The Nelson Man o'Bar
Winkleman Gallery
Summer 2011
The Nelson
Man o’Bar
The delirium of maritime things slowly takes
hold of me
The wharf and its atmosphere physically
penetrate me
—Álvaro de Campos
“Mumbai,
Torrent, Mumbai,” I reminded a slumped form sinking further into a divan’s
cushions. “It hasn’t been called Bombay
for 16 years.” “The Indians may call it
what they please, Mr. Shaw, so long as they don’t begin speaking of Mumbai
Sapphire martinis or rename the city once again during your flight. There must be no missed connections: I want
you and Mr. Blachly personally to accompany the Man o’Bar back to New
York. Or do you insist on calling it New
Amsterdam?” A flight to India;
negotiations with museum officials who would certainly curse the Chadwicks’
role in their country’s history; packing of a ten-and-a-half-foot model; and
then, if we were lucky, a two-month sea voyage on a container vessel around the
Cape of Good Hope! This was several
orders of magnitude more arduous than any errand we’d yet run for the
family. And yet I heard Blachly agreeing
without a pause. My neck spun nearly one
hundred and eighty degrees to glare at him: it was all fine if, on his own
time, he devoured Patrick O’Brian novels, lingered for unseemly periods in
regional maritime museums, and scrawled misinformed nautical terminology into
his notebook, calling it “sea poetry.”
Committing me to this kind of undertaking was entirely different.
Back at the studio I hit Blachly with a gale-force berating. There was, to begin with, the abject
financial nature of the Chadwicks’ proposition: under-budgeted travel expenses
alone (perhaps half of what we’d actually have to spend), with no compensation
for our time. Then there was the time
itself: what on earth led Blachly to believe that I had two free months to give
to an object I had never even seen, and about whose place in the family collections
I had, frankly, serious doubts? Finally
there were the manifold difficulties of the trip—negotiations, hardships,
inevitable contingencies. Under normal
circumstances—with a supportive client—I might even be okay with these. But things were different with the
Chadwicks. Both of us knew that if we didn’t
achieve precisely what they expected, the Chadwicks would hold us personally
responsible—and perhaps dock our expenses.
How would it feel to call them from Mumbai explaining that the Man o’Bar
had actually been de-accessioned from the museum, broken into tiny shards to
feed a funeral pyre, or that the curators wanted twenty three times more money than
we’d established? How much support would
we get then?
I was warming to the topic.
And yet, it was as if the promise of the exotic nautical trip had
rendered Blachly oblivious, thickening his oily skin into an impermeable
membrane. There was something cretinous,
to be sure, in the smile I couldn’t erase from his visage, but—I realized as I
lobbed my string of objections and, later, insults—something contagious as
well. And so in time I succumbed to the
germ of a nautical voyage. Why not? I was on a year off from teaching. Perhaps I needed to stray beyond my comfort
zone?
Mumbai had been frictionless.
The curators were eager, in fact, to unload what they thought of as a
lower-end relic of the colonial period.
And so the trip had all seemed smooth enough—even glamorous—until one
night in the middle of the Arabian Sea when the mosquito-like buzz of
motorboats signaled the approach of the Somali pirates.
I could make them out maybe three hundred yards away, and closing
quickly. Our crew on the Yaadon hadn’t
seemed like the type for a gun battle.
Which meant that, in the likely event of a ransom scenario, we’d be at
the mercy of the Indian government, or, worse, the Chadwicks—who had neither
the money nor the patience to be of much use.
Blachly was snoring loudly. I
gathered the essentials: water, beef jerky, rope, knife, flare—and rousted him. Though ashen and somewhat wide-eyed, he
seemed surprisingly accepting of this turn of fate. Had he been abducted by pirates before? There was no time to inquire.
We had arranged for the Man o’Bar’s shipping
crate to remain accessible during the voyage, placed at ground level at the
bow, so that, during the long days at sea, we could open the front end of the
container, pull the boat out on the weather deck, and begin the restoration
process. This had cost some money in
port, but was easily enough achieved.
Now we made our way up the starboard side of the wall of stacked
containers, invisible to the pirates, approaching from port, and wedged
ourselves inside ours. The struggle
didn’t last long. A few rocket propelled
grenades, some rounds from a Russian-made machine gun—and the pirates were in
charge. Several times they rounded the
bow—sizing up the loot, securing the boat’s perimeter. But there didn’t seem to be a concerted
search for us. Had the others lied about
our existence? Had they imagined that we
might rescue them? Two pirates sat guard
on the bow—conversation filtering into our metal cell thirty yards away, where,
baking, we tried our best to remain silent.
But on the second night they made their way back to the navigation
bridge—happy enough with its view, higher and covering most of the ship. Except those containers, like ours, that
opened onto the weather deck. And so,
about three o’clock in the morning, we quietly opened the doors, hauled the Man
o’Bar out, and plunged over the Yaadon’s railings.
The hull rushed by us. Now
we were to keep our heads under our vessel, which we hoped would either escape
notice or appear merely as a piece of random flotsam. We heard no raised
voices, no shots, saw no flares. From
the corner of the Man o’Bar we could now see the cargo ship’s stern, receding
into the distance. Apparently we were
free—though also floating alone in the middle of the Arabian Sea.
Which brings us to our precarious life raft, the Man o’Bar, whose
proper introduction has thus far been rendered impossible by the rush of
events. Clinging to it day and night in
the open ocean, however, brought us more than enough time to appreciate this
singular curio. Especially since I had
stopped speaking to Blachly, except to issue brief commands. My thoughts in his direction, upon our plunge
into the water, had been reduced to a single question: could I bring myself to
eat him? I saw no ethical objections—the
problem was entirely aesthetic, or, gastronomic. But so far the beef jerky was holding out,
and thus we floated in relative peace.
Life raft—that was a new resume line for the Man o’Bar, which
already had a surprisingly long one: sea cinema, study center, casket-like
proscenium theater, theme pub—the Nelson Man o’Bar has been tugged from the
beginning between the scholarly and the spectacular, the precise and the
preposterous. The mysterious object was
constructed initially as a scale model for Lord Nelson’s customized HMS Victory,
the boat the admiral commanded in his decisive sea campaign against Napoleon,
and on which he was killed by a French sharpshooter during the Battle of
Trafalgar in 1805. As the English
nation mourned the loss of this newly deified sea savior, and churned out all
manner of memorials to his life and labors, the Chadwicks quietly purchased the
model itself. It is described in the
family papers as a “machine for private grief.”
Most writers have glossed this ambiguous phrase as a shrine. But our dive into this region of the archive,
before the fateful Mumbai jaunt, suggested rather different uses: apparently
the Chadwicks found the passive contemplation of the boat as funeral monument
too remote and discovered that, by removing sections of the exterior planking,
it was possible, through some exertion, to wedge a human body fully inside the
hull. Chadwick Dalton was the first to
attempt this nautical model spelunking.
Inside, Dalton would re-enact the known portions of Nelson’s famous
death speech—which had in life lasted three hours, much of the duration of the
Battle of Trafalgar. Perhaps impatient
with these monologues, and certainly less interested in scholarly
reconstructions (or, as he called them, “historical reinaccuracies”), Torrent
Chadwick then began, on Dalton’s absences from the manor, to use the model as a
kind of nautical pub—and it was he who introduced the term Man o’Bar. At once prop for historical mourning, and
nautically-themed bar, the model navigated this cross-current of conflicting
uses at Chadwick Manor until sometime in the 1940s.
Then, as the family’s debts mounted, the Man
o’Bar was sold, first to the Maritime Museum in Greenwich, which, unannounced to
the family, sent it off (possibly for authentication) to a maritime specialist
at the Victoria and Albert Museum—in Bombay.
There it was displayed for some years until that institution, too,
decided to dock the vessel in mothballs.
By the third day I could barely see. The glare had worked its way back inside my
head. At points Blachly appeared to me
as a slightly undercooked porpoise on a spit—though this may have been an
optical illusion caused by him clinging to one of the masts that had, by now,
fractured off the boat. As yet he wasn’t
even a vaguely tempting meal. Our first hours
in the water had been the most difficult.
When we tried to install the sails we discovered that they’d been
largely devoured by insects. It had been
Blachly who’d recommended keeping them furled until we reached the studio. Though I still held him responsible for our
predicament, the very hardship seemed, after three days, to bring us together
somewhat. At regular intervals he doggy
paddled a few strokes to retrieve rigging fragments or parts of the model that
were by now regularly breaking off.
These he then wedged as best he could into openings in the Man
o’Bar. Since neither of us had much
strength left, I interpreted this shepherding of the model as a gesture of
reconciliation. More, the boat listed
strongly to port in the open water. And
it was only with one of us kicking from behind and holding the Man o’Bar
straight that the other could find respite on the deck. But since my ankle was still swollen from a
break six months earlier, I pleaded for a smaller share of the paddling. Blachly accepted. And so it was that I was “on deck” when,
mid-afternoon on the fourth day, a vessel came into view. I waited a few seconds to make sure the
appearance wasn’t another optical trick—got Blachly’s confirmation—and then fired
the flare.
“Non ho mai visto una cosa così!
Giys thes ahhhhh … boat … esn’t deesined for d’open seas.”
It was an Italian freezer trawler that, tempted by the richer
waters of the Arabian Sea, had made its way through the Suez Canal to fish from
the Gulf of Aden up to the Gulf of Oman.
Luckily it was now on its return voyage.
Amused to no end, the fishermen hoisted the Man o’Bar onto the deck and
got down to studying it—and us. We were
apparently the most exciting catch they’d made on the entire trip. Eruptions of laughter and idiomatic phrases
in a Neapolitan accent I couldn’t understand punctuated their examination. I tried to explain the circumstances of our
winding up floating on the boat. But
nothing I could say in my poor Italian could disabuse them of the idea that we
had set out in this vessel. Still, their
ridicule was a small price to pay for our deliverance.
Safely below deck with a full stomach and a glass of grappa,
Blachly confessed a story that shed new light on what had seemed to me the
extraordinary endurance he had demonstrated during our four days at sea. It concerned an event that, until then, he
had been too embarrassed to narrate to me.
But now our new ordeals apparently put this previous event into
perspective. Our conversations about
going to Mumbai had occurred, in fact, several months after we had first
learned of the Chadwicks’ interest in putting together a blockbuster nautical
retrospective. At the first discussion
of the show, Blachly’s response, unknown to me, had been rather different from
his later blithe acceptance. “I was
terrified,” he confessed. I paused to
clarify: “Wait, a two-month trip aboard a cargo vessel was fine, but the
prospect of co-curating a nautical exhibition sent you into a crisis?” “All I knew of ships was from Patrick
O’Brian, and actually I didn’t really understand a lot of the vocabulary in the
novels.” Lacking a solid nautical
education, Blachly had worried that his new task would expose his ignorance—or,
worse, cause him to make irremediable errors during restoration. And so Blachly, then nearly 50, had resolved
to confront this problem by going to sea, or at least going near to sea: the
next week he had volunteered for an internship on a schooner called the Pioneer which, owned by South Street Seaport,
made tourist voyages out into New York Harbor, and occasionally beyond. I had known all about his internship; it was
Blachly’s style to take on, with each project for the family, a version of the
Chadwicks’ life within his narrow means.
This helped him comprehend his work.
But here the discrepancy had seemed simply abject. Still, I had overcome this feeling and even
accompanied him out on the schooner one day, documenting the nautical knots and
rope coils in a manner that had made some of the more butch lads aboard
slightly uncomfortable. I had even
helped Blachly learn the arcane vocabulary required on board the ship, a
project that had given rise to a pamphlet called Practicing Nautical Sentences.
What I didn’t know, however, and what Blachly now began to
narrate, was an event that had occurred some weeks before my first and only
voyage. He stumbled often in the
narrative, described key elements in vague or imprecise ways, and generally
lacked the zing I would like this pamphlet to radiate. So I’ll avoid cumbersome quotation marks and
just present my own version of his story.
The conflict began with the hoisting of a sail, an activity requiring the
full participation of at least two deck hands.
On this day Blachly’s hoisting mate was a woman named Elizabeth, who
combined a salty knowledge of things nautical with an elegant and
well-exercised torso. Or so it struck
Blachly, who betrayed a fascination with the lone female mate upon their first
co-hoisting operations. On this fateful
day, however, when the ship was making a celebratory cruise part way down the
New Jersey coast, Blachly had taken advantage of her arms’ occupation with the
rope to drop his portion of the burden and lift her shirt enough to catch a
full view of the anchor tattoo on her stomach.
A roundhouse kick to the temple had halted Blachly’s inquiries. When he rose, sheepish and swollen, he had
been ordered to furl the spanker, a dangerous operation he had accomplished
only once before, with significant aid.
This time, however, Elizabeth turned her back, joining the rest of the
crew at the bow. And so it was, a few
minutes later—after he had climbed into position—that Blachly’s accidental
plunge into the sea went unnoticed. When
he came up to the surface an intense wave of embarrassment sealed his
mouth. Then, just as he had gathered
himself to scream, he was swamped by a real wave. By his third rise, the ship was out of
range. He was about two miles from
shore. A doable swim, if he could find some
jetsam on which to rest. Before long he
had located a plastic bait cooler—fetid, sticky—to which he clung
periodically. In about three hours he
had washed up on Sandy Hook. After this
unexplained departure, the crew aboard the Pioneer insisted on calling him Lord
Jim-bo.
The trawler made its way around the boot of Italy and docked in
Naples. There we flipped a euro to see
who would call the Chadwicks. Blachly
looked at the coin once it had landed, and then flipped it over once more into
his other hand, as if he had intended to do that from the beginning. I protested.
But since we hadn’t specified just a flip, or a flip and a slap to the
other hand, it was I who steadied myself for the barrage to come: the container
was gone, the boat was severely damaged, and we were late. “You’re in Naples you say, well that may be a
stroke of luck.” Had Dalton located his
lost laudanum supplies? Where was the
explosion? “Well, do your best with
restoration in the field—we’ll simply have to finish it in the studio. And while you’re waiting for a new shipping
container, gather all the materials you can on the Chadwicks and Winkelmann for
the 2017 tri-centennial exhibition, and on Admiral Nelson’s stay in
Naples. I’m sure the family name still
opens the gate at Palazzo Sessa.” I
didn’t question.
That the Chadwicks would have felt a deep connection to Admiral
Nelson is not surprising. Nelson was
noted for his ability to inspire the best in his men: the Nelson Touch, as it
was called, which became even more focused after he lost an arm at the Battle
of Santa Cruz de Tenerife in 1797.
Indeed, the admiral’s grasp of strategy and unconventional tactics
produced a number of decisive victories, especially the Battle of the Nile
(1798), the Battle of Copenhagen (1801), and, of course, the Battle of
Trafalgar. When standard military
strategy dictated that commanders brought their line of frigates parallel the
enemy and then fired at close range, Nelson perfected a method of slicing
through the enemy line, isolating one section of the opposing fleet and
destroying it while the other hostile ships tacked to reposition themselves.
Nelson’s ties to the Chadwicks emerged through mutual connections,
in particular the Hamiltons—Lord William, British Envoy in Naples, and Emma,
Lady Hamilton, with whom Nelson carried on an open affair. It was also through the Hamiltons that the
Chadwicks first made the acquaintance of their current gallerist’s predecessor,
art critic Johann Joachim Winckelmann, whose life was cut short by a hustler
and petty thief in Trieste in 1768. Thus
Nelson, who was born in 1758, was 10 years old when Winckelmann died: old
enough, that is, to have translated the Odyssey,
published three or four books of poems,
and had several romantic liaisons at Eton, if one was a good English
literary prodigy. But Nelson was bound
for the sea, not the study. His rise
was to take place amid the rough shouts of deck hands, not the lisping of
antiquarians. And so he did not meet the
famous critic of Greek sculpture.
And yet Nelson got on surprisingly well with the learned. His close friend Lord Hamilton, or the
Cavaliere—as he was known—was, judging by volume of patronage, among the most
distinguished Neapolitan antiquarians. He collected more than 1000 Greek vases;
600 bronzes, 375 pieces of ancient glassware; 175 terracottas; 6000 coins,
along with cameos, intaglios, gems, statuary, erotic curiosa, and
paintings—some 350 canvases. The
publication of Hamilton’s collection of classical antiquities—Antiquités étrusques, grecques
et romaines (4 vols., 1767–76, text by Pierre François Hugues)—was a
massive work for which he paid more than 6000 pounds.
The impact of these volumes throughout
Europe was profound, and played a major role in the development of
neo-classical aesthetics, as did Lady Hamilton’s famous “attitudes,” in which
she posed for distinguished guests (Winkelmann, Goethe, Beckford, the
Chadwicks, Nelson) as various classical figures, draped in antique
costume. Hamilton tutored her in these
performances, and even designed a black-velvet-lined niche for her to stand in,
encasing her performances in a backdrop similar to those on his vases and
cameos. It may have been this willful
confusion between objects and persons that led Hamilton’s close friend Horace
Walpole to remark that the Cavaliere had “actually married his gallery of
statues;” and it was probably also what led Goethe to describe Emma as an
“object” (Gegenstand) to which
Hamilton’s “whole soul was devoted.”
Apparently, though, this soul-devotion left room for the living
sculpture to mingle freely with other bodies—like Nelson’s. The Chadwicks seemed to have hoped for similar
contact with this intermediate matter—encouraged not merely by the stories of
Emma, but by those—from William Beckford—about Hamilton’s first wife, Catherine.
Like Beckford, the Chadwicks cloaked
their advances under pleas for guidance from a sympathetic woman who fully
understood their maladies. All of which
may explain their protracted visit at Palazzo Sessa, which tested even
Hamilton’s patience.
Together with charges that a Chadwick lifted erotic curiosa from
the collection, and tried to broker an antiquities sale with a known tomb
looter—such were our discoveries in the Palazzo Sessa archive. The palazzo sits on Vico Santa Maria Cappella
and overlooks the Bay of Naples. We,
however, were in the basement, previous site of the Cavaliere’s collection
storage—a location only a few visitors in the eighteenth century were invited
to see, most being offered only a tour of the study. There was of course much more to learn—but
given the view of the family in the documents so far, we decided not to wait
another week for the two hours—Wednesday from 1 to 3pm—the archive was open to
the public. More discoveries like these
would no doubt end the Chadwicks’ inexplicably good humor.
And so, when the Finish container vessel on which we had booked
passage was ready to depart from the Port of Naples several days later, we did
not hesitate to board. There was no
coast of Somalia between Naples and New York.
Only beloved Palma, Gibraltar, and Cape Trafalgar itself, the little-known
site of the battle that gave its name to the square at the symbolic center of
imperial England. As we floated past
these locations, our attention turned once again to Nelson. The terrors of our ordeal in the Arabian Sea
now safely behind us, we began to bask in the admiral’s biography, trading
famous Nelson quips one for one on the forecastle.
Blachly: You know,
Foley, I have only one eye—I have a right to be blind sometimes.
Shaw: I have
fought contrary to orders, and I shall perhaps be hanged: never mind, let them.
Blachly: Take, sink,
burn, and destroy them.
Shaw: Our
weather-beaten ships will make their sides like plumb-pudding.
Blachly: Our plumb-pudding
will make their insides like weather-beaten ships.
Shaw: You know,
Blachly, I have only one good ankle—I have a right to be towed sometimes.
Blachly: There is no
way of dealing with a Frenchman but to knock him down.
Shaw: All
Frenchmen are alike—a country of fiddlers and poets, whores and scoundrels
Blachly: I believe
that’s “At least country poets aren’t like French whores.”
Shaw: Although a
military tribunal may think me criminal, the world will approve my conduct.
Blachly: Let me alone,
I have yet my legs left, and one Emma.
Shaw: They have
done for me at last, Hardy … my backbone is shot through… my sufferings are
great, but will soon be over.
Blachly: Brave
Emma! Good Emma! If there were more Emmas, there would be more
Nelsons
Shaw: I never saw fear, what is it?
Blachly: Brave
Emma—it’s a Frenchman’s enema!
Shaw: I am ready
to quit this world of animus, and envy none, but those of the estate six feet
by two.
Blachly: Oh!
How I hate to be stared at!
Shaw: If it is a
sin to covet glory, I am the most offending soul alive.
Our banter
had been very much like historic sea warfare itself: Blachly, not three feet
from me, firing a Nelson quip across my bow; and I, then, answering back,
letting loose the best word-volley I could remember. But, temporarily out of ammunition, we had
come to a stalemate. “Kiss me, Hardy,”
I offered as a truce. But Blachly was
not so easily pacified: “Kismet, Hardy,” he corrected, and explained how,
considering “Kiss me, Hardy” a little light in the docksiders, the most pressed
polo-shirted of naval historians had argued that in fact Nelson was suggesting
that his death was a matter of “kismet” or fate. Smooch me, undersecretary could simply not
have been the last words of the fiercest naval commander in the history of
western civilization! Or perhaps, I
countered, Nelson was actually disputing the fatefulness of the French
sharpshooter’s hit: “Kismet, hardly!”
His speech was rather slurred by that point in the battle. We seemed to be gearing up for more
broadsides of banter.
But at just that moment Blachly did
something genuinely surprising: he abandoned his defensive position alongside
me and, with a brief narrative, shot through my line of prepared quips! Blachly’s story, which again I prefer to
narrate myself, concerned the resolution of his time aboard the Pioneer. On the subsequent extended jaunt up the New
Jersey coast the weather had been rather rougher. Squalls had started in the harbor and, by the
time the schooner was under the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, there was talk of
returning to port. But the captain had
pressed on. It was at this point that
Blachly asked to be lashed to the mast.
This was not a defense against the siren songs of the mysterious Perth
Amboy! Blachly was not now tempted by
that greasy vortex of American art history.
No, to the contrary: he wanted greater immersion in the present
storm. He pined to become an embodied
eye, engulfed entirely in the violent elements.
Not winding up floating on a cooler back to Sandy Hook this time would
also be a plus. The deck hands had, at
first, protested at this novel request from a mere intern. But it was Elizabeth who had overcome their
objections, cinching the ropes to the point of blisters as Blachly was hoisted
into position, grimacing (with anticipated pleasure?) until the others had gone
below deck. Now the drama began. Blachly was pitched violently over the
troughs of waves, up high into the air, and then down close to the sea’s
surface again as the boat swung erratically through the enormous swells. He nearly passed out with the first few
lunges, wetted himself excessively, then emitted wide arcs of vomit over the
seascape and deck. But once he had emptied
himself and become acquainted with the ship’s range of motions, his terror began
to abate. Gradually he was impressed by
a vision of the murky, swirling environments with which he would overlay his
copies of drawings from the Chadwick nautical archives.
But something else happened on that
mast as well. After ten minutes the
bobstays parted and the spanker, one of the few sails small enough to remain
usable in this weather, ripped from earring to clew. By this point Blachly’s harness was slightly
less snug. He discovered that he could
wiggle an arm entirely free. From there
it was only a matter of moments until he was, to his thrill and horror, merely
holding onto the mast that swung with such violent motions. But now these lurches were more
predictable. His steps up the mast were
quick and assured. He located the
spanker, furled and unfastened its two separate sections—and reattached a new
sail in their place. His actions were so
fast that the crew, concerned with the immediate dilemmas of navigation, had
not even glanced up until the task was accomplished. Even Elizabeth was less icy when he rejoined
the sailors below.
Several days later, as we were finally
coming in view of New York harbor, I felt somewhat empty on seeing the patch of
coastline Blachly had described in his story.
Yes, I had had more nautical experience.
Yes, this had better prepared for the Chadwicks’ current retrospective. And yes, most of all, I had had downright
unbelievable adventures on this journey to retrieve the Man o’Bar. But despite all this I wondered if I might
not have missed something in not accompanying Blachly on his expedition up the
New Jersey coast—and particularly in not having myself lashed to the mast of
the Pioneer in a storm.
What was it
about my own experiences that made them less attractive than the ones I knew
Blachly was exaggerating? What was it
about my immediate, tangible domain of scholarly seafaring that made it seem
less powerful—less total, less immersive—than his imperfectly and partially
recounted stories?
No, Blachly was clearly overstating his accomplishments. Had I been there, I’d have been able to frame
the events in a more accurate way.
They would have seemed, as they did now that I really thought about them,
but a prelude to our real drama of recovering the Nelson Man o’Bar. Perhaps the Chadwicks were rubbing off on
him—with their sense that whatever they had
done was the most important thing in the world, no matter how far fetched,
peripheral to the culture at large, and amplified in grandeur. If we often found ourselves agreeing, this was
only because with them—at least—we were offered the adventure of tacking in
pursuit of their claims in that vast ocean of evidence—the Chadwick archive—to
which we were now returning.
