In 1821, while Byron and Shelley briefly shared what they high-mindedly called an ‘artist’s colony’ in Pisa, along with Mary Shelley and Byron’s current squeeze Contessa Teresa Guiccioli, they both impulsively decided to commission the building of boats in order to explore the gulf of La Spezia. While Shelley, in deference to his friend, named his Don Juan (the boat in which he would perish, aged 29, the following year), Byron christened his The Bolivar,in honour of Simon Bolivar, who was then attempting to liberate South America from the Spanish.
No stranger to noble causes, Byron would eventually go off to support the Greek War of Independence, dying ignominiously, aged 36, just two years after Shelley. Hugh Thomson invites us to imagine what might have happened had he decided to fight for Bolivar instead.
We first meet Byron two years earlier, as a jaded wreck in Ravenna with Teresa by his side – a man who has, according to a review in Blackwood’s, ‘exhausted every species of sensual gratification’. Burning for adventure, he wants a life of action, to ‘prove that a poet could be a soldier’. Writing to his great friend John Cam Hobhouse (an epistolary device Thomson uses well to give us both a flavour of Byron’s style as well as forwarding the plot), he announces he is to sail across the Atlantic, accompanied by Teresa, his Cambridge comrade William John Bankes, his trusty valet Fletcher and his four-year-old daughter Allegra by Claire Clairmont (whom he leaves behind). The latter is a poignant touch, as in real life Allegra would die of typhus after Byron abandoned her to a convent.
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