A biography of one’s ancestor is a special case of historical
writing. Descendency can spur one on to a painstaking pursuit of archival data.
Although subjectivity in the writing of history and biography is certainly not
exclusive to descendants, it may also be that one’s subjective beliefs are
colored by the compelling identifications of ancestry. It depends on the
identification the author makes with the subject, both consciously and out of
awareness. One of the achievements of David Lindsay’sMayflower Bastard
is the author’s ability to make his discovery of his ancestor also a pilgrimage
of his own self-discovery.The book’s title is Lindsay’s compass – his lodestar for
navigating the tale of his Mayflower ancestor Richard More. The story
that was already known was that Richard, along with his brother and two sisters,
was shipped off with the Mayflower Separatists by Lord Samuel More, who
had repudiated and disinherited the four young children born during his stormy
marriage to his cousin Lady Katherine More. However, Lindsay’s title signifies
his certainty that Richard was the child of Katharine More by the estate’s
yeoman, Jacob Blakeway (from whom Lindsay came to think he was descended) and
not by her lawful husband, Lord Samuel More.
While Lindsay’s conclusion
is a possibility – given the highly charged and ambiguous relationship of
Katherine to both Samuel and Jacob – Richard’s actual paternity remains
unproven, and at best uncertain. My own interpretation of the existing data and
the English law of the time does not really support Lindsay’s conclusion that
Richard should be considered illegitimate, let alone labeled a bastard
[1]. However, as befitting the descendant of the Mayflower voyager who
later became "Old Captain More," the salty vigor of "bastard" helped Lindsay
weave the sailor’s yarns he favors, spinning them out of considerable research
and spicing them with his predilection for inventiveness. [2] In a previous book
[3], Lindsay characterized Alexander Graham Bell as balancing "sense and
sensationalism" – which fits here. Neither was a bad hand at
discovery.
Although Lindsay launched Richard in rough waters, he was
steadier in relating Richard’s passage into adulthood and old age. He grants
Richard the man the dignity he deserves, even with his documented misdeeds of
business and weaknesses of flesh. Lindsay takes pains to show that Richard often
did the best he could with what life handed to him. We learn that he was not
without decency and kindness, and he displayed a sense of responsibility to his
family and friends. Richard More was an individualist but not a Separatist, and
despite a young childhood spent in Elder William Brewster’s household, he was
not one of the Saints. Richard’s survival-driven business practices in a
hardscrabble life were often dubious, and evidence also suggests that he
committed bigamy as a young man and adultery as an aging one. Lindsay here
reminds us how serious and scary sexual misconduct was in those times. It
certainly went on, but the punishing hand of the law could be very severe. In an
odd turn, it seems easier for Lindsay to think of Richard as a bastard then it
was for him to believe him actually guilty of adultery, which is more than
likely. The court’s charges (which Lindsay conjectures may have been fabricated)
were also made by his church, which excommunicated him (they reinstated him two
years later). However, if biography "aims not merely at informing but also at
moving the reader through the spectacle of another soul’s journey through
existence," [4] then David Lindsay has done well by Richard.
He also
does very well in his reading of the feisty Lady Katherine and the self-serving
Lord Samuel More. He captures the character of each and his psychological takes
seem right on the mark. With all due respect to Lord Samuel’s descendants,
Lindsay’s sober account of the harm done by the power-abusing Lord Samuel to his
first wife and the children (and in his later role as a deserter of his
soldiers) makes it understandable why Lindsay came to prefer to think of himself
as descended from a pleasure-seeking, working-class man like Jacob Blakeway.
The biography describes Richard being witness to the Witch Trials of his
hometown of Salem, where he kept an "ordinary" after his sea days were
over. Lindsay relates many historical events that occurred in the places that
Richard lived, as well as the areas he traveled to as a mariner. Sometimes the
data seem like oddments, but they often bring a fuller understanding of the
background that affected Richard’s life.
It would be tempting for a lover
of great literature to fault Lindsay on his narrative style or his ability to
evoke an always perfectly true picture of Richard in his sketches. Ironically,
only figures that come out of a writer’s deep and pure imagination can evoke an
indelible truth for the reader. We all know who the lovesick Juliet is. We
hardly know who the probably heartsick Dorothy (May) Bradford was. In this book
of Lindsay’s seafaring ancestor, the author is not Melville but Captain More is
also not Captain Ahab. Ahab, as pure fiction, could be single-mindedly portrayed
as driven by the evil of revenge. Richard More’s portrait is complicated by the
necessity of uncovering facts and analyzing them with judicious
restraint. Despite the imperfections of style, and possibly of interpretation,
Lindsay did create something of value. I’m glad that Lindsay thought there was a
hot story to be told because, like Columbus, he may not have been exactly where
he thought he was, but he discovered America anyway! Without Lindsay’s
identification with his subject an important journey might not have been made,
and a good tale might not have been told.
Notes
1. "Hostages of
Fortune/The More Children of the Mayflower". R.G. Kainer, New England
Ancestors. Winter, 2003.
2. The Patent Files/Dispatches From the
Frontiers of Invention. David Lindsay, New York: Lyons Press,
1999.
3. Madness in the Making: The Triumphant Rise and Untimely Fall
of America's Show Inventors. David Lindsay. New York: Kodansha,
1997.
4. "Biography and Pseudobiography". Kenneth Silverman,
Common-Place, vol. 3. No. 2, January 2003. [www.common-place.org]