Mr Penrose, page 43
Although the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua, where most of Mr. Penrose takes place, remained free of direct European control throughout the colonial period, beginning in the sixteenth century numerous Europeans attempted to exploit its human and nonhuman resources. By the time Penrose arrives on Central America’s Atlantic coast, despite Spain’s official ban on the Indian slave trade, “the Caribbean islands, and the heavily populated central American mainland region between Mexico and Panama” had become “a vast catchment area” for this nominally illegal slave trade.11 True to the region’s history, Penrose and the indigenous people he encounters live in constant fear of enslavement. When his Indian allies ask him to shelter a youth who has escaped from a Spanish mine, for example, we realize that Penrose’s dread of forced labor is founded on more than the “Black Legend” of past atrocities.
In Mr. Penrose Williams evokes an uneasy balance of power among Spanish, English, and indigenous people that is deeply rooted in the history of the Mosquito Coast. Despite armed expeditions in the sixteenth century and politically motivated missionary campaigns in the seventeenth century, Spain’s efforts to control the region failed, owing at least in part to the diffuse and relatively egalitarian social structure of the indigenous cultures. More productive in their relationship with Mosquito Coast Indians were English, Dutch, and French pirates, who, in the 1660s established “social, commercial, and military ties” with tribes inhabiting the region near Cabo Gracias a Dios (well north of Penrose’s hideaway). Beginning in the seventeenth century, notes the cultural anthropologist Baron Pineda, these Indians “adopted a common set of political and economic strategies that entailed cooperation with the English and hostility to Spanish and Indians from the interior.” As a result, “identification with English symbols, be they language, commodities, or ‘customs,’ had long been associated with prestige among all groups on the Mosquito Coast.” It is little wonder then that Penrose would “[take] care to style [himself] an English man,” or “Englese” (101).12
When he discovers that the Indians he meets have “a traffick with the Spaniards” (87), therefore, Penrose asks that they not reveal his presence, since his “nation was ever at war with them” (116). These words turn out to be more accurate than the castaway could know. In his thirteenth year of exile, Penrose observes “many large boats out on the Waters … all standing to the East” and concludes “that it was a Squadron of King’s ships … belonging to Spain probably” (227). A short time later, he learns that Spain “had but just then concluded a peace with the English, for there had been another war since that he … [was] concerned in” (294).
As a young man in England, Penrose had been swept into a European war centered half a world away in the Americas. Now, exiled in the Americas at the very crossroads of British and Spanish imperial ambitions, he appears to be wholly sheltered from this geopolitical strife. For unknown to Penrose, this lately concluded war is the Seven Years War (1756–1763), the last of the European imperial wars to be fought in North America. Ironically, this war, which had enormous consequences for the subsequent fortunes of Europe’s New World empires, is passed over entirely in Mr. Penrose. Penrose simply doesn’t know that it was going on, and so his journal makes no mention of it. The amity between him and an elderly Spaniard who had fought, like Penrose, in the War of Jenkins’ Ear and is subsequently “elected one of our society” (291) underscores the novel’s dominant message of tolerance and peace. At the same time, readers with the benefit of historical hindsight cannot escape the knowledge that the consequences of distant wars would have profound and often devastating effects on the lands and people over which they were fought.
Yet the Atlantic World Mr. Penrose depicts is not merely an arena for battling European empires. As a mariner, Williams would likely have worked alongside African seamen; moreover, during the period he spent painting in the West Indies, he lived within a society composed of a vast (up to 90%) black majority ruled by a tiny white minority with whom he did not sympathize.13 His novel is clearly embedded within this African Atlantic milieu as well. Mr. Penrose includes, or alludes to, numerous minor characters identified as African, black, or “mulatto”: the Jamaican William Bass; his friend Bell’s first wife; Rodrigo, a sailor whose wife purchased his freedom; a biracial pirate appointed (or rather, slain) to guard a cache of treasure (from the grave); and crew members of a Spanish Coast Guard from Cartagena (Colombia) described as “a Medly of Mortals composed of all the dips or casts from the Spaniard down to the Indian and Negro” (326).14
More pointed than these passing references is Penrose’s speculation that a sixteen-foot shark attained its “prodigious” size by “follow[ing] some ship from the coast of Africa after the dead Slaves, was caught by one of those Ships and had been let go again or made his escape” (280). The suggestion of the shark’s “escape” is particularly relevant in light of the fact that the Mosquito Coast was a well-known haven for fugitive slaves, or maroons, many of whom became integrated into Mosquito society through marriage.15 The Sancoodas, or Mosquitos, a tribe with which Penrose’s friends are at war (and “the most inveterate Enimies to all Spaniards” [329]), figure prominently in the second volume of The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789). In this text, a Mosquito leader harbors the escaped Equiano at a period coinciding with the final installments of Penrose’s journal.16 These references lend both historical legitimacy and urgency to the interpolated narrative of the fugitive slave Quammino, who ultimately finds ease and community among Penrose’s extended family (343).
Finally, the very language of Mr. Penrose savors of the cultural watershed of the Black Atlantic. In an analysis of lexical and grammatical data in Williams’s novel, the linguist John Holm identifies numerous “features characteristic of European languages in intense contact with African languages.” This verbal hybridity makes Mr. Penrose a prototype for the rich linguistic “un-Englishness” (to borrow Holm’s expression) that later writers such as Walt Whitman and Mark Twain would strive to emulate and promote as vital features of American speech and writing.17
(2)
Portraiture
During his lifetime and for the better part of two centuries thereafter, William Williams was known primarily for his contributions as a painter, not as a writer. By his own count, while living in the Mid-Atlantic and Caribbean colonies he completed more than 240 paintings, many of them commissioned by wealthy clients. Although only a fraction of his paintings survive, his Self-Portrait exhibits a level of artistry and technical skill that distinguishes him among his contemporaries. Seated at his easel, palette in one hand, paintbrush poised in the other, and a sketch on the wall behind him, the “self” this portrait projects is every inch an artist. And yet x-ray photographs of Williams’s brushwork reveal that portions of the canvas have been “over-painted,” obscuring a deeper layer of portraiture. Before the subject held a palette, he had held a book; and before he wielded his brush, he appears to have gripped a pen.18 Like the literary sleuthing of Dickason, the “scholar adventurer” whose rediscovery of Mr. Penrose began with a footnote in an art history text, radiographic analysis has revealed the writer behind the painter.19
Benjamin West, who rose to prominence as a founder and second president of the Royal Academy of Art, credited Williams, his boyhood mentor, with launching his career. Many years later, West partially repaid the debt when he engaged an elderly, indigent Williams to pose as a model for one of the toiling sailors in his massive historical panorama The Battle of La Hogue (c. 1775–1780). West’s portrayal of a shirtless, battle-weary old salt hoisting a fallen mate into a lifeboat provides a fitting companion piece to Williams’s Self-Portrait. Together, these eighteenth-century masterpieces--Williams’s only known likenesses--reveal multiple facets of this intriguing subject: Williams the creative genius whose work lies at the very fountainhead of American art and fiction, and Williams the man of action whose adventurous seafaring past inspired and shaped Mr. Penrose.
Williams’s artistic sensibility is abundantly evident in the numerous verbal portraits and self-portraits Penrose presents to the reader. His attention to sartorial details, for example, allows us to trace the protagonist’s transformation from naïve landlubber with an eye to the sea, proudly sporting a jaunty new Scotch bonnet, to ragged, sun-scorched castaway wearing little more than tattered trousers. Later we see him transformed again from seasoned islander outfitted in his “best attire”--straw “Sambraro” adorned “with two fine Maccaw feathers,” “Tigers skin” jacket (“hair side out”), and hatchet, bow and arrows, and machete all secured by “a belt of bass rope” (144)--to “counterfeit Spaniard” complete with cross at his breast, crucifix tattooed onto his hand, a clean-shaven face, and hair “platt[ed] … behind after the Spanish mode” (278–280).
Williams’s skill in verbal portraiture reveals an exceptional ear for language as well as a painter’s eye for visual details. In the figure of Penrose, Williams departs from eighteenth-century decorum by presenting an “Illiterate” working-class colonial-- a “poor Jack Tar” (218, 227), writing chiefly for his “Brother Tars” (267)--as narrator. His speech, down-to-earth and colloquial, will seem refreshingly up-to-date to modern readers despite the archaic spellings: in Penrose’s parlance, clothes are “dudds” (49), and in their absence a person might be described as “stript … to his buff (251) or “in his birthday suit” (84). Penrose shows his friends “where to turn in for the night” (85); when he’s in a quandary, he’s in “a fine pickkle” (119); and when “tigres” (wildcats) run away they “turn tail” (122). Although written as a journal, Mr. Penrose is surprisingly dialogic, and in the verbal exchanges that punctuate the novel, we hear other colloquialisms, such as “knock it off” (172) and “Shew me the money” (212), along with humorous, and sometimes ribald, jibes. In one memorable exchange, when his Dutch “Messmate” airs his racist objections to consorting with Amerindian girls, Penrose slyly assures him that “he need never to stand in any great dread of being ravished by any of them either a Wake or in his Sleep” (174–175).
Williams’s gift for representing natural, unaffected speech “by ear” appears, too, in Penrose’s rendering of his interlocutors’ distinctive idioms, which span a range of pidgin languages and Creole dialects. Most prominently appear the Dutchman Somer, with his crisp Teutonic consonants (one can practically hear him say “plows out his pranes” [158] and “you ben choakin? [joking]” [191]), and Norman Bell, a long-time resident of Venezuela whose Scottish brogue regains its “burr” as he becomes established in Penrose’s community. The most intriguing use of spoken language, however, occurs among the indigenous characters. Rather than attempting to “translate” the Indians’ speech into British English, whether idiomatic or stylized, Penrose records their words precisely as he remembers them. These indigenous voices, in dialogue with Penrose, illustrate a cultural reciprocity or transculturation that is seldom clearly conveyed in early Anglo-American literature. Through its multilingual heteroglossia, Mr. Penrose thus rewrites the myth of unilateral European influence acting upon receptive colonial subjects. As Holm’s groundbreaking linguistic analysis reveals, “Penrose was not only teaching the Indians his English, he was also learning theirs.”20
Despite its linguistic authenticity, however, readers will likely find Williams’s indigenous characters less fully realized than are their European counterparts. Still, the novel is careful to reject the Eurocentrism that constructed the apparent opacity of non-European societies as a cultural void. Instead, Penrose acknowledges his own deficiency with respect to indigenous languages and traditions. For instance, he explains, “in regard to Indian informations, Spelling their names, and the like I do not affirm them to be exact as a Man must be born among them before he shall be able to give a true pronunciation or be able to coppy their Ideas and manner of conveying sentiments” (167). As this example illustrates, Williams does not claim for his protagonist a privileged “insider’s” perspective.
Nor does he subject Amerindians to a colonizing gaze in order to portray them as passive victims of “inevitable” Europeanizing “progress.” Indeed, on numerous occasions he actually inverts the imperialist dynamics. An unwitting Penrose learns that he has been under surveillance by Indians; and in Penrose’s community a “Dover Court,” described as “all Speakers and no hearers” (337), suffers by contrast with an orderly delegation of Indians, among whom a single designated speaker mediates while the others respond “in one short word as one voice” (244). He also shows Penrose adapting gradually to Indian ways, even as he teaches them to read and introduces them to the Bible. More subtly and more remarkably, Williams does not invariably present European ways of knowing as normative, naturalized, or absolute. Following a period of instability in his relations with the Indians, for example, a discomfited Penrose confesses that he has “no liquor to treat them with now in store”; in reply, the Indian delegate is philosophical, “answer[ing] that all things decayed in time except the Sun, Moon and Stars, so that he wondered not at it in the least” (277). In this exchange, Penrose does not come off as masterful. Instead, here and elsewhere, his incomplete knowledge of Mosquito Coast languages and cultures proves a source of tension, humor, and occasional volatility in the novel’s plot.
To survive as a British castaway on the Mosquito Coast, Penrose considers it necessary to establish authority as well as to exercise diplomacy. When he becomes acquainted with two young Indians, brother and sister, he is careful not only to “gain their regard” but also to “carr[y] [him]self so as that they should regard [him] as a kind of superior” (88). Although Penrose has no desire to subjugate the Indians, he does claim a position of unquestioned leadership among the small group of Indians who choose to reside with him. His perceived need for control becomes most urgent, however, when he welcomes into his community its first European member aside from himself. Regarding the Dutch sailor Somer as possibly less “tractable” than his Amerindian friends, Penrose urges him to accept his “advice in all respects,” as knowing the Indians better (162). One of these Indian “ways” involves the role of marriage as a crucial tool of diplomacy on the Mosquito Coast. Through marriage, Penrose becomes a “White Brother in blood and flesh” to the Indians (274), and soon comes to “look upon Harry,” an Indian, as his “new Brother” (92), “a part of [him]self” (255). When a conflict arises in Penrose’s relationship with the Indians, marriage provides the solution, and when a recently widowed woman considers leaving Penrose’s community, the Indians fear that the peace between them has been broken and death permitted to vanquish life.
Although indigenous women are not individuated as clearly as their male counterparts, they compare favorably with the few English women who appear in the novel’s early pages. These English women are either sentimentalized (as is Penrose’s mother), identified as “brutes” (prosti tutes), or portrayed simultaneously as pathetic victim of male violence and licentious object of male lust (as is the waifish wife of the Bristol landlord). Troubling too is Penrose’s inability to imagine any white woman who would be “so indelicate as for to contaminate with an Indian” (371), which, like the depiction of the landlord’s abused and faithless wife, signals a decided failure of marriage as an instrument of harmony. Taken together, these images bespeak a gender ideology in which sexual purity, racial purity, and sexual violence are implicated in the imbricated projects of commodification, conquest, and exploitation.21
The stark contrast between the depiction of women in the European and Mesoamerican sections of Mr. Penrose is one indication of the gradual and uneven but ultimately radical transformation Penrose experiences over the thirty-odd years of the narrative. This transformation appears most clearly in his response to the constructed categories of “savagery” and “civilization.” Although Penrose fears that if he returned to Europe, his children, remaining in America, would grow up “savages,” he unequivocally challenges not only the “barbarous stories … related of [the Natives]”; he also sharply criticizes the actions of Europeans (especially, but not exclusively, the Spanish), urging readers to “let us first enquire who were the agressors.” As he confidently attests, “I have resided so long among them that I know the error to fall on the Christian side” (130). Ultimately, his indictment of European aggression impinges on the entire imperialist project, not sparing the conventional Christian defense of imperialism as a civilizing force. Contemplating a separation from his Indian friends, Penrose reflects:
Here I was to part, perhaps never more to meet, with some of the most disinterested mortals, a people who out of common humanity had done the utmost in their way to be the generous relievers of my wants, had come so many leagues without any expectation of reward. And this I blush to own was not done by Europian Christians but by men we are pleased to call brute Savages. So I may with justice remark, where is the advantage they have gained by the Spaniards’ discovery of this New World? Have they not done all evils among them, destroying and Enslaving under colour of Exchanging one Idol for another, while they committed such crimes among them which ought really to point them out as the most infamous and inhumane Savages on earth? I say, had not those poor cretures been in a much better state so to have remain’d untill God should have been pleased to have brought about their Redemption in or by some more Apostolical means? (116–117)
As his extended “family” of fugitives, exiles, their wives, and their children increases, Penrose comes to embrace a providential worldview in which “the poor Savages, our sincier friends” inspire a decidedly ecumenical “Model of Christian Charity” (to repurpose John Winthrop’s phrase), one which Penrose and his mates strive to emulate by “reliev[ing] the Distressed” (216)--regardless of nation and race--whom Providence sends their way.
