Cloud Atlas Ch. 1

[jbor at bigpond.com]

I'll start, then. No spoilers.

The first chapter is written as a fragment of the journal of Adam 
Ewing, supposedly written in the mid-to-late 1840s. Ewing is an 
American notary (he is scorned as "Mr Quillcock") who has just been in 
Sydney in the colony of New South Wales on business and is returning 
home to San Francisco, where "gold-fever" is rife. The 'Prophetess', 
the commercial schooner he is a passenger on, has had to stop over for 
repairs on the main island of the Chatham Islands, a New Zealand 
dependency comprising ten small islands about 800 km east-south-east of 
Wellington NZ.

http://www.chathams.com/

(From memory, it was the first inhabited place in the world to 
celebrate the new millennium.)

Embedded in Ewing's account of his exploits is a potted history of the 
Moriori natives of the islands told by Mr D'Arnoq, the preacher on 
Chatham Island. Ewing writes of D'Arnoq's narrative: "His spoken 
history, for my money, holds company with the pen of a Defoe or 
Melville ... " (p.10). I guess it's possible that Ewing had read or 
knew of Melville's _Typee_ (1846) and _Omoo_ (1847), as these and the 
other early works of Melville's were well-received and instantly 
popular.

While the chapter is written in a faux 19th C. style, it's not as 
stylised as the Rev'd Cherrycoke's narration in _M&D_. Mainly it's just 
the use of the ampersand, some old-fashioned vocabulary, and the formal 
register which mark it as 19th C. language; but it's also 
historically-situated through a representation of the characters' 
various attitudes towards race and the terms used to describe different 
racial groups. The writing is both accessible and effective. Ewing does 
come across in his use of language as a bit twee and prudish, but I 
take that to be part of the characterisation (i.e. he's generally 
perceived as a "Mr Quillcock".)

Some other possible connections with Pynchon's work, apart from the 
obvious comparisons to _M&D_ and Cherrycoke:
Ewing went to New South Wales to "locate the Australian beneficiary of 
a will executed in California." (p. 10)
The footnote on p. 21 seems to have been inserted by Ewing's son (or 
daughter, but it sounds like a masculine voice), which recalls Herbert 
Stencil and Sidney Stencil's diaries in _V._ (At this point it's a bit 
of a mystery, that footnote.)
The subject matter and use of historical detail are very familiar, as 
is the uncertainty attaching to the various levels of narrative. I 
particularly liked the debate on pp. 16-17 about the best way "to 
*civilze* the black races", which ends:
	As many truths as men. Occasionally I glimpse a truer Truth, hiding in 
imperfect simulacrums of
	itself, but as i approach, it bestirs itself & moves deeper into the 
thorny swamp of dissent. (p. 17)

Mostly it's historically accurate. I'm not sure that the adjective 
"Australian" would have been current in the contexts it is used by 
Mitchell (Ewing also describes the 'Nellie' as "an Australian steamer" 
on p. 5), but Tasmania was known as Van Diemen's Land until 1855 and 
the general information about tribal conflicts (the subjugation of the 
Moriori by the New Zealand Maoris) and British colonialism in the 
period ring true. For example, the reference to the Moriori's 
"woebegone cousins of Van Diemen's Land" (p. 11) is an allusion to the 
systematic extermination of the Tasmanian Aborigines by the white 
settlers during the 19th Century. (Truganini, the last full-blooded 
Tasmanian Aborigine, died in 1876.)

http://www.africawithin.com/rashidi/destruction_aborigines.htm

The placenames and geography of Chatham Island seem accurate. Details 
about whaling, sealers, multi-ethnic crews, medical treatments and 
protocols, colonial routines and attitudes, inter-tribal conflict in 
the South Pacific, slavery, and the contrasts between the church and 
the public house, polite society and the bordello, are well-rendered.

While it's supposed to be a journal, there is quite a bit of dialogue, 
and the voices of some of the other characters (Dr Henry Goose, Mr 
Boerhaave, Cpt. Molyneux, Autua the stowaway) are articulated pretty 
well by Mitchell. The mysteries of the plot (the "dendroglyphs", the 
footnote, Rafael, Ewing's "condition" and the narcotic remedy 
administered him by Goose) pique the reader's interest.

The chapter ends in mid-sentence (p. 39), with Ewing beginning a 
comment about how he had just reread an earlier journal entry (which is 
also not included in the chapter) describing his first meeting with 
"Rafael", an Australian and one of the ship's crew towards whom Ewing 
seems to be especially partial. On board the ship, Rafael has just sung 
the song 'Oh, Shenandoah'.

best