From the first, A Short Residence must have seemed a highly unusual book. Not only was its narrator an unaccompanied woman, travelling first with her child and a maid, and later entirely on her own. But stranger than this, she was travelling not to Europe, but to Scandinavia – a largely unknown region, almost indeed a boreal wilderness. The poet Robert Southey wrote excitedly to his publisher friend Joseph Cottle: ‘Have you met with Mary Wollstonecraft’s (travel book)? She has made me in love with a cold climate, and frost and snow, with modern moonlight.’
Even the most mundane details of Scandinavian life – the feather-filled duvets, the wood-burning stoves, the salty fish and meats of the smorgasbord, the huge pine forests, the steep meadows with their bell-hung cattle, the wild cataracts and the glassy fjords – struck the reader as something ‘rich and strange’. The novelty of this in cultural terms cannot be overestimated. Hitherto the English literary traveller (for the great part male, well-heeled and accompanied by guides, valets or tutors) had adhered to a well-defined circuit through Europe and the Levant that over three centuries had become known as the Grand Tour. ‘The grand object of travel’, pronounced Dr Johnson, ‘is to visit the shores of the Mediterranean’ – though he himself got no further than Paris.
Sterne, Smollett, Gray, Walpole had all limited their itineraries to France and Italy, or those parts of Germany and Switzerland reached by the river Rhine. The essential attraction was towards the cities and civilizations of the south. To go north and east – beyond say the international port of Hamburg and the old walled and turreted medieval city of Lübeck, was to journey beyond the pale of Western culture. The shores of the distant Baltic, and the half-legendary lands of the midnight sun beyond, were terra incognita for all but a few hardy sailors, merchants, diplomats and the new race of commercial travellers. The latter were a significant class of whom Wollstonecraft had a great deal to say.
Her own itinerary was therefore remarkable in itself, and should be glanced at on the map. From Gothenburg in Sweden she travelled north across the Norwegian border as far as Halden. She crossed the Skaggerak to the wild, rocky shores beyond Larvik. She remained for several weeks at Tonsberg, and sailed west as far as Risor. Next she returned via Oslo (then Christiania) and travelled south again, crossing the Kattegat into Denmark, where she stayed in Copenhagen. Finally she crossed the straits to Schleswig, and so to Hamburg, where she took a regular ship home to Dover. The whole journey lasted three and a half months, from late June to early October 1795, at a time when the rest of Europe was at war with France, and all travel was generally hazardous.
The little that was then known about Scandinavian society, its arts, languages, social customs, laws and forms of government, is skilfully sketched in by Wollstonecraft during the course of her narrative, and brought alive by her sharp eye for detail and – even more – by her willingness to ask pertinent questions. She is characteristically pleased when her first host in Sweden, a naval district pilot and customs officer, remarks bluntly at supper ‘that I was a woman of observation, for I asked him men’s questions’.
We learn from her of the political domination of Denmark over its neighbour Norway, and to a lesser extent Sweden; and the commanding influence of the great Danish statesman Count A. P. Bernstorff, who had put the whole of Scandinavia on a footing of ‘armed neutrality’ towards the conflicting powers in Europe. The dramatic assassination of the Swedish King Gustav III in 1792, and the amorous intrigues of Princess Matilda at the Danish court with the royal physician Struensee, both subjects of popular interest in England, also draw Wollstonecraft’s attention.
But equally we feel we are entering a beautiful, unexplored world of Nature, which serves above all as a backdrop – sometimes poetically intense – for Wollstonecraft’s own reflections and memories. Almost the only previous topographical work on the subject was William Coxe’s Voyages and Travels (1784), which provided little more than a series of geographical and economic notes. The main link between Britain and Scandinavia remained the trade in raw materials and naval stores – timber, rope and certain minerals. Beyond the confines of the royal courts at Christiana and Copenhagen, it was considered to be a primitive world, on which the ideas of the Enlightenment, and the possibilities of political liberty touched off by the French Revolution were only just beginning to impinge. The northernmost state, Norway, with which Mary Wollstonecraft fell in love, was free only by the fact of its remoteness from Copenhagen. It had no proper constitution until 1814, no university until that founded at Christiania in 1811, and did not gain full political independence until more than a century later in 1905. It was on the other hand the first state in northern Europe to grant women the vote, in 1907.
The immediate question that arises, therefore, is the motive for Wollstonecraft’s travels. What was she doing in Scandinavia at all, and why did she follow the curious, looping itinerary to the tiny ports of western Norway? The mystery is deepened by the sense of weariness and reluctance which strikes the opening chord of the book – not at all the light-hearted eagerness of the conventional, picturesque traveller. The tone grows steadily more thoughtful and melancholy as the journey progresses.
Part of the answer is provided by Godwin’s Memoirs. The idea for the voyage was Gilbert Imlay’s. After Wollstonecraft’s return from France in the spring of 1795, and her first attempt at suicide in London, he was anxious to distract her and give her the chance to reflect on their situation. The shipping business he had embarked on when they were together the previous year at Le Havre had run into difficulties, and he suggested that she go as his agent to sort out the problems with his business partner Elias Backman, who was based in Gothenburg. This arrangement explains the immediate form of A Short Residence, which is written as a series of twenty-five letters to an unnamed correspondent in London, who, it becomes clear, has been the narrator’s lover. The whole book is, in effect, addressed to Gilbert Imlay and makes frequent half-veiled references to their previous life together in France. This provides the essential confessional thread of the work.
It had long been thought that this curious business venture was largely a cynical manoeuvre of Imlay’s to put Mary Wollstonecraft at a safe distance from himself. Yet this leaves out of the account several other factors. Having been brought up in various parts of England by her shiftless father, Wollstonecraft in adulthood was naturally restless. She was a born traveller and an instinctive seeker after new horizons and new societies. She could never rest very long in one place, she was always half-consciously looking for an ideal form of existence, a Golden Age.
In the previous ten years she had been not only in France (living in both Paris and Normandy), but also in Ireland and Portugal. This was exceptional, especially for a woman of that time. She had always longed to go to America, and had she lived, I suspect she would have persuaded Godwin to make a new life there. In all this she expresses that yearning spirit of Romanticism, half practical pioneering and half visionary Utopia, which becomes so explicit in the writers who followed her; Southey’s and Coleridge’s dream of Pantisocracy on the banks of the Susquehanna; Lord Byron’s excursions into Greece; Shelley’s lifelong search for some ideal commune in Switzerland or Italy. These are all the direct reflections of the same voyaging, unappeased spirit.
Wollstonecraft added Norway to the list of enchanted destinations which fascinated the Romantics. Writing to Imlay from Christiania, in a characteristic passage, she conjures up one of those enduring images of the ideal life that is always just out of reach. Here the bitterness of her past experience lies in the balance with her unquenched hopes. It is a vivid piece of self-portraiture, the kind of thing with which Godwin (rather than Imlay) fell in love; and it is difficult to believe that it was written by a woman for whom travel was not a deep reflex, a profound need of intellect and heart.
She describes how autumn has come to Christiania, and the gathering clouds urge her to depart southwards. Yet despite the ‘calls of business and affection’, she feels a strang
e urge to press onward into yet remoter regions. She continues:
You will ask perhaps, why I wished to go further northward. Why? not only because the country, from all I can gather, is most romantic, abounding in forests and lakes, and the air pure, but I have heard much of the intelligence of the inhabitants, substantial farmers, who have none of that cunning to contaminate their simplicity, which displeased me so much in the conduct of the people on the sea coast … The description I received of them carried me back to the fables of the golden age: independence and virtue; affluence without vice; cultivation of mind, without depravity of heart; with ‘ever smiling liberty’, the nymph of the mountain. – I want faith! My imagination hurries me forward to seek an asylum in such a retreat from all the disappointments I am threatened with; but reason drags me back, whispering that the world is still the world, and man the same compound of weakness and folly, who must occasionally excite love and disgust, admiration and contempt. (Letter 14)
This was not written by a woman who could be sent away on a fool’s errand. It was written by one of nature’s pilgrims, who would always seek, hoping against hope to find. If she quotes from the old Republican poet Milton, the spirit in which she admonishes and then encourages herself is not far from Bunyan.
V
‘The Treasure Ship’
YET THERE IS fascinating evidence, of a different kind, that her journey was more than a romantic literary adventure. It was also a genuine business enterprise, and Imlay had expressed remarkable confidence in her talents by putting it into her hands. Wollstonecraft was indeed a serious commercial traveller. Modern research has slowly revealed that she was responsible for the legal recovery of a very large sum of money: in fact nothing less than a treasure ship. As this extraordinary story is never revealed in her book, despite her long polemic passages on the commercial spirit and the destructive effect of the mercantile outlook (passages all aimed directly at Imlay), it is worth investigating it in some detail. It gives us a striking new perspective on Mary Wollstonecraft’s exceptional abilities, and goes a long way to explaining both the itinerary she travelled and the daring nature of what she undertook.
Wollstonecraft’s first modern editor, William Clark Durant, discovered in the Abinger Papers a remarkable legal document drawn up by Imlay, in which she is appointed his legal representative and given power of attorney throughout Scandinavia. It states:
Know all men by these presents, that I, Gilbert Imlay, citizen of the United States of America, at present residing in London, do appoint Mary Imlay, my best friend and wife, to take the sole management of my affairs and business which I had placed in the hands of Mr Elias Backman, negotiant, Gottenburg, or those of Messers Myburg and Co, Copenhagen … For which this letter shall be a sufficient power, enabling her to receive all the money that may be recovered from Peter Ellyson, whatever the issue of the trial now carrying on, instituted by Mr Elias Backman, as my agent, for the violation of trust which I had reposed in his integrity. (William Clark Durant, ed., Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft, 1927, p. 295)
The exact implications of this document have for long remained obscure. Backman – a shrewd commercial fixer who subsequently became the first American Consul in Sweden – was known as Imlay’s agent in a semi-legal trading business, shipping much-needed raw materials from Gothenburg to Le Havre, and running the British blockade round the neutral Baltic ports into wartime France. This was a business undertaken by British and American sympathizers with France, and connived at by firms like Myburg, but which was strictly speaking a ‘traitorous correspondence’ with the enemy. Nevertheless excise records show that similar businesses – in gold coin, tobacco and spirits – were illegally maintained throughout the war from almost all the ports of southern England. Operations through Hamburg, Copenhagen, Gothenburg or Arendal were considerably more respectable, though not necessarily safer.
But the identity of ‘Peter Ellyson’, the reason for his ‘trial’, and the exact nature of his ‘violation of trust’ have not been known to modern biographers. They have therefore tended to discount Imlay’s document, and to give little credence to its concluding statement: ‘Thus, confiding in the talent, zeal, and earnestness of my dearly beloved friend and companion, I submit the management of these affairs entirely and implicitly to her discretion.’
Yet zeal and discretion were most certainly demanded of Mary Wollstonecraft. To what degree has been revealed, only recently, by a modern governor of Gothenburg, Mr Per Nystrom. In the late 1970s Nystrom began to interest himself in the early shipping records of his city. The result of his researches appeared in a little pamphlet published by the Royal Society of Arts and Sciences of Gothenburg in 1980 (Mary Wollstonecraft’s Scandinavian Journey, RSAS Gothenburg, Humaniora No. 17, 1980). What he shows is that Mary Wollstonecraft was in pursuit of a stolen treasure ship, packed with silver and Bourbon plate. The ship had been spirited away by its Norwegian captain from Imlay’s trading company, which owned the vessel and its cargo. It represented the greater part of Imlay’s assets. In fact, Wollstonecraft was on a treasure-hunt in Scandinavia.
The extraordinary story, as unfolded by Nystrom, is briefly this. In June 1794, registration documents show that Gilbert Imlay purchased a cargo ship called La Liberté from a group of French merchants at the Normandy port of Le Havre. Imlay had already had some success with his blockade-running business, probably with cargoes shipped from Hamburg on Danish ships, and he now decided to set up on his own account as a clandestine importer of alum and naval construction materials from the Baltic. He was in an optimistic mood and full of schemes. He had recently rented a house for Mary Wollstonecraft in Le Havre, and the month before their daughter Fanny had been safely born. He felt expansive.
The ship was ideal for the task – fast and highly manoeuvrable – and only required false papers to disguise her mission. To this purpose, he renamed her Maria and Margaretha (perhaps there was a private joke here, using the Italian version of his wife’s name, Mary, and her maid’s, Marguerite). He then hired a twenty-five-year-old Norwegian sailor to be her captain. The sailor’s name was Peder Ellefsen, the son of a well-known merchant family from Risor, the small port between Larvik and Arendal on the Skagerrak.
Imlay was now able to apply through Ellefsen to the Danish Consul in Le Havre (who dealt with all Scandinavian shipping), and re-register the ship as a neutral vessel. According to these new papers the Maria and Margaretha was a Norwegian cargo ship, based in Kristiansund, owned by Ellefsen himself, and carrying ballast back to Copenhagen. The flag of convenience was complete. Imlay now secretly loaded up his ship with its real cargo, intended as the convertible currency with which he would purchase the stores at Gothenburg, under Elias Backman’s supervision. Nystrom is able to show what this cargo was, from subsequent documents connected with the ‘trial’ of Peder Ellefsen. It consisted of thirty-two bars of silver, and thirty-six pieces of plate, some of it rumoured to carry the royal Bourbon coat of arms. The total value was £35,000; an enormous sum, equivalent to perhaps a million pounds in modern currency.
How Imlay ever obtained such valuables remains a mystery. Perhaps it was through his connections in Paris, perhaps it was confiscated or even stolen aristocratic property, perhaps through some Franco-American syndicate involving his old friend Thomas Christie. At all events it was a capital investment far beyond his private means, and to lose it would have meant ruin. There can be no doubt that Mary Wollstonecraft, at the time she was acting as his agent in 1795, must have been fully briefed on all these details.
The ensuing events can be traced. The ship was dispatched under Ellefsen’s command in August 1794 to run the British blockade through the North Sea. Norwegian shipping records show that she reached the shores of the Skagerrak safely on 20 August, and put in at one of the small ports near Arendal. But she never reached her destination port of Gothenburg, down the coast in Sweden. In reply to his urgent requests for information, Backman was first told that the treasure ship had sunk. But further
inquiries during the autumn confirmed that Peder Ellefsen was in fact safely back in his home port of Risor. There were independent reports that the treasure had been taken off in a small boat by the captain, and that the first mate (who was English) had been given the ship as the price of his silence. Whatever the exact details, by the winter of 1794–95 when he had returned to London, Gilbert Imlay was aware that his venture had disastrously miscarried. The Maria and Margaretha had disappeared, the silver and plate had been misappropriated, and Peder Ellefsen had ‘violated his trust’. It was, one may think, a case of poacher poached.
Legally speaking, of course, the situation was extremely delicate. It throws new light on all those mysterious business worries for which Wollstonecraft was continually reproaching Imlay, and which cast their shadow over A Short Residence in the tirades against the profit motive, and the obsession with trade, in Letters 23 and 24, from Hamburg. French law had no jurisdiction in the case; British law would have regarded both parties as criminal. Imlay’s only recourse was to the Danish courts, and he instructed Backman to apply to Copenhagen, in an attempt to bring some kind of pressure to bear on the merchant community in Norway. To his great surprise, and perhaps through the influence of American traders with A. P. Bernstorff, the motions at least of legal redress were forthcoming.
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