Mr Penrose Read online

  Mr. Penrose

  William Williams: Self-Portrait

  (Henry Francis DuPont Winterthur Museum)

  Mr. Penrose

  THE JOURNAL OF PENROSE, SEAMAN

  William Williams

  INTRODUCTION AND NOTES BY

  DAVID HOWARD DICKASON

  AFTERWORD BY SARAH WADSWORTH

  INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS

  Bloomington & Indianapolis

  This book is a publication of

  Indiana University Press

  Office of Scholarly Publishing

  Herman B Wells Library 350

  1320 East 10th Street

  Bloomington, Indiana

  47405 USA

  iupress.indiana.edu

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  First paperback edition 2013

  © 1969 by Indiana University Press

  All rights reserved

  No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.

  The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1992.

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  The Library of Congress has assigned the hardcover edition the following LC control no.: 69016004

  ISBN 978-0-253-01047-6 (pb)

  ISBN 978-0-253-01052-0 (eb)

  2 3 4 5 6 18 17 16 15 14 13

  For

  MARJORIE and CINDY

  who shared my most pleasant

  and rewarding year in England

  in pursuit of the elusive

  WILLIAM WILLIAMS

  alias

  Penrose

  Contents

  Editor’s Original Acknowledgments

  Illustrations

  Introduction / David Howard Dickason

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4 Second Year of My Lonely Condition

  Chapter 5 Third Year of My Residence

  Chapter 6 Fourth Year of My Residence

  Chapter 7 Fifth Year of My Residence

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9 Sixth Year of My Residence

  Chapter 10 Seventh Year

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12 Eighth Year

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15 Ninth Year

  Chapter 16 Tenth Year

  Chapter 17 Eleventh Year

  Chapter 18 Twelveth Year

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20 Thirteenth Year

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22 Fourteenth Year

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24 Fifteenth Year

  Chapter 25 Sixteenth Year

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27 Seventeenth Year

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29 Eighteenth Year

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31 Nineteenth Year

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33 Twentieth Year

  Chapter 34 Twenty First Year

  Chapter 35 Twenty Second Year

  Chapter 36 Twenty Third Year

  Chapter 37 Twenty Fourth Year

  Chapter 38 Twenty Fifth Year

  Chapter 39 Twenty Sixth Year

  Chapter 40 Twenty Seventh Year

  Chapter 41 Twenty Eighth Year

  Afterword: Penrose in the Twenty-First Century / Sarah Wadsworth

  Editor’s Original Acknowledgments

  The discovery of Williams’ original manuscript and the preparation of this volume were made possible by a senior Fulbright Research Fellowship to England, and a concurrent sabbatical leave granted me by the Trustees of Indiana University. I should also like to thank both the Indiana University Foundation and the Office for Advanced Studies and Research for financial assistance.

  I am obviously very grateful to Mr. David Randall, Director of the Lilly Library, for the acquisition of the manuscript from its English owner, and to the late Professor William Riley Parker, Chairman of the English Department of Indiana University, for vital support in the project.

  Many persons in England contributed essential data, but I should like to acknowledge here the special kindness of Miss Elizabeth Ralph, City Archivist of Bristol; Frank Simpson, Esq., of London; Dr. and Mrs. John Eagles of Corsham; and Major and Mrs. Philip Graham-Clarke of Abergavenny, Wales, who directed me to key documents and ultimately to the manuscript of Penrose. Colonel John F. Williams of San Diego, genealogist of the Williams family in his Fifty-Six Generations, has been most generous in sharing information.

  Illustrations

  William Williams: Self-Portrait

  (Henry Francis DuPont Winterthur Museum)

  Title Page of Second English Edition

  (Vignette by Edward Bird, R.A.)

  First Page of Williams’ Manuscript

  (Lilly Library)

  An 18th Century Map of the Moskito Coast

  (The British Museum)

  Edward Bird, R.A.: Penrose’s First Sight of the Indians

  (From Second English Edition)

  The Round Robbin

  Cryptogram

  INTRODUCTION

  I

  A colonial American painter of portraits, conversation pieces, and symbolic landscapes who flourished in Philadelphia and New York-William Williams (1727–1791)—may now be identified as the author of one of our earliest novels, Mr. Penrose, or, as he subtitled it, The Journal of Penrose, Seaman. This narrative in point of composition is very probably America’s first novel—that much argued and ever elusive phenomenon. It was first published in England in 1815, anonymously, posthumously, and in a completely restyled and bowdlerized form,1 and has never been listed in any bibliographies of American fiction. Although Williams was born and died in Britain he may be counted an American by virtue of his thirty years of adult residence in this country; and his novel evidently was written during that period. A signal addition to our early national literature, Mr. Penrose is here printed from the original manuscript for the first time.

  The saga of a Caribbean castaway in the Crusoe tradition (but varying widely from that prototype), Mr. Penrose is an absorbing tale of crisis and adventure against an exotic background, and of a man’s efforts to formulate a viable personal philosophy, a modus vivendi, under adverse circumstances. A laconic first-person narrative, it employs the realistic mode in the meticulous reportage of scene and event, yet it is suffused with the spirit of high romanticism.

  These qualities are evidenced in the account of a young Welsh lad, Llewellin Penrose, who leaves an unhappy home for the lure of a privateer’s life; and after imprisonment by the Spaniards at “the Havannah” is deserted by his shipmates on the Moskito Coast of Central America. Here he not only survives, but establishes amicable relations with the local Indians (evidently of the Rama tribe), and finds a shapely maiden of seventeen as his bed-partner (Luta, a “Green Grove,” suggestive of an early Fayaway or Rima in her Green Mansions). With her he enjoys a tropical idyll, albeit in primitive circumstances, which is terminated by her death as she bears their second son. Her successor adds twins to Penrose’s menage, of whom the girl is christened America.

  Through the years his little community grows by accretion of Indian relatives and friends, shipwrecked Dutch and Scottish sailors, and an old Negro, the escaped slave Quammino. A child drowns, an Indian girl is killed in the jungle, and two violen
t deaths occur in a sailors’ brawl. But Penrose and his people withstand the rigors of earthquake, hurricane, and fire, the depredations by tigres (wildcats), snakes, and other natural enemies, the threat of apprehension by the Spanish military, and the stringent limitations of a tiny self-contained society. After twenty-seven years on shore as the benevolent but firm-handed paterfamilias and regent of his little utopia, Penrose, having refused all opportunities to return to the pressures and self-seeking materialism of white civilization, dies among his adopted clan. His final request to his son is to dispatch his cherished Journal to safe hands in the English-speaking world.

  II

  There are, indubitably, some autobiographical echoes in this narrative. Born in Bristol, England, in 1727, no doubt the son of the “William Williams Mariner” entered in the Bristol Burgess Book of 1734,2 young Williams attended the local Grammar School, but found that “his greatest delight was to go & see an elderly artist who painted heads in oil, as well as small landscapes”; and, as the eminent Benjamin West later recalled concerning the man who became his first art teacher, “his greatest wish was to be a Painter; but in that he was disappointed.”3 No great scholar, he became an early drop-out; and as was the case with many boys from the school he was “put to the sea” by his parents. In the great tradition of Captain Woodes Rogers of Bristol, who brought Alexander Selkirk back from his Crusoe island, it would be pleasant to envisage the young adventurer voluntarily setting out to see the world, but this was not the case.

  Title Page of Second English Edition

  (Vignette by Edward Bird, R.A.)

  He signed on as an apprentice seaman in the Virginia trade under a Captain Hunter, who recalled many years later:

  “When he was on board my ship I often remarked him engaged in drawing, & soon distinguished him to be a Boy of no common capacity, and it was my intention had he remained with me to place him in my Counting house at Norfolk, to better his situation in life.”

  But two decades later Williams himself admitted to his former master:

  “After going the second voyage … when in Norfolk in Virginia—to tell you the truth—I left the ship & sailed for the West Indies, where I hoped to be unknown, that I might work my way to some places—& accomplish my wishes as a Painter:—and after some years had elapsed I was able to come to this city [Philadelphia].”

  While Williams himself lived for two or three years at most in the Caribbean, his hero Penrose spent twenty-seven years in voluntary exile (Defoe similarly extended Selkirk’s four years on Juan Fernández to Crusoe’s twenty-eight). There is no categorical proof that Williams actually passed his castaway days with the Rama Indians of coastal Nicaragua (though he does declare elsewhere that he was “shipwreck’d”), for dozens of synthetic accounts were whipped up by resourceful eighteenth-century “Travel-liars.” But as a contemporary reviewer argued:

  The internal evidence is, on the whole, favourable we think to the authenticity of the story. Some of the traits of character are so naive, some of the impressions so natural, the whole course of the story so matter-of-fact, so utterly unlike a made tale, that, if it be a fabrication, it is to say the least, an uncommonly skilful one.4

  Benjamin West, for one, was persuaded that the setting was authentic, and many of the earlier episodes autobiographical. But since the work is indeed a novel it is a moot point.

  Benjamin West first met Williams in 1747, when Williams, then aged twenty but looking older than his years, had recently arrived in Philadelphia from the tropics. West, a precocious lad of nine, was visiting prosperous relatives in the city. Much impressed by the boy’s promise, Williams lent him two books on art and took him on as pupil and protege. Fifteen years after Williams’ death, West wrote:

  From the year 1747 to 1760, my attention was directed to every point necessary to accomplish me for the profession of painting. This often brought me to the house of Williams; and as he was an excellent actor in taking off character, he often, to amuse me, repeated his adventures among the Carribs and Negro tribes, many of which adventures were strictly the same as related in your manuscript of Penrose. … He spoke the Negro and Carrib tongue, and appeared to me to have lived among them some years.

  And as recognition of his formative influence on his career West added: “Most undoubtedly, had Williams not been settled in Philadelphia I shd. not have embraced painting as a profession.”

  Under the sign of Hogarth’s Head in Loxley’s Court in Philadelphia Williams in the 1750's carried on his “Business viz. Painting in General,” and since income was uncertain he likewise advertised “an Evening School for the Instruction of Polite Youth, in the different branches of Drawing, and to sound the Hautboy, German and common Flutes.”5 Both his versatility and economic necessity were demonstrated by his further role as America’s first professional theatrical scene painter, for David Douglass as manager of the Hallam Company in the Southwark Theatre in 1759, and very probably in its successor in 1766.

  In search of portrait commissions among the prosperous planters in “the West-Indies”—an area which revived memories of his vagabond days—Williams made an extended trip in 1760–61, as his intriguingly brief note indicates: “Pictures painted in Jamaica 54—.” Shortly thereafter he became involved in another practical art in a situation that doubtless provided him with his pseudonym. Wrote West:

  It has often occurred to me that Williams must have given the name of Penrose to his manuscript in compliment to a very great friend of his in Philadelphia of that name. Mr. Penrose was one of the most elegant ship builders in all America, or I believe to be found in Europe—And it was the painting, & ornamenting of his ships that was Williams’ best employment. …

  The Penrose family, from Bristol-born Bartholomew to Thomas and his son James, were indeed famous Philadelphia shipbuilders. Williams certainly knew both Thomas and James (who died at the age of thirty-three in 1771), and felt for them both a personal friendship and appreciation as employers and patrons in a successful enterprise.

  Meanwhile, Williams (who perhaps had deserted an Indian mistress and half-caste son) had married “a respectable townswoman of our City,” as his Captain (later Colonel) Hunter described her. Hunter also noted that he visited Williams “in his family” in 1755. Certain ambiguities remain, but since Williams in his will referred to “portraits of my two wives,”6 it is probable that he was soon left a widower with two small sons, and that he promptly remarried. His second wife was the young Mary Mare, born about 1740, the sister of a New York artist, who bore him a son on November 17, 1759, appropriately christened William.7 A newly discovered checklist of Williams’ works does, in fact, contain the entry, “a small whole length of William Williams Junr Painter,”8 and this boy grew up to be known as William Joseph Williams, the artist of the hard-jawed, unflattering Masonic Washington and many other portraits. Two sons by Williams’ first marriage (but not the above William Joseph) died in the Revolution, for as West stated: “His sons being born in Philadelphia, they soon became attached to America & took up arms with thousands of other youths to join her Armies, & were killed in some of the battles.”

  By 1769 or before, Williams moved to New York City, where, under the sign of Rembrandt’s Head in Batteaux Street, he again undertook “painting in general, viz. History, Portraiture, landskip, sign painting, lettering, gilding, and strewing smalt. N.B. He cleans, repairs, and varnishes any old picture of value, and teaches the art of drawing.”9

  Though his Imaginary Landscape and several portraits are extant from that period,10 the stringencies of the approaching war years lessened the demand for even these varied artistic services. His wife Mary Mare had died after only four years of marriage, so Williams, once more alone and discouraged, made the crucial decision to leave New York. As West recorded it:

  Mr. Williams finding himself advancing in years—& much dejected at the loss of his sons, & the revolution of families and things … availed himself of a friendly proposition made to him by an English gentl
eman returning from America, to embark with him for England—to reside under his roof in Bedfordshire, & to paint there for his amusement for the remainder of his life.

  On their arrival in London in 1776 Williams sought out West, his now prominent ex-pupil (soon to be President of the Royal Academy), introduced his sponsor, then retired into the country in what would seem an ideal situation. But only eighteen months later his patron died, and Williams returned to his one friend in the metropolis—“He was frequently at my house,” West recalled—and to his studio, where the first version of The Battle of La Hogue (1778) was in progress. Too proud to accept financial succor, Williams happily served as a model in that large marine composition: “I introduced a likeness of Williams in one of the Boats, next in the rear of Sir George Rook[e].”

  The old artist diverted himself by collecting engraved portraits of painters; but after a year or two he drifted back to Bristol, where he attempted once more to set himself up in business, as attested by a professional card (now in the City Archives): “Williams, Portrait & Landscape Painter, No. 29 Clare Street, Bristol.” With a resurgence of energy perhaps inspired by a monumental religious triptych by his much admired Hogarth in the St. Mary Redcliffe church, Williams produced and advertised for public exhibition at “the Mulberry Tree in Broad-Street” three large pictures “Representing the Birth, Death, and Burial of Our Saviour Jesus Christ,” together with a “Variety of high-finished Pictures and Drawings in History, Landscape, &c. many of which are to be dispos’d of.”11 His local riverscape Hotwells and Rownham Ferry also dates from this period. His strong Self-Portrait was painted after he entered the Almshouse.12

  During this time the lonely old man apparently married again, for his first will makes a bequest to “my Daughter in Law [i.e., stepdaughter] Mrs Mary Byrchmore, the only Daughter of my Late Deceas’d wife Esther Williams,” who evidently was a widow with a grown daughter when he married her. Documentary proof is lacking, but it seems probable that this marriage was contracted in England and that Esther died not long afterward, for Williams was solitary and defeated when he sought shelter through the aid of Thomas Eagles, an eminent Bristolian. On his request to obtain for him “a pass to St. Peter’s Hospital” Eagles protested that it was “a wretched place … for the lowest paupers.” Instead, Eagles provided tactful financial assistance and genuine personal hospitality to the old artist until in 1786 a place became available in the very comfortable Merchants’ and Sailors’ Almshouse in King Street, Bristol, sponsored by the august (and still active) Merchant Venturers’ Society. In this safe haven the old mariner-painter-storyteller lived out his few remaining years.