“His scars were his only medals”—Israel Potter, American hero

You will notice that Israel Potter is one of these characters who, by pure happenstance and dumb luck, participated in some key historical events. He fought the British at Bunker Hill, heard John Paul Jones proclaim he had not yet begun to fight the Serapis, smuggled secrets to Benjamin Franklin in Paris’s Latin Quarter, and convinced an English king that he was, at least, an honest rebel.

Throughout all this he proclaims a love for the land of his nativity, hardly yet a nation or a country—and a place he has never yet lived since its independence. But American he is, as apple pie—or at least, as hunters, trappers, farmers, and whalers.

But he has hardly an inkling of the events that actually go on around him. He heads to Boston to fight only after he’s finished plowing his field. He ends up a sailor on an American fighting ship simply because he’s been to sea before. He finds himself smuggling intelligence but never cares to find out what it is. He has no idea what Benjamin Franklin is doing in Paris, nor who John Paul Jones is at all until that man makes his fame and import very clear. When actually adventuring with Jones, Israel still has no idea how this fits into the larger picture of the war; after all, Jones is simply plying around the British Isles, harrying the coasts and dependent entirely on favorable winds and chance. None of these activities are placed within the context of the Revolution, which, as a larger historical event, doesn’t seem to particularly concern Israel.

He’s most concerned with it ending, so he can get home—he can’t sail from England otherwise. By the time he can, he has other ties to England, and remains there for many more years. Again, he only experiences the meaning of wars in his localized way: the Napoleonic conflict is important only insofar as its beginning removes soldiers from England’s shores, driving up the price of labor, while its end does the opposite, reducing Israel to poverty once more.

This haphazardness takes an adventure novel that superficially seems an exercise in American myth-making and turns that on its head. These adventures of Israel, his myths, lose the historical context that should give them power. Israel’s sad ending is of a piece with a kind of cynicism that presents the events of war as glorious and entertaining but ultimately less meaningful than one might want to make them.