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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
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