Forgotten Seamen

MR. BULKELEY AND THE PIRATE --edited by B. D. Roberts--Oxford ($3).

THE LIFE AND ADVENTURES OF JOHN NICOL, MARINER--edited by Alexander Laing--Farrar & Rinehart ($4).

In the attics and among the heirlooms of the earth, historical manuscripts lie hidden like nuggets in the coarse ore of family possessions. They seem to be everywhere except where a scholar might be expected to look for them. Thus Caulaincourt's great memoir of Napoleon (TIME, Dec. 2) turned up in the wall of an old chateau; the manuscript of Boswell's Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides was found in an old croquet box. A valuable pack of the letters of Vincent van Gogh was located in the belongings of a family in Winter Park, Fla., far from where that tormented artist ever thought of traveling. Last week two more neglected literary treasures made their appearance. Both were of modest historical significance, both made interesting reading, both dealt with the troubles of seamen.

Mr. Bulkeley and the Pirate is a condensation of the diary of Mr. William Bulkeley, a Welsh squire of the 18th Century. For 26 years this pugnacious, high-spirited, cranky old landowner kept a day-to-day record of his affairs, with little more to note than the state of his crops, the weather, his many unsuccessful lawsuits, his trips to Dublin, his impatience with the government, his troubles with his irresponsible son. A widower, Mr. Bulkeley had a 20-year-old son and a 21-year-old daughter when he began his diary. Blowing up about debts, lawyers and parsons, as methodically as a geyser erupting, Mr. Bulkeley seems a good deal like the individual Clarence Day pictured in Life With Father as he fumes about the "shrubs," "up-starts" and "Hypocritical Pharisees" who were trying to collect money he owed them.

But on March 21, 1738, a disquieting influence disrupted the pleasant round of Mr. Bulkeley's dissatisfactions. His daughter Mary, who was apparently not very bright, wrote requesting "speedy consent of her being marryed" to a stranger named Mr. Fortunatus Wright, a brewer from Liverpool. Precisely what happened remains unclear, for Mr. Bulkeley scratched out a long passage in his diary, but "in plain English," states Editor Roberts, "Mr. Wright had seduced Mary Bulkeley." The young couple came to live with the squire, disappeared, returned, left their daughter for him to raise. But by 1746 Fortunatus Wright was famed throughout Great Britain as a dazzling privateer, "the brave corsair" whose raids on French shipping had netted him 16 ships and prize money totaling -L-400,000. The boldest of English pirates, Wright operated in the hostile Mediterranean with such success that the King of France offered a title to the man who captured him, dead or alive. Back on his farm in Wales, Mr. Bulkeley commented little on his son-in-law's fame. He noted more unsuccessful lawsuits, letters from his daughter telling of her being mistreated, abandoned in Leghorn, cheated of her husband's fortune after his death. Fortunatus Wright, it seemed, had another wife. Presently Mr. Bulkeley's destitute grandchildren began to straggle back to Wales, first two, then their mother, then three more, until the old gentleman lamented his "troublesome days" and stopped writing about anything except the weather.

Alexander Laing (The Sea Witch) ran across the reminiscences of John Nicol in the Boston Public Library while doing research for an historical romance. Thinking only his inexperience had made him unaware of the book, he was surprised to find that it was almost unknown, the only reprint badly bowdlerized and the original issue, published in 1822, unnoticed at the time it appeared. The Life and Adventures of John Nicol is one of the first autobiographies of the sea written from the point of view of a common sailor. A brief, well-written book, beautifully Dound and illustrated in its present edition, it tells the story of a sailor who was born near Edinburgh in 1755, sailed to Canada, the West Indies, the South Seas, was pressed into service in 1794 and took part in the battles of Cape St. Vincent and Aboukir Bay. Writing vividly and unconventionally of South Sea natives, of historic battles as they appeared from the powder magazine, John Nicol reaches his highest point in his account of the voyage of a convict ship that transported female convicts to New South Wales. All the sailors took wives from among the convicts on their first day at sea. Nicol fell in love with a modest, unfortunate girl named Sarah Whitelam, who bore him a son before the twelve-months voyage was over. Determining to take her back to England and marry her as soon as her sentence was served, he got a berth on a whaler, found that he could not return to New South Wales. An escaped convict told him that Sarah had gone to India. He tried to follow her, but was taken first to London, then to China. As he approached his goal, a pressgang from His Majesty's Navy caught him, and it was seven years before he was discharged. Although he still thought of Sarah, he "was too old to undertake any more love pilgrimages" and the desire he "at one time felt to repossess her was now softened into a curiosity to know what had become of her." But he never found out as he settled down, married, dodged more pressgangs, was destitute when a kindly bookbinder persuaded him to record his story.

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