It should not be supposed that Benj. H. Nute vanished from history after his ordeal, as recounted in A Narrative Of The Shipwreck, Captivity And Sufferings Of Horace Holden And Benj. H. Nute; Who Were Cast Away In The American Ship Mentor, On The Pelew Islands, In The Year 1832; And For Two Years Afterwards Were Subjected To Unheard Of Sufferings Among The Barbarous Inhabitants Of Lord North’s Island by Henry Holden (1836). We know, from that book, that Nute never reconciled himself to the fashion of going without clothes, that he was intrepid, that, among the barbarous savages, he went by the name of Rollo, and that he was concealed for some time under some mats at the Tahboo, a place of public resort. Henry Holden tells us nothing more about his companion, and if it were not for the indefatigable research skills of Eben. J. Hunt, that would be that. But now, in a magisterial piece of literary-historical detective work, Mr Hunt has followed the traces of Benj. H. Nute through evidence scattered in all sorts of unlikely source materials.

Hunt’s first inkling that Benj. H. Nute had an afterlife beyond his maroonment came by happy accident, when, skim-reading a forgotten 1854 novella by Mrs Lascelles Spivack entitled The Mats Of The Tahboo, he stumbled upon this passage:

I ran away from the colony of giant walruses as fast as I could, towards the Tahboo, intending to hide under one of the mats. Imagine my surprise to find a man without clothes already concealed there. “Ssshh!” he hissed, “My name is Rollo and I am intrepid. I don’t suppose you have with you any clothing with which I could cover my shameful nakedness?”

The narrator hands Rollo some kind of velveteen tunic, and scampers away towards further adventures.

Hunt’s second inkling that Benj. H. Nute had an afterlife beyond his maroonment came by happy accident, when, skim-reading a forgotten 1862 chapbook by Ogden Spray entitled Character Sketches Of Intrepid Men Named Rollo, he stumbled upon this passage:

It would be remiss of me not to include in this exciting chapbook at least a passing mention of the mysterious figure named Rollo who, reluctantly without clothing, hid under a mat in the public resort known as the Tahboo. Like the other personages whose deeds and adventures I have chronicled in these pages, his abiding characteristic was his intrepidity.

Hunt’s third inkling that Benj. H. Nute had an afterlife beyond his maroonment came by happy accident, when, skim-reading a forgotten 1867 Bildungsroman by Kenilworth Blavatsky entitled The Invention Of Greaseproof Paper, he stumbled upon this passage:

As soon as I had invented greaseproof paper, I embarked upon a sea voyage, enlisting as a harpoonist on the HMS Tahboo. Well do I remember how, one night, as we narrowly averted a lethal collision with an iceberg, I found a stowaway hiding under a mat. His name was Rollo, and despite the Arctic cold, he was entirely without clothing. I dragged him from under the mat and tossed him overboard. The last I saw of him, he was clinging to the iceberg. He struck me as a very intrepid fellow, and I had no doubt that he would find a way out of the pickle I had put him in.

And it seems he did, for Hunt’s fourth inkling that Benj. H. Nute had an afterlife beyond his maroonment came by happy accident, when, skim-reading a forgotten 1875 children’s primer by Constance Pulp entitled Ipsy-Dipsy And The Ploppy Pigs, he stumbled upon this passage:

See Ipsy-Dipsy raise the flag of Empire over the swamp. See the swamp bubble and froth. See Ipsy-Dipsy quail in fear.

Ipsy-Dipsy drops the flag. Ipsy-Dipsy runs. Run, Ipsy-Dipsy, run!

Ipsy-Dipsy hides under the Tahboo mat. Ipsy-Dipsy hears grunting. Is it the Ploppy Pigs? No. It is grunting Rollo. Rollo grunts. Rollo is intrepid. Rollo has no clothes on. Ipsy-Dipsy smacks Rollo on the head and runs away. Ipsy-Dipsy hides under a different Tahboo mat.

At this point, the trail seemed to run cold. Benj. H. Nute did indeed seem to vanish from the record, all the more tantalisingly, since a new fact – his grunting – had emerged. But Hunt did not give up the pursuit, and was eventually rewarded with a fifth inkling, from a modern source, a so-called “weblog” run by the Swiss sage Alain De Botton. Skim-reading it on his iBotton, Hunt stumbled upon this passage:

What had seemed like passion from afar was revealed at closer range to be unusual devastation. She was shaking with sorrowful disbelief, he was cradling her in his arms, stroking her short blonde hair, in which a hairclip in the shape of a tulip had been fastened. Repeatedly, they would look into each other’s eyes. He, Rollo, intrepid and naked, who only recently had been forced to hide under a mat in the public resort of Tahboo, and she, Rolloette, his soul-mate!

Five inklings would have been enough for a weedy milksop researcher, but Eben. J. Hunt is tough and uncompromising, and he was not satisfied until he had a further dozen inklings under his belt, gleaned from the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. Only then did he set to work in earnest on the book which, as I have already said, is magisterial. The more Hunt looked for Benj. H. Nute, the more he found, including, to his astonishment and joy, several passages where Nute went by his own name, where he wore a dashing suit of the finest linen, where he was uncharacteristically trepid and where, rather than hiding under a mat in Tahboo, he hung one from a line strung between two trees in the Tahboo and beat it savagely with a carpet-beater.

What we have, gathered in this work which I shall once again call magisterial, are glimpses of a man who, once marooned among barbarous islanders, survived to leave his mark on almost two hundred years of history. He continues to haunt us, if we will let him.

Any account of Aesop’s foibles is necessarily hampered by the fact that we know so very little about him. Indeed, it is not certain that he ever actually existed. Assuming, for the moment, that he did exist, and made up at least some of the stories attributed to him, we could advance the idea that it is a peculiar foible to bang on about animals having the powers of human speech and reason. It is the sort of conceit a writer might use once or twice, for a particular artistic purpose, but to keep returning to it again and again indicates a low-level mania we could describe as a foible. Then there is Plutarch’s story that Aesop was convicted of theft from a temple and subsequently thrown off a cliff. Charitably, we could say that petty larceny, such as stealing a bitty-bob from a place of worship, is better described as a foible than as the character flaw of the habitual criminal, as revealed by phrenology. But these are slim pickings, and until we are able to discover more about the historical Aesop, we have no basis upon which to impute further foibles to him.

I had intended, today, to give you precise instructions for the wiring up of that galvanic battery to the brain inside the graceful head of the swan, but do you know what? I had no idea just how fiddly and complicated a process it was going to be! I am no butterfingers, but lawks-a-mercy, guvnor!, I botched it up good and proper.

With hindsight, I ought to have spotted the telltale clue that Washington Irving, or rather his spirit-form, was talking twaddle all along. It was the ethereal shade of Irving, you will recall, who mentioned the galvanic battery in the head of the swan in the mystic communication from the Beyond he dictated to Henry J Horn in 1871. But read it again, carefully. He writes of “a galvanic battery in the graceful swan-head”. I missed it on a casual reading, and perhaps you did too. It is not the head of a swan that is graceful, but its neck. A certain gracefulness is imparted to the swan’s head by dint of it being perched atop the indubitably graceful neck, but the head by itself is far from graceful. In fact, it is savage and menacing. You can see this for yourself by the simple expedient of looking at a swan’s head in isolation from the graceful swan-neck to which it is usually attached. I am not of course suggesting for a moment that you hike over to the nearest pond or canal armed with a razor-sharp cleaver and start beheading any swans you might find gliding gracefully across the water. There are laws against such behaviour, and rightly so, or where would we be but in a state of anarchy littered with the severed heads of swans, their bloodied corpses staining our ponds and canals red with swan-gore? No, all you need do to grasp my point is to take a cardboard swan and snip off the head with a hefty pair of scissors. Toss the body, and neck, on to a pyre, and make a careful study of the detached head. Where, I ask you, where is the grace? I think you will find that what grace there was lay in the curvature of the neck, the cardboard neck now turning to ashes in the blaze.

If we assume that Henry J Horn made an accurate transcription of the spirit-witterings of Washington Irving, we must conclude that the author of A History of New-York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, by Diedrich Knickerbocker (1809) didn’t know his swans from his starlings, at least not after he had passed from his earthly domain into the Elysian Fields. Perhaps, in his translucent shimmering ghostly form, he forgot what a swan was, exactly? That is possible, for which of us can say with certainty that we will retain our ornithological wisdom beyond the grave? But before we chuck brickbats at the dead Washington Irving, there is another possibility we can consider. Given that he was communicating from what he calls “the spirit world”, could it be that the swan-head into which the galvanic battery was implanted was the head, not of a swan, but of a spirit-swan? It may well be that spirit-swans have graceful heads as well as graceful necks. Alas, we cannot put this theory to the test, for just as we are in no position to go around beheading spirit-swans, nor do we have the means to make one out of cardboard, so far as I am aware. If you know any different, please let me know.

Whether or not we give Washington Irving in spirit form the benefit of the doubt, it remains the fact that wiring up the galvanic battery to the swan’s brain proved far too complicated for me. In mitigation, remember that I was working against the clock. Though the serum with which the swan had been injected was a powerful one, it had to wake from its coma at some point, and I did not want to find myself rummaging around in its head, tugging at wires and at bits of its brain, when it regained consciousness. Do you have any idea how implacable can be the ferocity of a swan, even in circumstances less likely to provoke its cygnate wrath?

So I am afraid it is back to the drawing-board. We have successfully inserted a galvanic battery in a swan’s not remotely graceful head, lodged against its brain, but a fat lot of good that will do us if we cannot connect them up. I am currently investigating possible wireless methods, and will let you know as soon as I have something further to report.