In English first-person writing, as in Amelang’s Continental first-person texts, the experience of displacement is often, literally, an experience of travel. To leave England and venture abroad is to experience cultural dislocation and disturbance and to expose familiar values and settled identities to the disturbing effects of otherness (Bedford and Kelly 2007: 63). In a number of first-person accounts of experience abroad by those serving as soldiers on campaigns, or aboard ship, writers not only confront their stay-at-home readers with glimpses of disturbing strangeness and disorder, but, more disturbingly, call into question the stability of familiar behaviours and values once removed from home. The forms in which these accounts are written include personal chronicle, travel account, and narrative verse. The primary function of the self in these texts is often that of authenticating eyewitnesses of events and actions, but the authorial self intrudes into the text to at least some, and often to a very great, degree. What all the texts have in common is a sense of the way dislocation challenges familiar and accepted identities and conventional narratives.
The manuscripts of the soldier-chroniclers Elis Gruffudd, describing in Welsh English campaigns in France from the 1520s to the 1550s, and William Farmer, describing campaigns in Ireland at the end of the century, erase, to a greater or lesser degree, the authorial self in order to focus on the historical events they witness. In each case, nevertheless, the authors’ own perspectives and judgements shape the accounts. The Welshman Gruffudd casts himself as an experienced and sceptical onlooker, with disillusioned views about the behaviour of his fellow soldiers. War is a place where honour and glory are in short supply, especially among the gentlemen and aristocrats charged with leadership.237 William Farmer, less explicitly present in his own text, constructs in the face of Irish otherness a determined version of the English as compassionate, orderly, and civilized. Only occasionally do the fissures in this ideal become visible, as in an episode where Irish children found cannibalizing their mother turn out to have been robbed of all other form of sustenance by the English themselves (1907:129-30).
War and its power to throw assumed values and familiar categories into disorder is vividly evident in Gascoigne’s verse account of his own service in the Netherlands in the early 1570s, ‘The Fruits of War’, printed in Posies (1575). Gascoigne figures himself at first as a disinterested intellectual without first-hand knowledge of war, but that persona is abandoned in the second half of the poem, in which Gascoigne invokes his own experience as a soldier to depict a military chaos caused by English incompetence and Dutch veniality. The experience of war, it seems, is quite different from bookish definitions. In the upside-down world of the Netherlands depicted in this poem, land is water, sailors lead soldiers, and Gascoigne’s own heroic efforts are misinterpreted as cowardice and betrayal. No doubt the poem’s printing aims to
Right that misapprehension, but the poem in fact deprives the reader of stable values and perspectives. Not only is the authorial Gascoigne presented as contradictory and unreliable, but England, the ‘Peroratio’ hints, may be contaminated by the same veniality and lack of integrity that has so undermined the Netherlands (435-8; see Heale 2008).
Miles Philips spent fourteen years as a captive of the Spanish in Mexico (Philips 1965).238 239 His narrative begins as an account of what happened to some of the 114 sailors put ashore in the Gulf of Mexico by Hawkins in 1568 but in its final section focuses on the experience of Philips himself. The collective ‘we’ of the early part of the narrative gives place to the first person as Philips is separated from his companions when they come under the scrutiny of the Spanish Inquisition (Helgerson 2003). Philips’s shift into the rhetoric of first-person testimony (‘And then was I Miles Philips’) suggests not only the Inquisitorial process he underwent in Mexico, but that Philips’s narrative may be in some sense conceived of as a legal testimony before actual or anticipated English inquisitors. He may have felt his relatively lenient treatment by the Inquisition, compared to most of his companions, and his often admiring and sympathetic account of Spanish life in Mexico, needed some justification.11 Philips asserts his loyalty:
For mine owne part I could never throughly settle my selfe to marrie in that countrey, although many faire offers were made unto mee of such as were of great abilitie and wealth, but I could have no liking to live in that place, where I must every where see and know such horrible idolatrie committed, and durst not once for my life speake against it. (1965: 575)
The prose in this passage, as repeatedly elsewhere in his narrative, registers the seductions and attractions of the settled civil life of Spanish Mexico, even as it asserts the purity of his Protestant English identity.
Another traveller, Robert Baker, found the certainties of his own English identity less impervious to the disintegrative effects of the other. In two poems, part epic, part traveller’s account, Baker presents himself as a second Orpheus braving the dangers of a hellish Africa and its devilish inhabitants on voyages in 1562 and 1563. In the second poem, in which Baker is cast adrift with nine companions in a small boat off the ‘Guinie’ coast of Africa, the epic machinery of Roman gods and the underworld gives way to a discourse of dependence on divine grace. The ‘black devils’ prove kinder and more hospitable than the Portuguese Christians. Finally, Baker and his surviving companions lose all marks of racial difference, living naked and digging in the ground for roots like the ‘black devils’ they had previously mocked, and, but for the grace of God, coming close to cannibalism (1965:132-42; see Heale 2003: 80-5).
In these tales of deracination and confrontation with a godless and savage foreignness, settled identities and established values seem to come under threat. In the journals of Richard Madox, a chaplain on the ‘troublesome’ voyage of Captain Edward Fenton in 1582, it is the familiar and seemingly civil that proves savage and godless (Bedford and Kelly 2007: 85-91). The Oxford-educated clergyman records, with fearful secrecy, his horror as he finds that his own assumptions about the English officers, commissioned by the Crown, are misplaced. Far from exemplifying the ideals of gentlemen, and pursuing the ‘public good’, they turn out to be pirates, hypocrites, and cowards (Madox 1959: 182). Madox’s journal fervently asserts his own virtue, but his enforced participation in a collective enterprise of dishonour compromises his reputation and undermines the ideals of English enterprise that inspired his participation in the voyage. John Bale’s Vocation (1553) should have been a triumphant account of his calling by God and the King to evangelize the Irish in the bishopric of Ossory. Instead it turns into a tale of persecution, kidnap, and the disintegration of all stability. In Ireland, Bale finds himself isolated in the face of attacks by his landowning neighbours, and the outrageous ignorance, hypocrisy, and corruption of his fellow priests, not least ‘that greate Epicure’ the Archbishop of Dublin. Attempting to return home to England, he is taken for ransom at sea. The disorder Bale experiences abroad and on the water mirrors the overthrow of order at home as the reign of the godly Edward VI turns into the reign of the godless Mary I. The experience confirms for Bale that deracination in this world is a sign of homecoming in the next: ‘For no chosen chylde receyveth he to enherytaunce | without muche correction’ (1990:52, 79).240
In such first-person narratives of experience abroad, the authors figure themselves as eyewitnesses of events and societies that call into question established assumptions about identities and callings, and in some cases challenge a sense of the civil English self as different from or better than barbarous or idolatrous others. In much of the travel-writing, as in the career and life narratives considered in the previous section, finding and maintaining a desirable identity in the face of disorder and instability is a central concern and a source of considerable anxiety and effort.
World History
