On ill-treatment of sailors aboard American ships - photo 1
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On ill-treatment of sailors aboard American ships

Lot 101
15.06.2023 10:00UTC -05:00
Classic
Starting price
$ 8 000
AuctioneerCHRISTIE'S
Event locationUSA, New York
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ID 967638
Lot 101 | On ill-treatment of sailors aboard American ships
Estimate value
$ 8 000 – 12 000
On ill-treatment of sailors aboard American ships

Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1 April 1859

HAWTHORNE, Nathaniel (1804-1864). Autograph letter signed ("Nathl Hawthorne") to Henry Bright, [London,] 1 April 1859.



Eight pages, bifolia, 212 x 137mm neatly laid into larger sheets (losses from ink erosion and partial fold separations).



"I am not in the least anxious to figure in the controversy which you are about to begin … I shall be tarred and feathered, when I go home if I betray to England the secret that we are utterly deficient in the bones and sinews of naval power."



An unpublished, lengthy, and detailed letter to his good friend Henry Bright, mentioning his work on his latest "Romance" (The Marble Faun), followed by an intricate discussion of the brutal conditions aboard American ships and his thoughts on remedying the problem. Recently returned from Italy, Hawthorne opens with a good-natured rib: "I have often wondered why you did not write to me, and (of course) took your neglect as a proof that years of kindly intercourse make but very little impression upon the tough heart of an Englishman." After expressing his pleasure in his friends' continued interests he adds that "In the languid London air … and with innumerable things to disturb and distract me, I have continue to write a Romance," and expresses his hope that it would be published soon.



Hawthorne then turns to Bright's apparent request for the former U.S. Consul and customs house veteran to comment publicly on the brutal state of affairs in the American merchant service and its implications on U.S. naval power. Bright, a shipping magnate who would later offer financial support to several sailors' homes that housed and fed destitute seamen, was asking specifically about "the punishment of acts of cruelty on board our [American] ships." Hawthorne responds that there "is something else (as I have repeatedly urged upon my government) to be first accomplished; and it is something which we ourselves must do without your help. We must abolish the present mode of whipping deserters, we must create a sufficient supply of good, native seamen (a class which now does not exist) and we must give all merchant captains the legal means of maintaining discipline on board. Until all this is done, we must either persist in justifiable cruelties as are now practiced, or quit the sea altogether." Hawthorne continues, noting the lack of "native seamen" in the United States, which compelled sea captains to recruit inexperienced men, where were often "mad with liquor, or dead drunk, all but a few, who keep part sober enough to rob their companions of their clothes."



Hawthorne continued in this vein, eventually throwing up his hands in frustration, unable to propose a concrete solution, insisting that he was "not in the least anxious to figure in the controversy which you are about to begin; nor even for the sake of being quoted and allowed in your pamphlet, as 'your distinguished friend late American consul at this port, whose successes in the fields of fiction will give weight and authority to whatever statements and opinions he may set forth.' I shall be tarred and feathered, when I go home if I betray to England the secret that we are utterly deficient in the bones and sinews of naval power. Not published in Letters, Centennial Edition.

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