If you go to the Cutty Sark Museum at Greenwich, you can see a collection of figureheads in the hold of the famous ship. One is Lalla Rookh, but it is from a different boat than the one that hailed in distress to the men of Worthing. This is what its label says:

“LALLA ROOKE (sic)
A China tea clipper of 869 tons built at Liverpool in 1856. She went ashore in dense fog on rocks at Agmmon Head, near Tor Point, Devon, in March 1873. During a five-month voyage from Shanghai, she had run 3000 miles in a fortnight. The figurehead was found at Jersey and brought to England just before the Second World War.”

1856 — the year the barque from Worthing vanished. Jersey — the birthplace of one Lalla Rookh and the salvage yard fate of another a century later.

I stand in the Cutty Sark’s hold, gazing up at Lalla Rookh’s elegant face. She is a bold and graceful carving, highly detailed for something usually seen only from a distance. Her costume is sheer fantasy, all pure white and sky blue, the colours of the Virgin Mary. If it wasn’t for her deep brown skin and cloud of white turban, she could easily have stepped out of one of Quebec’s many Roman Catholic churches. She holds a golden cup and gazes lovingly into the distance, looking, no doubt, to her lover. Like “Pocahontas,” her companion in the Cutty Sark’s hold, she is the embodiment of the exotic, the illusory “other,” a mixture of the beautiful and the alien, of those tantalizing and frightening places and beings “out there” on Britain’s ever expanding horizon.

Thomas Moore’s Lalla Rookh is a classic example of the kind of Orientalist fantasy that presented India as a mixture of erotic temptation and sinister danger. In Moore’s tale, Lalla Rookh is a pampered Indian princess traveling overland from her Delhi home to Cashmere, where she is to meet and marry the Prince of Bucharia.  On her lengthy journey, she is entertained by a poet named Feramorz who tells her a series of tales, including that of the young maiden Zelica trapped in the harem of Mokanna, “The Veiled Prophet of Khorassan.” In this poem within a poem, Moore, through the voice of Feramorz (who turns out to be Lalla Rookh’s Prince), plays on the purpose of the veil as a device to both conceal and tempt (a standard image in exotic tales of India and the Arab world). The most significant veil is Mokanna’s which the prophet claims shields one’s eyes from the intense divine light that emanates from his brow, but in fact conceals a deformed and demonic visage, a visage which poor Zelica is forced to witness.

Moore’s symbolism is clear. Beneath the tempting veil of India, the “jewel” in the crown of the British Empire, lays a sinister threat embodied, primarily, in the “alien” religions of the region. The cult leader Mokanna is the incarnation of England’s deep-rooted fears of the other and intolerance of non-Christian cultures. It is a story of obvious contemporary relevance.

Did the ship at Worthing sport a figurehead like the one preserved at Greenwich? I have no idea. Back on Worthing’s shore, gazing out at the calm sea in the dull morning light, I wonder if the eleven fishermen looked up at a strange and exotic figure of an Indian princess as they clung to their overturned ferry Britannia and then slipped beneath the sea’s dark “veil.” Did the tempting figure of India resonate as a symbol of Empire? I doubt it. Did the fishermen encounter the divine light beneath the veil promised in Moore’s tale? I can only hope they did.

More about the Cutty Sark Museum

More about Thomas Moore’s Lalla Rookh:
Thomas Moore, from Lalla Rookh: An Oriental Romance
Gill Stoker's Version
A Hyper-Concordance to the Poems of Thomas Moore
Ecstacy in the East