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Books: The buried treasure of a stormy port ... Philip Marsden

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  • Books: The buried treasure of a stormy port ... Philip Marsden

    Arts & Book Review
    July 1, 2011
    First Edition


    The buried treasure of a stormy port;
    After travels that took him from Armenia to Ethiopia, Philip Marsden
    has explored the global connections of his home in Cornwall. He talks
    to Boyd Tonkin about the literary lure of the sea

    by Boyd Tonkin

    Many writers love out-of-the-way retreats, but few make themselves
    quite as - apparently - scarce as Philip Marsden does now. Turn off
    one of the steep-hedged lanes that thread through the Roseland
    peninsula in west Cornwall, and almost a mile of rough track takes you
    down to an early-Victorian farmhouse that itself stands on the site of
    a medieval manor. Swifts wheel above; a lone pheasant gazes curiously
    at two humans sitting at an outside table; silence reigns. Seen from
    the land, this isolation seems complete. But the terrestrial is not
    the only view. For these grounds slope down through tangled growth to
    an inlet - one of many tiny capillaries into which the huge body of
    the Fal estuary narrows - and an old landing-stage. When the winds and
    tides concur, Marsden can take his boat moored there, sail downriver
    into the Carrick Roads and - as he writes in his new book - "point the
    bows south towards the flat horizon, and the open sea".

    As award-winning travel writer, narrative historian and novelist - of
    a 1930s Cornish fishing village, in The Main Cages - Marsden has
    always had a knack of linking the local and the global, the near and
    the far. In The Crossing Place, he tracked the Armenians and their
    tragic diaspora. The Spirit Wrestlers and The Bronski House carved
    strange stories out of idiosyncratic lives on the ragged fringe of the
    Russian and Soviet empires. The proudly self-sufficient culture and
    faith of Ethiopia, where he served his apprenticeship as traveller and
    writer, gave rise to The Chains of Heaven and The Barefoot Emperor.
    Under his eye, the margins and the metropoles swap places. Outcasts
    occupy the centre-stage. And the forgotten or patronised backwater
    turns out to flow straight into the mainstream of history.

    Now his own watery backyard gives Marsden another choice anchorage.
    The Levelling Sea, his "story of a Cornish haven in the age of sail"
    (HarperPress, £18.99), not only follows the history of the town and
    port of Falmouth from the 16th to the 19th centuries, and depicts the
    salty characters who helped transform a piratical hideaway into the
    bustling, raucous north-eastern corner hub of a trans-oceanic
    "Atlantic village". In lyric interludes it traces the author's own
    romance with the sea, a love "as powerful as any human attachment".
    Yet no love - as the book shows - could ever go more utterly
    unrequited. Marsden quotes (who else?) Joseph Conrad, who wrote that
    "the sea has never adopted the cause of its masters".

    The book itself, its scenes of well-crafted history and biography
    intercut with subjective seaborne reminiscences, has something of the
    episodic, changeable quality of a voyage under sail. "More than in
    previous books," says Marsden, "I was feeling my way... That's quite
    dangerous, but it also makes you reckless - like the early saints
    taking to sea without knowing where they were going or even whether
    they were going to reach the shore at all. That's the sense I had."

    Marsden's own efforts to win the sea's consent, if not to control it,
    began in infancy. Every year he would come to Cornwall on family
    holidays and sail around the Fal estuary in his grandfather's boat,
    the Ratona. "It was only a couple of weeks each year," he says, before
    late-June showers drive us into the kitchen of the farmhouse where he
    and his family have moved from St Mawes (his wife is the writer, and
    Russia specialist, Charlotte Hobson). "But the most intense memories
    of my childhood were here - possibly because it was slightly rarefied
    and brief". During the later squalls of young adulthood, he thought of
    the Cornish coast as "a place where it seemed that the best things
    happened". The Levelling Sea abounds with stories of mariners who,
    lost on land, found their feet at sea. During its author's early
    twenties, he felt "hopeless at everything. But I knew how to handle a
    boat."

    Tanned and lean, he still does. The Liberty - the vintage harbour
    launch described (and photographed) with a lovingly elegiac eye in The
    Levelling Sea - has now given way to the "old coble with cutch-brown
    sails" evoked at the book's close. Meanwhile, their skipper races in
    competition around the estuary at weekends, on one of the oyster boast
    crewed by local people who - these days - may well be the builders and
    plumbers who renovate second homes. As a fledgling travel writer,
    Marsden would alternate his voyages in the Horn of Africa or the
    Middle East with productive seclusion - especially through
    tourist-free winters - in his family's own summer house. "For about
    ten years, I revolved around it. It was the still point in a rather
    chaotic life... and a great background against which to write."

    The idea of the safe haven as a "springboard" for global adventure
    propels The Levelling Sea. "I didn't want to write a history of
    Falmouth because that would be fairly limited," Marsden says. "I
    wanted this small place to represent a huge story." It certainly
    boasts the backdrop. Falmouth commands the third largest deep-water
    harbour in the world (after Sydney and Rio). If geography is destiny,
    then this exemplary shelter looked set to shine. Yet in medieval
    times, it nestled at the unruly edge of an offshore island.

    Then, lent a fair wind by the buccaneering "rebel state" of Protestant
    England, came the 16th-century breakthroughs in ship design and
    seamanship. Those advances saw the marginal mariners of the West
    Country criss-cross the world as the "British Impire" (John Dee's
    coinage, in 1577) took on its original, maritime shape. "It was a
    revolution, both technologically and culturally," Marsden insists. "It
    was a coincidence of technology, politics and skills." From the
    Elizabethan era, Falmouth mushroomed out of its marsh, a boom town in
    a void. Marsden compares the port to a colony itself, a magnet for
    incomers drawn to its sudden wealth. "It was open ground, a long way
    from anywhere... Everyone was a newcomer."

    The writ of monarchs and magistrates ran very faintly on this coast.
    Falmouth's past sails down that narrow and disputed channel between
    criminality and enterprise. Piracy flourished here, as did its
    slightly more respectable cousin, privateering. Marsden tells his
    history through biography, with no local lives more redolent of
    wind-lashed illegality than those of the Killigrew family. Pirate
    kings of Falmouth in the 16th and 17th centuries, they were prone to
    sudden fits of loyalty to the crown, then equally abrupt hoistings of
    the Jolly Roger.

    "What does the sea do to individuals?" Marsden wonders. "What does the
    sea do to communities and countries? One of the things, perhaps, is
    that it gives this extraordinary licence to people - the sense that
    they can get away with it." He then backtracks and finds this schema
    too "deterministic". But his book crawls with chancers who got away
    with murder. Hollywood romps, building on a tradition of jingoistic
    romance, have sanitised the pirates. Marsden's account of early
    Falmouth shakes the stardust from a bloody business.

    Over time, the explorers began to rival the brazen ruffians. Among the
    curious fortune-seekers who set sail from Falmouth in the 17th
    century, Peter Mundy travelled more than 100,000 miles and watched the
    Taj Mahal go up. Then came the naval heroes. In their front rank was
    admiral Edward Pellew - superior in seamanship to Nelson, some said -
    who unwisely returned from jousting with Napoleon's fleet to farm for
    a while. After the thrill of the sea, watching crops grow "made his
    eyes ache".

    Come the 19th century, and Falmouth-based reformers who wanted to
    amend the world took over from the brigands who sought to plunder it.
    James Silk Buckingham, teetotal anti-imperialist and anti-slavery
    activist, counts as Marsden's favourite among this high-achieving
    crew. He survived successive captures and rescues to blaze a highly
    moral trail across the Ottoman empire, Persia and India.

    To Buckingham we owe the fullest account of the most remarkable
    "blow-in" who crossed oceans to make Falmouth - strategic base of the
    Royal Mail's packet boats from 1688 to 1850 - their home. Joseph
    Emidy, a brilliant musician and composer born in west Africa, found
    himself pressganged in Lisbon in 1795 to serve as fiddler on Edward
    Pellew's ship, the Indefatigable. Already a freed slave, now captive
    again, he was released from the navy in Falmouth. Forr many years, he
    led the town's musical life as both performer and impresario. He wrote
    concerti, quartets and symphonies that won the esteem of colleagues of
    Haydn and Beethoven. Yet not a single note by Emidy - not only
    Cornwall's but Britain's first African-origin musical celebrity - has,
    so far as we know, survived.

    The Levelling Sea rides high on a tide of such tall tales - all of
    them true. As Marsden came to maturity as a writer, he learned from a
    glittering generation of non-fiction narrators: the likes of Colin
    Thubron, Bruce Chatwin and Jonathan Raban. More recently, the "new
    nature writing" of authors such as his friend Robert Macfarlane,
    Kathleen Jamie and Richard Mabey has offered another kind of
    inspiration: "I find myself responding to that directly myself, but it
    has also thrown up some really wonderful writing, with the weaving-in
    of history and place."

    Although he allows that fictional and factual prose share "devices and
    techniques", he emphasises that authors of the latter have to honour
    the line between them as one of the "pillars of writing". They simply
    mustn't make things up. For Marsden, "There's an unwritten contract
    between the reader and the writer. The reader relies on that
    contract... And if you breach that contract as writer - and I've seen
    it - then you're destroying everything that you've created. I have
    seen the fury of readers who have been hoodwinked like that. It's like
    someone has played a joke on them... Every book has its own rules and
    you have to be clear about what they are."

    Savoury legends about the exploits of Lady Jane Killigrew, reputedly a
    pirate herself, lurk in the Falmouth records. Alas, they are
    fantasies. "As a writer, you think, 'I've lost that - how annoying'.
    And yet what you do find is much more interesting, if less colourful,
    because it's true. Something that has happened does have a quality
    about it." Marsden mines drama and colour enough from the hunt in the
    stacks for precious nuggets of fact that will bring a person or place
    to life: "All my books have been about finding the story as much as
    the story itself." The Levelling Sea does contain one well-sourced
    hint of pirate treasure buried somewhere near Falmouth. (Where
    exactly? Read it!) Yet the real gold, as it shows, hides among those
    dusty shelves.

    Marsden's next literary trip will stay close to home but take him
    inland, for a book about Cornwall's mysterious antiquities and the
    "layers of interpretation" they have attracted down the centuries.
    Noting that "All the books I've done have been about people whose
    lives have been shaped by place," he points out that even the
    Neolithic builders of stone circles may have conceived of their henges
    and menhirs as a creative response to the spirit of the landscape. On
    the coast or in the country, nature can still drive culture.

    Early in his career, Marsden talked to elderly exiled Armenians. They
    mourned not only the massacres of their people during the First World
    War but expulsion from a cherished home. "What was consistent, it
    seemed, was that the loss of the land was a greater wound than the
    loss of the population... A lot of our culture is based on place and
    landscape - much more than we now acknowledge."


    From: Baghdasarian
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