Narrative of a Voyage to the South Seas, and the Shipwreck of the Princess of Wales Cutter: with an Account of Two Years’ Residence on an Uninhabited Island[1] is an obscure castaway narrative from 1838 with a special relation to Newfoundland. It is one of countless tales of shipwreck and castaways that circulated in the popular “transatlantic literature” of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.[2] Through seven editions and reprints, it provided its author, Medyett Goodridge, a source of income in his late years. It has provided readers then and now with an authentic and truthful account of the physical and existential demands of life in the new extreme environments into which imperialism and adventure carried mariners in the early nineteenth century.

Narrative of a Voyage tells the story of how, in the year 1820, Medyett Goodridge, a young seafarer from Devon, was shipwrecked with a dozen other men on a remote island halfway between South Africa and Antarctica. They were left to subsist for both food and shelter on little else but the sea elephants and birds they managed to club to death on a godless rock at the bottom of the world that, for almost two years, they called home.

Medyett and his companions were eventually found by an American sealing crew with whom they then continued hunting and birding on the various smaller islands in the Southern Ocean, before crossing back into civilization in Van Diemen’s Land, still dressed in the sealskin tunics they had made in the time of their desolation. In Hobart, Goodridge took various jobs, including bark cutter and ferryman, until he was finally able to make his way back to his father’s hearth in Devon.

Back in England in 1831, 11 years after his departure, Medyett learned of his brother Henry’s success in a seasonal fishing enterprise in Renews, Newfoundland. On Henry’s passing, Medyett had expected, as an older brother, to inherit a portion of the Renews estate and to use the proceeds from it to return to the southern hemisphere and live out his last days in Van Diemen’s Land.[3] Henry instead willed his estate to his son Alan, who, in another extraordinary Goodridge tale, built his own barque and sailed it single-handedly from Devon to Newfoundland. With this dramatic gesture, Medyett’s nephew Alan effectively settled the Goodridges in Renews. Within a generation, they had their own shipyard and schooners and were one of the three largest businesses on the island, connecting the fish produced in the island’s remote outports to markets in the Caribbean and Southern Europe. Since then, they have continued to make significant contributions to the economy, culture, and political life of the island. They have been lawyers, artists, professors, and senior government administrators. Augustus Goodridge, great nephew to Medyett, was Prime Minister of the island for a brief period in 1894 during the political and financial turmoil of the early 1890s.

Their commercial enterprises declined with the reorganization of the political and economic life of the island after Confederation with Canada, as the founding merchant families gave way to the forces of North American consumerism and factory jobs. The Goodridges’ rise and eventual decline as “principal inhabitants” or “planter gentry” of the young colony followed the emergence of Newfoundland from fishing station to settled colony and nation, to its decline as a sovereign nation and its eventual absorption into Canada.[4]

Narrative of a Voyage is a book about Newfoundland in only the most indirect of ways, since it was the loss of expected income from his brother’s Newfoundland estate that led Medyett to write his memoir and tale of seafaring and shipwreck, as a way of supporting himself and his ailing wife in his late years back in Devon. It records a turning point in the family narrative when the proceeds made in Newfoundland might have been redirected to a settled life in Hobart, and a very different antipodean history of the Goodridges might have come to pass.

Narrative of a Voyage is what literary scholars today might call a systems novel or systems narrative. In recounting the life story and adventures of one young man from Devon, it describes the means and mechanisms of the nascent world system of commodities, capital, and bodies that connected the world’s hemispheres, seas, and continents. It is about Newfoundland in the way that Mansfield Park is about Antigua, in that it describes the engine of primitive accumulation that generated wealth in the colonies and recirculated it through the interpersonal dramas of families in Europe.[5]

You will find a copy of Medyett Goodridge’s Narrative of a Voyage in the rare book section of the Centre for Newfoundland Studies. It is also available as a digitized e-book. The copy I read, though, was an original, leather-bound edition handed down since the mid-nineteenth century through Medyett’s descendants in Newfoundland, to whom I am related. I came to know the book as an object of family history that still circulates among the Goodridge family. I first read it as a source of information about their origins in Devon and as what we now might call a “prequel” to their permanent settlement in Newfoundland.

The leather was peeling off the binding of the family copy; notes were jotted in the margins. Between the pages were pieces of family memorabilia that had been inserted through the years, including a genealogy of the family through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries listing places of birth, marriage, and death. The obituaries were either copied from newspapers or prepared for them. The passages describing the inheritance of the Renews estate had been copied out by hand on index cards so that the information could be circulated independently of the book.

Medyett’s Narrative of a Voyage is an obscure, minor work and I do not want to overstate its importance, but I would like to explain why it holds my attention and what I think we might learn from an obscure text like this.

In the first case, it is remarkable as a living work that continues to circulate through a large extended family. Nearly two centuries after its appearance, it still provides the family with a “cognitive map” of the forces that settled them in Newfoundland and connect them to Devon. I recently had to give back my copy so that, almost 200 years later, a nephew could do a school report on Uncle Medyett’s adventure.

What the family values in this book is a detailed genealogy that situates Medyett and his brother in a long line of Goodridges from Devon. It dramatizes the “prehistory” of the settling of this Devonian family of yeoman, farmers, and innkeepers, cum sealers and castaways: One brother roams the wild, unpopulated islands of the Southern Ocean, making a living through a temporary occupation of the new frontiers that colonial expansion had opened up, as the other begins to establish a settled colonial family in the northern reaches of the Empire.

Recent colonial historiography has taken a whole new interest in “transnational families” like the Goodridges as social institutions that played an important role in the connections and networks that formed the world system. The estates, wills, inheritance patterns, forms of obligation, marriage, and love that tied together families like these were the mechanisms through which the larger-scale political and economic forces of colonialism were realized in the everyday life-worlds and lived experiences of ordinary people. By the end of the eighteenth century, these families had drawn together a web of people, money, and information that connected, among other things, bloody sealing expeditions in the Southern Ocean and fishing stations in the North Atlantic.[6]

At the time of its publication, though, no one would have recognized Narrative of a Voyage as a book about a Newfoundland family. When it was first sold in England in the 1830s, it was as one of countless other Robinsonades, or castaway stories in the style of Robinson Crusoe, for which there was a continuous popular demand since Defoe’s founding text of the genre in 1719. Medyett’s castaway narrative rode the wave of popular fascination with these tales of desolation and hardship. In the Romantic period when it appeared, there was an immense popular interest in this “minor literature” of authenticated and truthful varieties of Crusoe tales. The reading public wanted to hear stories of these modern beings who, through some catastrophic misfortune, were dispossessed of all traces of civilization and human convenience and forced back into the state of nature. These were tales of modern people who had been made to live like wild beasts, and who had only their own resourcefulness to aid them in retaking themythic Hobbesian step from animal to human.[7]

Such works styled themselves on the genre conventions of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. The figures through which their Enlightenment themes of “anthropogenesis” and self-assertion came to life were not exceptional beings like Odysseus, or the Christian martyrs, but ordinary people. The characters of Robinsonades were adventurers and seafarers and sometimes sealers, like Medyett Goodridge, with backgrounds no different from their readers. Virginia Woolf thought that Crusoe was a story about everyone because, in the dimming and reigniting of human possibility, it revealed the tenuous hold on life, others, and civility that we all share.[8]

While these stories were about humanity in general, as Woolf suggests, they had a special resonance for the colonies. Above all, they were stories about the perils and risks that accompanied the opening up and settling of the colonial world. As a popular art form, the Robinsonade captured the shared desires and anxieties of colonial modernity. As a new genre of literature it differed from an older tradition of shipwreck narratives because the scenes of maritime catastrophe and destruction were here followed by a second narrative moment in which the protagonists were forced to recreate a new world in their new isolated and diminished circumstances — typically a desert island. In the narrative tension at the centre of these stories, ordinary people were forced to recreate civilization in the midst of an alien and hostile environment. In this way, the genre gave representational form to diffuse and inarticulate fears of what the isolated colonial life in the New World could do to the European. As I explain below, recent work in settler studies has shown how similar anxieties about the possibility of creating civil life in the midst of uncivil places could be found in wider cultural representations of the colonies, and in debates about how they should be settled and governed and what kind of life might be possible there. With these thoughts in mind, I would like to offer some historical and social context for Medyett’s Narrative of a Voyage, and then go on to make some more speculative comments on what minor texts like this, in the castaway or Robinsonade genre, might add to “settler studies” and, more especially, to the discourse on the settling of Newfoundland.

Like Robinson Crusoe and its many derivatives, Narrative of a Voyage takes the form of a Bildungsroman — a story of the self-formation of an individual life.[9] Medyett describes his development from child to adulthood as driven by a tension between the timeless security of his family hearth in Paignton and all the modern opportunity and adventure of the seafaring life that connected the bustling harbours of Paignton and Devonshire to the wider world. Medyett begins his tale by locating himself in the time and space of late eighteenth-century Devon. He is one in a long line of Goodridges who have been in Paignton since time immemorial, as yeomen, farmers, innkeepers, and seafarers. He describes the intricate sequence of deaths, wills, second marriages, and inheritances that leads to his chapter in the Goodridge epic. We encounter him first as a schoolboy lit up by the mariner’s desire, and then at the age of 13 as a young man thrust into a seafaring life, touring around the North Atlantic triangle during the late years of the Napoleonic Wars.

He spends his teenage years moving around the Atlantic basin: from America to Newfoundland, and from the Azores to the West Indies. He records encounters with slavers, thieves, and what Rediker and Linebaugh call the many-headed hydra of “Sailors, pilots, felons, lovers, translators, musicians, mobile workers of all kinds” that made up the “Atlantic proletariat” who worked the engine of primitive accumulation that connected bodies, goods, and money together into an emerging world system.[10]

In these early years, Newfoundland is a familiar port of call. In one year alone, on board The Cenus with Captain Silly, he makes three separate trips from Newfoundland to Oporto, trading salt fish for Madeira wine.[11] Newfoundland is one node in this immense network of spaces, but it holds a special place in his young imagination. Paignton, as he tells us, is a village situated near Dartmouth, a seaport at that time doing considerable trade in the Newfoundland fisheries. The historian Keith Matthews said that by the early nineteenth century, Newfoundland was an extension of Devon.[12] We might imagine it as a sort of neighbourhood or suburb of Devonshire. Families from Devon had been working, and sometimes overwintering, in Newfoundland since the early 1600s. [13] One of the earliest known European houses in what is now Canada is a fisherman’s dwelling found at Renews. Given the settlement patterns of the early period, it quite likely belonged to someone from near Paignton. [14] Newfoundland is such a familiar point of reference for a boy from Devon that when, as a man of 20, Medyett seeks wider horizons and adventures, the island marks the boundary of the familiar and the unknown: “About April, 1820 I expressed my intention of going to London to go on a longer voyage than Newfoundland, adopting the phrase that Newfoundland was hardly out of the smoke of my father’s chimney.”[15]

Artur Blain, who has written one of the most sustained analyses of the Robinsonade, explains that works in this genre unfold in a semantic and spatial opposition of bounded and unbounded, closed and open spaces. Most begin with “the hero’s crossing of the boundary of the narrow, closed space of home . . . to the external, open space of boundless possibilities.”[16] In Medyett’s Narrative of a Voyage that closed space of home is the familiar circuit of the North Atlantic triangle that connected Devon, Southern Europe, and Newfoundland.

So, in 1820, seeking greater adventures beyond the smoke of his father’s chimney, Medyett Goodridge signs on for the fateful voyage bound for the Southern Ocean, seeking oils, fins, skins, and ambergris.

Blain identifies the three structural moments around which all Robinsonades are formed, and which distinguish them from the conventions of older, related genres like the travel and shipwreck narratives.[17] There is first a moment of catastrophic separation from civilization such as a shipwreck or abandonment; then unfolds the core of the work in which the subject is reduced to something resembling a “state of nature” and must recreate a world in the diminished circumstances of, usually, a desert island. This is most often followed by a final, third moment of rescue and re-entry into “civilization.” These elements can occur in different ratios of importance. Some works dwell more on the disastrous circumstances that reduce sailor to beast, others on the ingenuity of the ways that he (or she) creates a new world. As David Blewett shows, for instance, nineteenth-century English Robinsonades dwelt more on the bestial image of despair, while the French liked to emphasize themes of industry and reason.[18] The third moment — rescue — is not even essential to the genre. I will turn to questions about the meaning and interpretation of the genre below. For the moment, I will use Blain’s schema simply to distinguish these three moments of the narrative and to offer some context for the events that unfold in it.

Medyett’s separation from the known world of his youth begins on the 9th of May 1820, when he sets sail from Limehouse Hole Pier, London: “and now begins that part of my narrative, which though I trust it will be most interesting to my readers, was the most disastrous to me, and which separated me from my mother country for above eleven years.”[19]

He embarks with a crew of 15, ranging in age from 16 to 50. There are Englishmen from Dartmouth and London, an Italian, and a Hanoverian. Some are long-time South Sea fishers, others new to the trade. They meander down the coast of Europe and Africa, and by the end of September they have made it around the Cape of Good Hope and drop down into the southern basin of the earth, to make their way among the increasingly remote islands of Marseven and Diana, the Prince Edward Islands, and the Crozets. These islands are part of a widely dispersed constellation of points, separated by intervals of hundreds and thousands of miles and forming an arc across the Southern Ocean. They are visited by American and European crews, who live under boats and in huts and rough camps as they hunt for birds, seals, and furs. Many of these islands have the remains of huts and camps; some have animals left behind by earlier itinerant hunters who had stayed for a while. Each is extreme in some way. Some places are closer to the southern reaches of the Indian Ocean. Amsterdam Island, where some of the men end up for a spell, has volcanic hot springs and wild hogs that can sustain a crew in relative comfort for a duration. Nearby, St. Paul has firewood, hogs, and goats. Others, like the Crozets, where they spend almost two years, are subpolar and more extreme and inhospitable.

It is common to imagine colonialism as territorial conquest and the spread of European ideas of civility. As recent early modern archaeology has shown, however, the less considered but no less sociologically interesting forms of European colonialism are these early camp-like sites of temporary occupation for birding, fishing, and resource extraction. These were also folded into the web of power, money, and infrastructure that radiated out from Europe and channelled the world’s resources back to it. These places required new experimental ways of living and the domestication of restricted and extreme physical circumstances not usually thought suitable for human habitation.[20]

Newfoundland, where Medyett’s brother Henry was establishing a fishing business, was slowly undergoing an evolution from a slightly more elaborate form of migratory “fishing station” to settled colony with civil institutions such as parliament, jails, roads, press, and other markers of civil society. Nonetheless, as I explain more fully below, well into the twentieth century, public policy in Newfoundland was still influenced by the idea that permanent settlement in remote and isolated parts of the island, which were better suited to seasonal occupation, had produced pathological forms of social life that required radical intervention, ranging from changes in social entitlements to population resettlement and even suspension of the state.

Medyett and his mates first try their luck sealing at the Prince Edward Islands off South Africa, but the seals are not as numerous as expected, and the crew steer the Princess of Wales further on, to the Crozets. These islands lie at a point almost equidistant from South Africa, Antarctica, and Australia. They are really little more than barren rocks with scarce vegetation, visited only sporadically by seals and sea elephants. They are similar in appearance and climate to some stretches of coastal Newfoundland. The ship makes its way among the five islands, and in each case the men fall into a similar work routine. The Princess of Wales is moored offshore, and crews of a few men make expeditions by skiff to stay on the desolate rock islands and hunt seals and birds for days and sometimes weeks at a time. Medyett describes “the hardships and privations” this work places on the body and soul of an itinerant sealer:

The land affords no shelter whatsoever, there being neither tree nor shrub on these islands, and the weather is at most times extremely wet. . . . Their boat, therefore hauled on shore, serves them for their dwelling-house by day, and their lodging house by night. Their provisions consist of salt pork, bread, coffee and molasses; and on this hard fare, with the shelter only of their boat turned upside down, and tussicked up, they sometimes remain a fortnight at a time, each day undergoing excessive labor, in searching for and killing seals . . . and very often without meeting with an adequate reward, after all their privations. Added to this, when a gale renders it necessary for the vessel to drive to sea, each hour she is absent, the mind is harassed with fears for her safety, and of the consequences that would result to themselves if left on such a desolate spot, surrounded by a vast ocean, and where years might pass without a vessel ever coming near them.[21]

In a footnote to the text, he explains that “Tussicking up the boat consists in placing one edge on the ground, then raising the other three or four feet, with a sort of turf wall, leaving an opening for a doorway sufficient for the men to creep in and out. A fire is made outside the opening with sea elephant blubber and each man on retiring to rest takes his station between the thwarts of the boat where he usually rows.”[22]

The physical structure produced in this way gives us a sense of the scale of discomfort and the generally inhumane conditions — squat into the space between the thwarts — in which birds and fins were turned into wealth at these remote sites. Only the most elementary degree of domestication — the turf pressed into the edge of the boat — separates the men from the wild terrain. These rough conditions are bearable only as long as they can trust in their eventual return to the mother ship.

As the reader expects, though, one fateful night the men’s worst fears are realized. A gale forces the ship’s crew to slip the cable and take the vessel out to sea to ride out the rough weather, “but before we had proceeded any distance, it came on a dead calm, so that we entirely lost all command of the vessel.”[23] The crew then find themselves in unusual and dangerous circumstances: in water too deep to drop anchor but with no wind to steer her in any direction. Like this, they are left to the command of a wild and unpredictable swell that plays with the Princess of Wales through the night, before finally thrusting it up against the perpendicular cliffs “victim to the unspent power of a raging sea.”[24] Abandoning the sinking wreck, the crew escapes to the island by skiff with the few meagre supplies they are able to rescue.

Now begins the second “structural moment”: the recognition of the “desolate situation to which we now considered ourselves doomed for life.”[25] For the first three weeks of their stay, foul weather keeps them confined to the shelter of their skiff. These restricted circumstances — “tussicked” under the skiff — add to the immediate sense of crisis and the confined, limited horizon of their new world.

When the weather finally breaks, they emerge and their minds become “somewhat more reconciled to our forlorn situation.”[26] They make the first gestures towards creating a new world in these diminished circumstances and turn their attention to erecting “a more commodious dwelling place.”[27]

All their desolate island has to offer them are the bits of iron and wood left behind in the remains of an older American camp, evidence of the ongoing sporadic use of these islands that are unsuitable for long-term human habitation. Nevertheless, with stones and scraps of timber from the ship they set up the “House of Commons,” as they call their new home. Once the sea elephant skin roof is in place they “began to look a little after the interior comforts; for beds we gathered a sufficient quantity of the long dry grass; and the skins of seals we chanced to kill served us for sheets, blankets and counterpanes.”[28]

As they set about imposing domestic order on the desolate chaos, we recognize the conventions and tropes of the castaway genre: the ingenious solutions to practical problems of shelter, fire, water; the formation of a division of labour; and then the battle between a sublime loneliness and the solace of religion.

They invent primitive tools. They devise desperate methods of fishing and hunting that involve chasing fish onto the land and luring birds with fire at night. Members of the crew who had previously been to the Kerguelen Islands and South Georgia to procure sea elephant oil “were informed about the birds frequenting the South Sea Islands they use for food and the best mode of taking them.”[29]

Like other Robinsonades, this one conveys a purposive, sociological sense about their social affairs. The imperative of physical survival requires that the group’s routine activities be consciously thought out and arranged. One of the reasons Crusoe is thought to be the first novel is because it is the first work in which the ordinary activities of an average person are the object of sustained interest.[30] In these stories, the highly unusual context of the desert island — in this instance, a subantarctic tundra desert — makes otherwise quotidian matters stand out with an added significance and intensity. Along with the action, we are witnessing the creation of the lonely world in which it takes place. Thus:

Mr. Veale [the captain of the Princess of Wales] had fortunately saved his watch uninjured so we were able to divide our time pretty regularly when settled in our habitation. We usually rose about eight in the morning and took breakfast at nine; after breakfast some of the party would go catering for the day’s provisions whilst the others remained home to fulfill domestic offices to cook etc. . . . we . . . manufactured what we named mocha as a substitute for tea and this was prepared from raw eggs beat up in hot water. We supped about seven or eight, and generally retired to rest about ten.[31]

The greatest feats of ingenuity concern their exploitation of the sea elephant’s carcass. A passage on some of its more clever uses gives a sense of their resourcefulness in meeting the visceral demands of life in this extreme environment:

The Sea Elephants . . . served us for meat, washing, lodging, firing, lamp-light, shoe-leather, sewing thread, grates, washing tubs, and tobacco pipes. The flesh resembled very coarse beef . . . and by no means palatable; also the skins of the old ones, which with the snotters[32] and flippers, well boiled, formed a thick jelly, and with the addition of a few eggs, two or three pigeons or sea hens, made an excellent soup. The tongue, the heart and sweetbread we roasted, boiled or fried, according as our fancy dictated.

Secondly, in the laundry department, . . . making a washing tub of the body, we then rubbed away at our linen, dipped in the blood as a washing woman would in soap-suds, and after rinsing it out two or three times in the running brook close by, our wash was complete and the linen was cleansed as well as if we had used the best soap for the purpose. . . . our firing and lamp light were produced from the blubber or fat of the animal. . . . And the teeth form a pipe of sorts.[33]

For close to two years, they live like this, and after a time they settle into a routine: following a day of foraging, bludgeoning, and domestic work, they take supper (or “supp”) at eight and retire with an elephant tooth pipe and a cup of bird egg tea, to tuck into their sealskin sheets and counterpanes. Left to their own devices, they create an elementary parliament and public sphere where: “The welfare of the community was the individual endeavour of all; and individual wishes always gave away to the proposals that obtained the largest suffrages.”[34]

The desert island section of the narrative also has its share of passages conveying the sharp pain of despair and deeply affective states of shared desperation and fear for what will become of them. However organized and rationalized their domestic affairs, they cannot help but succumb to a self-pity when they are seized by the magnitude of their situation: “castaway on a desert island in the midst of an immense ocean without a hope of deliverance lost to all human sympathy. . . . The chance of our ever being released from our Seagirt prison seemed so remote and impossible that we had seriously resolved on the steps that should be pursued as we individually departed this life.”[35]

Their growing indifference to their appearance reminds them of how they have been reduced to their diminished circumstances, and have started to live according to standards of the world they have created:

as we happened to have neither barber nor razors among us, the addition of long beards to our sealskin dresses and fur caps, with a knife and steel stuck in our belt, gave us anything but a pleasing exterior, however, as we had not to come in contact with any of the fairer works of creation, we did not much study our appearance; and on the whole we formed as grotesque a group as could well be imagined.[36]

He imagines how they must have first appeared to their rescuers: “Dressed in shaggy fur skins, with cap of the same material, and beard of nearly two years growth, it was not probable they should take him for a civilized being.”[37]

In the third narrative moment of rescue and return, the shaggy derelicts are discovered by an American vessel passing through these waters after seals and birds. They are found on 21 January 1823. The ship’s captain promises to drop them on the Ile de France (now Mauritius) in the Indian Ocean at the end of March. In the meantime, the vessel stays its course on for the islands of Amsterdam and St. Paul, 1,100 miles northeast of the Crozets. The sealing is so good, though, that they remain in the South Seas for a month more than anticipated.

Frustrated by this waylay and eager to improve their lot, three of the recently rescued men ask to be let ashore on nearby Amsterdam Island, where they can seal on their own while waiting to flag a passing vessel on this well-travelled sea route to Hobart and New South Wales. Not long after, still more of the rescued men complain that even though they have now laboured for months on the ship, the captain has not offered them a change of clothes or linen and has left them dressed in the animal skin tunics they had fabricated on their desolate island. Their demand for a degree of human decency is taken as an act of insubordination and the offenders are ordered to be put ashore on nearby St. Paul Island.

In an act of defiant solidarity, Medyett and all except three of the others determine to join the newly outcast. With remarkable ease they return to desolation, confident that someone will soon happen by and carry them on to the next destination. It is true that St. Paul and Amsterdam Islands have warmer climates with considerably better resources than their last home. St. Paul Island has boars, goats, firewood, and the remains of an old hut. Amsterdam has hogs and hot springs where they can be cooked. Most importantly, both islands are in the busy lanes of sea traffic. Medyett explains:

a little delay was the only privation we were likely to feel, as we had not procured any great addition to our comforts. We had not received even a supply of clothes, had labored unceasingly since we had reached these islands, and our only reward appeared to be a passage to a land of strangers, where, when we arrived, we should be in complete destitution.[38]

So, they trade a little more desolation for a little less destitution. On the first of April they disembark, still in sealskin tunics, and take up residence in their new home on St. Paul Island. They set up in the rundown remains of a hut. With the same spirit of ingenuity that served them on the Crozets, they catch wild hogs and keep them alive in a cave adjoining their dwelling, feeding them on the mice that overrun the hut. They live like this for two months until the third of June, when a vessel appears that collects them all and drops them, after a time, in Van Diemen’s Land. When they disembark in Hobart Town, they are still dressed in the skin tunics they had made on the Crozets.

Here they find themselves in a centre of international flows of humanity, power, money, goods, and prisoners. Medyett works itinerant jobs with an eye to returning to Devon. He is a logger, a bark cutter, a hired hand, and a ferryman. Seven years, seven months, and seven days later, he returns to “the smoke of his father’s chimney” in Devon, where he learns of his brother Henry’s new enterprise in Newfoundland. Had he inherited the Renews estate, as he had expected, he would have rolled the money into a life in Hobart. Instead, he remained in Devon. He married Ann Moyle, whose father was a musician at the Newfoundland Inn. Medyett wrote the story of his seafaring life, all the while his nephew Alan began to settle the Goodridges in Newfoundland.

Medyett Goodridge’s book went through several printings, each one reproducing the endorsements of the readers of the previous editions, including the royal family. In Devon, Exeter, and London, it was sold by subscription, by hand, and by word of mouth as a Robinsonade, a tale in the style of Defoe’s. As the “Opinions of the Press” reproduced in its front matter explain, it “reminds us forcibly of the adventures of Robinson Crusoe and bears more the stamp of verity than any other work of the kind we have read.” It was the popular demand for this literary form that accounts for the success of the book’s several printings and many endorsements, and whatever meagre source of income it provided its author.

Since its publication in 1719, Defoe’s novel has been reworked into countless derivative forms, by great authors (Goethe, Jules Verne, Michel Tournier, J.M. Coetzee) and by many more in the lesser firmament of Medyett Goodridge. The castaway can be one or many. It can be any gender. The desert island can be a scene of catastrophe or utopia, purposeful industry or eternal boredom. Castaway narratives stir up archetypal Biblical and Odyssean themes of homelessness and return, but it is important to recognize the newness and modernity of these stories. The castaway is a figure who emerged in the movement of European expansion into the New World. They lived like pre-civil beasts but they were modern characters who were carried away on arguably the most advanced technology of the day — the deep-ocean vessel. The science and commerce of the age carried them out of the reach of human civilization. Unlike the mythic “wild man” of the Middle Ages, who supposedly still dwelled in the forests of Europe and had not yet left the State of Nature, castaways were modern people who had been forced back into it, through the risks and perils of modern imperial adventure.[39]

Recent scholarship on the closely related genre of early modern shipwreck narratives has studied those forms of popular literature as kinds of “resistance” to the expansionist ambitions of European imperialism. The fascination with the pathos and suffering of the shipwreck signals a “dis-identification” with empire, an interruption of the ideals of maritime circulation and movement at the heart of “imperialist ideology.”[40] Shipwreck stories provided detailed studies of the failures of human contrivances to tame nature for our purposes. These stories described the destruction of lives subjected to the incalculable risk of seafaring and colonial adventure.[41]

The castaway story differs in important ways from the shipwreck narrative. Certainly, it interrupts ideas of imperial circulation, but it addresses a more particular set of concerns about the meaning and effects of isolation, and the possibility of recreating European ideas of civility in the outer reaches of the known world. For this reason, its appearance and popularity as a literary form may help us appreciate some of the “cultural imaginary” of the settler colonial world in which transnational families like the Goodridges moved about.

Narrative is a socially symbolic act that, whether made explicit or not, is about the social and historical world in which a work emerges. Popular narratives “manage anxieties about the social order,” Fredric Jameson writes, but to do so they must first “rev them up” and then given them “some rudimentary expression.”[42] The idea here is that works of popular culture hold our attention because they provoke and play with ambiguous anxieties and desires about our collective lives. As Jameson explains:

anxiety and hope are two faces of the same collective consciousness so that works of mass culture, even if their function lies in the legitimation of the existing order — or some worse one — cannot do their job without deflecting in the latter’s service the deepest and most fundamental hopes and fantasies of the collectivity, to which they can therefore no matter in how distorted a fashion, be found to have given voice.[43]

Popular narratives give representation to the often unpresentable social forces that constrain and enable us at any given time. Shipwreck and castaway narratives are especially interesting to consider in this way because they are among the first forms of mass-produced, popular print culture. They appeared in pamphlets, pocket book editions, and “string literature” — pamphlets hung over strings in the bookshops of Lisbon.[44] What anxieties and desires circulated in them? And to return to the theme with which we began, what, if anything, might they add to our understanding of the family settler narrative at the centre of Medyett’s book?

One common interpretation of Robinson Crusoe presents him as a proto-capitalist and colonizer who maximizes his value, rationalizes his means and ends, and dominates the environment and all the subjects already there. He emerges in the currents of imperial expansion and he is their ideological exemplar. Crusoe’s desolation is compensated for by the utopian vision of the self-made man and the triumph of European civility over the most barbaric circumstances.[45]

Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe excites our attention, though, because it plays with the possibility of the failure of seafaring adventure and with the threat that the restricted horizon of the colonial milieu poses to European ideas of civility. Though he creates his systems and tends his goats, what Crusoe fears most is not being rescued and instead being swallowed up by the island. The spectre of isolation is what makes the otherwise dull description of his duties readable. No matter what the ultimate fate — rescued or not — the castaway narrative is centred in this fantasy space in which we are asked to imagine the possibility of absolute desolation, and the denuding of the most basic infrastructure of human well-being as the condition of all the wonders and opportunities of colonial expansion.

The Robinsonade was a fluid form that was borrowed and copied, excerpted and modified. Through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the figure of the castaway that emerged in this popular “minor literature” was not always the heroic self-actualizing individual. As the genre developed, it gave rise both to “bourgeois” themes of mastery and self-sovereignty but equally to tales of anxiety about subjection to inhuman circumstance. One version celebrated themes of self-sovereignty and fortitude; another gave rise to more unsettling images of the imperial outside as threatening places of doom, degeneration, and incivility. Minor books in the genre like Asthon’s Memorial, The Dutch Sailor, and Crusoe Richard Davis offered authentic accounts of men and women who were so altered by these places that they had fallen backward into the state of nature.[46]

Ian Watt describes some of the real castaway stories that inspired Defoe’s tale: “a Frenchman who, after only two years of solitude on Mauritius, tore his clothing to pieces in a fit of madness brought on by a diet of raw tortoise; and . . . a Dutch seaman on St. Helena who disinterred the body of a buried comrade and set out to sea in the coffin.” As these desperate figures were “harassed by fear and dogged by ecological degradation, they sank more and more to the level of animals, lost the use of speech, went mad, or died of inaction.”[47] Eve Tavor Bannet explains that this “other Robinson Crusoe” was “Less what Joyce called ‘the symbol of British conquests’ and the ‘true prototype of the British colonist’ than a representative of the often victimized British common man . . . [who] . . . risked danger, capture and death for a livelihood, to see the world, or for a place to settle.”[48]

As it develops after Defoe, the Robinsonade is about not only what the European can do to the colony, but what the colony can do to the European. It addresses the power of their new home to make them sick before their time, and to drive them mad with the solitude of their own thoughts.

David Blewett has studied the history of the illustration of Robinson Crusoe through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and has traced the depiction of Crusoe as a beast, a terrifying “Nebuchadnezzar [reduced] to the level of animal existence.”[49] This “bestialization” is the thrust of the many dystopian versions of the story, such as William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, but most interestingly of J.M. Coetzee’s rewriting of Crusoe, Foe. A second castaway arrives on the island and through her eyes we see that Cruso (sic) is now old and set in his ways. He has been altered and weathered by his time alone. His teeth ache. He is not bothered by the monotony of his diet. He no longer lights a signal fire; he goes to the bluffs not to watch for ships but to revel in his solitude.[50]

By the late eighteenth century, the islands and continents of the globe had congealed into a world system that circulated people, goods, and information. At the same time, the spectre of the isolated human began to fascinate European thought all the more. Gilles Deleuze says that as the world became more connected and fluid, we mythologized desertedness and made it sacred.[51] The Robinsonade was, and still is, a central device for representing and thinking about what isolation teaches us about ourselves. One of the reviewers of Medyett’s book remarks, “Somehow or other human nature has always delighted to picture to itself a being dwelling in perfect isolation from all of humankind.”

Isolation has had an ambiguous meaning since the eighteenth century, when Defoe’s book appeared. On the one hand, isolation is the sign of absolute sovereignty and self-presence in many individualist philosophies of the eighteenth century. It is the isolation of Crusoe that interests Rousseau and Adam Smith. Removed from social influence and constraint, he becomes the rational economic agent any of us would naturally be. On the other hand, isolation is the principle of absolute subjection to a set of imposed circumstances. Isolation separates the physical body from the means of exercising its agency. Napoleon, for example, who was on St. Helena at the same time that Medyett and his crew were stranded on the Crozets, is punished by his own isolation. The cellular Panopticon — the symbol of institutional social control imagined by Jeremy Bentham in the late eighteenth century — works by isolating individuals from populations in order to better subject them to a regime of power. Since the eighteenth century, isolation and solitude have had these contradictory values. In a remarkable reading of Robinson Crusoe, Jacques Derrida traces the contradictory image of solitude at its centre. An absolute solitude is the defining quality of ultimate sovereignty. Whether it concerns a King, a people, or an individual, sovereignty is the ability to be what one is independently of others. Isolation, on the other hand, is also the basis of desolation (de solus), understood here as a lack of those relations to others that are necessary for human flourishing. [52] Isolation, in other words, is the defining quality of the two extreme possibilities of human experience — the beastly and the sovereign in us.

To bring these thoughts back to the themes of settlement and family history with which we began, I would like to offer some more speculative, concluding remarks on how some of these anxieties about isolation, settlement, and sovereignty that circulated through popular print literature might help us appreciate the wider colonial imaginary in which families like the Goodridges settled into the New World at the time that these books were popular.

As settler societies emerged in the nineteenth century and European women and children became more common in the New World and the tropics, Crusoe-esque anxieties about the isolating and affective qualities of the colonial milieu became real existential problems for settlers. Could the colony be a place not only to make wealth through temporary occupation, but in which to live and thrive? Colonial life was a scene of opportunity and wonder, but it also exposed the European to alien food, weather, disease, animals, microbes, social structures, and beliefs. Colonial life posed a threat to ideas of personal and political sovereignty. Could there be regular civil life and sovereignty in places like Newfoundland, which, despite its integration into worldwide circuits of commerce and production, still lacked civil institutions like a parliament, schools, and churches into the late eighteenth century, and where, in the more remote parts, one still found people living in rough, camp-like settings? Would there be normal forms of intimacy, intergenerational continuity, transmission of wealth, knowledge, and culture? Could women live there? Could children thrive there?

Scholars such as Ann Laura Stoler and Satoshi Mituzani have shown how, in the tropics, fears of long-term exposure to colonial conditions led to an “internal racism” that organized white privilege on the basis of time spent in the colonies — the more time without furlough, the fewer opportunities.[53] The circulation of Europeans into and out of the colonies, in the right ratios of movement and stasis, produced distinctions among kinds of persons who were more or less civilized, and more or less able and fitted for self-rule. Newfoundland itself offers an interesting and important variation on this theme.

There is a long tradition of questioning whether Newfoundland was suitable for settled human habitation or was instead on a continuum with places like the Crozet Islands and, consequently, better suited for temporary, seasonal occupation. David Alexander said that “The burden which Newfoundland has carried is to justify that it should have any people. From the Western Adventurers of the seventeenth century to Canadian economists in the twentieth, there has been a continuing debate as to how many, if any, people should live in Newfoundland.”[54]

Historians of Newfoundland have spilled a lot of ink debating whether, and in what way, the island was subjected to legal restrictions on settlement that purposely “retarded” the development of civil institutions such as governors, courts, jails, parliaments, and schools in order to promote migratory fishing interests that saw the place as a site of temporary seasonal use. Whatever the answer to that debate, it became common to complain that the kind of unplanned and unsponsored “settlement without government” that developed in the isolated out-ports of eighteenth-century Newfoundland diminished the conditions of the people who lived there — and eventually affected their ability to live in civility and self-sovereignty.[55] Themes of degenerative isolation run through the discourse on the settling of early Newfoundland and inform ideas about its governance well into the twentieth century.

In 1764, James Balfour, missionary for the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, found the inhabitants of Trinity to be living “in an original state of nature, or if you please, little better than savages.”[56] In the fall of 1723, with the migratory fishers gone and another winter of “lawless” isolation approaching, a small committee of leading inhabitants in St. John’s formed themselves into a community for their mutual preservation. Calling on the authority of their copy of John Locke’s Treatise on Civil Government, they produced a document to “embody [themselves] into a community for the mutual preservation of his Majesty’s Peace.” Among the many things one could say about this remarkable scene is that the authors understood that their isolated circumstances had stripped them of a degree of civility, which they then felt compelled to purposely recreate. More remarkable perhaps is the authority of print culture that made this possible. At any rate, John Locke gave them the right to detain and punish their neighbours, and with this, the principal inhabitants were lifted out of the state of nature to which Newfoundland was reduced in the fall of each year, when the admirals left at the close of the fishing season and “men do as they list.”[57]

Fears about the degenerative effects of isolation gained a whole new importance in the Amulree Report of 1933, which justified suspension of responsible government. There were, of course, many other factors at work in the collapse of the Newfoundland state, but the Amulree Report nevertheless identified isolation and degeneracy as some of the causes of the failure of democracy on the island, and pointed to these characteristics of life in Newfoundland as justification for its principal recommendation. In the northern and southwestern promontories, the British Commission sent to investigate the island’s political and economic troubles found that:

Long periods of enforced isolation have given rise to intermarriage, chronic disease through absence of medical advice, and gradual degeneration. . . . in the more remote places the inhabitants are driven in on themselves . . . and exhibit a child-like simplicity when confronted with matters outside their own immediate horizon.[58]

Like J.M. Coetzee’s Cruso, who is no longer bothered by the monotony of his diet, people on the northern and southwestern promontories appeared to the commissioners to have been shaped by a pathological isolation that had driven them in on themselves and made them accustomed to their limited horizon.[59]

To confront fears of isolation and subjection to diminished circumstances, settler families of means throughout the colonial world moved frequently from the colony to the metropolis for education and “furlough,” as the British in India called it, in order to escape the restricted conditions of colonial life. The nineteenth-century Goodridges settled in Newfoundland but family artifacts, such as the genealogical and other records inserted into Medyett’s book, and records and ledgers in the Maritime History Archives at Memorial University show that while they quickly ascended the political and economic structure, they had an uneasy relation with colonial life. They seem to have lived a version of what V.S. Naipaul calls “a half and half life,” belonging neither to colony nor to metropolis but to some new middle ground that was opening up between centre and periphery.[60] The Goodridges lived in the colony and helped build its economy and polity but they led large, cosmopolitan lives that involved wintering and convalescing in England and Europe. They hired English nannies to care for their children and sent them to school in England. They greeted their own fish-laden ships from Newfoundland as they arrived in Southern European ports and then stayed on, living for months at a time in hotels in the south of France and Algeria. The changes in domestic life in Newfoundland mirrored similar changes that were redefining the lives of elite Portuguese families in Africa, and the French and Dutch in Indochina.

My point here is not to suggest that the Goodridges thought of themselves as castaways, but rather to show some of the ways in which anxieties about isolation, settlement, and civility that circulated through the popular print culture of the time were reflected in colonial life. These anxieties shaped new ways of living, thinking, and ruling on the peripheries of the world system.

Castaway tales like Narrative of a Voyage confirmed European ideas of self-assertion and ingenuity. They also stirred up fears of the powerful alterity — microbial, cultural, and environmental — that Europeans like the Goodridges might encounter as they turned the rough camps and sites of primary resource extraction into places of permanent settlement and civil society.