Captain Marryat Repeats Himself

This chapter explores the under-studied popular marine fiction of Captain Frederick Marryat. Marryat’s sea-novels are shy of the element upon which they are set; he rarely focuses on the craft of sailing and describes the sea itself even less often. If, however, Marryat’s novels are not about the sea, sea-life defines their central characteristic: a multi-faceted repetitiveness. These texts repeat marine tropes that are already themselves repetitious, such as seasickness, heroic resurrection, and the revenant ghost ship. Tightly repetitive adherence to generic formulae is often deemed evidence of contrived or artificial writing. In the context of writing about the sea, though, repetition invites a competing reading: it is perhaps evidence of authenticity, of Marryat’s struggle to find a register appropriate to the ocean.