From Swerve of Shore to Bend of Bay: On the trail of the Rosevean

'He laid the dry snot picked from his nostril on a ledge of rock, carefully. For the rest let look who will. Behind. Perhaps there is someone.
He turned his face over a shoulder, rere regardant. Moving through the air high spars of a threemaster, her sails brailed up on the crosstrees, homing, upstream, silently moving, a silent ship.'

This is the lovely end of the 'Proteus' episode of Ulysses, where Stephen Dedalus, after picking his nose, sees a passing ship, later identified as Rosevean. This week, in the Glasgow Ulysses reading group, John Coyle asked why Stephen sees the ship 'moving through the air' rather than the water. I found the answer in this map from Clive Hart and Ian Gunn's wonderful revised edition of James Joyce's Dublin: A Topographical Guide to the Dublin of Ulysses, Split Pea Press, 2022. You can download this for free at Joycetools.

The map shows Stephen's route across Sandymount Strand, reconstructed from clues in the text, quoted as A-F on the map. His position in the last few pages of the chapter is 'by the mole of boulders' at F. When Stephen picks his nose, his back is to the mole and the road. Wondering if he is being watched by anybody on the Pigeon House Road, he turns around, facing north. At this very moment the ship passes by, with only its masts and high spars visible. So the hull is hidden by the mole.

The map also shows why the ship’s sails are 'brailed up'. She's being carried upstream by the Liffey tide, earlier revealed to be coming in ('under the upswelling tide').

It would have been easy for Joyce to have written 'Moving through the air, behind the mole...' but he didn't want to make things easy for the reader. This reminds me of Joyce's comments to Jacques Benoist-Méchin, who repeated them to Richard Ellmann in a 1956 interview:

'If I gave it all up immediately, I'd lose my immortality. I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring one's immortality.'

Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, Oxford University Press, New York, Revised Edition (1982), p. 521.

Joyce read this passage to Frank Budgen, who told him he had made a mistake in his description of the rigging:

Frank Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses

Why did Budgen assume the ship was a schooner? Perhaps his memory of the conversation was influenced by her later appearances in the book. The second is in the 'Wandering Rocks' episode, when Bloom's crumpled paper throwaway floats past her in the Dublin docks.

'Elijah, skiff, light crumpled throwaway, sailed eastward by flanks of ships and trawlers, amid an archipelago of corks, beyond new Wapping street past Benson’s ferry, and by the threemasted schooner Rosevean from Bridgwater with bricks.'

'Wandering Rocks'

She's arrived at point 10 on Hart and Gunn's map below.

Joyce found 'Rosevean, from Bridgwater, with bricks' in the Shipping News section of the Freeman's Journal, 16 June 1904. It's interesting to look at the other ships he could have picked (Eblana or Blackwater from Liverpool).

Imagine all those ships coming and going!

Joyce has made a basic mistake here, missing the ‘YESTERDAY’ at the top. For Bloomsday arrivals, he should have used the following day’s paper.

The paper doesn't say she was a schooner, but she is identified as one by the 'Sr' in the 1900 Mercantile Navy list. She was built in the Isles of Scilly in 1847 and, in 1900, was owned by Clifford James Symons.

Googling Clifford Symons, I found he was a brick manufacturer.

'The Bridgwater area became renowned for making bricks and tiles in the 19th century. The industry had grown popular both due to the natural deposits of clay in the River Parrett and the invention of more cost-effective production techniques. The growth of the rail network in Somerset meant that bricks and tiles could be transported out of the area. This led to a myriad of companies plying their trade throughout what is now the Sedgemoor district. One of these companies was Colthurst, Symons & Co., which owned at least seven brick and tile works around the Bridgwater area at the height of their production.'

The Symons Family: Part One Humble Beginnings, Shersca Genealogy web page

Bridgwater was also a busy port, full of ships like Rosevean, whose only cargo would have been bricks and tiles. The trip to Dublin, a short voyage across the Irish Sea, would have been a regular one.

There is still a brick and tile museum in Bridgwater.

Here's a Colthurst and Symons brick, from Dave Sallery's Old Bricks website. How many Dublin houses were made with these?

Googling Rosevean, I discovered this painting of her, which is in the Blake Museum, in Bridgwater.

Photo credit: Bridgwater Town Council

So Rosevean had two, not three, masts, and she was rigged fore-and-aft (sails parallel to the ship) rather than the square rig implied by Joyce's 'crosstrees'. He wanted crosstrees to make Stephen think of the crucifixion, remembered blasphemously in the Library episode:

'He Who Himself begot middler the Holy Ghost and Himself sent Himself, Agenbuyer, between Himself and others, Who, put upon by His fiends, stripped and whipped, was nailed like bat to barndoor, starved on crosstree...'

'HOMING...A SILENT SHIP'

Stephen, who doesn't know that Rosevean is from Bridgwater, wrongly assumes that she's 'homing' i.e. returning to her home port. The Joyce Project argues that 'this silent ship may somehow reenact Odysseus' stealthy return to his home in Ithaca':

'Joyce's Odysseus, Leopold Bloom, will appear on the very next page of the novel, so the final words of the Telemachiad read like a prophetic transition, a linking of expectant son to triumphantly returning father. But symbolic connections tend not to cohere quite so neatly in Joyce's fictions. Bloom is not arriving on a schooner on June 16; he is conducting everyday business as a citizen of Dublin. And symbolically, he has only started on his journey from Calypso's island to an Ithacan homecoming.'

'A Silent Ship' The Joyce Project.

The idea that Rosevean is carrying an Odysseus home is developed in her third and final appearance in Ulysses, in the late night 'Eumaeus' episode. We meet one of my favourite characters in the book, a 'redbearded bibulous individual, portion of whose hairs greyish, a sailor probably':

—Murphy’s my name, the sailor continued. D. B. Murphy of Carrigaloe. Know where that is?
—Queenstown harbour, Stephen replied.
—That’s right, the sailor said. Fort Camden and Fort Carlisle. That’s where I hails from. I belongs there. That’s where I hails from. My little woman’s down there. She’s waiting for me, I know. For England, home and beauty. She’s my own true wife I haven’t seen for seven years now, sailing about.

Mr Bloom could easily picture his advent on this scene, the homecoming to the mariner’s roadside shieling after having diddled Davy Jones, a rainy night with a blind moon. Across the world for a wife. Quite a number of stories there were on that particular Alice Ben Bolt topic....
—We come up this morning eleven o’clock. The threemaster Rosevean from Bridgwater with bricks. I shipped to get over. Paid off this afternoon. There’s my discharge. See? D. B. Murphy. A. B. S.

'this morning eleven o'clock'. According to Joyce's Linati schema, the 'Proteus' episode ends at eleven o'clock, when the threemaster passes Stephen, so this must be the same ship.

I love the detail of his red beard. I've always imagined Odysseus as redbearded because that's how he's depicted by Alice and Martin Provenson, in their magnificent 1956 children's version of the Odyssey. I fell in love with this book, and the Ancient Greeks, at junior school. I looked for red hair in the Odyssey, but Athena's speech here reveals that he's a blond:

'I will begin by disguising you so that no human being shall know you; I will cover your body with wrinkles; you shall lose all your yellow hair.' Odyssey 13.399

In the Linati schema and notes given to Herbert Gorman, Joyce wrote 'Sailor-Ulysses Pseudangelos', that is Ulysses the false messenger. Joyce got this from the title of a lost Greek tragedy, referred to by Aristotle:

'Again, there is a fictitious form of discovery arising from the fallacious reasoning of the parties concerned, as in the Odysseus the False Messenger.'

Poetics XVI

Joyce's False Messenger is a teller of tall tales:

—You know Simon Dedalus? he asked at length.
—I’ve heard of him, Stephen said.
Mr Bloom was all at sea for a moment, seeing the others evidently eavesdropping too.
—He’s Irish, the seaman bold affirmed, staring still in much the same way and nodding. All Irish.
—All too Irish, Stephen rejoined.

—I seen him shoot two eggs off two bottles at fifty yards over his shoulder. The lefthand dead shot.

Though he was slightly hampered by an occasional stammer and his gestures being also clumsy as it was still he did his best to explain.
—Bottles out there, say. Fifty yards measured. Eggs on the bottles. Cocks his gun over his shoulder. Aims.
He turned his body half round, shut up his right eye completely. Then he screwed his features up someway sideways and glared out into the night with an unprepossessing cast of countenance.
—Pom! he then shouted once.
The entire audience waited, anticipating an additional detonation, there being still a further egg.

—Pom! he shouted twice.
Egg two evidently demolished, he nodded and winked, adding bloodthirstily:
—Buffalo Bill shoots to kill,
Never missed nor he never will.

That 'there being still a further egg' is my favourite line in the whole book.