Vindication (33 page)

At the end of May, she swallowed an overdose of laudanum. Later, her novel
The Wrongs of Woman
recreates what happened: ‘Maria' feels her head swim and then faintness. Mrs Wollstonecraft's dying words echo in her fading consciousness–‘have a little patience and all will be over'–before she allows herself to sink with the thought: ‘what is a little bodily pain to the pangs I've endured?' Her final thought is for her child. At this, she vomits and resolves to live.

Mary too did not die. Imlay, advised in time of her intentions, came to her rescue, and his promptness must have saved her life. With roused feelings, he urged her to go on. She had to live for her child; and she had to live because something indomitable in her could not accept Imlay's conduct. She could not accept that this man of many gifts should not be educable, like Clarissa with Lovelace. Like Lovelace, Imlay had the
attractions of a confident talker whose intelligence invites a woman to believe he is educable if only she can convey her character; but both Imlay and the fictional Lovelace are fixed in sexual habit. Lovelace is a practised deceiver of women, who at times can admit that the rake's code betrays his own best interest. Imlay was even tougher to counter because libertinism was at home in the rhetoric of liberty. And then, too, he really did believe himself a friend to women. His rescue of Mary Wollstonecraft during the Terror appeared the act of a ‘generous soul'; only slowly did she find herself trapped in the fatal plot of the fallen woman–as Clarissa finds herself locked, literally, with whores by the very man to whom she had looked for rescue.

Mary's act stung Imlay's conscience. His reputation, more than hers, was at stake: he risked the scandal of a celebrity whose attempted suicide declared ill use, even though she never spoke ill of him. He could have defended himself by denying her claim to be ‘Mrs Imlay'. He could have cast her off with the backing of society's righteous virulence towards a wanton with a bastard. That Imlay did not do so tells us he was not that sort of scoundrel, and this is one reason why Mary held on as long as she did.

 

Imlay's answer to her rejection of his support was to offer her work in Scandinavia. For two centuries it has not been known what exactly this entailed, but it turns out that to discover the fate of the silver ship was not the purpose of her voyage. New archival evidence shows that, as the ice thawed in March, ‘Gilbert Inckay' (as Swedish record calls him) had sold a ship called the
Margrethe
to Elias Backman of Gothenburg. Divers off the coast of Norway have looked for sunken treasure in vain. It's now beyond doubt that the ship did not sink, and that Mary Wollstonecraft knew where it was before she arrived on the scene.

Why did Imlay not undertake this journey himself? Some priority that ‘alarmed' Mary Wollstonecraft directed him not to Norway but to
France
. It was more urgent to settle some difficult business there, most likely, awkward questions from Barlow's contacts on the Food Commission, about the loss of the expected return of grain. Imlay had some explaining to do: he would have to convince the Commission that the silver had been stolen. He,
the benevolent, trusting Imlay had been tricked by a thieving captain. Since Mary now warned him against his associates on both sides of the Channel, it may be worth noting that Imlay would again coincide with Joel Barlow, who was due to leave Hamburg for Paris.

If Imlay's part in this should prove ‘unlucky', Mary told him, she would regret it less if it sent him home to her convinced that a true friend was another form of ‘treasure'.

Mary Wollstonecraft was indeed an asset, known throughout Europe, and particularly in Paris, for her high-mindedness. It would vindicate Imlay's case to have a celebrity of this calibre state his position, with her customary eloquence, to the prime movers in the case: Ellefsen's lawyers, his judge, and most powerful of all, the Prime Minister of Denmark as ruler of Norway. So, while Imlay did his part in Paris, Mary Wollstonecraft was to back his case against the accused in Norway. There were two aspects to her projected journey: the more important, perhaps, from Imlay's point of view was that a celebrity of moral standing would be seen to be on his side; and at the same time there were the practical matters: she was to carry through the repairs to the ship and confront Ellefsen.

What is certain is that Imlay led Mary to believe that by pressing the rich Ellefsens for restitution, she could again make him, Imlay, her own. She agreed, she told him, ‘to extricate you out of your pecuniary difficulties', while he, in turn, heartened her purpose by declaring her to be his wife in a letter of attorney addressed to Mrs Mary Imlay. Here were her orders:

There follows a tight, cryptic direction
*
concerning Norway, which could be unravelled in this way: Mary Imlay was to fix in her mind Imlay's distress over the loss of the silver, ‘aggravated' by further distress and loss resulting from ‘Ellefsen's disobedience of…instructions' to do with the ship. On the basis of that accusation (not, it appears here, an accusation that Ellefsen himself stole the silver), Mrs Imlay was to extract an unspecified sum as ‘damages' due to her husband. The actual amount would depend on what she would find out on the spot: whether Ellefsen's family found themselves ‘implicated in his guilt'; whether they had the ‘means' to make a substantial ‘resistitution'; and whether they could be persuaded to settle out of court. The next paragraph, also cryptic, turns to Mary Imlay's task in Denmark:

The date shows this plan to have been in place two weeks before Mary took the overdose. It revived immediately after, encouraged by Imlay's suggestion they meet up when their missions were done. The journey ahead also opened up the possibility of a travel book. An advance from Johnson would pay Mary's debts and renew her confidence as a writer who could support herself through an uncertain future. Though hopes of Imlay were not dead, her doubts, understandably, had more hold.

Ten years earlier, after Fanny Blood's death, she had fought depression. Now, she had to pull herself free of the doomed plot of the fallen woman. Scandinavia, as a destination, was way off course from the usual Grand Tour centred on the Mediterranean. Between June and September 1795, Mary Wollstonecraft would show her mettle far north in lands no one visited at the time.

M
en often travelled with swords or pistols along roads infested with highwaymen. On 9 June, Mary, Marguerite and Fanny, three unprotected females, set off on an overnight coach for the north of England. Mary had little sleep with a one-year-old on her lap. When they arrived at the port of Hull, they found themselves in a damp room in a house like a tomb. It was two in the afternoon. The hoot of the post-horn broke the silence, Fanny echoed it, and tired as Mary was, she dashed off a letter to Imlay to catch the next post:

His determination to save her, and signs of regret when she departed, had raised ‘involuntary hopes' he yet might change.

Casual sex had atrophied his heart, she warned him. ‘You have a heart, my friend, yet…you have sought in vulgar excesses, for that gratification only the heart can bestow…–Ah! my friend, you know not the ineffable
delight, the exquisite pleasure, which arises from a unison of affection and desire, when the whole soul and senses are abandoned to a lively imagination, and renders every emotion delicate and rapturous. Yes; these are emotions…of which the common herd of eaters and drinkers and
child-begeters
, certainly have no idea.'

She could hear Imlay demand to know the purpose of all this, and had her answer ready: ‘I cannot help thinking that it is possible for you, having great strength of mind, to return to…purity of feeling–which would open your heart to me.'

During her stay in Hull, Mary visited her childhood town of Beverley. Her nostalgia had a jolt. She had changed, while Beverley had remained the same; only, eclipsed by the growth of Hull, it had shrunk into ‘sullen narrowness', more class-bound than ever in obedience to the ‘fanaticism' of counter-revolution.

A cargo vessel was due to sail for Copenhagen in six days. It was not fitted out for passengers, but would have to do since the captain agreed to take her to Arendal (the Norwegian base of the Ellefsens) or Gothenburg (the official destination of the silver ship). So it was that an Englishwoman and a Frenchwoman with a toddler between them went aboard on 16 June. At the last minute, departure was delayed. Marguerite became seasick as the vessel rode at anchor. Fanny, ‘gay as a lark', began to play with the cabin boy, then became restless when rain kept her below deck. Whenever the ship prepared to sail, the wind changed or dropped. Mary used the delay to write almost daily to Imlay, who sent as many replies, urging her on. For she remained depressed, and was telling him in every way short of explicitness that she felt unfit for so uncertain a journey.

‘Now I am going towards the North in search of sunbeams!' she put it wryly.

It was a mere fortnight since she had taken the overdose. Though ‘a determination to live' had revived, she did let mention ‘the secret wish' that the sea might become her tomb, ‘and that the heart, still so alive to anguish, might there be quieted by death'. Another would have fetched her back, and this is what she hints when she observes, with apparent surprise, how she had improved in London (near Imlay) but was now losing
ground at the prospect of leaving her country (Imlay) behind. She lived for his words, and at length persuaded the kindly captain to take her ashore to see if an extra letter had arrived. Her disappointment was unreasonable, for Imlay thought her at sea, but so long as she lingered in England, hope still flickered that he'd come after all. She could not ask it, and Imlay could not–or would not–decode the language of depression.

Eventually, the ship sailed on 21 June. Winds prevented a landing at Arendal, so they made for Sweden. Not far from Gothenburg, the vessel was becalmed. Mary persuaded the captain, against rules of the sea, to have her rowed to a lighthouse on what was probably the Onsala peninsula. There, Marguerite's apprehensions were realised when, casting about for inhabitants, they came upon two shaggy men covered in coal. Poor, cowering Marguerite, so far from Paris, implored their return to the ship. Mary insisted they must go on, and Marguerite had no alternative but to follow her back into the boat where Mary begged the sailors–against orders–to row them six miles to the mainland. They did so sturdily, watching their vessel in case it should sail without them. After eight days at sea, Mary stumbled ashore and collapsed on a rock that seemed to heave under her. She struck her head, and was unconscious for a quarter of an hour. The sensation of liquid–blood–running over her eyes brought her round.

‘I am not well,' Mary informed Imlay, ‘and yet you see I cannot die.'

Set in a land of firs and lakes, and opposite rocky, wooded hillocks in a wavy line against the pale summer sky, eighteenth-century Gothenburg was laid out in the Dutch style with canals and merchants' houses lining the streets near the harbour. Elias Backman, a good-natured man of thirty-five, invited Mary's party to stay with his family in the country. Mrs Backman was French, which must have eased Marguerite. Fanny could be with their four little boys, especially the youngest, only a few months older. The pure northern air, the long light of summer nights when Mary could write without a candle, the balm of sleep outdoors, and the kindness of the Backmans, began to restore her. Pink crept back into her cheeks and her body rounded with returning health. Since Backman had lived in France, French must have been their common
language over the next twelve days as they reviewed the misfortunes of the silver ship.

How bad was the damage, Mary would have asked. And what was Backman's understanding of Ellefsen the thief?

 

Captain Peder Ellefsen of the
Margrethe
came from a family of ironmasters and shipowners whose wealth had been established in the seventeenth century. When his father died at the age of forty-three, after fathering fifteen children, the entire fortune came into the hands of Peder's proud and beautiful mother. At the time of this story Margrethe was the dominant figure in a leading family who were amongst the founders of the seafaring town of Arendal.

On about 24 August 1794 Peder had disembarked at an obscure spot called Groos on the southern coast of Norway. He planned to go ahead to Arendal, while the mate, Thomas Coleman, was told to delay a few days, then bring the ship there. With no roads as yet in that remote part of Norway, Peder galloped away through the woods in the long-trailing light. When he reached Arendal, he sold the ship to his mother and stepfather. Then, on 1 September, Coleman duly docked the
Margrethe
at Sandviga on the island of Hisøy in the channel leading towards the town.

What happened next is murky: even at the time, it proved difficult to verify conflicting stories. There was Coleman's story that it was at Sandviga that the crew was ordered ashore, and while the ship was deserted, Captain Ellefsen returned in a boat with four men to carry off the silver. There would have been many convenient hideaways, for the buildings on the shore were propped on poles and hung over the water, serving as warehouses as well as homes.

Another story, later investigated but unsolved in court, said the silver was ferried by a smuggler called Søren Ploug to Flensburg (on the Schleswig-Holstein coast). Rumours of lost treasure will always fly about, but there's something convincing in the specificity of Flensburg. In the late eighteenth century Schleswig-Holstein specialised in silverware for the flourishing burghers of Hamburg. Wealth was displayed in silver
necklaces cascading across the bosom, candelabra, spoons with ornamental handles, tea-sets, silver hymn books, great clasps for Bibles and waists, and even a silver model of a ship with three masts and sails, all combining an almost filigree craft and opulence.

Finally, there was the story–lingering in Norwegian folklore–of shipwreck on a rock at Skurvene, near Arendal, of treasure lost overboard, of one silver bar remaining. What emerged eventually from judicial inquiries is that there had indeed been a plan to sink the ship.

Something in Ellefsen's plan went wrong, because on 10 September his sale was revoked, followed by fresh moves on his part to detach himself from the ship. On 20 September he signed it over to Coleman, with three witnesses, including Peder's lawyer. The crew–kept in the dark–were not present at the handover. They were paid part of their wages for a further voyage, and promised the rest if they proved loyal.

Coleman hung on in Arendal, with talk of contrary winds, for three weeks after he took command. If there was an attempt to sink the ship, this would have been the most likely time. At last Coleman set sail, for Gothenburg he said, on the morning of 10 October, but the ship was damaged by a storm–so the crew said. Planks were damaged, they said, and the ship sprang a leak. Two days later it was back in Norway, slipping into Oksefjorden, near Tvedestrand, halfway between Arendal and Captain Ellefsen's homeport of Risør. It was a long inlet and deep enough for a sailing ship, though it had to pass through foul water. Then, on the 17th, the
Margrethe
shifted once more, slipping by rocky, fretted inlets whose entrance was guarded by skerries, small islands, a tightly wooded land shadowed by the serrated edges of firs. The ship lingered a further month at Risør with its chain of outlying islands, dense with brushwood. As the home of Coleman's former captain, this can't be a coincidence. It was here the trouble started for the Ellefsens.

At the end of October, Imlay at last revealed to Backman that the delayed ship had carried a cargo of silver. Backman leapt to action. First, he dispatched trusty Captain Waak, who had finally sailed the other treasure ship, the
Rambler
, safely to port at Gothenburg at just this time. Waak talked quietly to Coleman as one seaman to another, and this is when
Coleman owned that silver–whether some or all, he didn't say–had been taken ashore in Norway without the crew's knowledge. As tensions rose, Ellefsen seems to have pressed Coleman to back him, which Coleman–having told his story–could no longer do.

The magistrate of Risør cross-questioned Ellefsen about the letter Imlay had given him in Le Havre to convey to Backman. Ellefsen opened the letter, extracted and destroyed the enclosed receipt for the silver, and denied the silver's existence. He also tried to retrieve a responsible image as captain. On 14 November, he advertised for a lost ship, claiming that the mate had that day ‘escaped with the ship from East Risør harbour'.

Where did the
Margrethe
go? This is where Per Nyström lost sight of the ship when he did his pioneering archival searches in the 1970s. Norwegian historian Gunnar Molden has carried these searches a stage further with a series of remarkable discoveries, including the crew's testimony. It reports two efforts to reach Sweden, coastal pilots not responding to signals, and the ship battling with a torn sail through successive storms. A man is washed overboard and swept away by heaving seas. The hold carries two feet of water, and pumping must go on continuously. Twice, the ship ventures in as close as it dares to the rock-bound land, and twice it goes back out to sea–a half-wrecked vessel divested of its treasure, adrift in the Skagerrak.

When Mary asked questions, she learnt that ‘Swedish harbours [are] very dangerous…and the help of experience is not often at hand, to enable strange vessels to steer clear of the rocks, which lurk below the water, close to the shore'. It was not uncommon, she heard, that ‘boats are driven far out and lost'.

There was another danger: the oncoming winter, turning into that worst of winters. Hardening ice in Swedish inlets could have made entry difficult if not impossible, especially where fresh water from rivers enters the ocean. Coleman retreated to south-west Norway where harbours were still open. A badly damaged ship came to land, way off course, at Nye-Hellesund in the parish of Sogne. The crew refused to put to sea again, and the ship was moved further into Hellesund harbour for nearly a month, until mid-December, when it sailed east to Kristiansand. There the
Byfogd
(Town Magistrate) and the Chief of Police interrogated Coleman. The case at once attracted high-level attention. The magistrate gave his opinion that guilt lay with Ellefsen, not Coleman. Talk in Norway was shocked to find a son of the grand Ellefsens accused of ‘crimes very awful and dishonourable to the Nation, while in charge of the ship'. A document was found in the captain's quarters. It was in English and vital to the case against Ellefsen: his declaration of 12 August 1794 that ‘the ship belongs to Gilbert Imlay and is his absolute property'.

‘How I hate this crooked business!' Mary Wollstonecraft exclaimed to Imlay on 29 December. At that time he was turning to legal redress. The following month a Royal Commission was set up by Norway's rulers in Copenhagen to investigate the affair. Peder Ellefsen was arrested, and only released when his mother paid an enormous bail of ten thousand
riksdaler
(equivalent to more than half the value of the silver).

In March, when the ice broke up, Backman bought the ship from Imlay. Its imminent departure for Sweden led to a flurry of further judicial inquiries in the town hall of Arendal in the spring of 1795. Without Ellefsen's receipt for the silver it was impossible to prove it had ever been aboard; then, too, Ellefsen claimed to have ‘mislaid' Imlay's instructions to him. In all, sixty-nine witnesses took the stand and their testimonies now cast doubt on Ellefsen's guilt. Defence lawyers also cast aspersions on one of the two judges appointed by the Royal Commission, a Norwegian called Jacob Wulfsberg. Since he had acted in the past for Backman, Wulfsberg was too biased in Backman's favour, lawyers said, to be an impartial judge. ‘Who were fooled by whom?' Gunnar Molden asks. After two centuries that question is suddenly hot with a sense that answers can be found.