Sailor? Pirate? Byronic stage-player? Let us see.
II
The known, the traceable, history of Edward John Trelawny begins with his birth in London in 1792, and comes to an abrupt end some seventeen years afterward. His father, Lt. Colonel Charles Trelawny, was a middle aged army officer who had retired to economise his wife’s fortune, the relics of his own, and play the rôle of stern, Roman father on the stage of family life. Both family and family name were Cornish, and the boy began life with the heritage of those of Cornish blood, the heritage of an ancient and separate race whose antiquity runs past the pillars of Stonehenge into the dawn of time. There was a Celtic streak in Trelawny; the joy of battle was his, the quickening fire, the strange madness, and even the Celt’s power over the souls of words.
Something darker and far more ancient, however, had fought its way back to life in Trelawny’s veins. The boy was born a warrior, but not a warrior of Celtic Arthur’s kind. The true comrades of his spirit were the heroes of the primitive Gaels, the mighty men whose blood seemed to “run up into their fiery hair,” during the exultation of killing and war.
Fanny Kemble saw Trelawny in his later years during his visit to the United States, and divined the dark side of his inheritance. “Mr. Trelawny’s countenance,” she wrote, “was habitually serene, occasionally sweet in its expression, but sometimes savage with the fierceness of a wild beast.”
When a young savage comes into the world, the problem of how to civilize him usually commands attention, but no one bothered his head about Edward John Trelawny. The savagery of neglected boyhood was allowed to grow wild in the congenial soil of the boy’s obscure and primitive inheritance. It was not a pretty childhood, and the following anecdote preserves its quality.
The Trelawny urchins had an enemy, a tame raven “with ragged wings and a grave antique aspect,” who used to drive them away from some fruits they coveted. This old demon had a trick of rushing at the children with outstretched wings, and though they threw stones, he carried the day. Little Edward John, however, having courage and the warrior instinct, kept up the fight, and presently managed to wound the enemy. Shouting and yelling, the children raced to the gruesome execution, and a final curtain descended on Edward John hanging the horrible blood-stained old mass of feathers in a noose made of a sash borrowed from his little sister!
Spelling lessons were battles. “Spell your name, you young savage,” shouts the Roman father. “Spell, sir?” The boy, becoming confused, misplaces the vowels. At this, the Roman father “arose in wrath, overturned the table, and bruised his shins in an attempt to kick me as I dodged him, and rushed out of the room.”
From the bosom of this peppery homelife, the great, bony, awkward boy was kicked into a school. There he encountered floggings, canings, and hideous practical jokes. The young Cornish Celt with the black hair and the wild blue eyes fought the savagery with savagery. His Roman father countered by handing him over to the Royal Navy. The new life was the school all over again, save that the sea-hazing was more brutal and the practical jokes even more atrocious. A strange trait, that English liking for practical jokes! Then followed a season at Dr. Burney’s Naval Academy at Greenwich, a voyage on a frigate during whose course “Tre” revenged himself on a persecutor by jabbing him with a pen knife, and then a long world cruise on a sloop of war.
Brutalised at home, brutalised at school, brutalised in the Navy, it is a wonder that the young savage remained reasonably human. With the arrival of adolescence a sense of injustice and an urge to rebellion struck root in his mind. Rebellion was his only outlet, and in rebelling, he was most his primitive self. For the boy was only primitive, not vicious. Presently he decided that he had had enough, and made up his mind to desert.