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Sea Narratives: Cultural Responses to the Sea, 1600–Present pp 47–79Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

‘A Sea of Stories’: Maritime Imagery and Imagination in Napoleonic Narratives of War Captivity

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Abstract

Whilst a growing interest in prisoners of war has shifted the lens of investigation towards a cultural appreciation of their ‘low literature’, little attention has been given to the use of landscapes, particularly mnemonic and imaginary seascapes, in voicing forced displacement in times of war. In this chapter, Duché addresses this issue by exploring, in unison, how French and British captives of the Napoleonic Wars mobilised and circulated sea-inspired tropes not only to express their situation in reference to the sea voyage genre, but also to retrieve a lost everyday and to converse with the societies surrounding their seclusion. Drawing on diaries and objects produced by detainees, this chapter re-evaluates the role of the sea as a site of narration and memorialisation of coerced mobility.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Richard Langton, Narrative of a Captivity in France From 1809 to 1814, 2 vols (Liverpool: Smith, 1836).

  2. 2.

    Langton, Narrative of a Captivity, vol. 1, pp. 1–4. See also Dean King, ed., Every Man Will Do His Duty: An Anthology of First-Hand Accounts from the Age of Nelson 1793–1815 (London: Conway Maritime Press, 1997), p. xiv.

  3. 3.

    Langton, Narrative of a Captivity, vol. 1, p. 31.

  4. 4.

    Expression borrowed from the work of Philip Edwards.

  5. 5.

    Patrick Le Caravèse, ‘Les Prisonniers Français en Grande-Bretagne de 1803 à 1814’, Napoleonica. La Revue, 3:9 (2010): 118–52; Gavin Daly, ‘Napoleon’s Lost Legions: French Prisoners of War in Britain, 1803–1814’, History, 89:295 (2004): 361–80.

  6. 6.

    On the imagined space of the Channel, see Renaud Morieux, Une Mer pour Deux Royaumes: la Manche, Frontière Franco-Anglaise (XVIIe–XVIIIe Siècles) (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2008).

  7. 7.

    Philip Edwards, The Story of the Voyage: Sea-Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). On the cultural shift from negative to positive visions of the sea in the West during the period, see Alain Corbin, The Lure of the Sea: The Discovery of the Seaside in the Western World, 1750–1840 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994).

  8. 8.

    Pauline Turner Strong, Captive Selves, Captivating Others: The Politics and Poetics of Colonial American Captivity Narratives (Boulder: Westview Press, 2000), p. 9.

  9. 9.

    Linda Colley, ‘Perceiving Low Literature: The Captivity Narrative’, Essays in Criticism, 53:3 (2003): 199–218.

  10. 10.

    Catriona Kennedy, Narratives of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars: Military and Civilian Experience in Britain and Ireland (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Linda Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire and the World, 1600–1850 (London: Jonathan Cape, 2002); Linda Colley, ‘Going Native, Telling Tales: Captivity, Collaborations and Empire’, Past and Present, 168:1 (2000): 170–93.

  11. 11.

    Catriona Kennedy has briefly explored the symbolic significance for the sea amongst Revolutionary and Napoleonic ‘travellers in uniforms’, namely sailors in regular service abroad. Yet, the question of how coerced mobility, in the context of war captivity, affected and was impinged by representations of the sea remains uncharted territory. Catriona Kennedy, Narratives of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, p. 95.

  12. 12.

    For example, see Narrateur de la Meuse, 8 October 1813, p. 1.

  13. 13.

    On the social and gender unsettlement of war captivity, see, amongst others, Alon Rachamimov, ‘The Disruptive Comforts of Drag: (Trans) Gender Performances among Prisoners of War in Russia, 1914–1920’, American Historical Review, 111:2 (2006): 362–82.

  14. 14.

    Simon Schama coined the expression ‘hydrographic culture’ in The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (London: Collins, 1987), p. 44.

  15. 15.

    Howard Marchitello, Narrative and Meaning in Early Modern England: Browne’s Skull and other Histories (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 4–5.

  16. 16.

    H. Porter Abbott, The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 20–2.

  17. 17.

    Harold Mytum and Gilly Carr, eds. Prisoners of War: Archaeology, Memory, and Heritage of 19th- and 20th-Century Mass Internment (New York, Heidelberg, Dordrecht, London: Springer, 2012). On the ‘sea of stories’, see Salman Rushdie, Haroun and the Sea of Stories (London: Granta, 1990); Jean-Pierre Durix, ‘“The Gardener of Stories”: Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories’, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 28:1 (1993): 114–22.

  18. 18.

    On the popularity of the Arabian Nights and Oriental storytelling in Europe during the period, see, amongst others, Fahd Mohammed Taleb Saeed Al-Olaqi, ‘The Influence of the Arabian Nights on English Literature: A Selective Study’, European Journal of Social Sciences, 31:3 (2012): 384–96.

  19. 19.

    On the imagined space of the Channel, see Morieux, Une Mer pour Deux Royaumes.

  20. 20.

    Edwards, The Story of the Voyage, pp. 1–7.

  21. 21.

    Edwards, The Story of the Voyage, p. 2.

  22. 22.

    John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), pp. 125–97.

  23. 23.

    Edwards, The Story of the Voyage, p. 3.

  24. 24.

    Philip Edwards, Sea-Mark: The Metaphorical Voyage, Spenser to Milton (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1997), p. 6.

  25. 25.

    Sue Parrill, Nelson’s Navy in Fiction and Film: Depictions of British Sea Power in the Napoleonic Era (Jefferson: MacFarland, 2009); Margarette Lincoln, Representing the Royal Navy: British Sea Power, 1750–1815 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2002).

  26. 26.

    Nicholas Tracy, Britannia’s Palette: The Arts of Naval Victory (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007), p. 222.

  27. 27.

    The union of sky and sea was a common feature in Turner’s productions, yet in his particular portrait of Napoleon in exile the blurred and incandescent marine landscape aimed to represent the brutality and futility of the recently ended conflicts. The Emperor was portrayed as studying a rather banal mollusc, whilst crossing his arm in resignation and despair. See the recent analysis of the painting by Karine Huguenaud for Napoleonica http://www.napoleon.org/en/essential_napoleon/key_painting/files/476835.asp [accessed 11 November 2014]. The importance of the sea in Turner’s work has recently been highlighted in an exhibition at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich. See Christine Riding and Richard Johns, Turner and the Sea (London: Thames and Hudson, 2013).

  28. 28.

    Peter Fritzsche, Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2004).

  29. 29.

    Paul Westover, Necromanticism: Traveling to Meet the Dead, 1750–1860 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 1–2.

  30. 30.

    Westover, Necromanticism, p. 90.

  31. 31.

    Peter Fritzsche, ‘Specters of History: On Nostalgia, Exile, and Modernity’, American Historical Review, 106:5 (2001): 1587–1618.

  32. 32.

    William Story, A Journal Kept in France, during a Captivity of More than Nine Years, Commencing the 14th Day of April 1805 and Ending the 5th Day of May 1814 (London: Gale and Fenner, 1815).

  33. 33.

    Charles Sturt, The Real State of France, in the Year 1809; with an Account of the Treatment of the Prisoners of War, and Persons Otherwise Detained in France (London: Ridgway, 1810).

  34. 34.

    Amongst others, see James Lawrence, A Picture of Verdun, or the English Detained in France, 2 vols (London: Hookham, 1810); Andrew Blayney, Narrative of a Forced Journey through Spain and France, 2 vols (London: Kerby, 1814); Peter Gordon, Narrative of the Imprisonment and Escape of Peter Gordon, Second Mate in the Barque Joseph of Limerick, Captain Connolly (London: Conder, 1816); Robert Wolfe, English Prisoners in France, Containing Observations on their Manners and Habits Principally with Reference to their Religious State (London: Hatchard, 1830); Seacombe Ellison, Prison Scenes: and Narrative of Escape from France, during the Late War (London: Whittaker, 1838); Donat Henchy O’Brien, My Adventures During the Late War, 2 vols (London: Colburn, 1839); Edward Proudfoot Montagu, The Personal Narrative of the Escape of Edward Proudfoot Montagu: An English Prisoner of War, from the Citadel of Verdun (London: Beccles, 1849); Edward Boys, Narrative of a Captivity, Escape, and Adventures in France and Flanders during the War, 2nd edn. (London: Cautley Newby, 1863).

  35. 35.

    This is exemplified by its multiple adaptations for children’s books, which include Un corsaire de quinze ans (Paris: Bibliothèque Rouge et Or, 1954) and more recently Corsaire de la République (Paris: Phébus, 1984).

  36. 36.

    Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, trans. and ed. Stephen Heath in Image–Music–Text (London: Fontana, 1977), pp. 42–8; Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982).

  37. 37.

    James Forbes, Letters from France Written in the Years 1803 and 1804, Including a Particular Account of Verdun and the Situation of the British Captives in that City, 2 vols (London: Bensley, 1806), vol. 2, p. 227.

  38. 38.

    These productions differed greatly from local paintings, which, almost without exception, depicted the town from within its ramparts, thus subduing its fluvial charm to highlight urban scenes and architectures. Bibliothèque d’Etude de Verdun, France, Dessins et Cartes: BCM122, Henry, ‘Porte de France’ (1815); V20, Henry, ‘Vue prise de la Grande Digue’ (1815). Musée de la Princerie, Verdun, France, uncatalogued: Five watercolours of Verdun by James Forbes, 1804. See also Bibliothèque d’Etude de Verdun, France, Dessins et Cartes: V19 bis, Samuel Robinson, ‘A West View of the Town of Verdun in Lorrain from the Heights’, undated.

  39. 39.

    Story, A Journal Kept in France, p. 52.

  40. 40.

    Blayney, Narrative of a Forced Journey, vol. 2, p. 341.

  41. 41.

    ‘Miscellaneous Reviews’, The Gentleman’s Magazine, November 1836, pp. 75–6.

  42. 42.

    Ann Marie Fallon, Global Crusoe: Comparative Literature, Postcolonial Theory and Transnational Aesthetics (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), pp. 28–9.

  43. 43.

    Fallon, Global Crusoe, p. 28.

  44. 44.

    Lawrence, A Picture of Verdun, vol. 1, pp. 90–1; Langton, Narrative of a Captivity, vol. 1, pp. 254–5; Blayney, Narrative of a Forced Journey, vol. 2, p. 197.

  45. 45.

    Kennedy, Narratives of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, pp. 125–6.

  46. 46.

    Langton, Narrative of a Captivity, vol. 1, pp. 254–5. Contemporaries narrated that ‘Verdun began to lose the appearance of a French town’ as captives settled in and renamed its commercial artery Bond Street, see Henry Raikes, ed., Memoir of Vice-Admiral Sir Jahleel Brenton, Baronet, K.C.B. (London: Hatchard, 1846), p. 189. ‘At Verdun’, wrote Reverend Lee in a letter, ‘I found myself enclosed in a small town, comprehending about the space of that iniquitous part of Oxford which surrounds the castle: the river is the same dimension and nearly in the same manner environed with mansions […] The ramparts afford agreeable walks […] which I have christened by the much loved names of Christ Church, Magdalen and such like denominations.’ See John Parry-Wingfield, ed., Napoleon’s Prisoner: A Country Parson’s Ten-Year Detention in France (Ilfracombe: Stockwell, 2012), p. 29.

  47. 47.

    See National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, PRN/6, Officers of HM Royal Navy, prisoners of war at Verdun, 1803–13; John Hopkinson, ‘Register of fellow prisoners at Verdun’ in Thomas Walker, The Depot for Prisoners of War at Norman Cross, Huntingdonshire, 1796 to 1816 (London: Constable, 1913), pp. 312–14.

  48. 48.

    Daly, ‘Napoleon’s Lost Legions’, p. 363.

  49. 49.

    Louis Cros, Condition et traitement des prisonniers de guerre (Montpellier: Delord-Boehm, 1900).

  50. 50.

    Patricia Crimmin described how some French prisoners refused to eat fish as a form of protest against the naval system under which they were sequestered. Patricia K. Crimmin, ‘Prisoners of War and British Port Communities, 1793–1815’, The Northern Mariner/Le Marin du nord, 6:4 (1996): 17–27; Daly, ‘Napoleon’s Lost Legions’, p. 364.

  51. 51.

    On the definition of ‘raffaler’, see the Ortolang dictionary project http://www.cnrtl.fr/definition/raffaler [accessed 11 November 2014].

  52. 52.

    Daly, ‘Napoleon’s Lost Legions’, p. 380.

  53. 53.

    The Narrateur de la Meuse reported on various ‘inventions nautiques des Anglais’. Narrateur de la Meuse, 5 September 1813, p. 6.

  54. 54.

    Léon Renard, L’Art Naval, 3rd edn. (Paris: Hachette, 1873), pp. 254–8; John Goldworth Alger, Napoleon’s British Visitors and Captives (1801–1815) (London: Methuen, 1904), p. 201; James Kingston Tuckey, Maritime Geography and Statistics, 4 vols (London: Black, 1815).

  55. 55.

    Joan W. Scott, ‘The Evidence of Experience’, Critical Inquiry, 17:4 (1991): 773–97.

  56. 56.

    Doreen Massey, For Space (London: Sage, 2005), p. 118. Other seminal studies of space as an ongoing social production include: Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991); Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989).

  57. 57.

    For an example of the adoption of the military term ‘mess’ to refer to dinner parties organised by civilians, see Lawrence, A Picture of Verdun, vol. 1, p. 92.

  58. 58.

    John Barnabas Maude, ed., Book of Common Prayer (Verdun: Christophe, 1810).

  59. 59.

    The aforementioned sermons appeared in James Stanier Clarke, Naval Sermons Preached on Board His Majesty’s Ship The Impetueux in the Western Squadron, During Its Services Off Brest (London: Payne and White, 1798). The expression ‘blue lights’ refers to evangelical sailors. See Richard Blake, Evangelicals in the Royal Navy, 1775–1815: Blue Lights & Psalm-Singers (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2008).

  60. 60.

    Kennedy, Narratives of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, p. 119.

  61. 61.

    Throughout his account, Langton endeavoured to justify himself by presenting his breach of honour as a ‘meditated escape’, Langton, Narrative of a Captivity, vol. 1, p. 98.

  62. 62.

    Alexander Stewart, The Life of Alexander Stewart: Prisoner of Napoleon and Preacher of the Gospel (London: Allen & Unwin, 1948), p. 15.

  63. 63.

    Stewart, The Life of Alexander Stewart, p. 15.

  64. 64.

    Stewart, The Life of Alexander Stewart, pp. 17–18.

  65. 65.

    The day after, he wrote, ‘the historic fact dovetailed most accurately with every part of the dream’; Stewart, The Life of Alexander Stewart, p. 20.

  66. 66.

    Stewart, The Life of Alexander Stewart, p. 18.

  67. 67.

    On the potency of myths of wreckage in eighteenth-century England, see Cathryn Pearce, Cornish Wrecking, 1700–1860: Reality and Popular Myth (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2010).

  68. 68.

    Stewart, The Life of Alexander Stewart, p. 17.

  69. 69.

    Stewart, The Life of Alexander Stewart, p. 20.

  70. 70.

    This process manifested itself in letter-writing. See the letters of a Methodist captive named Nicholas Lelean to his wife, Royal Institute of Cornwall, Courtney Library, The Wesleyans of Mevagissey papers, uncatalogued, Correspondence of Nicholas Lelean, 1806–1813. A similar confessional awakening in captivity can be found in the writings of Captain Jahleel Brenton detained in Verdun. See Raikes, Memoir of Vice-Admiral Sir Jahleel Brenton.

  71. 71.

    The convention of citing Classics was aligned with the romantic reimagining of the epic, and served to situate individual prisoners at the centre of a ‘sentimental journey’. On the question of the place of the epic in history-writing during the period, see Elisa Beshero-Bondar, Women, Epic, and Transition in British Romanticism (Plymouth and Lanham: University of Delaware Press, 2011); Chloe Wheatley, Epic, Epitome, and the Early Modern Historical Imagination (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013).

  72. 72.

    Woodriff was tried on HMS Gladiator after liberation. See William Patrick Gossett, The Lost Ships of the Royal Navy, 1793–1900 (London: Mansell, 1986), pp. 48–9.

  73. 73.

    National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, WDR6, Captain Daniel Woodriff, Map of Lat. 49.34, Long. 9.010, n°3, 25–6 September 1805; ‘Statement of occurrences on the 25th and 26th September 1805 n°1’.

  74. 74.

    This representation was based on a social practice, as it was commonplace to return the dead to the sea during voyages.

  75. 75.

    Émile Jobbé-Duval, ed., Mémoires du Baron de Bonnefoux, Capitaine de vaisseau. 1782–1855 (Paris: Plon, 1900), p. 184.

  76. 76.

    ‘Le crève-cœur de longer les côtes de France, d’en apercevoir les sites riants et de nous en éloigner avec le pénible sentiment de notre liberté perdue. Dans cette tempête, le Marengo fut démâté de tous ses mâts et faillit périr; mais il avait tant souffert dans sa vaillante résistance qu’il n’y avait rien d’étonnant’; Jobbé-Duval, Mémoires du Baron de Bonnefoux, p. 192.

  77. 77.

    ‘victime de sa passion pour la mer […] La République, non plus que l’Empire, ne sut garantir nos côtes, ni même l’intérieur de plusieurs de nos ports, des blocus ou des croisières anglaises; espérons qu’une telle humiliation est passée pour la France’; Jobbé-Duval, Mémoires du Baron de Bonnefoux, pp. xxxi, 53.

  78. 78.

    Paul Westover has made a compelling argument on the cruciality of dislocation in turning towards the ‘dead’ in France, America and Britain during the experience of warfare in the Romantic age; Westover, Necromanticism, p. 128.

  79. 79.

    Clive Lloyd, A History of Napoleonic and American Prisoners of War 1756–1816: Hulk, Depot and Parole, 2 vols (Woodbridge: Antique Collectors Club, 2007), vol. 2, p. 129.

  80. 80.

    See the series of curatorial podcasts for the Thomson Collection, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Simon Stephens, ‘Napoleonic French Prisoner-of-war boxwood and ebony model of the 120-Gun First-Rate-Ship-Of-The-Line “L’Ocean”’ http://www.ago.net/agoid108063b [accessed 11 November 2014].

  81. 81.

    See Paul Chamberlain, Hell Upon Water: Prisoners of War in Britain, 1793–1815 (Stroud: Spellmount, 2008).

  82. 82.

    Arthur Claude Cook painted ‘Plait merchants trading with the French prisoners of war at Norman Cross or Yaxley Camp, Cambridgeshire, 1806–1815’ (1909), whilst Arthur David McCormick depicted the sale of a ship model in his ‘Prospective buyer’ (1931).

  83. 83.

    See Ewart Freeston, Prisoner-of-War Ship Models, 1775–1825 (Lymington: Nautical Publishing Company, 1973); Wolfram zu Mondfeld, Knochenschiffe: Die Prisoner-of-War-Modelle 1775 bis 1814 (Herford: Koehler, 1989); Manfred Stein, Prisoner of War Bone Ship Models: Treasures from the Age of the Napoleonic Wars (Hamburg: Koehler, 2014).

  84. 84.

    Daly, ‘Napoleon’s Lost Legions’, p. 376.

  85. 85.

    Lloyd, A History of Napoleonic and American Prisoners of War, vol. 2, p. 139.

  86. 86.

    Stuart Frank, Ingenious Contrivances, Curiously Carved: Scrimshaw in the New Bedford Whaling Museum (Jaffrey: Godine, 2012).

  87. 87.

    These transfers explain the variety of nationalities represented by these models, which encompassed French, Danish, American and British vessels.

  88. 88.

    National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, SLR0655, full hull model of a funereal catafalque made by a French prisoner of war in Britain, 1806.

  89. 89.

    Brian Lavery and Simon Stephens, Ship Models: Their Purpose and Development from 1650 to the Present (London: Zwemmer, 1995).

  90. 90.

    National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, SLR0638, full model of a 74-gun two-decker warship mounted on a slipway prior to launching made by a French prisoner of war in Britain (1804–14); SLR0615, full hull model of a French 100-gun, three-decker ship of the line with an attached scenic watercolour of a maritime landscape (1804–15).

  91. 91.

    National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, SLR0641, ship model in straw marquetry case crafted by a French prisoner in Britain (1804–15).

  92. 92.

    For other examples of such a display with additional miniature curtains, see Lloyd, A History of Napoleonic and American Prisoners of War, vol. 2, pp. 94–5.

  93. 93.

    Lloyd, A History of Napoleonic and American Prisoners of War, vol. 2, pp. 92–3.

  94. 94.

    Lloyd, A History of Napoleonic and American Prisoners of War, vol. 2, pp. 110–11.

  95. 95.

    Lloyd, A History of Napoleonic and American Prisoners of War, vol. 2, p. 112.

  96. 96.

    The development of ship models in bottles was concomitant with the development of clear glass bottles over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; Robert B. Kieding, Scuttlebutt: Tales and Experiences of a Life at Sea (Bloomington: iUniverse, 2011), pp. 249–50.

  97. 97.

    Lloyd, A History of Napoleonic and American Prisoners of War, vol. 2, p. 125.

  98. 98.

    National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, AAA0001, wooden watch-stand made by a marine prisoner in France, 1806–14.

  99. 99.

    Franco Moretti, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture (London and New York: Verso, 2000), p. 23; Peter Fritzsche, Stranded in the Present, p. 77.

  100. 100.

    Kennedy, Narratives of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, p. 104.

  101. 101.

    Julie Garland McLellan, ed., Recollections of my Childhood: The True Story of a Childhood Lived in the Shadow of Napoleon Bonaparte (London: Create Space, 2010), pp. 7, 47.

  102. 102.

    As Carolyn Steedman has shown in Strange Dislocations, childhood was an intricate concept, a physiological prism through which a ‘sense of insideness’ developed in the late eighteenth century and the nineteenth century; Carolyn Steedman, Strange Dislocations: Childhood and the Idea of Human Interiority, 1780–1930 (London and Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. xi.

  103. 103.

    McLellan, Recollections of my Childhood, pp. 23–4.

  104. 104.

    Foucault referred to an heterotopia: ‘the boat is a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea […] The ship is the heterotopia par excellence. In civilisations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates.’ Michel Foucault, ‘Des Espaces Autres’, lecture given at Architecture/Mouvement/Continuité, October 1967, trans. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics, 16:1 (1967): 22–7.

  105. 105.

    Foucault, ‘Des Espaces Autres’, pp. 24–5.

  106. 106.

    Foucault, ‘Des Espaces Autres’, p. 43.

  107. 107.

    Foucault, ‘Des Espaces Autres’, p. 44.

  108. 108.

    Carolyn Steedman, ‘Englishness, Clothes and Little Things: Towards a Political Economy of the Corset’, in Christopher Breward, Becky Conekin and Caroline Cox, eds, The Englishness of English Dress (Oxford: Berg, 2002), pp. 29–44.

  109. 109.

    See also the emotive charge of the Channel after displacement in Langton, Narrative of a Captivity, vol. 1, p. 120: ‘The sea once more seen, created sensations indiscribable [sic].’

  110. 110.

    Stewart, The Life of Alexander Stewart, pp. 91–2.

  111. 111.

    Stewart, The Life of Alexander Stewart, pp. 91–2.

  112. 112.

    Stewart, The Life of Alexander Stewart, pp. 91–2.

  113. 113.

    Thomas Dutton, The Captive Muse (London: Sherwood, 1814), p. 31.

  114. 114.

    In A Culture of Freedom, Christian Meier has shown that ‘for many people [in Ancient Greece], the sea represented freedom and mobility’. The trope circulated widely in time and space to become a pillar of European culture; Christian Meier, A Culture of Freedom: Ancient Greece and the Origins of Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 8.

  115. 115.

    See Shakespeare’s King Richard II, ii, 1; and his King John, ii, 1.

  116. 116.

    Kennedy, Narratives of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, p. 95; see also Isaac Land, War, Nationalism, and the British Sailor, 1750–1850 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

  117. 117.

    On the political implications of the rhyme between slaves and waves and the femininity of Britishness, see Emma Major, Madam Britannia: Women, Church, and Nation 1712–1812 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 56.

  118. 118.

    Edward Boys, Narrative of a Captivity, Escape, and Adventures in France and Flanders during the War, 2nd edn. (London: Cautley Newby, 1863), p. 158.

  119. 119.

    Dutton, The Captive Muse, p. 97.

  120. 120.

    A note from the publisher of Dutton’s poems reads: ‘it is a proud ground of legitimate triumph, and exultation for the British character, that this passage requires copious elucidation. To the English reader, who has never quitted his own happy sea-girt isle – that inviolable sanctuary of Freedom, and of equal Law – it may well appear inexplicable’; Dutton, The Captive Muse, pp. 125–6.

  121. 121.

    Alon Rachamimov, ‘Islands of Men: Shifting Gender Boundaries in World War I Internment Camps’, Institute of European Studies Lecture, University of California, Berkeley, 23 April 2009 http://www.nrcweb.org/outreachitem.aspx?nNRCID=56&nActivityID=151021 [accessed 11 November 2014].

  122. 122.

    Other types of sources such as theatre plays could further inform this differentiation.

  123. 123.

    See the seminal work of Eugen Weber, Peasants Into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976).

  124. 124.

    ‘Mélange étonnant, concours singulier d’événements! On eût dit que, sur un point de l’univers, vainqueurs, vaincus, amis, infortunés, avaient cherché à triompher de mille difficultés pour se réunir un instant, se communiquer leurs émotions, et se séparer après s’être seulement entrevus’; Jobbé-Duval, Mémoires du Baron de Bonnefoux, p. 190.

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  1. York St John University, York, UK

    Elodie Duché

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  1. Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom

    Charlotte Mathieson

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Duché, E. (2016). ‘A Sea of Stories’: Maritime Imagery and Imagination in Napoleonic Narratives of War Captivity. In: Mathieson, C. (eds) Sea Narratives: Cultural Responses to the Sea, 1600–Present. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58116-7_3

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