Atalantis Major

It was not less odd, to see the Conduct of Greeniccio; for tho' he had not less Mischief in his Heart, yet it was of another Kind; and tho' he had not the same View of the Succession, nor perhaps was directly in the Tartarian Interest, and therefore shew'd no Pity, or Sympathy with the Mortifications of the other, yet he met with Disappointments equally perplexing, and which made him heartily repent the length he had gone; but as it was in his Nature to be rash, it was impossible to prevent his being disappointed almost in every Thing he went about: For it is in Atalantis Major just as it is in other Parts of the World, viz. That rash headstrong unthinking Tempers, generally precipitate themselves into innumerable Mischiefs, which Prudence and Patience would evite and prevent; and also, that these furious rash People, as they are hot and impatient under those Mischiefs when they are surprised with them, so they are not always the best able to extricate and deliver themselves.

This will necessarily lead us to a long History of the Disappointments he met with:

1. In his Project of charging and impeaching his General, and the great Testador, or – of the Nations Treasure, which he could never, either bring Crime enough to justifie, or Friends enough to joyn in, and make it terrible.

2. How he was disappointed in his ambitious Views of being made General against the Tartarians; whereas, he had on the contrary, the Mortification, to see the great Commander continu'd, with an addition of Generallissimo to his Titles of Command; and himself, like what we used to call in England, being Kick'd up Stairs, sent out of the Way with a Feather in his Cap, and the Title of General, to carry on a remote Unfortunate, and never-to-be Successful War in Japan, and the Lord knows where, among Barbarians and Savages.

This was not all; When upon his embracing this Title, which his Temper (naturally Ambitious) jumpt at, and eagerly closed with, he began to choose Officers, name Regiments, and draw out Forces to form the Army he was to Command, he found the new Generalissimo had supplanted him there too; for he had not only prevailed with the Queen of the Country, not to draw away any of the old Troops then establish'd for the Tartarian War, of which this Gew-Gaw-General fancied to himself he should form his Army: But the Generalissimo obtain'd, That the best Troops which were remaining in Atalantis Major, should be sent over to strengthen the Army against the Tartars: So that this new General was likely to go away to Japan without any Army, but such Troops as her Atalantic Majesty and Her Allies had hired from the Emperor of China, and such other People; and he had none but Strangers, Barbarians and Mercenaries to Command.

It is true, That his Design of drawing off the Troops from the Tartarian War, to carry on a Wild-Goose War in the remotest Parts of Japan, was like the rest of his Schemes, so inconsistent, so destructive to the general Design of the War, and would in all its probable Circumstances be so dangerous to the true Interest of Atalantis Major, That notwithstanding some had persuaded the Government to a New Scheme, and that the War was to be pushed on ESPECIALLY in Japan (a Thing which perhaps some encouraged at first, on purpose to draw him in to accept of that Command, which many of inferiour Rank to him had declin'd) yet when they came to look nearer into the Thing, and to see the fatal Prospect of weakning the Forces on the Tartarian side, while the Emperor of Tartary at the same Time was vigilant and forward in encreasing his Preparations, they soon found the Representations of the Generalissimo had such Weight in them, and were founded so much upon their general Good, that they thought fit to alter their Measures.

How Greeniccio was thus disappointed; how he resented it; how to Pacifie him, an Appearance of drawing some Troops together was made; how he was at last sent away with a whole Ship load of fine Promises; as he on the contrary loaded the same Ship back with a full Freight of Schemes, Projects and Rhodomontadoes; how he went; what he did, and what he did not; how Tinker like, he mended the Work of those that went before, and left it for others to mend after him; these are Things I may give you a farther Account of when I return from my next Progress to that glorious Country of Atalantis Major.

FINIS

1

George Macaulay Trevelyan, England Under Queen Anne (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1948), III, 68.

2

These are Trevelyan's figures (op. cit., 73). W. A. Speck (Tory and Whig [London: Macmillan, 1970], p. 123) gives the Tories 332 seats and 181 seats to the Whigs in this election.

3

In point of fact, Harley's concern for the loyalty of the representative peers is unique in the history of these elections. In subsequent Parliaments, the Scottish peers seldom, if ever, voted against the Government – even at the trial of Lord Lovat in 1745-6. For one thing, almost without exception, the representative peers were dependent on governmental subsidies and this dependence increased during the course of the eighteenth century (see J. H. Plumb, The Growth of Political Stability in England [London: Penguin, 1973], p. 180; and Geoffrey Holmes, British Politics in the Age of Anne [London: Macmillan, 1967], p. 393). The practice of electing a representative peerage for Scotland was discontinued after 1782 (see Trevelyan, op. cit., 235).

4

Trevelyan, op. cit., 58.

5

James R. Sutherland, Defoe (London: Methuen, 1950), p. 179.

6

The Letters of Daniel Defoe, ed. by George Harris Healey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), p. 296.

7

Ibid., pp. 294-295.

8

Healey reports that "in such issues as I have been able to find of the Scots Postman, or the New Edinburgh Gazette, there is no mention of the Scots Atalantis" (Letters, p. 306, n. 1). The title of this work and of Defoe's Atalantis Major are derived from Mrs. Manley's New Atalantis or Secret Memoirs and Manners of several Persons of Quality of both Sexes from the New Atalantis, an island in the Mediterranean (1709). The OED records that the word atalantis enjoyed a brief currency in the eighteenth century with the meaning, "a secret or scandalous history."

9

Letters, p. 307.

10

John Robert Moore, A Checklist of the Writings of Daniel Defoe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1960), p. 82.

11

Page 12, line 5: do is omitted before this; page 16, line 24: an for on; page 17, line 6: Grandfathers for Grandfather's; page 19, the catch-word, the for this; page 20, line 5: run for ran; page 22, line 22: of for off; page 28, the catch-word, they for the; page 36, the catch-word, Cha- for Courage; page 37, the catch-word, Lansd for Lands. In addition, there are several places where the printer uses eighteenth-century variant spellings such as ballances (pp. 5, 8), mannaged (p. 2), quallifie (p. 8), Soveraign (p. 41) and steddy (p. 15). Eighteenth-century orthographic practice would have permitted such spellings. The word entitled, however, appears on page five as both entituled and intituled.

12

None of the various copies I have examined contains typographical differences – even in the case of the typographical errors.

13

On page 38, line 25, the word Big is used where Large would have been the English usage; on page 42, line 3, the word Bann'd is used for Swore and defined in the text as an "Atalantic word"; on page 43, line 4, the word evite is used instead of avoid.

14

William Lee, Daniel Defoe: His Life, and Recently Discovered Writings (London: Hotten, 1869), I, 177; Paul Dottin, Daniel Defoe, trans. Louise Ragan (New York, Macaulay, 1929), p. 155; John Robert Moore, Daniel Defoe, Citizen of the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 191; and Moore, A Checklist of the Writings of Daniel Defoe(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1962), p. 82.