The Life and Death, and Life of William Mackay

This essay traces my dedication, over two decades, to reconstructing the life of Captain William Mackay of the (English) East India Company. Mackay was second officer on an unseaworthy country ship, the Juno, which was wrecked in the Bay of Bengal in 1795. The ship did not sink entirely—the teak cargo in her hold was sufficiently buoyant to keep sections of the upper deck just above the waterline. The seventy-two crew members and passengers, after the main mast was cut down to lighten the ship, climbed into the rigging of the fore and mizzen masts. Only fourteen people survived their exposure to the elements for twenty-three days before the ship, serendipitously, washed up on the Arakan (Burmese) coast. My essay develops this uncanny situation as an extended metaphor for the task of reclaiming and memorialising the life of William Mackay, but also considers my own, perhaps pathological, attachment to his narrative.