The Isle Of Pines (1668) Part 3

This little pamphlet was put out in the poorest dress possible, bespeaking a press of meagre equipment, and a printer without an idea of the form which even the leaflet can a.s.sume in skilful hands. Without imprint, author's name, or any mark of identification, it indicates a secret impression and [33]issue--one of the many occasional pamphlets which appeared at the time from "underground" shops which least of all wanted to be known as the agent of publication. Neville either avowed the authorship or it was traced to him, and the displeasure of Cromwell and banishment from London followed.

In 1681 he printed "Discourses concerning Government," which was much admired by Hobbes, and even Wood admits that it was "very much bought up by the members [of parliament], and admired: But soon after, when they understood who the author was (for his name was not set to the book), many of the honest party rejected, and had no opinion of it" A later writer describes it as an "un-Platonic dialogue developing a scheme for the exercise of the royal prerogative through councils of state responsible to Parliament, and of which a third part should retire every year."{1} Reissued at the time under its better known t.i.tle--"Plato Redivivus"{2}--it was reprinted in 1742,{3} and again by Thomas Hollis in 1763.

1 Dictionary of National Biography, XL. 259.

2 Plato Redivivus, or A Dialogue concerning Government: wherein, by Observations drawn from other Kingdoms and States both ancient and modern, an Endeavour is used to discover the politick Distemper of our own; with the Causes and Remedies. The Second Edition, with Additions. In Octavo.

Price 2s. 6d. Printed for S. I. and sold by R. Dew. The Term Catalogues (Arber), 1.443--the issue for May, 1681. The initials S. I. do not again occur in the Catalogues, and R.

Dew is credited with only two issues, both in May, 1681, neither giving the location of his shop. The tract called out several replies, such as the anonymous Antidotum Brittanic.u.m and G.o.ddard's Plato's Demon, or the State Physician Unmasked ( 1684).

3 A copy is in the Library Company, Philadelphia.

His translations from Machiavelli are not so easily traced, nor is any explanation possible for his having delayed for nearly [34]thirty years publication of evidence of his admiration for the Florentine politician.

He was not alone in desiring to make the Italian political moralist better known, for translations of the "Discourses" and "The Prince,"

with "some marginal animadversions noting and taxing his [Machiavelli's]

errors," by E. D.{1} was published in a second edition in November, 1673, but I do not connect Neville with that issue. In the following year the connection of Charles Harper's name with the "Florentine History" suggests Neville, as does a more ambitious undertaking of the "Works," first fathered by another London bookseller, but with which Harper was concerned in 1681:

The Florentine History, in Eight Books. Written by Nicholas Machiavel, Citizen and Secretary of Florence: now exactly translated from the Italian. In Octavo. Price, bound, 6s. Printed for Charles Harper, and J.

Amery, at the Flower de luce, and Peac.o.c.k, in Fleet street.{2}

The Works of the Famous Nicholas Machiavel, Citizen and Secretary of Florence. Containing, 1. The History of Florence. 2. The Prince. 3. The Original of the Guelf and Ghibilin Factions. 4. The life of Castrucio Castraceni. 5. The murther of Vitelli, etc., by Duke Valentine. 6. The State of France. 7. The State of Germany. 8. The Discourses of t.i.tus Livius. 9. The Art of War. 10. The Marriage of Belphegery a Novel.{3}

1 Edward Dacres.

2 The Term Catalogues (Arber i. 18--the issue for November 25,1674.) It was entered at Stationers' Hall, June 20, 1674, "under the hands of Master Roger L'Estrange and Master Warden Mean" with the statement that the translation was made by "J. D. Gent."

3 This novel wa added by Starker to a translation of novels by Gomez deQueverdoy Villegas published in November, 1670.

The name of the printer suggests a connection with Neville.

[35]11. Nicholas Machiavel's Letter in Vindication of himself and his Writings. All written originally in Italian; and from thence newly and faithfully Translated in English. In Folio. Price, bound, 18s. Printed for J. Starkey at the Mitre in Flret street near Temple Bar.

[Same t.i.tle.] The Second Edition. Printed for J. Starkey, C. Harper, and J. Amery, at the Miter, the Flower de luce, and the Peac.o.c.k, in Flret street. Folio. Price, bound, 16s.{1}

1 The Term Catalogues (Arber) i.199--the issue for February, 1675. Entered at Stationers' Hall, February 4, 1674-75, "under the hands of Master Roger L'Estrange and Master Warden Roycroft," with the statement that the translation was made by "J.B. Salvo iure cuilibet." The resort to L'Estrange in both instances is suggestive. 2 Ib 453--the issue for June, 1681. "The Works of that famous Nicholas Machiavel" is announced in the Catalogues, June, 1675, for publication by R. Boulter, in Cornhill, and at the same price of 18s., but I doubt if Neville had anything to do with that translation.

It may be admitted that questions of government were eagerly discussed in the seventeenth century. It was only needed to live under the Stuarts and to pa.s.s through the Civil War and Protectorate to realize that a transition from the divinely anointed ruler to a self-const.i.tuted governor resting upon an army, and again to a trial of the legitimate holder of royal prerogative, offered an education in matters of political rule which naturally led to a const.i.tutional monarchy, and which could not be equalled in degree or lasting importance until the American colonies of Great Britain questioned the policy of the mother country toward her all too energetic children. Hobbes' "Leviathan, or the Matter, Form and Power of a Commonwealth, Ecclesiastical and Civil,"

appeared in 1651, a powerful argument for absolutism, but cast in such a form as to make the [36]writer an unwelcome adherent to royalty in exile.

In 1652 Filmer published his "Observations concerning the Original of Government," one of a series of tracts, completed by his "Patriarcha,"

printed after his death, which has made him a prophet of the extreme supporters of the divine origin of kingship. These are only examples of the political discussion of the day, and to them may be added Harrington, whose "Oceanan" appeared in 1656.{1} It satisfied no party or faction, and a second edition was not called for until 1700, when other writings of the author were added. This compilation was, in 1737, pirated by a Dublin printer, R. Reilly, who added Neville's "Plato Redivivus;"{2} but the third English edition (1747), issued by the same printer who made the second edition, omitted Neville's tract.

1 Entered at Stationers' Hall by Livewell Chapman, September 19,1656. Eyre and Rivington, ii. 86.

2 Bibliotheca Liudeusianat ii. 4228.

THE STORY

"The Isle of Pines" was Neville's fifth publication, issued nine years after his fourth, a political tract: "Shuffling, Cutting and Dealing in a Game of Picquet" Like most t.i.tles of the day, that of "The Isle of Pines" did not fail in quant.i.ty. It was repeated word for word, except the imprint, on the first page of the text. Briefly, the relation purports to have been written by an Englishman, George Pine, who at the age of twenty shipped as book-keeper in the India Merchant, which sailed for the East Indies in 1569.

Having rounded the Cape of Good Hope and [37]being almost within sight of St. Lawrence's Island, now Madagascar,{1} they encountered a great storm of wind, which separated the ship from her consorts, blew many days, and finally wrecked the vessel on a rocky island. The entire company was drowned except Pine, the daughter of his master, two maid-servants, and one negro female slave. They gathered what they could of the wreckage, and Pine and his companions lived there in community life, a free-love settlement By the four women he had forty-seven children, and in his sixtieth year he claimed to have 565 children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. It was from one of his grandchildren that the Dutch ship received the relation. Apart from the t.i.tle-page, the entire tract is occupied by the story of George Pine, from whom the island took its name. In 1667, or ninety-eight years after Pine was wrecked, the Dutch captain estimated that the population of the island amounted to ten or twelve thousand persons. Methuselah, with his years to plead for him, might boast of such breeding, but in ordinary man it is too near the verminous, the rat, the guinea-pig, and the rabbit, to be pleasant.

1 It was the Island of St. Laurence of James Lancaster's Voyage, 1593. Hakluyt, Princ.i.p.all Navigations, vi. 401.

The publication must have attracted attention at once, for before the end of July Neville put forth a second part, "A New and further Discovery of The Isle of Pines," which purported to be the relation of the Dutch captain to whom the history of Pines had been confided. It is an unadorned story such as might have been gathered from a dozen tales in Hakluyt or Purchas, and is interesting only in giving the name of the [38]Dutch captain--Cornelius Van Sloetton--and the location of the supposed island--longitude 76 and lat.i.tude 20, under the third climate--which places it to the northeast of Madagascar. Almost immediately after the publication of the second part it was combined with the first part, as already described, and published late in July or early in August Cornelius Van Sloetton, as he signed himself in the second part, became Henry Cornelius Van Sloetten in the combined issue.

INTERPRETATIONS

It was Pine's relation which received the greatest attention on the continent, and that was chiefly concerned in describing his performances in populating the island. It was therefore with only a mild surprise that I read in one of those repulsively thorough studies which only a German can make, a study made in 1668 of this very tract, "The Isle of Pines," the a.s.sertion that Pines, masquerading as the name of the discoverer and patriarch of the island, and accepted as the name of the island itself, was only an anagram on the male organ of generation--p.e.n.i.s. On one of the German issues in the John Carter Brown [39]Library this has also been noted by a contemporary hand.{1} Such an interpretation reduces our tract to a screaming farce, but it closely suits the general tone of other of Neville's writings, which are redolent of the sensual license of the restoration. To this I would add an emendation of my own. The name adopted by Neville was Henry Cornelius van Sloetten. It suggests a somewhat forcible English word--s.l.u.t--of doubtful origin, although forms having some resemblance in sound and sense occur in the Scandinavian languages.

1 Christian Weise, Prof. Polit, in augusteo in A. 1685.

Such interpretations seem to fit the work better than that of a German critic, who sees in the book a sort of Utopia, a model community, or an exhibition in the development of law and order. Free love led to license, maids were ravished, and the complete promiscuity of intercourse disgusted Pine, who sought to suppress it by force and, in killing the leader of a revolt, a man with negro blood in his veins, to impose punishments for acts which he had himself done. The ground for believing that Neville had any such purpose when he wrote the book is too slight to be accepted. In 1668 the author had no call to convey a lesson in government to his countrymen by any means so frankly vulgar and pointless as the "Isle of Pines." If Neville had intended such a political object, a phrase would have sufficed to indicate it. No such key can be found in the text, and there is nothing to show that, politician as he was, he realized that such an intimation could be drawn from his paragraphs.

To a.s.sume, therefore, that so carefully hidden a suggestion of a model republic could have aided the circulation [40]of the pamphlet at the time, or at any later period, is to introduce an element unnecessary to explain the vogue of the relation. It pa.s.sed simply as a story of adventure, and as such it fell upon a time when a wide public was receptive to the point of being easily duped. Wood a.s.serts that the "Isle of Pines," when first published, "was look'd upon as a mere sham or piece of drollery; "{1} and there are few contemporary references to the relation of either Pine or Van Sloetten, and those few are of little moment If the seamen, who were in a position to point out discrepancies of fad in the story, made any comment or criticism, I have failed to discover them.

1 Athenae Oxomiensis (Bliss), iv. 410.

Neville himself freely played with the subject, and it is strange that he did not excite some suspicion of his veracity among his readers.

He had told in his first part of a Dutch ship which was driven by foul weather to the island and of the giving to the Dutch the story of Pine. His second part is the story of the Dutch captain, sailing from Amsterdam, re-discovering the Isle of Pines, and returning home--that is, to Holland. Yet Neville for the combined issue, and presumably only a few days after giving out the first part, composed two letters from a merchant of Amsterdam--Abraham Keek--dated June 29 and July 6, saying that the last post from Roch.e.l.le brought intelligence of a French vessel which had just arrived and reported the discovery of this very island, but placing it some two or three hundred leagues "Northwest from Cape Finis Terre," though, he added with reasonable caution, "it may be that there may be some mistake in the number of the Leagues, as also of the exact [41]point of the compa.s.s from Cape Finis Terre."

Keek offered an additional piece of geographical information, that "some English here suppose it maybe the Island of Brasile which have been so oft sought for, Southwest from Ireland."{1} The first letter of Keek is dated five days after the licensing of the first part of the "Isle of Pines," and the second sixteen days before the date of Sloetten's narrative. It is hardly possible that Neville could have been forgetful of his having made a Dutch vessel responsible for the discovery and history of Pine, and it is more than probable that he took this means of giving greater verisimilitude to the Isle of Pines, by bringing forward an independent discovery by a French vessel. However intended, the ruse did not contribute to such a purpose, as the combined parts did not enjoy as wide a circulation as the first part.

1 See page 53, infra.

On the continent a German, who knew the tract only as translated into German through a Dutch version of the English text, and therefore imperfectly, gave it serious consideration, and had little difficulty in finding inconsistencies and contradictions. Some of his questions went to the root of the matter. It was a Dutch ship which first found the Isle of Pines and its colony; why was not the discovery first announced by the Dutch? Piece by piece the critic takes down the somewhat clumsily fashioned structure of Neville's fiction, and in the end little remains untouched by suspicion. No such examination, dull and labored in form, and offering no trace of imagination which wisely permits itself to be deceived in details in order to be free to accept a whole, could pa.s.s beyond the narrow circle of a university.

[42]As an antidote to the attractions of Neville's tract it was powerless, and to-day it remains as much of a curiosity as it was in 1668, when it was written. Indeed, a question might be raised as to which tract was less intentionally a joke--Neville's "Isle of Pines," or our German's ponderous essay upon it? At least the scientific ignorance of the Englishman, perfectly evident from the start, is more entertaining than the pseudo-science of the German critic, who boldly a.s.serts as impossible what has come to be a commonplace.{1}

1 Das verdachtige Pineser-Eylandd, No. 29 in the Bibliography. It it dedicated to Anthonio Goldbeck, Burgomaster of Altona, and the letter of dedication b dated at Hamburg, October 26, 1668.

Hippe calls attention to the geography of the relation as not the least interesting of its features, for the neighborhood of the Island of Madagascar was used in other sea stories as a place of storm and catastrophe. "The ship on which Simplicissimus wished to return to Portugal, suffered shipwreck likewise near Madagascar, and the paradisiac island on which Grimmelshausen permits his hero finally to land in company with a carpenter, is also to be sought in this region.

In precisely the same way the shipwreck of Sadeur,{1} the hero of a French Robinson Crusoe story, [43]happens on the coast of Madagascar, and from this was he driven in a southerly direction to the coast of the southern land."

1 La Terre Australe commue, a romance written by Gabriel de Foigny (pseud. J. Sadeur), describing the stay of Sadeur on the southern continent for more than thirty-five years, The original edition, made in Geneva in 1676, is said to contain "many impious and licentious pa.s.sages which were omitted in the later editions." Sabin (xviii. 220) gives a list of editions, the first English translation appearing in 1693.

It is possible that the author owed the idea of his work to Neville's pamphlet.

In most of the older surveys of the known world America counts as the fourth part, naturally coming after Europe, Asia, and Africa. Even that arrangement was not generally accepted. Joannes Leo (Hasan Ibn Muhammad, al-Wazzan), writing in 1556, properly called Africa "la tierce Partie du Monde;" but the Seigneur de la Popelliniere, in his "Les Trois Mondes,"

published in 1582, divided the globe into three parts--1. Europe, Asia, and Africa; 2. America, and 3. Australia. A half century later, Pierre d'Avitz, of Toumon (Ardeche), ent.i.tled one of his compositions "Description Generale de l'Amerique troisiesme partie du Monde," first published in 1637.{2} The expedition under Alvaro de Mendana de Nevra, setting sail from Callao, November 19, 1567, and steering westward, sought to clear doubt concerning a continent which report had pictured as being somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. The Solomon Islands rewarded the enterprise, and with New Guinea and the Philippines completed a connection between Peru and the continent of Asia. There had long existed, however, a settled belief in the existence of a great continent in the southern hemisphere, which should serve as a counterpoise to the known lands in the northern.

1 A copy is in the Boston Athenaeum.

The geographical ideas of the times required such a continent, [44]and even before the circ.u.mnavigation of Africa, the world-maps indicated to the southward "terra incognita secundum Ptolemeum,"{1} or a land of extreme temperature and wholly unknown.{2} The sailing of ships round the Cape of Good Hope dissipated in some degree this belief but it merely placed some distance between that cape and the supposed Terra Australia which was now extended to the south of America, separated on the maps from that continent only by the narrow Straits of Magellan, and stretching to the westward, almost approaching New Guinea.{3}

1 As on the Ptolemy, Ulm, 1482.