Classic children’s adventure tropes

John Trenchard is 15 years old, the classic age for a hero of an adventure story – no longer a helpless child (‘a stout lad for my age’, p.76) but not yet an adult tied down with responsibilities of job, wife, or even a sweetheart. He is still attending the village school led by Parson Glennie in the dilapidated old village almshouse, who tells them many folk stories and legends of the surrounding area, not least about the notorious smuggler ‘Captain’ John Mohune otherwise known as Blackbeard.

Also classic is the fact that his parents are both long dead, which means he is free, unconstrained by parental supervision. He is in the care of his aunt, Miss Arnold who is, in the classic style, a church-going disapprover of all things to do with boys though with little legal or moral control over him, so she can be easily ignored when adventure comes along.

Also classic is the way the narrator drops broad hints throughout the story that it all happened a long time ago, when he was young, and that now he is older, tireder and wiser now, looking back.

I remember the place well though I have not seen it for so long… (p.191)

…yet in the overrulings of Providence it was ordered that this note in Mr. Aldobrand’s book should hereafter change the issue of my life. (p.193)

And it is set in a classic era: the adventure starts in October 1757. The 18th century was the classic setting for stories of pirates and smuggling and buccaneers – Treasure Island is set in the mid-1700s, Kidnapped in 1751. It was a period when Britain was still struggling against the navies of France and to some extent Spain, well before victory in the Napoleonic Wars and the rise of industrial capitalism set Britain on the path to global ascendancy. You could still have adventures in the British imperial era (see Rider Haggard) but they were somehow less innocent.

All in all, ‘Moonfleet’ is consciously a book for boys, with no pretence of seeking an adult readership as the semi-adult stories of Rider Haggard and Conan Doyle did, something emphasised by the sweet epigraph from Shakespeare:

We thought there was no more behind
But such a day tomorrow as today
And to be a boy eternal.
(The Winter’s Tale. Act 1, scene 2, line 80)

Moonfleet

So it’s 1757 and Moonfleet is the name of the Cornish village where 15-year-old John Trenchard lives. One day he accidentally discovers that the crypt of the local church is being used as a storage space for contraband booze being smuggled in from France.

The secret passage

After a particularly strong storm hits the village, he is curious about a hole which has opened up at the foot of an ancient tomb and wriggles down to go exploring. The crypt is the burial chamber of the Mohune family. It is widely thought to be haunted, in particular by the ghost of Colonel John ‘Blackbeard’ Mohune, a notorious pirate who is said to have stolen a diamond from King Charles I and hidden it somewhere, as detailed in Parson Glennie’s many stories on the subject. (Fuller account of Blackbeard on page 149.) Note that Glennie always emphasised that Blackbeard had a bad conscience from his evil deeds and was said to have wanted to use the diamond for charitable purposes, maybe building a poorhouse in Moonfleet etc.

Anyway, it was partly with thoughts of trying to find this legendary diamond that John follows a tunnel down into the crypt and is in the middle of exploring the place when he hears voices coming and quickly hides behind one of the ancient coffins arranged on shelves around the dank underground space.

The smugglers, the locket

From here he overhears a meeting of the smugglers and their plans. Only when they’ve long gone and disappeared back up the tunnel does he dare come out. In doing so he leans on the coffin which breaks and he realises his hand is touching the beard of the corpse and he whips it away but it has also caught hold of a silver locket, which snaps and comes off in his hand. For a moment he excitedly thinks it might contain the famous diamond, but all it has inside is a folded-up scrap of paper with excerpts from the Psalms written on it.

Trapped

Now, when he goes back up the passage he discovers the smugglers have leaned heavy slate slabs against the hole he came in by and he can’t get out. He tries digging with his fingers. He tries shouting for help. Hours pass and he begins to panic and shout more. Then falls asleep. At least a day and a half pass with him getting into more of a state, hungry and dehydrated. Desperate, he breaks open some of the casks in the crypt and drinks deeply from them, getting drunk, shouting helplessly, then passing out.

Elzevir Block

To his surprise, John wakes up nice and clean in a bed which turns out to be above the inn run by a man named Elzevir Block. This Block is landlord of the ‘Why Not?’ inn and one of the leaders of the smugglers. (The name of the village inn, ‘Why Not?’, is a pun on the Mohune coat of arms, which includes a cross-pall in the shape of the letter ‘Y’.)

To my great surprise Elzevir turns out to be not at all the baddie you’d expect but a thoughtful and kind man, despite being ‘a grim and grizzled giant’ (p.129) with a ‘jaw and deep chin…firm and powerful’ (p.152). A passerby heard muffled shouts in the churchyard and said he thought it was ghosts when he mentioned it to Elzevir. But the latter immediately realised the calls must have come from the tunnel and went late at night with colleagues to dig poor John, who had by this time passed out, out of the hole, brought him to his house etc.

Elzevir invites him to stay and John accepts. His aunt doesn’t mind him leaving, thinks he’s a trouble-maker, thinks he was gone for two days because he’s a gadabout and a drunk.

John becomes a contrabandier

And so without much effort, John is recruited into the gang of smugglers and starts helping them out. We learn the different roles and responsibilities involved in managing the illegal landing of contraband, a surprisingly complex business. He gets on well with Elzevir and many’s the evening they spend in front of the inn fire playing backgammon.

• Smugglers’ Britain

How Mr Maskew shot Davey Block

I haven’t mentioned a key bit of background which is that, before the narrative opens, Elzevir’s teenage son, David Block, had been shot by the local magistrate, Mr. Maskew, when the patrol boat Maskew was aboard closed with a smuggling vessel off the coast. There is, therefore, deep animosity between Maskew and Elzevir. John speculates that this may also be why Elzevir took him in, as a kind of replacement for his dead son.

The auction for the Why Not?

Which is why it is a tense scene when the lease of the Why Not? is renewed, a purely formal process whereby Elzevir is the only bidder for the lease, as overseen by a local bailiff. However, on this occasion it is interrupted when Maskew arrives at the inn and makes a counter-bid, way in excess of what Elzevir can afford (£200 compared to the £12 it previously cost) and wins the auction, with the result that Elzevir and young John have to move out. John notices that Maskew had a silver-hafted pistol tucked under his coat in case things turned nasty.

Word also gets around that Maskew is becoming very pally with Revenue officials in local towns, and is general becoming the Main Enemy of the smugglers. All of which makes it awkward that John is falling in love with his daughter, Grace Maskew, about his own age, who also attends the village school. He confides in her that he is one of the smugglers, knowing she will keep his secret (‘I told Grace all my secrets, not even excepting the doings of the contraband, and the Mohune vault and Blackbeard’s locket, knowing all was as safe with her as with me.’ page 92).

At Hoar Head

By now it is the spring of the following year, 1758. It is on 16 April (p.93) that John accompanies Elzevir to a location up the coast, Hoar Head, to a beach below steep cliffs, for the next smuggling date.

Here, in the middle of the night, they meet a crew of other contrabandiers. The rowboat comes ashore and the men unload it, loading some onto a carthorse, carrying the other kegs individually. In the middle of operations there’s a kerfuffle and a group of the smugglers keeping watch come down onto the beach pushing the cowed figure of Mr Maskew who they’ve caught spying on them. They’ve already torn his coat off and smacked him about a bit, and tied his hands. They’ve also discovered the silver-hafted pistol Maskew always carries.

Death of Mr Maskew

They’re all for lynching him there and then but Elzevir, with the authority of the gang leader, tells them Maskew is his. Reluctantly the rest of the crew load up with the final kegs and set off tramping the bridle path beside the cliffs, leaving the deserted midnight beach to Maskew, Elzevir and John.

So within ten minutes all were winding up the bridle-path, horses and men, all except three; for there were left upon the brambly greensward of the under-cliff Maskew and Elzevir and I, and the pistol lay at Elzevir’s feet. (p.100)

I thought Elzevir might have wanted the others to leave because he was going to display noble forbearance and let Maskew go, but not a bit of it, he squares up to Maskew and prepares to shoot him in the head. John does three things: he launches an impassioned plea to Elzevir to spare Maskew’s life; when this doesn’t work he at first covers his ears and closes his eyes so as not to see the murder. But then, on an impulse, he leaps at Elzevir as he’s preparing to shoot, they struggle and the gun fires harmlessly into the air.

The soldiers

They’re both still recovering from this fight when they notice activity on the clifftop. It is no longer the dead of night and dawn is approaching. Someone shouts down from the clifftop (‘Yield at the King’s command!’) and they realise it is soldiers! Then there’s a rattle of musket fire and the sound of bullets hitting the turf ‘fut, fut, fut’. In this first volley Maskew is himself shot in the head, drilled with a neat hole.

This is a super-common trope of the thriller genre, whereby the ‘good’ guys try to bring themselves to kill an obvious enemy, and while they are agonising about it, the enemy is conveniently killed by a third party.

John is stricken because he is in love with Maskew’s daughter and realises she has now lost her father and become an orphan.

Cliffside ascent

Also John is shot in the foot. As the soldiers reload Elzevir carried him over the cliff where they’re safe for the moment. But they can be sure the soldiers will now come running down the bridlepath off to the side of the cliff so Elzevir embarks on a desperate expedient. For up the cliff itself runs a very narrow ‘track’, in a zigzag pattern, sometimes just a foot wide, in fact the shepherds who use it call it The Zigzag (p.109).

The next few pages describe their nailbiting progress as Elzevir has to carry John up this incredibly dangerous ‘track, and how half way up John looks down at the dizzying height they are above the pebbly beach, gets vertigo (a ‘cursed giddy fit’) and nearly falls (p.113).

A plan

Anyway, they finally make it to the top of the cliff and rest on the turf. They’re in a pretty pickle but can see the soldiers have moved to some rocks on the beach so they have a breather before they come back up the bridlepath. Elzevir’s plan is to head north along the coast and rest up in a secret place, a hiding hole in Purbeck known as Jacob’s Pit.

The boy

It’s seven miles away and Elzevir sets off carrying John with the result that, by soon after noon he is exhausted and they rest behind an old stone wall. They both fall asleep but are awoken by a shot. it’s still daylight and it’s just a farm boy scaring rooks with a blunderbuss for his farmer master. But he climbs over the wall and thus discovers them. Elzevir very confidently tells the boy he and John have come hunting for rabbit but he’s lost his powder flask. In quick succession he buys the boy’s powder, then bullets, then gun, for a princely guinea. But John knows the boy has noticed his own bloody boot and bandaged leg and will run off to alert the authorities.

The sea-cave

Finally they arrive in the country of abandoned quarries (whose history Falkner explains) and Elzevir carefully goes down the slippery steps into one of these, then along pitch black corridors, arriving at a big cave lit by cracks in the rocks.

The trouble with injuring your hero is it immediately introduces delay and wait. When John was shot in the leg on the beach my heart sank. Aware of the problem he’s created for himself, Falkner has John sink into a hazy sickness so he can get a lot of days to pass quickly. John sinks into delirium as Elzevir cares for him, foraging at night, making a splint for his leg, stealing cooking utensils and a pot to boil water.

News

He gets word to the most loyal of his band of smugglers, Ratsey the sexton, who leaves food for them at an abandoned cottage, where Elzevir can collect it at night. They hear that the boy who sold them the gun grassed them up, that’s there’s debate about who shot Maskew, and there’s a reward of £50 on Elzevir’s head, £20 on John’s (p.126).

By mid-May John has recovered his strength and can limp. Elzevir carries him out into the sunshine on a sort of ledge beyond the cave, where men used to winch slabs of marble down to waiting boats. Elzevir has been extraordinarily kind and caring to John who has come to love him like the father he never had.

A scary scene

One dark and stormy night Elzevir has left on a journey to Poole leaving John alone in the cave as daylight fades to pitch black and he begins to remember the stories Elzevir sold him about these abandoned workings being haunted. Folk say that St Aldhelm drove the old pagan gods down into these black depths which they haunt to this day, in particular a violent demon named the Mandrive which jumps out to strangle the unwary. And Falkner describes John becoming more and more scared and then his heart stops when he hears a shuffling coming closer towards him in the darkness.

It is revealed to be Ratsey the sexton, but not before John has nearly died of fright and the reader along with him.

Two months have passed

Tatsey’s first words reveal that two months have passed since the fateful night of Maskew’s death on Hoar Head beach (p.134). Ratsey confirms the story of the price on their heads. The smuggling gang is all broken up. Elzevir and John will never be able to go back to Moonfleet. The Why Not? stands empty. Maskew’s daughter watched her father’s body brought back to Moonfleet, loudly jeered by the mob, some of them spitting on the coffin. But Ratsey testifies that Grace refused to sign papers condemning Elzevir or him for her father’s murder, saying she knows John ‘for a trusty lad, who would not do such things himself, nor yet stand by whilst others did them.’ He tells John how sad Maskew’s funeral was with only his thin wasted daughter following the coffin to the churchyard and then no man offering to carry it into the cemetery until Ratsey himself took pity and roused some of the others.

The secret message

But Ratsey’s visit is important because John had been rereading the parchment he found inside Blackbeard’s locket all those months ago. On it are written excerpts from the Psalms said to ward off evil spirits. When he heard Ratsey creeping into the cave John dropped it in his fear. Now Ratsey picks it up and reads it and immediately spots an anomaly. As a sexton who hears or himself reads bits of the Psalms, he immediately spots that the quotes are correct but the line attribution is wrong.

Thus ‘The days of our age are three-score years and ten…’ is certainly from Psalm 90 as the parchment says, but not line 21; it only has 20 lines and this is line 10.

Ratsey suggests other Bible verses John might want to learn then passes on to the general idea that he and Elzevir need to escape England altogether and suggests names of smuggling ships which might take them to France.

When Ratsey finally leaves, John rereads the verses and suddenly the penny drops. He realises it’s a code. The erroneous line number for each quote in fact stands for the number of the key word in each quote. In the quote from Psalm 21, he is to take the twenty-first word. Quickly he applies this to all five quotes and comes up with: ‘Fourscore—feet—deep—well—north’.

A few hours later Elzevir returns from his overnight trip to Poole and John can’t wait to share his discovery with him. He has interpreted it to mean Blackbeard’s diamond is buried in a well somewhere in Moonfleet but he’s been racking his brains in vain to think what well it could be.

Now Elzevir puts him straight; there isn’t a well in Moonfleet but there is one at Carisbrooke, the castle where Blackbeard served as head of the guard imprisoning King Charles I. (‘For just over a year from 13 November 1647, the king was held captive on the Isle of Wight, primarily at Carisbrooke Castle. From there, he took part in numerous negotiations with the English and Scottish parliaments, failed in several escape attempts, and only heard afterwards about the uprisings of the Second Civil War in the summer of 1648.’ English Heritage)

Elzevir knows there’s a well at Carisbrooke and moreover that it is of a legendary deepness. He interprets the code to mean that the treasure – presumably the diamond stole off the king – is buried 80 feet deep on the north side of the inside of the well.

He now announces that instead of taking ship to France he’ll organise transport to the Isle of Wight for them to find the buried treasure. He knows the owners of the ship who will take him wherever he wants, and he knows of a good smuggling inn at Newport which will hide them.

Moonfleet one last time

They have to wait 8 days till the ship arrives that will take them from their hiding place. A few days before the date John asks Elzevir for permission to go back to Moonfleet one last time. Elzevir rightly discerns that he wants to see someone and John tells him about his puppy love for Grace Maskew. Elzevir gives him his blessing. They have already had Ratsey supply them disguises, the kind of smocks worn by drovers, and John has rubbed walnut juice onto his face to make it appear darker.

After a long night’s walk he arrives above Moonfleet, then walks down to the Manor House, knocks and Grace herself opens the door. She doesn’t recognise him till he reveals his identity, then the clasp hands before she leads him to the garden at the back. Walking through the house John glimpses the old magistrate’s study untouched since Maskew died and his heart is tugged by the sorrow felt by Grace.

In the garden he reveals the secret of the treasure but Grace reminds him of the legend that Blackbeard meant to sell it and give the money to the poor i.e. the diamond is cursed if the money is spent on self.

In former days she had kept a candle in her bedroom which could be seen out at sea (the Manor house is on the hill sloping up out of Moonfleet) and now she says she will light one every night as a token of her love for him. The reader can only imagine this is noted because John will, indeed, return by sea. She gives him a little food, brings a pillow and he sleeps in the summer house, safe and loved. When he wakes she gives him food for the journey back and kisses him goodbye.

The Isle of Wight

So he arrives back at the cave, finding Elzevir safely there. The following day they see the smuggling ship the Bonaventure lying off the coast and come nightfall it sends a boat to carry them away from the cave they’ve been hiding in for over two months. They are greeted like old friends by fellow smugglers they have helped many a time. The wind conveys them up Channel and they put shore at Cowes, walking to Newport. Here the landlord of the Bugle recognises Elzevir, puts them up and treats him like a prince, because it turns out he is the mastermind of smuggling along the whole coast.

Elzevir works on a plan to gain access to the well at Carisbrooke Castle but, alas, it is being used as a prison for French prisoners in the ongoing Seven Years War. In the end he does a deal with the well keeper who is let in on the plan and agrees to provide cover for a third of the booty. So they set out from the inn one day dressed as plasterers with the story that they’ve come to plaster up the sides of the well.

The well-keeper is a shifty, untrustworthy man, who admits them to the castle, takes them across a courtyard, through the former banqueting hall which is now a prison, out into another court to the well-house which is an actual building around the well.

There is some quibbling about who will go down in the bucket at the end of a rope into the well, with the turnkey wanting Elzevir to go but John strongly wanting Elzevir to stay above so he can deal with the situation if the well-man turns treacherous.

The well

The descent deep into the dark narrow slimy well is vividly described. This is more a book about vivid descriptions or descriptions of tight spots than of action. For some reason the scene on the smuggling beach which leads up to the shoulders shooting down at them didn’t really stir me. The stirring scenes all happen underground being 1) John being trapped in the lightless tunnel and underground crypt, 2) the dark and stormy night when John hears someone shuffling in the darkness of the cave, and now this, 3) the tremendously atmospheric descent into the deep dank well.

Anyway, after some false starts, John sees a Y roughly carved into one of the small bricks lining the well and realises it is the cross-pall sign of the Mohunes. He chips away at the mortar surrounding it, extracts the brick, reveals a hole behind it in which sits a bag, tears open the bag and discovers a diamond as big as a walnut (p.177).

He calls and the others winch him but the Well-man stops it just before it gets to ground level, insisting that John hand over the gem. At which point the presence of the Arabian Nights, behind so many classic adventure stories, bursts into the open.

There was a look in his face that brought back to me the memory of an autumn evening, when I sat in my aunt’s parlour reading the book called the Arabian Nights; and how, in the story of the Wonderful Lamp, Aladdin’s wicked uncle stands at the top of the stairs when the boy is coming up out of the underground cavern, and will not let him out, unless he first gives up the treasure. But Aladdin refused to give up his lamp until he should stand safe on the ground again, because he guessed that if he did, his uncle would shut him up in the cavern and leave him to die there; and the look in the turnkey’s eyes made me refuse to hand him the jewel till I was safe out of the well, for a horrible fear seized me that, as soon as he had taken it from me, he meant to let me fall down and drown below. (p.179)

It turns into a standoff, then the turnkey shouts that he knows who they are, he knows there’s a price of £50 on Elzevir’s head and £20 on John’s, and demands the whole value of the diamond, and then whips out his pistol and fires at Elzevir. But the latter being on the other side of the wide well, and the hoisting machinery in between, the bullet hits the chain supporting the bucket and then the turnkey throws himself onto Elzevir in a life or death struggle.

John hastily shimmies up the last few feet of the chain and swings onto dry land but Elzevir, ‘wonderfully strong, and seasoned as a salted thong’ was winning the wrestling match. In fact it turns out (a bit late to tell us) that Elzevir was a famous wrestler in his youth and now flings his man to the floor in a move known, apparently, as ‘the Compton toss’. Except it isn’t a full fall and instead the turnkey staggers back a few paces and, with enjoyable predictability, teeters on the edge of the deep well.

Elzevir (in order to exonerate him, just as he was exonerated on the beach) grabs at the man’s belt and they are suspended as in a photo like that for a moment. But then the belt snaps and the man plunges backwards and they hear several sickening cracks as his head smashes against the brick lining before a crack and splash as his body hits the water at the very bottom. Oops.

Elzevir jumps in the bucket and is lowered and stays at the bottom but when he comes up he is alone. The turnkey’s body has sunk. John is now convinced the diamond carries an evil curse and is all for throwing it into the well, but Elzevir puts him off and asks to look after it. John hands it over (p.184).

Cursed

John is haunted by an illustration of Cain from his aunt’s edition of the Bible, a terrifying image of eternal loss. The narrative repeats the warnings about Blackbeard’s wicked behaviour which Parson Glennie told at the start of the story, which Grace Maskew repeated, which John himself has brooded over. In the well-house, while Elzevir was at the bottom, John had a powerful intuition of a tall bearded figure pacing impatiently, the ghost of the accursed Blackbeard.

Escape

The turnkey’s belt is there with all its keys. they find the one to the well-house itself to let themselves out but throw the rest down the well. The guards to the banquet hall and then the castle gates let them out, remembering them coming in, though grumbling at lazy Ephraim (name of the dead turnkey) for not accompanying them.

Back at the Bugle Inn, Elzevir consults with the landlord about fleeing, though he hasn’t told him anything about the diamond, instead saying he thinks the Revenue have got wind of them. They clean up and put on new disguises as sailors and set off for Cowes with a letter from the landlord to the skipper of a Dutch ship which brought smuggled gin over but is now returning to Holland with a legitimate cargo of wool (p.187).

Holland

So they arrive at Scheveningen, then move on to the Hague which, conveniently enough, Elzevir has learned is the premier diamond-trading town in Europe. It turns out, also with great convenience, that Elzevir speaks Dutch because ‘he comes of Dutch blood’ on his mother’s side, hence his unusual Christian name, which is Dutch (p.189).

After making enquiries they settle on dealing with a diamond merchant named Krispijn Aldobrand. This is a wizened old man, his expression one of craftiness and greed. The narrative tells us he is Jewish and if you wanted, you could take exception to his depiction as being an antisemitic stereotype. Or you could say he is just one among the many stereotypes which populate the entire narrative, with its heroic smugglers, its strong, silent, kindly father figure (Elzevir), its naive boy protagonist in love with a virtuous sweetheart (Grace), the treacherous turnkey, the over-officious magistrate (Maskew) and so on.

Women!

If you want to be offended by old literature there’s more scope for taking offence in the gender stereotyping of a nineteenth century author pretending to be an eighteenth century boy:

• Thus a sick dread got hold of me, and had I been a woman or a girl I think I should have swooned; but being only a boy, and not knowing how to swoon, did the next best thing [which was to grab the locket]
• It was ten days or more before youth and health had their way, and I was strong again; and all that time Elzevir Block sat by my bed, and nursed me tenderly as a woman…
• It was not for want of money that Maskew let things remain thus, for men said that he was rich enough, only that his mood was miserly; and perhaps, also, it was the lack of woman’s company that made him think so little of neatness and order…
• Then Elzevir spoke. “John,” he said, “there is no time to play the woman; another minute of this and we are lost. Pluck up thy courage…”
• He put his hand upon my shoulder gently, and spoke with such an earnestness and pleading in his voice that one would have thought it was a woman rather than a great rough giant…
• “I had rather drown on Moonfleet Beach than live in prison any more, and drown we must within an hour. Yet we will play the man, and make a fight for life.”

Associating femininity with fainting, nursing, a tendency to keep living paces clean and tidy, being weak and afraid, gentleness and pleading, masculinity with strength and fight and endurance? I wonder whether, on account of what culture warriors might take to be its antisemitism and its misogyny, Moonfleet might eventually be banned. Well, let’s enjoy it while we can.

Throwing away the diamond

Anyway, back in the story, the old merchant asks John his name and before he has the wit to make up a false one, John declares himself John Trenchard of Moonfleet village in the Country of Dorset, which the merchant showily writes in his ledger while Elzevir glares at him for this elementary error.

Then Aldobrand performs a handful of showy and sham tests on the stone before grandly declaring to them it is only ‘paste’ and not the great treasure they thought and he will offer them ten crowns for their trouble. Elzevir is so outraged he grabs the stone from the man and throws it out the open French windows into his garden below. The jeweller shrieks but Elzevir has already taken John by the arm and leads him out the room, down the stairs, out the front door, into the street and along to an inn where they order dinner and brood.

Here John has a eureka moment and realises the old merchant was lying. All his tests were blarney to conceal the fact the diamond is immensely valuable. Elzevir admits he had the same thought but threw it away chiefly because he also has come to believe it is cursed. He has been a smuggler all his life yet only when talk of the diamond entered it, has he become associated with two grim deaths, become outlawed a price on his head. (This isn’t strictly true; nobody knew the treasure might be findable till after Maskew’s death on the beach and they had hidden in the cavern, but to go along with the melodramatic mood you have to elide this inconvenient fact.)

Elzevir argues strongly that even if it is a real diamond, they’d be better off without it, but John has fallen in love with the shiny thing and persuades Elzevir, late that night, to accompany him back to the jeweller’s house and break into his back garden.

At Aldobrand’s

They climb over the wall. John thoroughly searches the flowerbed where he saw the diamond land. It isn’t there. By now in the grip of an obsession, John impulsively climbs a pear tree espaliered against the house to the first floor balcony of the room they were in earlier. Peering through the shutters he sees Aldobrand sat at his work table with the diamond on it, his diamond, his precious (p.205). Yet again Elzevir tries to restrain him, whispering that it is an evil accursed stone. Come away. Let’s leave.

But John bursts through the French windows and in a few steps is at the desk, wrestling the merchant for the diamond. But breaking through the glass set off alarm bells (in 1758?) all round the house and in seconds six toughs armed with cudgels burst through the door and knock John and Elzevir out.

Prison

They are thrown into a cold dank prison where they remain for months. Eventually they are hauled out to stand trial and Aldobrand testifies that they came touting a fake diamond merely in order to case his house then broke in and assaulted him with a view to stealing real diamonds. They are condemned to the chain gang for life, though not before John has had chance to curse Aldobrand to hell.

They are manacled with scores of other convicts and marched in the January rain and mud to a fortress which they are set to help building. Labouring on the fortress by day, sleeping on straw in a foul barracks alongside fifty other convicts by night. He is branded with a red hot iron like a sheep, with a Y on his cheek. This stands for Ymeguen, the place they’re at, but in his mind John of course associates it with the Y coat of arms of the Mohunes.

And it comes back to him that Parson Glennie used to tell his young pupils that the Y stood for the dividing place in the path of life, that the way of virtue and honesty was off to one side, narrow and difficult but rewarded by heaven, while the other one was broad and easy to descend and led to hell. As they brand him John realises which path he has taken.

Ten years later

Ten years later John is 26, hale and strong from outdoor labour. Finally the fortress is nearly complete and they are lined up and marched back to the Hague. Rumour gets round that they are to be shipped to Java to work as forced labour on the sugar plantations. He sees Elzevir for the first time in two years since he had worked out outworks and Elzevir inside the great tower. Even now it is only a brief sighting and a few words. How desperately ill his destiny has proved to be.

The prison ship

He and Elzevir are chained close together in the lowest decks of the slave ship. A week into the voyage they hit very heavy weather and the ship starts to founder. The hatch is removed and to their amazement their jailer throws down the key to their chains and tells them to make haste. In a flash Elzevir has undone the padlocks and freed all the convicts.

The shipwreck

Up on deck they discover all the sailors have abandoned ship, all the sails are ripped to shreds, and the ship is being propelled backwards towards a rocky shore. In a flash of lighting they both recognise a spur of rock descending into the sea. They are off the English coast not far from Moonfleet, they are in Moonfleet Bay!

In a very exciting scene Falkner describes their desperate struggle to turn the ship towards the rocks and deliberately wreck her. The other convicts launch the one remaining boat but Elzevil knows a wild sea like this will only overturn it, as indeed happens, with all drowned.

Falkner gives a completely convincing description of the two men waiting till the last moment to leap into the huge surf between the beached ship and the clear shore and moving up the pebbles as fast as they can before the next wave hits with its treacherous undertow. There are rescuers on the beach, stretching down in a chain with ropes thrown into the surf. Elzevir reaches the rope first but John is plucked backwards by the undertow and, seeing this, Elzevir lets go the rope, comes back to him and, as the next big wave hits, throws John forward with all his might and John grabs the rope and the next wave pummels Elzevir then drags him back into the sea.

Waking

John regains consciousness by a fire, wrapped in blankets. He is alive! And home! And free! He hears men talking by the fire and starts to talk, amazing them by revealing that his is none other than the John Trenchard they all knew from ten years ago, for the men are Ratsy and another Moonfleet man. But when he asks about Elzevir they say they saw a strong man throw him forwards to safety then be swept back into the pounding surf and that no other man escaped alive.

Elzevir gave his life to save him.

Stunned, John puts on the dry clothes they offer and emerges from what he now realises is the Why Not? inn where they had brought him and goes down to the still storm-ridden beach, still dark, hoping against hope. There’s a really brilliant passage where the narrator considers the many, many men who have died in storms at sea and in particular describes the terrible fate of those who jump ashore with hope in their faces, within sight of their potential rescuers, only to be swept backwards off the steep beach by the surf and drowned, ‘all come to the beach at last’ (p.235).

The power of these descriptions, along with the archetypal self sacrifice of Elzevir, life the novel to a whole new level of intensity and emotion. It is characteristic of Falkner’s strengths and weaknesses that this isn’t a piece of plotting or dialogue so much as a tremendous set-piece scene.

Elzevir’s body

Finally, amid all the other flotsam and jetsam, Elzevir’s corpse is brought up by the waves and John wades in to grab it and haul it ashore. The other men are surprised to see him handle it so tenderly, as John leans down to kiss Elzevir’s face but then word starts getting round that this is the giant who saved the young man’s life, and then that these are the long-lost Moonfleet native sons, Elzevir and Trenchard. And then the men come forward and shake his hand and touch Elzevir’s cold white hand out of respect and I’m afraid I burst into tears. God, the dead, the dead, the power and futility of human love.

They stood for a little while looking in silence at the old lander who had run his last cargo on Moonfleet beach, and then they laid his arms down by his side, and slung him in a sail, and carried him away. (p.237)

At the Why Not?

Falkner wrings the maximum from the heartstrings by having the men place Elzevir’s body on the same table in the Why Not? as they laid his dead son Davey all those years ago, then leave John by himself, to look at all the relics of his happy life there with Elzevir before Maskew took it away and his life began its downward spiral.

Grace

And really piles on the agony when Grace silently appears by his side, no longer a girl but a stately dignified woman. She asks why he didn’t come to see her? She has waited these long years. Then he breaks down and tells her his entire story and calls himself a broken wretch. But she amazes him with the power of a woman’s love and constancy and declares she still loves him and she is rich so his poverty doesn’t matter, and she will be waiting for him, and she silently departs, leaving John with a world of confused memories and emotions, a-wonder:

to find how constant is the love of woman, and how she could still find a place in her heart for so poor a thing as I. (p.241)

John makes a fire in the dusty abandoned inn. Ratsey comes and tells him that Grace refused to sign the order for his arrest, asserting that the death of her father was an accident. Then Parson Glennie comes, much aged. He reads the burial of the dead over Elzevir’s body, tells him a few things about deaths in the village.

But then comes the genuinely surprising climax of the book. Parson Glennie takes out and reads a letter he received eight years ago. It is a long letter from a Dutch attorney summarising the last will and testament of Krispijn Aldobrand. The merchant wished to make amends for the wrong he did John by stealing his diamond, which was a real diamond and vastly precious. In the event, as soon as he sold it, Aldobrand’s fortune and health went into a decline and in his last months he raved that John had laid a curse on it with his few whispered words as John was being dragged out of the court where Aldobrand secured his conviction.

So the story goes that the Dutch lawyer wrote to John, the letter was returned, being a lawyer he was advised to write to the village priest and that’s why Glennie ended up getting a letter from him. But this was all eight years ago, will the legacy still exist? Glennie says another prayer over Elzevir’s body and repeats the kind of sermon he delivered to him as a boy, that Blackbeard’s treasure must be used for good, all riches should be used for good, whereas ‘a good woman’s love is worth far more than all the gold and jewels of the world’, obviously referring to Grace.

Coda

What need to tell this tale at any more length, since you may know, by my telling it, that all went well? for what man would sit down to write a history that ended in his own discomfiture? All that great wealth came to my hands, and if I do not say how great it was, ’tis that I may not wake envy, for it was far more than ever I could have thought. And of that money I never touched penny piece, having learnt a bitter lesson in the past, but laid it out in good works, with Mr. Glennie and Grace to help me.

He rebuilds the almshouse to be a rest for weary sailors. He builds a lighthouse to guide sailors away from the rocks. He heavily restores the church. He marries Grace and has three beautiful little children. He becomes Lord of the Manor and Justice of the Peace. He becomes a pillar of Christian rectitude, morality and justice.

It is a moving monument. The last thirty pages of the book transfigure it into something deep and moving and the final paragraph, describing his eternal gratitude to the man who saved him from the power of the sea, made me cry all over again. Wow.

Falkner’s biography

Although he wrote two other novels, ‘The Lost Stradivarius’ (1895) and ‘The Nebuly Coat’ (1903), as well as guides to the counties of Oxfordshire and Berkshire, John Meade Falkner is mainly remembered for Moonfleet, a classic adventure story for boys – but he was never actually a writer by trade. Born in 1858, Falkner went to Marlborough public school and Oxford before getting a job at Armstrong Whitworth, one of the largest arms manufacturers in the world. Falkner worked his way up through the business to become the firm’s chairman in 1915. During a lifetime of travelling to sell arms he also collected antiquarian treasures. On his retirement in 1921 he became Honorary Librarian to the Dean and Chapter Library of Durham Cathedral, where he could indulge his interest in ecclesiastical and antiquarian history. Sounds like a charmed life.

Vocabulary

Falkner was an antiquarian. He certainly rams his text with 18th century vocabulary. A fair amount of this appears to be West Country dialect terms or ‘our round Dorset speech, such as they talk it out in the vale,’ (p.158). Since the Penguin Children’s edition I read had no notes, I had to look them up online.

• an askew – (meaning unknown) ‘the way of making a marble quarry is to sink a tunnel, slanting very steeply down into the earth, like a well turned askew’
• to bait – of horses, hay or feed: ‘ the horses being led away to bait’
• a bedesman – a pensioner or almsman whose duty was to pray for his benefactor and, I think, to look after almshouses: ‘there were now no bedesmen, and the houses themselves were fallen to decay’
• bit and sup – food, refreshment: ‘the shippers would give us bit and sup, and glad to, as long as we had need of them’
• blue vinny – traditional blue cheese made near Sturminster Newton in Dorset, England, from cows’ milk; a hard, crumbly cheese: ‘with hot rabbit pie and cold round of brawn, and a piece of blue vinny’
• brawn – meat from a pig’s or calf’s head that is cooked and pressed in a pot with jelly
• to case – put a corpse in a coffin: ‘[I] had helped Ratsey to case some poor bodies that had died in their beds’
• to chaffer – to buy and sell at a market: ‘he had been chaffering with the fishwives this very day’
• a chin-band – strap for binding shut the jaw of a corpse: ‘The clutch which I had made to save myself in falling had torn away this chin-band and let the lower jaw drop on the breast’
• contrabandiers – smugglers: Elzevir ‘was indeed a prince among the contrabandiers’
• doited – having the faculties impaired, especially by age but here something more like rotted: ‘Cracky Jones, a poor doited body, was found there one summer morning, lying dead on the grass’
• founds – foundations: ‘I was looking at the founds to see if they wanted underpinning from the floods’
• a fugleman – a soldier who stands in front of a regiment or company to demonstrate and maintain time in drilling exercises; a leader, organiser or spokesman: ‘a minute later fugleman Ratsey spoke again’
• gaugers – an exciseman who inspects dutiable bulk goods: ‘we should have the gaugers in, and our store ransacked twenty times.’
• grizzle – mixed white and black hairs, from which ‘grizzled’: ‘seeing Elzevir’s white hair and bowed shoulders trudging in front of me, [I] remembered when that head had scarce a grizzle on it’
• a horse-leech – vet: ‘”for the Duchy, whose servant I am,” and he raised his hat, “is no daughter of the horse-leech.”‘
• a lander – man who organised ponies, horses and carts for transport, or in particularly difficult areas, tub carriers to carry the barrels of liquor and bales of tobacco quickly away from the beach where it’s been landed: ‘a strong posse was to be held in readiness to take the landers in the act the next time they should try to run a cargo’
• a lipper – a small wave, the kind of low weak wave like a wash creeping over your feet: ‘I could catch the rustle of the water on the beach—not of any waves, for the bay was smooth as glass, but just a lipper at the fringe.’
• a lugger – a sailing vessel defined by its rig, using the lug sail on all of its one or more masts: ‘more than one dark night I was in the landing-boats that unburdened the lugger’
• a mort – an amount: ‘it takes a mort of knowledge to make it rattle kindly on the coffin-lid’
• a messuage – a dwelling house with outbuildings and land assigned to its use: ‘the Mohune Arms, an excellent messuage or tenement now used as a tavern’
• a plumb – clump: ‘I saw something moving behind one of the plumbs of bramble’
• a postillion – a person who rides the leading nearside (left-hand side) horse of a team or pair drawing a coach or carriage, especially when there is no coachman: ‘I went up to the top end of the village to watch for the bailiff’s postchaise, and about eleven of the forenoon saw it coming down the hill with four horses and two postillions’
• the Preventive men – I think this means officers of the Revenue: ‘the Preventive men mark all the footpaths on the cliff with whitewashed stones, so that one can pick up the way without risk on a dark night’
• a quarantine – type of fruit; apple? ‘many a sunny afternoon have I sat on the terrace edge looking down over the village, and munching red quarantines from the ruined fruit gardens’
• to roister – celebrate in a noisy or boisterous way: ‘”Are you Revenue-men that you dare shout and roister?”‘
• to run a cargo – bring contraband ashore; ‘ ’twas thought little sin at Moonfleet to run a cargo’
• a sennight – week; ‘they should lie underneath this ledge tomorrow sennight’
• shagreen – a kind of untanned leather with a rough granulated surface
• to sodden – to soak or soften in water or make damp; ‘the salt damps of the place had soddened it in the night’
• shrammed – shriveled and benumbed with cold: ‘”I was shrammed with wet and cold, and half-dead with this baffling wind”‘
• a spile – a small wooden peg or spigot for stopping a cask; ‘my hand struck on the spile of a keg’
• a steep – cliff side
• a stackyard – a yard or field containing straw or grain in stacks: ‘and so came to a square building of stone with a high roof like the large dovecots that you may see in old stackyards’
• a thumb-nick – indent in a locket to allow a fingernail to pry or click it open
• a touch – affair, ruckus: ‘”This is a well-licked whelp,” replied Elzevir, “who got a bullet in the leg two months ago in that touch under Hoar Head”‘
• wide-bitten – large, ‘ It was a bleak wide-bitten place’

Observations on life

Novelists often make generalisations about life or situations or character types etc, it is one of the appeals of the genre, the ability to sound off without requiring any proof or authority apart from the story you’re telling. Falkner’s narrative makes several pleasant observations which I give in the original form:

I did not know then, but have learnt since, that where there is a loud noise, such as the roaring of a cascade, the churning of a mill, or, as here, the rage and bluster of a storm—if there arise some different sound, even though it be as slight as the whistle of a bird, ’twill strike the ear clear above the general din. And so it was this night, for I caught that stumbling tread even when the gale blew loudest, and sat motionless and breathless, in my eagerness of listening, and then the gale lulled an instant, and I heard the slow beat of footsteps as of one groping his way down the passage in the dark… (p.132)

Now, however lightly a man may glance through a book, yet if his own name, or even only one nice it, should be printed on the page, his eyes will instantly be stopped by it; so too, if his name be mentioned by others in their speech, though it should be whispered never so low, his ears will catch it. Thus it was with this mark, for though it was very slight, so that I think not one in a thousand would ever have noticed it at all, yet it stopped my eyes and brought up my thoughts suddenly, because I knew by instinct that it had something to do with me and what I sought… (p.174)

I have found then and at other times that in such moments, though the mind be occupied entirely by one overwhelming thought, yet the eyes take in, as it were unwittingly, all that lies before them, so that we can afterwards recall a face or landscape of which at the time we took no note. (p.194)

Thoughts

Slow moving

Moonstone is OK but for most of its length isn’t a patch on Robert Louis Stevenson. The narrative moves very slowly, there aren’t really any vivid characters (Elzevir Block isn’t in the same league as Long John Silver) and something about Falkner’s prose felt clogged and delaying. Falkner lacks the quality of celerity which makes Stevenson’s best narratives so breathlessly exciting.

Stodgy prose

I kept having to reread paragraphs only to find they didn’t really say much. For example, here’s just one sentence:

Then I resolved that come what might I would make my way once more to Moonfleet, before we fled from England, and see Grace; so that I might tell her all that happened about her father’s death, saving only that Elzevir had meant himself to put Maskew away; for it was no use to tell her this when she had said that he could never think to do such a thing, and besides, for all I knew, he never did mean to shoot, but only to frighten him.

Maybe you read that straightaway with no problems, but coming in the context of hundreds of other sentences of similar length and complexity, I kept realising my eyes had skimmed over entire passages without knowing what they said. Sometimes Falkner’s prose is lovely in the straightforward but evocative way of children’s books from a simpler age:

The day was still young, and far below us was stretched the moving floor of the Channel, with a silver-grey film of night-mists not yet lifted in the offing. A hummocky up-and-down line of cliffs, all projections, dents, bays, and hollows, trended southward till it ended in the great bluff of St. Alban’s Head, ten miles away. The cliff-face was gleaming white, the sea tawny inshore, but purest blue outside, with the straight sunpath across it, spangled and gleaming like a mackerel’s back. (p.115)

But more often it’s like this:

It was a bleak wide-bitten place enough, looking as if ‘twould never pay for turning, and instead of hedges there were dreary walls built of dry stone without mortar. Behind one of these walls, broken down in places, but held together with straggling ivy, and buttressed here and there with a bramble-bush, Elzevir put me down at length and said, ‘I am beat, and can carry thee no farther for this present, though there is not now much farther to go. We have passed Purbeck Gates, and these walls will screen us from prying eyes if any chance comer pass along the down. And as for the soldiers, they are not like to come this way so soon, and if they come I cannot help it; for weariness and the sun’s heat have made my feet like lead. A score of years ago I would have laughed at such a task, but now ’tis different, and I must take a little sleep and rest till the air is cooler. So sit thee here and lean thy shoulder up against the wall, and thus thou canst look through this broken place and watch both ways. Then, if thou see aught moving, wake me up.—I wish I had a thimbleful of powder to make this whistle sound’—and he took Maskew’s silver-butted pistol again from his bosom, and handled it lovingly,—’tis like my evil luck to carry fire-arms thirty years, and leave them at home at a pinch like this.’ With that he flung himself down where there was a narrow shadow close against the bottom of the wall, and in a minute I knew from his heavy breathing that he was asleep. (p.117)

There’s nothing wrong with any individual sentence, there’s just rather a lot of them and they go on a bit. Maybe all I’m saying is that Falkner’s style, both in his narrative and his dialogue, is long-winded. He’s just a bit too wordy to be really enjoyable, which is a deep flaw in an adventure story.

That said, sometimes his descriptions of nature, especially of the ever-changing sea, turn the wordiness which is a weakness in adventure writing to advantage.

The wind had blown fresh all the morning from south-west, and after Elzevir had left, strengthened to a gale. My leg was now so strong that I could walk across the cave with the help of a stout blackthorn that Elzevir had cut me: and so I went out that afternoon on to the ledge to watch the growing sea. There I sat down, with my back against a protecting rock, in such a place that I could see up-Channel and yet shelter from the rushing wind. The sky was overcast, and the long wall of rock showed grey with orange-brown patches and a darker line of sea-weed at the base like the under strake of a boat’s belly, for the tide was but beginning to make. There was a mist, half-fog, half-spray, scudding before the wind, and through it I could see the white-backed rollers lifting over Peveril Point; while all along the cliff-face the sea-birds thronged the ledges, and sat huddled in snowy lines, knowing the mischief that was brewing in the elements. (p.130)

Split subject matter

But the actual plot seemed to limp along as slowly as John with his broken leg. And it was during the ‘descent into the well’ passage that I realised something important. All the blurbs and summaries you read about this book describe it as a classic adventure about smuggling and yet it isn’t. It is about buried or concealed treasure. Sure, there’s smuggling in it, but the main interest from the plot doesn’t derive from the activity of smuggling; John and Elzevir could have been carpenters or masons fixing up the Mohune crypt and stumbling across the locket and its secret message.

There is nothing at all about smuggling in the main core interest of the narrative; for example, they don’t find the secret message in a cask of brandy or on board a ship or anything like that. It’s as if the treasure hunt trope has been grafted onto a smuggling setting. It’s as if two completely different genres have been glued together. And I found that a profound flaw with the structure of the entire book.

Magnificent climax

But, as I’ve made clear in my summary (above) all these faults are forgiven, swept away, by the tremendous power of the final scene of disastrous shipwreck, by the nobility of Elzevir’s self-sacrifice, and by John’s reconciliation with the sweetheart who has waited for him through all the long bitter years; by his complete transformation and by his charity.

But it is also an artistically brilliant move to end the narrative not with this goody two-shoes stuff but with a bittersweet memory of the cruel sea. As so often earlier in the book, it is in vivid description where Falkner triumphs and which the novel ends with.

But as for us, for Grace and me, we never leave this our happy Moonfleet, being well content to see the dawn tipping the long cliff-line with gold, and the night walking in dew across the meadows; to watch the spring clothe the beech boughs with green, or the figs ripen on the southern wall: while behind all, is spread as a curtain the eternal sea, ever the same and ever changing. Yet I love to see it best when it is lashed to madness in the autumn gale, and to hear the grinding roar and churn of the pebbles like a great organ playing all the night. ‘Tis then I turn in bed and thank God, more from the heart, perhaps, than, any other living man, that I am not fighting for my life on Moonfleet Beach. And more than once I have stood rope in hand in that same awful place, and tried to save a struggling wretch; but never saw one come through the surf alive, in such a night as he saved me.

Related link

• Moonfleet online

Related reviews

• Fiction of the 1890s