Graham Palmer rediscovers The Life and John Daniel and explores what this proto-science fiction work has to say about exploration, colonialism and trade.
In the 1700s maps still carry the legend terra incognita. There is money to be made and the Dutch and British East India Companies are ransacking the far-east for commodities saleable in the west. While longitude remains difficult to calculate, navigation is often by the circling stars and over 70 ships run aground and are wrecked in 1751 alone. Into this strange world John Daniel launches himself, hurtling around like an 18th century Dr Who with absolutely no control over where he’ll end up. Take Robinson Crusoe, cross it with Gulliver’s Travels, add in a flying machine engineered around an iron water pump and you’ll get the gist. Here is a story of sea-monsters, unimaginable lunar animals and brilliantly shining copper people which exposes the contemporaneous ideas of gender, race, civilisation and trade.*
The narrative starts with John Daniel (a provincial English blacksmith) fleeing his stepmother’s sexual advances (a ‘vile prostitution’ which will eventually drive her insane) and joining the crew of a merchantman heading for Livorno. He abandons the idea of setting up in trade there as the market is already flooded with cheap English goods and instead earns his passage on a Dutch East India Company ship heading east.
A violent storm leaves him shipwrecked on an otherwise uninhabited island with just one other survivor, a Dutch sailor called Thomas who proves to be a resourceful companion as they slaughter the wildlife and scavenge from other wrecks to survive. On one expedition Thomas is left with a branch impaled in his groin after falling from a tree but will not let John tend the wound. In agony, Thomas is forced to admit that he is really a woman called Ruth Comin. After treating the wound, John reflects: ‘I knew not where to divide between her present and past actions, or to separate the manly from the womanly part of them…whence I naturally judged, that what we take things to be, that they certainly are, as to us; and that the distinction rather lies in our own true or false judgment, than in the objects themselves.’
Ruth’s is not a spiritual fall from grace but a physical revelation that frees John’s previous infatuation with his male companion to flourish into ‘extravagant love’. His marriage proposal (which will unite the representatives of two of the world’s most powerful trading nations) is, however, initially rejected by Ruth who worries that their uncivilized offspring might ‘become wild, as the island swine’ and prey on ‘each other, without the least regard of social virtue, or fear of the omnipotent being.’ John counters with the example of Adam and Eve, and presents her with a wedding ring made out of cat gut. (If the book has a motto, it’s ‘Needs must’.)
The couple’s Eden is the ‘Island of Providence’ and provides all that they want, even following the birth of their son. It is only when bodies from a wreck wash up on the beach that the couple realise that their child needs to be clothed, so they strip the corpses, finding ‘two large handkerchiefs, a tobacco-box, and a long clasp knife.’ This snaps John into a frenzy of acquisition as he salvages European-manufactured goods from the splintered ship. What at first sight appears to be a coffin proves to be a trunk filled with clothes, swords, pistols, gunpowder, shot, carpenters’ tools and alcohol. Life is born out of death as the old world provisions their colonial settlement and John and Ruth’s offspring increase. In the sixth year of their ‘reign’ another wreck brings with it a pregnant bitch (whose pups will help exterminate the island’s dangerous wild boars), seeds (which can be planted on their new farmstead and sprout into barley, peas and oats), bricks (to build a furnace) and cannon that can be melted down and refashioned into ploughs and nails. So the plantation can flourish, John and Ruth encourage their children to inter-marry and produce grandchildren. One son, Jacob, remains stubbornly single, wedded to the idea of ‘England’, which he believes is the whole world beyond the island, and the craft of smithing, which he has learned at his father’s knee. On discovering that Jacob has crafted a flying machine (‘the Eagle’), John is astonished.
Before he can experience a flight for himself, at Ruth’s request he sets out on a six-month royal ‘progress’ to his children’s farmsteads in order to coordinate the destruction of the island’s dangerous wild boar (which are no longer needed as generations had been selectively bred until they became tame) and establish consensus on ‘regulations…for the well being of the island in general’. On his return, John and Jacob take to the air but lose control of the Eagle and crash land on the moon, which they think is some, as yet unexplored, part of the globe. The innocent, unarmed moon-natives ‘shine like gold’ and worship the sun in their naivety. Untouched by trade, they seek to gift John and Jacob as much food as they can eat but the moon-food cannot sate the earthmen’s appetite. This is no El Dorado. Clearly there is little of value to be had, so John abandons his attempt at exploration, and they depart. Their reception on reaching the Earth could not be more different. As the Eagle swoops down on a bustling port, a ship at anchor opens fire, damaging its wing, and they are forced to crash-land on a jagged island. John and Jacob find it inhabited by ‘devils’ who ‘bore the exact resemblance of the human species in their erect posture and limbs, save their mouths were as broad as their whole faces, and had very little chins; their arms seemed all bone, and very thin, their hands had very long fingers, and webbed between, with long claws on them.’ These are the illiterate descendants of a respectable English couple (Miles and Joanna Anderson) who were journeying to take on the governorship of a fort ‘on the coast of Africa’ when they were shipwrecked. Their children are men ‘in faculties’ but ‘bestial’ ‘in nature’, who can only eat raw meat and fish and do not know the use of cutlery. Having got used to the male creature’s appearance and realized he is highly intelligent, John conjectures that his physical adaptations are not deformities but have been designed by ‘divine will’ so that he may better survive on the island.
John learns his error when he comes across Joanna’s hidden journal. It reveals the colony is founded on a lie and that Joanna had been ‘too much of our first mother’ [Eve] and had cheated on her husband with a sea monster. She had explained away the ‘mixed breed’ twins’ fish-like scales and claws by claiming that her shock at seeing a horrific monster while she was pregnant had caused the babies’ deformities. For John this is a bombshell. Joanna’s sexual attraction to the ‘other’ was as insatiable as his own stepmother’s. The disfigurement of Joanna’s offspring – creatures he previously thought well-adapted to their environment – is a direct result of her inability to tame her nature. On reading the journal, John can ‘no longer take the same satisfaction in the society and company’ of his host (whom he now thinks a ‘monster’) and leaves as soon as he can.
The Eagle next lands in Lapland where a Sámi divine reveals that on the Island of Providence, with the patriarch/king removed, civilisation is collapsing. Ruth is ‘dying with grief’ from losing her husband, his offspring have quarrelled and ‘great mischief was like to follow.’ With no bearing to guide him back to save the island from descending into savagery, John and his son board a whaling ship captained by a Yorkshireman. Jacob, disillusioned, by the people he has encountered since returning to Earth, is drowned – his whaleboat pulled under by the leviathan he has snared. In England, John – a penniless ‘patriarch’ of a figure – lives off the charity of strangers until he succumbs to dementia and dies, leaving a stranger to recount his story.
Since first publication, ‘The life of John Daniel’ has been through several editions, though is now largely forgotten. Intriguingly, the first printing identified its author as Ralph Morris – a name suppressed in all subsequent printings, begging the question, ‘Why?’ The book leaves us with other difficult and more unpleasant questions. Questions like, ‘How exactly did we get here?’ Perhaps that is why it has been mistaken for science fiction.
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Graham Palmer
*It may be a coincidence but in 1681 a ship under the real-life Captain John Daniel charted part of the coast of Western Australia.