In 1822, Shelley arranged for the writer and critic Leigh Hunt to travel to Italy to assist himself and Lord Byron in setting up a journal. Named The Liberal, the purpose of the journal was to publish the works of the three poets, in defiance of conservative periodicals such as Blackwood's Magazine and The Quarterly Review.
Shelley was living at the time with his wife, Mary Shelley, in an isolated old boat house called Casa Magni, on the Gulf of La Spezia. They anchored their sailing boat, the Don Juan, at Lerici, about three miles down the coast. On 8 July 1822 – 27 days before his 30th birthday – Shelley had been in Livorno (commonly known in English as Leghorn) to set up the journal. The distance from Livorno (Leghorn) to Lerici is approximately 40 miles.
Shelley's boat had been custom–built for him in Genoa. The name Don Juan had been chosen by Shelley's friend Edward Trelawney as a tribute to Lord Byron – who was living in Pisa at the time, and working on his great epic poem of that title. (Pisa is about twelve miles from Livorno, almost on the way to Lerici and La Spezia.) Mary Shelley later said that her husband had changed the name to Ariel, but that this had annoyed Byron, who forced the painting of the words Don Juan on the mainsail.
As Shelley was returning to Lerici, the Don Juan was struck by a sudden storm in the Gulf of La Spezia (meaning it can't have been more than a couple of miles from home). It sank rapidly. The boat was eventually found, ten miles off the shore, and the bodies of Shelley and his two companions (a friend of Shelley's called Edward Williams – a retired English naval officer – and a boatboy named Charles Vivien) were found ten days after the sinking. Shelley's body was washed up on the shore near Viareggio (about half way between Leghorn and Lerici), and in keeping with quarantine regulations it was cremated on the beach. The ashes were interred at the Protestant Cemetery in Rome.
For some reason, Shelley's heart refused to burn. Modern physicians have suggested that it may have calcified due to an earlier bout of tuberculosis. It was snatched from the pyre by the aforementioned Edward Trelawney, and claimed by Leigh Hunt, but eventually turned over to Mary Shelley.
Mary Shelley died in 1851, aged 53. Some time later, her son Percy Florence Shelley found his father's heart in her desk, wrapped in a copy of Adonais – one of Shelley's last poems, mourning the death of his great friend John Keats some 17 months before his own. Following Percy Florence's death in 1889, the heart was buried with him (and Mary) in the family vault at the church of St. Peter's, Bournemouth.
There are various conspiracy theories surrounding the death of Percy Bysshe Shelley. He was in financial difficulty at the time; some believe he was depressed and wanted to die. Others claimed political motives: some ten years earlier, Shelley had been attacked in the night at his home at Tremadog in North Wales, by a man who may, according to some later writers, have been an intelligence agent. Still others speculated that pirates had mistaken the Don Juan for Byron's boat.
There was evidence that when the boat was found, it had been staved in by a much larger vessel. Trelawney wrote of an Italian fisherman who confessed on his deathbed to ramming the Don Juan with intent to rob Shelley, but whose plan had been confounded by the rapid sinking of the boat.
Others, however, believe that the sinking was simply the result of poor seamanship on the parts of its three occupants.
Lord Byron died in April 1824 – less than two years after Shelley – of a fever, in the Greek City of Missolonghi. Greece was fighting for independence from the Ottoman Empire; Byron was one of many European aristocrats who took up arms in the Greek cause. Missolonghi was a rebel stronghold, as a result of which it was constantly under attack. There Byron contracted a virulent cold and was treated by bleeding, which probably led to sepsis.
Three of England's great romantic poets – Keats, Shelley and Byron – had all suffered tragic deaths, in the space of just three years and two months. Only Byron had lived to see his 30th birthday.
© Haydn Thompson 2018