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| Hong Kong and San Francisco (Library of Congress). |
Frank Marryat (Samuel Francis ~; 1826–1855) was a traveler and writer, both of which were family professions. Marryat wrote two travelogues in the 1840s and 1850s featuring detailed lithograph and woodblock prints of places from Hong Kong to California. He sailed to both the long way.
Marryat joined the Royal Navy at age 14, very much in his father’s footsteps—the eminent Captain Frederick Marryat (1792–1848) also enlisted around age 14 and went on to become a prolific novelist. A pioneer in nautical fiction, the elder Marryat is known for books including an 1836 autobiographical novel, Mr. Midshipman Easy, and a children’s novel published in 1847, The Children of the New Forest.
As a naval officer, Frederick served aboard British naval vessels during the War of 1812 and was promoted to commander just as the war was ending, in 1815. That was one tough father to live up to.
Frank Marryat’s sister certainly did. A novelist and actress, Florence Marryat (1833–1899) wrote some seventy books as well as short stories, articles for newspapers and magazines, and works for the stage. She also traveled: Just before her twenty-first birthday in 1854, Florence married Thomas Ross Church at Penang in Malaya and spent the next seven years traveling extensively in India before returning to England. She and Church had eight children, three of them born in India.
As for Frank Marryat, he served as midshipman aboard the surveying vessel HMS Samarang, spending four years touring the Far East and living the same naval life his father had. As Marryat reports at the beginning of his book Borneo and the Malay Archipelago:
"On the 25th of January, 1843, H. M. S. Samarang, being completely equipped, went out of Portsmouth harbour and anchored at Spithead. The crew were paid advanced wages; and, five minutes after the money had been put into their hats at the pay-table, it was all most dexterously transferred to the pockets of their wives, whose regard and affection for their husbands at this peculiar time was most exemplary. On the following day, the crew of the Samarang made sail with full hearts and empty pockets."
Marryat’s initial interest was illustration, not writing. In his words, “In describing people and countries hitherto unknown, no description given by the pen will equal one correct drawing” Aboard the Samarang, Marryat produced detailed drawings of places and peoples, later transferring them to lithograph and woodblock, but the publishers wanted more.
“It was my intention to have published these drawings without letter-press, but in this I have been overruled,” he complained. Marryat turned to his private journal, which fortunately was packed with adventures and experiences that made for a much richer book. Borneo and the Indian Archipelago was published in London in 1848.
In 1850 Marryat traveled to California to collect material for a second book, Mountains and Molehills or Memoirs of a Burnt Journal—"a sportsman-tourist's chronicle of California in the early 1850s: hunting, horse races, bear and bull fights" and "an Englishman's bemused comments on social life in San Francisco, Stockton, and the gold fields."
Marryat returned to England in 1853 with plans to marry and take his bride back to California, but he contracted yellow fever on the journey and died two years later from complications at only twenty-nine. His sister later wrote, “He was a young man of as great promise as his brother, and had displayed considerable talent as a draughtsman.”
Marryat’s two books give us a window into mid-nineteenth century life in Asia and in California, including descriptions of Hong Kong just after the British took possession and the San Francisco area just after the California Gold Rush of 1848 that drew an estimated 300,000 people to Northern California and put San Francisco in the map.
Here is the full introduction to Marryat’s Borneo and the Indian Archipelago:
"I wish the readers of these pages to understand that it has been with no desire to appear before the public as an author that I have published this Narrative of the Proceedings of Her Majesty's ship Samarang during her last Surveying Cruise.
"During the time that I was in the ship, I made a large collection of drawings, representing, I hope faithfully, the costumes of the natives and the scenery of a country so new to Europeans. They were considered, on my return, as worthy to be presented to the public, as being more voluminous and more characteristic than drawings made in haste usually are.
"I may here observe, that it has been a great error on the part of the Admiralty, considering the great expense incurred in fitting out vessels for survey, that a little additional outlay is not made in supplying every vessel with a professional draughtsman, as was invariably the case in the first vessels sent out on discovery. The duties of officers in surveying vessels are much too fatiguing and severe to allow them the time to make anything but hasty sketches, and they require that practice with the pencil without which natural talent is of little avail; the consequence is, that the engravings, which have appeared in too many of the Narratives of Journeys and Expeditions, give not only an imperfect, but even an erroneous, idea of what they would describe.
"A hasty pencil sketch, from an unpractised hand, is made over to an artist to reduce to proportion; from him it passes over to the hand of an engraver, and an interesting plate is produced by their joint labours. But, in this making up, the character and features of the individual are lost, or the scenery is composed of foliage not indigenous to the country, but introduced by the artist to make a good picture.
"In describing people and countries hitherto unknown, no description given by the pen will equal one correct drawing. How far I may have succeeded must be decided by those who have, with me, visited the same places and mixed with the people delineated. How I found time to complete the drawings is explained by my not doing any duty on board at one time, and at another by my having been discharged into the hospital-ship at Hong Kong.
"It was my intention to have published these drawings without letter-press, but in this I have been overruled. I have therefore been compelled to have recourse to my own private journal, which certainly was never intended for publication. As I proceeded, I found that, as I was not on board during the whole of the time, it would be better, and make the work more perfect, if I published the whole of the cruise, which I could easily do by referring to the journals of my messmates.
"I would gladly mention their names, and publicly acknowledge their assistance; but, all things considered, I think it as well to withhold them, and I take this opportunity of thanking them for their kindness."
This is part 1 in a series exploring some of Marryat's experiences.
By John Sailors, History Travels.
Links
Frank Marryat
Frederick Marryat
Florence Marryat
Books by all three Marryats are available in multiple formats online including at Project Gutenberg, the Internet Archive, and the Library of Congress.
(c) 2024, by John Sailors