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I have called this book Blenden Hall. I might have christened it more aptly ‘A Passage to India,’ had not the title been already claimed by a less obscure writer for a more notable though fictitious tale. For this is the story of a passage to India—one of the strangest and longest and most parlous ever made. How many novelists have taken a small community of incongruous persons and flung them by a trick of fortune into some remote and inaccessible spot—John Buchan in A Lodge in the Wilderness, Rose Macaulay in Orphan Island, Owen Rutter in Lucky Star, to name three modern examples out of many; have delighted to show the human response to so strange a conjunction, the discovery of an Admirable Crichton, the rise of him, the fall of her, the love-making and the quarrels, the revolution in values, and in the end, of course, the return of the community, changed and chastened, or unchanged and unchastened, to the world we know! That has all been fiction, but here is the thing in history, as it really happened, once on a time, to a little party of English men and women—chosen, as it were, by the mere hazard of a booked passage—in the year 1821.

Here, then, is the interest of the story, such as it is, the interest and the fascination which must always cling round any tale of a desert island. Quite lately Mr. Walter de la Mare has written a book on this very subject. He concerns himself chiefly with Alexander Selkirk, who was or was not (for there is a difference of opinion on the point) the original of Robinson Crusoe. I respectfully deplore the gaps in Mr. de la Mare’s notes. That he should have omitted all mention of the Blenden Hall is not surprising, for probably, like most people, he has never met the story. But what of those other omissions? Of Philip Ashton, for instance, who lived for the better part of a year on Roatan, a pleasant enough spot where wild fruit and cocoanuts and the eggs of turtles abounded, and pigs ranged the woods; where, notwithstanding, he never ceased to bewail his fate. Then there was Robert Jeffery, of the Royal Navy, who was caught stealing the midshipmen’s beer and marooned on the rock of Sombrero, off the Leeward Islands. A very poor job Jeffery made of his marooning, though it is true that his whole equipment consisted of a clasp knife and a pocket handkerchief, and that his island held nothing more edible than seagulls and black lizards. He spent most of his time weeping, and was nearly dead when he was taken off by an American schooner. I was glad, on the other hand, that Mr. de la Mare had included the delightful story of Peter Ferrano, wrecked on a sandy island off the coast of Peru, where he remained, if we are to believe him, for seven long years, dining on turtle and shellfish. After three years another man was washed ashore off another wreck, and when the pair of them met, each was convinced that the other must be the Devil. So they retired to a safe distance and recited the Apostles’ Creed at each other. I am sorry to say that later on they quarrelled and ceased to be on speaking terms, and for some months cut each other in the most approved fashion when they met.

Personally I have known only one man who has been cast away on a desert island. He was a midshipman in H.M.S. Megaera, which in 1871 sprang a leak and was driven by storm on to St. Paul’s Island, in the South Indian Ocean. St. Paul’s is a mere volcanic rock, with no amenities or excitements. I cannot remember how my friend and his 300 comrades lived during the eighty-one days spent there. They must have got stores out of the wreck, and they certainly found penguins’ eggs, for my friend used to tell how they cooked them in a minute or two simply by putting them in the sand. They were excessively bored and not at all sorry when at last they were taken off. They had no casualties until they reached Australia, where one or two of them died through the excessive hospitality of the inhabitants.

The truth is that life on a desert island is a vastly over-rated business. It is much better in fiction than in fact. It must brighten things up, for instance, if Captain Kidd has buried his treasure (perhaps I should say one of his numerous treasures) on your island, or if there is the chance of an occasional visit from cannibals, or Spaniards, or pirates. Again, it would not be so bad if you could choose your island beforehand—and the less desert the better; best of all if it were such a cornucopia as that of the Swiss Family Robinson, in which every sort of useful plant and every kind of beast, wild and domestic, miraculously flourished. You think you would be good and happy in such an Eden? Perhaps you would. But how would you fare in an island not of fancy but of fact? You would have little time or inclination even for the improving soliloquies of Robinson Crusoe; for such hours as you might spare from the hard business of finding food, you would certainly spend in devising means of escape. You would get very tired of a menu of penguin and wild celery. If you had companions you would soon loathe the sight of them; if you had none you would be oppressed with loneliness. You would be deliriously excited on that happy day when your deliverer’s smoke appeared on the horizon; and, if your sojourn had been sufficiently long, when you were taken aboard you would find, like Alexander Selkirk, that you had almost forgotten how to talk English, that your digestion, like Robert Jeffery’s, would rebel against civilised food and your feet against civilised boots. But you would not, I think, ask to be put back again. You disagree? Very well, then I must beg you to read carefully the story of the Blenden Hall.

I confess that when I first encountered it I had my suspicions. It seemed to good to be true. These people had stepped straight out of a novel—of some imitator of Thackeray’s perhaps, for here and there we find a suggestion of The Newcomes; in Mrs. Lock, with her past and her tongue; in little Painter, whose wife, so precipitately acquired, was so much the better half; in Dr. Law, who was valiant on whisky and prudent on water; in Quartermaster Hormby, who behaved so terribly, terribly badly; in Peggy, who chose in the end the simple life rather than the fleshpots of civilisation; and finally in no less significant a person than Master Stephen Newcome, a cadet ‘of the Company’s Marine.’

Yet, when I came to look into the matter, I found very quickly that the story was true and that the people were real, and that there was a ship Blenden Hall, which sailed from Gravesend on Sunday, May 6th, 1821, and was cast away on Inaccessible Island on July 23rd.

Even so, without Alexander Greig and his little book, we should have had no more than the bare bones of the story—a voyage, a shipwreck, and in fullness of time a rescue. It would be a tale remarkable enough to claim a chapter in a book of escapes at sea, but not so uncommon as to merit a volume of its own. For five years I hunted Greig and his diary without success, finding him at last by no merit of my own, but through the good services of Mr. Charles Lauriat of Boston. He it was who finally procured and sent me a copy of Greig’s book. From a label on the front of the binding and a stamp on the title-page I gather that it was run to ground in no more likely a spot than the library of the Young Women’s Christian Association at Brooklyn, New York. Its full title is

Fate

of

The Blenden Hall

East Indiaman,

CAPTAIN ALEXANDER GREIG,

Bound to Bombay:

with

AN ACCOUNT OF HER WRECK

AND THE SUFFERINGS AND PRIVATIONS ENDURED BY

THE SURVIVORS, FOR SIX MONTHS, ON

THE DESOLATE ISLANDS OF

Inaccessible and Tristan D’Acunha^[1]

in Lat. 37° 29″ South. Long. 11° 45″ West.

By Alexander M. Greig,

One of the passengers,

From a Journal kept on the Islands, and written

with the Blood of the Penguin.

The book was published by William H. Colyer of New York in the year 1847, a quarter of a century after the events of which it tells. It could not have been published sooner, and even in 1847 could not be published in this country, for reasons, I suspect, connected with the law of libel. Let Greig himself explain:

‘It was extremely difficult for me to decide, for a long time, whether I should introduce the real names of our passengers. This dilemma has been one of the principal reasons why I have not sooner acceded to the wishes of my friends by an earlier publication. The greater part of my fellow-sufferers are gone to their long home, and I should deeply deplore the infliction of any injury to the feelings of those they have left behind, by reciting incidents, in connection with their names, which might reflect upon their characters; while justice compels me to speak of each as I found him under the most trying position in which he could be placed; and I leave the reader to make that allowance for those imperfections of human nature which are too frequently exhibited by less disastrous events than those I witnessed. With a determination to adhere strictly to the facts, a promise which I was desirous of making to the reader, I felt the difficulty of my situation increased as under the circumstances using assumed names would, in a measure, be a deviation from such a pledge.

‘Upon reflection, however, aided by the advice of friends, I have determined to announce the reasons why, in this instance, I am induced to portray the character of the different parties under other names, retaining their rank and position in society precisely as they stood.

‘As this book will, in all probability, find its way into the hands of those of our passengers who still survive, and who, notwithstanding the disguise of a cognomen, will have no difficulty in recognising their own characters, I have only to assure them, which I do with the utmost candour that I will

Nothing extenuate, or aught set down in malice.

They must be fully aware that a number of unfounded reports and exaggerated statements have, from time to time, been circulated respecting them, casting unmerited reflections upon the conduct of some, and attributing virtues to others to which they had no claim. I trust they will also do me the justice to believe that I am influenced by no personal animosity; for many I shall ever entertain the highest respect and esteem, and sincerely regret, in laying before the reader a faithful narrative of the sufferings we endured together, that I am compelled to censure the conduct of anyone.’

I know practically nothing of Greig himself, save the little he tells us. He was the son of Captain Greig, who owned and commanded the Blenden Hall; and apparently between 1821 and 1847 he emigrated to and found employment in the United States, as on the reverse of the title-page he is described as ‘in the Clerk’s Office of the Southern District of New York.’ When he sailed east in the Blenden Hall he was a youth of seventeen; and we may add from internal evidence that he had a sense of humour, an eye for the foibles of his neighbours, no great respect for his elders, and a touch of the malice which he is so careful to disclaim.

Writing about his fellow-passengers with a candour which I find wholly admirable, we have seen that as late even as 1847, he judged it prudent to rechristen them with names of his own invention. The disguise is flimsy enough. In most cases we might penetrate it without much difficulty. But why should we try? The people themselves only matter for the part they play in the story. They are dead. Let them rest in peace. And let us, with one or two necessary exceptions, use Alexander’s pseudonyms throughout.

I must expect, of course, to be asked for proof that the story he tells is genuine. Though I cannot vouch for every detail, I am convinced of its general veracity; and wherever it has been possible to test the author he has emerged creditably from the ordeal. I have discovered in the files of the Old East India Company now stored at the India Office, some correspondence dealing with the Blenden Hall; and this, by the courtesy of the librarian, I have been permitted to copy and reproduce in an appendix. Apart from its value as evidence, it is an interesting example of its kind. Further, there is an anonymous article in Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal,^[2] and there is another article in the Asiatic Journal of 1822,^[3] by ‘Lieutenant John Pepper, Honourable East India Company’s Bombay Marine,’ whom we shall meet presently under the code name of ‘Painter.’ In these sources I have found much to confirm and nothing to confute our friend. The correspondence is official and strictly relevant to its subject—the claims of certain of the Company’s officers, who had lost most of their possessions in the shipwreck, to compensation; and if the two articles are necessarily much more discreet than Greig’s diary makes any pretension to be, they endorse him on many points and may therefore be taken as sound evidence for the defence.

Then it may be asked, Why not print his book as it stands, his ipsissima verba, without deletion or addition or comment? For these reasons. Even Alexander has his dull patches. I have already quoted a full page which might have been compressed into a few lines. When events march, and there are quarrels, shipwreck, mutiny and so forth, he marches with them vigorously enough; but he wrote in a day when you were expected to moralise in misfortune, and moralise again when you had escaped from it, and describe your plight and your surroundings in language that sounds prosy and sententious to the twentieth-century ear. Alexander does this less than others in his circumstances have done, but he does it. It was an age when the amateur in letters often modelled his style on that of Dr. Johnson. Nowadays even the founder of that school of writing is not easy to read, and the ‘Johnsonese’ of his imitators is less easy. It is a style that might suit a dictionary, but is not the most convenient for a narrative of shipwreck and adventure; and Alexander, whenever he becomes self-conscious, drops into it. But there are other reasons why I have told his story in my own way. There are numerous gaps in it. For instance, although he tells us something of his home he does not give its exact locality, which, however, I discovered without much difficulty; and although he was making his first voyage in the Blenden Hall, he tells us next to nothing about the ship. I have therefore supplemented his facts from other sources, when supplement was possible and necessary. His dates, again, are most carelessly given; they are often obviously and absurdly wrong. And he has no sense of construction. He describes happenings out of their due sequence, breaks off to tell us something else, goes back to his original theme, repeats himself, alludes casually to people and occurrences not previously mentioned. In short, he commits almost every offence which, in a story of this sort, will weary and bewilder the reader.

So I hope my assurance will be accepted that I have taken out nothing that should have stayed in, that when he tells his tale well I have left him to tell it almost without interference, and when not so well, as in the latter part of the book, I have made bold to step in and interrupt.

I must end this Introduction by recording my gratitude to Mr. Charles Lauriat for the loan of Greig’s book.

[1]	The island is so spelt throughout. I have, however, followed the more usual spelling of Tristan da Cunha.

[2]	Vol. V, p. 252.

[3]	Vol. XIV, p. 119. Greig gives a wrong reference for each of these articles.