John Holdsworth, Chief Mate

by William Clark Russell

On the arrival of the “Jessie Maxwell” at Sydney, Holdsworth had accompanied Mr. Sherman to his house, and been then and there established as an inmate as long as he chose to remain. He was also given a clerkship in Mr. Sherman’s office, worth £250 a year, which was by no means an out-of-the-way price for a man’s labour in Australia in those days, though in Holdsworth’s case the salary was rendered nearly worth as much again by his friend providing him with board and lodging free. The truth was (1) Mr. Sherman wanted an honest man in his office; (2) Holdsworth’s sufferings, friendlessness, and perfect amiability, coupled with his deprivation of memory, which affected all whom he conversed with as something worse even than blindness, had obtained a permanent hold for him on his generous patron’s sympathy long before the “Jessie Maxwell” had sighted the Australian shore.

Mr. Sherman was a widower and childless. A maiden sister of his lived with him, a woman whose character and face were as like his as an egg is to an egg. Not knowing Holdsworth’s name, they agreed to call him Mr. Hampden, which would serve as well as any other, and which had at least the merit of beginning with the letter of his real name.

As Mr. Hampden he was introduced to Mr. Sherman’s friends, who took a very great interest in him. Indeed, some of these people went to the extent of giving dinner-parties in his honour, and for a time he was a lion. All this attention, meant in perfect kindness, greatly disturbed him, for his loss of memory made him singularly sensitive, and his nervous system had entirely given way under the extraordinary sufferings he had endured. Mr. Sherman would have kept his secret, but Captain Duff and the officers and men of the “Jessie Maxwell” went and talked of him all over the city, and then the tale of his discovery and rescue was published in a newspaper and made the property of the public.

But the public soon forgot him. The colony was young, and the New Hollander had too many mines to sink, and houses to build, and acres to clear, and convicts to protest against, and home oppressions of every species to deal with, to keep his mind long fixed on one object. Holdsworth settled into a regular clerkly routine, and every day improved himself in Mr. Sherman’s opinion, by the peculiar sweetness of his amiability, and by his gratitude expressed in every delicate form that could vehicle the emotion of his full heart.

There was an able doctor at that time practising in Sydney, and Mr. Sherman invited him to his house, and introduced him to Holdsworth, believing that, by skilful handling, it was possible to restore the poor fellow’s memory. But the doctor after a few weeks shook his head, and pronounced the case hopeless, or at least beyond the reach of human skill.

Indeed, rarely had a more curious and baffling problem been submitted, than Holdsworth’s mind in those days.

Here was a man capable of recollecting with precision every incident that had befallen him since his rescue, exhibiting shrewdness in conversation, and accuracy in matters of current fact. His intellect was as healthy as that of the healthiest-headed man who conversed with him, but up to the period of his rescue everything was in darkness. The conjectures which were offered him—so close to the mark some of them, that they brushed the very skirts of real facts, and told the truth by implication—conveyed no ideas. His eternal rejoinder was no more than a shake of the head. Had he been a sailor? Did he remember the port from which he sailed? the rig or name of the vessel? his native town? Such questions, and hundreds of them, were asked, but though he grasped familiar names with almost passionate eagerness, they established no faintest clue as to his real past. And then inquiries becoming at last no better than fruitless importunities, were dropped, and Holdsworth was considered incurable.

Yet this could hardly have been thought, had those who gave in this opinion been conscious of the under-current of secret, but not the less powerful, yearnings, absolutely objectless, scarce owning definite forms, which yet the restless instincts of the man urged with greedy emphasis. These movements were, indeed, purely spiritual—the action of the soul groping in her cell and searching for that window of the mind which had been blackened, and through which no light could break. Of the mental torments this intellectual blindness occasioned, no words that I possess can describe the anguish. Month after month went by and still found him searching heart-brokenly in the gloom for some image, some substance, some sign, that should appease the piteous cravings of his instincts, which knew all, but could not speak.

Whatever feminine tact could suggest to give light to his mind, Mr. Sherman’s sister did. She made out a long list of names beginning with H, trusting that one among them might be his, and that the sight of it would recall many things or all.

But, long and patiently compiled as the list was, many names there must be which she would omit; and amongst them his own. Then she made out a list of the names of the ships; but here was an endless job, prosecuted for a long while with benevolent industry, and then abandoned in despair. She read the European papers carefully, hoping to find some account of the loss of the vessel in which, it was surmised, Holdsworth had been a passenger; but no such account ever rewarded her search. Numerous were the other remedies she resorted to, but none of them produced any result.