A Tale of Shipwreck

What was to become an exemplary transatlantic literary career started with a ship wrecked in Boston Harbor. In 1767, at age five, Susanna Haswell Rowson had just crossed the Atlantic for the first time, when the vessel she was on struck on a reef of rocks near Lovells Island, on a stormy January night. English-born Rowson was accompanied by her father William Haswell, a Royal Navy officer stationed in Massachusetts, who brought his daughter to live with him in the North American colonies. The voyage already had been delayed considerably by strong winds in the North Atlantic, and the ship’s passengers and crew had almost starved to death as the food rations had run out. As the waves washed over the wrecked vessel, Rowson and her fellow travelers grew increasingly fearful, but as luck would have it, they could be evacuated the next morning. In the process, five-year-old Rowson herself, who was unable to climb down an icy ladder, was even tied to a rope and lowered down the side of the ship.

This episode of suspended maritime movement is remarkable for a number of reasons: first, the only historical evidence about it comes through a fictionalized account included in Rowson’s novel Rebecca, or the Fille de Chambre. In the 1814 Boston edition of the text (the novel was first published in 1792), said to be “corrected and revised by the author” (Rowson 1814, n.p.), Rowson included an introductory chapter in which she reveals the autobiographical nature of the narrative summarized above. “[T]he distress at sea, the subsequent shipwreck,” she points out, “are events which really took place …, though the persons here mentioned as the sufferers are fictitious” (iv). While it might seem doubtful that Rowson had detailed memories of an incident she witnessed as a five-year-old, the passage in Rebecca still provides a gripping tale of catastrophe at sea: in highly dramatic fashion, Rowson describes how “the wind suddenly changed, rising almost to a hurricane” (135), and how the passengers were left “nearly exhausted” (136) and “disheartened” (137) by the prolonged voyage. The narrative reaches a climax when the ship enters Boston Harbor: even though the travelers could already see land, “snow and sleet [that] froze as it fell” (140) prevented the safe completion of the journey. “Their situation now was imminently dangerous,” Rowson writes, “driving before the wind, among a multitude of rocks and breakers, without the least chance of avoiding them; to be shipwrecked in the very sight of home, was a painful trial indeed” (140). This dramatic portrayal of Atlantic crossing establishes an ambivalent relationship between the facts of Rowson’s life and her literary work (in addition to Rowson’s insistence that the shipwreck “really took place” [iv], the passage features two further truth claims in footnotes). As she imagines her five-year-old self “tossing about” (136) between two continents, Rowson thus exploits her own biography in order to gratify her readers’ (likely) fascination with the arduous maritime voyages undertaken in the shifting imperial geographies of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world.

Second, the shipwreck episode (and its fictionalization in Rebecca) is remarkable as it represents an inaugural moment of a literary career (as a novelist, playwright, actress, and teacher) that would span both sides of the Atlantic. “[T]he facts of Rowson’s biography,” Melissa J. Homestead and Camryn Hansen argue, “make a transatlantic approach nearly inevitable” (2010, 620). Susanna Rowson’s first Atlantic crossing of 1767 was followed by several others, and her works were published and read in England as well as in the United States. She also appeared as a stage actress in London, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Boston and enjoyed a successful theatrical career that made her, according to theater historian Jeffrey H. Richards, “the space or hyphen between the two English-speaking cultures” (2005, 22).Footnote 1 Moreover, the recent scholarly interest in the global entanglements of early American literature and cultureFootnote 2 has also directed increased attention to the transatlantic themes of Rowson’s writing itself. Critics have remarked, for instance, on the “trope of an Atlantic crossing correlat[ing] with … a swoon moment” (Doyle 2008, 6) in her best-selling novel Charlotte Temple, or on the use of “an alternative transatlantic space, namely Africa, as a key location for understanding [American] early national gender and politics” (Dillon 2004, 410) in the play Slaves in Algiers. The autobiographical childhood tale in Rebecca, then, seems to be part of a more overarching concern in Rowson’s work with the—voluntary or forced, commercial or military—exchange of persons, goods, information, and affect across the Atlantic, as well as with the structures of connectivity (sailing ships, ports, and diverse laboring bodies) that made such exchange possible.

Culturally speaking, Rowson’s autobiographical engagement with seafaring in the North Atlantic is indicative of a prominent and pervasive European imperial fantasy: that of a coherent and self-evident “Atlantic world” in which all sorts of extraction, encounter, exchange, and cross-fertilization might take place—all enabled by established routines of maritime mobility. It was against and/or alongside this imperial fantasy that (Rowson’s) early American national identity needed to be articulated and enforced.

The third reason the episode is significant is because it more specifically tells the story of maritime travel as a story of catastrophe, or at least, of severe distress. Rowson’s narrative of mobility in the North Atlantic is not one of seamless transmission and uninterrupted flow, but one of setback, accident, and deferral. Anne Baker, who is concerned with the episode from Rebecca as well, suggests that these “tempestuous passages” (2011, 205) must be understood metaphorically, as they constitute “an appealing trope for a writer obsessed with women’s increasingly limited opportunities for achieving agency in their own lives in the 1780s and 90s” (206). However, Rowson’s tale of shipwreck also has more literal significance, as it points to the highly imperfect and error-prone material conditions on which the imperial fantasy of the Atlantic world ultimately depended. In the context of pre-industrial maritime traffic, the “established routines” for transportation across the Atlantic were not so routine after all. Essentially, the episode—alongside many other narratives of “shipwreck’s global modernity” (Mentz 2016, ix), most famously perhaps Daniel Defoe’s 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe—shows that the idea of seamless transatlantic correspondence relied on a precarious material network: bad weather, solid rocks, leaky vessels, unknown waterways, pirates, or a mutinous crew could all, at least temporarily, destabilize the circulation of bodies, goods, ideas, and affect between Europe, Africa, and the Americas.

Imagining Transatlantic Mobility

In this essay, I pick up on these deliberations in order to examine how the work of Susanna Rowson employs ships and sea travel as a site of the cultural articulation and negotiation of mobility:Footnote 3 through her writings on seafaring, I will argue, Rowson examines the tensions between imperial fantasies of Atlantic coherence and the typically flawed material and infrastructural conditions that enabled/foreclosed that coherence. Apart from Rebecca, this essay looks at the articulation of these tensions in three different texts (in three different textual genres): Rowson’s didactic treatise “Rise and Progress of Navigation” (1811), her two-part novel Reuben and Rachel (1798), as well as her play Slaves in Algiers; or, A Struggle for Freedom (1794). By examining the tensions between imperial fantasy and the materiality of maritime travel in these texts, I do not make an attempt at historical scholarship in the sense of tracking the comings and goings of specific ships, the operations of actual ports, or the lives and livelihoods of people involved in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century seafaring, including Rowson herself;Footnote 4 instead, I analyze the ways in which Rowson fictionalized maritime mobility in order to deliberate how the materiality of transatlantic travel made possible and at the same time interfered with imperial fantasies of seamless correspondence in the Atlantic world. I do not necessarily intend to generate a literary topology of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century seafaring (shipwrecks, storms, delays, encounter, etc.); rather, I put forward an analysis of the cultural functions Rowson assigns to maritime travel as she represents the shifting imperial geographies of the Atlantic world. In particular, I will show that Rowson uses ships and seafaring as a prominent site at which she can relate early U.S. national identities (such as her own) to larger questions concerning Atlantic imperialism around 1800.

By focusing on the ways in which Rowson mediates the relationship between cultural fantasies of the Atlantic world and the materiality of transatlantic mobility, this essay takes inspiration from Stephen Greenblatt’s insistence that “mobility must be taken in a highly literal sense” (2010, 250). A proper grasp of the significance of metaphorical movement (and the imaginative realms established by such movement), Greenblatt argues, depends to a considerable extent on an understanding of “the physical, infrastructural, and institutional conditions of movement” (250). Hence, for Greenblatt, “[b]oarding a plane, venturing on a ship, climbing onto the back of a wagon, crowding into a coach, mounting on horseback, or simply setting one foot in front of the other and walking … are indispensable keys to understanding the fate of cultures” (250). Sociologist John Urry issues a similar call for paying attention to the “physical or material infrastructures that orchestrate and underlie … economic, political and social patterns” (2007, 19). For Urry, it is vital to recognize that mobilities are organized into specific “mobility-systems” (13) (such as the pedestrian system, the horse system, the rail-system, the car-system, etc.) that each requires “different embodied performances” (37) on the part of travelers. Accordingly, moving by ship produces fundamentally different cultural meanings of mobility than moving by car, or by plane.

While Urry focuses on the reliability—and thus, on the “systematicity”—of functioning systems (which “permit predictable and relatively risk-free repetition of the movement in question” [13]), my own interest lies in a more ambivalent dynamic: the incongruity between the predictability implied by the system and the typically more disruptive, at times even failing, practices of actual mobility. Hence I find Rowson’s fictionalized childhood story insightful for the way it negotiates the relationship between the fantasy of uninterrupted travel within a coherent British imperial realm (her father was a loyalist officer stationed in North America) and the mundane facts of bad weather and eventual shipwreck. In her seminal study of print culture and early U.S. nation-building, The Republic in Print (2007), Trish Loughran pursues a similar project, as she points to the discrepancy between the imagined correspondence and simultaneity of a national print public sphere, and the actual dissemination and circulation of the printed letter in the United States via pre-industrial printing presses, bad roads, and a malfunctioning postal system. “[T]he foundational project of American nation building,” Loughran argues, “was, quite literally, an issue of building” (2007, xvii, original emphasis). However, while Loughran is primarily concerned with the mobility of people, artifacts, and information on land, and with the fantasy of U.S. continental coherence, my reading of Rowson’s work focuses on the maritime and transatlantic dimensions of the mobilities that facilitated/obstructed (post-) revolutionary U.S. nation-building.

Considering the uncertain sailing time between England and the North American colonies, it perhaps comes as no surprise that the late colonial and early national archive is full of stories of strange coincidences, lingering doubts, and even tragedy connected with the transatlantic time lag. Loughran, for instance, offers a curious explanation for the instant popularity of Thomas Paine’s best-selling revolutionary pamphlet Common Sense—an explanation directly related to the materiality of transatlantic maritime mobility. Clarifying the original publication context of the pamphlet in Philadelphia in early January 1776, she points out that

Paine’s antimonarchical tirade fortuitously arrived in bookstalls, coffeehouses, and taverns on the same day that a long-awaited anticolonial speech by King George III also arrived from London. This coincidence lent the pamphlet’s arguments a surreal sense of timeliness at a time when few printed artifacts could boast such newslike quality. (2007, 45)

Of course, one can only speculate about the particular impact of this “surreal” coincidence on the progress and outcome of the American Revolution (Paine’s Common Sense would eventually play a crucial role in mobilizing public opinion for the independence of the American colonies); still, the anecdote reveals the complicated relationship between the fantasy of a coherent, “commonsensical” transatlantic realm (in which conflict between the imperial center and the colonies could be negotiated) and the material reality of delayed, yet uncannily timely, information delivered by a ship from London.

Numerous stories of delayed letters (lucky or tragic), while obviously anecdotal, also indicate that early Americans were routinely affected by the incongruity between the imperial fantasy of a coherent Atlantic world (in which it made more sense to travel to southern Europe than to the southern United States in order to live in a warmer climate, for instance) and the precarious material movement on which this fantasy depended. My reading of processes of maritime mobility in the work of Susanna Rowson not only highlights this incongruity, but also shows how the writer functionalized it for a deliberation of the relationship between early American national identity and more encompassing transatlantic cultural contexts. This analysis may thus serve as a transatlantic complement to Loughran’s continental argument about early American nation-building: Rowson’s maritime mobilities, I suggest, show how the early United States could imagine its role as a nation by ambivalently deliberating the movements of its citizens in a larger Atlantic world.

Imperial Fantasies in “Rise and Progress of Navigation”

Susanna Rowson published “Rise and Progress of Navigation” in 1811 in Boston, as part of the didactic volume A Present for Young Ladies. The short treatise, which represents a combination of history and geography lessons, must be understood as a consequence of the pedagogical practice that occupied Rowson during the later years of her life: in 1797, she had founded the Academy for Young Ladies, a boarding school in Boston, and had participated somewhat fervently during the following decade in the promotion of “proper” republican womanhood central to the early national period. As Gay Gibson Cima points out, “Rowson’s academy and others like it were designed to stage the significance of educating wealthy white girls: in holiday and graduation ceremonies open at first only to families and later to the wider public (for a fee), the girls … perform[ed] … their adoption of the implicitly white ‘cultured American’ body. They modeled obedient, partial citizenship” (2006, 157). The concern for an explicitly nationalized white femininity that informed Rowson’s pedagogical work on the whole is complemented in “Rise and Progress of Navigation” by a keen attention to geographical matters—a focus which carried larger significance in early America: in his The Geographic Revolution in Early America, Martin Brückner observes a “rapid rise of geography” (2006, 3) in the course of the eighteenth century, “from a scarce and symbolic text that symbolized privileged lives inside an imperial culture, to a form of everyday discourse widely used by a socially diverse population of English-speakers living in colonial British America and the early United States” (3–4). This popularization and “democratization” of geographical discourse (through such texts and textbooks as Rowson’s), Brückner argues, was, like postal infrastructure, crucial to the nation-building process of the United States, as it both “fostered a sense of national identity at home” and “paved the way for imperialism abroad” (8).

How exactly is Rowson’s “Rise and Progress of Navigation” involved in such imperial nation-building? In what ways does the text construct American national identity by recourse to seafaring and navigation? And how does the treatise, despite its pretensions to factuality, fictionalize various practices of maritime travel? For Rowson, the history of seafaring up to the early nineteenth century constitutes a development that leads European navigators out of the Mediterranean into the Atlantic. Hence, she associates the beginnings of maritime travel with ancient Phoenicians, Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans, but devotes the main part of her historical narrative to the (Eurocentric) exploration of the Atlantic world. Despite the odd mention of the Marco Polo’s “voyage on the Indian ocean” (1811, 125–126), or of Ferdinand Magellan’s first circumnavigation of the globe (145), Rowson’s treatise is primarily concerned with Spanish and English conquest and settlement in the Americas; the text thus proposes a historical arc that reaches from Columbus’s first 1492 Atlantic crossing to the newly independent United States of Rowson’s own 1811 present.

Rowson adopts an ambivalent stance toward Spanish “voyage[s] of discovery” (130). Initially, she offers a veritable hagiography of Christopher Columbus (which is in line with a rekindled interest in the Genovese explorer in the American early national period),Footnote 5 who is described not only as “naturally of an inquisitive turn and capable of deep reflection” (130), but also as “one of the most expert navigators in Europe.” Columbus’s transatlantic voyages of the 1490s are then chronicled as the brave overcoming of financial and natural obstacles. Crucially, though, Columbus is portrayed as a friendly explorer, not a violent usurper. Upon contact with indigenous populations, Columbus and his associates exhibited “friendly demeanor” (133) and soon “became familiar” (133) with the locals, who sympathetically “brought them provisions” (134). Later however, Columbus’s benevolence is sharply contrasted with the violence of subsequent Spanish imperial expeditions, which are characterized by treachery, terror, and cold-blooded massacres of indigenous peoples. “The laudable spirit of enterprize which first instigated the Spaniards,” Rowson writes in a typical rendering of the Black Legend, “was now degenerated into avarice and cruelty” (136).

Whereas Rowson spends considerable time detailing “contact” between (either benevolent or atrocious) Spanish seafarers and indigenous populations, the British colonial project is presented in much more abstract terms, as an effortless and seemingly self-evident development toward U.S. nationhood. After brief allusions to the British settlements in Virginia, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania, Rowson announces, “in a few years thirteen flourishing colonies were established” (147). She further explains—in a sweeping historical generalization—that these colonies “in the process of time [were] feeling their own consequence,” and naturally desired independence from the British crown. Without indicating the battles of the Revolutionary War, Rowson’s treatise ends with the founding and international recognition of the United States, which “are at present acknowledged by all the powers of Europe” (148). There is no mention of indigenous populations in North America at all.

Importantly, Rowson constructs this fantasy of effortless U.S. American nation-building by gradually eliding the material conditions and consequences of maritime travel. While her narrative of Spanish explorers is full of “ill appointed squadron[s],” (132) “dreadful engagements” (141) with indigenous peoples, or questions concerning “fresh suppl[ies] of provisions” (132), her account of British imperialism takes the Atlantic world already for granted as a common realm, and thus shifts to an abstracted depiction of maritime mobility: seafaring on the Atlantic ocean is no longer explained in material terms, but rather in terms of the transatlantic cultural imaginations and political structures it enables. Hence, Rowson’s “Rise and Progress of Navigation” does not really mediate the incongruity between the highly precarious movement (and clashes) of material bodies and the fantasy of a coherent imperial realm, but rather assigns different historical temporalities to each dimension. The “progress” her treatise suggests is a historical shift away from a (Spanish) past of “actual” material movement and cross-racial encounter to a (British-)American present characterized by abstracted, disembodied, and seamless imperial mobilities. Importantly, this narrative effacement of the materiality of seafaring is accompanied by a historiographical corollary: it completely erases the contemporary indigenous presence in North America and at the same time posits the implicit whiteness of early U.S. citizenship. By gradually eliding the materiality of maritime mobility, Rowson also elides issues of encounter, conquest, or even co-existence with Native American peoples; in her “imperial pedagogy” (Heil 2012, 623), indigenous populations are figured as a thing of the past, of no immediate concern for the formation of early U.S. national identity. As it constructs a historical fantasy of how the “Atlantic world” becomes culturally self-evident, then, “Rise and Progress of Navigation” also turns the cross-racial encounter of actual bodies into an anachronism, a cultural practice that has become increasingly obsolete.

Becoming-American in Reuben and Rachel

Rowson had already told a similar yet much more complexly fictionalized story of the emergence of the Atlantic world, as well as an attendant American origin myth, in her 1798 novel Reuben and Rachel; or, Tales of Old Times. However, whereas “Rise and Progress of Navigation” offers a neat separation of Spanish and British colonization projects in the Americas, Reuben and Rachel presents them as inextricably entwined, through fictional genealogy. As an elaborate literary complement to “Rise and Progress of Navigation,” the two-volume novel presents a centuries-long, multigenerational family history that reaches from the first landing of Christopher Columbus in the Americas (a later 1498 landing is mysteriously relocated to Peru)Footnote 6 to a melodramatic renunciation of European titles in eighteenth-century Philadelphia (“distinctions nothing worth” in a “young country, where the only distinction between man and man should be made by virtue, genius and education,” Rowson [1798] 2009, 368).

As part of a recent rediscovery of Rowson’s novels beyond her bestselling Charlotte Temple, Reuben and Rachel has been lauded by critics in particular for its espousal of interracial and interreligious connection and exchange—even marriage—for its transatlantic and hemispheric perspectives on early America, as well as for its positive depiction of female agency and women’s political empowerment. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, for instance, claims that the novel “constitutes a matriarchal origin myth” (1993, 496) and “presents an American subject constituted through fusion, not confusion” (497). In a similar manner, Jennifer Desiderio suggests that in Reuben and Rachel, Rowson “challenges the notion of a fixed and pure American identity by changing the major players in the country’s founding and settlement to include women and people of color” (2011, 77). And indeed, the family history that leads up to the eponymous twin siblings Reuben and Rachel includes the interracial marriages between Columbus’s son Ferdinando and the Peruvian princess Orrabella at the turn of the sixteenth century as well as that between the New Hampshire boy William Dudley, who is abducted by Native Americans and grows up with the Narragansett tribe, and the daughter of the tribe’s sachem, Oberea, in the seventeenth century.Footnote 7 Moreover, the novel (in particular its early parts) features an array of strong-willed and independent-minded women, from the Spanish queen Isabella to Columbus’s great-granddaughter Columbia to the heroic Algonquian Oberea.

Importantly, though, much of the progressive racial and gender politics of Reuben and Rachel is restricted to the first volume of the novel, and is for the most part undone in the course of the second. Part two, which focuses on the lives of the last offspring of the multiracial Columbian family tree, the twins Reuben and Rachel, changes from a narrative of adventure and cross-cultural encounter or fusion to one concerned with domestic and sentimental matters—a “middle-class romance” (Smith-Rosenberg 1993, 500) that shifts from a transatlantic/transhemispheric past to the more sedentary prospect of “purchasing land, building a house, and putting the whole in … a state of cultivation” (Rowson [1798] 2009, 201) in Philadelphia.

While Rowson explains this shift toward the domestic in terms of a personal career move,Footnote 8 critics have repeatedly pointed out (and lamented) its broader political significance in the increasingly socially conservative context of the early Republic. Still, if volume two of Reuben and Rachel reflects the larger cultural atmosphere of the early Republic, it remains an open question to what extent the politics of the entire novel is determined by the plot developments of its second part. Does the transnational heritage of the first nine generations still affect the newly found patriotic Americanness of Reuben and Rachel? Or do the multiracial “branches of our several families … sink into oblivion” (Rowson [1798] 2009, 369), as Reuben claims in the final pages of the novel? Joseph F. Bartolomeo and Melissa Carrere both stress the centrality of genealogy to Reuben and Rachel’s overall import, but arrive at significantly different conclusions. Bartolomeo suggests that Rowson did not discard or rewrite the first part after all, and despite her reservations included it in the novel. “[T]o whatever extent she qualified and diluted the first volume,” Bartolomeo writes, “she did not abandon it. The second volume is as unthinkable without it as Reuben and Rachel are without their family tree” (2009, 32). Carrere, on the other hand, takes issue with the second part’s numerous strategies of disclaiming native kinship and “whitewash[ing]” (191), and shows in detail how volume two only selectively remembers the racial complexities of volume one. For Carrere, “oblivion” is indeed a crucial notion for understanding Reuben and Rachel, and she argues that “Rowson’s novel works against itself, as the second volume actively forgets the first’s formal structure of generational continuity and the memories of an inclusive American history passed down through those generations” (2013, 191–192).

My own reading of the novel concurs with Carrere’s assessment, but I want to suggest that Rowson not only “actively forgets” the progressive politics of the first part, but also adopts a strategy of performative rewriting, as she repeats particular plot sequences with different, more culturally conservative, outcomes. Perhaps the most conspicuous of these repetitions revolves around the captivity narrative already alluded to. In volume two, Reuben—like his grandfather William—is captured by Native Americans, and is supposed to “be bound to the stake, and suffer those inhuman tortures which none but savages could inflict” (Rowson [1798] 2009, 353). Fortunately, Reuben is clandestinely set free by the chief’s daughter Eumea, who has fallen in love with him and who follows him to Philadelphia after his escape. Unlike his ancestor, however, Reuben does not choose to marry the Native princess, but rather employs her as a servant, until she drowns herself in Schuylkill River because of a broken heart. By differentially repeating a plot sequence from volume one, Rowson spectacularly rewrites the mixed-race marriage between a white man and a Native American woman that was still a viable possibility in the early parts of Reuben and Rachel; as Reuben (in volume two) eventually marries the Englishwoman Jessy Oliver, he not only forgets, but also performatively obscures the more inclusive notion of American identity his ancestors have embodied.

While a number of critics have remarked upon the above doubling (see Carrere 2013, 190–191, Castiglia 1996, 150, Smith-Rosenberg 1993, 501), there is another set of rewritings in the novel related to maritime mobility which has not been critically examined so far. As will become evident, these rewritings are specifically concerned with the larger geopolitical framework of the Atlantic world, which Reuben and Rachel constructs and at the same time relies on. In the course of the novel, Rowson repeats twice a plot sequence concerned with ships in distress in coastal waters, in the liminal zone that connects continental territoriality with the open sea. For Alexandra Ganser, the coast carries enormous cultural significance, as it is “spatially structured by acts of departure and arrival and by cultural encounter” (2013, 116), and thus, metaphorically, “refers to the point where semiotic systems become unstable and difference is negotiated anew, given that territorial orders are in suspension” (116). By differentially repeating a coastal distress sequence, Rowson partakes in this negotiation: she not only highlights the precarious materiality of pre-industrial seafaring, but also uses the sequence to subtly shift the significance of the Atlantic world for the process of “becoming-American” of her characters.

The first version of the sequence takes place early in the novel, during Columbus’s stay in Peru (which mysteriously becomes part of the Atlantic world in Rowson’s fictitious geography of exploration). On a particularly hot day, Rowson’s protagonists are surprised by “[t]wo hours of such tremendous threatenings from gleaning meteors, bursts of thunder, and contortions of the earth” (Rowson [1798] 2009, 90)—an earthquake that destroys the Peruvian royal palace and kills innumerable people. During the incident, Columbus is on board of his ship, which is anchored in port. As there is also a “hurricane, attendant on the earthquake” (91), everyone supposes Columbus drowned. However, it turns out that the Atlantic Ocean constitutes a refuge for the Spanish navigator, who decides that being at the mercy of the waves is in fact safer than being anchored to the shaking ground. Columbus, Rowson writes, “cut the cables of his ship, and ordering the sails to be loosed [sic!], prepared to put before it, whichever way it should drive, as the only hope of saving his vessel” (91–92). Upon realizing that the arrival of the hurricane is imminent, Columbus trusts that maritime movement, even if it is completely random, will be the means for survival. Those who stayed put were not so lucky: “Those who caught the first moment to put to sea, were saved,” Rowson explains, “three ships remained in port, and were swallowed in the general ruin” (92).

By telling a story of ships wrecked and ships saved in the context of natural disaster, Rowson participates in the narrative construction of what Steve Mentz calls “shipwreck modernity” (2016). Mentz suggests that we understand the early modern period through the trope of the shipwreck—an “ecological parable” (2016, xix) that epitomizes the disruptions and changes brought about by the intersecting practices of modernity and globalization. For Mentz, early modern shipwreck narratives “elaborate a thoroughly antipastoral view of the human relationship with its environment” (xxxi) and constitute “opportunities to explore changing ideas about the natural environment” (xxxi). Curiously, however, Rowson’s first shipwreck narrative is not only a story of ecological catastrophe, but also one of survival on the sea. In this first instance of coastal distress, the Atlantic Ocean is framed in positive terms as a site of adventure and risk rewarded, and more particularly as a site of refuge and relief. While continental territoriality is literally shaken in this episode, it is paradoxically the material volatility of movement on the waters and the Atlantic framework they imply that offer a safe haven and that eventually guarantee individual, familial, and cultural survival. As Columbus takes to the ocean, his ship is prevented from wreckage, and his transatlantic, mixed-race family line can persevere.

Whereas people routinely go back and forth between Europe and the Americas in volume one of Reuben and Rachel, volume two opens by introducing the Atlantic Ocean as a site of catastrophe. In this reiteration of the original scene of coastal distress, Reuben and Rachel’s father (also named Reuben) returns to England from the North American colonies. Having purchased land for the family in Philadelphia, he writes to his children in advance that he will return soon to pick them up and bring them to Pennsylvania to live with him (their mother Cassiah Penn had died in childbirth at the end of part one). The letter announcing the imminent arrival of their father by ship, paired with uncertainty about his exact arrival date, puts Reuben and Rachel in a prolonged state of excitement. This excitement, however, turns to anxiety as they hear about a ship in distress in coastal waters. “[T]hey were informed,” Rowson writes, “that a ship had been seen in the offing, before dark, as it was supposed, endeavoring to make the port of Liverpool; but that she appeared much disabled in her masts, yards, and rigging, and it was imagined she was now on shore, or in imminent danger” (Rowson [1798] 2009, 218).

As it turns out, the vessel is the very ship that carried Reuben and Rachel’s father across the Atlantic; unfortunately, however, after a couple of days of apprehension, the twins get “the melancholy intelligence” (221) that the ship sunk in sight of land and Reuben senior died in the waves. In this passage, Rowson not only rewrites her personal memories,Footnote 9 but also challenges the more positive function she had assigned to the Atlantic Ocean in the first part of Reuben and Rachel. By wrecking a ship with a central protagonist on it at the beginning of volume two, Rowson deploys the precarious materiality of eighteenth-century seafaring in existential terms, as ships were not only delayed or suffered from rough weather, but frequently sank and destroyed many lives in the process. Through this different take on coastal distress, Rowson reconfigures the significance of circulation in the Atlantic world more generally, as she repositions the Atlantic Ocean as a site of anxiety and trauma. No longer a place where the Columbian family members can find refuge from harm, the Atlantic Ocean is turned into a grave, a fearful reminder for the two orphaned siblings of their father’s untimely death.

Toward the end of volume two, however, Rowson rewrites this sequence of maritime mobility for yet another time. After the death of Reuben senior, a substantial part of the narrative is concerned with Reuben junior retracing the steps of his father in Philadelphia—a work of mourning that is at the same time a struggle for economic survival. At last, Rachel plans to join him in the American colonies and boards a ship that carries her across the Atlantic. Due to the flawed materiality of eighteenth-century transatlantic communication, Reuben, although he “made every inquiry at the post-office” (360), is left in the dark about the particulars of his sister’s journey. One day, while visiting a friend at the New Jersey seaside, a storm comes up, which soon “was increased to a tremendous degree, not blowing steadily, but in gusts, that threw the ocean into horrible convulsions, heaping up vast mountainous waves that seemed to threaten heaven” (361). Yet another time, Rowson introduces a ship in distress close to the shore; with great attention to material detail, she describes how Reuben recognizes a vessel “dreadfully shattered, endeavouring to make the harbour. Her foremast and maintopmast were gone; some of her sails, torn in atoms, were fluttering in the wind, and the few she could expand were scarcely manageable” (361). The ship eventually runs aground, and “[a]ll the aim of those on shore was now to save, if possible, the lives of some, who, borne by the foaming surge, seemed almost to reach the land, when the receding wave would dash them back into the dread abyss of waters” (362). Unbeknownst to Reuben, but clear to the reader at that point, the ship carries Rachel, who is luckily “snatched from a watery grave” (362) and reunited with her brother in a tearful recognition scene.

The meticulous reiteration of the coastal distress sequence with a happy ending not only rewrites the traumatic memory of the dead father, who perished in similar circumstances, but also once more shifts the significance of the Atlantic world in the novel. This time, the transatlantic crossing is hazardous, but eventually successful; it positions the Atlantic Ocean neither as a site of refuge nor as a site of death, but instead as merely an unpleasant obstacle to be overcome in order to be able to settle down on the shore. Crucially, Rachel’s final crossing is not about opening up the Atlantic world for circulation again, but rather about the unidirectional progression of settler colonialism, in which the ultimate objective is continental sedentariness. Hence, Reuben and Rachel’s pathos-ridden final affirmation of early national identity, in which they profess to raise “true-born Americans” (368), must also be understood as a renunciation of transatlantic exchange. As they abandon their European property as well as their titles, they also abandon the Atlantic world as a site of maritime travel, and with it, their doubly rewritten, multiracial and transatlantically mobile family history.

A “Happy” Ending: Slaves in Algiers

The Atlantic framework put forward in Rowson’s 1794 play, “[i]nterspersed with Songs” ([1794] 1995, 55), Slaves in Algiers; or, A Struggle for Freedom, differs somewhat from the frameworks she uses in “Rise and Progress of Navigation” and Reuben and Rachel. The play, which depicts the captivity of (Christian) American citizens in (Muslim) North Africa, is not about exploration or cultural exchange, but about the changing conditions of imperial capitalism in the Atlantic world. As numerous critics have observed, Slaves in Algiers can be considered part of the Barbary captivity genre, which is concerned with the (actual) seizure of European and American trade ships and the imprisonment of their passengers by pirates and privateers along the North African coast, and which fascinated readers since the sixteenth century (see Baepler 1995, Gross 2014, or Sorensen 2012). For the newly independent United States, more specifically, Barbary captivity soon turned into a significant foreign policy and foreign trade problem, as the country had lost the naval protection of the British crown, and was soon confronted with an increasing number of its citizens held captive in North African countries. A theatrical production that was performed in Philadelphia in 1794 and (in abbreviated form) in Baltimore in 1795, Slaves in Algiers clearly capitalized on these current political developments;Footnote 10 however, the play also intervened in a larger, ongoing political debate about the commercial and military role of the early United States in the Atlantic world. As Martha Elena Rojas points out, “[b]ecause of their popularity and their affective power, accounts of Barbary captivity were vital to the development of U.S. diplomatic practice and foreign policy” (2003, 159).Footnote 11

In recent years, Slaves in Algiers has been subject to much critical scrutiny, mostly owing to its complex depiction of the intersections between race, gender, and empire (see Dillon 2004, Gould 2003, or Schueller 1998). By conjoining questions of sexual freedom with questions of racial, religious, and national freedom, the play quite ingeniously negotiates various, and often conflicting, meanings of the idea of “liberty”—proto-feminist, liberal capitalist, or early national. In particular, Rowson opens up an imaginative space for the articulation of female political subjectivity and offers “a surprisingly bold representation of the moral, ideological, social, and sexual being of women” (Schueller 1998, 64). Slaves’ opening scene can be read as emblematic of the audacity that characterizes large parts of the play. The scene introduces Fetnah, the “favorite of the Dey” (Rowson [1794] 1995, 59), who is complaining about her sexual enslavement in Algiers. While Fetnah’s racial and religious identity is ambiguous (she was born in England to a Jewish father, who then converted to Islam and had his daughter “educated in the Moorish religion” [60]), her opinions are unabashedly liberal: Fetnah yearns for freedom and self-determination, and explains that an American friend has “taught [her] woman was never formed to be the abject slave of man. Nature made us equal with them and gave us the power to render ourselves superior” (60–61). Importantly, however, Fetnah’s lofty feminist rhetoric is always already complemented by overt sexualized language: even though she dreads him, Fetnah makes fun of the Dey’s “huge scimitar” (59) and declares that his lovemaking is so stiff that she actually “should burst out a-laughing in his face” (59).

Arguably, Fetnah’s performance of sexual and political confidence in this and other scenes is facilitated by various dynamics of alterity and distance: as Malini Johar Schueller points out, Rowson’s subversive femininities “are to a large extent made possible because she uses the Oriental setting to break free of conventions at home” (65). Because Slaves in Algiers represents an Orientalist fantasy set at the other end of the Atlantic world, the play is able to negotiate gender politics in ways that would be impossible in more “domestic” surroundings. Hence, Rowson figures the Atlantic Ocean as a barrier that creates a safe distance between the proto-feminist liberal rhetoric, complete with sexual innuendo, of characters held captive in faraway Algiers, and the (perhaps) more sexually and socially conservative here and now of audiences in Philadelphia and Baltimore. Because of this distance, Marion Rust suggests, playgoers “get to try on, albeit temporarily, sexualities denied the white Anglo-American Christians without suffering cruel fates in response” (2008, 202). Through Orientalist projection, Rust claims, American theater audiences can deliberate and indulge safely the possibility of female political subjectivity and bodily integrity, as they are “invited to try on [the characters’] sensations, if only within the temporal and spatial bounds of the theater and if only in the realm of fantasy” (202).

It is important to realize that this fantasy of transatlantic distancing depends on the paradoxical absence of maritime mobility in the Atlantic world. Even though ships, sailors, or Barbary “pirates” would certainly have had a spectacular presence on stage, Slaves in Algiers does not make explicit the maritime Atlantic context of the Barbary captivity narrative at all; even though the play negotiates early American identity “in a global-transatlantic context rather than a solely national one” (Dillon 2004, 408), it does not perform in any way the materiality of movement across the Atlantic. Instead, Rowson establishes Algiers as a remote setting, so isolated from global circulation that when the “slave” Rebecca asks her captor (and the play’s villain) Ben Hassan, “[i]f I am trouble to you, … why do you not send me away?” (Rowson [1794] 1995, 82), he matter-of-factly, yet tellingly, retorts, “[t]here be no ships here for you to go in” (82). In Slaves in Algiers, Algiers is characterized by a temporality of delay in which ransom for the captives (and thus reintegration into the commercial network of the Atlantic world) is always expected but never arrives (when it finally does, it is withheld by Ben Hassan). While this seclusion is obviously detrimental to the Christian captives, it opens up a space of possibility for the play’s audiences, as Algiers’s imaginative distance allows for an “experiment with the performativity of race, religion, and nation in the transatlantic world of capitalism” (Cima 2006, 185).

This experiment comes to a close in Slaves in Algiers’s final scene, which not only grafts a generic “happy” ending (i.e., conventional in terms of race, gender, and sexuality) onto an initially much more daring dramatic constellation, but also reinstalls a functioning system of transatlantic mobility. As the Christian captives are set free in the course of a slave revolt and celebrate an exclusively white, British-American family reunion, they also reassert the liberal capitalist order of the Atlantic world and the maritime circulation on which it depends. “Tomorrow,” the former captive Henry announces proudly, “we shall leave your capital and return to our native land, where liberty has established her court” (Rowson [1794] 1995, 93). Even though Rowson still does not employ ships or other naval objects as props, she references transatlantic mobility in order to point to the (future) restoration of imperial “normalcy,” in which white Christians are liberated and taken home, and non-white Muslims (such as Fetnah) are left behind. As she finally introduces actual maritime mobility to a play that has pondered the political stakes of (un/impeded) transatlantic movement throughout, Rowson also “reinstate[s] the barriers of race, nationality, and religion” (Cima 2006, 153), and thus ultimately forecloses the more pluralistic political subjectivities she has showcased in the course of Slaves in Algiers.

Conclusion

In this essay, I have examined the intricate ways in which Susanna Rowson uses the materiality of seafaring in order to interrogate cultural and political imaginaries of the Atlantic world as a realm of (imperial) connectivity and exchange. While all of the texts analyzed seem to functionalize maritime mobility for a reflection of how early American national identity is established vis-à-vis larger, transatlantic contexts, each text offers a different explanatory framework: “Rise and Progress of Navigation” gradually effaces the materiality of seafaring and cross-racial encounter in order to mark a historical development in which the Atlantic world becomes a self-evident realm, and the North American colonies politically viable; Reuben and Rachel, like Rebecca, uses various scenarios of coastal distress and shipwreck in order to rearticulate the significance of the Atlantic ocean from a site of circulation to a site of the unidirectional movement of American settlers; and Slaves in Algiers deploys the curious absence of transatlantic maritime mobility in order to establish an isolated location where alternative political subjectivities can be performed. Moreover, whereas both “Rise and Progress of Navigation” and Reuben and Rachel look back on Eurocentric Atlantic exploration from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, and thus historically legitimize early American identity and nationhood, Slaves in Algiers presciently gestures toward “tomorrow,” toward the future of nineteenth-century U.S. imperial expansion and globalized commerce. Whether it engages a historical trajectory or charts what lies ahead, Rowson’s writing ultimately posits the Atlantic world as a contested and contradictory space—a space in which various fantasies of seamless correspondence and circulation had to be reconciled with the often flawed material conditions of maritime travel; and a space, crucially, in which seafaring turned out to be a key practice through which early Americans could negotiate their national sense of self.