Mr. Penrose: The Journal of Penrose, Seaman by the colonial painter William Williams (1727-1791) is a provocative, semi-autobiographical tale of a renegade British seafarer who makes a home for himself among Central American Indians after being cast adrift on the Mosquito Coast. It is a narrative replete with descriptive details of geography, flora, and fauna, rife with anthropological interest, bristling with physical adventure, and enriched by the narrator's reflections on issues of equality, intellectual and religious freedom, and the autonomy of the individual. Though seldom recognized as such, it is also the first extant novel (in fact, a fictionalized travel narrative) written in what would become the United States.
The publication and reception of this "first American novel" was complicated and, in many ways, compromised by its generic affiliations with the wide-ranging corpus of literature based on real and imagined journeys that burgeoned during the eighteenth century. Indeed it is largely due to its troubled publication history that Mr. Penrose is not widely recognized today. For Mr. Penrose was rejected by the publishers to whom it was initially submitted, sensitized as they were to the vogue for "true" travel journals, on the basis of questionable authenticity. And, when this very genuine, yet stubbornly unauthenticable, text was finally published (many years after the author's death) it was issued in a greatly revised version tailored to the expectations of a Victorian readership brought up on the "master narrative" of travel-adventure tales, Robinson Crusoe. In fact, it was not until 1969 that Mr. Penrose was published in its original form, and then only in a short-lived University Press edition. This paper belatedly introduces the audience to this fascinating and nearly-forgotten text, arguing that it can (and should) be read not only as a hybrid travel narrative and imaginative novel, but also as an early American political text charged with incisive criticism of European imperialism, authoritarian religion, and racial oppression.
In Mr. Penrose, the protagonist, Lewellin Penrose, comes to recognize the corruption of the European world from which he has been forced into exile, establishes over the course of many years an alternative polis comprising a small band of Central American Indians and a few renegade Europeans, and refuses all opportunities to return to the "civilized" world. As leader of this alternative colony, Penrose is poised precariously between two threats to the self-determination of the community. On the one hand, British and Spanish imperialisms pose threats in the form of Catholic missionaries, pirates and privateers, and slavery. On the other hand, anarchy becomes a possibility following the appearance of various Europeans who challenge Penrose's self-proclaimed authority. This paper investigates how Penrose achieves a kind of equilibrium between the conflicting tensions of empire and anarchy by taking on the role of benevolent patriarch of his adopted community of Rama Indians and European outcasts, thus effecting a balance between individual self-determination and political control which is itself tenuous and ultimately problematic.
Note: This presentation will be supplemented by slides showing key paintings by William Williams that bear on my discussion of Mr. Penrose: The Journal of Penrose, Seaman.
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