"Tobias who?" I seemed to hear some readers mutter yesterday at the mention Tobias Smollett's notions about Davy Jones. Smollett is little heard of nowadays, and few of us are familiar with The Faithful Narrative of Habbakkuk Hilding or have thrilled to the adventures of the eponymous Humphry Clinker in another of his books. Yet Smollett was a popular and always controversial novelist in his time - which was of course the middle of 18th century.
Smollett's interest in Davy Jones, the evil spirit of the deep who would appear to sailors as a precursor of hurricanes or shipwrecks, is summed up in yet another novel - the just as quaintly titled Adventures of Peregrine Pickle.
One of the characters, Commodore Hawser Trunnion, has had personal experience of this gruesome spectre: "By the Lord, Jack, you may say what you will but I'll be damned if it was not Davy Jones himself. I knew him by his saucer eyes, his three rows of teeth, his horns and tail, and the blue smoke that came from his nostrils. "What does this blackguard want with me? I am sure I never committed murder except in the way of my profession, nor wronged any man whatsoever since first I went to sea." But Smollett's curiosity was not confined to trivialities like Davy Jones. He also investigated serious matters like the local weather, and indeed kept a record of its daily variation. During a sojourn in the south of France at Nice, for example, he wrote to a friend: "The air is so dry here that in summer, and even in winter, except in wet weather, you may pass the evening and indeed the whole night sub Dio without feeling the least dew or moisture." Notes also survive on the way Smollett read the temperature from the two thermometers in his possession. "One is of mercury, constructed after the manner of RZamur," he writes, referring to a temperature scale, an alternative to Fahrenheit or Celsius, that was popular on the Continent around that time. "It has on the scale 10 degrees from ice to temperate"; the former is the freezing point of water, and the latter is taken to mean a temperature typical of an "average" day outdoors. "It has 20 degrees as silkworm heat, and 80 degrees as the temperature of boiling water."
"The other is of spirit of wine, constructed by Chateauneuf and graduated in the same manner. They are both placed in the shade in a room without a fire in a southerly exposition, and the observations made between 10 and 11 in the morning."