 Cover of the 1860 edition | |
| Author | Frederick Marryat |
|---|---|
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
Publication date | 1842 |
Percival Keene is a coming-of-age adventure novel published in three volumes in 1842 by Frederick Marryat. The book follows the nautical adventures of the title character, a low-born illegitimate child of a captain in the Royal Navy, as he enters service as a midshipman during the Napoleonic Wars and rises through the ranks with the help of his influential father.
At Madeline Hall, an old mansion-house near Southampton belonging to the wealthy de Versely family, lives an elderly spinster Miss Delmar, the aunt of the earl de Versely and Captain Delmar. Miss Delmar invites Arabella Mason, the daughter of a deceased, well-liked steward to stay with her as a lower-class guest in the house. Captain Delmar is known to visit his aunt at Madeline Hall frequently, accompanied by his valet Ben Keene, who is also a private marine. Captain Delmar eventually suggests that Ben should propose to Arabella, and the two marry in secret, to the frustration of Miss Delmar and Arabella's mother. The captain is able to smooth over the situation with his aunt, even after it is discovered that Arabella was six months pregnant at the time of the marriage. She later gives birth to a boy, who takes the Captain's Christian name and Ben's surname—the titular Percival Keene.
The family moves to Chatham, after Ben is ordered back with his detachment. Arabella opens up a successful shop and circulating library below her house, enlisting the help of her mother and sister, Amelia. Percival becomes well known in town from his mischievous pranks on officers and other strangers, often encouraged by his aunt Amelia. However, Percival's mother and grandmother are less fond of his disregard for manners, and insist on sending him to school after an episode in which he bites his grandmother. Percival reports to the school house of Mr. O'Gallagher, a poor Irish scholar, who rules his class with a system of severe corporal punishment. Mr. O'Gallagher routinely bullies Percival by stealing his lunch, leading Percival to seek revenge by poisoning his sandwiches with calomel. On Guy Fawkes Day the schoolteacher confiscates all the schoolboys' fireworks, for which Percival retaliates by setting off the collected fireworks while the teacher sits above them, leading to the total destruction of the schoolhouse and near death of the schoolmaster.
When Percival is a young teenager, Captain Delmar reappears and offers him a position aboard his new navy ship, the H.M. Calliope. While preparing to enter service, Percival overhears gossip of his illegitimate birth, introducing the idea that Captain Delmar may be his father. He confronts his mother about his parentage, which she at first harshly denies but later tearfully explains the truth of her affair. Early in his service in the navy, Percival is captured during a pirate raid along with others. The pirate crew is entirely black, and the captain explains that they are primarily escaped slaves from the Americas. Percival is taken in as a cabin boy, and later dyes his skin tan in the appearance of a mulatto to please the captain who doesn't approve of white skin. The pirates often seek to take over slave trading vessels, killing every white person on board. During the taking of one such vessel, Percival is able is convince the captain to spare the lives of a wealthy Dutch merchant and his young daughter, Minnie. Eventually the H.M. Calliope takes the pirate ship, and Percival—unrecognizable with his dyed skin—is taken as a prisoner, later to convince his fellow shipman of his true identity.
After his reappearance aboard the ship, Percival gains esteem among the crew and is welcomed back by the emotional Captain Delmar. His reputation continues to grow over the course of his service in conflicts with Dutch and French vessels around the island of Curacao. He also stands in for an ill Captain Delmar in a duel with a French officer, effectively saving the captain's life. At this point, the captain receives news that his older brother has died, making him the new Lord de Versely, and before returning to England he grants Perceval command of his own schooner. After another intense but successful battle with a French war ship, Percival is promoted to captain. During his service in the Navy, Percival still partakes in the merry pranks of his youth, and at one point teams up with a mulatto hotel owner in Curaçao to convince his fellow officers they've been poisoned. He also keeps correspondence with Minnie, developing a romance with the beautiful heiress.
Near the end of the story, Percival guides his crew through a terrible storm in which many of the crew are killed and the ship is heavily damaged. After being saved by another English vessel, he receives a letter informing him of Lord de Versely's sudden death from heart complications and learns that he has been left all of his personal property. Percival is still disappointed that he can not take his father's name. He later journey's with his friend Bob Cross to Hamburg to reunite with Minnie, but is captured by French troops on the road and sentenced to execution for spying. During a skirmish between the French and the Cossacks, Percival and Cross are able to escape and continue on the road. At the end of the novel, Percival proposes to Minnie, and stands to inherit a great fortune through her father. He also receives a letter from the de Versely attorney letting him know he has been granted the arms and name of Delmar.
As an early nineteenth century adventure novel, Percival Keene splits its focus between concerns of family and social connections and nautical action and seafaring. Percival narrates his story in first person, much like Marryat's stylistically similar Peter Simple , which also focuses on the life of a young midshipman in the Napoleonic Wars. Percival Keene was published a decade after Peter Simple, however, in the second half of Marryat's writing career which many critics regard as his transition into juvenile adventure fiction. [1] Percival Keene could also be read as a form of bildungsroman novel; there is a great deal of focus on the titular protagonist's education and process of coming-of-age as he matures from age six to eighteen.
Frederick Marryat first entered naval service at age fourteen as a midshipman aboard the Impérieuse, under the command of Lord Thomas Cochrane who may have influenced his writing of Captain Delmar and other characters. He experienced many different skirmishes around Europe during the Napoleonic Wars and was later promoted to lieutenant before eventually being promoted to commander. He developed an influential system of maritime flag signalling known as Marryat's Code, and he was "the first important English novelist after Tobias Smollett to make full and amusing use of his varied experience at sea." [2]
The British Royal Navy saw huge growth at the beginning of the nineteenth century during the Napoleonic Wars. During peacetime in the eighteenth century, the number of seamen in the Navy ranged from 12,000 to 20,000 men. This number grew to almost 150,000 at the peak of the Napoleonic Wars. [3] Through the formidable size of their fleet, the Royal Navy was able to effectively disrupt France's trade outside of the continent—both through blocking shipping routes in the Atlantic and by seizing French colonies.
The transatlantic slave trade became a lucrative business around the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the trade's profits began to attract the interest of pirates. Because of this, many pirates at this time were also slavers. Due to shifting attitudes towards slavery, the British parliament passed the Slave Trade Act of 1807 which abolished the slave trade. They backed this up with another act in 1834 which specified that anyone who offended the 1807 law would be tried under existing British laws against piracy and sentenced to death. Despite the redefinition of slavery as a form of piracy, many Caribbean pirate captains welcomed runaway slaves, who made up "as much as one-third of some pirate crews." [4] The revolts aboard slave ships La Amistad (1839) and Creole (1841) challenged new definitions of piracy. Slave traders were legally defined as pirates but, according to Sarah Ficke, "rebellious slaves from the Amistad and Creole were referred to by some newspapers not only as 'murderers' but also as 'pirates.'" [5] There is no evidence that Marryat knew of the Amistad or Creole, but they were reported on by many British newspapers right around the publication of Percival Keene.
Imperialism is introduced in the text through the warring of European naval forces over colonial islands in the Caribbean. Specifically Percival explains the battles between English and French forces over Martinique and Pigeon Island. Minnie Vanderwilt's father is an extremely wealthy Dutch merchant living in Curaçao, a formerly Dutch colony. Nautical trade of colonial goods, including slaves, is also brought in by the text.
Through serving in the British Royal Navy, Percival and his fellow sailors often uphold the value of British Nationalism, displaying animosity towards their French rivals. Marryat as a writer often allows the concerns of British family connections and social status to overshadow the naval action in the text. At one point, Percival explains that his desire to inherit Captain Delmar's name, "has been the sole object of my ambition," [6] suggesting that proper social status relating to British identity is key in the novel.
Percival's connections to the British Royal Navy frequently lead him to raid and destroy French ships, and the only specific reference to piracy in the novel comes when Percival is taken hostage by a crew of runaway slaves. The pirate crew is described as 'negro' and captain Vincent swears to kill any white sailor whom he captures, burning slave-traders alive and throwing others overboard. Percival is the first white captive that Vincent decides to spare, and the two often seem sympathetic of each other, with Percival going so far as to dye his skin a darker color to please the captain. Vincent makes several connections in the text between race and piracy, mentioning that the black race is branded with the "curse of Cain" and that, "even the white pirates feel the truth of this, or why do they hoist the black flag?" [7] Sarah Ficke interprets the pirate episode of Percival Keene as representing the chaos of giving up national identity in favor of a racial identity. "By transforming piracy into racial warfare in this novel, Marryat expresses his anxieties about the nature of a national identity that would incorporate ethnic others as legal and political equivalents." [8] Other critics suggest that this nationalist relationship between British sailors and black slaves is further explored by Marryat in Peter Simple [9]
Contemporaneous reviewers of Percival Keene noted its similarities to Marryat's other novel Peter Simple, saying that they both relied largely upon the same model. A review in an 1842 edition of Ainsworth's Magazine said "the hero is the same preternaturally tricksy, shrewd, successful being—always in scrapes, always on Fortune's high way, but never run over by the many untoward circumstances which travel the same road." [10] Other reviewers from the same year were critical of the main character of the novel, with one regarding Percival as "a shrewd, knowing, getting-on fellow, with the most selfish disregard for everything below the sun, save his own interests and advancement," [11] and another admitting "with all of Capt. Marryat's cleverness, the last of his sea-heroes is not the most engaging. We are amused with the adventures, but care nothing for the principal actor in them." [12] Some saw the book in a more favorable light, however, noting that it "has a vein of humour and pleasantry which, with all its occasional coarseness, one cannot resist, it is full of life, it has one or two capital descriptions, and it is read through before it is laid down." [13] Marryat's writing was notably enjoyed by many famous later writers, including Mark Twain, Joseph Conrad, and Ernest Hemingway. Critic Mark Spilka has suggested that Percival Keene might have served as inspiration for part of Hemingway's story The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber. [14]
The era of piracy in the Caribbean began in the 1500s and phased out in the 1830s after the navies of the nations of Western Europe and North America with colonies in the Caribbean began combating pirates. The period during which pirates were most successful was from the 1660s to the 1730s. Piracy flourished in the Caribbean because of the existence of pirate seaports such as Port Royal in Jamaica, Tortuga in Haiti, and Nassau in the Bahamas. Piracy in the Caribbean was part of a larger historical phenomenon of piracy, as it existed close to major trade and exploration routes in almost all the five oceans.
Captain William Hobson was an Irish officer in the British Royal Navy, who served as the first Governor of New Zealand. He was a co-author of the Treaty of Waitangi.
Captain Frederick Marryat was a Royal Navy officer and a novelist. He is noted today as an early pioneer of nautical fiction, particularly for his semi-autobiographical novel Mr Midshipman Easy (1836). He is remembered also for his children's novel The Children of the New Forest (1847). In addition, he developed a widely used system of maritime flag signalling, known as Marryat's Code.
Bartholomew Roberts, born John Roberts, was a Welsh pirate who was, measured by vessels captured, the most successful pirate of the Golden Age of Piracy. During his piratical career, he took over 470 prize ships. Roberts raided ships off the Americas and the West African coast between 1719 and 1722; he is also noted for creating his own pirate code, and adopting an early variant of the Skull and Crossbones flag.
The second USS Somers was a brig in the United States Navy during the administration of President John Tyler. It became infamous for being the only U.S. Navy ship to undergo a mutiny which led to executions.
Clarissa Oakes is the fifteenth historical novel in the Aubrey-Maturin series by British author Patrick O'Brian, first published in 1992. The story is set during the Napoleonic Wars and the War of 1812.
Honor Among Enemies is a 1996 science fiction novel by American writer David Weber. It is the sixth book in the Honor Harrington series. In the book, Honor returns to active duty from her political exile on Grayson to command a Q-ship and fight space pirates.
Mr. Midshipman Hornblower is a 1950 Horatio Hornblower novel written by C. S. Forester. Although it may be considered as the first episode in the Hornblower saga, it was written as a prequel; the first Hornblower novel, The Happy Return, was published in 1937.
John Percival, known as Mad Jack Percival, was a celebrated officer in the United States Navy during the Quasi-War with France, the War of 1812, the campaign against West Indies pirates, and the Mexican–American War.
Henry Every, also known as Henry Avery, sometimes erroneously given as Jack Avery or John Avery, was an English pirate who operated in the Atlantic and Indian oceans in the mid-1690s. He probably used several aliases throughout his career, including Benjamin Bridgeman, and was known as Long Ben to his crewmen and associates.
The Golden Age of Piracy is a common designation for the period between the 1650s and the 1730s, when maritime piracy was a significant factor in the histories of the North Atlantic and Indian Oceans.
Jeremiah Cocklyn, better known by the name Thomas Cocklyn, was an English pirate known primarily for his association with Howell Davis, Olivier Levasseur, Richard Taylor, and William Moody.
Christopher Moody (1650s-1722) was a pirate as a member of Bartholomew Roberts' crew but was never a captain in his own right. He is best known not for his own actions but for a popular Jolly Roger flag mis-attributed to him as well as for later authors confusing him with unrelated pirate William Moody.
Alan Lewrie is the fictional hero and main character of Dewey Lambdin's naval adventure series of novels set during the American and the French Revolutions and the Napoleonic Wars. The series spanned some twenty-five novels with a 26th reportedly in progress at the time of Mr. Lambdin's death in July 2021.
Richard Bolitho, Midshipman is a novel in the Bolitho series of nautical fiction set in the late-18th-century Royal Navy, written by Douglas Reeman under the pseudonym Alexander Kent. The book was published in 1975. It was the eighth novel in the series, though it is set earlier than the others, at the start of the career of Richard Bolitho.
The Battle of Cape Lopez was fought in early 1722 during the Golden Age of Piracy. A Royal Navy ship of the line under the command of Captain Chaloner Ogle defeated the pirate ship of Bartholomew Roberts off the coast of Gabon, West Africa.
The Atlantic World refers to this area between the European colonisation of the Americas (1492-) and the early nineteenth century. Piracy became prevalent during this era because of the difficulty of policing this vast area, the limited state control over many parts of the coast and the competition between different European powers. The best known pirates of this era are the Golden Age pirates (c.1650-1730) who roamed the seas off the coast of North America, Africa and the Caribbean.
Nautical fiction, frequently also naval fiction, sea fiction, naval adventure fiction or maritime fiction, is a genre of literature with a setting on or near the sea, that focuses on the human relationship to the sea and sea voyages and highlights nautical culture in these environments. The settings of nautical fiction vary greatly, including merchant ships, liners, naval ships, fishing vessels, life boats, etc., along with sea ports and fishing villages. When describing nautical fiction, scholars most frequently refer to novels, novellas, and short stories, sometimes under the name of sea novels or sea stories. These works are sometimes adapted for the theatre, film and television.
John Leadstone was a pirate and slaver active off the west coast of Africa. Often called “Captain Crackers” or “Old Captain Cracker,” he is best known for his actions against the English Royal African Company and for his brief involvement with Bartholomew Roberts.
John Pro was a Dutch pirate best known for leading a pirate trading post near Madagascar.