Hester Pulter’s forty-third emblem takes the “stately ship” as its central image to reflect upon the futility of pride. The poem opens with a particular ship, the vessel carrying Aeneas from the Trojan war. Juno’s storms, as Virgil relates, waylay Aeneas’s ship until Neptune quells them to help his great-nephew. Although the poem includes this detail, the speaker connects the ensuing calm sailing conditions with witchcraft, speculating that “Elfin Lapland hags” had bagged the winds. Such supernatural interference reminds the speaker of the storms, blamed on North Berwick “witches,” that endangered King James’s ships on his voyage from Scotland to retrieve Anna of Denmark. The speaker then relates how the ship with which the poem opened inexplicably stalls. “Julius” dives from the ship to discover the cause of the delay – a remora stuck to the ship’s keel. This “Julius” corresponds to the “Caesar” named at the outset as the ship’s passenger, even though the reference to Neptune acting “for his lovely niece’s sake” initially identifies “Caesar” as Aeneas, Julius’s ancestor (4-5). The detail of diving to find the remora, moreover, echoes an account in Pliny that does not name either Caesar. Pliny, the Elder, The Historie of the World: Commonly Called, the Naturall Historie of C. Plinius Secundus, trans. Philemon Holland (London, 1634), Book 32, ch. 1, p. 426, STC (2nd ed.) 20030.
The emblem’s moral about pride is not politically neutral. The epithet “stately” denotes a ship’s grandeur and elegance, OED, s.v. “stately, adj.,” senses 1.a, 4.a, and 7, Sept. 2024.
OED, s.v. “stately, adj.,” sense 2.
King James Bible, Proverbs 16:18-19.
In addition to its topical political resonance, Pulter’s complex treatment of pride is gender-inflected, as were conceptualizations of pride in seventeenth-century England. Familiar exemplars of sinful pride certainly included male figures, such as Lucifer, Hamon in this emblem, or Phaeton and Icarus in Pulter’s On the Fall of that Grand Rebel the Earl of Essex’s Effigies in Harry the 7th’s Chapel in Westminster Abbey [Poem 62], but as an abstract concept, pride was usually feminized (see the curation “Feminized Pride”). The image of a ship in sail fits well with typical visualizations of pride as a swelling or puffing up, For examples of pride as a puffing up or swelling, see William Gearing, The Arraignment of Pride (London, 1660) B3v and Richard Hooker, A Learned Sermon of the Nature of Pride (Oxford, 1612), 8, 12 STC/1026:04.
“Proud tyrant” Periander’s destructive vengeance as bereft father presents a counterpoint to a theme of motherhood underlying the stately ship’s pride. Diction evocative of pregnancy is present in the description of the stately ship as “Proud of her carriage … / For Caesar and his fortunes she did bear.” “Miscarriage” circulated from at least 1615 as a term for a lost pregnancy, and “bear” could mean to carry offspring in the womb in addition to carrying or transporting someone or something from one place to another. OED, s.v., “carriage, n.,” senses I.1, II, and IV, Sept. 2024.
we have laughed to see the sails conceive
And grow big-bellied with the wanton wind,
Which she, with pretty and with swimming gait
Following (her womb then rich with my young squire),
Would imitate, and sail up on the land
To fetch me trifles and return again,
As from a voyage rich with merchandise.
The “halcyon” picks up on the connotations of motherhood in the language describing the stately ship’s pride, for the “halcyon, too, her young had new disclosed” (10). With the word “too,” the speaker ostensibly points out that the mythical seabird’s calming influence over the sea is present in addition to Neptune’s power stilling the winds, but “too” could also connect the halcyon to the stately ship: like the ship bearing a precious passenger, the seabird has her vulnerable young in tow.7
If motherhood is a thematic undercurrent in Pulter’s emblem on pride, it extends to the remora that immobilizes the stately ship. The meaning of the word “remora” in Latin is “delay.” “Many early modern texts” refer to the remora or echeneis, a creature that “allegedly fastened itself to boats, thus impeding or halting their movement,” as Aylin Malcolm explains in the Deep Ecologies Curation to Pulter’s Universal Dissolution, Made When I Was with Child, of my 15th Child, my Son, John, I Being, Everyone Thought, in a Consumption, 1648 [Poem 6] Malcolm’s Curation includes an excerpt from Holland’s translation of Pliny that attributes “Mark Antony’s failure at the Battle of Actium, and thus the end of the Roman Republic, to the echeneis,” a context relevant to the remora’s halting of the ship of state in Pulter’s emblem insofar as it signifies a change of political regime. A little further on from this passage, though, Pliny relates the remora’s “medicinal properties” according to various “Greek writers”: if a woman have it fastened either about her neck, arme, or otherwise, she shal go out her full time if she were with child: also, that it will reduce her matrice into the right place, if it were too loose and ready to hang out of her body. Others again report the contrary, namely, That if it be kept in salt and bound to any part of a woman great with child and in paine of hard travel, it will cause her to have present deliverance.
The remora’s medicinal association with childbirth reinforces the thematic connection between the stately ship’s pride in her passenger and a mother’s pride in the child she carries or has carried. Although the remora was thought to hinder ships but aid in childbirth, in both cases it underscores the precarity of the source of pride. This very precarity, with the wellbeing of infant or passenger subject to the influence of something as little and inexplicable as the remora, makes this female-gendered pride just as futile as (if more forgivable than) the pride of Periander and others the poem cites as examples.
Like the remora, the witches to which the speaker refers perhaps function as an unpredictable and mysterious force capable of taking down pride. The speaker first mentions witches to elaborate on the calm sailing conditions with “all but one trade wind … reposed”: “I verily think some Elfin Lapland hags / Had put the one and thirty winds in bags” (11-13). Here, the speaker imagines that witches must have produced such calm by containing the winds. “Folklore had it,” as Knight and Wall relate, “that witches (‘hags’) from the region of Finland would sell wind to mariners.” Knight and Wall, “The Stately Ship” (Elemental Edition), note to “elfin Lapland hags.”
Retha M. Warnicke, “Lawrence Normand and Gareth Roberts, eds., Witchcraft in Early Modern Scotland, James VI’s Demonology and the North Berwick Witches,” Renaissance Quarterly 55.1 (2002): 347-8, reports that the North Berwick witch trials accused people of having delayed Anna from arriving in England, while other accounts, including Terry Stewart, “North Berwick Witch Trials,” Historic UK https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofScotland/North-Berwick-Witch-Trials/, relate that James blamed North Berwick villagers for imperilling his own ships when he went to retrieve Anna. A 1591 publication, News from Scotland, declaring the damnable life and death of Doctor Fian (London, 1591), STC (2nd ed.) 10841 a., no page numbers, reports that Agnis Tompson, a villager accused of witchcraft, “confessed” that she and others caused a “tempest” that was responsible for the “perishing of a Boate or vessell coming over from the towne of Brunt Iland to the towne of Lieth, wherein was sundrye jewelles and riche giftes, which should have been presented to the now Queen of Scotland, at her Majesties coming to Lieth.” She also confessed that the same witchcraft “was the cause that the Kinges Majesties Ship at his coming foorth of Denmarke, had a contrary winde to the rest of the his Ships.”
Structurally, the poem evokes a pictorial emblem comprising an illustration, motto, and reflection. The first thirty lines establish the shifting scene of the stately ship first riding the “curling billows” and then at a standstill with a remora stuck to its keel. The ensuing declaration, “By this we see how poor a thing will stop / Man’s proud designs,” signals a turn to reflection upon the meaning of the stately ship’s remora-halted voyage. Four comparable examples guide this reflection – two biblical, one historical, and one mythical, an assortment that, as with the merging of history and myth at the poem’s beginning, gestures to the universality of the moral message. Readers are reminded of individuals who, in the “height of pride” (37), encountered something small that laid them low. For Hamon it was a “stiff knee;” for Herod Agrippa, a worm; for “Pope Alexander,” a fly; and for Creusa, a garment. The final couplet could serve as an emblem motto: “Then let us all move humble in our sphere, / And then no remora we need to fear” (39-40). The poem is written in iambic pentameter rhyming couplets, with the exception of the above-cited line at which the poem turns from the stately ship to consider its meaning. Here, poetic form mirrors content with the only line that does not form half a rhyming couplet: “By this we see how poor a thing will stop” (31). So “poor a thing” as the word “stop” (or the lack of a word to rhyme with “stop” in the next line) disrupts the poet’s overall “design” of rhyming couplets, with “stop,” remora-like, also halting the poetic description of the ship. Pulter’s enactment, through poetic form, of the emblem’s message is self-reflective, including her own poetic art among “man’s proud designs,” while also rewarding close engagement with her writing.
— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
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