The Water-Witch

James Fenimore Cooper

Description

Chiefly set on the waters and islands of New York Harbor in the early years of the 1700s, James Fenimore Cooper's novel The Water-Witch (1830) paints a vivid picture of life in the little colonial port. It was familiar territory for Cooper, who a century later had served as a junior officer on board an eighteen-gun sloop-of-war stationed at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. That experience acquainted him with the navigational intricacies and dangers with which his characters must deal as they carry out the central action of the novel, the repeated attempts by a British naval cruiser to capture the brigantine commanded by a notorious smuggler known as the Skimmer of the Seas. As in all of Cooper's nautical novels, the scenes of ship-handling and naval combat in The Water-Witch are rendered with absolute authenticity, but here he envelops them in a cloud of mystery and magic that is dispersed only in the chaotic climax of the book. This scholarly edition includes an informative historical introduction and thorough explanatory notes. It also serves as an example of the processes by which an authoritative text is established.

The Writings of James Fenimore Cooper

The distinguished Cooper scholar James Franklin Beard (1919–1989) began organizing the Writings of James Fenimore Cooper in the late 1960s, as his work on publishing the monumental Letters and Journals of James Fenimore Cooper came to fulfillment. Beard's intention was to provide readers with sound scholarly editions of Cooper's major works, based wherever possible on authorial manuscripts. To date, the Writings of James Fenimore Cooper has made available texts of many of Cooper's best-known novels, as well as some of his most important works of political and social commentary.
Acknowledgments

Historical Introduction

Illustrations

Preface [1830]

Preface [1834]

Preface [1851]

The Water-Witch

Explanatory Notes

Textual Commentary

Note on the Manuscripts

Textual Notes

Emendations

Rejected Readings

Word-Division

Sujets

• Regional
• Historical fiction
• Region
• Sea story
• Adventure fiction

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 01 septembre 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438485232
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

The Water-Witch Or, The Skimmer of the Seas

James Fenimore Cooper
The Writings of JAMES FENIMORE COOPER

J AMES F RANKLIN B EARD , F OUNDING E DITOR -I N -C HIEF , 1966–1989
K AY S EYMOUR H OUSE , E DITOR -I N -C HIEF , 1990–2002
L ANCE S CHACHTERLE , E DITOR -I N -C HIEF , 2002–
S TEPHEN C ARL A RCH , A SSOCIATE E DITOR-IN -C HIEF
J AMES P. E LLIOTT , C HIEF T EXTUAL E DITOR
R. D. M ADISON , T EXTUAL E DITOR
Sponsors
A MERICAN A NTIQUARIAN S OCIETY
C LARK U NIVERSITY
W ORCESTER P OLYTECHNIC I NSTITUTE
Advisory Committee
L ANCE S CHACHTERLE , EDITOR-IN-CHIEF AND CHAIR
S TEPHEN C ARL A RCH , ASSOCIATE EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
J AMES P. E LLIOTT , CHIEF TEXTUAL EDITOR
A SHLEY C ATALDO
W AYNE F RANKLIN
J OHN M C W ILLIAMS
R. D. M ADISON
L INN C AREY M EHTA
K EAT M URRAY
T HOMAS P HILBRICK
A NNA S CANNAVINI
G. T HOMAS T ANSELLE
THE WATER-WITCH Or, The Skimmer of the Seas
JAMES FENIMORE COOPER
Edited and with a Historical Introduction by Thomas Philbrick and Marianne Philbrick
“Mais, que diable alloit-il faire dans cette galère?”
—Molière, Les Fourberies de Scapin , II.vii.
Cover image: John Cleveley the Elder (c.1712–1777), The Luxborough Galley on Fire, 25 June 1727 . Courtesy of the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London, Greenwich Hospital Collection.
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
©2021 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Cooper, James Fenimore, 1789-1851, author. | Philbrick, Thomas, editor. | Philbrick, Marianne, editor.
Title: The water-witch, or, The skimmer of the seas / James Fenimore Cooper; edited and with a historical introduction by Thomas Philbrick and Marianne Philbrick.
Other titles: Water-witch
Description: Albany : SUNY Press, [2021] | Series: The writings of James Fenimore Cooper | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021009168 | ISBN 9781438485218 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781438485225 (paperback) | ISBN 9781438485232 (ebook)
Subjects: GSAFD: Sea stories.
Classification: LCC PS1418 .W3 2021 | DDC 813/.4--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021009168
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents

Acknowledgments
Historical Introduction
Illustrations
Preface [1830]
Preface [1834]
Preface [1851]
The Water-Witch
Explanatory Notes
Textual Commentary
Note on the Manuscripts
Textual Notes
Emendations
Rejected Readings
Word-Division
Acknowledgments

The editors wish to thank the following institutions and their staffs for making the manuscript materials and rare editions of The Water-Witch available to them: the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Yale University; the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection. the Lee Kohns Memorial Collection, and the George Arents Collection of the New York Public Library; the Clifton Waller Barrett Library of the University of Virginia; the Research Library of the New York State Historical Association; the Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Columbia University; the Princeton University Library; the Huntington Library; the National Library of Sweden; the Othmer Library of the Brooklyn Historical Society; the Miriam Lutcher Stark Library of the University of Texas; and the American Antiquarian Society. They are especially grateful to Henry S. F. Cooper, Jr., for permission to use the pre-publication materials in forming the text of the present condition.
The research required in the preparation of this edition would not have been possible without the facilities and the generous help of the staffs of the Harvard College Library; the New York Public Library; the Brown University Library; the Boston Public Library; the New York State Historical Association; and the Sturgis Library of Barnstable, Massachusetts. The editors wish to thank in particular Marie Lamoureaux and Thomas Knoles of the American Antiquarian Society for their generous help with this edition and our previous editorial projects.
Among the many individuals who contributed their knowledge and their wisdom to the making of this volume, the editors would like to express their appreciation particularly to Ralph H. Orth of the University of Vermont, who guided it through the inspection required for the approval of the Committee for Scholarly Editions, to Hugh C. MacDougall of the Cooper Society, and, from the editorial board of The Writings of James Fenimore Cooper, to Wayne Franklin, R. D. Madison, and, finally, Lance Schachterle, to whom we owe the deepest debt of all.
Historical Introduction

I
What prompted James Fenimore Cooper in the summer of 1829, three years into his seven-year sojourn in Europe, to determine on writing a nautical romance set in New York harbor and its adjacent waters in the early eighteenth century is not obvious. In the spring of 1829, when the project apparently first occurred to him, he, his wife Susan, their five children, and his nineteen-year-old nephew William Yeardley Cooper were comfortably settled in Florence in a ten-room suite in the massive Palazzo Ricasoli. The Coopers had already resided in France for two years, visited England and Holland, and made an extensive tour of Switzerland. Now, at the height of his reputation in the United States as the standard bearer of American literary genius and in Europe as a leading light of the international romantic movement, the writer turned his thoughts to Sandy Hook, Raritan Bay, Staten Island, the Manhattan waterfront, Hell Gate, and Long Island Sound, far removed from Florence and its river Arno.
Since his arrival in Europe, Cooper had conceived, written, and published two novels: The Red Rover , a sea tale set in colonial Rhode Island and the western waters of the Atlantic, and The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish , a narrative of seventeenth-century Connecticut. Viewed in relation to its two predecessors, the book that was to become The Water-Witch seems less an anomaly than the continuation of a pattern. All three works invite their readers to inhabit the pre-Revolutionary American past and to consider both its differences from the familiar bustling present and its anticipation of the values and tendencies of that present. All three, moreover, focus on the distinctive landscapes, cultures, and histories of the colonies in which they are set, thereby highlighting the diversity of the communities that were to form the Union. In this respect, they seem to be vestiges of an ambitious scheme that Cooper had announced in 1825 on the half-title page of Lionel Lincoln , where he identified that novel as the first of a series called "Legends of the Thirteen Republics." Presumably, each member of the series was to depict the experience of a different American state in the Revolutionary War and thus contribute to a grand panoramic treatment of the birth of the nation. While the lackluster reception of Lionel Lincoln (and surely the rigidity of the scheme itself) discouraged Cooper from pursuing his plan, The Water-Witch and its two immediate predecessors suggest that it still lingered in his mind. There is a hint of the abandoned scheme in the southwestward movement from Rhode Island to Connecticut to New York. And although the detailed historicity and Revolutionary setting of Lionel Lincoln are dropped, something of its interfusion of local color and suggestions of the supernatural, its combination of the realistic and the legendary, persists.
Whatever the stimulus of the new undertaking may have been, Cooper's choice of the setting of The Water-Witch was ideally suited to the situation of an author separated by thousands of miles from the locales it was to depict. In preparing to write Lionel Lincoln , his ignorance of the novel's terrain required him to make a trip to Boston to acquaint himself with the city and its environs. But the New York harbor setting of the new work was ingrained in his memory with all the particularity that its plot demanded. He first encountered the East River and the long passage from there through the Narrows out to the open sea in 1806 when, at the age of seventeen, he began his voyage before the mast in the merchantman Stirling. Two years later he revisited the scene as a newly appointed midshipman stationed at the Brooklyn Navy Yard at Wallabout Bay. Except for a year's tour of duty on Lake Ontario, most of his naval service was limited to New York harbor. In late 1809 he was assigned to the sloop-of-war Wasp , a ship of the same general class as Ludlow's Coquette , which, like the fictional Coquette , spent much of her time lying at anchor. The Wasp did, however, contribute to one of the most compelling episodes of The Water-Witch , the passage of the Coquette through Hell Gate without a pilot. As Cooper wrote in reference to the episode in a letter to his old naval friend William Branford Shubrick in 1831, "I remember the passage of Wasp through Hell Gate very well. I had left the ship at Whitestone, and was dining at Gibbs' place when she came down. I had also the benefit of poor