Masterman Ready, or, The Wreck of the Pacific, Written for Young People (1841)

Masterman Ready, or, The Wreck of the Pacific, Written for Young People was written by Frederick Marryat. Marryat (1792-1848) was a Royal Navy officer and an early practitioner of nautical fiction.

Masterman Ready is about the Seagrave family and the sailor Masterman Ready. The Seagraves are bound for Australia, where Mr. Seagrave has land, sheep, and cattle. The Seagraves are Mr. Seagrave, his ailing wife, and their children, William, Tommy, Caroline, and the infant Albert. They are assisted by Juno, their black slave. Masterman Ready is a sailor on the Pacific, the ship bringing the Seagraves to Australia. Unfortunately, the Pacific gets caught in a ferocious storm and is too badly damaged to carry on. The Pacific’s Captain Osborn is struck insensible during the storm, and the ship’s crew abandons both the Pacific and the Seagraves, loading many of the ship’s supplies on to a boat and setting off on their own. Ready is too good a man to let the Seagraves die, so he helps get the Seagraves to the nearest island. Ready then sees to it that the Seagraves survive, helping them at every turn to salvage what they can from the wreck of the Pacific, survive and prosper on the island, build shelter, make fire, catch fish and turtles, blaze trails across the island, create a model, miniature colony, and eventually fight off the “savage” natives. Ready is mortally wounded getting fresh water for the Seagraves, but he holds on long enough for Captain Osborn to arrive in a new ship and rescue the Seagraves.

Masterman Ready was meant by Marryat to be a book for his and other people’s children to read. But the genesis of it came from Marryat’s own reading of Johann Wyss’ The Swiss Family Robinson (1812-1813). Just as H. Rider Haggard is (probably apocryphally) reputed to have read Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island and snorted that he could do better, eventually producing King Solomon’s Mines (see: Allan Quaterman Adventures) as a response, so too did Marryat respond to The Swiss Family Robinson with disgust and vow to write something better, eventually writing Masterman Ready. Marryat’s problem with Wyss were the numerous inaccuracies and liberties Wyss took with seamanship (“or rather the want of it, which occasions impossibilities to be performed on board of the wreck”¹) and the flora and fauna of the island on which the Robinson family landed. As far as correcting Wyss’ mistakes, Marryat succeeds magnificently. The realism of the book and the amount of detail given, both in the scenes on the Pacific and then on the island, is faultless. Too, the amount of action in Masterman Ready would probably have been sufficient to thrill most boys in the nineteenth century. And the novel was successful enough to alter the nautical genre, by 1842 a played-out genre, so that afterwards nautical books were written for juveniles rather than adults.² Yet in most other respects Masterman Ready has not weathered the passage of time well, and the modern reader, juvenile or adult, is most likely to find it tedious rather than exciting.

Marryat’s prose style is utilitarian, and sometimes not even that. The novel has some uneven patches, and Marryat’s descriptions of the island and the plants and animals on it are lackluster. The novel’s characterization is perfunctory, and far too often Marryat writes lectures rather than true dialogue. Marryat’s desire to rebuke Wyss and write a better version of The Swiss Family Robinson results in a didactic novel, in which the Seagraves are usually helpless and the omni-competent Ready must rescue them while describing, in great detail, what he is doing. Marryat, like Wyss, is writing a Robinsonade, a story of survival in a hostile, isolated environment. The original model for this is Daniel Defoe’s The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719), from which the Robinsonade genre got its name. Defoe’s work gained its power in large part from the desperation of Crusoe, whose battle with his surroundings is truly life or death, and Crusoe’s ingenuity in conquering his island with few tools and fewer skills. The peril of Robinson Crusoe is missing in Wyss, who replaces it with an unrealistic bounty of natural supplies as well as a tooth-hurtingly saccharine family, whose unceasing harmony and religious fervor are respectively unrealistic and off-putting. Unfortunately, Marryat focuses too intently on achieving factual accuracy and forgets to restore the element of adventure. Worse, the religious didacticism of Wyss is actually increased by Marryat, who has Ready continually invoke the name of the Almighty and the necessity of mere mortals to “put our trust in a merciful God...who will dispose of us as he thinks fit.”³ Marryat no doubt felt it his place to educate the youths who might read Masterman Ready, to tell them accurate facts about seamanship and ships and untracked Pacific islands, and to teach them moral and religious and life lessons, but to a twenty-first century reader it all adds up to hundreds of pages of preachy tedium. Nor does the novel lack in racism. Juno, the Seagraves’ slave, is a happy slave, and the island’s natives are one-dimensional savages. Masterman Ready is also full of imperialism; the clear message of the novel is that the methods the Seagraves and Ready use to “civilize” the island are the ones which should be used on the entire world, and Mr. Seagrave gives a short speech on the triumph of the British Empire over all its challengers: “the sun is said, and very truly, never to set upon...English possessions.”⁴

Lastly. special mention must be made of Tommy, the Seagraves’ six-year-old son, who never misses a chance to do the worst, most annoying thing possible, from throwing rocks at lions in a zoo, to needlessly shooting off guns and alarming the entire family, to wasting the family’s water supply and causing Ready’s death. Marryat likely meant Tommy to be a mischievous scapegrace, someone whose thoughtless acts the reader would smile and shake their heads over. Marryat has several such characters in his works. But the modern reader is likely to feel that Tommy is as thoughtless and unlikable, in his way, as Bracebridge Hemyng’s Jack Harkaway (see: The Jack Harkaway Adventures), and that corporal punishment is the least that is called for.

¹ Frederick Marryat, “Preface,” in Masterman Ready (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1841-1843), 6.

² Sutherland, Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction, 413.

³ Marryat, Masterman Ready, 46.

⁴ Marryat, Masterman Ready, 166.