An Interesting Keats footnote. . . .

An interesting footnote in the life of John Keats occurred when he arrived in Italy on his forced, health-motivated, exile. Keats was dying from Consumption and in the fall of 1820, accompanied by his friend and painter Joseph Severn, he departed England on a ship called the “Maria Crowther” on the way to Naples. ‘Maria Crowther’ was by no means a luxurious passenger vessel, but was a merchant brigantine with a small number of berths for travelers. After an exhausting thirty-four day journey, they arrived in Naples and were immediately put into quarantine. Such quarantine was standard practice at the time and though the ten days of isolation on the ship, with the tantalizing view of the Italian coast so close at hand, would be hot and difficult, it was not unexpected.

When the ship weighed anchor in the Naples Harbor a British Navy lieutenant and six seamen from an English Man-o-war rowed over to the ‘Maria Crowther’ to inquire after the ship’s statue. However, for reasons that seem to be a mystery, the junior officer and his small group of seamen made the mistake of boarding the ship, making them subject to the rule of quarantine, and so they were stuck on the ship for the ten days. Because some naval captains were meticulous about details, it might, with some intense research, be possible to actually find out who these seven soldiers were but as far as I know now they are simply seven anonymous men who lived out their humble lives and probably all passed away well over a hundred years ago.

But the story of these men having to unexpectedly spend ten days about a merchant vessel strikes me as a compelling story. I can’t help wonder if the lieutenant got in trouble for his error. Did he spend those ten days brooding and fretting about his mistake? If he did, it seems so strange to think that all this worrying, along with the young man’s life has now vanished into the universal ether. I wonder if any of these seamen talked to Keats or one of the other three or four passengers. What would they have made of Keats and Severn, two middle-class artists in a foreign land?

Of course, we will never know the answers to these questions because they are lost in time. But they are certainly the kind of facts that fire the imagination. It is the kind of by-road of literary history that strikes me as fertile ground of human fancy.