JOEL GRIFFETT

Picture this: you’re Richard Trevithick. You’ve just spent 11 years in South America, in search of your very own El Dorado – a huge fortune buried beneath the ground in the form of gold, silver or even copper. You’ve failed. You still can’t speak a word of Spanish. You’ve lost everything but the clothes you stand in and a couple of prized engineering instruments. Somehow, you manage to get aboard a ship bound for Falmouth and you wonder what your family and friends will think when you reappear one day out of the blue.

What’s the best thing to do in this situation? Pretend you’ve only been gone a night. That’s what Trevithick did. He slipped back into family life without a word. Wife Jane was living it up by the coast at Hayle and he hasn’t even met his youngest son, whom Jane gave birth to after he departed for Lima.

There must have been an element of guilt in his return. Two-time MP and his long-standing friend Davies Gilbert wrote him a letter all but begging for Trevithick to return for his family’s sake at least. Gilbert described him as

‘the same, honest, thoughtless and careless man I always knew’

But the undertone was ‘come home now Dick, you’re taking the piss. Your children have grown up and your wife is an old woman. Give it up my beauty.’  

He obliged, eventually. Coming back empty handed worked in his favour, because he never sent a letter home. He could have done anything in those 11 years. Fragments of letters survived, ones where his name was mentioned and presumably passed on to his wife, now the landlady at an inn in Hayle. What little she knew was vague at best. Time to work some magic, time to write my own legend, thinks Trevithick. No one needs to know of his failure to find El Dorado when he can dazzle them with endless stories of adventure, bravery, death and deception.

It was serendipitous. Second youngest child Francis was obsessed by his father’s disappearance and infatuated with the notion of setting sail round the Cape Horn in search of his dad. He was barely a teenager at this point and no doting mother would let a young lad disappear on his own. What if he never came back, just like his father. When Trevithick returned Francis was 15. In his son he had the perfect (captive) audience. Francis would sit transfixed by his aging yet sun-bronzed father as he told him of Simon Bolivar and civil war ravaging his mine workings in Peru, of jungle trekking through Costa Rica with a future president of the country and sailing his very own brig, Devan, up and down the pacific coast.

These stories would dazzle anyone even now. Imagine how they went down with the hard working, heavy drinking townsfolk all across Cornwall.

Perpetuate the legend of your father

Who better to carry forth the torch than your own flesh and blood? No one would dare question the veracity of Trevithick’s very own son, well placed to sit like a sponge and absorb all the information he could; to listen to story after story without ever tiring of this far away land of danger and riches.

In many ways, Trevithick was a mystic, far too advanced for his own time. He was envisioning railways across the Andes 40 or 50 years before the first tracks were laid. He was petitioning for iron tanks aboard ships long before the Admiralty had ever considered it. He built his own diving bell to fish for pearls and re-floated sunken ships with the very same iron tanks no one had any interest in. An innovator so transfixed by the future that he was essentially living in it, much to the confusion of those around him. By the end of his life he must have known this and after he failed to find El Dorado he finally decided someone needed to carry on his legacy for generations to come. He had to look no further than his own son, who was literally the future, of progress and of the Trevithick name.

All he had to do was share his stories with young Francis and hope that once he left this world his stories would endure, into the 20^th century and beyond. He succeeded; without his work far less would be known about his father and I wouldn’t currently be sat at a desk in a coworking space in Santiago writing about the pair of them.

Perhaps it is odd that a teenage boy was so obsessed with his own father rather than standard teenage boy activities like fighting or furious masturbation. Perhaps he balanced the two with aplomb (I hope the activities never overlapped). But this was perfect for Trevithick. His actual legacy and the legacy he had the final say in was to be immortalised, almost 40 years after his death into the first and most comprehensive account of his life: Life of Richard Trevithick (1872).

It is clear that even this long after his death, Francis’ respect, pride and love for his father is evident. He could do no wrong and he stopped at nothing to further embellish the well embellished stories of his father, rendering him a swashbuckling adventurer like Gulliver as well as an innovative engineer. There were bound to be large gaps in his memory, this is natural some 40 or 50 years after the events took place and in perpetuating the legacy of his father he did a fine job, taking the storyteller’s prerogative wherever it was necessary.

Does a good story need to be historically accurate?

From birth we are force fed logic and reason like geese being fattened up for foie gras and this causes us to overlook the mythical and mystical elements of our reality. We dismiss them as falsities, for our rampant search for the truth will leave no stone unturned. This is the scientific method; a definitive answer for every question; the belief that every question actually needs answering. The historian in me agrees with this sentiment but my soul wants to resist, for why should we bust every single myth and demystify the entire world, just because we can?

If I wanted to turn back time and return to my history degree, I might have wanted to undertake this project on an academic basis. I would certainly run into some problems. A lot of Trevithick’s legacy and the subsequent perpetuation of it is far from what a historian would call ‘accurate’ or ‘reliable’ and using Francis Trevithick’s book as a primary or even secondary source would require me to criticise it at length. The second problem is that there are precious few other resources available to find out about this 11-year period of his life, because most of it went directly into his son’s mind and affected every future book about him whether the author wished it or not. 

History is written by anyone with the power to tell it. On a grander scale, this is usually the victor, but on an individual basis, simply whomever is alive to tell the story. Naturally, if you’re in control of the narrative you’re going to omit most of the things that make you look bad and exaggerate the bits that make you look good. This is why history is or should be a constant revaluation of the available material and the search for new evidence, because most of the people in control of the narrative are self-serving. But I know and you know, we’d all do the same given the chance.

Fact and fiction blur together everywhere we look. If you tell a lie enough times it becomes the truth and a good story is a good story, regardless of whether it is ‘true’ or not. Who is to say, in the age of endless information, rolling news cycles and a constant power shift that tries to swing the agenda one way then another that anything is true? Are we even real? Is this reality an illusion we have fabricated and subsequently convinced ourselves is all there is on this earth?

I’ve been pondering for months: whether to take an academic or a slightly mystical approach to this blog and the trip in general. It is perhaps fitting that Trevithick returned from this, the continent home to almost every hallucinogenic plant known to man, the birthplace of magical realism and ancient cultures with enduring mystical perception, with his very own sense of how reality played out between 1816 and 1827.

And then I remembered an old bit of Cornish slang that sums it up perfectly.

Truth or myth…matter do ee?

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