The Symbol Seekers

by A. A. Glynn

  Dacers shuffled his feet and gave a nervous cough. Then he took the plunge.

  ‘Miss Van Trask—Roberta,’ he began huskily, ‘I am not a wealthy man and I am unlikely ever to be able to offer you a fortune in gold. The most precious thing I can offer is a total, unswerving devotion so long as I have a breath in my body. You spoke of gestures and symbols. Well, even if I am scorned and laughed at, I came here to make a specific, old time gesture.’

  Her face which had considered him with an expression of wonderment was transformed by a spreading, radiant smile and her remarkably expressive eyes sparkled with affection.

  ‘A gesture, Mr. Dacers?’ she queried.

  ‘Yes—this gesture.’ He stood up, moved a little nearer her chair and made an elaborate show of going down on one knee and placing his right hand over his heart.

  Roberta began to chuckle then said: ‘Oh. Mr. Dacers—dear, shy, reticent Englishman that you are—I thought you’d never ask!’

  FIRST AFTERWORD

  “THE PATHFINDER OF THE SEAS”…

  Matthew Fontaine Maury became famous as “The Pathfinder of the Seas”. It was a title richly earned by this American sailor, scientist and scholar who served in two navies, that of the United States and, after the outbreak of the Civil War, that of the rebel Confederate States. He did invaluable work and was a benefactor of seafarers the world over.

  Born in Virginia in 1806, he entered the US Navy at eighteen as a midshipman. He had a short experience at sea before an accident left him with a leg injury that ruled out further seafaring. He remained in the navy and devoted himself to intense scholarship, studying navigation, winds, currents and the behaviour of the oceans and seas of all the world. He charted marine dangers in every part of the globe, investigated safe routes and published books that put him in the debt of naval men, merchant seamen and sea-goers of every description. In 1842, while the United States was still at peace, he was made Superintendent of the United States Naval Observatory but when the Southern States broke with the Union at the dawn of the Civil War, as a Virginian, he resigned his commission and joined the infant Confederate States Navy.

  He was advised to go to England to help spread propaganda promoting support for the recognition of the Confederacy by European nations and to work with James D Bulloch, the South’s chief naval naval agent in procuring and commissioning ships for the Southern navy. Although opposed to slavery, Maury, a devoted Christian, outspokenly desired an end to the devastating war between his countrymen. He nevertheless worked earnestly for a Southern victory and was responsible for procuring several ships in Britain and France. He settled in Birkenhead to where he managed to bring his wife and children.

  In 1865 six months after the end of the Civil War, the Confederate commerce raider Shenandoah which was commissioned through the efforts of Bulloch and Maury, arrived in Liverpool. She had been prowling Arctic waters in search of US shipping, unaware that hostilities had ceased until meeting a British merchantman. Rather than surrender in an American port for fear of his crew being hanged as pirates, her commander, James Waddell, brought her on an epic voyage by way of Cape Horn to Liverpool where she was surrendered to the British authorities. It was the boast of her crew that they were the last to fly the battle flag of the Confederate States.

  Soon afterwards, the Shenandoah’s officers visited Maury and his family at Birkenhead and gave a number of souvenirs of the ship to Maury’s daughters. The flag was presented to Miss Eliza Maury. For years, it was kept in secret for fear of its being seized by British customs authorities but, after the turn of the century, it was returned to the United States and lodged in the Confederate Museum in Richmond, Virginia, the former capital of the Confederate States.

  In 1866, Matthew Maury left his family for a time, going to Mexico. Napoleon the Third, the grandiose Emperor of the French, had invaded that country and set up another Bonaparte, the Austrian Archduke Maximillian, as puppet emperor when he considered his conquest to be complete. Several noted Confederate military men and ex-politicians went to Mexico to enter Maximillian’s service, rather than endure the rigours of Reconstruction in the defeated South.

  Maximillian made Maury ‘Imperial Commissioner for Immigration’ and the Pathfinder of the Seas had hopes of bringing defeated Southerners to Mexico and setting up a colony called New Virginia.

  After a short time, he returned to England to visit his family and while he was away, Mexican military force overthrew the rickety structure of Maximillian’s empire. Maximillian, victim of the hare-brained French adventure, was imprisoned and, the following year, shot by firing squad. His wife, the tragic Empress Carlotta, lost her reason permanently.

  Remaining in England, Maury earned honours from across the globe for his work for the benefit of the international maritime community. The British First Lord of the Admiralty, at a public dinner in his honour, gave him a substantial cash prize; the University of Cambridge made him an honorary Doctor of Laws; there was a valuable set of coins from Pope Pius XI and several countries conferred knighthoods or the equivalent on him.

  In 1868, Maury and his family returned to the United States where, in his native State, he became a professor at Virginia Military Institute. He travelled, lecturing on scientific themes and made an important study of the natural history and future potential of Virginia, a State which saw the highest number of Civil War battles. Its aim was to restore the health of the State.

  In 1873, the highly honoured Pathfinder of the Seas died, aged 77, at his home in Lexington, Virginia.

  Any suggestion that the flag of the raider Shenandoah was stolen from Maury’s Birkenhead home in 1867 must be put down to novelist’s licence!

  SECOND AFTERWORD

  …AND THE MAN WHO DIED TWICE

  One night in April 1890, a man was found lying close to a public house in Chelsea. He was said to be dead and his throat was cut. In his mouth there was a coin which some reports said was a sovereign while others claimed it was a half-sovereign. Later speculation about the presence of the coin in the mouth suggested it symbolised one guilty of slander while another opinion drew on mythology and recalled the way a corpse was equipped to pay the ferryman who took the soul across the River Styx.

  The man was Charles Augustus Howell. He was 50 years old and he had a colourful life in which legend and blatant lies were entangled with much shady activity including unproven suggestions that he was a blackmailer.

  Howell was born in Oporto, Portugal, of an English father and Portuguese mother whom he claimed had aristocratic origins. He frequently wore the ribbon of a Portuguese royal order which he said was conferred in perpetuity on her family. As a young man, he arrived in England from the Continent, supposedly after being caught cheating at cards.

  Between 1858 and 1864, he was missing from England, according to his own tales, indulging in various European exploits. Among other things, he claimed he was an accomplice in the attempt to assassinate Napoleon III, Emperor of the French, for which his friend Felice Orsini, accused of throwing a bomb at the royal carriage, was executed.

  Howell was closely associated with notables in the British art world in the 1860s and 1870s as an artists’ agent, a dealer in objects of fine art and a fixer of various deals, astonishingly adept at buying and selling. In artistic circles, some relished his winning charm and glib, often outrageously transparent, tall tales but others could not stand him. The poet Algernon Charles Swinburne called him ‘the vilest wretch I ever came across’ and Whistler said of him: ‘Criminally speaking, the Portugee was an artist.’

  The Cockney mistress of one of the artists referred to him as “’Owell” thus he was given the nickname ‘Owl.’ By the time of his death, Howell had fallen on hard times.

  Howell went down in legend as the man who organised and supervised the exhumation of the body of Lizzie Sidall, the wife of the painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, from her grave in Highgate Cemeter
y in 1869, seven years after burial. Rossetti wanted to retrieve a book of his unpublished, poems which he buried with her enfolded in her hair, so that he might publish them. He could not bring himself to attend the exhumation and stipulated that it must be done at dead of night and kept secret from the general public. Later, word of it got out, possibly through Howell.

  Howell had an attractive, statuesque wife as well as a mistress, Rosa Corder, who bore him a daughter. She was an accomplished painter who had been a pupil of the pre-Raphaelite artist, Frederick Sandys. A scandal occurred when it was discovered that some drawings attributed to Dante Gabriel Rossetti were fakes and it was believed that they were created by Corder, acting under Howell’s persuasion. This caused a split between Howell and Rossetti.

  Very soon after reports of the finding of Howell’s body were made public, another story became current. This said he was not dead when found but died later in the Home Hospital in Fitzroy Street—ironically a street long associated with London’s artistic and literary colony. The cause of death was said to be pneumonic phthisis, a form of tuberculosis, and the wounds to his throat were for some reason caused surgically after death.

  After his death it was found that Howell had hoarded a substantial set of letters from notables he was acquainted with and it was conjectured that he kept them for blackmail purposes but there was never any evidence of blackmail against him.

  Curiously, no reports of an inquest or a police inquiry have ever surfaced, giving rise to a conspiracy theory around the death of ‘Owl.’

  Charles Augustus Howell inspired Arthur Conan Doyle to create Charles Augustus Milverton, the blackmailer in the Sherlock Holmes saga.

  Any suggestion that Charles Augustus Howell ever organised a robbery at the Birkenhead home of Matthew Meary in 1867 must be put down to novelist’s licence.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Anthony Arthur Glynn was born in Manchester in 1929, and had a disrupted wartime childhood including enduring the Luftwaffe’s blitzing of the city in 1940 and 1941.

  Drawn to art and writing from an early age, he was strongly influenced by two uncles, one a newspaperman who, in his spare time, wrote a variety of articles as well as fiction for juvenile weeklies. The other, who settled in Canada, was a chief theatrical scenic artist, working on the sets for many top stage shows.

  Reading avidly from a young age, he became interested in all kinds of books and devoured popular fiction. Discovering the American comic strip Buck Rogers when he was about seven sparked off a lifelong interest in science fiction, and he later became well known among British science fiction fans. This activity led to lasting friendships and opportunities to write and illustrate in the amateur fanzines of Britain and the US.

  At twenty-two came his first professional science fiction sale. Others followed and he worked in other fields, including juvenile fiction and, eventually, western and detective novels.

  He started work as a textile designer in Manchester at sixteen and studied the subject at Manchester Regional College of Art in the evenings. After two years’ National Service in the army, he changed direction for a short period, his fascination with theatre and film leading him into the professional film world—as a projectionist for the Rank Organisation.

  In his early twenties, he became a reporter on a weekly newspaper in Cheshire, serving an enjoyable apprenticeship covering rural events and riding country lanes on a bicycle. Later, he returned to Manchester, produced some Western novels; worked on the features desk of the Sunday Mirror and spent thirty-three years with the Bolton Evening News newspaper group as chief reporter, then assistant editor of one of its weekly papers.

  Since retiring, he has written a number of new western novels as well as short science fiction and fantasy stories for Wildside’s Fantasy Adventures series. Currently he is planning on a return to detective fiction, and Case of the Dixie Ghosts and its sequel, The Symbol Seekers, reflects his interest in the strong links between Lancashire and America in the U.S. Civil War.