SLPAD - 124 - “Low-Lands” - 35

[Michael Bailey]

Elements of Bolingbroke’s sea story:

Guns
alcohol
Mutiny
A storm
Sleep deprivation
Political unrest all over the sea-girt world
And a bit of uneasy polyamory

- as in Melville’s Tale of the Town-Ho, the captain is never named afaict.

Unlike that sea story, the first mate, Porcaccio, rather than being a cruel
executor of the captain’s orders, mounts a successful mutiny.

Porcaccio seems to mean “horrible person”

https://context.reverso.net/translation/italian-english/Porcaccio

Overtone of Pig?


The genesis of the rebellion was a cache of armaments in the Deirdre
O’Toole’s hold, destined for the union side of a violent labor dispute in
Guatemala (plus ça change)

After Porcaccio brandishes a Very pistol (flare gun) demanding to divert
ship and guns to his own effort to reclaim Cuba for Italy, he and the
captain engage in 2 days of unsleeping alcohol abuse, and emerge on deck
with “arms flung about each other’s shoulders,” but a heavy squall
apparently washes the Captain overboard.

As master of the ship, Porcaccio promises everyone a jeroboam of champagne
when they liberate Havana, but first - a little stop in Caracas for liquor,
as they’ve run out.

Bolingbroke and Sabbarese take the opportunity to jump ship, and spend a
couple months living with an Armenian refugee [big kerfuffle with the Turks
during WWI] named Zenobia, “sleeping with her on alternate nights.”

“Finally something—whether homesickness for the sea or an attack of
conscience or the violent and unpredictable temper of their patroness -

(near-replica of Flange’s motivations?)

- Bolingbroke had never quite decided—prompted them to visit the Italian
consul and give themselves up. The consul was most understanding. He put
them on an Italian merchantman bound for Genoa and they shoveled coal as if
into the fires of hell all the way across the Atlantic.”


Here’s the buddy dynamic - Pig’s got one, Bolingbroke had one & Flange the
toff had 2 in his cadaver theft caper.

Going back a generation or more, Bolingbroke’s story seems to say, “it was
ever thus.”

Not naming the captain - is that a sign that his identity is subsumed in
being captain? Enwrap’t, as Melville might put it?

Attitudes towards authority -

- Pig has a strong contrariety, evident in just about everything he does -

- Bolingbroke and Sabbarese weren’t part of the initial mutiny (Porcaccio
only mustered “2 Chinese wipers and a deckhand subject to epileptic fits.”)

Bolingbroke obeys the captain without comment on the gun-running - he may
or may not have known & may or not not have supported it - IWW had a strong
maritime union for a time so maybe he was even in on it. But he breaks with
the new chain of command under Porcaccio, whose demented vision (did Italy
ever even want Cuba?) is obviously suicidal, and also no longer in support
of the One Big Union (if that’s a consideration of his)

Flange, whom the world has treated more gently than either Pig or
Bolingbroke, hasn’t had to articulate or act out a stance towards
authority, but is able to mostly ignore or sidestep it.