-keino onkin helpoin.

Toinen menettelö on niinkutsuttu syvään-kaivaminen. Tämä vaatii

täydellisiä vuorimiehen-taitoja, hirsillä salvettuja kaivu-aukkoja ja
kaivannosta vettä nostavia pumppukoneita.

Kolmatta kullansaanti-keinoa käytetään silloin, kuin kulta on

painunut ukonkiveen. Silloin sitä täydellisesti ei voi irroittaa
koneellisella tavalla, vaan eroitetaan se, kiven särettyä, elohopean
avulla. Tätä menettelöä sanotaan "amalgamation'iksi".
 Itsekullakin kulta-alalla on monta korkeata virkamiestä ja joukko
poliisipalvelioita, jotka valvovat rauhan ja järjestyksen yli, auttaen
sorrettua oikeuksiinsa. Jos suurempien levottomuuksien aikana tämä
järjestyskunta ei riitä, kehoittaa virkamies oikein ajattelevia lain
nimessä auttamaan häntä.

Jos kullankaivaja tahtoo tarkasti suojella löydetyn kultansa, viepi

hän sen nahkapussissa kultakonttuoriin virkamiesten halttuun. Pussi
pannaan sinettiin, punnitaan, varustetaan omistajan nimellä ja tämä
saapi siitä todistuksen. Joka viikko viedään kulta kaupunkiin sitä
varten tehdyssä vaunussa, jota seuraa aseelliset poliisipalveliat
ratsain; tätä saattoseuraa kutsutaan kultavartiakunnaksi ja tämän
perille saavuttua on tavara säilössä. Usein tapahtui, että
kultavartiakunta sai kärsiä päällekarkauksen ja heille uskotut aarteet
ryöstettiin; mutta siinä tapauksessa ei työntekiä raskaasti
ansaitsemalle omaisuudelleen kärsinyt vahinkoa, vaan hallitus antoi
todistuksen omistajalle joko sen kadotetun määrän kultaa tahi sen
arvon rahassa.

Hallitus piti vielä huolen jumalanpalveluksen viettämisestä kulta-

alueissa, joten ne, jotka tunsivat vielä paremman aarteen kuin
jalkainsa alla olevan metallin, saivat eläkettä sielullensa. Ja todella
olikin se usein mieltä ylentävä ja jalo näky, kun paljaan taivaan alla
joku evankelisen kirkkomme arvokas palvelia julisti evankeliumia
kaikenvärisille ja kaikista maailman osista kokouneelle ihmisjoukolle.

Uuden Seelannin Mauri-nimiset alku-asujamet ovat paljon

vilkkaampaa ja älyllisempää kansaa kuin Austraalian papuaskansa.
He elävät huoneissa, viljelevät peltonsa ja heidän seassaan näkee
kauppamiehiä ja käsityöläisiäkin. Siitä onnesta, että ovat paremmalla
portaalla kuin villit veljensä, on heidän suureksi osaksi kiittäminen