'Sard Harker' by John Masefield: A Guest Post by Henry Wessells

The year is 1897. A sailor ashore in one of the sugar countries of leeward South America that had experienced a civil war a decade earlier. Chisholm Harker, known as Sard (for ‘sardonic’), is a straight-edge first officer on a British sailing ship, who accompanies his Captain for a day’s leisure in Las Palomas before the Pathfinder sails. They attend a boxing match that descends into foul fighting and crooked refereeing. Harker has served under Captain Cary since he went to sea at thirteen, and has risen to hold a position of trust, so when they overhear talk suggesting that there is a plot to kidnap an Englishwoman resident in the port city, Harker is despatched to warn her brother before rejoining the ship.

He borrows a bicycle, delivers the message to Mr. Kingsborough at his residence, Los Xicales. Harker catches a glimpse of the sister and at a phrase of her conversation, ‘her voice rang in his brain like a memory’, but the brother swiftly dismisses him and seems to pay little heed to the warning. The borrowed bicycle is stolen, and the novel steps boldly into the terrain of romantic adventure: a paradise of metaphor and simile.

Sard Harker, by poet John Masefield, published by Heinemann in October 1924, is set in Santa Barbara, ‘an imaginary country on the north-east coast of South America, a tinpot Ruritania run by dictators and financed by the United Sugar Company’ (as John Clute has noted in The Book Blinders). It is in the great tradition of exotic English adventure in South America, W.H. Hudson’s first book, The Purple Land (1885), and his Green Mansions, published in 1904, the same year as Joseph Conrad’s novel of political intrigue Nostromo. John Buchan’s The Courts of the Morning (1929) is another interwar entry in the tradition. Even more than with the works of Buchan, Sard Harker is closely adjacent to the fantastic. Trying to take a short-cut to get back to his ship, Harker steps upon a sting-ray and receives a full dose of its sting.  He writhes in agony on the beach:

'The poison seemed to swing him round and double him up. It seemed to burn every vein and shrivel every muscle and make every nerve a message of agony. He managed to cast loose the wrapping from the foot. The foot no longer looked like a foot, but like something that would burst. In his deadly sickness he thought that his foot was a pollard willow tree growing to the left of the road.  [. . .] When he came to himself a little, he said something about the stars being too many, altogether too many, for the job in hand. He said that he could not pick up the guiding lights. Then he felt that every star was a steamer’s masthead light, and that all those myriads of steamers were bearing down upon him without sidelights.'

In early passages of the novel, Masefield sketches the history of Santa Barbara and the revolution of 1887, of Harker’s childhood and early maritime career, and plants the deep roots of coincidences that will unfold years later. The cast of characters includes dodgy ministers, crooked detectives, warm-hearted old salts, a dirty, beautiful woman in a shack on a beach, snakes both human and reptile, murderous villagers, kindly wives, and vultures. When Harker explains the meaning of his name to the beauty in the shack, ‘one who listens’, she muses about what people listen for: ‘“The sea wind in the heat,” she said thoughtfully, “and the crowing of the cock in the night of pain; and, in life, the footstep of the beloved who never comes; or when he does come, goes on the instant.”’ She asks him what he listens for. All he will say is, ‘A change of wind, perhaps. Adios.’

Harker falls among evil companions who put him on a freight train to nowhere, into a desert mining town where he only just escapes a firing squad and heads for the hills. The landscape is harsh and ancient and impossibly beautiful. Harker crosses mountains upon mountains, hears a dead friend speaking to him in dreams, and then hears the rocks speaking and winds singing. It is the South America of abandoned villages and mysterious temples, a land of adventure and visions, and wild honey. As he attempts to cross the snowfields, the boundary between dream and waking is fluid, for the figurehead of the Pathfinder appears to him in a dream. She guides him across the glacier and disappears as he finds another tomb and then the trail down to another port town, San Agostino. Masefield specifies that his trek lasted nineteen days. Harker has returned to the workaday world: a fellow officer hails him and asks, “Could you take the Yuba to Santa Barbara?”

And upon arrival in the capital port, Harker is thrust back into political intrigue and high Gothic coincidence and confrontation. Captain Cary has died of a fever and after his burial at sea, the Pathfinder has gone upon the rocks: ‘the day after he goes, the sea smashes all that ever he made, as though it were nothing.’ Harker meets his long-lost childhood love, and is imprisoned with her by a devilish false priest, who ‘now wore a scarlet robe wrought with symbols, which gave him the appearance of a cardinal of the Middle Ages.’

With his prisoners before him, the former Father Garsinton, self-styled Holy One, Sagrado, ‘sat still for a moment upon his throne. Once again Sard had the impression that something evil flowed into the man to make him bigger: he seemed to dilate and glow with an increase of personality.’

It is, perhaps the oldest convention in the fantastic, that the evil villain is powerless not to expound to the helpless, intended victims; and thereby chronicle his own doom, and permit the survival — against all odds — of the innocent. This is solely the province of literature. The bombs fell without warning in Dresden or Tokyo or Gaza or Beirut or . . . The other thing the Gothic teaches us from its beginnings is that psychological horror is the fiercest of all: horrors inflicted by one human being upon another. The supernatural is by definition outside the realm of human experience, and its intrusion into the world is (as Wendy Walker has suggested) the literary expression of profound injustices, which upon examination, are rooted in laws made to protect owners at the expense of the dispossessed.

John Masefield (1878-1967) was trained as an officer in the merchant marine service and went to sea at sixteen, sailing on the four-master Gilcruix round Cape Horn to Chile. It is reported that despite his love of the sea he was an indifferent sailor and was eventually shipped home ‘distressed British seaman’. Harker’s nautical attitudes seem deeply rooted and carefully observed from within. Masefield jumped ship in New York and travelled in the U.S., working for a time in Yonkers and reading the great English poets. He returned to England for good in 1897, and  soon made his name as a poet, beginning with Salt-Water Ballads (1902). Masefield was named poet laureate in 1930 but his manner remained ‘simple and unaffected … He took special pleasure in helping younger writers’ (ODNB). In person, he was tall and blue-eyed, with 'an expression of perpetual surprise' (Muriel Spark). 

Sard Harker was the first of three novels by John Masefield set in the country of Santa Barbara. ODTAA (1926) looks at the history of Santa Barbara before the events of Sard Harker and is as episodic as its title suggests: ‘one damned thing after another’; The Taking of the Gry (1934) is a further return to the land.  

I read Sard Harker in a copy of the deluxe issue (one of 350 copies signed by the author), that had remained unopened after page 20, so I felt a bit like someone coming into an abandoned house. I opened the pages, and read the novel with delight. The central chronicle of Harker’s inland travels is startling and vivid and richly imagined. I have given only the barest outlines of the book and the pleasure is all in the reading. It’s not Nostromo but the adventure is as gripping as anything written in the 1920s.

Dust jacket of Sard Harker (London: William Heinemann, 1924), courtesy of James Cummins Bookseller, New York City. ODTAA map from the deluxe edition, private collection of Henry Wessells.