The
autobiography of Hannibal Lugg as told to Frances R. Green
is a fascinating look at the life of a first generation English immigrant who
settled in Yorkville, Wisconsin in 1842 and then moved to Racine, Wisconsin
some years later, but still managed to make five trips across the Atlantic
Ocean in his lifetime (Green 10). Because he came from Cornwall, England (a
small town located on a peninsula which is surrounded by the English Channel
and the Celtic Sea), and later in life lived next to Lake Michigan in
Wisconsin, Hannibal Lug spent a good majority of his life intimately close to
water, and it shows in his autobiography, which he presumably dictated to
Frances R. Green of Racine, Wisconsin, as the title of the text suggests. Apart
from the autobiography itself, no solid information can be found about Hannibal
Lugg or Frances Green. However, whether the text is fact or fiction, it still
provides insight into maritime life or at least how American maritime
literature existed in the minds of those contemporary to it.
In the autobiography, Hannibal speaks of his youth in
England, his motivations for emigrating to America in 1842, his many travels,
and other important events he experienced after settling in Wisconsin, such as
his first and second marriages and the death of his first wife. Hannibal’s
autobiography is relatively short, fast-paced, and action-oriented, and doesn’t
give many explicit descriptions of the emotions of its narrator, Hannibal does
seem to linger on certain events more than others, which leaves the reader with
the assumption that those events were more important, remarkable, or memorable
to him. Most of these events occurred at sea or on or near other bodies of water,
such as Lake Michigan or the river systems and other Great Lakes that brought
him to his new home in Wisconsin. For example, he devotes only a few sentences
to speaking about his wives, and those sentences are very informational rather
than emotional. He devotes entire paragraphs to his travels on water and how he
nearly drowned on the coast of Cornwall at age fifteen (3). He also spoke much
more briefly about his land or how he settled it than he did his transatlantic
journeys. This could be, in part, because he employed others to work his farm;
he was a carpenter by trade and made much of his income that way. Therefore,
his occupation didn’t put him in direct contact with the land like farming did
for many others. Instead, his many travels put him in closer contact with water
and it becomes clear in his autobiography that Hannibal was a man who settled
in Wisconsin, but truly lived at sea, if we are to take his account as fact. On
the other hand, if the autobiography is indeed a fiction, it still serves to
illustrate where the literary imagination may have been during this time—a time
when westward expansion had begun but many immigrants were still arriving by
sea, and had to brave Atlantic waters to make their new home in America. While
some were looking westward, still others were looking east to the sea, or to
their native lands beyond it, as Hannibal himself did.
Hannibal first journeyed back to Cornwall in 1851, with
the purpose of visiting his mother and his childhood home. While he did make it
back to the house of his youth, his mother no longer occupied it, having passed
away two weeks earlier while he was at sea to see her (Green 12). This trip
proved to be the most remarkable to him because of the barbaric events that
took place on this ship, which was named the Liverpool (10). These events include a flogging, which he
remembers vividly: “The first thing the mates did was to give the men a
flogging ‘to break them in’…This happened in New York harbor in the year 1851,
on an American ship. I have crossed the Atlantic Ocean five times, but never
witnessed anything like that demonstration” (10). Hannibal included later that
another sailor had been “lashed by one of the mated with a rope to which a
block of wood was tied, and was hurt in a way that caused him to walk lame” and
that yet another sailor threw himself overboard after a pot of varnish he had
knocked over by accident, “preferring death to life on board the vessel”
(11). While it is not clear from the
text alone whether he only witnessed ship brutality once because he was always
a passenger and never part of a crew, and thus, wouldn’t know if the practice
was common or not, other examples of floggings exist in other works, such as
R.H. Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast
(Dana 101). However, the text does suggest that flogging or other forms of ship
brutality may have been a uniquely American practice and offers an outsider’s
view into the life of an American sailor.
Because Hannibal Lugg was a first generation English
Immigrant, his autobiography also offers some key insights into the American
immigrant experience and motivations,
the formation of national identity and how
ideas of manifest destiny may have made their way to Europe after the
revolutionary war. Because Hannibal was English, he makes no mention of having
to learn a new language and, while he did spend some time in Quebec early in
his journey, probably never had to overcome a language barrier like many other
immigrants did. His transition from English to American, as he tells it,
appears very smooth but mainly because he only mentions it in passing. His
motivation for moving to America was to find work in his trade (carpentry) and
to start a family with his future wife, whose family moved to America just
before him (Green 4). In a brief summation of his motivations he says: “I was a
young man with a desire to make for myself a home. I could have remained at
home with my parents, but that seemed not to be what I wanted” (10). While he
identified England for his homeland his whole life, as he admits when he speaks
of his last trip back to England where he had planned on spending the remainder
of his days, his motivation for uprooting himself from England is uniquely
American: he wished to create his own destiny, his own life. He also gives
mention that a number of his English friends had also moved to America, which
points to a rise in individualistic thinking in Europe as well as America, and
thus, a movement of ideas across seas.
So much of Hannibal’s unique story was focused on his
travels and his movements. If we are to take his account for truth, Hannibal
was a very active man and remained so into his nineties (Green 14). The fact
that most of his journeys occurred on water proves just how central waterways,
lakes and the ocean were to travel before there were rails, cars, or airplanes.
Thus, water became not only the backdrop for his travel, but his means of
travel and consequently, became a large part of his life. Most settlers in
America did just that—they settled... They bought land, cultivated it, and
lived on it, or they moved westward in order to do the same at less cost.
Hannibal, however, kept crossing the Atlantic and held on to his past while he
created his future. His story is one of dual national identity, of immigration,
and , largely, of water.
Work Cited
Dana,
Henry Richard. Two Years Before the Mast.
New York: P.F. Collier & Son Corporation, 1937. Print.
Wisconsin
Historical Society. Wisconsin Genealogy Index: Birth Record Entry for Racine
County, Reel No. 0248, Record No.
002578; viewed online at http://www.wisconsinhistory.org
on 10/23/15.
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