Читать книгу Coleridge: Darker Reflections - Richard Holmes - Страница 9

At dawn on 19 April, Coleridge’s telescope picked out the great brown rock of Gibraltar’s “famous Apes Hill” detaching itself from the limestone sweeps and ridges of the Spanish coast. By the evening they were anchored under Europa Point and awaiting quarantine clearance – a rigid requirement in a zone of rapidly transmitted plagues and fevers, which killed off far more men than actual combat.

Coleridge was now entering a new world: colourful, hot, violent, polyglot, dominated by war and the rumours of war. People of every race and degree thronged the island – Jews, Arabs, Spaniards, Italians, Greeks. His first expedition along the quayside yielded a muleteer with the face of a monkey, a learned Jew in university dress, a Greek woman with earrings the size of “chain rings on a landing place for mooring boats”, a senior English officer with an “angel Face” woman on his arm, and “Soldiers of all Regiments & Runaway Sailors” of every nation.³⁴

Taken by Captain Findlay to Griffith’s Hotel, through a stinking labyrinth of backstreets, he found himself plunged into the active-service culture of the British navy abroad: patriotic, punctilious, hard-drinking, with its endless yarns about weather, battles and promotion. The first news he heard was of the previous Portsmouth convoy, largely wrecked in a foul-weather passage to the West Indies; and of Nelson’s dispatches intercepted by a French frigate.

He delivered letters of introduction to the navy chaplain, and to Major Adye, a young gunnery officer. Adye was a one-time pupil of his brother George’s, who sportingly volunteered to act as his guide to the rock. Then he spent the afternoon climbing over Europa Point, pleased to see the homely pink geraniums clinging to the walls among the exotic prickly pears. ‘Reluctantly I returned to a noisy Dinner of 17 Sea Captains, indifferent food, and burning Wines.”

Much discussion turned on Nelson’s Mediterranean strategy, and the importance of Malta for securing the trade routes into the eastern Mediterranean, the casus belli of 1803. “Struggle in the minds of the (native) inhabitants between their Dislike of English manners & their Dread of French Government. I find it a common opinion that if the Peace had continued the French would have monopolized the Commerce of the Levant.”³⁵ This was to become a topic of dominant importance during his time in Malta. Coleridge finally escorted Captain Findlay – “my now very tipsy Capt” – back to the Speedwell, and left him drinking with three other merchant masters in his cabin.

They spent five hectic days at Gibraltar. Coleridge togged himself out in sailor’s nankeen trousers and canvas shirt, and roamed all over the island, basking in the heat, drinking beer, making notes on plants, racial types, architecture, naval gossip and Mediterranean politics. In a packed letter to his newspaper editor Daniel Stuart, he leaped from subject to subject with all his old ebullience. The island was worth “a dozen plates by Hogarth”. The climate of the south would “re-create” him. Whole days were spent “scrambling about on the back of the Rock among the Monkeys: I am a match for them in climbing, but in Hops & flying leaps they beat me.”³⁶

Meanwhile Major Adye briefed him on military matters, and sent a Corporal to escort him round the cliff-side gun emplacements – “The Noise so deafening in these galleries on the discharge of Guns, that the Soldiers’ Ears have bled.” By contrast, he scrambled alone into the deep silence of St Michael’s Cave, with its massy natural pillars and huge stalactites “the models of Trees in stone”, and wondered at the subterranean chambers (an old fascination) where men had descended three or four hundred feet “till the Smoke of their torches became intolerable”.³⁷

Sitting high up at Signal House, the very summit of Gibraltar, “which looks over the blue Sea-lake to Africa”, the magic of the Mediterranean south rose up to him in sight and sound and smell (the crushed tansy under his shoe). He thought how many mountains he had stood on in his life, and how the Rock was something profoundly new and mysterious, in all its warlike nameless shapes and intimations. “What a complex Thing! At its feet mighty ramparts establishing themselves in the Sea with their huge artillery – hollow trunks of Iron where Death and Thunder sleep; the gardens in deep Moats between lofty and massive walls; a Town of All Nations & all languages;…fences of the prickly aloe, strange Plant that does not seem to be alive, but to have been a thing fantastically carved in wood & coloured, some Hieroglyph or temple Ornament of undiscovered meaning.”³⁸

Coleridge was deeply excited by the Mediterranean, and his whole body responded to the physical impact of sun and sea. Moving easily among the soldiers and sailors, picking up their talk and laughter, he saw himself once again as footloose adventurer, poetic traveller, special correspondent for Daniel Stuart’s newspaper. His letter gives detailed naval “intelligence” of Nelson’s lost dispatches, and the Hindoostan burnt out with only four survivors and the loss of fifty guns and £300,000 of cargo, “chiefly of naval Stores of all kinds for Malta with a hundred Artificers”. Malta would be in “great Distress” for these losses, and he thought this would be the first crucial chance to get the news to London, by the return convoy: “after Letters will be better worth the postage”.³⁹

But, of course, beneath breathless activity, the manly sweating extraversion of the new self, older feelings stirred. “What change of place, Country, climate, company, situation, health – of Shrubs, Flowers, Trees – moving Seasons: & ever is that one feeling at my heart, felt like a faint Pain, a spot which it seems I could lay my finger on.” It was Asra, of course; and everything she represented of the Wordsworths, the Lakes, lost love.

The past self stood like a ghostly reflection in every company; the remembered hills rose up behind every sunlit cliff and rock. “I talk loud or eager, or I read or meditate the abstrusest Researches; or I laugh, jest, tell tales of mirth; & ever as it were, within & behind, I think & image you; and while I am talking of Government or War or Chemistry, there comes ever into my bodily eye some Tree, beneath which we have rested, some Rock where we have walked together, or on the perilous road edging high above the Crummock Lake, where we sat beneath the rock, & those dear Lips pressed my forehead.”⁴⁰ This was the cargo of memory that could not be sunk or abandoned or burnt; the secret self that crouched below the waterline.

Coleridge’s last day on Gibraltar was spent on a “long & instructive walk” with Major Adye round the entire defences, from the gun emplacements to the brewery, discussing British strategy in the Mediterranean. They visited St Michael’s Cave again, and Coleridge was more and more struck by its mysterious rock formations, “the obelisks, the pillars, the rude statues of strange animals” like some cathedral of half-created forms and monuments.⁴¹

They planned to meet again in Malta, and Adye promised to carry home to England whatever letters and journals Coleridge had prepared. Back on the Speedwell, they discussed the dangers of the voyage ahead, and sailors’ superstitions about dates and positions of the moon which reminded Coleridge of his Mariner. Captain Findlay said briskly, “Damn me! I have no superstition”, but then revealed that he thought “Sunday is a really lucky day to sail on.” They were interrupted by a huge cargo-ship, which nearly rammed them as they lay at anchor, and were only saved by Findlay shouting directions to the lubberly crew to go about. “Myself, the Capt. and the Mate all confessed, that our knees trembled under us,” for the towering forecastle threatened to strike them amidships and sink them instantly. This at any rate was not a good omen.⁴²