Humor, Horror in the Voyage of Sincerity

Set in the mid-19th century, Matthew Kneale’s darkly funny novel begins simply enough. When the shipless British Capt. Illiam Quillian Kewley has an opportunity to purchase a bankrupt merchant vessel called the Sincerity, he stocks the ship with both legal cargo and contraband and sets off with his crew from the Isle of Man, hoping to earn a fortune.

Although Kewley narrates the opening portion of “English Passengers,” his voice soon recedes, allowing a stream of other characters, including a Tasmanian Aborigine and two Englishmen, to take over. With patience and deadpan humor, Kneale weaves an elaborate, sticky web that ultimately brings on disaster.

When Kewley receives a fine from British Customs for carrying contraband, he decides he must charter his ship out in order to avoid bankruptcy. There are two takers: the Rev. Geoffrey Wilson and Dr. Thomas Potter, both of whom would like to form a larger expedition and travel to Tasmania--for very different but equally passionate, if nutty, reasons.

Wilson is trying to develop a creation theory that will prove that the Garden of Eden was located in Tasmania, thereby rescuing Christianity from the blasphemies of recent scientific findings, while Potter hopes that a trip to Tasmania to study the “primitives” will help refine his theories about British racial superiority.

In a series of flashbacks, Kneale illustrates what befell the Tasmanians long before the Sincerity’s arrival at their port. His sympathy with these endangered people rings clearly through the voice of Peevay, the son of an Aborigine mother kidnapped and raped by a white escaped convict. The only narrator whom Kneale does not satirize, Peevay convincingly depicts his tribe’s bewilderment and horror at the ways of the white man. With his reflective, unpretentious voice, he commands our attention:

“So we went on with our war, going east or south, hither and thither, further and again, till even the forest was strange, with trees I never saw before. That was sad, and often at night I dreamed of the world, where I knew all blossom scents, where I could tell the stories inside every rock and river. . . . Sometimes we said we wanted to go back, but Mother said it never mattered where we went now because every land in all the world was the same, and everything was just war with white scuts.”

If the Tasmanian natives manage to evade rape and murder, they are still unlikely to escape death by the white man’s diseases. By the end of Kneale’s tale, there are fewer than a dozen surviving tribe members.

With its scathing exposure of British colonialism and its populous and heavily caricatured cast, Kneale’s adventure tale takes on a Dickensian seriousness. As the ship moves farther from British waters, the perspective of its passengers seems to shrink, as if in losing sight of their homeland, they lose all capacity for reason. The reader uneasily anticipates the violent combustion bound to occur when British plans backfire, leaving them at the mercy of those little motivated to behave mercifully. Kneale’s detailed exposition of the consequences of Christian zeal and 19th century eugenics brings complexity to this novel, making the tale as horrifying as it is funny.