TRELAWNEY THE BUCCANEER

The Adventures of a Younger Son. By Edward John Trelawney. (J. M. Dent and Sons. Is. 6d. net.)

EDWARD TRELAWNEY assured himself of fame when he wrote Recollections of ;he Last Days of Shelley and Byron, one of the most valuable literary memoirs in the language, in spite

of his habit of improving on the truth. He was indeed to be envied for his close friendships with so many great men, and for the sort of good fortune which guided him into lively

encounters. The book seems unfortunately to be out of print, but the present abridged reprint of Trelawney's earlier Adventures of a Younger Son makes us hope to see soon a reissue of those famous Recollections.

The Adventures stands midway between the Elizabethan

picaresque romances and Stevenson. An autobiography that reads like the most thrilling fiction, it is packed with privateers, shipwrecks, tiger-hunts, top-gallants and hand- to-hand fights with Mahratti and Javanese, and must have supplied local colour time and again to all those who have written books in the Henty tradition.

It begins briskly :-

" My brother was tractable, mild, and uncomplaining. I was in continual scrapes . . . Everything I was directed cautiously to shun, as dangerous or wrong, I sought with avidity, as giving the most pleasure."

Ire knocked down an usher, thrashed his tutor, and set fire to the room in which he was confined for punishment. Shipped on board a line-of-battleship, he fretted to find he had just missed taking part in the Battle of Trafalgar, and was soon drafted on board a sloop, which carried him to India. Continually insubordinate, and on bad terms with his superiors, he deserted at Bombay, and after revenging himself on a " villainous " second-lieutenant who had made his life difficult, threw in his lot with the com- mander of a French privateer called Pe Ruyter. This man, whom even Trelawney acknowledged to be his superior both mentally and physically, was an exceptional and impressive creature, and an able free-lance navigator. In the years that followed Trelawney experienced every adventure that his turbulent nature craved, and he describes them all vividly, if a trifle pompously. A good deal of it is doubtless fabricated, or at least rounded out ; but nevertheless it, rings true.

Always irritating because he regards himself so much too clearly as a hero, he is sometimes a striking writer :-

" An instant, and bodies would be mingled and mangled in the

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" " Sweat dropped from his brow like rain from the eaves of a

PiFtYe."

The Malay chieftain . . . thrust his spear through the whelp, and buried his dagger twenty times in the body of the tiger ; then, dragging the lifeless brute from above me, he helped me up, and said, ' Yes, this is very good amusement—I like it ! Let's go into the jungle again . . . ' upon which, roaring like a lion, and reeking with sweat and blood, he shook his spear and darted into the wood again."

He often gets a happy phrase, such as " the red and rapid lightning" ; while Meredith himself, who afterwards used Trelawney as a model for " The Old Buccaneer " in The Amazing Ma-riage, might have said :-

" The winds came gentle as a lover's voice to woo the sleepy canvas, not like the simoon of wedlock."

The best piece of sustained writing in the book is a full description of the sufferings of a shipwrecked crew his boat

picked up in the Indian Ocean, " more like corpses uncharnelled than living men." He let his imagination and his pen run away with him to effect in reconstructing their sufferings :-

"They covered, in despair, their inflamed eyes with their cracked and spongy hands, and groaned in agony. . . . With rheumed, glassy, bloodshot eyes, haggard, wrinkled, and hollow cheeks, sunken mouth, swollen, slaty, and cracked lips, contracted nostrils, gabbling more like brutes than men ; can the extremest age to which human existence has yet been stretched with all its withering palsy and impotency do more ? In seven days and t, few hours,

youth, inte]lec strength were thus blasted ! in their frenzy, threw themselves in the sea, slaked their thirst in its briny waters, and died under its cool canopy. One, after lying in idiotic insensibility, burst into fierce, yelling madness, tore the living flesh from his limbs, sucked his own blood, lay down, sleet, and awoke no more. Four, besides the officer, remained on the seventh day."

Like all self-appointed gentlemen-adventurers, Trelawney was a not altogether pleasing mixture of generous impulses, vanity and lawlessness. He was a poseur. And though he had an eye to see the humour of an enthusiastic Scotch

surgeon burning for battle and bloodshed in order to try out new amputating instruments, and of a greedy steward trying to carry off an enormous turtle while hotly pursued by warlike natives, he was unable to see how ridiculous he made himself by describing how he attained " the attributes of perfect manhood." He is never tired of saying how popular he was with his messmates : that he permitted none to tyrannize : that he displayed " a reckless daring." He was immensely proud of his physical prowess, and insisted that Byron was a wretched swimmer in comparison with himself. At the age of forty-one he swam the river at

Niagara above the falls. At eighty-one he was still riding and driving, and taking cold baths every morning. With

all this energy he certainly possessed a warm and valiant nature : he lavished a great deal of affection on his friends, particularly Shelley, and energetically threw himself with Byron into the Greek struggle for independence. And, perhaps typically, he was practically vegetarian and teetotal.

Mary Shelley, who helped him to prepare his two books Vie notoriously wrote and spelt at random) described him, on first impressions, as

" a kind of Arab-Englishman . . . He is clever ; for his moral qualities I am yet in the dark. He is a strange web which I am trying to unravel."

No doubt she guessed at the sinister and insubordinate aspect

of this black-haired giant. Certainly as a youth he allowed himself to be possessed by such unbridled emotions as might well have made of him a criminal ; but instinct as much as 'destiny fortunately led him to choose a violent career among ,violent companions, where he worked off his more dangerous energies. By the time he settled down in England, a celebrated figure and the friend of Landor, Rossetti and Lytton, the fire-eating youth had turned into a more or less respectable and much respected eccentric. bus BARRY..