Marooned

Miss Macauley and Queen Victoria on a Desert Isle

The Story. On board a liner bound for San Francisco from London, in 1851, were 50 miscellaneous orphans in charge of Miss Charlotte Smith, a young English spinster. The ship also contained one O'Malley, inebriate doctor, a Scotswoman named Jean, some scoundrelly sailors and many others who would doubtless have been relevant to this account had not God broken that ship in half, tipping all its wretched occupants into an obscure corner of the Pacific Ocean.

The survivors, including Miss Smith, O'Malley and 43 of the 50 orphans, landed on a nearby desert island. There the perfidious sailors, led by a knave named Thinkwell, deserted them, stealing off by night with one of the long boats. Dying a respected man of property as such a character was sure to, Thinkwell left a written confession which, 70 years after the scurvy deed, fell into the hands of his grandson, a lecturer at Cambridge. Lecturer Thinkwell set out with his three children to investigate and, if possible, to right the wrong done by his unscrupulous forebear. For, thought he, there is a possibility that some may have survived. Allowing that the 40 orphans made 20 pairs, each pair having an average of 10 children (Victorians) and the second generation doing the same, the island might be well populated.

Who could credit what they beheld when they arrived? The island crawled, swarmed, bristled, writhed with life. The Thinkwells were received by a pompous gentleman with long chestnut whiskers. He was Albert Smith, Prime Minister, son of the original Miss Smith who, aged 99, still ruled the island. Now the islanders, after 70 years of segregated history, had attained an astonishing civilization which was almost an exact facsimile of that from which they had been marooned in 1851. Miss Smith, an extraordinary old woman, usually drunk, had come to believe that she was herself Queen Victoria. She called her palace Balmoral. Antimacassars covered every cocoa-nut-cloth chairback. On the trees about the premises were graven such verses as:

Lord, I ascribe it to thy grace

And not to chance, as others do,

That I was born of Christian race

And not a heathen or a Jew.

She had married with the dissolute O'Malley, now dead. Many were her descendants, all Smiths, for the Smith blood was inviolate. Men who married female Smiths were considered merely as consorts. There were two social classes, Smith and Or phan. To admit being Orphan was to admit needing a bath, a scrub.

Shops, jails, highways, bigotry, money, bad manners, a parliament, cricket were on the island. Except that its swinging moons were fiercer, its flowery seas boomed with a sleepier sound along the beaches at night, it was Victorian England in microcosm. Though the Thinkwells were so funny-looking, the gay and feathered islanders were kind to them. Miss Smith's convicts stole their ship, left them without hope of es cape, but they did not mind. A scene on the beach in which Miss Smith was denounced, despite her Bastardy Laws, as one who had lived in sin rather than in lawful wedlock with ginger-whiskered O'Malley, provided the opening for a coup d'etat; Dr. Thinkwell was chosen Prime Minister Miss Smith took a stroke and died. Across the future of Orphan Island is scrawled a question-mark.

Significance. To satirize one country by creating another in its image, derisively affecting the same government, society, institutions, is an arti fice which many great men have honored. Sir Thomas More suggested it in his Utopia, Voltaire used it in his Vig, Jonathan Swift in Gulliver's Travels, Samuel Butler in his Erewhon and Erewhon Revisited. Yet all these, with the exception of Swift, thought it enough to make the reader laugh at the land they satirized without trying to interest him in the land they created. Not so Miss Macaulay. She knows the importance of being probable. Her island, her people, are real--so real that when a tipsy old runnion thinks she is Queen Victoria, behold! she is. This book would have made Thomas Babington Macaulay uncomfortable; it would have made William Ewart Gladstone glower; it would have brought a smirk to the lips of Benjamin Disraeli.

The Author. Rose Macaulay is the daughter of a Cambridge lecturer who had a large family. She lives in Edgeware Road, London, asserts she has no hobbies, keeps no rabbits, collects no stamps. Best known of her books are: Potterism, Dangerous Ages. The Mystery at Geneva, Told by an Idiot.