Captain in Calico. George Fraser MacDonald
into another world. Our father had a warm, dark voice, perfect for storytelling, and invariably the story would be about pirates. He had a special fondness for those outlaws of the sea; their flawed, restless characters captured his imagination more than honourable heroes ever could. It was a lifelong love, and so it was hardly surprising that his first attempt at full-length fiction, Captain in Calico, should be a pirate story.
He evidently laboured at it and reworked it over a number of years, presumably in any spare time he had from working long hours as a journalist and bringing up a young family. The book is full of the influences of the writers he had loved as a boy – Sabatini, Wren, Henty, Sir Walter Scott – and the story itself is an old-fashioned yarn of the type he told us as children, but with added sex and violence. The story is based quite closely on real events in the lives of ‘Calico’ Jack Rackham and Anne Bonney, who were both notorious eighteenth-century pirates (and lovers), reflecting our father’s belief that the most compelling stories are those of real events happening to real people. Despite the failure of Captain in Calico to find a publisher, his faith in the method of using fiction to bring history to life was borne out by the later success of the Flashman novels, in which he embroidered real historical events with the exploits of his fictional anti-hero. It is interesting to see him trying his hand at a prototype anti-hero in the character of Jack Rackham, and he evidently worked hard to make him a sympathetic rogue with heroic appeal. But it was only when he came to write Flashman that he hit upon the perfect device, creating an out-and-out cad who triumphs heroically through a mixture of luck and charm, and in spite of his own cowardice and deceit.
Captain in Calico was rejected by publishers, and in time he came to regard these rejections as justifiable – in the margin of an early typed account of its rejection he has written, apparently years later, the word ‘deservedly’ – but we believe he retained affection for the story, and the spark of his early and earnest faith in its merits never quite died. We say this because we believe he would have destroyed it otherwise, not left it in a fireproof safe in his old study for us to find after his death. Of course, eventually he hit upon the inspiration of bringing his beloved pirates to life in a quite different way, when he wrote The Pyrates – a book of comic genius, and one to which the movie Pirates of the Caribbean may owe more than a small debt.
An early reader’s report on the manuscript and letters from The Authors’ Alliance, which are reprinted here, are direct in their criticisms of the work, seeing it as over-long and derivative. But whatever the novel’s flaws, there is no denying that the style is polished, the characters are deftly drawn, and the writing is vivid and powerful.
A book such as Captain in Calico would probably be even less likely to find a publisher today than sixty years ago – not because it isn’t excellently written, but because ripping yarns are hardly fashionable now – and we do not want readers to be deceived into thinking it is vintage George MacDonald Fraser, and of the standard of the Flashman novels or the McAuslan short stories. Indeed, we thought long and hard before allowing it to be published, and are only doing so because we believe that, as an early work, Captain in Calico is a delightful curiosity, one which we hope will provide fans of GMF with a fascinating insight into the inspirations and creative impulses that turned him into such a fine novelist. That he was always a great storyteller was never in doubt. We knew that as children, long ago.
Sie, Caro and Nick Fraser
Surveying the distant strand of silver beach washed by the blue Caribbean rollers, Master Tobias Dickey made a mental remark that the view was prodigious fine and life was very good to live. His contentment was born out of a good supper eaten after a hard day’s work, and also out of that sense of wellbeing which had possessed him ever since the day on which he had first set foot in this beautiful New Providence of the Bahamas.
He stood at his window in Governor’s House, a small, portly man well advanced into middle age, pulling at his pipe of Gibraltar tobacco and comparing its fragrance with that of the bougainvillea with which the garden abounded. Life and the evening were quiet, and Master Dickey never dreamed that he was waiting on the threshold of a high adventure in which he was to be called to play a not unimportant part.
‘When I reflect,’ he was to write later in his journal, ‘on the Peaceful Temper with which I compos’d myself to Rest, suspecting nothing of what was to Befall, I never cease to wonder at the manner in which Providence ever reserv’s its most Sudden Strokes for the time when we are least prepar’d, even as the Tempest Breaks when the Tropick Day is most Serene.’
Certainly nothing could have been more placid and contentedly reflective than Master Dickey’s mood as he knocked out his pipe, took a last look at the scene on which the sudden Caribbean night would shortly be descending, half closed the broad screen doors and prepared for bed.
It was a far cry, he thought, from a draughty garret in Edinburgh to a Governor’s residence, from clerking in an advocate’s office to his present post as first secretary, man-of-affairs, and close confidant of the Governor of the Bahamas, Captain Woodes Rogers. Yet it had only been the merest chance that had crossed his path with Woodes Rogers’ two years ago when the captain had been renting the Bahama Islands from the Lords Proprietors and obtaining a commission as Governor. Dickey had been a cog in the legal machine which had been engaged on that complex business, but Rogers, the great discoverer and privateer, had noted his diligence and had offered him his present employment. Dickey had accepted with the eagerness of one escaping from slavery, nor, he reflected as he climbed into his comfortable bed and watched the shadows lengthen across his spacious apartment, had he had cause for one moment to regret his step.
Since their landing in New Providence two years ago and the expulsion of those pirates who had used it as a haven there had been much to occupy the new Governor and his assistant. Woodes Rogers saw the Bahamas as an estate of which he was to be steward for twenty-one years, and he set about to make it a model for the Western seas. To a remarkable extent he had succeeded and Master Dickey, at the Governor’s right hand in all things, had been made to feel that he too was doing his share towards making history in the Caribbean.
Thus Master Dickey had ample grounds for satisfaction as he lay musing, and as the shadows deepened in the garden outside he began to doze gently.
He came out of his half-sleep with a sudden start, his thoughts racing back to identify the noise that had disturbed him. Something had moved on the verandah. There had been a quick scraping, as though a foot had brushed over the boards. He listened, straining to catch the sound again, and gradually, as he lay in the warm silence, he became aware of an almost imperceptible but regular rustling just beyond the screen doors. Someone was standing there, and Tobias could hear him breathing.
It was almost dark outside, and he could see nothing but the dim oblong of light between the doors. Slowly he reached out a hand towards the table at the side of his bed, in the drawer of which he kept a loaded pistol as a precaution against nocturnal marauders. His hand closed on the knob and at the same moment a board creaked on the verandah, and a vague shape loomed in the narrow space between the doors.
Sweat broke out on Master Dickey’s forehead, but the hand which drew open the drawer and descended on the pistol butt was quite steady. Gently he drew the weapon out and rested it across his body, the barrel pointing towards the window.
‘Come in wi’ your hands up’, he ordered, his finger ready on the trigger in case the intruder should make a sudden move.
To his astonishment the screen doors were pushed gently aside and the figure on the verandah stepped into the room. ‘If you have a pistol, take care what you’re about,’ said a deep voice.
‘God save us!’ exclaimed Master Dickey. He sat bolt upright in bed, the pistol extended in the direction of the stranger. ‘Stop you there, my lad. Not a step closer. Guards!’ He raised