The Three Sirens by Irving Wallace Read Free Book Online

Campanella’s The City of the Sun , Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, and James Harrington’s The Rota . Along the way, Wright could not resist striking out at prevailing practices of government, law, education, public welfare, and religion. Wright found a courageous publisher, and by 1795 the first copies of the slender and explosive volume had come from the press. Before these copies could be distributed, Wright learned, through Godwin, that members of George Ill’s court had become informed of the contents of the radical book. Charges were being drawn to declare Wright’s marital Utopia as “youth-corrupting” and “subversive.” Confiscation of the book and imprisonment of its author were inevitable. Heeding the advice of Godwin and other friends, Wright packed a copy of his book, the most portable of his household goods, his savings, and, with his wife, family of three, and three disciples, rushed in the night to the Irish port of Kinsale. There, the party boarded a 180-ton vessel bound for Botany Bay, New Holland, later known as Sydney, Australia.
    According to Courtney’s story, based on original papers in the native village of The Three Sirens, Daniel Wright would not have fled England merely to save his skin. In truth, he was martyr-minded, and, on trial, would have enjoyed trumpeting his ideas to the authorities and the kingdom. What made him escape, as he did, was a motive more affirmative. For several years, he had toyed with the idea of going off to the young sixteen states in the New World, or to the recently explored Southern Seas, to practice what he preached, so to speak. That is, instead of merely writing about his visionary ideas on matrimony, he considered traveling to some remote place and putting them into actual practice. However, he was a sedentary scholar, a thinker not a doer, and he had the day-to-day responsibility of growing youngsters, and he could not rouse himself to make so dramatic a revolution in his life. The suppression of his book and the impending prison sentence in Newgate inflamed him, not only at the injustice of the government, but at the narrowness of the society in which he dwelled. It was this, then, that incited him to go off and do what he had always wanted to do anyway.
    During his long, weary voyage to Australia, he had the time to convert the Utopian fancies of his book into practical measures, at least on paper. All that was needed was a free place to try them out. Daniel Wright hoped Australia might prove such a place. No sooner had he and his company landed in Botany Bay than he knew that he was mistaken. The area, great morasses and mud, abandoned by the first colonists to naked blacks with spears and convicts with cutlasses, was a hell on earth. Hastily, Wright and his company moved on to Sydney Cove, the main colony of the English felons, established eight years before. Within a month, Wright knew that he must move on even further. Life in the convict colony was too harsh, violent, unwholesome, and there was no tolerance for an English crackpot reformer and zealot to live under His Majesty’s Governor.
    Possessing the romantic writings of both Louis Antoine de Bougainville and James Cook, who had explored the South Seas, Wright decided that this unsullied paradise was exactly where he belonged. After all, had not Bougainville written of the Tahiti of 1768 in his log: “The canoes were filled with women whose pleasing faces need concede nothing to the majority of Europeans and, for beauty of body, could rival any. Most of these nymphs were naked, for the men and old women with them removed the loincloths in which they usually wrapped themselves. At first they made from their canoes little teasing gestures. The men, simpler, or else freer, made matters clearer; they urged us to choose a girl, follow her to shore, and their unequivocal gestures showed the fashion in which we were to make their acquaintance”? And once ashore, had not Bougainville added: “It was