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GENDER, DEVELOPMENT AND SOCIAL CHANGE

BODIES IN RESISTANCE
GENDER AND SEXUAL POLITICS IN THE
AGE OF NEOLIBERALISM

Edited by Wendy Harcourt

Gender, Development and Social Change

Series Editor
Wendy Harcourt
Associate Professor in Critical Development
and Feminist Studies
The International Institute of Social Studies
Erasmus University, The Hague, The Netherlands
 Series Committee
Lydia Alpizar
Executive Director of the Association for Women’s Rights
in Development, São Paulo, Brazil

Srilatha Batliwala
India-based feminist activist and Scholar Associate
with the Association for Women’s Rights in Development
Bangalore, India

Yvonne Underhill-Sem
Associate Professor of Development Studies,
University of Auckland, New Zealand

The ‘Gender, Development and Social Change’ series brings together path-
breaking writing from gender scholars and activist researchers who are
engaged in development as a process of transformation and change. The
series pinpoints where gender and development analysis and practice are
creating major ‘change moments’. Multidisciplinary in scope, it features
some of the most important and innovative gender perspectives on devel-
opment knowledge, policy and social change. The distinctive feature of
the series is its dual nature: to publish both scholarly research on key issues
informing the gender and development agenda as well as featuring young
scholars and activists’ accounts of how gender analysis and practice are
shaping political and social development processes. The authors aim to
capture innovative thinking on a range of hot spot gender and develop-
ment debates from women’s lives on the margins to high level global poli-
tics. Each book pivots around a key ‘social change’ moment or process
conceptually envisaged from an intersectional, gender and rights based
approach to development.

More information about this series at

http://www.springer.com/series/14999
 Wendy Harcourt
Editor

Bodies in Resistance
Gender and Sexual Politics in the Age of
Neoliberalism
Editor
Wendy Harcourt
ISS Erasmus University Rotterdam
Rotterdam, The Netherlands

Gender, Development and Social Change

ISBN 978-1-137-47779-8 ISBN 978-1-137-47780-4 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-47780-4

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016957770

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work
in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the pub-
lisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the
material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made.

Original cover design by Serena Dinelli

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

The registered company is Macmillan Publishers Ltd.
The registered company address is: The Campus, 4 Crinan Street, London,
N1 9XW, United Kingdom
 SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE TO BODIES IN
RESISTANCE: GENDER AND SEXUAL POLITICS
IN THE AGE OF NEOLIBERALISM

As with my first edited book that started the series, Women Reclaiming
Sustainable Livelihoods (2012), this collection is the product of good
conversations, innovative research, friendships and memorable encoun-
ters. In the case of Bodies in Resistance there were two key events at the
International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) of Erasmus University in The
Hague in 2013 (The Intercultural Dialogue on Sexuality, Reproductive
Health and Rights in Development: Going Beyond the Comfort Zone
[June] and Theories and Practice in Civic Innovation: Building Bridges
among Politics, Markets and Gender/Sexuality) that initiated the discus-
sions in this book.
The fruit of those discussions are now published three years later and
are still vitally relevant. Neoliberalism and the new developmentalism are
proving to be enduring, and the hopes for new forms of democracy con-
tinue to be sorely challenged. Abortion is an even more crucial issue with
the rise of fundamentalism in different parts of the world, and also in
early 2016 with the horrifying news of the zika virus transmitted by the
Aedes species of mosquito leading to the risk of thousands of pregnant
women having babies with microcephaly. The politics of the body as place,
combining health, environment and community responses, is growing in
importance in the wake of climate crisis. Feminist solidarity and social
justice movements are finding new challenges with the rise of anti-migrant
sentiment, the threat of the jihadist militant group “Islamic State” and
continuing gender-based violence in world conflicts. The volume’s detailed
examination of gender and sexual politics resonates with the sexual rights

v
vi SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE TO BODIES IN RESISTANCE...

of transgender persons now widely acknowledged, and even mainstreamed

with films such as Hollywood’s The Danish Girl (2015).
As the book title suggests, the topics covered are varied: women’s
community ecology; movement organizing; schismatic debates within
feminism; human rights, political rights and abortion; transgender; co-
optation and body politics; intergenerational debates about sexual health
and reproductive rights; masculinities; and research into pornography.
These are discussed in specific places—Colombia, Mexico, India, Nepal,
Iran, Turkey, Nicaragua, Brazil, Latin America and East Africa—as well as
globally, from different points of view, reflecting diverse cultures, histories
and experiences in terms of age, region, gender and race.
Particularly interesting about the book is that many of the authors write
as activists first and academics second, if at all. Everyone has made a con-
certed effort to write in ways that bridge the gap between those two sets
of knowledges, equally important in terms of feminism knowledge and
movement-building, and for documenting what feminists are confront-
ing under neoliberalism. Another unique and important feature of this
collection is that many of the writers are young graduates—the upcoming
generation of feminist activists and scholars.
As the Introduction explains, the institutional setting for the book is
the fledging research group of the Civic Innovation Research Initiative
(CIRI). The initiative undertakes research that fosters creative forms of
cultural, political and economic resistance, and establishes pathways to
social change. The chapters that follow reflect this CIRI approach—to
understand lived experiences in the struggle for democratic power and
to capture the fluidity of changing understandings of identities, bodies,
emotions, networks, power relations and knowledge in today’s “messy”
world. This is particularly important when looking at how gender and
sexual relations are changing in places that defy easy capture in a social
science framing. The book contributes to this CIRI way of doing research
by looking at the complexities of gendered embodiment in relation to
changing economies, geographies, cultures, networks of communications,
experiences of pleasures, and visible and invisible interactions.
Again as stated in the Introduction, the book interrogates historically
positioned, engendered and embodied knowledge both in terms of exist-
ing resistances and in terms of the possibility for change. It looks at how
power is played out in neoliberal regimes and also at how resistance is
integral to challenges and changes in these regimes. The sense of frisson
in these stories is why it is so important and exciting to have this volume
in the series.
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

‘Bodies in Resistance’ is inspired by the courage of the people in feminist

and social movements around the world. Special thanks to our colleagues
and friends of the Civic Innovation Research Intiative (CIRI) at the
International Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University for providing
a nurturing space where the book’s initital conversations could happen.

vii
 CONTENTS

1 Introduction 1
Wendy Harcourt, Silke Heumann and Aniseh Asya

Part I The Politics of Place: Gender, Movements and Bodies 23

2 Politics of Place at the Women’s School of Madrid:

Experiences Around Bodies and Territory 25
Juliana Flórez Flórez, Guisella Andrea Lara Veloza,
Patricia Veloza Torres, Manuela Cardozo García
and Claudia Espejo

3 Reclaiming the Right to Become Other-Women in

Other-Places: The Politics of Place of the Ecologist Women
of La Huizachera Cooperative, Mexico 57
Daniela M. Gloss

4 Moments of Movement Intersection in India: Informing

and Transforming Bodies in Movements 79
Manisha Desai

ix
x CONTENTS

5 Contesting Bodies in the Constitutional Debate About

Citizenship in Nepal 95
Kumud Rana

6 Embodying Change in Iran: Volunteering in Family

Planning as a Practice of Justice 117
Aniseh Asya

7 Neoliberal Body Politics: Feminist Resistance and

the Abortion Law in Turkey 133
Cevahir Özgüler and Betulto Yarar

8 Dialogue: Transgendered Bodies as Subjects of Feminism:

A Conversation and Analysis about the Inclusion of
Trans Persons and Politics in the Nicaraguan
Feminist Movement 163
Silke Heumann, Ana V. Portocarrero,
Camilo Antillón Najlis, María Teresa Blandón,
Geni Gómez, Athiany Larios, Ana Quirós Víquez
and Juana Urbina

Part II Points of View on Gender Politics, Rights and

Bodies in Resistance 189

9 The Development Industry and the Co-optation of

Body Politics 191
Wendy Harcourt

10 An Intergenerational Trialogue on Global Body Politics 213

Sara Vida Coumans, Wendy Harcourt and Loes Keysers

11 Post-What? Global Advocacy and Its Disconnects:

The Cairo Legacy and the Post-2015 Agenda 235
Rishita Nandagiri
 CONTENTS xi

12 Where Are the Men? Reflections on Manhood,

Masculinities and Gender Justice 251
Jan Reynders

13 Body Politics, Human Rights and Public Policies

in Brazil: In Conversation with Jacqueline Pitanguy 275
Wendy Harcourt and Jacqueline Pitanguy

14 Some Thoughts on New Epistemologies in

Latin American Feminisms 295
Virginia Vargas

15 The Subject of Porn Research: Inquiring Bodies and

Lines of Resistance 311
Karen Gabriel

16 An American’s View of Trans* Emergence in Africa

and Feminist Responses 329
Chloe Schwenke

Index 345
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Camilo Antillón Najlis is currently studying for a Master’s in cultural

studies at the Instituto de Historia de Nicaragua y Centroamérica-
Universidad Centroamericana. He is Assistant Professor there. He has
research experience in social and cultural history, gender, sexuality, vio-
lence and health, with national and international institutions and organi-
zations. He has authored papers and books on these subjects and he is
co-editor of the Anthology of Nicaraguan Contemporary Critical Thinking
(forthcoming).
Ana Quirós Víquez is the director of the Centro de Información y
Servicios de Asesoría en Salud – CISAS in Nicaragua and the former conve-
nor of the national Civil Society coordinating body, the Coordinadora Civil.
She is part of the Coordinadora Política of the “Movimiento Autonomo de
Mujeres” (MAM). She is a human right defender of LGBTI and women.
Aniseh Asya combines her training in anthropology and international
studies with a particular interest in the contexts in which human rights
practices emerge and take hold. Her work in social science and law exam-
ines the manners in which individuals and social movements engage with
each other and with governmental institutions to bring about gender jus-
tice. To this end, she has worked in academic institutions and with global
development organisations for over two decades.
Athiany Larios is a feminist and human rights activist, a trans woman
with one discourse of “we are all women”, and collaborating as part of the
trans and feminist movements in Nicaragua.

xiii
xiv NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Geni Gómez is a feminist activist and educator. She was born in Madrid
and visited Nicaragua for the first time in 1989. Adopted by the city
Matagalpa, she grew roots in these fertile grounds with its long tradition
of feminists with whom she has shared struggles, dreams, learnings, indig-
nation and rebelliousness. She is part of the feminist movement in
Nicaragua, through her participation in Grupo Venancia and the Women’s
Network from Matagalpa. After many years, she followed the Masters
Program in ‘Perspectives of Gender and Development’ at the Central
American University in Managua. That experience has opened up new
opportunities for reflections, dialogues and learning that have broadened
her perspective and given her new tools to contribute to the feminist
movement’s task of transforming inequalities.
Sara Vida Coumans is a Dutch national who was born in Nicaragua and
lived in the Philippines as a child. She has been a member of the youth-led
organizations CHOICE for Youth and Sexuality and the Youth Coalition
for Sexual and Reproductive Rights. She was involved in advocacy efforts
around the International Conference on Population and Development
(ICPD) Beyond 2014 review process and co-chaired the Bali Global Youth
Forum in 2012 with Rishita Nandagiri. Sara holds a Master’s in social
policy for development from the International Institute of Social Studies
(ISS) in the Netherlands with a specialization in children and youth stud-
ies, and she has explored contemporary Dutch debates about age and sex
work in her Master’s research. Sara currently works at Amnesty
International as International Youth Coordinator and is responsible for
designing and managing the global programme of youth engagement,
including supporting youth-led campaigning and strengthening the pro-
tection of young human rights defenders.
Manisha Desai is Associate Professor of Sociology and Women, Gender
and Sexuality Studies at the University of Connecticut. Her research and
teaching interests include gender and globalization, transnational femi-
nism and contemporary Indian society. Her most recent book is
Subaltern Movements in India: The Gendered Geography of Struggle against
Neoliberal Development (2016). Among her other books are Gender,
Family, and Law in a Globalizing Middle East and South Asia (co-edited
with Ken Cuno, 2010, Syracuse University Press) and Gender and the
Politics of Possibilities: Rethinking Globalization (2008). She is currently
completing a book on women and gender in a globalizing world for
Routledge’s Global Studies Series.
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xv

Claudia Espejo is a psychologist at the Universidad Piloto de Colombia.

She is a member of the Asociación Herrera. She has experience in the
design, coordination and execution of social, environmental, educative,
communitarian and cultural projects in the public and private sector as
well as in community-based organizations.
Juliana Flórez Flórez is a researcher and Associate Professor at the
Instituto de Estudios Sociales y Culturales Pensar, Pontificia Universidad
Javeriana, Bogotá. She was a scholarship researcher at the Consejo
Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales (CLACSO), LASA and a visiting
researcher at the Latin American Studies Institute, University of North
Carolina, Chapel Hill. Her doctoral thesis received an award for being the
best doctoral thesis in social science (UAB) and was published in the books
Emerging Readings: The Decolonial Turn in Social Movements (Vol. I) and
Emerging Readings: Subjectivity, Power and Desire in Social Movements
(Vol. II). Her writing focuses on critical perspectives of development, bor-
der feminism, meeting of knowledges and communitarian economy. She
was co-translator of J.K. Gibson-Graham’s books.
Karen Gabriel is Associate Professor in the Department of English, St
Stephen’s College, University of Delhi. She is also Founder-Director of
the Center for Gender, Culture and Social Processes at St Stephen’s
College. She is currently at the ISS as a European Union International
Incoming Marie Curie Fellow, where she is researching the com-
mercial bases of pornography. Karen has written extensively about
issues of gender, sexuality, cinema and the nation-state. Her book on
Bombay Cinema, Melodrama and the Nation, was published in 2010.
Manuela Cardozo García is a psychologist with a gender approach from
the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana-Bogotá, Colombia. Her degree the-
sis, entitled “Movimientos sociales en la Sabana de Bogotá” (“Social
movements in Bogota’s savanna: Contributions for a pacifist and transfor-
mative social psychology”), initiated her interest in the body and territory
in women’s lives at the Escuela de Mujeres de Madrid. Currently she works
as a psychologist at the District Secretariat for Women’s Affairs in Bogotá.
María Teresa Blandón is a Nicaraguan sociologist and feminist, founder
of the Feminist Central American Program La Corriente. She is author of
several publications on the situation of women’s rights in Nicaragua and
Central America and a lecturer in the Master’s program ‘Perspectives on
Gender and Development’ at the Central American University in Managua.
xvi NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Daniela M. Gloss is Assistant Professor at the Sociocultural Studies

Department of Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de
Occidente, Guadalajara, Mexico. She holds a Master’s in science and cul-
tural communication from that university. Her research focuses on social
anthropology, feminist political ecology, communication and social move-
ments. Her latest research project was about the appropriations of space in
defense of place processes led by groups of women. She has also partici-
pated in a multidisciplinary research project on civic organizations that
defend sexual and reproductive rights, and she has worked as a communi-
cations consultant and a documentary short-film producer in civic organi-
zations and research centers.
Wendy Harcourt is Associate Professor in Critical Development and
Feminist Studies at the ISS. She joined the ISS in November 2011 after
20 years at the Society for International Development, Rome, as Editor
of the journal Development and Director of Programmes. At the ISS she
is Research Programme leader of the civic in innovation research initiative
and co-coordinates the Sexuality Research Initiative. She has edited 12
books, and her monograph, Body Politics in Development: Critical Debates
in Gender and Development (2009), received the 2010 Feminist Women
Studies Association Book Prize. She is series editor of Palgrave’s Gender,
Development and Social Change Series, and Editor of the Routledge
Series of Gender, Development and Sexuality. She is actively involved in
several journal boards, and gender and development networks.
Silke Heumann is a sociologist and Assistant Professor in Women’s and
Gender Studies at the ISS. Her research interests include gender, sexual
politics and (their relation to) social justice: social movements and dis-
course analysis.
Loes Keysers is a Dutch feminist activist who has been working on repro-
ductive and sexual rights and women’s health issues since the 1980s. She
has been an active member of several women’s networks, including as
founder of the Women’s Global Network for Reproductive Rights
(WGNRR). For 35 years she was a faculty member of the ISS, teach-
ing and researching in the evolving domain of women, gender and
generation in population and development studies. She is currently
teaching part time in gender studies at Leiden University College.
Rishita Nandagiri works on abortion rights, reproductive justice and
feminist organizing. She has worked with the WGNRR and consulted for
a number of organisations in recent years. Currently reading for her PhD
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xvii

at the London School of Economics and Political Science, her research

explores women’s abortion-related decision-making. Rishita serves on
WGNRR’s board of directors and she volunteers with Blank Noise, a col-
lective based in Bangalore, India. She tweets on @rishie_ and dabbles in a
feminist podcasting project (on hiatus), the quietude (the-quietude.com).
Cevahir Özgüler is a PhD student both in the Women’s and Gender
Studies Programme at Ankara University, and at ISS, where she is a mem-
ber of the Population, Environment and Resources Research Group. Her
PhD study focuses on gendered experiences in environmental movements
with a case study from Turkey. For years she has worked as a freelance
researcher with NGOs, universities and research groups in various
research projects, such as on the issues of violence against women
(VAW), a women’s shelter house, migrant children and social move-
ments. In addition to research, she worked at the Women’s Shelter
House in Ankara, and she worked to support refugees in Çorum.
Currently she is part of the research project entitled “New Social
Movements, Media and New Communication Technologies”. She is
a member of the Women’s Shelter House Collective.
Jacqueline Pitanguy is a sociologist and political scientist. She has been
part of the early feminist movement in Brazil. From 1986 to 1989 she
held a cabinet position as President of the National Council for Women’s
Rights (CNDM), designing and implementing public policies to improve
women’s conditions in Brazil. The CNDM played a key role in ensuring
woman’s rights in the new Brazilian Constitution. In 1990 she founded
Citizenship, Studies, Information and Action, a non-governmental
organization, and she has been its Executive Director ever since.
Jacqueline is a member of the National Council for Women’s Rights of
Brazil of the Commission on Citizenship and Reproduction, of the Brazil
Fund for Human Rights, of the Women’s Learning Partnership for, Peace,
Development and Rights and of the Inter American Dialogue. She was
awarded the Medal of Rio Branco, from the Ministry of Foreign Relations
and the Medal do Mérito de Brasília.
Juana Urbina is a trans feminist activist participating in both the trans
and the feminist movements.
Ana V. Portocarrero is a Nicaraguan feminist economist, lecturer and
researcher at the Interdisciplinary Gender Studies Program of the
Department of Social Sciences, the Central American University in
Nicaragua. Her research and teaching interests include gender and
xviii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

sexuality; feminism, economics and environment; epistemology, power

and social change; and theories and queer movements. In particular she
has worked on the following topics: “pleasure, service and feminism in
Nicaragua”, “transgenderism and feminism in Nicaragua”, “discourses on
climate change, development and social exclusion” and “epistemic justice,
higher education and social justice”. Ana is also a member of a collective
of artists, academicians and activists called Operación Queer, as well as a
yoga instructor. She is doing a PhD at the ISS on the subject of climate
change, international trade and food sovereignty.
Kumud Rana has worked on a range of issues relating to gender, sexual-
ity, masculinity, conflict, peacebuilding and environmental justice in Nepal,
the UK and Madagascar. She is currently a PhD candidate at the
College of Social Sciences, University of Glasgow, Scotland, where
she is studying the ‘third gender’ or lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgen-
der and intersex (LGBTI) movement in Nepal and its connections with
regional and global queer politics.
Jan Reynders is an international development consultant, researcher and
activist in the field of gender justice, sexual and reproductive health and
rights (SRHR), prevention of gender-based violence (GBV), engaging
men and sustainable development. Based in the Netherlands, he has worked
in international development for over 40 years, hands on in Bangladesh
and Afghanistan, and as manager and gender policy advisor in a Dutch
funding agency. As consultant he has conducted evaluations, assessments,
training and assignments for policy development, program design, change
management, visioning and strategizing in more than 45 countries, includ-
ing in fragile/post-conflict states. He focuses on the gender dimensions of
sustainable socioeconomic development, conflict prevention and transfor-
mation, GBV and SRHR, promoting gender-transformative approaches
with respect to the role of men/masculinities and the intersectionality of
power positions and abuse in (gender) relations. He is active in the Dutch
Gender Platform (WO=MEN), and sits on the steering committee of the
international MenEngage network (Europe chapter).
Chloe Schwenke is a human rights activist, development practitioner and
academic with more than three decades of international experience, nearly
half of it while living in Africa and Asia. She recently served as vice president
for global programs at Freedom House in Washington, DC, and previously
was a senior political appointee for the Obama administration at the US
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xix

Agency for International Development (USAID). Chloe currently teaches

on the adjunct faculty at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown
University, at the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland and
(online) at the School for Global Inclusion and Social Development at the
University of Massachusetts at Boston. She also works as an independent
consultant in international development and human rights.
Patricia Veloza Torres is a student of geography at the National
University of Colombia. She has experience of creating and implementing
research projects (educational, cultural and environmental). She is a social
activist for human rights that work with youth and women in economic,
social and cultural rights, especially the right to food, and topics related to
floriculture at Bogotá Savanna.
Virginia Vargas is an active feminist militant, founded the Center for
Peruvian Women Flora Tristán in 1978. She has been part of numerous
feminist networks and initiatives in Latin America and worldwide, such as
Between Women: a North-South Dialogue, Social Watch, Development
Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN), Postneoliberal Agenda,
Peoples Dialogue, Campaign for an Interamerican Convention of Sexual
and Reproductive Rights, Campaign against Fundamentalisms, Campaign
for Legalization of Abortion in Latin America. Virginia was the Latin
American and Caribbean NGOs’ Coordinator to the NGO Forum held in
September 1995 on the occasion of the 4th World UN Conference on
Women in Beijing, China. In 2000 she spoke at the UN General Assembly
in New York on behalf of Latin American and Caribbean women’s NGOs
at a special session of the UN General Assembly: Women 2000: Gender
Equity, Development and Peace in the 21st Century. In 2005, at the
Millennium Social Summit, she was a speaker representing Civil Society at
the UN General Assembly, New York. Since 2001 she has been actively
involved in the processes of the World Social Forum, as part of its
International Committee, on behalf of the Articulacion Feminista
Marcosur.
Guisella Andrea Lara Veloza has a BA in community education with an
emphasis on human rights from the National Pedagogical University. For
almost ten years she has worked in social and artistic organizations at
Bogotá Savanna, especially in Madrid, Cundinamarca. Nowadays she
works at the Herrera Association, where she coordinates the field of educa-
tion in human rights, and she also works in educational and artistic research.
xx NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Betül Yarar was a lecturer in the Faculty of Communication, Gazi

University, and a teacher in the Women Studies Graduate Programme at
Ankara University until recent events when she has been forced to leave
the country. She has published various books and articles on a range of
issues, including popular culture, modernization and politics in Turkey,
cultural transformation and gender, the women’s movement in Turkey,
feminist theory, bio-politics and gender and violence. Among various
others, her most recent research project, which is international and is still
in progress, is called “New Social Movements, Media and New
Communication Technologies”. The main focus of this is the women’s
movement in Turkey and in Slovenia. She has been teaching various
courses such as body politics, gender and body politics, gender and vio-
lence, visual culture, popular culture and social structure in Turkey.
 LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 2.1 Hand-drawn map of Madrid in Colombia 26

Fig. 2.2 Fuentes: Universidad Nacional-Sena, ASOCOLFLORES
(2010), DANE y Gobernación de Cundinamarca”
(Veloza y Lara 2014) 30

xxi
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Wendy Harcourt, Silke Heumann and Aniseh Asya

This book emerged out of a series of conversations that took place among
feminist activists and scholars from around the world when they met twice
at Erasmus University’s International Institute of Social Studies (ISS)
in 2013.1 The conversations revolved around the multiple challenges
imposed by changing and increasingly complex regimes of gendered
power (re)configured by the influences of what we broadly termed “neo-
liberalism”. We understood neoliberalism as “an ideology, and a political
and economic practice” (Carty and Mohanty 2015: 84) which threatens
to “dismantle progressive social and economic policies in a process of sub-
jugation, co-optation and delegitimation” (Naples 2013: 133).
In this context we discussed the diverse and innovative ways in which
people resist neoliberal political, economic and social forces, individually
or collectively, in public and in private. The participants shared how orga-
nizations and individuals mobilize to change understandings and practices
of embodiment, sexuality and gender from widely different contexts—
from Bangladesh to Brazil, with equally different approaches, from deco-
lonial and postcolonial perspectives to trans* feminism and queer politics
(CIRI 2013; SRI, iBMG & KNCV 2013). The institutional setting for he
volume is the ISS and, more specifically, the fledging research group of

W. Harcourt ( ) • S. Heumann • A. Asya

ISS, The Hague, The Netherlands

© The Author(s) 2017 1

W. Harcourt (ed.), Bodies in Resistance,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-47780-4_1
2 W. HARCOURT ET AL.

the Civic Innovation Research Initiative (CIRI).2 The CIRI undertakes

research that fosters creative forms of cultural, political and economic
resistance and establishes pathways to social change. This type of research
means recognizing frictions, contractions and contesting energies. The
chapters that make up Bodies in Resistance reflect this CIRI approach—to
understand lived experiences in the struggle for democratic power and
to capture the fluidity of changing understandings of identities, bodies,
emotions, networks, power relations and knowledge in today’s “messy”
world. This is particularly important when looking at how gender and
sexual relations are changing in places that defy easy capturing in social
science framing. The book therefore deliberately aims to contribute to
new CIRI ways of doing research that can describe the complexities of
gendered embodiment in relation to changing economies, geographies,
cultures, networks of communications, experiences of pleasures, and vis-
ible and invisible interactions.
Building on the CIRI approach to innovative research, this collec-
tion of essays maps out how gender and sexuality (together with other
dimensions of inequality and discrimination) become entwined in politics
and political struggles in complex ways. It looks at the gender, racial and
sexual politics of “bodies in resistance” in the streets, in communities,
in silences, in homes and in the in-between marginal places as people
fight and stand up for their territories, their rights, their integrity and
their survival. The chapters from Africa, Europe, Latin America, North
America, the Middle East and South Asia explore the role of sexuality in
the politics of power and resistance in different contexts across the globe,
looking for organized and collective as well as everyday and individual
forms of politics and resistance. They show how these struggles change
or reinforce certain (heteronormative, race- and class-based) regimes of
gender and sexuality.
The volume documents feminist movements’ struggles for change
in local contexts around social justice and sexual rights in Brazil, Colombia,
India, Iran, Nicaragua, Mexico, Turkey, India and Nepal, and also translo-
cally (i.e. across linked localities) in the Andean region and sub-Saharan
Africa. Some chapters also explore the politics (and resistance) of doing
research on reproductive rights, sexuality and sexual rights globally. Within
these contexts they explore diverse responses to today’s power regimes
shaped by neoliberalism, neoconservatism, globalism and fundamental-
ism, and the new dynamic forms of social protest that the world is cur-
rently witnessing.
 INTRODUCTION 3

The book collects together subject matter as complex and different

as abortion, research on pornography, global advocacy on reproductive
rights, the human rights of trans* persons and indigenous rights to terri-
tory. Taken together, these seemingly unique cases contribute to rethink-
ing, reclaiming and repositioning bodies. It is important to note that
they all respond to different forms of power as inscribed on the body. It
is in exploring these inscriptions of power on the body that the volume
connects gender with racial and sexual politics of “bodies in resistance”.
In analyzing the struggles for social justice, and sexual and reproductive
rights, we see resistance in terms of challenging the obvious manifestations
and machinations of power as well as in understanding the conditions on
which such power is based and that allow it to persist. When authoritative
acts are carried out, they rely on a series of conventions that allocate power
to people to speak, to ask and also to resist.
Methodologically, the book is written using feminist-situated, co-
productive and reflexive methodologies incorporating insights from
anthropology, sociology and development studies, politics and cultural
studies, as well as observations from the praxis of “doing feminism”. It
builds on the histories and knowledge of feminist engagement in body
politics in diverse cultural contexts and territories.
In the making of the collection we have debated how to engage in
non-extractive and collaborative research practices in order to bridge the
gap between academia and activism, and the tensions and conflicts of
being both an activist and a researcher (CIRI 2013; SRI, iBMG & KNCV
2013). We looked at how to deal with different audiences that question
the subject’s position and legitimacy to be part of the “true” realm of
discourses on social justice, with different, often competing or contradic-
tory, rules and rationales. We see it as important to consider how we can
feel constrained by the “moral imperatives” of different social movements,
the rules and constraints of academia, or the authoritative popular under-
standings of gender, sexuality and feminism. We have tried to bring to the
surface how these questions influence and shape our research. These chal-
lenges are experienced by the authors and by the groups and communities
with whom we co-produce knowledge. They relate to issues of power and
representation as well as to the different epistemologies that inform our
worldviews and research (CIRI Report 2013; SRI, iBMG & KNCV 2013).
Bearing in mind these differences and constraints, the book does not
seek to position all the chapters into one common frame that would encom-
pass the many diverse approaches to “bodies in resistance”. Instead, the
4 W. HARCOURT ET AL.

authors have been invited to situate their work openly within the context
of their different structural, political and discursive contexts. By building
on the different conversations from the dialogues at the ISS, the volume
can be read as a set of collaborative “multilogues” between the different
authors throughout its different stages. In addition to the many single-
authored and co-authored chapters, the book includes personal stories,
conversations and interviews that record conversations among the authors
around specific contested issues in feminist theory and praxis, such as the
inclusion of generations and “queer” identities, masculinities and perspec-
tives into feminist engagements with social (in)justice.
The two parts of the book are structured around concepts which have a
long history in feminist theory and praxis, which we now turn to in order
to define how we have discussed those concepts by positioning the volume
in our collaborative rethinking, reclaiming, and repositioning of bodies.
The context in which we are looking at bodies in resistance is “the
age of neoliberalism”. We see this as a process of saturating democracy
with market values, but also as an attack on “the principles, practices, cul-
tures, subjects and institutions of democracy” (Brown 2015: 9). As Wendy
Brown underlines, neoliberalism is “a normative order of reason develop-
ment … into a widely and deeply disseminated governing rationality …
that is quietly undoing basic elements of democracy” (Brown 2015: 17).
The chapters in explore how people are resisting the different forms that
neoliberalism has taken, recognizing its global shape but also its inconsis-
tencies that allow for challenges, resistances and ultimately change.

WHY BODIES?
The book aims to reflect on key critical feminist terms, such as reproduc-
tion, redistribution, production, governance and patriarchy, within our
contextualized examination of sexualities and the governance of bodies
in and between the geopolitics of modern states. In making visible the
counter discourses to dominant economic and social policies, the collec-
tion highlights how such struggles are gendered and are gendering bodies.
This examination of embodied lives recognizes the personal, the private
and the state as sites of struggle. Writing these chapters (and engaging in
the dialogues that preceded and were produced alongside them) has pro-
vided the space for contributors to situate their realities and discourses in
relation to issues of bodies, gender and sexuality. We consider these sites of
struggle not as equivalents to each other but as tension-riddled responses
 INTRODUCTION 5

to complex and changing neoliberal regimes of power. As neoliberalism is

constantly reinventing itself to stay relevant, all the while digesting vari-
ous forms of resistance and amassing power, it is imperative for those who
resist its negative consequences to also adapt. “Knowledge on bodies is
irreducibly interwoven with other discourses, social, colonial, ethical and
economic” (Shildrick and Price 1998: 3). If we understand how gendered
bodies are constructed in different discourses, we can challenge norms and
oppressive practices, and understand how to exercise different forms of
power that can transform and change oppressive conditions.
Our focus on bodies stems from our desire to emphasize the embodied
nature of experience. Bodies are sites of both normalization and resis-
tance, since social norms of gender and sexuality are inscribed on the body.
In this understanding of body politics, power is not always possessed as
such, with hegemonic forces determining what one does or does not do.
Rather, bodies are part of the normative construction of gender and sexu-
ality in everyday life or micropolitics through which our knowledge and
our experiences are shaped. The way that gender and sexuality are con-
structive include in the language we use and the practices of caring, par-
enting, sexual relations, health, medical and biological scientific processes.
Bodies are also about place. Much feminist theory has pointed to the
body as the first place for resistance in the challenge to neoliberal global
economic systems. Understanding the body as place underscores that
bodies are not external to political processes but rather firmly enmeshed
in them, even if they are not always the defining site for action. The lived
experience of the body, and the identity and definitions attached to bod-
ies, inform and are connected to all historically and geographically located
political struggles (Butler 1993; Grosz 1994; Harcourt 2009).
The chapters explore the embodied realities of different peoples’ lives
and their engagement in struggles for sexual health and reproductive
rights, access to abortion, an end to gender-based violence (GBV), lesbian,
gay, bisexual and trans* (LGBT) rights,3 the recognition of indigenous
territories, and all peoples’ rights to care, love and work freely. In these
struggles the body is understood in many ways: as a physical and cultural
reality caught in the dualism of dominant scientific and medical Western
knowledge systems; as a symbol of social/political projects through which
individuals and populations are governed; as a “self” to be nurtured and
honored; and as a sexualized and desired subject with fluid position-
ings across age, class and race, and determined by economic and politi-
cal constructions of gender. Ultimately the body (however gendered) is
6 W. HARCOURT ET AL.

understood as a powerful site full of potential, and a place of pleasure and

positive experiences, while at the same time it is also manifestly full of con-
tradictions and open to constraint and abuse.

WHY RESISTANCE?
In using the term “resistance” we are aware of the debates that it has gener-
ated in relation to the danger of reducing the notion of agency to resistance
(Mahmood 2001) and to the question of who has the authority to “judge”
what counts as resistance and what not (Mahmood 2001; Wedeen 1999).
This is not only about academic debates. Though the literature that we cite
is academic, the dilemma is very practical and real: it is about how to forge
social justice struggles and how a narrow idea of social justice (even with
the best of intentions) can produce more injustice and inequality.
From our own experiences as researchers and feminists, we understand
that power and resistance are both multiple and contradictory. There can-
not be a universal yardstick to qualify agency and resistance. What we
define as resistance depends on where we are positioned structurally, expe-
rientially and epistemologically. Resistance, then, cannot be reduced solely
to the conscious and organized political action of defiance but instead
describes an everyday practice that is shaped and motivated by people’s
attempts to find their own political, social and cultural positioning.
We are interested in the notion of resistance as a response to the predom-
inant definitions of gendered bodies. That is, we are particularly intrigued
by challenges that indirectly or directly undermine the oppressive effects/
disciplinary impacts of prevailing normative gender, and body discourses
and practices. In this understanding of resistance, not everyone deliberately
challenges, or sets out to challenge, an oppressive force; even actions that
are not meant to be liberating but undertaken as strategies for survival
qualify as acts of resistance. In the context of neoliberalism, we consider
acts that simply point to the power of neoliberal forces and the limitations
of the types of resistance possible to such forces to be forms of “resistance”.
These acts point out the contours of the conceptual system that oppresses
and confines individuals (Foucault 1970, 1972; Said 1979; Wedeen 1999).
The process of speaking to and challenging power has been especially
important to feminist critical thinkers who engage in the process of resig-
nifying constructs of women as found in Western academic and media
discourse by countering it with experiences in women’s accounts of their
own lives (Abu-Lughod 1993; Al-Ali and Pratt 2009; Mahmood 2005;
Petchesky 2005). In this vein, Bodies in Resistance aims to continue this
 INTRODUCTION 7

counter discourse by rethinking, reclaiming and repositioning the experi-

ences of marginalized women, men and others so that the transgressive
and “resistance” value of their actions can be understood.

WHY GENDER AND SEXUALITY?

We look at gender and sexuality as crucial domains of power and inequal-
ity. Following Rubin 1999; Bonder et al 2009; Correa et al. 2010 we see
gender and sexuality as intimately linked but not reducible to one another.
Further, we see them as always working in tandem with other relationships
of power (Rubin 1999; Scott 1986). An intersectional approach allows us
to analyze the way in which different forms of oppression based on gen-
der, sexuality, “race”/ethnicity, class and so forth intersect, connect and
reinforce each other, and how this informs our struggles. Ferree (2009)
proposes an interactive understanding of intersectionality in which dimen-
sions of class, gender, sexuality, age and ability are understood as already
constituted through their specific relationship within historically and con-
text-specific configurations of relationships between different dimensions:

This version of intersectionality insists that it cannot be located at any one

level of analysis, whether individual or institutional. The “intersection
of gender and race” is not any number of specific locations occupied by
individuals or groups (such as black women) but a process through which
“race” takes on multiple “gendered” meanings for particular women and
men (and for those not neatly located in either of those categories) depend-
ing on whether, how and by whom race-gender is seen as relevant for their
sexuality, reproduction, political authority, employment or housing. These
domains (and others) are to be understood as organizational fields in which
multidimensional forms of inequality are experienced, contested and repro-
duced in historically changing forms. (Ferree 2009: 85)

This approach enables possibilities for change and resistance at the same
time as allowing for a much more fluid understanding of power and gen-
der that subverts apparent hierarchical givens.

WHY NEOLIBERALISM?
We use the term “neoliberalism” to ground the book to the historical
times in which we are living. We do not engage with it in great analytical
depth. We see neoliberalism as the dominant ideology of today’s phase of
capitalism that is undergoing critical challenges by feminists and others as
8 W. HARCOURT ET AL.

they question expansive and evasive economic growth at the cost of peo-
ples, environments and cultures. We write while being aware of cracks and
fissures in the neoliberal “order of things” as different people around the
world are rethinking mainstream neoliberal culture, economic and social
relations. In this way the book contributes to a critique of neoliberalism
and its extractive logic by offering embodied and gendered histories and
experiences that confront dominant transnational and global structures
and ideologies based on colonial, imperial, racial and heteronormative
gender power inequalities and asymmetries.4
We are interested in the possibilities that are emerging from critiques
that challenge capitalist interests. In this we are inspired by writers whose
focus is on how ordinary people, in particular women, are transforming
politics and economies in different locations. These experiences can be seen
as suggesting new possibilities for cultural, economic, environmental and
social relations. This type of scholarship decenters the neoliberal capitalist
economy and looks to other forms of economies where care, commons
and community predominate and the possibilities for non-heteronormative
relations emerge (Gibson-Graham 2006; Harcourt and Nelson 2015).
Another influence on our work is Chandra Talpede Mohanty. In an
essay with Linda Carty, she explores “the anatomies of dispossession and
violence in the age of neoliberalism” and maps out feminist responses
to neoliberalism, including the threat that “neoliberal states appropriate
gender discourses in their attempts to explain away or justify the erasure
of women’s rights” (2015: 9).
Our book resonates with Carty and Mohanty’s argument that as femi-
nists recognize the ways in which patriarchal globalization/neoliberalism
have impacted on women’s lives in tangible ways they have begun forge
transnational solidarities that are crucial to the anti-racist and anti-capital-
ist feminist struggles today (Carty and Mohanty 2015).
In these feminist visions of how to transform capitalism, women’s
mobilizing for change is seen as both an analytical and a political project
that works by connecting particular sites of resistance around women’s
care work, community livelihoods, body politics and engagement in alter-
natives to hegemonic development processes. These politics are about
resistance but also about the reappropriation, reconstruction and reinven-
tion of bodies, places and place-based practices, and the creation of new
possibilities of being-in-place and being-in-networks with other human
and non-human living beings (Harcourt 2013a, 2013b).
 INTRODUCTION 9

Therefore, while describing the critical engagement and resistance to

neoliberal capitalist practice, the book is also interested in how different
groups are living and embodying their daily resistance to the neoliberal
project as they ascribe importance to care, the household and personal
relations in economic and political analysis and practice that link ethics,
nature and culture. We explore the possibilities, as well as the difficulties
and contradictions, as people “live” their embodied resistance to neolib-
eralism by adopting lifestyles that respect ecological limits and defy the
greed, desire and gender blindness of powerful exploitative institutions.

RETHINKING, RECLAIMING AND REPOSITIONING BODIES

As well as engaging with the concepts of the body, resistance and neolib-
eralism, the collection reflects on three themes: how to rethink, reclaim
and reposition bodies in relation to different feminist theories, practice
and praxis.
The first theme, “rethinking”, takes up Foucault’s understanding of
power and knowledge and the constitutive “nature” of discourses and
their central role in the reproduction of social relations of power and
inequality (Foucault 1976; Mills 2003; Sawicki 1991). We address the
question of what Foucault’s notion of power means, and can mean, for
social movements’ diverse and different efforts to challenge and address
structural inequalities. The volume explores how the multiplicity of power
relations, and their (re)production through scientific and everyday forms
of knowledge, challenge social movements. For Foucault, power consists
of a multiplicity of force relations that are produced and dispersed from
everywhere (1990). His notion of power as multiple, diffuse, contradic-
tory and often emanating from small, subordinate groups in society is
reproduced through knowledge and through the construction of subjec-
tivities. This points toward challenges of social movements that are very
important to understand and to engage with if we aspire to an inclusive
project of social, political and economic justice. These knowledge/power
practices shape our subjectivities and define our very sense of self, and our
identity and position in the world as actors, as researchers and as advocates
(and often all three).
The second theme, “reclaiming”, revolves around diverse (direct and
indirect) engagements with states—understanding the “state” not as a
centralized holder of power but as a hegemonic effect (Foucault 1976). It
illustrates the importance of engaging with the state and also of the need
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
The Project Gutenberg eBook of Tough yarns,
vol. 1
 This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United
States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with
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laws of the country where you are located before using this
eBook.

Title: Tough yarns, vol. 1

A series of naval tales and sketches to please all
hands, from the swabs on the shoulders down to the
swabs in the head

Author: M. H. Barker

Release date: February 20, 2024 [eBook #72996]

Language: English

Original publication: Philadelphia: E. L. Carey and A. Hart, 1835

Credits: hekula03, Terry Jeffress and the Online Distributed

Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book
was produced from images made available by the
HathiTrust Digital Library.)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TOUGH YARNS,

VOL. 1 ***
 TOUGH YARNS;
A SERIES

OF

NAVAL TALES AND SKETCHES

TO PLEASE ALL HANDS,

From the Swabs on the Shoulders down to the Swabs in the Head.

BY THE OLD SAILOR,

AUTHOR OF “GREENWICH HOSPITAL,” ETC.

IN TWO VOLUMES.

Vol. I.

PHILADELPHIA:
E. L. CAREY & A. HART.
BALTIMORE:
CAREY, HART & Co.
BOSTON:
WILLIAM D. TICKNOR.
1835.
E. G. Dorsey, Printer,
12 Library Street.
 TO

CAPTAIN MARRYATT, R. N.

AUTHOR OF

‘The King’s Own,’ ‘Newton Foster,’ ‘Peter Simple,’

etc., etc.
THESE PAGES ARE DEDICATED

BY

THE OLD SAILOR.

CONTENTS OF VOL. I.

PAGE
Greenwich Hospital, 9
Tom Brookes, 145
Daddy Davy, the Negro, 159
 PREFACE.

Once more I present myself before the Public in a Book; and

whatever all hands may think of it, I can assure them it is no joke to
keep one’s brains like a winch, continually spinning yarns. However,
as my “Greenwich Hospital” met with a favourable reception, I have
been induced to try another launch—and—here I am at the service
of my readers.
THE OLD SAILOR.
TOUGH YARNS.
 GREENWICH HOSPITAL,
The grand depository of human fragments,—the snug harbour
for docked remnants,—Greenwich Hospital! Who is there that has
stood upon that fine terrace, when the calm of evening has shed its
influence on the spirit, and nature’s pencil intermingling light and
shade has graced the landscape with its various tints, without feeling
delighted at the spectacle? No sound is heard to break the stillness
of the hour, save when the sea-boy trills his plaintive ditty, studious
to grace the turnings of his song, for it was his mother taught it him,
and her he strives to imitate. To him the tide rolls on unheeded; he
sees not the tall mast, the drooping sail; ah, no! his heart is in the
cottage where he knew his first affection, when with a smile of
infantile delight he drew his nourishment from that fond bosom
lately bedewed with tears at parting.
Who is there that has not exulted in the scene, when the proud
ship has spread her canvass to the breeze to carry forth the produce
of our country to distant lands? or when returning to her own home-
shores, laden with the luxuries of foreign climes, the gallant tars
have

“Hailed each well-known object with delight!”

Ay, there they stand! the veterans of the ocean, bidding defiance to
care and sorrow, full of mirth and jollity although they are moored in
tiers. They are critics too, deep critics; but they cannot fancy the
steam vessel with a chimney for a mast, and fifty yards of smoke for
a pendant. These are the men that Smollett pictured,—the Jack
Rattlins and the Tom Pipes of former years. Ay, those were rattling
days and piping times! There is no place upon earth, except
Greenwich, in which we can now meet with them, or find the
weather-roll or lee-lurch to perfection. They are all thorough-bred,
and a thorough-bred seaman is one of the drollest compounds in
existence; a mixture of all that is ludicrous and grave,—of undaunted
courage and silly fear. I do not mean the every-day sailor, but the
bold, daring, intrepid man-of-war’s man; he who in the heat of
action primed his wit and his gun together, without a fear of either
missing fire.
The real tar has a language peculiarly his own, and his figures of
speech are perfect stopper-knots to the understanding of a
landsman. If he speaks of his ship, his eloquence surpasses the
orations of a Demosthenes, and he revels in the luxuriance of
metaphor. The same powers of elocution, with precisely the same
terms, are applied to his wife, and it is a matter of doubt as to which
engrosses the greatest portion of his affection,—to him they are
both lady-ships. Hear him expatiate on his little barkey, as he calls
his wooden island, though she may carry a hundred-and-fifty guns
and a crew of a thousand men. “Oh! she’s the fleetest of the fleet;
sits on the water like a duck; stands under her canvass as stiff as a
crutch; and turns to windward like a witch!” Of his wife he observes,
“What a clean run from stem to starn! She carries her t’gall’nt sails
through every breeze, and in working hank for hank never misses
stays!” He will point to the bows of his ship, and swear she is as
sharp as a wedge, never stops at a sea, but goes smack through all.
He looks at his wife, admires her head-gear, and out-riggers, her
braces and bow-lines; compares her eyes to dolphin-strikers, boasts
of her fancy and fashion-pieces, and declares that she darts along
with all the grace of a bonnetta. When he parts with his wife to go
on a cruise, no tear moistens his cheek, no tremulous agitation does
discredit to his manhood: there is the honest pressure of the hand,
the fervent kiss, and then he claps on the topsail-halliards, or walks
round at the capstan to the lively sounds of music. But when he
quits his ship, the being he has rigged with his own fingers, that has
stood under him in many a dark and trying hour, whilst the wild
waves have dashed over them with relentless fury, then—then—the
scuppers of his heart are unplugged and overflow with the soft
droppings of sensibility. How often has he stood upon that deck and
eyed the swelling sails, lest the breezes of heaven should
 “Visit their face too roughly!”

How many hours has he stood at that helm and watched her coming
up and falling off! and when the roaring billows have threatened to
ingulf her in the bubbling foam of the dark waters, he has eased her
to the sea with all the tender anxiety that a mother feels for her
first-born child. With what pride has he beheld her top the mountain
wave and climb the rolling swell, while every groan of labour that
she gave carried a taut strain upon his own heart-strings!
Place confidence in what he says, and he will use no deception;
doubt his word, and he will indulge you with some of the purest
rhodomontade that ingenious fancy can invent. He will swear that he
had a messmate who knew the man in the moon, and on one
occasion went hand-over-hand up a rainbow to pay him a visit. He
himself was once powder-monkey in the Volcano bomb, and he will
tell you a story of his falling asleep in the mortar at the
bombardment of Toulon, and his body being discharged from its
mouth instead of a carcass. With all the precision of an engineer, he
will describe his evolutions in the air when they fired him off, and the
manner in which he was saved from being dashed to pieces in his
fall. All this he repeats without a smile upon his countenance, and he
expects you to believe it: but you may soon balance the account, for
tell him what absurdity you will, he receives it with the utmost
credulity and is convinced of its truth. His courage is undoubted, for
he will stand on the deck undismayed amidst the blood and
slaughter of battle; yet on shore, he is seized with indescribable
apprehensions at the sight of a coffin. The wailings of distress find a
ready passport to his heart; but to disguise the real motives which
prompt immediate aid, he swears that the object of his charity does
not deserve a copper, yet gives a pound with only this provision,—
that the individual relieved does not bother him about gratitude. You
may know him from a thousand; for though in his dress
conspicuously neat, and his standing and running rigging in exact
order, yet they are arranged with a certain careless ease, as if he
had but just come down from reefing topsails. The truck at the
mast-head does not sit better than his tarpaulin hat, neither does
the shoe upon the pea of the anchor fit tighter than his long
quartered pumps. Grog is his ambrosia, his necktar; and he takes it
cold, without sugar, that he may have the full smack of the rum.
And these are the characters at Greenwich Hospital, who after
fighting the battles of their country are honoured with a palace. Oh,
it was a proud display of national gratitude to such brave defenders!
England has been compared to a huge marine animal, whose ports
were its mouths, and whose navy formed its claws. What then is
Greenwich but a receptacle for superannuated claws? I dearly love
to get amongst them,—nearly two thousand shattered emblems of
Britain’s triumphs,—the returned stores of our naval glory. Ay, there
they are with their snug little cabins, like turtles under their shells.
But let us enter the

Painted Wall,

formerly the refectory for the pensioners, but now devoted to the
commemoration of their gallant achievements. There are the
portraits of the heroes of the olden time, whose memorials cannot
perish; and there too is old Van Tromp, the Dutchman, who is
honoured with a distinguished place amongst the brave of England’s
pride.
Here the old blades are a cut above the common; the small iron-
bound officers who attend on visiters and point out the well-
remembered features of commanders long since numbered with the
dead.
“That ’ere, sir, on your right, is the battle of Trafflygar,” said a
short thickset man, apparently between sixty and seventy years of
age. His countenance was one of mild benevolence, and yet there
was a daring in his look that told at once a tale of unsubdued and
noble intrepidity; whilst the deep bronze upon his skin was finely
contrasted with the silky white locks that hung straggling on his
brow.—“That ’ere, sir, is the battle of Trafflygar, in which I had the
honour to be one.”
“Were you with Nelson?” inquired I.
 “I was, your honour,” he replied, “and those were the proudest
days of my life. I was with him when he bore up out of the line off
Cape St. Vincent, and saved old Jarvis from disgrace. I was one of
the boarders, too, when we took the Saint Joseph,—there’s the
picture, there in the middle of the hall;—and I was with him in that
ship there,—the Victory,—though it arn’t a bit like her,—and
stationed on the quarter-deck at Trafflygar.”
This was spoken with such an air of triumph, that the old man’s
features were lighted up with animation; it called to his
remembrance scenes in which he had shared the glory of the day
and saved his country. His eye sparkled with delight, as if he again
saw the British ensign floating in the breeze as the proud signal for
conquest; or was labouring at the oar with his darling chief, like a
tutelar deity of old, guiding the boat through the yielding element,
and leading on to some daring and desperate enterprise.
“I don’t like the picture,” said I; “the perspective is bad, and the
ship is too long and flat; besides the colour is unnatural.”
“Why, as for the matter of the prospective, sir,” replied the
veteran, “that’s just what his present Majesty, God bless him!
obsarved when he came to look at it; and for the colour, says the
king, says he, ‘why the painter must have thought he’d been
cooking, for he’s shoved the Victory into the hottest of the fire and
done her brown;’ it was too bad, your honour, to singe her in that
’ere fashion, like a goose. Mayhap, your honour arn’t seen them
there paintings of the battle at a place they call Exeter Hall, in the
Strand. Now they are some-ut ship-shape, and the heat of the
engagement warms a fellow’s heart to look at. An ould tar of the
name of Huggins painted ’em, and I’m sure it’s right enough, for he’s
made the Victory hugging the enemy just as a bear would a baby. I
could stand and look at them pictures for hours, till I fancied myself
once more in the midst of it, measuring out fathoms of smoke and
giving ’em full weight of metal. The Victory has just fell aboard the
French Redhotable and the Golision, as they calls it, gives each of
’em a lust different ways that looked so natural-like, that I felt myself
getting a heel to port in the ould Victory as I looked at her. Then
there’s the gale o’wind arter the battle; why, blow my ould wig, but
you may feel the breeze and shake yourself from the spray. God
bless his Majesty!—for they are the king’s, your honour;—long may
he live to view ’em, and long may Huggins hug to windward under
royal favour! I went to see him,—not the king, your honour, but
Muster Huggins, and when he found I was ‘the Old Sailor,’ what gave
some account of the life of a man-of-war’s man in ‘Greenwich
Hospital,’ he whips out his old quid, flings it into the fire, and we
sported a fresh bit o’bacca on the strength of it.—That was a
welcome worthy a great man, and he could’nt ha’ done more for the
king, though I arn’t quite sure that his Majesty does chaw his pig-
tail.”
There certainly was ample scope for the remarks of my old
friend, and I could not but consider the picture a complete failure.
“And so you were at Trafalgar,” said I.
“Ay, and a glorious day it was, too, for Old England,” replied the
tar. “Never shall I forget the enthusiasm which animated every
breast, as we bore down to engage; it was indeed a noble sight, and
so your honour would have said, if you had but have seen the
winged giants of the deep as they marched majestically before the
breeze, all ready to hurl their thunders at the foe. But the best
scenes were at the quarters, where the bold captains of each gun
stood cool and undaunted, waiting for the word: but for the matter
o’ that, every soul, fore and aft, seemed to be actuated by one and
the same spirit. ‘Look there, Ben,’ said Sam Windsail, pointing out of
the port-hole at the Royal Sovereign, just entering into action, ‘look
there, my Briton; see how she moves along, like a Phœnix in the
midst of fire,—there’s a sight would do any body’s heart good. I’d
bet my grog, (and that’s the lick-sir of life) I say I’d bet my grog
agen a marine’s button, that old Colly’s having a desperate bowse at
his breeches; he’s clapping on a taut hand, I’ll be bound for him.’
Just then the Sovereign hauled up a little, and opened her fire.
‘Didn’t I say so,’ continued Sam; ‘look at that! my eyes but he makes
’em sheer agen! Well behaved my sons of thunder! The old gemman
knows the French are fond of dancing, so he’s giving them a few
balls and routs! Ay, ay, we shall be at it presently, never fear; our old
chap arn’t the boy to be long idle, but then, d’ye mind, he never
does things by halves; so he loves close quarters, and as he is rather
near with his cartridges, why he doesn’t like to throw a shot away.
Howsomever, he’ll go it directly, like a doctor’s written orders,—this
powder and these pills to be taken immediately,—eh, Ben? Next
comes funny-section, or flay-bottomy, as the surgeons call it:—my
eyes, there goes old Colly’s breeches agen, he’ll make a breach in
the enemy’s line directly; ay, he’s a right arnest sallymander.’ By this
time, your honour, we’d got within gun-shot, and the enemy opened
a tremendous fire upon the leading ships of our division, which
played up old Scratch upon the fokstle, poop, and main-deck; for as
we bore down nearly stem on, and there was but a light breeze,
they raked us fore and aft.
“But I should have told you, sir, that just before going into action,
the admiral walked round the quarters attended by the captain and,
I thinks, Mr. Quillem, the first leftenant, but I won’t be sure. The
gunner, Mr. Rivers, was along with ’em, I know, and a worthy old
gemman he was; his son, a midshipman, was stationed on the same
deck with us,—a fine spirited youth, with his light hair flowing about
his ears and his little laughing eyes,—up to all manner of mischief.
Well, round they came, and the hero seemed proud of his men; he
stopped occasionally to speak to one and to another, and his keen
eye saw in a moment if any thing wasn’t ship-shape. His
countenance was rather stern, but there was a look of confidence
that told us at once the day was our own;—nay, for the matter o’
that, Sam Windsail began to reckon what he should buy for Poll with
his prize-money.
“When they reached the quarters where young Rivers was
stationed, Nelson looked at the son and then at the father, as much
as to say, ‘he’s a fine youth, you ought to be proud of him,’ as no
doubt the old gemman was, for he knew his gallant boy would do
his duty. But still the tender solicitude of a parent’s heart is not to be
repressed, however it may be concealed; and as he followed the
admiral, his head was frequently turned back to take another look at
his child, and perhaps he thought ‘mayhap it may be the last.’ Well,
as I was saying before, the enemy’s balls began to rattle into us like
hail-stones through a gooseberry bush, and many a poor fellow was
laid low. ‘Arrah, bad manners to ’em, what do they mane by that?’
cried Tim Doyle, as a whole shoal of shot travelled in one another’s
wake, and swept the entire range of the deck. ‘Come, don’t be
skulking down there, Jack Noggin,’ continued Tim, ‘but lay hoult of
the tackle-fall.’ Jack never moved. ‘Och bother, don’t you mane to
get up?’ But poor Jack’s glass was run, his cable was parted; so we
launched his hull out at the port, stock and fluke.
“Mayhap you never saw a battle, sir. It is no child’s play, take my
word for it. But the worst time is just before engaging, when silence
reigns fore and aft, and a poor fellow douses his jacket without
knowing whether he shall ever clap his rigging on agen. Then it is
that home with all its sweet remembrances clings round the heart.
Parents, or wife, or children, become doubly dear, and the fond ties
of kindred are linked by stronger bonds. Howsomever, as soon as
the first shot is fired, and we get within a sort of shake-hands
distance of the enemy, every other thought gives way to a steady
discharge of duty.
“Well, d’ye see, close upon our quarter came the Trimmer-rare,
98, and as we hauled up a little, we brought our larboard broadside
to bear upon the great Spanish four-decker;—there, that’s she in the
picture showing her galleries, just by the Victory’s starn:—so we
brought our broadside to bear, and oh, if you had but have seen the
eager looks of the men as they pointed their guns, determined to
make every shot tell,—and a famous mark she was, too, looming out
of the water like Beachy-head in a fog. ‘Stand by,’ says Sam
Windsail, looking along the sight with the match in his hand; ‘stand
by, my boy; so, so,—elevate her breech a bit,—that will do. Now,
then, for the Santizzy-mama-Trinny-daddy, and I lay my life I knock
day-light through his ribs. Fire!’ and the barking irons gave mouth
with all their thunder. A few minutes afterward, and slap we poured
another raking broadside into the Spaniard, and then fell aboard a
French seventy-four.
“Well, there, d’ye see, we lay, rubbing together with the muzzles
of the lower deckers touching one another. When our guns were run
in for loading, the ports were instantly occupied by the small-arm
men, and several attempts were made to board the enemy. At this
time one of the Frenchmen kept thrusting at us with a boarding-
pike, and pricked Tim Doyle in the face. ‘Och, the divil’s cure to you,’
bawled Tim; ‘what do you mane by poking at me in that way. A
joke’s a joke, but poking a stick in a fellow’s eye is no joke, any how;
be aisey then, darlint, and mind your civility.’ As soon as we had
fired, in came the pike agen, and Tim got another taste of it. ‘Och
bother,’ said Tim, ‘if that’s your tratement of a neighbour, the divil
wouldn’t live next door to yes! But faith, I’ll make you come out o’
that, and may be you’ll be after just paying me a visit.’ So he catches
hold of a boat-hook that was triced up in a-midships, and watching
his opportunity, he hooked Johnny Crapeau by the collar and lugged
him out of one port-hole in at the other, without allowing him time to
bid his shipmates good-by. ‘Is it me you’d be poking at, ye
blackguard?’ said Tim, giving him a thump with his fist. ‘Is it Tim ye
wanted to spit like a cock-sparrow or a tom-tit? Arrah, swate bad
luck to yes,—sit down and make yer life aisey; by the powers there’ll
be a pair o’ ye presently.’ But Tim was disappointed, for they let
down the lower deck ports for fear we should board them through
the port-holes.
“Soon after, both ships dropped aboard the Trimmer-rare; and
then we ploughed up the Frenchman’s decks with our shot, whilst
she lay grinding and groaning in betwixt us. It was just now that
young Rivers was struck, and his leg knocked away; but his spirit
remained unsubdued, and as they took him down to the cock-pit, he
cheered with all his might, and shortly after the hero himself was
conveyed below. At first, the news of his being wounded seemed to
stagnate all hands, and each stood looking at the other in fearful
anxiety; but in a few minutes, resolution again returned, the shots
were rammed home with redoubled strength, though at times the
men would struggle with their feelings, and give vent to their grief
and indignation. At every opportunity inquiries were made, and
when the news of his death reached our quarters,—‘He’s gone!’ said
Sam, ‘his anchor’s a-weigh, and the blessed spirits are towing him to
immortality.’
“But who is there, your honour, that remembers Nelson now?
Even the car that carried his body to its last moorings has been
broken up as useless lumber, though I did hear that a gemman
offered two thousand guineas for it. Some parts are down in the
store-rooms, and some has been burnt for fire-wood. There’s his
picture and his statue to be sure, but I think they should have
spared the car. Nelson was strict to his duty, and made all hands
perform theirs; and when he punished one man, it was that he
might not have to punish twenty, and every soul fore and aft knew
what they had to do. The brave, the generous, the humane
Collingwood too,—there’s his picture, your honour, he is almost
forgotten. Collingwood detested flogging; and when any captain
came to him with a complaint of being short-handed through
desertion, he would stand and hitch up his breeches, saying, ‘Use
your men better, sir; use your men better, and then they wouldn’t
leave you. My men, sir, never run; because they know they cannot
get better treatment elsewhere.’ He was also an avowed enemy to
impressment, being well convinced that the British navy might be
manned with volunteers, if Jack’s peculiarities were only managed
with kindness. But they are gone, sir, they are gone, and their
authority is over; yet there are a few rough knots who can
remember them,—ay, and cherish the remembrance in their hearts.
“Mr. Rivers is still living,—and there he is, your honour,” said the
veteran, pointing to an active man in lieutenant’s uniform, who
flourished his wooden pin as he descended the stone steps; “there
he is, for he’s now lieutenant of the college, and has a fine family
just over the way there in the square. They ought to have made him
a commander, at any rate, for I’ve seen him unbuckle his wooden
leg and go aloft as quick as any topman in the ship; and there was
but few could beat him at dancing, for it was quite delightful to see
how he handled his timber support, and how the ladies and gemmen
sheered out of his way for fear of their toes. Ah, there he goes agen,
all life and spirit,—spinning his tough yarns and cracking his jokes,
as full of fun as ever;—he’s much prized by the governors, because
he takes all the trouble off their hands.”
“Is the portrait of Nelson considered a good likeness?” I inquired.
“My sight gets rather dim, sir,” replied the veteran; “but before
they put it up, when I could see it closer, I did not think it very like.
Lord Collingwood’s is by far the best.”
At this moment I felt somewhat of a mischievous inclination to
try the old man’s temper, and therefore remarked, “Ay, he looks
stern and scowling. Nelson was a brave man, no doubt, but then he
was tyrannical and cruel.”
The hoary tar turned round and stared me full in the face: a
storm was gathering in his heart, or rather, like a vessel taken aback
in a sudden squall, he stood perplexed as to which tack he should
stand on. But it was only for a moment, and as his features relaxed
their sternness he replied, “No matter, your honour,—no matter. You
have been generous and kind, and I’m no dog to bite the hand that
deals out bounty.”
This seemed to be uttered with the mingling emotions of
defiance and melancholy, and to urge him further, I continued,
—“But, my friend, what can you say of the treatment poor Caraccioli
experienced? You remember that, I suppose?”
“I do, indeed,” he replied. “Poor old man! how earnestly he
pleaded for the few short days which nature at the utmost would
have allowed him! But, sir,” added he, grasping my arm, “do you
know what it is to have a fiend at the helm, who when Humanity
cries ‘port!’ will clap it hard a-starboard in spite of you?—one who in
loveliness and fascination is like an angel of light, but whose heart
resembles an infernal machine, ready to explode whenever passion
touches the secret spring of vengeance?”
I had merely put the question to him by way of joke, little
expecting the result; but I had to listen to a tale of horror. “You give
a pretty picture, truly, old friend,” said I; “and pray who may this
fiend be?”
“A woman, your honour,—one full of smiles and sweetness; but
she could gaze with indifference on a deed of blood, and exult over
the victim her perfidy betrayed. It is a long story, sir, but I must tell
it you that you may not think Nelson was cruel or unjust. His
generous heart was deceived, and brought a stain upon the British
flag, which he afterwards washed out with his blood. Obedience is
the test of a seaman’s duty—to reverence his king, and to fight for
his country. This I have done, and therefore speak without fear,
though I know nothing of parliaments and politics.
“Well, your honour, it was at the time when there was a mutiny
among the people at Naples, and Prince Caraccioli was compelled to
join one of the parties against the court; but afterwards a sort of
amnesty, or damnification I think they call it, was passed by way of
pardon to the rebels, many of whom surrendered, but they were all
made prisoners and numbers of them were executed.
“Well, one day I was standing at the gangway getting the barge’s
sails ready, when a shore-boat came alongside full of people, who
were making a terrible noise. At last they brought a venerable old
man up the side; he was dressed as a peasant, and his arms were
pinioned so tight behind that he seemed to be suffering considerable
pain. As soon as they had all reached the deck, the rabble gathered
round him, some cursing, others buffeting, and one wretch,
unmindful of his gray hairs, spat upon him. This was too much to
see and not to speak about; the man was their prisoner and they
had him secure,—the very nature of his situation should have been
sufficient protection; so I gave the unmannerly fellow a tap with this
little fist,” holding up a hand like a sledge-hammer, “and sent him
flying into the boat again without the aid of a rope. ‘Well done, Ben!’
exclaimed a young midshipman, who is now a post-captain; ‘Well
done, my boy, I owe you a glass of grog for that; it was the best
summerset I ever saw in my life.’ ‘Thank you for your glass o’grog,
sir,’ said I, ‘you see I’ve made a tumbler already;’ and indeed, your
honour, he spun head over heels astonishingly clever. I was brought
up to the quarter-deck for it, to be sure, because they said I had
used the why-hit-armis; but I soon convinced them I had only used
my fist, and the young officer who saw the transaction stood my
friend, and so I got off.
“Well, there stood the old man as firm as the rock of Gibraltar;
not a single feature betraying the anguish he must have felt. His
face was turned away from the quarter-deck, and his head was
uncovered in the presence of his enemies. The Neapolitans still kept
up an incessant din, which brought the first-lieutenant to the gang-
way; he advanced behind the prisoner, and pushing aside the
abusive rabble, swore at them pretty fiercely for their inhumanity,
although at the same time seizing the old man roughly, he brought
him in his front. ‘What traitor have we here?’ exclaimed the
lieutenant; but checking himself on viewing the mild countenance of
the prisoner, he gazed more intently upon him. ‘Eh, no!—it surely
cannot be:—and yet it is!’—his hat was instantly removed with every
token of respect, as he continued—‘it is the prince!’
“The old man with calm dignity bowed his hoary head to the
salute, and at this moment Nelson himself, who had been disturbed
by the shouting of the captors, came from his cabin to the quarter-
deck, and advancing quickly to the scene, he called out in his hasty
way when vexed, ‘Am I to be eternally annoyed by the confusion
these fellows create! What is the matter here?’ But when his eye had
caught the time-and-toil worn features of the prisoner, he sprang
forward, and with his own hands commenced unbinding the cords.
‘Monsters,’ said he, ‘is it thus that age should be treated?—Cowards,
do you fear a weak and unarmed old man?—Honoured prince, I
grieve to see you degraded and injured by such baseness,—and
now,’ he added, as the last turn released his arms, ‘dear Caraccioli,
you are free!’ I thought a tear rolled down Nelson’s cheek as he cast
loose the lashings, which having finished, he took the prince’s hand
and they both walked aft together.
“They say the devil knows precisely the nick of time when the
most mischief is to be done, and so it happened now; for a certain
lady followed Nelson from the cabin, and approached him with her
usual bewitching smile. But oh! your honour, how was that smile
changed to the black scowl of a demon when she pierced the
disguise of the peasant, and recognised the prince, who on some
particular occasion had thwarted her views and treated her with
indignity. It had never been forgiven, and now—he was in her power.
Forcibly she grasped Nelson by the arm and led him from the deck.
“‘His doom is sealed,’ said one of the lieutenants, conversing in
an undertone with a brother officer, ‘no power on earth can save
him.’ ‘On earth,’ rejoined the other, ‘no, nor in the air, nor in the
ocean; for I suspect he will meet his death in the one, and find his
grave in the other.’ ‘Yet surely,’ said the surgeon, who came up, ‘the
admiral will remember his former friendship for the prince, who once
served under him. Every sympathetic feeling which is dear to a noble
mind must operate to avert his death.’ ‘All the virtues in your
medicine-chest, doctor,’ rejoined the first, ‘would not preserve him
many hours from destruction, unless you could pour an opiate on
the deadly malignity of ——,’ here he put his finger upon his lip, and
walked away.
“Well, your honour, the old man was given up to his bitter foes,
who went through the mockery of a court-martial,—for they
condemned him first and tried him afterwards. In vain he implored
for mercy; in vain he pleaded the proclamation, and pointed to his
hoary head; in vain he solicited the mediation of Nelson, for a
revengeful fury had possession of his better purposes, and damned
the rising tide of generosity in the hero’s soul; in vain he implored
the pardon and intercession of ——; but here I follow the example of
my officer, and lay my finger on my lip.
“The president of the court-martial was Caraccioli’s personal
enemy, and the poor old man was not allowed time to make a
defence; he was sentenced to be hung, and his body to be thrown
into the sea. I was near him, your honour, when he entreated Mr.
Parkinson, one of the lieutenants, to go to Nelson and implore that
he might be shot. Oh, if you had but have seen him grasp the
officer’s hand as he said, ‘I am an old man, sir, and I have no family
to leave behind to lament my death. Indeed I am not anxious to
prolong my life, for at the utmost my days would be but few; but the
disgrace of hanging,—to be exposed to the gaze of my enemies,—is
really dreadful to me!’
“But every attempt to obtain a mitigation or a change of the
sentence was unavailing, and at five o’clock that afternoon the brave
old man, the veteran prince, in his eightieth year, hung suspended
from the fore-yard-arm of a Neapolitan frigate he had once
commanded,—for he was an admiral, your honour. Never shall I
forget the burst of indignation with which the signal-gun was heard
by our crew, and a simultaneous execration was uttered fore and aft.
“Nelson walked the deck with unusual quickness; nay, he almost
ran, and every limb seemed violently agitated. He heard the half-
suppressed murmurs of the men, and a conviction of dishonour
seemed to be awakening in his mind. But oh, sir, where was pity,
where was feminine delicacy and feeling? The lady approached him
in the most seducing manner and attracted his attention: he stopped
short, looked at her for a moment with stern severity, and again
walked on. ‘What ails you, Bronté?’ said she; ‘you appear to be ill,’
and the witchery of her commanding look subdued the sternness of
his features;—he gazed upon her and was tranquil. ‘See!’ said she,
pointing out at the port to where the body of Caraccioli was still
writhing in convulsive agony, ‘see! his mortal struggles will soon be
over. Poor prince! I grieve we could not save him. But come, Bronté,
man the barge, and let us go and take a parting look at our old
friend.’ I shuddered, your honour, and actually looked down at her
feet to see if I could make out any thing like a cloven hoof. ‘The
devil!’ exclaimed a voice in a half-whisper behind me that made me
start, for I thought the speaker had certainly made the discovery;
but it was only one of the officers giving vent to his pious
indignation.
“Well, the barge was manned, and away we pulled with Nelson
and the lady round the ship where the unfortunate prince was
hanging. He had no cap upon his head, nor was his face covered;
but his white hair streamed in the breeze above the livid contortions
which the last death-pang had left upon his features. The
Neapolitans were shouting and insulting his memory; but they were
rank cowards, for the truly brave will never wreak their vengeance
on a dead enemy.
“Nelson and the lady conversed in whispers; but it was plain to
be seen his spirit was agonized, and his fair but frail companion was
employing every art to soothe him. She affected to weep, but there
was a glistening pleasure in her eyes as she looked at the corpse,
which had well nigh made the boat’s crew set all duty at defiance.
Nelson,—and no man was better acquainted with the characteristics
of a sailor,—saw this, and ordered to be pulled on board. She
upbraided him for what she called his weakness, but his soul was
stirred beyond the power of her influence to control his actions.
 “The body of the prince was taken out to a considerable distance
in the bay, where it was thrown overboard with three heavy double-
headed shot lashed between the legs; and, as the lieutenant said,
‘he met his death in the air, and had his grave in the ocean.’
“About a fortnight after this, a pleasure party was made up by
the royal family and nobility for an excursion on the water, and the
barge, with Nelson and the lady, took the lead. It was a beautiful
sight to see the gilded galleys with their silken canopies and bright
pennons flashing in the sun, and reflecting their glittering beauties
on the smooth surface of the clear blue waters, whilst the measured
sweep of the oars kept time with the sweet sounds of music. Not a
cloud veiled the sky, scarcely a breath curled the transparent crest of
the gentle billow; all was gayety, and mirth, and laughter.
“After pulling for several miles about the bay, we were returning
towards the shore, when a curious-looking dark object,—something
like a ship’s buoy, appeared floating a-head of the barge. The
bowmen were ordered to lay-in their oars, and see what it was; so
the oars were laid in, and they stood ready with their boat-hooks,
the coxswain steering direct on to it. As soon as the barge was near
enough, the bowmen grappled it with their boat-hooks, but in an
instant their hold was loosened again, and ‘A dead body! a dead
body!’ was uttered in a suppressed tone by both. The boat held on
her way, and as the corpse passed astern, the face turned towards
the lady and showed the well-remembered countenance of poor
Caraccioli. Yes, as the officer had said, ‘the ocean had been his
grave;’ but that grave had given up its dead, and the lady seldom
smiled afterwards.
“Nelson hailed one of the cutters that were in attendance, and
directed that the body should be taken on board and receive the
funeral ceremonies suitable to the rank which the unfortunate prince
had held whilst living. The music ceased its joyous sounds for notes
of melancholy wailing, and the voice of mirth was changed to
lamentation and sadness.
“Years passed away, and Nelson fell in the hour of victory; but
the lady, ah! her end was terrible. The murdered prince was ever
present to her mind; and as she lay upon her death-bed, like a
stranded wreck that would never more spread canvass to the
breeze, her groans, her shrieks were still on Caraccioli. ‘I see him!’
she would cry, ‘there, there!—look at his white locks and his
straining eye-balls! England,—England is ungrateful, or this would
have been prevented! But I follow—I follow!’—and then she would
shriek with dismay and hide herself from sight. But she is gone, your
honour, to give in her dead-reckoning to the Judge of all. She died in
a foreign land, without one real friend to close her eyes; and she
was buried in a stranger’s grave, without one mourner to weep upon
the turf which covered her remains.”
Here the veteran ceased, and folding his arms, he held down his
head as if communing with his own heart and struggling to dispel
the visions which his narration had conjured up. I cautiously
refrained from disturbing him, till by a sudden gulp or sea-sigh, like
the expiring gale when at its last gasp, he gave indications of having
becalmed his feelings, and we moved onwards up the steps into the
body of the Hall, till we stood before the fine painting of the Battle
of the Nile, by G. Arnald.
“There, your honour,” exclaimed the veteran, whilst his eye
sparkled with glowing recollections, “look there, your honour; isn’t
that a sight to awaken old remembrances! It’s worth a hundred of
that yonder, which is neither ship-shape nor Bristol fashion, as I take
it, for an officer in boarding to be rigged out as if he was going to a
ball. Mayhap, howsomever, it may be all well enough for landsmen
and marines to look at, because it’s pretty; but the eye of a seaman
only glances at it with contempt.” The subject of his last
observations, was a painting of Nelson boarding the San Josef of
112 guns in the battle off St. Vincent. “I told you before I was with
him in both doos; but, Lord love your heart, it was another sort of a
concarn than that ’ere; for there warn’t no fighting on the quarter-
deck of the three-decker,—all the fighting were in the San Nickylas
as we boarded first. But here’s a pretty picture, your honour,”
pointing to a small but beautiful painting of the re-capture of the
Hermione frigate by Sir Edward Hamilton, “and it tells a tale too!
Well, thank God, I never sailed with a tyrannical captain! and there
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