Robert retired hurt—by the stage, by Forster, by the low conduct of venal and inadequate actors, by a general disgust—though his disappointment did not stop him associating with the many new friends he had made, frequenting the backstage green room when he attended the theatre, dining with Macready and Forster and Talfourd and the rest, all of whom welcomed his good company. He retired for extended periods to Camberwell where, in his room, succoured by his immediate family and surrounded by his familiar and fetish objects, pictures, and books, an idea for another historical play occurred to him. But mostly he set himself back to work on his interrupted poem, Sordello, which he intended to finish during a visit to Italy.
Prompted perhaps by his theatrical disappointments (it is good form to remove oneself abroad temporarily after an embarrassing dramatic disaster), and probably also to add colour not only to his own life but to his poetic work in progress, he embarked on his adventure in the afternoon of Good Friday, 13 April 1838. He sailed from London’s St Katharine’s Docks as the only passenger on the Norham Castle, a merchant vessel bound for Trieste on Rothschild business. It may be supposed that passage had been arranged for Robert by Reuben Browning.
The journey to Trieste, where he was dropped off by the ship’s Captain, Matthew Davidson, took seven weeks. It was as terrible in its episodes of almost Byronic high drama as in constantly wretched periods of dispiritingly low seasickness. It took a full week of gales and snow before they even reached Start Point, Devon. On 26 April, they were off Lisbon; the next day they were sixteen miles north-west of Cape St Vincent. They passed the Straits of Gibraltar on Sunday 29 April, and on 6 May they came upon an upturned boat off the coast of Algiers. On 13 May, they were seven miles from Valetta; the next day they sailed close to Syracuse and were briefly becalmed on 16 May within sight of Mount Etna. It took another fortnight before they reached Trieste. The next evening, 31 May, Robert left by steamer for Venice, where he arrived early on the morning of 1 June.74
A letter to Fanny Haworth in Elstree is normally quoted in full in any account of Browning’s life. It is worth repeating as a rare early example of Robert’s narrative prose. It is dated 24 July 1838, by which time he was back in Camberwell. The introductory passage has been partly quoted already—‘I have, you are to know, such a love for flowers and leaves … bite them to bits … snowdrops and Tilsit …’; it is a charming, literally flowery, preface to saying:
You will see Sordello in a trice, if the fagging-fit holds. I did not write six lines while absent (except a scene in a play, jotted down as we sailed thro’ the Straits of Gibraltar)—but I did hammer out some four, two of which are addressed to you, two to the Queen … the whole to go in Book 3—perhaps. I called you ‘Eyebright’—meaning a simple and sad sort of translation of ‘Euphrasia’ into my own language: folks would know who Euphrasia, or Fanny, was,—and I should not know Ianthe or Clemanthe. Not that there is anything in them to care for, good or bad. Shall I say ‘Eyebright’? I was disappointed in one thing, Canova. What companions should I have? The story of the ship must have reached you ‘with a difference’ as Ophelia says,—my sister told it to a Mr Dow who delivered it, I suppose to Forster, who furnished Macready with it, who made it over etc. etc. etc.—As short as I can tell, this way it happened: the Captain woke me one bright Sunday morning to say there was a ship floating keel uppermost half a mile off; they lowered a boat, made ropes fast to some floating canvas, and towed her towards our vessel. Both met half-way, and the little air that had risen an hour or two before, sank at once. Our men made the wreck fast, and went to breakfast in high glee at the notion of having ‘new trousers out of the sails,’ and quite sure that she was a French boat, broken from her moorings at Algiers, close by. Ropes were next hove (hang this sea-talk) round her stanchions, and after a quarter of an hour’s pushing at the capstan, the vessel righted suddenly, one dead body floating out; five more were in the forecastle, and had probably been there a month—under a blazing African sun … don’t imagine the wretched state of things. They were, these six, the ‘watch below’—(I give you the results of the day’s observation)—the rest, some eight or ten, had been washed overboard at first. One or two were Algerines, the rest Spaniards. The vessel was a smuggler bound for Gibraltar; there were two stupidly-disproportionate guns, taking up the whole deck, which was convex and [here Browning inserts three small drawings of the ship, noting (‘All the “bulwarks,” or sides at the top, carried away by the waves’)]—nay, look you, these are the gun rings, and the black square the place where the bodies lay. Well, the sailors covered up the hatchway, broke up the aft deck, hauled up tobacco and cigars, good lord such heaps of them, and then bale after bale of prints and chintz, don’t you call it, till the Captain was half frightened—he would get at the ship’s papers, he said; so these poor fellows were pulled up, piecemeal, and pitched into the sea, the very sailors calling to each other ‘to cover the faces’: no papers of importance were found, however, but fifteen swords, powder and ball enough for a dozen such boats, and bundles of cotton &c that would have taken a day to get out, but the Captain vowed that after five-o’clock she should be cut adrift; accordingly she was cast loose, not a third of her cargo having been touched; and you can hardly conceive the strange sight when the battered hulk turned around, actually, and looked at us, and then reeled off, like a mutilated creature from some scoundrel French surgeon’s lecture-table, into the most gorgeous and lavish sunset in the world: there—only thank me for not taking you at your word and giving you the whole ‘story.’
The image of the loosed boat as a ‘mutilated creature’ turning to look at Robert Browning and his shipmates before reeling off into a luridly effulgent sunset is stunning—worthy of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, published in 1818, or any of the tuppence-coloured gothic horrors in Wanley’s Wonders of the Little World. Mrs Orr provides some supplementary detail, which Robert confided to Sarianna but withheld from Fanny as too sensational:75 ‘Of the dead pirates, one had his hand clasped as if praying; another, a severe gash in his head. The captain burnt disinfectants and blew gunpowder, before venturing on board, but even then, he, a powerful man, turned very sick with the smell and the sight. They stayed one whole day by the side, but the sailors, in spite of orders, began to plunder the cigars, etc. The captain said privately to Robert, “I cannot restrain my men, and they will bring the plague into our ship, so I mean quietly in the night to sail away.” Robert took two cutlasses and a dagger; they were of the coarsest workmanship, intended for use. At the end of one of the sheaths was a heavy bullet, so that it could be used as a sling. The day after, to their great relief, a heavy rain fell and cleansed the ship. Captain Davidson reported the sight of the wreck and its condition as soon as he arrived at Trieste.’
Robert’s letter to Fanny continues with a brisk itinerary: ‘“What I did?” I went to Trieste, then Venice—then thro’ Treviso and Bassano to the mountains, delicious Asolo, all my places and castles, you will see.’ Presumably Robert means that Fanny will see them if not first in poetical form in Sordello, then certainly in other poems in due course—Pippa would soon and significantly pass, in April 1841, through delicious Asolo. ‘Then to Vicenza, Padua and Venice again. Then to Verona, Trent, Inspruck (the Tyrol) Munich, “Wurzburg in Franconia”! Frankfort and Mayence,—down the Rhine to Cologne, thence to Aix-la-Chapelle, Liège, and Antwerp—then home.’ Robert here carefully blots out four lines, asking Fanny Haworth to ‘Forgive this blurring, and believe it was only a foolish quotation:—shall you come to town, anywhere near town, soon? I shall be off again as soon as my book is out—whenever that will be.’76
It may or may not have been true that Robert had written only four for sure, no more than six, lines of poetry: while the Norham Castle passed through the Pillars of Hercules (Robert being