When Marryat was about to start for the United States he gave a reason of some gravity for his proposed trip. The last words of the “Diary on the Continent” propound a serious question: “Do the faults of this people (to wit, the Swiss) arise from the peculiarity of their constitutions, or from the nature of their government? To ascertain this, one must compare them with those who live under similar institutions. I must go to America—that’s decided.” A biographer of any virtue will desire to be inspired with the Boswellian spirit—to write as loyally as Macaulay did of Addison—but I cannot quite believe that Marryat’s visit to America was caused by a sudden passion for the study of comparative politics, and the influence of institutions on national character. A more plausible explanation could be found. It was excellently given by the elder Mr. Weller in the course of some remarks made for the benefit of Mr. Pickwick. To write a book about America was a favourite enterprise with literary persons in those years. Miss Martineau and Mrs. Trollope had just done it, and there was no reason why Marryat should not do it also. A taste for seeing the world may have helped to turn his activity in that direction, and, besides he was, as will be seen, on the lookout for promising speculations, and may have had some thoughts on copyright. Possibly none of these motives were very clear to himself, and he may really have thought he was going to study American institutions.

Moved by sufficient motives, whether the alleged or the unconsciously felt, he did go to America by the packet Quebec in 1837, did stay there for two years, and write a book about the States in six volumes, and two series. Of this book it may be said, in a favourite phrase of the writer whom Marryat described as “Mr. Carlisle, the author of ‘Sartor Resartus’” (a slip which was dreadfully avenged), that “it is forgetable.” Marryat’s diary and remarks show that he would have made an excellent newspaper correspondent. He had a faculty for getting up information, a quick eye, and a ready pen. With these qualities a man can easily make “copy” out of a visit to a new country. Indeed, Marryat was no novice at the work, for which his “Diary on the Continent” had prepared him. When his six volumes on America are judged as what they were, they are on the whole creditable. He made the Americans very angry, but that it was never difficult to do. He had provocation to write more bitterly than he did. But whatever may be the merits of, or the excuses for, the thing, it is hardly worth while to return to “newspaper correspondence” at the end of half a century. Unless the correspondent has seen history in the making, and has noted it well so as to become an original authority, he can hardly hope to be read two generations or so later on. The worst of it, too, is that Marryat saw something which was well worth recording, and did not record it properly. A large part of his book is taken up with contradicting Miss Martineau; and who can rejoice in the refutation of an almost forgotten book by a still more forgotten book?

The incidents of the visit form an interesting passage in Marryat’s life. He reached New York in the midst of the great financial smash of 1837, and saw the “Empire City” in all the excitement of panic. He stayed in America till after the suppression of the Canadian rising, and himself took part in the fighting. Of course he had a newspaper controversy—and it was of a kind sufficiently honourable to himself. When he first landed Marryat seems to have been well received, though with a certain reserve. By reserve is not to be understood anything so absurd as that he was left alone. On the contrary, he was abundantly overwhelmed with inquiry and comment. But the Americans were then in the midst of one of the sorest of their sore fits with foreign comment, and were (not quite unjustifiably) on their guard against travellers who came to spy out the land, and make a book about it. They were not averse to comment, but they were anxious that it should not only be favourable, but of exactly that kind of favourableness of which they approved. Therefore they were intent to know whether Marryat meant to write about them, and, if so, what he meant to say. He extricated himself from the difficulty dexterously enough, and, on the whole, succeeded in keeping on friendly terms with his hosts. As a matter of course, American copyright institutions, and their effect on the national character of the publisher, had their share of his attentions. In this respect, also, his experiences were pleasing enough in America. He was working in the intervals of observation. For American consumption he wrote a play, “The Ocean Waif; or, The Channel Outlaw,” which appeared at a New York theatre; and he was moreover engaged on “The Phantom Ship.” In 1838 he made an arrangement with Messrs. Carey and Hart to sell them “proof sheets of his ‘Diary in America’ and ‘Phantom Ship,’ a month prior to their publication in London, for the sum of two thousand two hundred and fifty dollars; and provided no one else published the works in America within thirty days from the date they issued from their press, a further sum of two hundred and fifty dollars.” Whether pirate enterprise deprived him of the extra sum needed to make up the round two thousand five hundred, does not appear, but at least Marryat, with his usual turn for business, contrived to get something out of America for the amusement he had given it.

A letter to his mother, pleasant and manly as all his letters to her were, gives a sufficient picture of the first part of his stay in America.

From this letter it may be gathered that in October, 1837, Marryat was, in good humour with America, and was seriously thinking of a study of it which should be a possession for ever. America was, on the whole, well pleased with him. He had been civilly received, with a certain reserve as might have been expected, seeing that he was a writing man, who had come with the hardly disguised intention of writing, and after many who had written by no means acceptably; but still, in spite of this natural wariness, with kindness. He was a good talker and showed it. He had kinsmen in the States who helped him on. Altogether things had gone smoothly with him. The Americans had even been glad to acknowledge his connection with Boston, and some of them had given him a helping hand in that great copyright fight in which the sympathy of the more right-minded has never been denied to the English author, but has also never been of any effect Unfortunately this very trip to Canada led to a storm which put Marryat for a time into the position of best-abused man on the continent.

At Toronto he was naturally asked to a public dinner, and also naturally requested to speak. In the course of his speech he, again very naturally, took occasion to mention, in a laudatory manner, the cutting out of the Caroline, by Lieutenant Drew. This feat had then made some noise in the world. Canada was in a disturbed condition, and the confusion had been fomented by filibustering from the United States territory. The Caroline had been fitted out to help the rebels, and had been “cut out” in gallant style from under the guns of Fort Schlosser on the American side of the river, after sharp fighting by a Lieutenant Drew and a body of Canadian volunteers. After capturing the vessel and removing her crew, the Canadians had sent her down over the falls of Niagara. The incident was one of which the loyalists were with good reason proud. As an Englishman, as a naval officer, and as a speaker at a public dinner, Marryat was triply justified in praising “Captain Drew (as he styled him), and his brave comrades who cut out the Caroline.” Nothing ought to have been a more complete matter of course than that he should propose their health. But Americans were then in a particularly thin-skinned state, even for them. They chose to be very angry with him for doing what any American officer would have done under similar circumstances, at least as loudly. What may be called the spirit of Hannibal Chollop awoke within them, and a chorus of denunciation was begun at once, in the most loud-mouthed and abusive style of American journalism. Paragraphs headed “More Insolence,” and so forth, appeared in abundance. Marryat’s books and his effigy were publicly burnt. When he returned from Canada to the States, deputations waited on him, much in the frame of mind of the enlightened citizens who were so indignant when Martin Chuzzlewit offended a free people by coming back from Eden. As a matter of course, any stick was good enough to serve the turn of American journalism. He was accused, among other things, of having “insulted and contradicted, and refused to drink wine” with Henry Clay. The story was, it is needless to say, only a piece of Yankee smartness, but Marryat drought it necessary to appeal to that distinguished politician for a certificate of character, and obtained from him an assurance that their meeting had afforded mutual satisfaction. In short, the whole business was one of those displays of noisy gregarious folly of which our American cousins are occasionally guilty. It was rather more absurd than a recent incident of the same sort, because Marryat was merely a traveller, and was speaking on British territory when he gave the toast which Yankee journalism chose to think offensive. But the old colonial hatred of England (not yet perhaps so entirely dead as after-dinner orators are accustomed to assert) was then full of vigorous life. Americans were wavering between reluctance to plunge into war, and desire to do the old country a damage by helping the rebellious French Canadians. In this divided state of mind they relieved their feelings by howling at Marryat, because he had not “cracked them up accordingly.”

Marryat extricated himself from this pass with commendable nerve and dexterity. He faced and soft-sawdered the deputations. He took the burning of his books very coolly, went about as before, and finally had it out with his hosts at a dinner given him at Cincinnati. The speech, which is far too long to quote, is full of the manly good sense which the American, when not acting in the characters of raving journalist or anxious candidate, will commonly listen to. Marryat reminded his hearers that he had spoken in British territory to his countrymen, and that their own patriotic orators were not averse to waving the banner habitually, or restrained from doing so by the knowledge that an Englishman was present. His hosts being simply American gentlemen, sitting in their right senses, agreed with him. A somewhat dramatic finish was given to this stage of the incident by Captain J. Pierce, who had been captain of the American privateer Ida when she was taken by the Newcastle, of which Marryat was then second lieutenant. Captain Pierce got on his legs to thank Marryat for the courtesy and good nature he had shown to himself and other prisoners. “The Wizard of the Sea,” as the American newspapers loved to call him when they were not in a flaming rage, might consider that, as far as his hosts at Cincinnati could answer for it, he was cleared of the charge of insulting the great American people. Their opinion, like that of the “respectable American,” in so many other matters, did not avail to stop all annoyance. Marryat continued to be pestered by abuse, frequently conveyed in unpaid letters. At last, and somewhat weakly, in October of 1838, he published a general protest in the form of a letter to the editors of the Louisville Journal, wherein he denied with much detail that he intended to spy out the barrenness of the land. He was, of course, answered as offensively as might be.

Marryat had perhaps begun by this time to discover that it was not so easy to write of America in a philosophic spirit as he had once thought. To be sure he had laid himself open to annoyance by going to the States at all, and still more by going there with the intention of writing a book.

The Canadian troubles were destined to break into his tour again. In the autumn of 1838 the French population rose in open rebellion, and, as is commonly the fate of insurgents, gained some preliminary successes, which made their final punishment all the more severe. Marryat remembering that he was an English naval officer still on the active list, gave up philosophic inquiry, hurried back to Canada, and volunteered for service under Sir John Colborne. This officer, a veteran of the Great War, and one who had had a distinguished share in winning the battle of Waterloo, made short work of the rising. Marryat saw some fighting once more in his life, and described it briefly in another of his capital letters to his mother.

A postscript gives directions to B—— B——, who appears to have decided to come out and settle on the desirable piece of land which Marryat had purchased in Canada.

The American tour was near its end. Marryat never made that examination of the South which he had very justly thought necessary, if he was to obtain a thorough knowledge of the States. When he returned to New York in January, 1839, the country was in no condition to attract English travellers. The already existing hostility to England had been excited to a storm, and there was copious talk of the tallest kind about war going on from end to end of the Union. Everybody was waiting for the President’s message and professing to expect the outbreak of hostilities. Marryat waited to see what would come of it all. The prospect of serious war had for a moment swept all thought of books out of his mind. He waited for a summons to join Sir F. Head if his services were further needed in Canada; but while there was a prospect that he might again have “a man-of-war on the ocean,” he was in no hurry to run the risk of being shut up in Canada, where the best he could hope for would be a lake command. In a letter from New York to his mother he expresses very explicitly his wishes to serve again, and his hopes of further employment on blue water, and even ends up with one of those growls at the business of book-writing not uncommon among writing men when they happen to be languid, or to have heard bad news. “Mr. Howard” (his former sub-editor no doubt, and the author of “Rattlin the Reefer”) “writes me in very bad spirits. He says that I am injured by remaining away from England, and my popularity is on the wane. I laugh at that; it is very possible people will be ill-natured while I am not able to defend myself; but what I have done they cannot take from me, and if I wrote no more, I have written quite enough. If I were not rather in want of money I certainly would not write any more, for I am rather tired of it. I should like to disengage myself from the fraternity of authors, and be known in future only in my profession as a good officer and seaman.”

There is about this a ring of manly good sense. Marryat could well afford to laugh at Mr. Howard’s croaking, knowing as he did, with his robust self-confidence, that his popularity was in no danger; that he had it in him to make another popularity if the old was indeed waning. It may well be that his wish to be back in active service was wise. His life might have been longer, and happier, if he had again walked his own quarter-deck. The wish was certainly no vague one, floating idly in his mind. He made plans in Canada, drew maps, and sent home information to the Admiralty in the manifest hope that his exertions would serve him at headquarters. If war had broken out with the United States it is certain that Marryat, recommended as he was not only by his past services, but by his knowledge of the American coast, would have stood well for employment. But the storm blew over; the British Empire settled down into peace again, and Marryat remained on shore, driving away with his pen under the pressure of that tyranny which he describes as the state of being “rather in want of money.” He left the States early in 1839, and by June of that year was settled in quarters of his own in 8, Duke Street, St. James’s.