David Crane - Lord Byron’s Jackal - A Life of Trelawny

Not even Trelawny, though, in the drawn-out loneliness of his life at sea or the humiliations of the divorce courts, could have anticipated that destiny would bring him to Italy in time to play his part in English Romanticism’s Götterdämmerung . Neither, during his first weeks, was there any hint of the dramas that lay ahead. Through the early months of 1822, the sexual and political tensions that were always part of their Pisan world were stirring ominously beneath the surface, and yet in the very ordinariness of Edward Williams’s journal for this same time one glimpses in its last, leisurely days a world that feels as if it might have gone on for ever.

At the end of March their peace was threatened by an unpleasant and absurdly inflated incident with a sergeant major called Masi, a degrading brawl that ended in Masi’s wounding and ultimately Byron’s exit from Pisa. Some of the details of this incident are still obscure but it began when the party of Byron and Shelley, returning from shooting practice, took umbrage at a dragoon who galloped through their ranks on the road into Pisa. When the English gave chase there was a scuffle beneath the city gate that left Shelley on the ground and a Captain Hay wounded, but it was only when an unknown member of Byron’s household subsequently stabbed Masi outside the Palazzo Lanfranchi that the incident threatened serious consequences.

After one fraught night through which he was not expected to live, Masi recovered from his wound. But anti-English feeling ran high in the city, and even before the Gambas, the family of Byron’s mistress Teresa Guiccioli, were expelled and Byron went with them, Shelley and Mary had determined to quit Pisa.

The final calamity, when it came, however, sprang from a different direction with all the suddenness and violence of the Mediterranean storm that caused it. From long before Trelawny’s appearance there had been excited talk in Shelley’s circle of boats and boating expeditions, and when Trelawny arrived in January 1822 he immediately assumed, as the ex-naval man among them, a leading role in their schemes. In his journal for 15 January, Williams noted that Trelawny had brought them a model for an American schooner, and that they had settled to have a 30-foot boat built along its lines. Within days an order was placed through Daniel Roberts for this boat, together with a larger vessel that Trelawny was to skipper himself for Byron. Then, on 5 February, Trelawny wrote to Roberts again with his last, fateful instructions, dangerously reducing the original specifications for Shelley’s boat by almost half.

Dear Roberts,

In haste to save the Post – I have only time to tell you, that you are to consider this letter as definitive , and to cancel every other regarding the Boats .

First, then, continue the one that you are at work upon for Lord B. She is to have Iron Keel , copper fastenings and bottom – the Cabin to be as high and roomy as possible, no expense to be spared to make her a complete BEAUTY! We should like to have four guns, one … as large as you think safe – to make a devil of a noise!– fitted with locks – the swivels of brass! – I suppose from one to three pounders.

Now as to our Boat, we have from considerations abandoned the one we wrote about. But in her lieu – will you lay us down a small beautiful one of about 17 or 18 feet? To be a thorough Varment at pulling and sailing ! Single handed oars, say four or six; and we think, if you differ not, three luggs and a jib – backing ones ! 12

It is given to few men to kill two major poets, but the friend to whom Byron turned for his doctors and Shelley for his boat has claims to be considered one of the seminal influences on nineteenth-century literature. It was not until the middle of May that the Don Juan as she was named was finally delivered to Shelley at Lerici, but even then there were further sacrifices of stability to elegance to be made, additions of a false stern and prow to accentuate her lines, and a new set of riggings which gave her, to Williams’s eye, all the glamour and prestige of a 50-ton vessel.

Fast, graceful and spirited as she was, the Don Juan was certainly no craft to survive the approaching storm into which, with Shelley, Edward Williams and the boat-boy Charles Vivian on board, she disappeared off Leghorn on 8 July 1822. Trelawny had initially intended to accompany them on their journey back to Lerici in Byron’s Bolivar , but at the last was delayed by the port authorities. Sullenly and reluctantly, he refurled the Bolivar ’s sails, and watched the Don Juan ’s progress through his spy-glass. The sea had the smoothness and colour of lead, but to the south-west black storm-clouds were massing dangerously. The devil, he was told by his Genoese mate, was brewing mischief. On shore, an anxious Daniel Roberts took a telescope to the top of the lighthouse, straining to get one last view of the boat before it vanished into the thickening mist.

Sometime after six the storm broke with a sudden and spectacular violence. The captain of an Italian vessel which had made it back to the safety of the harbour reported sighting the Don Juan in mountainous seas. He had offered to take its crew aboard, but a voice had cried back ‘No’. A sailor called across for them to reef their sails at least, but when Williams was seen trying to lower them Shelley had seized an arm, angrily determined to stop him. 13 *

It was the last time the Don Juan was seen. Over the next ten days, while Mary and Jane waited in agony and Trelawny tirelessly patrolled the coast, pieces of wreckage followed by the bodies of Vivian, Williams and Shelley were washed ashore. Shelley’s corpse was found on the beach at Viareggio. After so long in the water the face was gone but Trelawny was able to identify him by the clothes and a copy of Keats’s poems still folded back in his jacket pocket. The body was buried where it lay in a shallow grave of quicklime, and Trelawny hurried to the Casa Magni on the Gulf of Spezia, the summer house where the Shelleys and Williamses had been living since the end of April. Over fifty years later he returned to the memory in a passage honed by time and repetition.

I had ridden fast, to prevent any ruder messenger from bursting in on them. As I stood on the threshold of the house, the bearer, or rather confirmer, of news which would rack every fibre of their quivering frames to the utmost, I paused, and looking at the sea, my memory reverted to our joyous parting only a few days before.

The two families, then, had all been on the veranda, overhanging a sea so clear and calm that every star was reflected on the water, as if it had been a mirror; the young mothers singing some merry tune, with the accompaniment of a guitar. Shelley’s shrill laugh – I heard it still – rang in my ears, with Williams’ friendly hale, the general buona notte of all the joyous party, and the earnest entreaty to me to return as soon as possible, and not forget the commissions they had given me.

My reverie was broken by a shriek from the nurse Caterina, as, crossing the hall she saw me in the doorway. After asking her a few questions, I went up the stairs, and, unannounced, entered the room. I neither spoke, nor did they question me. Mrs Shelley’s large grey eyes were fixed on my face. I turned away. Unable to bear this horrid silence, with a convulsive effort she exclaimed –

‘Is there no hope?’

I did not answer, but left the room, and sent the servant with the children to them. The next day I prevailed on them to return to Pisa. The misery of that night and the journey the next day, and of many days and nights that followed, I can neither describe nor forget. 14