Yachting and the Rule of the Waves

Nineteenth-century British yachting became a growing rich man's recreation after the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Tre Tryckare cites the yachting author Dixon Kemp who “estimated there were some fifty British yachts afloat in 1800 and as many as 503 in 1850” (184). Yachtsmen favored the Isle of Wight where the sailing interests of the Prince of Wales led to the relocation of his Royal Yacht Squadron from its former site on the Thames to the Solent. With shelter for docks and moorings available to the north and a manageable racing course achieved by following a route around the island, the situation of the Isle of Wight made a convenient, pleasant location that encouraged the nineteenth-century popularity of racing sailing. Cruising sailing, in contrast, flourished more gradually, generally in the Mediterranean and the Baltic, as well as nearer to home in the waters around Britain and Ireland and across the Channel in France.Footnote ⁶ But Grandcourt's choice of cruising over racing and his choice of cruising grounds in the Mediterranean boost his sense of superiority. Instead of competing with equals, cruising brings him into contact with foreigners whom he can regard as inferiors.

Originally, it was an American vessel that stimulated recreational sailing in Britain. In 1851, the same year that Eliot moved to London, the yacht America sailed in from New York and proceeded to outrace the British vessels around the Isle of Wight, winning the Royal Yacht Squadron trophy. This event prompted naval architects, notably William Camper of Gosport, to experiment successfully with schooner designs and materials like those of the America which gained its advantage through the use of hollow bows, heavily raked (aft-leaning) masts, and the use of cotton rather than flax sails (Dear 10).

British periodicals such as Bell's Life in London and the Illustrated London News contributed to the popularity of this recreation by reporting on yachting activities and providing much adventure-oriented material to the general public (Dear 9). When the Davilow sisters speculate on Gwendolen's time at sea the narrator points out that “this movement of Mr. and Mrs. Grandcourt had been mentioned in ‘the newspaper’” (708; bk. 8, ch. 58). Hunt's Yachting Magazine provided almost excessively detailed accounts both of cruises and of the racing of the many yacht clubs established during mid-century, often describing every puff or shift in wind during a given race.

Meanwhile, yachtsmen perceived themselves as engaging in their recreation at the same time they were supporting Britain's Navy. Of the Royal Yacht Squadron Tryckare comments: “The members were rich men owning large yachts, which were designed to resemble the brigs and schooners and cutters of the royal navy” (184). He continues, “the members considered, in fact, that one of their duties was to improve the design of sailing ships for the benefit of the royal navy” (184). Indeed, despite the gradual replacement of sail by the infinitely more maneuverable steam vessels in naval combat, yachting and naval projects continued to intersect.Footnote ⁷

The Crimean War solidified the relationship between naval vessels and sailing yachts. While Britain's rule of the sea since the defeat of the Spanish Armada had created merchant and naval designs that nineteenth-century Britons then turned to recreational purposes, during Crimea, British officers reversed the process by using their yachts, both sail and steam, as headquarters and transportation in the seas off Turkey and in the Baltic Sea. Lord Cardigan's Light Brigade disaster occurred during a period in which he was spending nights aboard his steam-powered yacht, the Dryad.Footnote ⁸ Lord Dufferin headquartered aboard his seventy-ton schooner, the Foam (Dear 14), from which he observed the action at the siege of Bomarsund. The history of the synergy between the yacht and the Navy implicates Grandcourt still further with the Empire by means of his recreation, as well as through the attitudes he shares with his colonizing compatriots.

“What Had She to Complain of”

As many interpretations emphasize, Eliot set Daniel Deronda only ten years before its time of publication, making it the most nearly contemporary setting in her fictional oeuvre. From 1865 (the novel's temporal setting) onward, the rich men Trekayre mentions favored two-masted schooners that reached a hundred or two hundred feet in length. Hence Grandcourt's yacht, though supposedly at sea during the sixties, shares similarities of plan, design, and materials with yachts launched at the time of writing, roughly 1872–75.

Indeed George Eliot's descriptions of Grandcourt's yacht support the conviction of Jay Picotte, curator of the Museum of Yachting at Newport, Rhode Island, who describes the Coronet (1885), currently undergoing restoration at the International Yacht Restoration School, as likely to include features similar to earlier yachts and thus comparable to Grandcourt's despite the twenty-year gap between the times the two yachts (one fictional) would have taken to the sea.

The design of Grandcourt's yacht, with its limitless luxury, both manifests his wealth and permits the interactions that occur as he and his wife cruise the Mediterranean. His yacht, like the Coronet, would have a typically level deck punctuated by low-profile pointed oblong skylights to let daylight in below decks. Small cannons occupied niches along the decks, reinforcing the similarity to Naval vessels. The level, ample decks provided extensive room for strolling (Grandcourt's occupation) and for the cushioned wicker chairs on which Gwendolen reclines. Such vessels also required enough deck space to accommodate the voluminous skirts of the women aboard. James Tissot's painting Boarding the Yacht pictures the fashion of 1873 (Eliot's time of writing), the bustled skirt, on the women ascending or descending the ladders, a costume which both encumbered the wearer and, aboard a yacht as elsewhere, required some spaceFootnote ⁹ (Figure 1). Even the spread of the crinolines of the previous decade, Gwendolen's garb, would not exceed the deck space on a hundred-foot yacht of the period.

Figure 1.

James Jacques Tissot, Boarding the Yacht. Oil on canvas, 1873. Private Collection.

Down below, the arrangement and decoration of the cabin space permitted the utmost luxury. Typically, as on the Coronet, the owner's cabins took up the space amidships where the broadest beam measurements allowed the greatest roominess. Bunks for officers occupied the tapering sterns beneath the aft deck on which the helmsman stood, while lowlier crew members slept in the bows. Such a vessel required a crew of about ten to twelve men, including both officers and seamen.

Eliot decorates the Grandcourt owner's cabin according to the most fashionable standards of the time. Ian Dear notes the reactions of one journalist to the interior of Charles Nicholson's 1866 Guinivere: “Her interior was described by one local journalist with all the bated breath of a cub reporter entering a superstar's boudoir: ‘There were to be no painted fittings below, and the result is a combination of cunning workmanship in choice woods rarely met with – even in “the English gentleman's floating hotels” as our yachts are frequently called – walnut and rosewood, mahogany and bird's eye maple, forming the structure of the cabins, saloons, etc’” (24). Eliot's narrator describes the Grandcourt cabin as “fitted up to perfection, smelling of cedar, soft-cushioned, hung with silk, expanded with mirrors” (670; bk. 7, ch. 54). It thus follows the design advice of Vanderdecken (pseudonym of William Cooper). Rather than mahogany, Cooper prefers lighter woods such as the cedar that perfumes Grandcourt's owner's cabin. Cooper also concludes that “Looking glasses make a cabin look double its real size, and two neat book cases may be constructed over the buffets with looking glass panels in the doors; if there are looking glass panels fitted over the sofas it will still further increase the delusion, and I do not know of any more elegant mode of fitting a saloon” (236). Eliot's installation of mirrors in the cabin of Grandcourt's yacht follows Cooper's book of advice on yachting, which appeared in 1873, indeed during the very period Eliot was composing Daniel Deronda.

Women and the Sea in George Eliot's Novels

Throughout her fiction, Eliot establishes links between women characters and boats, most often vessels in distress. In Adam Bede, the narrator accounts for the strangeness of Hetty's sudden turn to Adam after receiving the rejection letter from Arthur Donnithorne: “So are the motions of a little vessel without ballast tossed about on a stormy sea. How pretty it looked with its particoloured sail in the sunlight, moored in the quiet bay!” (286; bk. 4, ch. 31). Maggie Tulliver's most painful moments occur first in a rowing boat, then, again, when she forms her decision to part from Stephen aboard the Dutch trading vessel that picks them up along the Floss. Finally, of course, she drowns when the rowing boat in which she temporarily rescues Tom, overcome by the characteristic local tide the Eagre, sinks. In Romola, Eliot again moves from the metaphorical level at which she represents Hetty's pretty fragility to insert a sailing episode at plot level, for Romola saves herself from her despair over events in Florence by managing to embark from the beach in Viareggio alone aboard a small sailing boat. In Middlemarch, Eliot returns to the metaphorical level when Dorothea and Rosamond embrace each other as if shipwreck victims. Just before the climactic moment when Rosamond corrects Dorothea's conclusions regarding the relationship between Will and herself by identifying her as the object of Will's love, she begins to feel the surge of emotion that permits her revelation. After a preliminary kiss on Dorothea's forehead, “the two women clasped each other as if they had been in a shipwreck” (713; bk. 8, ch. 81). In Daniel Deronda, Eliot sustains this pattern, associating women and boats at both metaphorical and plot levels.

Metaphorically, the Deronda narrator asserts the historical importance of Gwendolen's motives and desires by placing them among those of other similar “girls and their blind visions” (124; bk. 2, ch. 11). Describing the “mighty drama” of political events such as the American Civil War, the narrator asserts of the apparently trivial young women: “In these delicate vessels is borne onward through the ages the treasure of human affections” (124; bk. 2, ch. 11). During the tête à tête with Gwendolen which prompts Grandcourt to announce his yachting plans, Deronda senses the real danger in Gwendolen's description of her vengeful feelings toward her husband: “Words seemed to have no more rescue in them than if he had been beholding a vessel in peril of wreck – the poor ship with its many-lived anguish beaten by the inescapable storm” (610; bk. 6, ch. 48). Once aboard, Grandcourt objectifies her by regarding her as a fitting or an ornament: “as if she were part of the complete yacht” (672; bk. 7, ch. 54). He uses the instrument of empire to confine Gwendolen more severely than ever. Meanwhile, Gwendolen's murderous impulses intensify. Rarely, indeed only for Romola, do boats occur in connection with women characters in a positive way.

In Deronda, George Eliot complicates the woman-as-stricken-vessel metaphor by applying nautical metaphors of power and strength to Grandcourt. Whereas his abandoned mistress Lydia Glasher disappears from society like “a lost vessel after whom nobody would send out an expedition of search,” Grandcourt “was seen in harbour with his colours flying, registered as seaworthy as ever” (340; bk. 4, ch. 30). At Topping Abbey, Mr. Vandernoodt adds a nautical allusion when he informs Daniel about the triangular relationship among Grandcourt, Gwendolen, and Mrs. Glasher: “It is a sort of Medea and Creüsa business” (432; bk. 5, ch. 36). Like Jason, Grandcourt sails heedlessly away from the mother of his children.

The Evening Sail

Of course the accident that results in Grandcourt's death occurs not on the luxury yacht itself but on the small boat Grandcourt hires to keep Gwendolen under his domination even while the luxury yacht is under repair, a motive reinforced by the couple's sudden meeting with Deronda on the steps of the Hotel d’Italia. Numerous uncertainties accompany Eliot's reports of the nautical maneuver that results in Grandcourt's death. The sailors and fishermen on the quay warn about the danger of changing the boat's direction when “putting about” (681; bk. 7, ch. 54), and Grandcourt concludes the chapter with the declaration, “I shall put about” (682; bk. 7, ch. 54). Descriptions of the effects of the change in direction of the boat come from two sources: Daniel's summary of the rescuing fishermen's conclusions and Gwendolen's broken confession. The “formal, legally recognized statement” (688; bk. 7, ch. 56) that Daniel secures from the fisherman concludes “it likely that he had been knocked overboard by the flapping of the sail when putting about” (688; bk 7, ch. 56). Gwendolen reports, “he was turning the sail – there was a gust – he was struck” (696; bk. 7, ch. 56). Both versions come from uncertain authorities. The fishermen have not seen the event itself; their observations begin only when they hear Gwendolen's shout and turn to see her jump into the sea after Grandcourt. Gwendolen brackets her words with disclaimers: “I don't know how it was . . . I know nothing” (696; bk. 7, ch. 56). If the change of direction Eliot describes as “putting about” refers to moving the boat's bow through the wind while sailing upwind, now most often called “coming about,” then both Gwendolen's gust of wind and the fishermen's flapping sail remain unlikely to have the effect of sending a man overboard. The upwind maneuver lies very much under the control of the helmsman, and only the most heedless of sailors would not prepare to duck his or her head so as not to be struck by the movement of the boom that holds the bottom of the sail as it moves from one side of the boat to the other. On the other hand, the alternative kind of direction change, a jibe, occurs on a much less stable point of sail: a run propelled by a following wind with the two sails let out as far as possible on opposite sides of the boat. A coming about requires a decisive thrust of the tiller downwind: hard alee. But just a light movement of a tiller or a slight change in wind direction can create a jibe, sometimes unintended, when a sailboat is running before the wind, and it carries the danger of the sail's sweeping overboard any thing or person in its way as it crashes across the deck to the other side of the boat.

The usual biographical sources reveal only limited experience on Eliot's part aboard sailing boats. On their frequent travels, she and George Henry Lewes generally voyaged on steam packets. Nevertheless, on at least one occasion, the Leweses’ 1857 journey to the Scilly Isles, they made the trip under sail on Scillonian Captain Frank Tregarthen's Ariadne. Previously, in 1856, in Tenby, Eliot and Lewes had boarded the schooner Coquette, owned by Ned Pigott's brother John, to have lunch, so, although they did not sail, she had the opportunity to observe its appointments (Figure 2). Like any nineteenth-century travelers in Europe, the Leweses acquired a certain amount of knowledge of how vessels respond to winds and currents while crossing the Channel, voyaging up and down the Rhine, or even just on the Thames, but in their case most often under steam power, rather than sail. Eliot's limited experience, together with the confused and sometimes conflicting accounts of the evening sail, combine to suggest that the drowning results from a jibe rather than the alternate possibility, a coming about. In addition, the instabilities accompanying any jibe would contribute to the multiple uncertainties with which Eliot surrounds Grandcourt's death.

Figure 2

“Sailing Match Round the Isle of Wight of ‘The Shadow’ Cutter and ‘Coquette’ Schooner.” Wood engraving, from Illustrated London News (23 May 1857): 488.

Meanwhile the catastrophic incident also results from Grandcourt's imperialist arrogance. As the couple prepares to board the small boat, Grandcourt savors the superiority of his position and nationality, especially in comparison to the Genoese on the docks. He “had a scornful satisfaction in the attention given by the nautical groups to the milord, owner of the handsome yacht which had just put in for repairs, and who being an Englishman was naturally so at home on the sea that he could manage a sail with the same ease that he could manage a horse” (680; bk. 7, ch. 54). He rejects the advice “concerning a possible change in the breeze” from the locally knowledgeable seamen: “Grandcourt's manner made the speakers understand that they were too officious, and that he knew better than they” (681; bk. 7, ch. 54). A good skipper knows not to discard local knowledge. Grandcourt's arrogance in doing so depends on his opinions concerning racial inferiority.

The chapter concludes with the Grandcourts still on the bay outside the port, and the narrative then jumps to the description of Deronda's reactions as he sees Gwendolen returning from her evening sail, drenched and terrified, accompanied by the fishermen who have rescued her. It does not narrate the accident itself. But meanwhile, on the boat, Gwendolen commits a small pre-mutinous offense. When her homicidal feelings frighten her most severely, she momentarily drops the tiller to say “God help me!” (681; bk. 7, ch. 54). Dropping the tiller against (or without) Grandcourt's orders constitutes a defiance, a small rebellion that precedes the later, more serious one.Footnote ¹⁰

In the following chapter, Gwendolen presents her narrative of the accident (the turn of the sail, the gust, and Grandcourt overboard) as she makes her broken confession to Deronda. Fragmented, full of dashes, it comes from a woman on the verge of disintegration. She, rather than the narrator, applies the term “galley slave” (695; bk. 7, ch. 56) to describe her feelings. As Grandcourt's “prisoner” (695; bk. 7, ch. 56), she takes his orders at the same time that her desire for his death intensifies. She mentions that the situation aboard the small boat reverses a childhood dream in which she has seen herself escaping from her repulsive stepfather aboard a sailboat: seeking and finding freedom rather than enslavement. Finally, she comes to the moment when Grandcourt calls from the water for her to throw him a rope. When she hesitates to do so, Grandcourt drowns. Meanwhile, dozens of paragraphs concerning her motives, her desires, her fears, her seesawing states of mind precede the single paragraph in which she describes the overboard itself.

Scholars have long debated Gwendolen's degree of guilt in Grandcourt's death and the degree of consciousness with which she helps cause it. Although she has yearned to kill Grandcourt almost from the day of their wedding, when the death comes, it results from a non-action that allows considerable uncertainty regarding guilt. Durable readings by Alexander Welsh and Gillian Beer, among others, typify scholars’ awareness of the difficulties arising from Eliot's treatment of Grandcourt's death solely in the confessional narrative of a distressed woman.

Despite entitling his chapter “Murdering Grandcourt,” Welsh emphasizes the impossibility of arriving at a definite verdict of deliberate murder. He acknowledges that the death “is at least partly accidental” (284) and that during Gwendolen's confession to Daniel she lays more emphasis on the desire for her husband's death than recounting the actual event (286). He finds complete ambiguity in the death “whether – at the crucial moment in the bay of Genoa – she successfully employed fear as a safeguard or effectively killed her husband by failing to throw the rope remains in doubt” (297). Welsh profitably distinguishes guilt in the sense of emotional suffering, the kind of guilt that concerns Gwendolen and Daniel, from a criminal verdict: “The whole line of suspense in the novel has more to do with psychological guilt than with the kind that would land the heroine in an Italian jail” (285). Gwendolen need fear no guilty verdict from anyone connected with formal judicial procedures because Italian authorities do not charge her with a crime.

Beer also emphasizes undecidability. She mentions Gwendolen's fantasy of sailing on and on “like the Flying Dutchman” (682) and concludes the paragraph with a series of unanswered questions: “after that everything becomes confusion. Could Grandcourt swim? We never know for certain. How long did she hold the rope? Did she take the rope with her when she leapt in after him?” (233). Important questions in determining Gwendolen's guilt, they remain unanswered in the narrative.

Nevertheless, Gwendolen's confession reveals that, at least briefly, she intends for her inaction to result in her husband's death. Her description of the exact moment of the drowning includes the statement that, after Grandcourt calls for the rope, “my heart said ‘Die!’” (Eliot's caps., 696; bk. 7, ch. 56). Moreover, she has preceded this desire at the crucial moment with her admission to Daniel that, on the quay, while boarding the boat, she “could have given up everything in that moment, to have the forked lightning for a weapon to strike him dead” (693; bk. 7, ch. 56). Her rebellious inaction results from an abundance of premeditation and an at least momentary clearly expressed desire for what she does or does not do to cause Grandcourt to die.Footnote ¹¹

Moreover, Daniel's conclusion that Gwendolen could not have murdered Grandcourt, even passively, comes from a man who is shrinking at the responsibility her confession lays upon him. Many readings have emphasized his reluctance; indeed he “dreaded” (689; bk. 7, ch. 56) hearing an admission of guilt from Gwendolen. Nor does the narrator attribute to him a certainty that she bears no real guilt: “It seemed almost certain that her murderous thought had had no outward effect – that, quite apart from it, the death was inevitable” (696; bk. 7, ch. 56; my emphasis). Shortly afterward, when he concludes further that her remorse indicates her “recoverable nature” (697; bk. 7, ch. 56), Deronda is out the door of the hotel room. Enabled by what seems almost certain, he can hardly wait to leave Gwendolen.

At any rate, a mutiny at sea such as I am attributing to Gwendolen, need not end in the murder of the captain. The most notorious mutiny victim in nautical history, Captain William Bligh, managed, after all, to return to England for the prosecution of Fletcher Christian and the other mutineers. Throughout their evening sail, though Gwendolen may hold either the tiller, the “ropes” (682; bk. 7, ch. 54), or both, Grandcourt remains in charge. She goes on “doing just what he told her” (681; bk. 7, ch. 54). However, Gwendolen's despairing abandonment of the equipment just before Grandcourt decides to turn the boat could have provided just that bit of instability that leads to an unexpected jibe.Footnote ¹² The narrator, in chapter 54, reports this lapse in her obedience to her skipper, and Gwendolen herself admits to it in chapter 56, both quoting the exact words (“God help me!”) that she utters inaudibly as she performs an unauthorized act. Gwendolen's rebellions in this novel avenge all the domination suffered by Eliot's previous women characters represented as helpless vessels.

Ruling the Waves II

The Grandcourts’ cruising route through the Mediterranean crosses the path of one of Eliot's few voyages on the Mediterranean: aboard the steam packet which carried the Leweses from Barcelona to Malaga in 1867. Hence it includes waters with which Eliot had some familiarity. When they landed in Malaga, Lewes celebrated their arrival in unfamiliar latitudes by picking off a stalk of sugar cane from the lush plethora of unfamiliar species he sees there (George Henry Lewes Journals, 11 February 1867).Footnote ¹³ During the Grandcourts’ cruise the husband breaks his silence to point out to Gwendolen a stand of sugar cane onshore, and she gathers herself to respond: “remembering that she must try and interest herself in sugar canes as something outside her personal affairs” (671–2; bk. 7, ch. 54). The reference to the sugar cane probably makes one of the coded communications with which Eliot sprinkles her novels.Footnote ¹⁴

On this phase of the cruise the yacht follows the wind's directions. Grandcourt chooses to take advantage of the fairest winds as they move around the Mediterranean: from the Balearic Islands, to Sardinia, to Corsica. While the yacht maintains a course that conforms to nature's inclinations, two things occur that reduce the probability of Grandcourt's murder. For one, Gwendolen becomes interested in the ways the schooner responds to the Mediterranean winds: “to observe the rigging of the vessel and forecast the necessary adjustments was a sort of amusement” (670; bk. 7, ch. 54). As she enjoys her forecasting she loses a little of the dangerous powerlessness that intensifies her murderous impulses. At one point during the period at sea, under this slight gain of will and recalling what Deronda has advised (to raise an interest in something outside the personal), she takes the step of throwing overboard the key to the box holding the dagger she yearns to plunge into Grandcourt's body. But when the yacht reaches Genoa, and Grandcourt reasserts his rule over the waves both as the province of the British and as nature subordinate to human will, he places himself in greatest danger. Defying nature by underestimating the wind shift leading to the (probable) jibe, he soon becomes the wind's victim as well as Gwendolen’s.