The Profilist

by Adrian Mitchell

  After a longish while our slow drifting came to a halt for a third and last time, still at a distance from the land, such as it was. Our voyage had stopped, exhausted itself, just short of our destination. Boats were lowered over the side, and then some of the baggage and some of the passengers; and the sailors leaned on their oars and headed towards a distant muddy trampled patch down in front of the shrubbery—and they stopped midstream too! They had rowed and poled as far as the boats could go. For another hundred yards or so the men waded along, pushing the boats until they scraped again on the mud. Thus far and no further.

  Now there was nothing for it but for the gentlemen to roll up their white trousers, and for the womenfolk to remove their shoes and stockings and hitch up their gowns, and all waded ashore as best they could, juggling their parcels and carpet bags and bonnets and baskets and what have you. Two or three of the gentlemen tried to carry their wives on their backs. Not everyone managed to keep their footing, let alone their dignity, and as the party slowly emerged ashore, some were more draggled than others, and all were at least a little spattered. This was altogether more dispiriting than the excited passengers of the previous day had imagined. If you will allow the pleasantry, they did not make quite the splash they had hoped for on their arrival.

  Where we struggled ashore was near some rudimentary piling, a kind of palisade still being constructed down one length of the creek, up against a bank of sand dunes, with branches from the scruffy little trees shoved in behind, to stop the sand leaking through between the stakes, and so inhibiting nature’s mockery of that labour. The effort seemed pointless, for if this pitiful shoreline was to become the beginning of a wharf, no ship could make its way so far up the shallows. Not even the ship’s boats could manage that except on the high tide. A little way off was an iron shed, belonging to the Company, but we saw no activity there. All about lay what looked like a rubbish tip, bits of farming machinery and building materials, heaps and heaps of bricks all higgledy-piggledy, and crates and barrels with the ends broken out, and yet with the colony not yet three years old this jumble must have been only just imported. It all had to be new, but it looked like what had already been thrown away.

  Two or three huts were in amongst the bushes and trees, assembled it seemed from nothing other than panels of bark. Somewhere out of sight was a constable’s hut, we learned. That was not helpful. And wherever it was, near it was a temporary campsite for the German immigrants we had heard were also coming to settle in the colony.

  Our way—it could not be called a track or a path—was at the far end of these elementary and unimpressive public works, up through and across two lines of sandhills. The sand was bright and white, dazzling in the intense sunlight. Little bits of bark, charred twigs, and bleached shells were mixed in with it. As we toiled up the slopes, the sand shifted beneath our feet with every step, and sifted back into the footprints made by the person plodding ahead. With every step we ascended, the sun seemed to glare more brightly, the heat increased, and unquestionably the flies had discovered our presence. They descended on us and would not let us alone, no matter how we swished at them.

  What a place this was turning out to be. We had made three lunges at arriving, we had stumbled ashore, we had struggled for the best part of half an hour up through the dunes and although we could reasonably assume we were now on land, we were still not on anything that could be called terra firma. After all our protracted voyaging, interesting as it had been in many things but tiresome on the whole, it seemed that this country intended to torment us, to keep on denying us an end to the one, and a beginning to the other. There was nobody about. The sailors who had bundled ashore some pieces of luggage, returned to the boat, and so to the ship; and that would be their routine for the next several weeks as there was no other way of discharging either passengers or cargo.

  It was all a bit disappointing, really. An anticlimax.

  On the far side of the dunes were at last a few signs that we had arrived somewhere. An open area of churned-up sand, mud and silt showed that there was activity aplenty from time to time, if not at present. Though there was in fact a wagon with a bullock team waiting, one of the bullocks very comfortably down on its knees, blinking in the sun and ruminating. Another dray was coming towards us too, with a load of futile pilings by the look of it. Neither driver was a distinguished conversationalist, and neither would accept passengers other than those who were to be employed by the Company. They were certainly not disposed to help in retrieving any of the boxes and trunks strewn along the shore. We had to do what we could for ourselves. Lump it or leave it, so to speak.

  We had arrived, and yet still we had not arrived, for the town was a further seven or eight miles off.

  Which meant that what one was to do next remained an open question. A hanging question, given our exasperation. Some of the passengers, particularly the women and children, resolved to return to the ship and keep their cabin there for the next week or so, while the luggage and cargo were unlading. The captain had made that option available, for a further consideration of course. It was going to take quite some time for everything to be hoisted out of the holds, and then for the sailors to get it all on to dry land as best they could. They were no better than mudlarks, out of their element, and they grumbled about it. Meanwhile, the menfolk were to make whatever arrangements they could for more settled accommodation in the town. Most of the passengers in steerage were only too glad to give their names to Captain Lipson and scramble into the boats, taking their chances in the fresh air of the new land; though to my mind there is not a lot to say one way or the other between the two kinds of fetor—the stale air of below decks after three months at sea or the smell of a mangrove swamp.

  For those of us who did not keep good Company, it was at first easy enough to follow the tracks of the drays along a narrow way across the swamplands, but once we arrived at a slightly higher and dryer ground, trails began to weave in and out of the scrub, and criss-cross and go off in different directions, unhelpfully. From time to time the wheel marks disappeared in amongst spiky grasses and scented shrubbery, and we had to cast about to find our way again. I was not the only one astonished at how easily we became disoriented in that meagre country, even when we knew we had no more to do than to head in the general direction of the hills. By this time it was toward the middle of the day, all of us were hot and some were wet with perspiration. The sun, if you looked at it for too long, became a flat pulsing button in the midst of too much incandescence; the shadows cast by the spindly trees and bushes were sharp and precise. Our own shadows seemed to shrink beneath our feet, to get away from the awful intensity.

  Our clothing was not light enough for this climate. Anyone with a free hand took off his coat, though you needed to keep that hand free to swish away the pestiferous flies, with a sprig of leaves if not a handkerchief. That action merely persuaded them to desist from your eyes a while and perch on the back of your waistcoat; then curiosity would get the better of them and they would circle around to make your acquaintance once again.

  At one stage, in the midst of nowhere, we suddenly met a pair of sturdy girls dragging a barrel of water on a forked branch broken from a tree, like a primitive sledge. The ends of the branches left a deep gouge in the dusty soil and leaf litter. By their language and startling bold blue eyes and their plain dress we gathered they were from the German camp. With much nodding and pointing and smiling and gesturing they gave us to understand that we could buy water from them. They were hauling their load from a spring further along the track, lugging it all the way back to the port, where fresh water was scarce, and a purchaser could readily be found. The ships had no easy access to fresh water, for example. They earned a pittance, those girls, but they were assisting their families.

  We were all quite warm enough to welcome the chance of refreshment, but the sharper ones among us reasoned that if the spring was further ahead it was on our way, and we would be able to supply ourselves. Others among us ch
ose to applaud the girls for their resourcefulness and their practical effort; and besides, we did not know whether the spring was out of our way or not. They had arrived in this strange country with almost nothing, and they were making the best of what little was available to them. With faces as pretty as theirs, they should go far. I was more than content to hand over a couple of small coins to fill my canteen, and to win a frankish smile.

  We had of course been keeping together as a group. On board our ship we had heard stories of what to expect, though already I was finding that this advance information was not entirely reliable. One thing that concerned us more than we cared to give voice to was whether we would be confronted by the natives. Whether, to say bluntly what was uppermost in our minds, the natives would be hostile. We had heard that passengers straggling along the way to the town sometimes got lost, and worse, sometimes got speared. It had happened, so we were told, to a ship’s captain less than a year ago. This detail had the effect of strengthening our resolve to stay together, not to walk too far ahead of the others, nor to trail too far behind. It also kept us subdued, not wanting to draw unwelcome attention to ourselves. And that in turn left us listening for any sounds that might betray the presence of the local inhabitants.

  What we heard was the astonishing silence of the bush. Some drilling noise of insects, some cracking of twigs as the sun baked them dry, and that was the sum total. Nothing moved, apart from ourselves.

  So that it was somewhat disconcerting to find, just as we began to see evidence of the township ahead of us, by a kind of dusty haze milling about above the canopy of the trees, that our way led us down into a shaded area, a glade along the bank of a diminutive creek, which was romantic enough, and right beside a camp of natives, which wasn’t. We were distinctly apprehensive, first because of the sudden riot of dogs that came running out towards us, and then at the intensity with which those people fixed their dark gaze upon us. None of them moved, and we were not well disposed to make our way between their little huts and campfires. Picking our path carefully past them, we were all too aware of the long spears leaning against the trunks of trees. The scene itself was of a serene beauty, but the people there were discomfiting, precisely because they made no movement. Their alarming stillness spoke strongly of possible activity. It was like an undeclared confrontation. You were made to feel you had invaded a space that was not yours. They provoked an uneasiness which, on reflection, encapsulated in little a much more complicated and disturbing thought.

  We did not feel we should scrutinise them too obviously, but to me they seemed so dark as to be somehow imprecise shadows in the shade. To my tactfully evasive eye they did not take distinct shape. They were little more than a presence, not least because we could not tell if they were actually looking at us or not, their eyes were so deep sunken. And their total silence most uncomfortable. The whole scene there in the shade of the trees was utterly unexpected, so very different from the blazing sunlight on the white sandhills, the brassy sun throbbing in the pale blue sky. It was as though a shade had come down between us and them; we did not know them and did not know how to know them. We certainly could not read their intentions towards us; if any. It is proving a land of extraordinary contrasts, contrasts as much in the mind as to the eye. I am beginning to think this country may have a sly sense of humour.

  It appeared that we had wandered on to a lesser track than the one we should have been following, for as we neared the creek, or rather the chain of stale ponds that marked its channel, we could see a much more heavily used track just a little further along, where something of a crossing had been made for drays and other traffic. Most of the extensive plain we had been crossing from the harbour had been remarkably level, with just a gentle ascent as we neared the worn creek bed. Now we met with more substantial trees, some of them quite massive, and bulrushes and a kind of baked scurf on the edges of the ponds the consistency and colour of dried cowpats, and at last some birds calling.

  Bits of bark and rushes and dead shrubbery up in the lower forks of the trees suggested that at times the creek comes down in quite a flood. On the far side the land rose quite abruptly—and there was our true destination, a town emerging from dusty roads and paths, and movement at last, if only of plodding bullocks, and buildings of varying degrees of temporariness and permanency, tents and bark huts and a few brick buildings, both complete and incomplete. At the far end of our way we could see that the hills were indeed substantial enough, though you would not call them a mountain range I think. They were somewhere in between the two; neither designation seemed quite to fit.

  A large rough building attracted our attention, not much more than a kind of shed, made of slabs of bark held together by saplings across the sheets. Above the main entrance was what had once been a green bough, back in old England a sign of welcome and refreshment, but now unhappily more indicative of desiccation and death. Nevertheless, we honoured the intention, and went into the surprisingly cool cavern for a glass of whatever was thirst-quenching, and to wait for our luggage to catch up with us when it would. And there I finished a sketch of the camp we had just passed, and wrote up these wandering first impressions.

  Sketch 2

  In which I make a scene

  WHEN I THINK about drawing, I am quite clear about the difference between point of view and perspective. They are opposite ends of a line of vision, the line from where I stand to what I look at. There is no confusion in my mind about the distinction between them.

  I have been reflecting on this more broadly, however, and thinking about my own circumstance, stretched as I am between a here and a there, and between my drawings and my notebooks.

  Because of my work as a silhouette artist in Portsmouth, you might think I have had little professional interest in perspective. That is in fact not true. I was not one of those slapdash fairground hucksters, showing off with my scissors. Nor was I one of those halfway hollow-cutters who sit their subject behind a screen and trace a reduced outline on to a piece of paper. That mechanical accomplishment was admittedly our studio’s bread and butter. But I did not approve. No, my forte was in painting shadow portraits on to porcelain and on the underside of convex glass, and miniatures on ivory for jewellery. And you could not well use a pantograph contrivance for that.

  While it is of course very acceptable to catch the sitter’s likeness, or sufficiently so to convince the customer, the art of the advanced silhouette artist is to give some subtle sense of a contour in the flat plane, to hint at the fullness of a face or figure; and I believe I may claim to be as adept at that as any. It is also true of course that dexterity is of the essence. Our customers complained loudly if the process took too long. I do not require an Academy portrait, they might grouse, with sometimes ruder emphasis than that form of words. They would come into the studio on a last-minute impulse, many of them, requesting a profile for an emigrating son to take with him, or to give to a dismayed parent just on the eve of departure. Time and tide await no man; and in Portsmouth there is less time than elsewhere because of its four tides a day.

  When there was less huff and puff, I might add in a gilded epaulette or some collar buttons on the likeness of a young officer, hint at the neckline of a young beauty—especially when the image was for one of those young officers. Bronzing, we called this kind of embellishment, a touch of gold, or sometimes Chinese white. Just the suggestion, you see, to overcome the flatness of the profile. The gentlemen seemed to appreciate a suggestion of rounded bosoms.

  That was my training, and my work. When I went rambling about the fields and woods outside the town and painted sketches for myself, I carried over some of those skills I had been acquiring; for after all, a sketch is just as much a flat surface as a profile, and it can be made to appear as deep or as shallow as one chooses. What most suited me was rapidity of execution. To my mind the notion of a still life, as it is called, a studied picture of that which is either inanimate or lifeless, is not only a contradiction in terms, but in the end n
ecessarily superficial. It is about surfaces.

  The French, not mincing their words, call it nature morte. I call it dead accuracy. In my sketches as in fact in my silhouettes, I try to find an active principle; to let my pictures speak both from and for life. That at least is what I understand. The modesty of my fame and fortune tells how far I have yet to go before I may claim to have mastered that ambition. I was not even well known in my home town, given that I worked inside a commercial studio. I was, you might say, behind the scene.

  Although much of it is a massively solid, defensively squat town, Portsmouth is an excellent place for a silhouette studio, and not only because there is so much activity around the dockyards and about the barracks; so many comings and goings that there was always a ready demand for our little souvenir profiles. Portsmouth is itself full of silhouettes, with its spires and bell towers and chimneys jabbing up above the rooftops of the town, and the wind vanes and gable ends, the turrets and flagpoles of the military buildings, the ornaments on the barracks gates. And those other jutting shapes around the dockyards too, the cranes and gantries along the wharves, the windmills behind, the bare trees up along the ramparts, and most conspicuous of all, the masts and rigging of the many ships riding at anchor in the harbour.

  Whichever way you turned, detail stood out in relief against the leaden skies or the half-light of evening, which is when I mostly had the freedom to walk the streets and look about me. As the light recedes, those particular features show more prominently than they do during the day; they come into a new relief. Whatever is not well noticed in the full light, overwhelmed by the great brutal defensive works, the granite walls and gateways and ramparts, now becomes more substantial, and fine. Even, one might say, elegant, an elegance commonly defeated in life itself. That is the key to the true art of the silhouette, the profile, to define what is there if we can only see it. To find shapeliness.