Viktor Rydberg, ‘The Freebooter of the Baltic’ (1857)

Viktor Rydberg was, perhaps, the most important Swedish novelist of the nineteenth-century, though he’s little known in the UK, what with our anglophonic chauvinism and insularity and everything. He wrote historical novels in a sort-of Scottian mode. His first, Fribytaren på Östersjön (‘The Freebooter of the Baltic’ 1857), is set in the early 1660s, soon after the death of the Swedish king, Charles X Gustav. The new king, Charles XI, is only four years old, so a seven-person Regency Council, chaired by the Queen Dowager Hedwig Eleonora, has been convened to run things. It is a time of political uncertainty, jockeyings for power, plots and attempted coups. Rydberg’s novel deals with these political machinations, but also includes pirates, alchemy, witch-trials, romance, adultery, all sorts. I read it not in Swedish, which I do not speak, but in Caroline L Broomall’s 1891 English translation.

The story opens with a ship off the Swedish coast. Its unnamed captain, and his first mate Ruys, are facing a crew close to mutiny. The captain gives them drugged wine and then, when they’ve all passed out, he holes the boat so it sinks, drowning all aboard, himself rowing ashore with Ruys. He kills them, he says, because ‘they have become acquainted with my true name and position in society’ [10] — and that must remain a secret. Ruthless!

The scene moves to the Sjövik estate, in the countryside outside Stockholm. Colonel Anders Drake built it, with the money he won in the Thirty Years War; and then spent the rest of his fortune on feasting, eating and orgies. When he dies he leaves his son Gustaf ‘his lands and an empty cash box’. Gustaf is energetic, not dissolute, ‘gloomy but resolute … he met his equals with coldness and his inferiors with contempt’ [12]. He lives on the estate with his wife and daughter, and practices alchemy in his own purpose-built laboratory, hoping to repair his fortunes by discovering how to turn lead into gold.

Out riding on his estate one day he meets Ingrid ‘the cunning woman, the witch’, who lives in a hovel on his grounds. She used to have a son, whom Drake had whipped for disrespecting him, and who subsequently disappeared — dead, it is thought. Ingrid also has a beautiful young daughter, Elin.

Drake meets with his neighbour, Senator Skytte, with whom he is involved in a political conspiracy. The two men support the claim to the throne of the late king’s brother Duke Adolf Johan and plan a coup to wrest power away from the present regency committee: ‘“Look here, my friend,” continued the Senator, opening a drawer of his writing table. “Here is a list of the most reliable and influential men of our party. These men are ready with oath and signature to bind themselves to our cause.”’

The Senator is also interested in alchemy, and has been studying with a man called Arnold Vanloo, the heir of a Batavian trading house, a wealthy and powerful figure in Swedish society, and someone with a reputation as a great alchemist. He promises to introduce Drake to Vanloo, so his friend can benefit from the man’s alchemic expertise.

There’s a ball at the Sjövik estate. Maria Skytte, the senator’s beautiful young daughter, is surrounded by many admirers, though it’s her cousin, handsome young Adolf Skytte, who truly loves her, and whom she loves. Adolf takes her home on his sleigh, but the two get lost in a midnight snowstorm, Adolf crashes, breaks his arm, the blizzard nearly claims them — they are saved by Ingrid the Cunning Woman, who gives them shelter in her hut, and mends Adolf’s broken arm with a special salve. The following day Ingrid and Elin are interrogated (as witches) by the local bishop Suenonius — Adolf intervenes, to save her.

The scene shifts to Stockholm. Vanloo is pursuing the mysterious captain from ch 1, and finds Ruys, the mysterious captain’s first mate in an inn. But he doesn’t unmask the mysterious captain. Said captain, whoever he is, has provided himself with a new boat, and all new crew. I’m not sure how.

Vanloo visits Gustaf Drake’s alchemical laboratory and, using his equipment, attempts to turn some base metal into gold, without success. Vanloo can see that Drake is near the end of his tether: on edge, wound up by his ambition, determined ‘to be Caesar or nothing’, hectic, drunk, offering violence. Drake is so caught-up in his alchemical experiments that he doesn’t leave the laboratory even when he is told that his youngest child, Hedwig, is very ill and like to die — and die she does, without her father being there. Drake monologues about necessity: ‘Nature groans under necessity. The clouds above do not direct their own course, the waves dance not by their own desires on the stormy sea; they are driven by blind necessity. And of all created things, man alone would be released from this law. This is an error. Destiny whose net spans all creation guides them by leading strings; the fibres of the brain are the reins by which it imperceptible rules the minds of men.’ [184]

Then, in a plot development I wasn’t expecting, Drake falls in love with the young Maria Skytte (‘“Oh that I were free!” thought he, “and my destiny united with that of this woman, whose image has now long stood in the centre of my picture of the future, around which grandeur, power and riches form the frame”’ [186]). He goes to his wife and suggests they separate. ‘“Agnes,” said he, seating himself opposite to her, “thou art not happy in thy union with me. I know it … we must be separated, Agnes; it is necessary’ [189]. Agnes, surprisingly, agrees (‘there stirred in Agnes’s breast a longing for freedom — a longing to be happy somewhere, anywhere’ [192]). Since divorce is an impossibility, Agnes agrees to fake her own death so that Drake can marry again. Then Vanloo jumps in, taking this opportunity to seduce her: ‘Vanloo continued to plead with increased earnestness. The longer Agnes listened the livelier throbbed her heart … finally Vanloo conquered — Agnes consented’ [193]. The married woman sleeps with her husband’s alchemical colleague. The married man goes after a girl young enough to be his daughter. You don’t get that in Dickens.

At this point the story abandons all its stuff about pirates, alchemists, political coups and extra-marital nookie, to devote a very lengthy section to witch trials — a fictionalisation of the actual Katarina Witch Trials of 1676. Young Adolf, discovering that Bishop Suenonius is about to arraign Ingrid and Elin as witches, urges them to leave the area, giving them money. But they dither, are arrested and sent for trial in Stockholm. Adolf follows and tries to intercede on their behalf, but everyone assume Ingrid and/or Elin has beguiled his wits with a diabolic love potion. As he continues to press their suit, he himself falls under suspicion of being a witch, or warlock.

Rydgard’s position on all this witch-craze stuff is interesting. His novel does not encompass actual supernatural or magical elements (Scott is like this too), but neither does he dismiss the witch-craze as mere misogynist hysteria. Rydgard thinks there is ‘something’ in the whole witches’ sabbath, orgying with the devil, flying around on broomsticks business, the something being: hallucinogens. Here’s Karin, one of the old women Bishop Suenonius persecutes, as the authorities arrive at her cottage to arrest her:

[Karin] lay on the floor with her head inclined against the chimney wall. Her heavy breathing indicated that she was sleeping. The expression of old age in her hungry, wasted face was ghostlike … “She has just returned from one of Satan’s entertainments!” said Suenonius … The bowl really contained boiled deadly nightshade henbane, the seed of dates and poisonous mushrooms. The old woman had intoxicated herself with this drink, of which the mode of preparation was a secret belonging to the so-called fortune-tellers and of which the effects were very peculiar. Attacked with the prevailing mental epidemic and loving this drink because it temporarily released her from the wakeful miseries of this life and transported her to a world of colours most brilliantly blended … she dreamed of mystic festivals during dark knights on gloriously illuminated mountains. And the dreams were so vivid that when, ceasing to sleep, she held them as pure reality. [102]

It puts her in an awkward place when she is taken, because she really believes his accusations, even though she has ‘actually’ done nothing. So Rydberg’s witches both are and are not guilty of ‘real’ witchcraftery. The trials go ahead: witnesses are called who testify that Ingrid, Elin and Karin killed their cow with a spell, or made them ill with magic. Many of the witnesses are children, who testify that they were taken to Blockula (Blåkulla in modern Swedish, ‘Blue Hill’) — the fantasy island where the Devil is supposed to hold Earthly court during a witches’ Sabbath) by their mothers or other women. It is claimed that Elin is married to Satan’s son. Adolf attends the assizes, hoping to save Ingrid and Elin.

Adolf noticed that the strange testimonies in a conspicuous manner corresponded with each other, the cause of which he could only explain by supposing that the diseased imaginations had gathered the subject of their pictures from popular ideas and superstitious hearsays. But he also observed that Judge Skytte and Pastor Suenonius — the latter interfering in the examination — made the conformity greater by the questions they propounded and so frequently repeated until the children complaining, who were often doubting and hesitating in their narrations, had answers to the satisfaction of the interrogators. [229]

Rydberg offers this as an explanation for ‘the inexplicable phenomenon of the witchcraft epidemic’ being ‘attended by the same conceits everywhere — in sunburnt Granada as well as in northern Dalecarlia — in Catholic as well as Protestant countries.’

In Catholic Christendom papal bulls had declared belief in the existence of witches to be a dogma which it was heresy to doubt. The Reformation, which contended against many other errors, allowed this to remain undisturbed. Luther himself believed in witchcraft and in the personal appearance of the devil to seduce and corrupt. Yea, the Reformation rather increased than diminished the evil. Popular imagination being no longer nourished by the ceremonies of the Catholic church, sought refuge outside from the prose of Protestantism in the mysterious and hidden, and with increased avidity cast itself into new paths — into the arms of superstition. This it occurred that witchcraft persecutions were more terrible in Protestant than in the Catholic countries. [233]

As the trial goes on, ‘a bright idea occurred to Judge Skytte for obtaining certainty of the guilt of the accused and silencing those who were denying it.’ That idea? ‘“Those who with such ease can fly in the air,” thought the Judge, “possibly have not the weight of innocent persons of like appearance.” He orders the accused weighed, and ‘signs and wonders! — the majority were found to be lighter than would be supposed, judging by their bodily structure’. [246] All very Monty Python — (the narrator adds that the executioner, eager to start executing people, has tampered with the scales to produce this result). ‘If she … weighs … the same as a duck …’

Then Bishop Suenonius, delivering his Sunday sermon, stops halfway through, rushes out of the pulpit and begins a fist-fight with an invisible apparition of Satan in the middle of the church, flailing his arms and shouting. This continues for some time, until the ‘demon’ is driven away; whereupon the bishop returns to his pulpit and completes the sermon. None of the congregation seem surprised by this extraordinary performance. The narrator reminds us that Luther used to do the same thing.

Then a particularly melodramatic scene: it is decided to extract a confession from the accused women by torturing them. They are taken to the church sacristy to be interrogated, and Suenonius and various clergymen go to work on them. Adolf, passing outside and hearing the women’s screams, breaks-in to discover the Bishop hanging Ingrid by her thumbs, whilst another woman, her ankles having been broken by a Spanish boot, has passed out from the pain on the floor. Furious, Adolf draws his sword, and Suenonius grabs a flaming torch with which to fight. Adolf stabs the bishop through the chest; he drops the brand and sets fire to the woman on the floor, killing her. Adolf is arrested.

Eventually, after a hundred pages or so of Witch Trial stuff, the novel remembers its other plots lines. The coup d’etat, long trailed, finally arrives, and Drake’s machinations are put into action. We discover that the mysterious pirate captain from chapter 1 is — none other than Drake himself. His whole ‘I’m a secret pirate captain’ act is part of his plotting towards the coup d’état. The night of the coup has arrived. He leads his piratical crew ashore and, wearing a mask to disguise himself, takes them into the royal palace to do the actual coup-ing.

Meanwhile: Ingrid and Elin, who have been sentenced to be beheaded, and afterwards burned, are saved at the last minute by Vanloo. It turns out Vanloo is Ingrid’s lost son and Erin’s lost brother — the lad beaten by Drake years before. He ran away to the Netherlands, ended up the favourite of a wealthy Dutch trader, inherited a fortune and returned to Sweden.

Drake’s coup-planning also involved a paid rentamob rushing the city gaol and releasing its prisoners — like storming the Bastille — and in this confusion Vanloo whisks the women away in his coach. Then Vanloo takes his own body of armed men into the royal palace, overpowers Drake’s troops and unmasks him:

“I know you well,” said Vanloo. “We have the accounts of youth to settle with each other.” With these words Vanloo snatched the mask from his opponent’s face. The lords of the Administration and Senate beheld with astonishment Gustaf Drake of Sjövik. [316]

Drake, though, escapes, by jumping through a window into the palace moat below, swimming out into the bay and rejoining his ship, which somehow still has a crew. Aboard he discovers young Adolf Skytte, who also escaped the gaol when it was stormed, and made his way to this selfsame boat, somehow. I’m not sure how, or why. Adolf swears allegiance to Drake, and proposes they escape Sweden and sail to America.

‘Listen,’ said Adolf, earnestly. ‘We have countrymen in America. Swedes are living by the Delaware. Their community, after a brave struggle, has yielded to stratagem and superior force. The Hollanders took the colony by surprise and are now masters. The Swedish flag has been insulted by these mercenary people. Ought we not to be avenged? Should we not release our countrymen from an ignominious yoke and acquire again a part of the New World for Sweden?’ [337]

One might think this would be a low priority for a pirate captain, but in fact Drake agrees: ‘our force is certainly small for such an undertaking, but it is possible we might get the assistance of Englishmen or join us with some of the free sailors who swarm in the waters of the West Indies.’ But before they go, Drake wants to grab Maria, and bring her along as his Pirate Captain Wife. So he goes ashore, rides through a stormy night, and bursts into her house. ‘Maria, I love thee and though must go with me and share my lot on the tempestuous ocean!’ [353] She agrees to go along, not from love (‘I do not love thee!’) but out of ‘desperation’, a terror that if she stays in Sweden, ‘to languish among ordinary persons during slowly gliding days one like another’, the ‘tedious monotony’ would destroy her. That’s good enough for Drake. They ride together back to the seashore. But when Maria spots Adolf in the longboat sent out to collect them, she changes her mind, turns her horse about and gallops away. No Pirate Captain Bride for the Pirate Captain after all.

“D — n!” muttered Drake.

The novel closes with a bit of naval conflict. Drake and Adolf sail away as corsairs, but Vanloo has a ship of his own, the ‘Algernon Sidney’ (named after the English politician and soldier, whom Vanloo admires) and he gives chase. Vanloo’s ship being faster, he catches up with her. The ensuing sea battle is rather stiffly described by Rydberg:

The Algernon Sydney opened fire with its bow chaser. The Scylla answered with its stern chaser. Shortly after on both sides began a lively firing of small arms, and while this continued the Algernon Sydney ran to the leeward of its opponent. A broadside was exchanged. Both vessels shook as if bursting in every joint, large portions of the bulwarks were crushed, and splinters flying around. [379]

Vanloo’s crew boards the Scylla, and after some general swashbuckling and battling between the two crew, Vanloo and Drake fight a single-combat sword duel: ‘slashes, thrusts and parries followed each other speedily. Drake fought with increasing eagerness. Vanloo was calm’ [380]. You can see where this is going: in addition to everything else, it transpires Vanloo is an Olympic-class fencer. He disables Drake with a precise cut ‘in the right arm, immediately below the shoulder — Drake’s arm sank, his hand still spasmodically grasping his weapon’ — and arrests him. Then he reveals his true identity, and backstory. ‘“Truly,” said Drake, “this explains so much; it explains everything. Nature made you to be a nobleman, but chance caused you to be born in a peasant’s cottage.”’ [385]

Then there’s a rapid tying-everything-up conclusion. ‘the intelligence that Gustaf Drake had been captured as a pirate and committed to the Swedish authorities to be punished spread through the Capital’ [395] He is tried (‘his bearing throughout was calm, his tone was frigid and sometimes sarcastic’) and sentenced ‘to be shot dead by an arquebusier’ which is quite a specific sentence, really, and perhaps one modern justice should revive.

With regard to the other characters, Rydberg is a bit sketchy, What of Maria, in love with Adolf, but so bored with her restrictive respectable bourgeois Swedish life that she was almost ready to run off with a man old enough to be her father, a pirate to boot, and follow his wild existence? ‘Concerning the later destine of Maria,’ says Rydberg, ‘we have unfortunately nothing edifying to relate’ [398]. She enters into a relationship with another senior Swedish politician, Count Gustaf Banér, even though ‘his wife was yet living’, although fortunately for her the wife is so outraged by her husband’s adultery that ‘she died shortly after of grief’. So that’s Maria. The persecution of witches continued, ‘for several years’, and Bishop Suenonius, who survived his sword-thrust from Adolf, was at the head of it — though Rydberg adds a rider: the stress of all this on Suenonius’s weak mental constitution was so intense that he ended his days in a lunatic asylum. The rest of the cast sail away from Sweden to start a new life in America. One presumes Adolf marries Erin, but Rydberg isn’t clear on this.

It is, taken altogether, a strange, rather garbled novel. Readable, in a fevered, gnashing, mad sort of way, but not very coherent. Partly this is because Rydberg has tried to mash together, like Jeff Goldblum and the fly going into the matter transporter and coming out in a gush of steam, radically different kinds of novel: a historical novel about the political situation in Sweden after the death of King Charles X; an adventure story of maritime derring-do, pirates and sailing ships; a novel about the late Renaissance craze for alchemy; a novel about the Swedish Witch Craze of 1676. These things do not go easily together, and what we have here is a mishmash.

Rydberg has a repeated tick, whereby the narrator describes this or that character than says: ‘of course they’re all dead now’ — ‘The plough for many seasons has turned the ground which served as the courtyard of Sjövik’ [1], ‘ the aristocratic country seat of Drake family [is] now a farm … only some heaps of brick mixed with gravel now remain to mark the place where stood the grand manor house erected with the spoils of the Thirty Years War’ and so on. Several characters are given monologues about the implacability of destiny, the overpowering force of necessity, the impossibility of choice and free-will. At the same time, the plot bounces crazily around like a ball-bearing in a pinball machine, and characters act in ways that seem radically underdetermined, not to say incoherent: why does Adolf, who has acted throughout the novel with a rather priggish rectitude and profound sense of personal honour suddenly, on getting out of jail (free), decide to throw in his lot with Drake and become a pirate? Why does Maria, who is wealthy, and has her choice of eligible men, agree to Drake’s mad proposal that she run away with him? What is all the alchemy stuff doing here? What has it got to do with anything? Rydberg’s novel is a goulash, a stew of all manner of things, stirred by the implicit philosophy of history that says: it’s all a crazy, spicy mixture of stuff, the past.