Who reads Captain Marryat today? Certainly, with his rousing adventure stories in which good trumps evil under the wise hand of Providence, he is not the kind of author who would make it onto the national curriculum. And he was writing at a time (he retired from the sea to write in 1830 and died in 1848) when the British Empire was in full expansion mode, with all the disastrous consequences that that is said to have inflicted on the planet, among them, according to post-colonialist historians in our own country, the white settlement of Australia. If you wanted a…