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Biosemiotics 20
Phillip Guddemi
Gregory Bateson
on Relational
Communication:
From Octopuses
to Nations
Biosemiotics
Volume 20
Series Editors
Kalevi Kull, Department of Semiotics, University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia
Alexei Sharov, Lab Genetics, Rm 10C222, Ste 100, National Inst on Aging,
Baltimore, MD, USA
Claus Emmeche, Department of Science Education, University of Copenhagen,
Kobenhavn K, Denmark
Donald F. Favareau, University Scholars Programme, National University of
Singapore, Singapore, Singapore
Combining research approaches from biology, semiotics, philosophy and linguistics,
the field of biosemiotics studies semiotic processes as they occur in and among
living systems. This has important implications and applications for issues ranging
from natural selection to animal behaviour and human psychology, leaving
biosemiotics at the cutting edge of the research on the fundamentals of life.
The Springer book series Biosemiotics draws together contributions from leading
scholars in international biosemiotics, producing an unparalleled series that will
appeal to all those interested in the origins and evolution of life, including molecular
and evolutionary biologists, ecologists, anthropologists, psychologists, philosophers
and historians of science, linguists, semioticians and researchers in artificial life,
information theory and communication technology.
More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/7710

Phillip Guddemi
Gregory Bateson on
Relational Communication:
From Octopuses to Nations
Phillip Guddemi
Bateson Idea Group
Sacramento, CA, USA
International Bateson Institute
Munso, Sweden
ISSN 1875-4651 ISSN 1875-466X (electronic)

Biosemiotics
ISBN 978-3-030-52100-4 ISBN 978-3-030-52101-1 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52101-1
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020

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Prologue: Cybernetics, Bateson,
and the Missile Crisis
During the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Gregory Bateson wrote a letter to his
cybernetic mentor, Warren McCulloch. In this letter Bateson asked McCulloch to
bring to the attention of the Kennedy Administration certain parallels between the
unfolding crisis and the communication system of octopus, which Bateson had been
studying. I don’t think it is an exaggeration to say that this is a stunning juxtaposi-
tion, one that few if any scientists or thinkers other than Gregory Bateson would
have attempted. Even fewer would have been able to ground their argument in an
unconventional perspective on animal communication and behavior, one which
spurns the usual adaptationist emphasis on the function of such behavior, in favor of
a semiotic approach which is also an interactional one emphasizing context.
The date of Bateson’s letter to McCulloch, October 25, 1962, in which Bateson
linked his research on animal communication (including octopus) to the Cuban
Missile Crisis, was during the last and culminating (and scariest) weekend of the
crisis. Here is the first portion of the introductory paragraph of this remarkable letter:
Dear Warren:
I am coming to Cambridge this Sunday night and want to talk to you Monday or
Tuesday. I will phone when I arrive. I am writing now to get some ideas across in advance
of our talk.
I want to ask your opinion and, if you think I have something, I would ask you to pass
the material on to Jerry Wiesner or to somebody at a similar policy-making level. It seems
to me that this brainstorm, which starts from the questions which I have been asking of
mammals and octopuses, may have some relevance to current international problems.
(Letter to Warren McCulloch, MC 1039-10a, October 25, 1962)
Warren McCulloch, Jerry Wiesner, and Gregory Bateson himself had all met as
part of the Macy Conferences, held in New York in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
The Macy Conferences were instrumental in pioneering the way of thought to which
they would give the name “cybernetics.” Although today we tend to think of the
word cybernetics as associated with machines such as computers (and the world
which these machines have helped bring about), the original conception of cyber-
netics had much more to do with developing a new way of thinking about how living
things behave—one which emphasized process and self-corrective systems. About
v
vi Prologue: Cybernetics, Bateson, and the Missile Crisis
a third of the original participants in the Macy Conferences were from either the
biological, medical, or social sciences, for example, neurophysiology, psychology,
psychiatry, economics, and, in the case of Bateson and his then-wife and collabora-
tor Margaret Mead, anthropology. This cross disciplinary group was brought
together by the hope of pioneering a new way of thinking about systems, particu-
larly living systems. Their collaboration resulted in the new emerging field of cyber-
netics. (The term “cybernetics” was popularized by the mathematical and theoretical
genius Norbert Weiner, in his book of that title in 1948.) This original cybernetics as
developed in the Macy Conferences set its task as examining the processes in time
in which feedback dynamics operate either to conserve or to change aspects of sys-
tems in ways which enable either their perpetuation or their failure to perpetuate.
This new perspective or field of cybernetics had roots in mathematics, even for
the less mathematically inclined founders such as Mead, and for those like Bateson
who were not always inclined to quantification. (However Bateson’s mathematical
literacy should not be underestimated, as we will see.)
Warren McCulloch, the recipient of Bateson’s letter, was a transdisciplinary
thinker with a breadth of philosophical and topical interests, as described in the
recent biography by Tara Abraham (2016). Born in 1898, McCulloch by the 1960s
was something of an elder statesman of the idea that a rigorous mathematics, com-
bined with experimental and laboratory work on the brain, could shed new light on
ancient philosophical questions about the nature and workings of the mind.
McCulloch’s own wide ranging and incisive mind and his philosophic and scientific
rigor impressed and inspired Bateson, and their friendship continued until
McCulloch’s death in 1969.
The scope of cybernetics as envisioned by the Macy Conferences was perhaps
best exemplified by their organizer and president, Lawrence Frank, in a letter which
he wrote to McCulloch in October 1946 regarding the themes he wanted to explore
in the upcoming Second Meeting. Lawrence Frank’s proposed themes for cybernet-
ics included:
1. Biological feedbacks in order to foster the conceptual clarification that is needed and to
avoid the taking over of a formula from the field of mechanics or electronics without
recognizing what the biological feedback involves
2. A clarification of the concepts of signals, signs, and symbols, not merely in semantic or
semiotic terminology but in terms of the biological and cultural processes which are
involved
3. The requirement of a mathematics for handling biological data as distinguished from
the kind of mathematics that has been developed for classical physics, chemistry, and
astronomy… (Frank [unpublished letter] 1946, quoted in Abraham 2016:135)1
1
Unpublished letter, Lawrence Frank to Warren McCulloch, October 7, 1946, quoted by Tara
Abraham, 2016, Rebel Genius: Warren S. McCulloch’s Transdisciplinary Life in Science, p. 135.
Folder “Conference: Josiah Macy Meeing II,” Seires II, WSM Papers, APS.
Prologue: Cybernetics, Bateson, and the Missile Crisis vii
Note that, fascinatingly, Theme 2 proposed by Lawrence Frank for cybernetics in

1946 anticipates, in a way, the need for what we would today call biosemiotics, by
calling attention, in a manner faintly anticipating Jesper Hoffmeyer, to the existence
in biology of a discourse of “signals, signs, and symbols,” which furthermore was
not yet fully assimilated into the biological theorizing of the day. So we see that the
idea of a cybernetic system, even from its very beginnings, unified pattern, feed-
back, and semiotics. Gregory Bateson’s letter to Warren McCulloch was predicated
on their common understanding of this new way of thinking forged in the Macy
Conferences.
And of course Bateson’s hope that Jerry Wiesner would carry this message to the
Kennedy Administration was based on Wiesner’s participation in this selfsame
intellectual movement. Jerome Wiesner was an electrical engineer by training and
had participated in several of the Macy Conferences. He became head of the
Research Library of Electronics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and
before taking up the position ensured the hiring of Warren McCulloch in 1951 to
join him at that institution (under the pretext of McCulloch studying synaptic trans-
mission in neurons). (Abraham 2016: 153)
A decade later, in 1961, Wiesner was chosen by John F. Kennedy to chair the
President’s Science Advisory Committee, a position he retained during and after the
Cuban Missile Crisis. In 1962, Wiesner was to recommend the phasing out of toxic
pesticides in the wake of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring; he was evidently instru-
mental in the achievement of the 1963 Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and the
establishment of an Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. He was somewhat
skeptical of the need for a manned Space Program. Ultimately he was replaced as
Science Advisory Chair shortly before President Kennedy’s assassination in
November 1963.2
Due to the timing of the Bateson–McCulloch letter, which as mentioned was just
a few days prior to the resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis, it is doubtful whether
Jerry Wiesner would have had time to hear of Bateson’s ideas or had the time to
bring them to the attention of the Administration. Indeed, there is no evidence that
Warren McCulloch acted on the letter, or that any note was subsequently taken of it,
until I discovered it in 2015 in the Gregory Bateson archives at the University of
California, Santa Cruz.
Gregory Bateson and Octopus
In his letter to Warren McCulloch, Bateson had referred to the research he was
doing at that time on octopus communication. The fact he was doing octopus
research is not generally known, since he did not publish anything formally about it,
either at the time or later. Nonetheless, over a period of half a decade or longer,
2
Wikipedia, Jerome Weisner. Accessed on January 12, 2019.
viii Prologue: Cybernetics, Bateson, and the Missile Crisis
Gregory Bateson, on his own (with help from his immediate family), collected and
studied octopus to observe their interactions. He began working on octopus while he
was working in California on schizophrenia, using tanks located at the Veteran’s
Hospital (in the morgue!) and then at his home, beginning around 1958 or 1959.
Later he continued his octopus work while working on dolphin communication with
John Lilly in 1963–64. He never made octopus his main focus of research, and he
never researched them in affiliation with any university or other research organiza-
tion. He did make several grant applications, to the NSF (and other organizations),
in 1962 to continue his research, but none of these were funded. As he wrote to one
psychologist who he hoped might help with his funding issues, “I suspect, however,
that my difficulty in getting money is related to the fact that I myself am neither fish,
flesh nor fowl – but only good red herring.” (Letter to Thomas Milburn, MC
1039–16, June 13, 1963)
As the son of the famed British biologist William Bateson (who invented the
word genetics), Gregory Bateson, though he is known as an anthropologist, never
abandoned a concern with biological topics and perspectives. His youth and young
adulthood, before he turned to anthropology at age 21, had been a collaborative one
which involved the co-authorship of one paper (on partridge feathers) with his father
(W. Bateson and G. Bateson 1925), and an expedition on his own in the spirit of
Darwin to the Galapagos Islands (Lipset 1982). Later in life, he pursued his interest
in the patterns of information in living things by pursuing seamlessly interwoven
studies of human beings and animals.
Gregory Bateson began his work specifically on animal communication with
observations on otters in the San Francisco Zoo, leading up to his “Theory of Play
and Fantasy,” in 1954. He did not separate animal and human communication, but
instead he looked at the ways human communication is continuous with the modali-
ties of animal communication, especially as regards what he would eventually term
“communication about relationship.” By the time of his octopus research, in the
early 1960s, Bateson had been studying for several years the patterns of interaction
in families with a schizophrenic member. This research was focused on how their
communication entangled itself in what he called double binds. But as part of this,
and prior to it, Bateson’s research emphasized those aspects of communication,
whether animal or human, which defied what he was later to call “the logician’s
dream that men should communicate only by unambiguous digital [or, as we might
say today, symbolic] signals.” (Bateson 2000: 418)3 These were the aspects of com-
munication he would later term as “analogue,” as opposed to “digital,” and that he
would identify as a universal mode of “communication about relationship.” In one
unpublished study he would term this form of communication the “carrier wave”
(Bateson CAF 319, March 30, 1961)—underlining its necessary ubiquity as a foun-
dation and substrate for any other possible communication.
3
“Redundancy and Coding,” in Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Chicago, University
of Chicago Press, 2000 (1972), p. 418. First published as Chapter 22 in Thomas Sebeok, ed., 1968,
Animal Communication: Techniques of Study and Results of Research, Indiana University Press.
Prologue: Cybernetics, Bateson, and the Missile Crisis ix
But why study octopus? Bateson indicated, in one of his unfunded grant applica-
tions, a number of reasons (CAF 231-E-5). Octopuses are intelligent species that are
far away from humans and other mammals on the phylogenetic tree of life of
Animalia. They can be studied in home aquaria with relatively little expense, and
Bateson took advantage of that since he was never actually funded to study them.
Much of what he felt he learned about them is to be found in his unsuccessful grant
applications for further research; but in those applications he set out what he had
already learned in two or three years of unfunded study. But the larger issue is no
doubt that if you can find commonalities in social behavior among species which
are as far apart phylogenetically as octopuses and vertebrates, you might be on to
something in terms of a general theory of animal social behavior. To take an exam-
ple that was studied more recently than Bateson’s work, naked mole rats are a mam-
malian species that in their social life is extremely reminiscent of “eusocial” insect
species such as bees or termites, as we learn from the work of E.O. Wilson. The fact
that hierarchical castes of a social insect type can evolve separately among mam-
mals is an example of what is called “convergence” in ecology, and it is theoreti-
cally significant but not that well understood.
Gregory Bateson’s own words on the subject, from the aforementioned unsuc-
cessful grant proposal:
About two years ago, preliminary work was begin on the inter-individual communication of
octopus, with the idea that it should be possible to demonstrate similar limitations in any
organism with sufficiently complex central nervous system and inter-individual behavior.
Octopus was deliberately chosen as being both neurally complex and maximally different
from the human species both in a phylogenetic sense and in the degree to which its normal
environment contrasts with that of man. (CAF 231-E-6)
Today we think of octopus in ways that have been emphasized since Bateson’s
own studies. Not only are they unusually intelligent and adaptable, they seem to be
“alien” in their DNA and its expression, and unusual in the way their neural matter
and its connectivity seems less centralized than that of other creatures. These “wow
factors” of today’s cephalopod research would seem to have little to do with what
Bateson observed. Those of us who have read about octopus recently are also aware
of the exquisite communication, using patterns of color on the skin, characteristic of
some octopus species, and we also find ourselves wishing that Bateson had had a lot
more to say about this fascinating topic of research (though he did mention color
communication in passing, relating it to moods). But actually he was more inter-
ested in commonalities with vertebrate or mammal communication, including that
of humans and human organizations—for example, nations pursuing the Cold War.
Brief Outline of the Book
In the next chapter of the book I simply reprint the letter itself, for readers to see in
its entirety. After this, I will follow the letter, paragraph by paragraph, setting forth
Bateson’s ideas which informed his line of argument. Some paragraphs will need
x Prologue: Cybernetics, Bateson, and the Missile Crisis
more than one chapter. For example, the first paragraph of the letter will, indeed, be
discussed in several chapters to set out Bateson’s concept of “communication about
relationship,” which he once termed the “carrier wave.”
Topics explored in ensuing chapters include concepts of analog and digital com-
munication, the strange problem of negation in analog communication, Bateson’s
own version of the evolutionary history of the sign (and of the place of “play” in this
evolution), and the Batesonian contrast between what he called symmetry and com-
plementarity which he (and I) utilized as a way of analyzing interactive dynamics.
Leading up to the discussion of the Cuban Missile Crisis will be an exploration
of peacemaking among primates and in a human ritual, and a detailed summary of
Bateson’s work among octopus based on his grant applications. Then the back-
ground and the chronology of the Cuban Missile Crisis itself will be discussed in
some detail in order to understand better how Bateson was able to apply his ideas to
it in the letter to McCulloch. This will enable me to explore how Bateson saw mat-
ters of war and peace. I will again look at his ideas of symmetry and complementar-
ity, and how his application of these to international affairs owed much to a Quaker
mathematician who developed a mathematics of armaments races in the years
between the twentieth century wars. I will also look at a letter he wrote on the very
eve of the Second World War to one of his mentors, Frederick Bartlett. And I will
apply some of his ideas to our current concerns.
Letter from Gregory Bateson to Warren
McCulloch, MC 1039-10a, October 25, 1962
Dear Warren:
I am coming to Cambridge this Sunday night and want to talk to you Monday or
Tuesday. I will phone when I arrive. I am writing now to get some ideas across in
advance of our talk.
I want to ask your opinion and, if you think I have something, I would ask you to
pass the material on to Jerry Wiesner or to somebody at a similar policy-making
level. It seems to me that this brainstorm, which starts from the questions which I
have been asking of mammals and octopuses, may have some relevance to current
international problems.
It seems to me that nations having almost total distrust for each other’s words in
fact operate with non-verbal cues and therefore face problems which must closely
resemble those which confront octopuses and pre-verbal mammals.
1. It appears to me that the discourse of these creatures (mammals, octopuses,
and nations) focusses almost totally upon matters of a rather high order of abstrac-
tion, viz., what shall be the rules and the styles of relationship between the two
communicating individuals. When the cat says “mew”, she is asserting a depen-
dency between herself and me. I may be able to deduce from this high-level abstrac-
tion that I should give her milk, but she does not in general mention milk and her
“mew” is approximately what we anthropologists would call a kinship term, i.e., an
assertion of a body of rules for a relationship.
2. These mammalian communications about relationship are in large measure
analogic. In verbal communication, which is largely digital, it is possible to have
words which will signify negatives. In non-verbal communication, very peculiar
steps have to be gone through in order to get across a negative message to the other
individual.
3. This is especially true where the negative message concerns the rules and
styles of relationship. In particular, the message “I shall not hurt you” or “I trust you
not to hurt me” can obviously only be communicated in one of two ways:
a. The individual may expose his vulnerable parts to possible attack – as do the
dogs and the octopuses, after there has been some fighting. But this method, though
dreamed of by many of our pacifists, is obviously very dangerous unless the
xi
xii Letter from Gregory Bateson to Warren McCulloch, MC 1039-10a, October 25, 1962
message which it seeks to transmit has already been transmitted, acknowledged,

and believe[d] in by the other individual It follows that the message cannot safely be
gotten across in this positive form.
The other alternative is (b) in which the transmitter of the message must in some
sense mention violence in some analogic code (e.g. by a hostile intention move-
ment) and must somehow introduce a negative into this analogic statement about
violence. But, as mentioned above, analogic codes characteristically do not contain
any signal for the word “not”.
4. Now, the phrase “intention movement” is a phony. It is true that when I clench
my fist I am thereby mentioning the notion of violence between myself and my vis
a vis. But whether I am saying “I shall hit you” or “I shall not hit you” is unclear
until we know more about the total interchange. Remember that peace-making cer-
emonies among primitive peoples usually consist in an exchange of violence and
that courtship in many species contains elements of conflict.
5. In fact, the negatives can only be communicated by total sequences of inter-
change in which these negatives are exemplified. The Octopuses, starting from
mutual hostility, pass through a sequence of minor battles in which nobody gets hurt
much. After this the slightly stronger octopus very slowly and gently embraces the
weaker, i.e. states, “I can hurt you but I am not doing so.” Following this, the weaker
comes over and attacks the stronger with his vulnerable backside, in response to
which the stronger retreats. I.e., the weaker has now said, “Yes, I know you are not
going to attack me” and the stronger has said, “That’s right.”
6. I was this morning asked to join in signing a telegram to the White House
which was worded as follows: “We regret the action of placing an embargo on Cuba,
because this action involves too much trust in Krushchev’s good judgment.”
Considering this wording, I suddenly realized that my own theoretical position is
precisely the reverse, that I rejoice in the action which Kennedy has taken precisely
because it places trust in Krushchev’s good judgement. It provides Krushchev with
a casus belli and permits him to decline it.
7. But the essence of the matter is that all the messages which negate war must
be gotten across and must be gotten across in an interlinked form. The great danger
at the moment is that Krushchev’s willingness to negotiate may be taken by us as
fear. Correspondingly there was always in the past the danger that our unwillingness
to go to war over Berlin, etc., could be taken by the Russians as an expression of
fear. Still more dangerous, we could accuse ourselves of cowardice in declining
these fights. What seems to me important is that at this stage our own past wisdom
and the Russians’ wisdom in not challenging the blockade should be linked together
to give the mutual understanding that we have each challenged the other and have
each shown enough sense to not pick up the challenge.
7a. There is, as I see it, a chance at this moment to get out of a lot of the “Prisoner’s
Dilemma” situation in which both sides have been caught. The great danger is that
the American public (and still worse, the Russians) may decide that the events of the
last few days prove the desirability of deterrence. The whole point is not deterrence
but that use of violence which in fact breeds trust.
Letter from Gregory Bateson to Warren McCulloch, MC 1039-10a, October 25, 1962 xiii
8. As far as I can see, the games theorists and others who have tried to formalize
these problems have consistently thought at a level of logical typing which was one
step too low – in fact, one level below what the octopuses and pre-human mammals
normally achieve. Somebody should be doing a lot of research, both mathematical
and observational, at the level which I have tried to define in this letter, in which the
analogic mention of violence becomes in the overall interchange a peace-making
move, not through deterrence but through the discovery of trust. We do not know
anything, for example, about the conditions and parameters of relationship in which
two opposed individuals get stuck in a steady state of continued mutual hostility.
I look forward to seeing you the beginning of the coming week.
Yours sincerely,
Gregory Bateson, M.A.
Ethnology Section
Acknowledgments
To begin with I would like to acknowledge Gregory Bateson with whom I had four
classes as an undergraduate at the University of California, Santa Cruz. One of them
was an independent study (in 1976) in which I purported to observe sea otters and
elephant seals. I was allowed to observe the elephant seals at Año Nuevo State Park,
in California, before the official tours began, and got chased by one, but did not
make any significant or pathbreaking observations.
I would like to thank Kalevi Kull for inviting me to write this book after the pre-
sentation I gave at the 18th Annual Biosemiotics Gathering, the University of
California, Berkeley, in June 2018, and for his ongoing supportiveness to the project
of writing it.
I want to acknowledge Nora Bateson for her ongoing friendship and encourage-
ment, and for providing such a shining example of how someone can be in this
world, when provided in childhood with a firm foundation in her father Gregory
Bateson’s way of thinking, along with the empathy inherent in it.
I thank my wife Gail Kara for being a close reader of the manuscript (and for her
discussion with me on the concepts of the book throughout its composition). I espe-
cially am grateful for her insistence on making my writing as accessible and read-
able as possible, in a way which enhances rather than detracts from precision and
clarity.
I will now turn to acknowledgments for specific items used in the book.
The extensive quotes from Gregory Bateson’s unpublished (and where applica-
ble, published) writing, as well as the transcriptions from his audio recordings, are
by permission of the Bateson Idea Group. I am President of the Bateson Idea Group,
which is composed of lifelong scholars of Gregory Bateson and which holds and
administers the rights to Gregory Bateson’s intellectual property that are held by his
estate. Nora Bateson was the prime mover for the establishment of the organization
and is one of its Directors. The Bateson Idea Group is a registered nonprofit organi-
zation in the USA and is the successor organization, with respect to Gregory
Bateson’s rights, to the Institute for Intercultural Studies.
I would like to thank Frans de Waal, who holds the copyright to his book
Peacemaking Among Primates, for his statement that my extended citations from
xv
xvi Acknowledgments
his book are within permissible limits, and for the permission to use the illustration
(my Figure 5) which is page 158 in his book Peacemaking Among Primates, pro-
vided that the species (stump-tailed macaque, Macaca arctoides) is clearly identi-
fied in the caption.
I would like to thank Peter Godfrey-Smith, book author and book copyright
holder, and Eliza Jewett, the artist, for permission to use an illustration (my Figure 4)
originally found on page 186 of his book Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and
the Deep Origins of Consciousness. The conditions from Eliza Jewett are as fol-
lows: “I’m fine with Phillip Guddemi using that illustration in his book, as long as
there is a credit line that includes your publication as well as my name.”
The quotations from the AUM conference by G. Spencer Brown are with the
permission of the rights holder, Cliff Barney, who wrote me regarding the AUM
conference transcript in general that “the more people see it, the better.”
The illustration, “The peace-making dance of the North Andaman,” my Figure 6,
is reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press.
Contents
1 Bateson, Cybernetics, and Nonverbal Communication�� 1

1.1 History of Bateson’s Interest�� 1
1.2 Humor and Humans – A Non-Digression into
the Carrier Wave�� 3
1.3 Nonverbal Nations�� 6
2 Bateson, Relationship, and the Biologists�� 9
2.1 The Relational Abstract�� 9
2.2 Critique of Conventional Biological and Scientific Ideas�� 12
2.3 The Question of Instinct�� 18
2.4 The Carrier Wave�� 24
3 Relationship and Metaphor: A Bird Courtship Interlude �� 27
3.1 Courtship Feeding as Abductive Metaphor�� 28
4 Among Wolves and Logicians, by Gregory Bateson�� 31
5 Human-Animal Interactions and the “Carrier Wave”�� 37
5.1 Cetaceans, Communication, and Music�� 41
6 Analog and Digital Communication, and Similar Contrasts �� 45
6.1 Analog and Digital�� 46
6.2 Primary Process�� 48
6.3 Digital Number and Analog Quantity �� 50
6.4 The Mu-Function�� 53
6.5 The “Ballading” of the Jackdaws�� 54
6.6 The Absence of a “Not” in Analog Communication�� 56
6.7 Left and Right Hemispheres �� 56
7 G. Spencer Brown on the Paradoxes of “Not” – And
Gregory Bateson on the Richness of Analog Communication �� 59
7.1 Further Spencer Brown on the Peculiarities
of the “Not” Message�� 61
xvii
xviii Contents
7.2 Spencer Brownian Communion and the “Restricted Code” �� 62
7.2.1 The Communicational Richness of (Human)
Interaction: A Partial Digression�� 63
7.3 The Cybernetics of Human Talk: Interaction
Analysis, 2008�� 64
7.4 The Cybernetics of Human Talk: The Natural
History of an Interview, 1955–1971 �� 65
7.5 Transmutation of Freudian Concepts
into Communication Theory �� 67
7.6 Kinesic Speculations�� 70
7.7 Lack of Translatability�� 72
8 The Slash Mark: Gregory Bateson’s Cybernetic Semiotic�� 75
8.1 The Slash Mark of Information�� 75
8.1.1 Gregory Bateson’s Cybernetic Semiotic�� 76
8.1.2 Implications for the Sparring Octopuses or Nations �� 85
9 Metacommunication and Its Contents �� 87
9.1 Mood Signs, Signals, and Play �� 87
9.1.1 Metacommunication and Its Misunderstandings
in Play�� 97
9.2 “Going By Opposites” in Behavioral Encounters�� 102
9.3 Epideictic, Epi-gamic, and Epi-eristic�� 104
10 Complementary and Symmetrical Versions of Conflict �� 109
10.1 Some Thinking About Contexts�� 109
10.2 Symmetrical and Complementary�� 110
10.3 Symmetry and Complementarity in Animal and Human
Conflict�� 113
10.4 A Human Conflict Example – “Ritualized” Symmetrical
Conflict among the Dani of West Papua �� 115
10.5 Recent Research in Animal Conflict �� 117
10.6 Conflict and Communication Among Octopus – Recent
Research�� 120
11 Intention Movements and Peacemaking Ceremonies�� 125
11.1 Instinct and Intention Movements�� 125
11.2 Peacemaking in Non-Human Primates �� 127
11.3 The Peacemaking Ceremonies of the Andaman Islanders
According to Radcliffe-Brown�� 130
12 Relational Communication in Octopus�� 135
12.1 Octopus Aggression and Peacemaking �� 139
13 Cuban Missile Crisis�� 143
13.1 The Social Drama (and Some Backstory)�� 143
13.2 High Noon�� 148
13.3 Missives to Power: Gregory Bateson’s Letter
and Bertrand Russell’s Letters�� 154
Contents xix
14 False and True Lessons from the Cuban Missile Crisis�� 159
14.1 Bateson and the Nuclear Arms Race – From
the 1940s to the 1970s�� 162
15 A Level Too Low�� 171
Appendix: Diagram of Symmetrical and Complementary

Conflict or Aggression . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183
Chapter 1
Bateson, Cybernetics, and Nonverbal
Communication
It seems to me that nations having almost total distrust for each other’s words in fact operate
with non-verbal cues and therefore face problems which must closely resemble those which
confront octopuses and pre-verbal mammals. (Letter to Warren McCulloch, MC 1039-10a,
October 25, 1962)
Gregory Bateson’s view was that inherent in any instance of communication,

among humans as with other animals, is communication about the relationship of
the parties who are communicating. This relational communication is over and
above the “content” of any communication – it is “metacommunicational” to overt
content, or to use a Batesonian phrase which will be explored further, it is of a
“higher logical type.” Bateson’s concept of communication about relationship forms
the larger subject of this book. In humans it is exemplified par excellence, though
not exclusively, by non-verbal, so-called analogue, forms of communication. These,
as Bateson often pointed out, have not died out in spite of the existence in humans
of linguistic, so-called digital, communication.
1.1 History of Bateson’s Interest
Gregory Bateson’s approach to this relational aspect of communication among

animals in particular, as well as in how it emerged in humans from deep roots in
animal communication, began to take shape fairly soon after he left anthropol-
ogy, Margaret Mead, and the United States East Coast, in 1948. His theoretical
interest in these matters had several roots. One taproot began with the Macy
Conferences, the unique interdisciplinary movement which gave birth to the field
of cybernetics. A second one was his proximity to the field of psychiatry, which
began with his appointment at the University of California Medical School to
study human communication in psychotherapy, along with the Swiss scholar
Jurgen Ruesch. And a third, in some ways the most important of all, was his deep
knowledge of natural history, which began with his boyhood as the son of the
famous evolutionist and pioneering geneticist, William Bateson. Gregory Bateson
often said, and increasingly so nearer the end of his life, that all his work in what
looked like disparate fields – anthropology, psychiatry, animal behavior, episte-
mology of perception – was actually devoted to a small set of questions in a
single field, that of evolutionary theory writ large. In the end he was his
father’s son.
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 1

P. Guddemi, Gregory Bateson on Relational Communication: From Octopuses
to Nations, Biosemiotics 20, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52101-1_1
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that the British navy, since Trafalgar, had enjoyed no opportunity to
use their guns. Nothing could convince a British admiral that
Americans were better fighters than Englishmen; but when he
looked at the American schooner he frankly said that England could
show no such models, and could not sail them if she had them. In
truth, the schooner was a wonderful invention. Not her battles, but
her escapes won for her the open-mouthed admiration of the British
captains, who saw their prize double like a hare and slip through
their fingers at the moment when capture was sure. Under any
ordinary condition of wind and weather, with an open sea, the
schooner, if only she could get to windward, laughed at a frigate.
As the sailing rather than the fighting qualities of the privateer
were the chief object of her construction, those were the points best
worth recording; but the newspapers of the time were so much
absorbed in proving that Americans could fight, as to cause almost
total neglect of the more important question whether Americans
could sail better than their rivals. All great nations had fought, and at
one time or another every great nation in Europe had been
victorious over every other; but no people, in the course of a
thousand years of rivalry on the ocean, had invented or had known
how to sail a Yankee schooner. Whether ship, brig, schooner, or
sloop, the American vessel was believed to outsail any other craft on
the ocean, and the proof of this superiority was incumbent on the
Americans to furnish. They neglected to do so. No clear evidence
was ever recorded of the precise capacities of their favorite vessels.
Neither the lines of the hull, the dimensions of the spars, the rates
of sailing by the log in different weather, the points of sailing,—
nothing precise was ever set down.
Of the superiority no doubts could be entertained. The best
proof of the American claim was the British admission. Hardly an
English writer on marine affairs—whether in newspapers, histories,
or novels—failed to make some allusion to the beauty and speed of
American vessels. The naval literature of Great Britain from 1812 to
1860 was full of such material. The praise of the invention was still
commonly accompanied by some expression of dislike for the
inventor, but even in that respect a marked change followed the
experiences of 1812–1814. Among the Englishmen living on the
island of Jamaica, and familiar with the course of events in the West
Indies from 1806 to 1817, was one Michael Scott, born in Glasgow in
1789, and in the prime of his youth at the time of the American war.
In the year 1829, at the age of forty, he began the publication in
“Blackwood’s Magazine” of a series of sketches which rapidly
became popular as “Tom Cringle’s Log.” Scott was the best narrator
and probably the best informed man who wrote on the West Indies
at that period; and his frequent allusions to the United States and
the war threw more light on the social side of history than could be
obtained from all official sources ever printed.
“I don’t like Americans,” Scott said; “I never did and never

shall like them. I have seldom met an American gentleman in
the large and complete sense of the term. I have no wish to eat
with them, drink with them, deal with or consort with them in
any way; but let me tell the whole truth,—nor fight with them,
were it not for the laurels to be acquired by overcoming an
enemy so brave, determined, and alert, and every way so
worthy of one’s steel as they have always proved.”
The Americans did not fight the War of 1812 in order to make
themselves loved. According to Scott’s testimony they gained the
object for which they did fight. “In gunnery and small-arm practice
we were as thoroughly weathered on by the Americans during the
war as we overtopped them in the bull-dog courage with which our
boarders handled those genuine English weapons,—the cutlass and
the pike.” Superiority in the intellectual branches of warfare was
conceded to the Americans; but even in regard to physical qualities,
the British were not inclined to boast.
“In the field,” said Scott, “or grappling in mortal combat on

the blood-slippery quarter-deck of an enemy’s vessel, a British
soldier or sailor is the bravest of the brave. No soldier or sailor of
any other country, saving and excepting those damned Yankees,
can stand against them.”
Had English society known so much of Americans in 1807, war

would have been unnecessary.
Yet neither equality in physical courage nor superiority in the
higher branches of gunnery and small-arms was the chief success of
Americans in the war. Beyond question the schooner was the most
conclusive triumph. Readers of Michael Scott could not forget the
best of his sketches,—the escape of the little American schooner
“Wave” from two British cruisers, by running to windward under the
broadside of a man-of-war. With keen appreciation Scott detailed
every motion of the vessels, and dwelt with peculiar emphasis on
the apparent desperation of the attempt. Again and again the thirty-
two-pound shot, as he described the scene, tore through the slight
vessel as the two crafts raced through the heavy seas within
musket-shot of one another, until at last the firing from the corvette
ceased. “The breeze had taken off, and the ‘Wave,’ resuming her
superiority in light winds, had escaped.” Yet this was not the most
significant part of “Tom Cringle’s” experience. The “Wave,” being
afterward captured at anchor, was taken into the royal service and
fitted as a ship-of-war. Cringle was ordered by the vice-admiral to
command her, and as she came to report he took a look at her:—
“When I had last seen her she was a most beautiful little
craft, both in hull and rigging, as ever delighted the eye of a
sailor; but the dock-yard riggers and carpenters had fairly
bedevilled her, at least so far as appearances went. First they
had replaced the light rail on her gunwale by heavy solid
bulwarks four feet high, surmounted by hammock nettings at
least another foot; so that the symmetrical little vessel that
formerly floated on the foam light as a sea-gull now looked like
a clumsy, dish-shaped Dutch dogger. Her long, slender wands of
masts which used to swing about as if there were neither
shrouds nor stays to support them were now as taut and stiff as
church-steeples, with four heavy shrouds of a side, and stays
and back-stays, and the Devil knows what all.”
“If them heave-‘emtaughts at the yard have not taken the speed
out of the little beauty I am a Dutchman” was the natural comment,
—as obvious as it was sound.
The reports of privateer captains to their owners were rarely
published, and the logs were never printed or deposited in any
public office. Occasionally, in the case of a battle or the loss of guns
or spars or cargo in a close pursuit, the privateer captain described
the causes of his loss in a letter which found its way into print; and
from such letters some idea could be drawn of the qualities held in
highest regard, both in their vessels and in themselves. The first and
commonest remark was that privateers of any merit never seemed
to feel anxious for their own safety so long as they could get to
windward a couple of gunshots from their enemy. They would risk a
broadside in the process without very great anxiety. They chiefly
feared lest they might be obliged to run before the wind in heavy
weather. The little craft which could turn on itself like a flash and
dart away under a frigate’s guns into the wind’s eye long before the
heavy ship could come about, had little to fear on that point of
sailing; but when she was obliged to run to leeward, the chances
were more nearly equal. Sometimes, especially in light breezes or in
a stronger wind, by throwing guns and weighty articles overboard
privateers could escape; but in heavy weather the ship-of-war could
commonly outcarry them, and more often could drive them on a
coast or into the clutches of some other man-of-war.
Of being forced to fly to leeward almost every privateer could tell
interesting stories. A fair example of such tales was an adventure of
Captain George Coggeshall, who afterward compiled, chiefly from
newspapers, an account of the privateers, among which he
430
preserved a few stories that would otherwise have been lost.
Coggeshall commanded a two-hundred-ton schooner, the “David
Porter,” in which he made the run to France with a cargo and a
letter-of-marque. The schooner was at Bordeaux in March, 1814,
when Wellington’s army approached. Afraid of seizure by the British
if he remained at Bordeaux, Coggeshall sailed from Bordeaux for La
Rochelle with a light wind from the eastward, when at daylight
March 15, 1814, he found a large ship about two miles to windward.
Coggeshall tried to draw his enemy down to leeward, but only lost
ground until the ship was not more than two gunshots away. The
schooner could then not run to windward without taking the enemy’s
fire within pistol-shot, and dared not return to Bordeaux. Nothing
remained but to run before the wind. Coggeshall got out his square-
sail and studding-sails ready to set, and when everything was
prepared he changed his course and bore off suddenly, gaining a
mile in the six or eight minutes lost by the ship in spreading her
studding-sails. He then started his water-casks, threw out ballast,
and drew away from his pursuer, till in a few hours the ship became
a speck on the horizon.
Apparently a similar but narrower escape was made by Captain
Champlin of the “Warrior,” a famous privateer-brig of four hundred
and thirty tons, mounting twenty-one guns and carrying one
431
hundred and fifty men. Standing for the harbor of Fayal, Dec. 15,
1814, he was seen by a British man-of-war lying there at anchor.
The enemy slipped her cables and made sail in chase. The weather
was very fresh and squally, and at eight o’clock in the evening the
ship was only three miles distant. After a run of about sixty miles,
the man-of-war came within grape-shot distance and opened fire
from her two bow-guns. Champlin luffed a little, got his long pivot-
gun to bear, and ran out his starboard guns as though to fight,
which caused the ship to shorten sail for battle. Then Champlin at
two o’clock in the morning threw overboard eleven guns, and
escaped. The British ship was in sight the next morning, but did not
pursue farther.
Often the privateers were obliged to throw everything overboard
at the risk of capsizing, or escaped capture only by means of their
sweeps. In 1813 Champlin commanded the “General Armstrong,” a
brig of two hundred and forty-six tons and one hundred and forty
men. Off Surinam, March 11, 1813, he fell in with the British sloop-
of-war “Coquette,” which he mistook for a letter-of-marque, and
approached with the intention of boarding. Having come within
pistol-shot and fired his broadsides, he discovered his error. The
wind was light, the two vessels had no headway, and for three
quarters of an hour, if Champlin’s account could be believed, he lay
within pistol-shot of the man-of-war. He was struck by a musket-ball
in the left shoulder; six of his crew were killed and fourteen
wounded; his rigging was cut to pieces; his foremast and bowsprit
injured, and several shots entered the brig between wind and water,
causing her to leak; but at last he succeeded in making sail forward,
and with the aid of his sweeps crept out of range. The sloop-of-war
432
was unable to cripple or follow him.
Sometimes the very perfection of the privateer led to dangers as
great as though perfection were a fault. Captain Shaler of the
“Governor Tompkins,” a schooner, companion to the “General
Armstrong,” chased three sail Dec. 25, 1812, and on near approach
found them to be two ships and a brig. The larger ship had the
appearance of a government transport; she had boarding-nettings
almost up to her tops, but her ports appeared to be painted, and she
seemed prepared for running away as she fought. Shaler drew
nearer, and came to the conclusion that the ship was too heavy for
him; but while his first officer went forward with the glass to take
another look, a sudden squall struck the schooner without reaching
the ship, and in a moment, before the light sails could be taken in,
“and almost before I could turn round, I was under the guns, not of
a transport, but of a large frigate, and not more than a quarter of a
mile from her.” With impudence that warranted punishment, Shaler
fired his little broadside of nine or twelve pounders into the enemy,
who replied with a broadside of twenty-four-pounders, killing three
men, wounding five, and causing an explosion on deck that threw
confusion into the crew; but the broadside did no serious injury to
the rigging. The schooner was then just abaft the ship’s beam, a
quarter of a mile away, holding the same course and to windward.
She could not tack without exposing her stern to a raking fire, and
any failure to come about would have been certain destruction.
Shaler stood on, taking the ship’s fire, on the chance of outsailing his
enemy before a shot could disable the schooner. Side by side the
two vessels raced for half an hour, while twenty-four-pound shot fell
in foam about the schooner, but never struck her, and at last she
drew ahead beyond range. Even then her dangers were not at an
end. A calm followed; the ship put out boats; and only by throwing
deck-lumber and shot overboard, and putting all hands at the
sweeps, did Shaler “get clear of one of the most quarrelsome
433
companions that I ever met with.”
The capacities of the American privateer could to some extent
be inferred from its mishaps. Notwithstanding speed, skill, and
caution, the privateer was frequently and perhaps usually captured
in the end. The modes of capture were numerous. April 3, 1813,
Admiral Warren’s squadron in the Chesapeake captured by boats,
after a sharp action, the privateer “Dolphin” of Baltimore, which had
taken refuge in the Rappahannock River. April 27 the “Tom” of
Baltimore, a schooner of nearly three hundred tons, carrying
fourteen guns, was captured by his Majesty’s ships “Surveillante”
and “Lyra” after a smart chase. Captain Collier of the “Surveillante”
reported: “She is a remarkably fine vessel of her class, and from her
superior sailing has already escaped from eighteen of his Majesty’s
cruisers.” May 11, the “Holkar” of New York was driven ashore off
Rhode Island and destroyed by the “Orpheus” frigate. May 19,
Captain Gordon of the British man-of-war “Ratler,” in company with
the schooner “Bream,” drove ashore and captured the “Alexander” of
Salem, off Kennebunk, “considered the fastest sailing privateer out
434
of the United States,” according to Captain Gordon’s report. May
21, Captain Hyde Parker of the frigate “Tenedos,” in company with
the brig “Curlew,” captured the “Enterprise” of Salem, pierced for
eighteen guns. May 23, the “Paul Jones,” of sixteen guns and one
hundred and twenty men, fell in with a frigate in a thick fog off the
coast of Ireland, and being crippled by her fire surrendered. July 13,
Admiral Cockburn captured by boats at Ocracoke Inlet the fine
privateer-brig “Anaconda” of New York, with a smaller letter-of-
marque. July 17, at sea, three British men-of-war, after a chase of
four hours, captured the “Yorktown” of twenty guns and one
hundred and forty men. The schooner “Orders in Council” of New
York, carrying sixteen guns and one hundred and twenty men, was
captured during the summer, after a long chase of five days, by
three British cutters that drove her under the guns of a frigate. The
“Matilda,” privateer of eleven guns and one hundred and four men,
was captured off San Salvador by attempting to board the British
letter-of-marque “Lyon” under the impression that she was the
weaker ship.
In these ten instances of large privateers captured or destroyed
in 1813, the mode of capture happened to be recorded; and in none
of them was the privateer declared to have been outsailed and
caught by any single British vessel on the open seas. Modes of
disaster were many, and doubtless among the rest a privateer might
occasionally be fairly beaten in speed, but few such cases were
recorded, although British naval officers were quick to mention these
unusual victories. Unless the weather gave to the heavier British
vessel-of-war the advantage of carrying more sail in a rough sea, the
privateer was rarely outsailed.
The number of privateers at sea in 1813 was not recorded. The
list of all private armed vessels during the entire war included
435
somewhat more than five hundred names. Most of these were
small craft, withdrawn after a single cruise. Not two hundred were
so large as to carry crews of fifty men. Nearly two hundred and fifty,
or nearly half the whole number of privateers, fell into British hands.
Probably at no single moment were more than fifty seagoing vessels
on the ocean as privateers, and the number was usually very much
less; while the large privateer-brigs or ships that rivalled sloops-of-
war in size were hardly more numerous than the sloops themselves.
The total number of prizes captured from the British in 1813
exceeded four hundred, four fifths of which were probably captured
by privateers, national cruisers taking only seventy-nine. If the
privateers succeeded in taking three hundred and fifty prizes, the
whole number of privateers could scarcely have exceeded one
hundred. The government cruisers “President,” “Congress,”
“Chesapeake,” “Hornet,” and “Argus” averaged nearly ten prizes
apiece. Privateers averaged much less; but they were ten times as
numerous as the government cruisers, and inflicted four times as
much injury.
Such an addition to the naval force of the United States was very
important. Doubtless the privateers contributed more than the
regular navy to bring about a disposition for peace in the British
classes most responsible for the war. The colonial and shipping
interests, whose influence produced the Orders in Council, suffered
the chief penalty. The West India colonies were kept in constant
discomfort and starvation by swarms of semi-piratical craft darting in
and out of every channel among their islands; but the people of
England could have borne with patience the punishment of the West
Indies had not the American cruisers inflicted equally severe
retribution nearer home.
Great Britain was blockaded. No one could deny that manifest
danger existed to any merchant-vessel that entered or left British
waters. During the summer the blockade was continuous. Toward
the close of 1812 an American named Preble, living in Paris, bought
a small vessel, said to have belonged in turn to the British and
French navy, which he fitted as a privateer-brig, carrying sixteen
guns and one hundred and sixty men. The “True-Blooded Yankee,”
commanded by Captain Hailey, sailed from Brest March 1, 1813, and
cruised thirty-seven days on the coasts of Ireland and Scotland,
capturing twenty-seven valuable vessels; sinking coasters in the very
bay of Dublin; landing and taking possession of an island off the
coast of Ireland, and of a town in Scotland, where she burned seven
vessels in the harbor. She returned safely to Brest, and soon made
another cruise. At the same time the schooner “Fox” of Portsmouth
burned or sunk vessel after vessel in the Irish Sea, as they plied
between Liverpool and Cork. In May, the schooner “Paul Jones” of
New York, carrying sixteen guns and one hundred and twenty men,
took or destroyed a dozen vessels off the Irish coast, until she was
herself caught in a fog by the frigate “Leonidas,” and captured May
23 after a chase in which five of her crew were wounded.
While these vessels were thus engaged, the brig “Rattlesnake” of
Philadelphia, carrying sixteen guns and one hundred and twenty
men, and the brig “Scourge” of New York, carrying nine guns and
one hundred and ten men, crossed the ocean and cruised all the
year in the northern seas off the coasts of Scotland and Norway,
capturing some forty British vessels, and costing the British
merchants and ship-owners losses to the amount of at least two
million dollars. In July the “Scourge” fell in with Commodore Rodgers
in the “President,” and the two vessels remained several days in
company off the North Cape, while the British admiralty sent three
or four squadrons in search of them without success. July 19, after
Rodgers had been nearly a month in British waters, one of these
squadrons drove him away, and he then made a circuit round Ireland
before he turned homeward. At the same time, from July 14 to
August 14, the “Argus” was destroying vessels in the British Channel
at the rate of nearly one a day. After the capture of the “Argus,”
August 14, the “Grand Turk” of Salem, a brig carrying sixteen guns
and one hundred and five men, cruised for twenty days in the mouth
of the British Channel without being disturbed. Besides these
vessels, others dashed into British waters from time to time as they
sailed forward and back across the ocean in the track of British
commerce.
No one disputed that the privateers were a very important
branch of the American navy; but they suffered under serious
drawbacks, which left doubtful the balance of merits and defects.
Perhaps their chief advantage compared with government vessels
was their lightness,—a quality which no government would have
carried to the same extent. The long-range pivot-gun was another
invention of the privateer, peculiarly successful and easily adapted
for government vessels. In other respects, the same number or even
half the number of sloops-of-war would have probably inflicted
greater injury at less cost. The “Argus” showed how this result could
have been attained. The privateer’s first object was to save prizes;
and in the effort to send captured vessels into port the privateer lost
a large proportion by recapture. Down to the moment when Admiral
Warren established his blockade of the American coast from New
York southward, most of the prizes got to port. After that time the
New England ports alone offered reasonable chance of safety, and
436
privateering received a check. During the war about twenty-five
hundred vessels all told were captured from the British. Many were
destroyed; many released as cartels; and of the remainder not less
than seven hundred and fifty, probably one half the number sent to
port, were recaptured by the British navy. Most of these were the
prizes of privateers, and would have been destroyed had they been
taken by government vessels. They were usually the most valuable
prizes, so that the injury that might have been inflicted on British
commerce was diminished nearly one half by the system which
encouraged private war as a money-making speculation.
Another objection was equally serious. Like all gambling
ventures, privateering was not profitable. In the list of five hundred
437
privateers furnished by the Navy Department, three hundred
were recorded as having never made a prize. Of the remainder, few
made their expenses. One of the most successful cruises of the war
was that of Joshua Barney on the Baltimore schooner “Rossie” at the
outbreak of hostilities, when every prize reached port. Barney sent in
prizes supposed to be worth fifteen hundred thousand dollars; but
after paying charges and duties and selling the goods, he found that
the profits were not sufficient to counterbalance the discomforts,
and he refused to repeat the experiment. His experience was
common. As early as November, 1812, the owners of twenty-four
New York privateers sent to Congress a memorial declaring that the
profits of private naval war were by no means equal to the hazards,
and that the spirit of privateering stood in danger of extinction
unless the government would consent in some manner to grant a
bounty for the capture or destruction of the enemy’s property.
If private enterprise was to fail at the critical moment, and if the
government must supply the deficiency, the government would have
done better to undertake the whole task. In effect, the government
in the end did so. The merchants asked chiefly for a reduction of
duties on prize-goods. Gallatin pointed out the serious objections to
such legislation, and the little probability that the measure would
increase the profits of privateering or the number of privateers. The
actual privateers, he said, were more than enough for the food
offered by the enemy’s trade, and privateering, like every other form
of gambling, would always continue to attract more adventurers
438
than it could support.
Congress for the time followed Gallatin’s advice, and did nothing;
but in the summer session of 1813, after Gallatin’s departure for
Europe, the privateer owners renewed their appeal, and the acting
Secretary of the Treasury, Jones, wrote to the chairman of the Naval
439
Committee July 21, 1813, —
“The fact is that ... privateering is nearly at an end; and

from the best observation I have been enabled to make, it is
more from the deficiency of remuneration in the net proceeds of
their prizes than from the vigilance and success of the enemy in
recapturing.”
In deference to Jones’s opinion, Congress passed an Act,

approved Aug. 2, 1813, reducing one third the duties on prize-
goods. Another Act, approved August 3, granted a bounty of twenty-
five dollars for every prisoner captured and delivered to a United
States agent by a private armed vessel. A third Act, approved August
2, authorized the Secretary of the Navy to place on the pension list
any privateersman who should be wounded or disabled in the line of
his duty.
These complaints and palliations tended to show that the
privateer cost the public more than the equivalent government
vessel would have cost. If instead of five hundred privateers of all
sizes and efficiency, the government had kept twenty sloops-of-war
constantly at sea destroying the enemy’s commerce, the result
would have been about the same as far as concerned injury to the
enemy, while in another respect the government would have
escaped one of its chief difficulties. Nothing injured the navy so
much as privateering. Seamen commonly preferred the harder but
more profitable and shorter cruise in a privateer, where fighting was
not expected or wished, to the strict discipline and murderous
battles of government ships, where wages were low and prize-
money scarce. Of all towns in the United States, Marblehead was
probably the most devoted to the sea; but of nine hundred men
from Marblehead who took part in the war, fifty-seven served as
soldiers, one hundred and twenty entered the navy, while seven
440
hundred and twenty-six went as privateersmen. Only after much
delay and difficulty could the frigates obtain crews. The
“Constitution” was nearly lost by this cause at the beginning of the
war; and the loss of the “Chesapeake” was supposed to be chiefly
due to the determination of the old crew to quit the government
service for that of the privateers.
Such drawbacks raised reasonable doubts as to the balance of
advantages and disadvantages offered by the privateer system.
Perhaps more careful inquiry might show that, valuable as the
privateers were, the government would have done better to retain all
military and naval functions in its own hands, and to cover the seas
with small cruisers capable of pursuing a system of thorough
destruction against the shipping and colonial interests of England.
CHAPTER XIV.
Gallatin and Bayard, having sailed from the Delaware May 9,
arrived at St. Petersburg July 21, only to find that during the six
months since the Czar offered to mediate, Russia had advanced
rapidly in every direction except that of the proposed mediation.
Napoleon after being driven from Russia in December, 1812, passed
the winter in Paris organizing a new army of three hundred thousand
men on the Elbe, between Dresden and Magdeburg, while a second
army of more than one hundred thousand was to hold Hamburg and
Bremen. Russia could not prevent Napoleon from reconstructing a
force almost as powerful as that with which he had marched to
Moscow, for the Russian army had suffered very severely and was
unfit for active service; but the Czar succeeded in revolutionizing
Prussia, and in forcing the French to retire from the Vistula to the
Elbe, while he gained a reinforcement of more than one hundred
thousand men from the fresh and vigorous Prussian army. Even with
that assistance the Czar could not cope with Napoleon, who, leaving
Paris April 17, during the month of May fought furious battles at
Lützen and Bautzen, which forced the allied Russian and Prussian
armies back from the Elbe to the Oder.
At that point Austria interfered so energetically as to oblige
Napoleon to accept an armistice for the purpose of collecting new
forces. During the armistice the Czar stationed himself at Gitschin in
Bohemia, nine hundred miles from St. Petersburg, and about the
same distance from London by the path that couriers were obliged
to take. When Gallatin and Bayard reached St. Petersburg, July 21,
the armistice, which had been prolonged until August 10, was about
to expire, and the Czar could not be anxious to decide subordinate
questions until the issue of the coming campaign should be known.
Meanwhile the government of England had in May, with many
441
friendly expressions, declined the Russian mediation. Castlereagh
probably hoped that this quiet notification to Lieven, the Russian
envoy in London, would end the matter; but toward the month of
July news reached London that the American commissioners,
Gallatin and Bayard, had arrived at Gothenburg on their way to
Russia, and Castlereagh then saw that he must be more explicit in
his refusal. Accordingly he took measures for making the matter
clear not only to the Russian government but also to the American
commissioners.
With the Russian government he was obliged by the nature of
their common relations to communicate officially, and he wrote
instructions to Lord Cathcart, dated July 5, directing communication
to be made.
442
“I am afraid,” said Castlereagh’s letter, “this tender of
mediation which on a question of maritime right cannot be
listened to by Great Britain, however kindly and liberally
intended, will have had the unfortunate effect of protracting the
war with the United States. It is to be lamented that the formal
offer was made to America before the disposition of the British
government was previously sounded as to its acceptance of a
mediation. It has enabled the President to hold out to the people
of America a vague expectation of peace, under which he may
reconcile them with less repugnance to submit to the measures
of the Government. This evil, however, cannot now be avoided,
and it only remains to prevent this question from producing any
embarrassment between Great Britain and Russia.”
Embarrassment between Great Britain and Russia was no new

thing in European politics, and commonly involved maritime objects
for which the United States were then fighting. Castlereagh had
much reason for wishing to avoid the danger. The most fortunate
result he could reasonably expect from the coming campaign was a
defeat of Bonaparte that should drive him back to the Rhine. Then
Russia and Austria would probably offer terms to Napoleon; England
would be obliged to join in a European Congress; Napoleon would
raise the question of maritime rights, and on that point he would be
supported by Russian sympathies. Napoleon and Russia might insist
that the United States should take part in the Congress, and in that
case England might be obliged to retire from it. Castlereagh felt
uneasy at the prospect, and ordered Cathcart to “press the Emperor
of Russia in the strongest manner not to push his personal
interference on this point further.” Cathcart was to use his utmost
endeavors to persuade the Czar “pointedly to discountenance a
design so mischievously calculated to promote the views of France.”
Another week of reflection only increased Castlereagh’s
anxieties, and caused the British government to take a step intended
to leave the Czar no opening for interference. July 13 Castlereagh
443
wrote Cathcart new instructions, directing him to present a
formal note acquainting the Czar that the Prince Regent was “ready
immediately to name plenipotentiaries to meet and treat with the
American plenipotentiaries in the earnest desire” of peace, either in
London or at Gothenburg; although he could “not consent that these
discussions should be carried on in any place which might be
supposed to imply that they were in any way connected with any
other negotiations.” He wrote privately to Cathcart that the mere
knowledge of the intervention of a third power in any arrangement
with the United States would probably decide the British people
444
against it.
Thus in July, 1813, when the war was barely a year old,
Castlereagh reached the point of offering to negotiate directly with
the United States. This advantage was gained by the Russian offer
of mediation, and was intended not to pacify America but to silence
Alexander and Roumanzoff. Castlereagh was frank and prompt in his
declarations. His offer of direct negotiation was dated July 13, at a
time when Alexander Baring received a letter from Gallatin
announcing his arrival at Gothenburg and inviting assistance for the
proposed mediation. Baring consulted Castlereagh, and wrote, July
22, a long letter to Gallatin, to inform the American commissioners
what the British government had done and was willing to do. “Before
445
this reaches you,” said Baring, “you will have been informed that
this mediation has been refused, with expressions of our desire to
treat separately and directly here; or, if more agreeable to you, at
Gothenburg.” To leave no room for misunderstanding, Baring added
that if the American commissioners were obliged by their
instructions to adhere pertinaciously to the American demands in
respect to impressments, he should think negotiation useless.
In regular succession all these expressions of British policy were
received at St. Petersburg in the Czar’s absence, and in the doubtful
state of mind which followed the battles of Lützen and Bautzen.
Alexander had left Count Roumanzoff at St. Petersburg, continuing
to act as Chancellor of the Empire and Foreign Secretary; but in
truth the Minister of Foreign Affairs, as far as the Czar then required
such an officer, was Count Nesselrode, who attended Alexander in
person and received his orders orally. Nesselrode at that time was
rather an agent than an adviser; but in general he represented the
English alliance and hostility to Napoleon, while Roumanzoff
represented the French alliance and hostility to England.
Of English diplomacy Americans knew something, and could by
similarity of mind divine what was not avowed. Of French diplomacy
they had long experience, and their study was rendered from time to
time more easy by Napoleon’s abrupt methods. Of Russian
diplomacy they knew little or nothing. Thus far Minister Adams had
been given his own way. He had been allowed to seem to kindle the
greatest war of modern times, and had been invited to make use of
Russia against England; but the Czar’s reasons for granting such
favor were mysterious even to Adams, for while Napoleon
occasionally avowed motives, Alexander never did. Russian
diplomacy moved wholly in the dark.
Only one point was certain. For reasons of his own, the Czar
chose to leave Roumanzoff nominally in office until the result of the
war should be decided, although Roumanzoff was opposed to the
Czar’s policy. The chancellor did not stand alone in his hostility to the
war; probably a majority of the Russian people shared the feeling.
Even the army and its old General Koutousoff, though elated with an
immense triumph, grumbled at being obliged to fight the battles of
Germany, and would gladly have returned to their own soil. The Czar
himself could not afford to break his last tie with the French interest,
but was wise to leave a path open by which he could still retreat in
case his war in Germany failed. If Napoleon should succeed once
more in throwing the Russian army back upon Russian soil,
Alexander might still be obliged to use Roumanzoff’s services if not
to resume his policy. Such a suspicion might not wholly explain
Alexander’s course toward Roumanzoff and Koutousoff, but no one
could doubt that it explained the chancellor’s course toward the Czar.
Indeed, Roumanzoff made little concealment of his situation or his
hopes. Adams could without much difficulty divine that the failure of
the Czar in Germany would alone save Roumanzoff in St. Petersburg,
and that the restoration of Roumanzoff to power was necessary to
reinvigorate the mediation.
Castlereagh’s first positive refusal to accept the mediation was
notified to Count Lieven in May, and was known to Roumanzoff in St.
Petersburg about the middle of June. Early in July the Czar received
it, and by his order Nesselrode, in a despatch to Lieven dated July 9,
expressed “the perfect satisfaction which his Imperial Majesty felt in
the reasons which actuated the conduct of this [British] government
446
on a point of so much delicacy and importance.” The Czar was
then in the midst of difficulties. The result of the war was doubtful,
and depended on Austria.
Just as news of the armistice arrived in St. Petersburg, Minister
Adams went to Roumanzoff, June 22, to inform him of Gallatin’s and
Bayard’s appointment. Roumanzoff in return gave Adams explicit
information of England’s refusal to accept the Czar’s offer. Adams
447
immediately recorded it in his Diary: —
“He [Roumanzoff] said that he was very sorry to say he had
received since he had seen me [June 15] further despatches
from Count Lieven, stating that the British government, with
many very friendly and polite assurances that there was no
mediation which they should so readily and cheerfully accept as
that of the Emperor of Russia, had however stated that their
differences with the United States of America involving certain
principles of the internal government of England were of a
nature which they did not think suitable to be settled by a
mediation.”
Adams expected this answer, and at once assumed it to be final;

but Roumanzoff checked him. “It would now be for consideration,”
he continued, “whether, after the step thus taken by the American
government [in sending commissioners to St. Petersburg], it would
not be advisable to renew the proposition to Great Britain; upon
which he should write to the Emperor.” Not because of any American
request, but wholly of his own motion, Roumanzoff proposed to
keep the mediation alive. His motives were for Adams to fathom.
The chancellor did not avow them, but he hinted to Adams that the
chances of war were many. “Perhaps it might be proper not to be
discouraged by the ill success of his first advances. After
considerations might produce more pacific dispositions in the British
government. Unexpected things were happening every day; ‘and in
our own affairs,’ said the count, ‘a very general report prevails that
an armistice has taken place.’” A Congress had been proposed, and
the United States were expressly named among the Powers to be
invited to it.
Adams reported this conversation to his Government in a
448
despatch dated June 26, and waited for his two new colleagues,
who arrived July 21. Personally the colleagues were agreeable to
Adams, and the proposed negotiation was still more so, for the
President sent him official notice that in case the negotiations were
successful, Adams’s services would be required as minister in
London; but with the strongest inducements to press the mediation,
Adams could not but see that he and his colleagues depended on
Roumanzoff, and that Roumanzoff depended not on Alexander, but
on Napoleon. Roumanzoff’s only chance of aiding them was by
clinging to office until the Czar should be weary of war.
Unwilling as Gallatin was to be thus made the sport of imperial
policy, he was obliged, like his colleagues, to submit. Two days after
their arrival, Roumanzoff told them that he meant, if possible, to
begin the whole transaction anew.
“The count said he regretted much that there was such

reason to believe the British would decline the mediation; but on
transmitting the copy of the credential letter to the Emperor, he
would determine whether to renew the proposal, as the
opposition in England might make it an embarrassing charge
against the Ministry if they should under such circumstances
449
reject it.”
Roumanzoff had written soon after June 22 to ask the Czar

whether, on the arrival of the American commissioners, the offer of
mediation should be renewed. The Czar, overwhelmed with business,
wrote back, about July 20, approving Roumanzoff’s suggestion, and
authorizing him to send a despatch directly to Count Lieven in
London renewing the offer. The Czar’s letter was communicated to
450
Adams August 10 by Roumanzoff, who was evidently much
pleased and perhaps somewhat excited by it.
Such a letter warranted some excitement, for Roumanzoff could
regard it only as a sign of hesitation and anxiety. Alexander was in a
degree pledged to England to press the mediation no further. While
he assured England through Nesselrode, July 9, that he was
perfectly satisfied with the British reasons for refusing his offer of
mediation “on a point of so much delicacy and importance,” he
authorized Roumanzoff only ten days afterward to annoy England a
second time with an offer which he had every reason to know must
be rejected; and he did this without informing Nesselrode.
Gallatin and Bayard found themselves, August 10, condemned to
wait two or three months for the British answer, which they knew
must be unfavorable, because Gallatin received August 17 Baring’s
letter announcing the determination of Castlereagh to negotiate
separately. Roumanzoff’s conduct became more and more
mysterious to the commissioners. He did not notify them of
Castlereagh’s official offer to negotiate directly. He confounded
Adams, August 19, by flatly denying his own information, given two
months before, that England rejected mediation in principle because
it involved doctrines of her internal government. Roumanzoff insisted
that England had never refused to accept the mediation, although he
held in his hands at least two despatches from Lieven, written as
late as July 13, officially communicating England’s determination to
negotiate directly or not at all. Castlereagh, foreseeing the possibility
of misunderstanding, had read to Lieven the instructions of July 13
for communication to Roumanzoff, besides authorizing Cathcart to
451
show them in extenso to the Czar. In denying that such
instructions had been given, Roumanzoff could not have expected
the American commissioners to believe him.
The motive of Roumanzoff’s persistence might be open to the
simple explanation that the chancellor hoped to recover power, and
within a few months to re-establish his policy of antagonism to
England. Alexander’s conduct could be explained by no such obvious
interest. When Castlereagh’s letters of July 13 and 14 reached
Cathcart at the Czar’s headquarters in Bohemia about August 10,
they arrived at the most critical moment of the war. On that day the
armistice expired. The next day Austria declared war on Napoleon.
The combined armies of Russia, Prussia, and Austria concentrated
behind the mountains, and then marched into Saxony. While starting
on that campaign, August 20, the Czar was told by Lord Cathcart the
reasons why his offer of mediation was rejected, and answered at
452
once that in this case he could do nothing more. Cathcart wrote
to Nesselrode a formal note on the subject August 23 or 24, but did
453
not at once communicate it, because the campaign had then
begun; the great battle of Dresden was fought August 26 and 27,
and the allies, again beaten, retired into Bohemia August 28. The
Czar saw his best military adviser Moreau killed by his side at
Dresden, and he returned to Töplitz in no happy frame of mind.
At Töplitz, September 1, Cathcart delivered to Nesselrode his
454
formal note, refusing Russian mediation and communicating the
offer of England to negotiate directly. In an ordinary condition of
government Nesselrode should have taken care that the British note
should be made known without delay to the American
commissioners at St. Petersburg, but the Czar kept in his own hands
the correspondence with Roumanzoff and the Americans, and
neither he nor Nesselrode communicated Cathcart’s act to
455
Roumanzoff. Possibly their silence was due to the new military
movements. August 29 the French marshal Vandamme with forty
thousand men, pursuing the allies into Bohemia, was caught
between the Prussians and Austrians August 30 and crushed. During
the month of September severe fighting, favorable to the allies,
occurred, but no general advance was made by the allied
sovereigns.
Alexander next received at Töplitz toward September 20 a letter
from Roumanzoff enclosing a renewal of the offer of mediation, to
be proposed in a despatch to Lieven, read by Roumanzoff to the
American commissioners August 24, and sent to London August 28.
The Czar must have known the futility of this new step, as well as
the mistake into which Roumanzoff had been led, and the awkward
attitude of the American commissioners. Only a fortnight before, he
had received Cathcart’s official note, and a few days earlier he had
assured Cathcart that he should do no more in the matter. Yet,
September 20, Alexander wrote with his own hand a note of four
lines to Roumanzoff, approving his despatch to Lieven, and begging
456
him to follow up the affair as he had begun it.
The Czar’s letter of September 20 completed the embroglio,
which remained unintelligible to every one except himself. Cathcart
was the most mystified of all the victims to the Czar’s double
attitude. At the time when Alexander thus for the second time
authorized Roumanzoff to disregard the express entreaties of the
British government, Cathcart was making an effort to explain to
Castlereagh the Czar’s first interference. If Castlereagh understood
his minister’s ideas, he was gifted with more than common
penetration.
“I believe the not communicating the rescript of the Emperor

concerning the American plenipotentiaries to have been the
457
effect of accident,” wrote Cathcart from Töplitz September
25; “but what is singular is that notwithstanding his
[Nesselrode’s] letter of the ninth [July], by the Emperor’s
command, to Count Lieven, this communication from and
instruction to Roumanzoff was not known to Count Nesselrode
till this day, when I mentioned it to him, having received no
caution to do otherwise, and he was not at all pleased with it. It
was during the advance to Dresden. But I cannot help thinking
that there must have been some policy of Roumanzoff’s stated
in regard to keeping hold of the mediation, which, whether it
was detailed or not, would not escape the Emperor’s
penetration, and upon which he may have been induced to act
as far as sanctioning the proposal of treating at London under
Russia’s mediation, which the Prince Regent’s government might
accept or reject as they pleased; and that not wishing to go at
that time into a discussion of maritime rights with either
Nesselrode or me, he afterward forgot it.”
Cathcart’s style was involved, but his perplexity was evident. His
remarks related only to the Czar’s first letter to Roumanzoff, written
about July 20, not “during the advance to Dresden.” He knew
nothing of the Czar’s second letter to Roumanzoff, dated September
20, renewing the same authority, only five days before Cathcart’s
labored attempt to explain the first. Of the second letter, as of the
first, neither Nesselrode nor Cathcart was informed.
The Czar’s motive in thus ordering each of his two ministers to
act in ignorance and contradiction of the other’s instructions
perplexed Roumanzoff as it did Cathcart. Lieven first revealed to
Roumanzoff the strange misunderstanding by positively refusing to
present to Castlereagh the chancellor’s note of August 28 renewing
the offer of mediation. Roumanzoff was greatly mortified. He told
Gallatin that the mediation had been originally the Czar’s own idea;
that it had been the subject of repeated discussions at his own
motion, and had been adopted notwithstanding Roumanzoff’s hints
458
at the possibility of English reluctance. The chancellor sent
Lieven’s despatch immediately to the Czar without comment,
requesting the Czar to read it and give his orders. The British
officials, unwilling to blame Alexander, attacked Roumanzoff. Lord
Walpole, who came directly from Bohemia to St. Petersburg to act as
British ambassador, said “he was as sure as he was of his own
existence, and he believed he could prove it, that Roumanzoff had
459
been cheating us all.” Cathcart wrote, December 12, to
Castlereagh,—
“I think Nesselrode knows nothing of the delay of

communicating with the American mission; that it was an
intrigue of the chancellor’s, if it is one; and that during the
operations of war the Emperor lost the clew to it, so that
460
something has been unanswered.”
Perhaps the Czar’s conduct admitted of several interpretations.

He might wish to keep the mediation alive in order to occupy
Roumanzoff until the campaign should be decided; or he might in his
good nature prefer to gratify his old favorite by allowing him to do
what he wished; or he took this method of signifying to Roumanzoff
his disgrace and the propriety of immediate retirement. Apparently
Roumanzoff took the last view, for he sent his resignation to the
Czar, and at the close of the year quitted his official residence at the
Department of Foreign Affairs, telling Gallatin that he remained in
office only till he should receive authority to close the American
mission.
The American commissioners in private resented Alexander’s
treatment, but were unable to leave Russia without authority.
Gallatin learned, October 19, that the Senate had refused to confirm
his appointment, but he remained at St. Petersburg, chiefly in
deference to Roumanzoff’s opinion, and probably with ideas of
assisting the direct negotiation at London or elsewhere. Meanwhile
the campaign was decided, October 18, by Napoleon’s decisive
overthrow at Leipzig, which forced him to retreat behind the Rhine.
Still the Czar wrote nothing to Roumanzoff, and the American
commissioners remained month after month at St. Petersburg. Not
until Jan. 25, 1814, did Gallatin and Bayard begin their winter
journey to Amsterdam, where they arrived March 4 and remained a
month. Then Gallatin received, through Baring, permission to enter
England, and crossed the Channel to hasten if he could the direct
negotiation which Castlereagh had offered and Madison accepted.
The diplomatic outlook had changed since March, 1813, when
the President accepted the offer of Russian mediation; but the
change was wholly for the worse. England’s triumphs girdled the
world, and found no check except where Perry’s squadron blocked
the way to Detroit. The allied armies crossed the Rhine in December
and entered France on the east. At the same time Wellington after a
long campaign drove Joseph from Spain, and entering France from
the south pressed against Bordeaux. The government and people of
England, in their excitement and exultation at daily conquests,
thought as little as they could of the American war. Society rarely
mentioned it. Newspapers alone preserved a record of British
feelings toward the United States during the year 1813. The
expressions of newspapers, like those of orators, could not be
accepted without allowance, for they aimed at producing some
desired effect, and said either more or less than the truth; as a rule,
they represented the cool opinion neither of the person who uttered
nor of the audience who heard them; but in the absence of other
records, public opinion was given only in the press, and the London
newspapers alone furnished evidence of its character.
The “Morning Chronicle”—the only friend of the United States in
the daily press of England—showed its friendship by silence.
Whatever the liberal opposition thought in private, no one but
Cobbett ventured in public to oppose the war. Cobbett having
become a radical at the time of life when most men become
conservative, published in his “Weekly Register” many columns of
vigorous criticism on the American war without apparent effect,
although in truth he expressed opinions commonly held by intelligent
people. Even Lord Castlereagh, Cobbett’s antipathy, shared some of
Cobbett’s least popular opinions in the matter of the American war.
English society, whatever shades of diversity might exist, was
frank and free in expressing indifference or contempt. Of the
newspapers which made a duty of reflecting what was believed to be
the prevailing public opinion, the “Times,” supposed to favor the
interests of Wellesley and Canning, was probably the ablest. During
the early part of the war, the “Times” showed a disposition to
criticise the Ministry rather than the Americans. From the “Times”
came most of the bitter complaints, widely copied by the American
press, of the naval defeats suffered by the “Guerriere,” the “Java,”
and the “Macedonian.” British successes were belittled, and abuse of
Americans was exaggerated, in order to deprive ministers of credit.
“The world has seen President Madison plunge into a war from the
basest motives, and conduct it with the most entire want of ability,”
said the “Times” of February 9, 1813. “The American government
has sounded the lowest depth of military disgrace, insomuch that
the official records of the campaign take from us all possibility of
exulting in our victories over such an enemy.” The “Times” found in
such reflections a reason for not exulting in ministerial victories, but
it bewailed defeats the more loudly, and annoyed the Ministry by the
violence of its attacks on naval administration.
As the year passed, and England’s triumph in Europe seemed to
overshadow the world, the “Times,” probably recognizing the
uselessness of attacking the Ministry, showed worse temper toward
the United States. The Americans were rarely mentioned, and always
with language of increasing ill humor. “Despicable in the cabinet,
461
ridiculous in the field,” the Americans disappeared from sight in
the splendor of victory at Vittoria and Leipzig. No wish for peace was
suggested, and if the “Times” expressed the true feelings of the
respectable middle class, as it was supposed to aim at doing, no
wish for peace could be supposed to exist.
Of the ministerial papers the “Courier” was the best, and of
course was emphatic in support of the American war. The Ministry
were known to be lukewarm about the United States, and for that
reason they thought themselves obliged to talk in public as strongly
as the strongest against a peace. When the Russian mediation called
for notice, May 13, the “Courier” at once declared against it:—
“Before the war commenced, concession might have been

proper; we always thought it unwise. But the hour of concession
and compromise is passed. America has rushed unnecessarily
and unnaturally into war, and she must be made to feel the
effects of her folly and injustice; peace must be the
consequence of punishment, and retraction of her insolent
demands must precede negotiation. The thunders of our cannon
must first strike terror into the American shores.”
The “Courier” felt that Americans were not Englishmen, and

could not forgive it, but was unable to admit that they might still
exercise a considerable influence on human affairs:—
“They have added nothing to literature, nothing to any of

the sciences; they have not produced one good poet, not one
celebrated historian! Their statesmen are of a mixed breed,—
half metaphysicians, half politicians; all the coldness of the one
with all the cunning of the other. Hence we never see anything
462
enlarged in their conceptions or grand in their measures.”
These reasons were hardly sufficient to prove the right of

impressing American seamen. The literary, metaphysical, or social
qualities of Americans, their “enlarged conceptions,” and the
grandeur or littleness of their measures, had by common consent
ceased to enter into discussion, pending a settlement of the simpler
issue, whether Americans could fight. For a long time the English
press encouraged the belief that Americans were as incapable of
fighting as of producing poets and historians. Their naval victories
were attributed to British seamen. Perhaps the first turn of the tide
was in November, 1813, when news of Perry’s victory on Lake Erie
crossed in London the news of Napoleon’s defeat at Leipzig. Perry’s
victory, like those of Hull, Decatur, and Bainbridge, was too complete
for dispute: “It may, however, serve to diminish our vexation at this
occurrence to learn that the flotilla in question was not any branch
of the British navy, ... but a local force, a kind of mercantile
463
military.”
By a curious coincidence, Castlereagh’s official letter to Monroe,
offering direct negotiation, was dated the same day, November 4,
when news of the victory at Leipzig met in London news of the
defeat on Lake Erie, and Castlereagh probably meant to allow no
newspaper prejudices to obstruct a peace; but public opinion was
slow to recover its balance. When news arrived that the Americans
had captured Malden, recovered Detroit, and destroyed Proctor’s
army on the Thames, the “Courier” showed the first symptom of
change in opinion by expressing a somewhat simple-minded wish to
hear no more about the Americans:—
“The intelligence is unpleasant, but we confess that we do

not view, and have never from the beginning of the war viewed,
the events in America with any very powerful interest. The
occurrences in Europe will no doubt produce a very decisive
effect upon the American government; and unless it is more
obstinate and stupid in its hostility than even we think it, it will
do as the other allies of Bonaparte have done,—abandon him.”
If the national extravagance could be expected to show its full

force in one direction rather than in another, naturalized Americans
taken in arms were certain to produce it. The issue was regularly
raised after Van Rensselaer’s defeat at Queenston in 1812. When the
American prisoners arrived at Quebec, they were mustered, and
twenty-three native-born subjects of Great Britain, belonging to the
First, Sixth, and Thirteenth U. S. Infantry, were taken from the ranks
and shipped to England to be put on trial as British subjects for
bearing arms against their king. The American agent in London
reported to the President that the men had arrived there for the
reason given. Secretary Armstrong, May 15, 1813, then ordered
twenty-three British soldiers into close confinement as hostages. The
British government directed Sir George Prevost to put double the
number of Americans in close confinement, and Sir George, in giving
464
notice of this measure to General Wilkinson, October 17, 1813,
added:—
“I have been further instructed by his Majesty’s government

to notify to you for the information of the government of the
United States that the commanders of his Majesty’s armies and
fleets on the coasts of America have received instructions to
prosecute the war with unmitigated severity against all cities,
towns, and villages belonging to the United States, and against
the inhabitants thereof, if, after this communication shall have
been made to you, and a reasonable time given for its being
transmitted to the American government, that government shall
unhappily not be deterred from putting to death any of the
soldiers who now are or who may hereafter be kept as hostages
for the purposes stated in the letter from Major-General
Dearborn.”
The limit of retaliation was soon reached, for the number of
prisoners was small on both sides. The British government
somewhat carefully refrained from committing itself too far; but the
press treated the matter as though it were vital.
“If Mr. Madison,” said the “Courier” of July 24, “dare to

retaliate by taking away the life of one English prisoner in
revenge for a British subject fully proved to be such being taken
in the act of voluntarily bearing arms against his country,
America puts herself out of the protection of the law of nations,
and must be treated as an outlaw. An army and navy acting
against her will then be absolved from all obligation to respect
the usages and laws of war. Hostilities may be carried on against
her in any mode until she is brought to a proper sense of her
conduct.”
The “Morning Post” of December 28 called for the execution of

British subjects taken in arms, and for retaliation on retaliation in
defiance of “the brutal wretches who, after betraying, are still
suffered to govern America.” The “Times” of May 24 spoke with
hardly less vehemence. Probably such talk was not shared by the
government, for the government never tested its sincerity by
bringing the men to trial; but at the close of 1813 public opinion in
England was supposed to be tending toward extreme measures
against the United States. The approaching fall of Napoleon
threatened to throw America outside the pale of civilization.
Englishmen seemed ready to accept the idea that Madison and
Napoleon should be coupled together, and that no peace should be
made which did not include the removal of both from office and
power. Of all periods in American history this was probably the least
adapted to negotiation, but while England was at the moment of her
most extravagant sense of power, President Madison received and
accepted Castlereagh’s offer to negotiate, and Gallatin went with
Bayard to London to hasten the approach of peace.

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message which it seeks to transmit has already been transmitted, acknowledged,

1 Bateson, Cybernetics, and Nonverbal Communication������������������������ 1

Appendix: Diagram of Symmetrical and Complementary

Gregory Bateson’s view was that inherent in any instance of communication,

1.1 History of Bateson’s Interest

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“I don’t like Americans,” Scott said; “I never did and never

“In the field,” said Scott, “or grappling in mortal combat on

Had English society known so much of Americans in 1807, war

“The fact is that ... privateering is nearly at an end; and

In deference to Jones’s opinion, Congress passed an Act,

Embarrassment between Great Britain and Russia was no new

Adams expected this answer, and at once assumed it to be final;

“The count said he regretted much that there was such

Roumanzoff had written soon after June 22 to ask the Czar

“I believe the not communicating the rescript of the Emperor

“I think Nesselrode knows nothing of the delay of

Perhaps the Czar’s conduct admitted of several interpretations.

“Before the war commenced, concession might have been

The “Courier” felt that Americans were not Englishmen, and

“They have added nothing to literature, nothing to any of

These reasons were hardly sufficient to prove the right of

“The intelligence is unpleasant, but we confess that we do

If the national extravagance could be expected to show its full

“I have been further instructed by his Majesty’s government

“If Mr. Madison,” said the “Courier” of July 24, “dare to

The “Morning Post” of December 28 called for the execution of

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