The Mirror of the Sea
by Joseph Conrad · English · Gutenberg #1058 · 360,054 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: The Mirror of the Sea
Author: Joseph Conrad
Release date: October 1, 1997 [eBook #1058]
Most recently updated: August 14, 2015
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1058
Credits: Transcribed from the 1907 Methuen & Co. edition by David Price
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MIRROR OF THE SEA ***
Transcribed from the 1907 Methuen & Co. edition by David Price, email
ccx074@pglaf.org
THE MIRROR OF THE SEA
MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS
BY
JOSEPH CONRAD
* * * * *
“ . . . for this miracle or this wonder
troubleth me right greatly.”
BOETHIUS DE CON: PHIL: B. IV., PROSE VI.
* * * * *
THIRD EDITION
* * * * *
METHUEN & CO.
36 ESSEX STREET W.C.
LONDON
* * * * *
_First published_ _October_ _1906_
_Second Edition_ _December_ _1906_
_Third Edition_ _January_ _1907_
* * * * *
TO
KATHERINE SANDERSON
WHOSE WARM WELCOME AND GRACIOUS HOSPITALITY
EXTENDED TO THE FRIEND OF HER SON
CHEERED THE FIRST DARK DAYS OF MY PARTING WITH THE SEA
THESE PAGES ARE AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED
TABLE OF CONTENTS
THE MIRROR OF THE SEA:— PAGE
LANDFALLS AND DEPARTURES I. 1
EMBLEMS OF HOPE IV. 17
THE FINE ART VII. 33
COBWEBS AND GOSSAMER X. 52
THE WEIGHT OF THE BURDEN XIII. 69
OVERDUE AND MISSING XVI. 86
THE GRIP OF THE LAND XX. 102
THE CHARACTER OF THE FOE XXII. 109
RULES OF EAST AND WEST XXV. 123
THE FAITHFUL RIVER XXX. 157
IN CAPTIVITY XXXIII. 180
INITIATION XXXV. 201
THE NURSERY OF THE CRAFT XXXVII. 233
THE _TREMOLINO_ XL. 244
THE HEROIC AGE XLVI. 289
I.
“And shippes by the brinke comen and gon,
And in swich forme endure a day or two.”
_The Frankeleyn’s Tale_.
LANDFALL and Departure mark the rhythmical swing of a seaman’s life and
of a ship’s career. From land to land is the most concise definition of
a ship’s earthly fate.
A “Departure” is not what a vain people of landsmen may think. The term
“Landfall” is more easily understood; you fall in with the land, and it
is a matter of a quick eye and of a clear atmosphere. The Departure is
not the ship’s going away from her port any more than the Landfall can be
looked upon as the synonym of arrival. But there is this difference in
the Departure: that the term does not imply so much a sea event as a
definite act entailing a process—the precise observation of certain
landmarks by means of the compass card.
Your Landfall, be it a peculiarly-shaped mountain, a rocky headland, or a
stretch of sand-dunes, you meet at first with a single glance. Further
recognition will follow in due course; but essentially a Landfall, good
or bad, is made and done with at the first cry of “Land ho!” The
Departure is distinctly a ceremony of navigation. A ship may have left
her port some time before; she may have been at sea, in the fullest sense
of the phrase, for days; but, for all that, as long as the coast she was
about to leave remained in sight, a southern-going ship of yesterday had
not in the sailor’s sense begun the enterprise of a passage.
The taking of Departure, if not the last sight of the land, is, perhaps,
the last professional recognition of the land on the part of a sailor.
It is the technical, as distinguished from the sentimental, “good-bye.”
Henceforth he has done with the coast astern of his ship. It is a matter
personal to the man. It is not the ship that takes her departure; the
seaman takes his Departure by means of cross-bearings which fix the place
of the first tiny pencil-cross on the white expanse of the track-chart,
where the ship’s position at noon shall be marked by just such another
tiny pencil cross for every day of her passage. And there may be sixty,
eighty, any number of these crosses on the ship’s track from land to
land. The greatest number in my experience was a hundred and thirty of
such crosses from the pilot station at the Sand Heads in the Bay of
Bengal to the Scilly’s light. A bad passage. . .
A Departure, the last professional sight of land, is always good, or at
least good enough. For, even if the weather be thick, it does not matter
much to a ship having all the open sea before her bows. A Landfall may
be good or bad. You encompass the earth with one particular spot of it
in your eye. In all the devious tracings the course of a sailing-ship
leaves upon the white paper of a chart she is always aiming for that one
little spot—maybe a small island in the ocean, a single headland upon the
long coast of a continent, a lighthouse on a bluff, or simply the peaked
form of a mountain like an ant-heap afloat upon the waters. But if you
have sighted it on the expected bearing, then that Landfall is good.
Fogs, snowstorms, gales thick with clouds and rain—those are the enemies
of good Landfalls.
II.
Some commanders of ships take their Departure from the home coast sadly,
in a spirit of grief and discontent. They have a wife, children perhaps,
some affection at any rate, or perhaps only some pet vice, that must be
left behind for a year or more. I remember only one man who walked his
deck with a springy step, and gave the first course of the passage in an
elated voice. But he, as I learned afterwards, was leaving nothing
behind him, except a welter of debts and threats of legal proceedings.
On the other hand, I have known many captains who, directly their ship
had left the narrow waters of the Channel, would disappear from the sight
of their ship’s company altogether for some three days or more. They
would take a long dive, as it were, into their state-room, only to emerge
a few days afterwards with a more or less serene brow. Those were the
men easy to get on with. Besides, such a complete retirement seemed to
imply a satisfactory amount of trust in their officers, and to be trusted
displeases no seaman worthy of the name.
On my first voyage as chief mate with good Captain MacW— I remember that
I felt quite flattered, and went blithely about my duties, myself a
commander for all practical purposes. Still, whatever the greatness of
my illusion, the fact remained that the real commander was there, backing
up my self-confidence, though invisible to my eyes behind a maple-wood
veneered cabin-door with a white china handle.
That is the time, after your Departure is taken, when the spirit of your
commander communes with you in a muffled voice, as if from the sanctum
sanctorum of a temple; because, call her a temple or a “hell afloat”—as
some ships have been called—the captain’s state-room is surely the august
place in every vessel.
The good MacW— would not even come out to his meals, and fed solitarily
in his holy of holies from a tray covered with a white napkin. Our
steward used to bend an ironic glance at the perfectly empty plates he
was bringing out from there. This grief for his home, which overcomes so
many married seamen, did not deprive Captain MacW— of his legitimate
appetite. In fact, the steward would almost invariably come up to me,
sitting in the captain’s chair at the head of the table, to say in a
grave murmur, “The captain asks for one more slice of meat and two
potatoes.” We, his officers, could hear him moving about in his berth,
or lightly snoring, or fetching deep sighs, or splashing and blowing in
his bath-room; and we made our reports to him through the keyhole, as it
were. It was the crowning achievement of his amiable character that the
answers we got were given in a quite mild and friendly tone. Some
commanders in their periods of seclusion are constantly grumpy, and seem
to resent the mere sound of your voice as an injury and an insult.
But a grumpy recluse cannot worry his subordinates: whereas the man in
whom the sense of duty is strong (or, perhaps, only the sense of
self-importance), and who persists in airing on deck his moroseness all
day—and perhaps half the night—becomes a grievous infliction. He walks
the poop darting gloomy glances, as though he wished to poison the sea,
and snaps your head off savagely whenever you happen to blunder within
earshot. And these vagaries are the harder to bear patiently, as becomes
a man and an officer, because no sailor is really good-tempered during
the first few days of a voyage. There are regrets, memories, the
instinctive longing for the departed idleness, the instinctive hate of
all work. Besides, things have a knack of going wrong at the start,
especially in the matter of irritating trifles. And there is the abiding
thought of a whole year of more or less hard life before one, because
there was hardly a southern-going voyage in the yesterday of the sea
which meant anything less than a twelvemonth. Yes; it needed a few days
after the taking of your departure for a ship’s company to shake down
into their places, and for the soothing deep-water ship routine to
establish its beneficent sway.
It is a great doctor for sore hearts and sore heads, too, your ship’s
routine, which I have seen soothe—at least for a time—the most turbulent
of spirits. There is health in it, and peace, and satisfaction of the
accomplished round; for each day of the ship’s life seems to close a
circle within the wide ring of the sea horizon. It borrows a certain
dignity of sameness from the majestic monotony of the sea. He who loves
the sea loves also the ship’s routine.
Nowhere else than upon the sea do the days, weeks and months fall away
quicker into the past. They seem to be left astern as easily as the
light air-bubbles in the swirls of the ship’s wake, and vanish into a
great silence in which your ship moves on with a sort of magical effect.
They pass away, the days, the weeks, the months. Nothing but a gale can
disturb the orderly life of the ship; and the spell of unshaken monotony
that seems to have fallen upon the very voices of her men is broken only
by the near prospect of a Landfall.
Then is the spirit of the ship’s commander stirred strongly again. But
it is not moved to seek seclusion, and to remain, hidden and inert, shut
up in a small cabin with the solace of a good bodily appetite. When
about to make the land, the spirit of the ship’s commander is tormented
by an unconquerable restlessness. It seems unable to abide for many
seconds together in the holy of holies of the captain’s state-room; it
will out on deck and gaze ahead, through straining eyes, as the appointed
moment comes nearer. It is kept vigorously upon the stretch of excessive
vigilance. Meantime the body of the ship’s commander is being enfeebled
by want of appetite; at least, such is my experience, though “enfeebled”
is perhaps not exactly the word. I might say, rather, that it is
spiritualized by a disregard for food, sleep, and all the ordinary
comforts, such as they are, of sea life. In one or two cases I have
known that detachment from the grosser needs of existence remain
regrettably incomplete in the matter of drink.
But these two cases were, properly speaking, pathological cases, and the
only two in all my sea experience. In one of these two instances of a
craving for stimulants, developed from sheer anxiety, I cannot assert
that the man’s seamanlike qualities were impaired in the least. It was a
very anxious case, too, the land being made suddenly, close-to, on a
wrong bearing, in thick weather, and during a fresh onshore gale. Going
below to speak to him soon after, I was unlucky enough to catch my
captain in the very act of hasty cork-drawing. The sight, I may say,
gave me an awful scare. I was well aware of the morbidly sensitive
nature of the man. Fortunately, I managed to draw back unseen, and,
taking care to stamp heavily with my sea-boots at the foot of the cabin
stairs, I made my second entry. But for this unexpected glimpse, no act
of his during the next twenty-four hours could have given me the
slightest suspicion that all was not well with his nerve.
III.
Quite another case, and having nothing to do with drink, was that of poor
Captain B—. He used to suffer from sick headaches, in his young days,
every time he was approaching a coast. Well over fifty years of age when
I knew him, short, stout, dignified, perhaps a little pompous, he was a
man of a singularly well-informed mind, the least sailor-like in outward
aspect, but certainly one of the best seamen whom it has been my good
luck to serve under. He was a Plymouth man, I think, the son of a
country doctor, and both his elder boys were studying medicine. He
commanded a big London ship, fairly well known in her day. I thought no
end of him, and that is why I remember with a peculiar satisfaction the
last words he spoke to me on board his ship after an eighteen months’
voyage. It was in the dock in Dundee, where we had brought a full cargo
of jute from Calcutta. We had been paid off that morning, and I had come
on board to take my sea-chest away and to say good-bye. In his slightly
lofty but courteous way he inquired what were my plans. I replied that I
intended leaving for London by the afternoon train, and thought of going
up for examination to get my master’s certificate. I had just enough
service for that. He commended me for not wasting my time, with such an
evident interest in my case that I was quite surprised; then, rising from
his chair, he said:
“Have you a ship in view after you have passed?”
I answered that I had nothing whatever in view.
He shook hands with me, and pronounced the memorable words:
“If you happen to be in want of employment, remember that as long as I
have a ship you have a ship, too.”
In the way of compliment there is nothing to beat this from a ship’s
captain to his second mate at the end of a voyage, when the work is over
and the subordinate is done with. And there is a pathos in that memory,
for the poor fellow never went to sea again after all. He was already
ailing when we passed St. Helena; was laid up for a time when we were off
the Western Islands, but got out of bed to make his Landfall. He managed
to keep up on deck as far as the Downs, where, giving his orders in an
exhausted voice, he anchored for a few hours to send a wire to his wife
and take aboard a North Sea pilot to help him sail the ship up the east
coast. He had not felt equal to the task by himself, for it is the sort
of thing that keeps a deep-water man on his feet pretty well night and
day.
When we arrived in Dundee, Mrs. B— was already there, waiting to take him
home. We travelled up to London by the same train; but by the time I had
managed to get through with my examination the ship had sailed on her
next voyage without him, and, instead of joining her again, I went by
request to see my old commander in his home. This is the only one of my
captains I have ever visited in that way. He was out of bed by then,
“quite convalescent,” as he declared, making a few tottering steps to
meet me at the sitting-room door. Evidently he was reluctant to take his
final cross-bearings of this earth for a Departure on the only voyage to
an unknown destination a sailor ever undertakes. And it was all very
nice—the large, sunny room; his deep, easy-chair in a bow window, with
pillows and a footstool; the quiet, watchful care of the elderly, gentle
woman who had borne him five children, and had not, perhaps, lived with
him more than five full years out of the thirty or so of their married
life. There was also another woman there in a plain black dress, quite
gray-haired, sitting very erect on her chair with some sewing, from which
she snatched side-glances in his direction, and uttering not a single
word during all the time of my call. Even when, in due course, I carried
over to her a cup of tea, she only nodded at me silently, with the
faintest ghost of a smile on her tight-set lips. I imagine she must have
been a maiden sister of Mrs. B— come to help nurse her brother-in-law.
His youngest boy, a late-comer, a great cricketer it seemed, twelve years
old or thereabouts, chattered enthusiastically of the exploits of W. G.
Grace. And I remember his eldest son, too, a newly-fledged doctor, who
took me out to smoke in the garden, and, shaking his head with
professional gravity, but with genuine concern, muttered: “Yes, but he
doesn’t get back his appetite. I don’t like that—I don’t like that at
all.” The last sight of Captain B— I had was as he nodded his head to me
out of the bow window when I turned round to close the front gate.
It was a distinct and complete impression, something that I don’t know
whether to call a Landfall or a Departure. Certainly he had gazed at
times very fixedly before him with the Landfall’s vigilant look, this
sea-captain seated incongruously in a deep-backed chair. He had not then
talked to me of employment, of ships, of being ready to take another
command; but he had discoursed of his early days, in the abundant but
thin flow of a wilful invalid’s talk. The women looked worried, but sat
still, and I learned more of him in that interview than in the whole
eighteen months we had sailed together. It appeared he had “served his
time” in the copper-ore trade, the famous copper-ore trade of old days
between Swansea and the Chilian coast, coal out and ore in, deep-loaded
both ways, as if in wanton defiance of the great Cape Horn seas—a work,
this, for staunch ships, and a great school of staunchness for
West-Country seamen. A whole fleet of copper-bottomed barques, as strong
in rib and planking, as well-found in gear, as ever was sent upon the
seas, manned by hardy crews and commanded by young masters, was engaged
in that now long defunct trade. “That was the school I was trained in,”
he said to me almost boastfully, lying back amongst his pillows with a
rug over his legs. And it was in that trade that he obtained his first
command at a very early age. It was then that he mentioned to me how, as
a young commander, he was always ill for a few days before making land
after a long passage. But this sort of sickness used to pass off with
the first sight of a familiar landmark. Afterwards, he added, as he grew
older, all that nervousness wore off completely; and I observed his weary
eyes gaze steadily ahead, as if there had been nothing between him and
the straight line of sea and sky, where whatever a seaman is looking for
is first bound to appear. But I have also seen his eyes rest fondly upon
the faces in the room, upon the pictures on the wall, upon all the
familiar objects of that home, whose abiding and clear image must have
flashed often on his memory in times of stress and anxiety at sea. Was
he looking out for a strange Landfall, or taking with an untroubled mind
the bearings for his last Departure?
It is hard to say; for in that voyage from which no man returns Landfall
and Departure are instantaneous, merging together into one moment of
supreme and final attention. Certainly I do not remember observing any
sign of faltering in the set expression of his wasted face, no hint of
the nervous anxiety of a young commander about to make land on an
uncharted shore. He had had too much experience of Departures and
Landfalls! And had he not “served his time” in the famous copper-ore
trade out of the Bristol Channel, the work of the staunchest ships
afloat, and the school of staunch seamen?
IV.
BEFORE an anchor can ever be raised, it must be let go; and this
perfectly obvious truism brings me at once to the subject of the
degradation of the sea language in the daily press of this country.
Your journalist, whether he takes charge of a ship or a fleet, almost
invariably “casts” his anchor. Now, an anchor is never cast, and to take
a liberty with technical language is a crime against the clearness,
precision, and beauty of perfected speech.
An anchor is a forged piece of iron, admirably adapted to its end, and
technical language is an instrument wrought into perfection by ages of
experience, a flawless thing for its purpose. An anchor of yesterday
(because nowadays there are contrivances like mushrooms and things like
claws, of no particular expression or shape—just hooks)—an anchor of
yesterday is in its way a most efficient instrument. To its perfection
its size bears witness, for there is no other appliance so small for the
great work it has to do. Look at the anchors hanging from the cat-heads
of a big ship! How tiny they are in proportion to the great size of the
hull! Were they made of gold they would look like trinkets, like
ornamental toys, no bigger in proportion than a jewelled drop in a
woman’s ear. And yet upon them will depend, more than once, the very
life of the ship.
An anchor is forged and fashioned for faithfulness; give it ground that
it can bite, and it will hold till the cable parts, and then, whatever
may afterwards befall its ship, that anchor is “lost.” The honest, rough
piece of iron, so simple in appearance, has more parts than the human
body has limbs: the ring, the stock, the crown, the flukes, the palms,
the shank. All this, according to the journalist, is “cast” when a ship
arriving at an anchorage is brought up.
This insistence in using the odious word arises from the fact that a
particularly benighted landsman must imagine the act of anchoring as a
process of throwing something overboard, whereas the anchor ready for its
work is already overboard, and is not thrown over, but simply allowed to
fall. It hangs from the ship’s side at the end of a heavy, projecting
timber called the cat-head, in the bight of a short, thick chain whose
end link is suddenly released by a blow from a top-maul or the pull of a
lever when the order is given. And the order is not “Heave over!” as the
paragraphist seems to imagine, but “Let go!”
As a matter of fact, nothing is ever cast in that sense on board ship but
the lead, of which a cast is taken to search the depth of water on which
she floats. A lashed boat, a spare spar, a cask or what not secured
about the decks, is “cast adrift” when it is untied. Also the ship
herself is “cast to port or starboard” when getting under way. She,
however, never “casts” her anchor.
To speak with severe technicality, a ship or a fleet is “brought up”—the
complementary words unpronounced and unwritten being, of course, “to an
anchor.” Less technically, but not less correctly, the word “anchored,”
with its characteristic appearance and resolute sound, ought to be good
enough for the newspapers of the greatest maritime country in the world.
“The fleet anchored at Spithead”: can anyone want a better sentence for
brevity and seamanlike ring? But the “cast-anchor” trick, with its
affectation of being a sea-phrase—for why not write just as well “threw
anchor,” “flung anchor,” or “shied anchor”?—is intolerably odious to a
sailor’s ear. I remember a coasting pilot of my early acquaintance (he
used to read the papers assiduously) who, to define the utmost degree of
lubberliness in a landsman, used to say, “He’s one of them poor,
miserable ‘cast-anchor’ devils.”
V.
From first to last the seaman’s thoughts are very much concerned with his
anchors. It is not so much that the anchor is a symbol of hope as that
it is the heaviest object that he has to handle on board his ship at sea
in the usual routine of his duties. The beginning and the end of every
passage are marked distinctly by work about the ship’s anchors. A vessel
in the Channel has her anchors always ready, her cables shackled on, and
the land almost always in sight. The anchor and the land are
indissolubly connected in a sailor’s thoughts. But directly she is clear
of the narrow seas, heading out into the world with nothing solid to
speak of between her and the South Pole, the anchors are got in and the
cables disappear from the deck. But the anchors do not disappear.
Technically speaking, they are “secured in-board”; and, on the forecastle
head, lashed down to ring-bolts with ropes and chains, under the
straining sheets of the head-sails, they look very idle and as if asleep.
Thus bound, but carefully looked after, inert and powerful, those emblems
of hope make company for the look-out man in the night watches; and so
the days glide by, with a long rest for those characteristically shaped
pieces of iron, reposing forward, visible from almost every part of the
ship’s deck, waiting for their work on the other side of the world
somewhere, while the ship carries them on with a great rush and splutter
of foam underneath, and the sprays of the open sea rust their heavy
limbs.
The first approach to the land, as yet invisible to the crew’s eyes, is
announced by the brisk order of the chief mate to the boatswain: “We will
get the anchors over this afternoon” or “first thing to-morrow morning,”
as the case may be. For the chief mate is the keeper of the ship’s
anchors and the guardian of her cable. There are good ships and bad
ships, comfortable ships and ships where, from first day to last of the
voyage, there is no rest for a chief mate’s body and soul. And ships are
what men make them: this is a pronouncement of sailor wisdom, and, no
doubt, in the main it is true.
However, there are ships where, as an old grizzled mate once told me,
“nothing ever seems to go right!” And, looking from the poop where we
both stood (I had paid him a neighbourly call in dock), he added: “She’s
one of them.” He glanced up at my face, which expressed a proper
professional sympathy, and set me right in my natural surmise: “Oh no;
the old man’s right enough. He never interferes. Anything that’s done
in a seamanlike way is good enough for him. And yet, somehow, nothing
ever seems to go right in this ship. I tell you what: she is naturally
unhandy.”
The “old man,” of course, was his captain, who just then came on deck in
a silk hat and brown overcoat, and, with a civil nod to us, went ashore.
He was certainly not more than thirty, and the elderly mate, with a
murmur to me of “That’s my old man,” proceeded to give instances of the
natural unhandiness of the ship in a sort of deprecatory tone, as if to
say, “You mustn’t think I bear a grudge against her for that.”
The instances do not matter. The point is that there are ships where
things _do_ go wrong; but whatever the ship—good or bad, lucky or
unlucky—it is in the forepart of her that her chief mate feels most at
home. It is emphatically _his_ end of the ship, though, of course, he is
the executive supervisor of the whole. There are _his_ anchors, _his_
headgear, his foremast, his station for manoeuvring when the captain is
in charge. And there, too, live the men, the ship’s hands, whom it is
his duty to keep employed, fair weather or foul, for the ship’s welfare.
It is the chief mate, the only figure of the ship’s afterguard, who comes
bustling forward at the cry of “All hands on deck!” He is the satrap of
that province in the autocratic realm of the ship, and more personally
responsible for anything that may happen there.
There, too, on the approach to the land, assisted by the boatswain and
the carpenter, he “gets the anchors over” with the men of his own watch,
whom he knows better than the others. There he sees the cable ranged,
the windlass disconnected, the compressors opened; and there, after
giving his own last order, “Stand clear of the cable!” he waits
attentive, in a silent ship that forges slowly ahead towards her
picked-out berth, for the sharp shout from aft, “Let go!” Instantly
bending over, he sees the trusty iron fall with a heavy plunge under his
eyes, which watch and note whether it has gone clear.
For the anchor “to go clear” means to go clear of its own chain. Your
anchor must drop from the bow of your ship with no turn of cable on any
of its limbs, else you would be riding to a foul anchor. Unless the pull
of the cable is fair on the ring, no anchor can be trusted even on the
best of holding ground. In time of stress it is bound to drag, for
implements and men must be treated fairly to give you the “virtue” which
is in them. The anchor is an emblem of hope, but a foul anchor is worse
than the most fallacious of false hopes that ever lured men or nations
into a sense of security. And the sense of security, even the most
warranted, is a bad councillor. It is the sense which, like that
exaggerated feeling of well-being ominous of the coming on of madness,
precedes the swift fall of disaster. A seaman labouring under an undue
sense of security becomes at once worth hardly half his salt. Therefore,
of all my chief officers, the one I trusted most was a man called B—. He
had a red moustache, a lean face, also red, and an uneasy eye. He was
worth all his salt.
On examining now, after many years, the residue of the feeling which was
the outcome of the contact of our personalities, I discover, without much
surprise, a certain flavour of dislike. Upon the whole, I think he was
one of the most uncomfortable shipmates possible for a young commander.
If it is permissible to criticise the absent, I should say he had a
little too much of the sense of insecurity which is so invaluable in a
seaman. He had an extremely disturbing air of being everlastingly ready
(even when seated at table at my right hand before a plate of salt beef)
to grapple with some impending calamity. I must hasten to add that he
had also the other qualification necessary to make a trustworthy
seaman—that of an absolute confidence in himself. What was really wrong
with him was that he had these qualities in an unrestful degree. His
eternally watchful demeanour, his jerky, nervous talk, even his, as it
were, determined silences, seemed to imply—and, I believe, they did
imply—that to his mind the ship was never safe in my hands. Such was the
man who looked after the anchors of a less than five-hundred-ton barque,
my first command, now gone from the face of the earth, but sure of a
tenderly remembered existence as long as I live. No anchor could have
gone down foul under Mr. B—’s piercing eye. It was good for one to be
sure of that when, in an open roadstead, one heard in the cabin the wind
pipe up; but still, there were moments when I detested Mr. B—
exceedingly. From the way he used to glare sometimes, I fancy that more
than once he paid me back with interest. It so happened that we both
loved the little barque very much. And it was just the defect of Mr.
B—’s inestimable qualities that he would never persuade himself to
believe that the ship was safe in my hands. To begin with, he was more
than five years older than myself at a time of life when five years
really do count, I being twenty-nine and he thirty-four; then, on our
first leaving port (I don’t see why I should make a secret of the fact
that it was Bangkok), a bit of manoeuvring of mine amongst the islands of
the Gulf of Siam had given him an unforgettable scare. Ever since then
he had nursed in secret a bitter idea of my utter recklessness. But upon
the whole, and unless the grip of a man’s hand at parting means nothing
whatever, I conclude that we did like each other at the end of two years
and three months well enough.
The bond between us was the ship; and therein a ship, though she has
female attributes and is loved very unreasonably, is different from a
woman. That I should have been tremendously smitten with my first
command is nothing to wonder at, but I suppose I must admit that Mr. B—’s
sentiment was of a higher order. Each of us, of course, was extremely
anxious about the good appearance of the beloved object; and, though I
was the one to glean compliments ashore, B— had the more intimate pride
of feeling, resembling that of a devoted handmaiden. And that sort of
faithful and proud devotion went so far as to make him go about flicking
the dust off the varnished teak-wood rail of the little craft with a silk
pocket-handkerchief—a present from Mrs. B—, I believe.
That was the effect of his love for the barque. The effect of his
admirable lack of the sense of security once went so far as to make him
remark to me: “Well, sir, you _are_ a lucky man!”
It was said in a tone full of significance, but not exactly offensive,
and it was, I suppose, my innate tact that prevented my asking, “What on
earth do you mean by that?”
Later on his meaning was illustrated more fully on a dark night in a
tight corner during a dead on-shore gale. I had called him up on deck to
help me consider our extremely unpleasant situation. There was not much
time for deep thinking, and his summing-up was: “It looks pretty bad,
whichever we try; but, then, sir, you always do get out of a mess
somehow.”
VI.
It is difficult to disconnect the idea of ships’ anchors from the idea of
the ship’s chief mate—the man who sees them go down clear and come up
sometimes foul; because not even the most unremitting care can always
prevent a ship, swinging to winds and tide, from taking an awkward turn
of the cable round stock or fluke. Then the business of “getting the
anchor” and securing it afterwards is unduly prolonged, and made a
weariness to the chief mate. He is the man who watches the growth of the
cable—a sailor’s phrase which has all the force, precision, and imagery
of technical language that, created by simple men with keen eyes for the
real aspect of the things they see in their trade, achieves the just
expression seizing upon the essential, which is the ambition of the
artist in words. Therefore the sailor will never say, “cast anchor,” and
the ship-master aft will hail his chief mate on the forecastle in
impressionistic phrase: “How does the cable grow?” Because “grow” is the
right word for the long drift of a cable emerging aslant under the
strain, taut as a bow-string above the water. And it is the voice of the
keeper of the ship’s anchors that will answer: “Grows right ahead, sir,”
or “Broad on the bow,” or whatever concise and deferential shout will fit
the case.
There is no order more noisily given or taken up with lustier shouts on
board a homeward-bound merchant ship than the command, “Man the
windlass!” The rush of expectant men out of the forecastle, the
snatching of hand-spikes, the tramp of feet, the clink of the pawls, make
a stirring accompaniment to a plaintive up-anchor song with a roaring
chorus; and this burst of noisy activity from a whole ship’s crew seems
like a voiceful awakening of the ship herself, till then, in the
picturesque phrase of Dutch seamen, “lying asleep upon her iron.”
For a ship with her sails furled on her squared yards, and reflected from
truck to water-line in the smooth gleaming sheet of a landlocked harbour,
seems, indeed, to a seaman’s eye the most perfect picture of slumbering
repose. The getting of your anchor was a noisy operation on board a
merchant ship of yesterday—an inspiring, joyous noise, as if, with the
emblem of hope, the ship’s company expected to drag up out of the depths,
each man all his personal hopes into the reach of a securing hand—the
hope of home, the hope of rest, of liberty, of dissipation, of hard
pleasure, following the hard endurance of many days between sky and
water. And this noisiness, this exultation at the moment of the ship’s
departure, make a tremendous contrast to the silent moments of her
arrival in a foreign roadstead—the silent moments when, stripped of her
sails, she forges ahead to her chosen berth, the loose canvas fluttering
softly in the gear above the heads of the men standing still upon her
decks, the master gazing intently forward from the break of the poop.
Gradually she loses her way, hardly moving, with the three figures on her
forecastle waiting attentively about the cat-head for the last order of,
perhaps, full ninety days at sea: “Let go!”
This is the final word of a ship’s ended journey, the closing word of her
toil and of her achievement. In a life whose worth is told out in
passages from port to port, the splash of the anchor’s fall and the
thunderous rumbling of the chain are like the closing of a distinct
period, of which she seems conscious with a slight deep shudder of all
her frame. By so much is she nearer to her appointed death, for neither
years nor voyages can go on for ever. It is to her like the striking of
a clock, and in the pause which follows she seems to take count of the
passing time.
This is the last important order; the others are mere routine directions.
Once more the master is heard: “Give her forty-five fathom to the water’s
edge,” and then he, too, is done for a time. For days he leaves all the
harbour work to his chief mate, the keeper of the ship’s anchor and of
the ship’s routine. For days his voice will not be heard raised about
the decks, with that curt, austere accent of the man in charge, till,
again, when the hatches are on, and in a silent and expectant ship, he
shall speak up from aft in commanding tones: “Man the windlass!”
VII.
THE other year, looking through a newspaper of sound principles, but
whose staff _will_ persist in “casting” anchors and going to sea “on” a
ship (ough!), I came across an article upon the season’s yachting. And,
behold! it was a good article. To a man who had but little to do with
pleasure sailing (though all sailing is a pleasure), and certainly
nothing whatever with racing in open waters, the writer’s strictures upon
the handicapping of yachts were just intelligible and no more. And I do
not pretend to any interest in the enumeration of the great races of that
year. As to the 52-foot linear raters, praised so much by the writer, I
am warmed up by his approval of their performances; but, as far as any
clear conception goes, the descriptive phrase, so precise to the
comprehension of a yachtsman, evokes no definite image in my mind.
The writer praises that class of pleasure vessels, and I am willing to
endorse his words, as any man who loves every craft afloat would be ready
to do. I am disposed to admire and respect the 52-foot linear raters on
the word of a man who regrets in such a sympathetic and understanding
spirit the threatened decay of yachting seamanship.
Of course, yacht racing is an organized pastime, a function of social
idleness ministering to the vanity of certain wealthy inhabitants of
these isles nearly as much as to their inborn love of the sea. But the
writer of the article in question goes on to point out, with insight and
justice, that for a great number of people (20,000, I think he says) it
is a means of livelihood—that it is, in his own words, an industry. Now,
the moral side of an industry, productive or unproductive, the redeeming
and ideal aspect of this bread-winning, is the attainment and
preservation of the highest possible skill on the part of the craftsmen.
Such skill, the skill of technique, is more than honesty; it is something
wider, embracing honesty and grace and rule in an elevated and clear
sentiment, not altogether utilitarian, which may be called the honour of
labour. It is made up of accumulated tradition, kept alive by individual
pride, rendered exact by professional opinion, and, like the higher arts,
it spurred on and sustained by discriminating praise.
This is why the attainment of proficiency, the pushing of your skill with
attention to the most delicate shades of excellence, is a matter of vital
concern. Efficiency of a practically flawless kind may be reached
naturally in the struggle for bread. But there is something beyond—a
higher point, a subtle and unmistakable touch of love and pride beyond
mere skill; almost an inspiration which gives to all work that finish
which is almost art—which _is_ art.
As men of scrupulous honour set up a high standard of public conscience
above the dead-level of an honest community, so men of that skill which
passes into art by ceaseless striving raise the dead-level of correct
practice in the crafts of land and sea. The conditions fostering the
growth of that supreme, alive excellence, as well in work as in play,
ought to be preserved with a most careful regard lest the industry or the
game should perish of an insidious and inward decay. Therefore I have
read with profound regret, in that article upon the yachting season of a
certain year, that the seamanship on board racing yachts is not now what
it used to be only a few, very few, years ago.
For that was the gist of that article, written evidently by a man who not
only knows but _understands_—a thing (let me remark in passing) much
rarer than one would expect, because the sort of understanding I mean is
inspired by love; and love, though in a sense it may be admitted to be
stronger than death, is by no means so universal and so sure. In fact,
love is rare—the love of men, of things, of ideas, the love of perfected
skill. For love is the enemy of haste; it takes count of passing days,
of men who pass away, of a fine art matured slowly in the course of years
and doomed in a short time to pass away too, and be no more. Love and
regret go hand in hand in this world of changes swifter than the shifting
of the clouds reflected in the mirror of the sea.
To penalize a yacht in proportion to the fineness of her performance is
unfair to the craft and to her men. It is unfair to the perfection of
her form and to the skill of her servants. For we men are, in fact, the
servants of our creations. We remain in everlasting bondage to the
productions of our brain and to the work of our hands. A man is born to
serve his time on this earth, and there is something fine in the service
being given on other grounds than that of utility. The bondage of art is
very exacting. And, as the writer of the article which started this
train of thought says with lovable warmth, the sailing of yachts is a
fine art.
His contention is that racing, without time allowances for anything else
but tonnage—that is, for size—has fostered the fine art of sailing to the
pitch of perfection. Every sort of demand is made upon the master of a
sailing-yacht, and to be penalized in proportion to your success may be
of advantage to the sport itself, but it has an obviously deteriorating
effect upon the seamanship. The fine art is being lost.
VIII.
The sailing and racing of yachts has developed a class of fore-and-aft
sailors, men born and bred to the sea, fishing in winter and yachting in
summer; men to whom the handling of that particular rig presents no
mystery. It is their striving for victory that has elevated the sailing
of pleasure craft to the dignity of a fine art in that special sense. As
I have said, I know nothing of racing and but little of fore-and-aft rig;
but the advantages of such a rig are obvious, especially for purposes of
pleasure, whether in cruising or racing. It requires less effort in
handling; the trimming of the sail-planes to the wind can be done with
speed and accuracy; the unbroken spread of the sail-area is of infinite
advantage; and the greatest possible amount of canvas can be displayed
upon the least possible quantity of spars. Lightness and concentrated
power are the great qualities of fore-and-aft rig.
A fleet of fore-and-afters at anchor has its own slender graciousness.
The setting of their sails resembles more than anything else the
unfolding of a bird’s wings; the facility of their evolutions is a
pleasure to the eye. They are birds of the sea, whose swimming is like
flying, and resembles more a natural function than the handling of
man-invented appliances. The fore-and-aft rig in its simplicity and the
beauty of its aspect under every angle of vision is, I believe,
unapproachable. A schooner, yawl, or cutter in charge of a capable man
seems to handle herself as if endowed with the power of reasoning and the
gift of swift execution. One laughs with sheer pleasure at a smart piece
of manoeuvring, as at a manifestation of a living creature’s quick wit
and graceful precision.
Of those three varieties of fore-and-aft rig, the cutter—the racing rig
_par excellence_—is of an appearance the most imposing, from the fact
that practically all her canvas is in one piece. The enormous mainsail
of a cutter, as she draws slowly past a point of land or the end of a
jetty under your admiring gaze, invests her with an air of lofty and
silent majesty. At anchor a schooner looks better; she has an aspect of
greater efficiency and a better balance to the eye, with her two masts
distributed over the hull with a swaggering rake aft. The yawl rig one
comes in time to love. It is, I should think, the easiest of all to
manage.
For racing, a cutter; for a long pleasure voyage, a schooner; for
cruising in home waters, the yawl; and the handling of them all is indeed
a fine art. It requires not only the knowledge of the general principles
of sailing, but a particular acquaintance with the character of the
craft. All vessels are handled in the same way as far as theory goes,
just as you may deal with all men on broad and rigid principles. But if
you want that success in life which comes from the affection and
confidence of your fellows, then with no two men, however similar they
may appear in their nature, will you deal in the same way. There may be
a rule of conduct; there is no rule of human fellowship. To deal with
men is as fine an art as it is to deal with ships. Both men and ships
live in an unstable element, are subject to subtle and powerful
influences, and want to have their merits understood rather than their
faults found out.
It is not what your ship will _not_ do that you want to know to get on
terms of successful partnership with her; it is, rather, that you ought
to have a precise knowledge of what she will do for you when called upon
to put forth what is in her by a sympathetic touch. At first sight the
difference does not seem great in either line of dealing with the
difficult problem of limitations. But the difference is great. The
difference lies in the spirit in which the problem is approached. After
all, the art of handling ships is finer, perhaps, than the art of
handling men.
And, like all fine arts, it must be based upon a broad, solid sincerity,
which, like a law of Nature, rules an infinity of different phenomena.
Your endeavour must be single-minded. You would talk differently to a
coal-heaver and to a professor. But is this duplicity? I deny it. The
truth consists in the genuineness of the feeling, in the genuine
recognition of the two men, so similar and so different, as your two
partners in the hazard of life. Obviously, a humbug, thinking only of
winning his little race, would stand a chance of profiting by his
artifices. Men, professors or coal-heavers, are easily deceived; they
even have an extraordinary knack of lending themselves to deception, a
sort of curious and inexplicable propensity to allow themselves to be led
by the nose with their eyes open. But a ship is a creature which we have
brought into the world, as it were on purpose to keep us up to the mark.
In her handling a ship will not put up with a mere pretender, as, for
instance, the public will do with Mr. X, the popular statesman, Mr. Y,
the popular scientist, or Mr. Z, the popular—what shall we say?—anything
from a teacher of high morality to a bagman—who have won their little
race. But I would like (though not accustomed to betting) to wager a
large sum that not one of the few first-rate skippers of racing yachts
has ever been a humbug. It would have been too difficult. The
difficulty arises from the fact that one does not deal with ships in a
mob, but with a ship as an individual. So we may have to do with men.
But in each of us there lurks some particle of the mob spirit, of the mob
temperament. No matter how earnestly we strive against each other, we
remain brothers on the lowest side of our intellect and in the
instability of our feelings. With ships it is not so. Much as they are
to us, they are nothing to each other. Those sensitive creatures have no
ears for our blandishments. It takes something more than words to cajole
them to do our will, to cover us with glory. Luckily, too, or else there
would have been more shoddy reputations for first-rate seamanship. Ships
have no ears, I repeat, though, indeed, I think I have known ships who
really seemed to have had eyes, or else I cannot understand on what
ground a certain 1,000-ton barque of my acquaintance on one particular
occasion refused to answer her helm, thereby saving a frightful smash to
two ships and to a very good man’s reputation. I knew her intimately for
two years, and in no other instance either before or since have I known
her to do that thing. The man she had served so well (guessing, perhaps,
at the depths of his affection for her) I have known much longer, and in
bare justice to him I must say that this confidence-shattering experience
(though so fortunate) only augmented his trust in her. Yes, our ships
have no ears, and thus they cannot be deceived. I would illustrate my
idea of fidelity as between man and ship, between the master and his art,
by a statement which, though it might appear shockingly sophisticated, is
really very simple. I would say that a racing-yacht skipper who thought
of nothing else but the glory of winning the race would never attain to
any eminence of reputation. The genuine masters of their craft—I say
this confidently from my experience of ships—have thought of nothing but
of doing their very best by the vessel under their charge. To forget
one’s self, to surrender all personal feeling in the service of that fine
art, is the only way for a seaman to the faithful discharge of his trust.
Such is the service of a fine art and of ships that sail the sea. And
therein I think I can lay my finger upon the difference between the
seamen of yesterday, who are still with us, and the seamen of to-morrow,
already entered upon the possession of their inheritance. History
repeats itself, but the special call of an art which has passed away is
never reproduced. It is as utterly gone out of the world as the song of
a destroyed wild bird. Nothing will awaken the same response of
pleasurable emotion or conscientious endeavour. And the sailing of any
vessel afloat is an art whose fine form seems already receding from us on
its way to the overshadowed Valley of Oblivion. The taking of a modern
steamship about the world (though one would not minimize its
responsibilities) has not the same quality of intimacy with nature,
which, after all, is an indispensable condition to the building up of an
art. It is less personal and a more exact calling; less arduous, but
also less gratifying in the lack of close communion between the artist
and the medium of his art. It is, in short, less a matter of love. Its
effects are measured exactly in time and space as no effect of an art can
be. It is an occupation which a man not desperately subject to
sea-sickness can be imagined to follow with content, without enthusiasm,
with industry, without affection. Punctuality is its watchword. The
incertitude which attends closely every artistic endeavour is absent from
its regulated enterprise. It has no great moments of self-confidence, or
moments not less great of doubt and heart-searching. It is an industry
which, like other industries, has its romance, its honour and its
rewards, its bitter anxieties and its hours of ease. But such sea-going
has not the artistic quality of a single-handed struggle with something
much greater than yourself; it is not the laborious absorbing practice of
an art whose ultimate result remains on the knees of the gods. It is not
an individual, temperamental achievement, but simply the skilled use of a
captured force, merely another step forward upon the way of universal
conquest.
IX.
Every passage of a ship of yesterday, whose yards were braced round
eagerly the very moment the pilot, with his pockets full of letters, had
got over the side, was like a race—a race against time, against an ideal
standard of achievement outstripping the expectations of common men.
Like all true art, the general conduct of a ship and her handling in
particular cases had a technique which could be discussed with delight
and pleasure by men who found in their work, not bread alone, but an
outlet for the peculiarities of their temperament. To get the best and
truest effect from the infinitely varying moods of sky and sea, not
pictorially, but in the spirit of their calling, was their vocation, one
and all; and they recognised this with as much sincerity, and drew as
much inspiration from this reality, as any man who ever put brush to
canvas. The diversity of temperaments was immense amongst those masters
of the fine art.
Some of them were like Royal Academicians of a certain kind. They never
startled you by a touch of originality, by a fresh audacity of
inspiration. They were safe, very safe. They went about solemnly in the
assurance of their consecrated and empty reputation. Names are odious,
but I remember one of them who might have been their very president, the
P.R.A. of the sea-craft. His weather-beaten and handsome face, his
portly presence, his shirt-fronts and broad cuffs and gold links, his air
of bluff distinction, impressed the humble beholders (stevedores, tally
clerks, tide-waiters) as he walked ashore over the gangway of his ship
lying at the Circular Quay in Sydney. His voice was deep, hearty, and
authoritative—the voice of a very prince amongst sailors. He did
everything with an air which put your attention on the alert and raised
your expectations, but the result somehow was always on stereotyped
lines, unsuggestive, empty of any lesson that one could lay to heart. He
kept his ship in apple-pie order, which would have been seamanlike enough
but for a finicking touch in its details. His officers affected a
superiority over the rest of us, but the boredom of their souls appeared
in their manner of dreary submission to the fads of their commander. It
was only his apprenticed boys whose irrepressible spirits were not
affected by the solemn and respectable mediocrity of that artist. There
were four of these youngsters: one the son of a doctor, another of a
colonel, the third of a jeweller; the name of the fourth was Twentyman,
and this is all I remember of his parentage. But not one of them seemed
to possess the smallest spark of gratitude in his composition. Though
their commander was a kind man in his way, and had made a point of
introducing them to the best people in the town in order that they should
not fall into the bad company of boys belonging to other ships, I regret
to say that they made faces at him behind his back, and imitated the
dignified carriage of his head without any concealment whatever.
This master of the fine art was a personage and nothing more; but, as I
have said, there was an infinite diversity of temperament amongst the
masters of the fine art I have known. Some were great impressionists.
They impressed upon you the fear of God and Immensity—or, in other words,
the fear of being drowned with every circumstance of terrific grandeur.
One may think that the locality of your passing away by means of
suffocation in water does not really matter very much. I am not so sure
of that. I am, perhaps, unduly sensitive, but I confess that the idea of
being suddenly spilt into an infuriated ocean in the midst of darkness
and uproar affected me always with a sensation of shrinking distaste. To
be drowned in a pond, though it might be called an ignominious fate by
the ignorant, is yet a bright and peaceful ending in comparison with some
other endings to one’s earthly career which I have mentally quaked at in
the intervals or even in the midst of violent exertions.
But let that pass. Some of the masters whose influence left a trace upon
my character to this very day, combined a fierceness of conception with a
certitude of execution upon the basis of just appreciation of means and
ends which is the highest quality of the man of action. And an artist is
a man of action, whether he creates a personality, invents an expedient,
or finds the issue of a complicated situation.
There were masters, too, I have known, whose very art consisted in
avoiding every conceivable situation. It is needless to say that they
never did great things in their craft; but they were not to be despised
for that. They were modest; they understood their limitations. Their
own masters had not handed the sacred fire into the keeping of their cold
and skilful hands. One of those last I remember specially, now gone to
his rest from that sea which his temperament must have made a scene of
little more than a peaceful pursuit. Once only did he attempt a stroke
of audacity, one early morning, with a steady breeze, entering a crowded
roadstead. But he was not genuine in this display which might have been
art. He was thinking of his own self; he hankered after the meretricious
glory of a showy performance.
As, rounding a dark, wooded point, bathed in fresh air and sunshine, we
opened to view a crowd of shipping at anchor lying half a mile ahead of
us perhaps, he called me aft from my station on the forecastle head, and,
turning over and over his binoculars in his brown hands, said: “Do you
see that big, heavy ship with white lower masts? I am going to take up a
berth between her and the shore. Now do you see to it that the men jump
smartly at the first order.”
I answered, “Ay, ay, sir,” and verily believed that this would be a fine
performance. We dashed on through the fleet in magnificent style. There
must have been many open mouths and following eyes on board those
ships—Dutch, English, with a sprinkling of Americans and a German or
two—who had all hoisted their flags at eight o’clock as if in honour of
our arrival. It would have been a fine performance if it had come off,
but it did not. Through a touch of self-seeking that modest artist of
solid merit became untrue to his temperament. It was not with him art
for art’s sake: it was art for his own sake; and a dismal failure was the
penalty he paid for that greatest of sins. It might have been even
heavier, but, as it happened, we did not run our ship ashore, nor did we
knock a large hole in the big ship whose lower masts were painted white.
But it is a wonder that we did not carry away the cables of both our
anchors, for, as may be imagined, I did not stand upon the order to “Let
go!” that came to me in a quavering, quite unknown voice from his
trembling lips. I let them both go with a celerity which to this day
astonishes my memory. No average merchantman’s anchors have ever been
let go with such miraculous smartness. And they both held. I could have
kissed their rough, cold iron palms in gratitude if they had not been
buried in slimy mud under ten fathoms of water. Ultimately they brought
us up with the jibboom of a Dutch brig poking through our spanker—nothing
worse. And a miss is as good as a mile.
But not in art. Afterwards the master said to me in a shy mumble, “She
wouldn’t luff up in time, somehow. What’s the matter with her?” And I
made no answer.
Yet the answer was clear. The ship had found out the momentary weakness
of her man. Of all the living creatures upon land and sea, it is ships
alone that cannot be taken in by barren pretences, that will not put up
with bad art from their masters.
X.
FROM the main truck of the average tall ship the horizon describes a
circle of many miles, in which you can see another ship right down to her
water-line; and these very eyes which follow this writing have counted in
their time over a hundred sail becalmed, as if within a magic ring, not
very far from the Azores—ships more or less tall. There were hardly two
of them heading exactly the same way, as if each had meditated breaking
out of the enchanted circle at a different point of the compass. But the
spell of the calm is a strong magic. The following day still saw them
scattered within sight of each other and heading different ways; but
when, at last, the breeze came with the darkling ripple that ran very
blue on a pale sea, they all went in the same direction together. For
this was the homeward-bound fleet from the far-off ends of the earth, and
a Falmouth fruit-schooner, the smallest of them all, was heading the
flight. One could have imagined her very fair, if not divinely tall,
leaving a scent of lemons and oranges in her wake.
The next day there were very few ships in sight from our mast-heads—seven
at most, perhaps, with a few more distant specks, hull down, beyond the
magic ring of the horizon. The spell of the fair wind has a subtle power
to scatter a white-winged company of ships looking all the same way, each
with its white fillet of tumbling foam under the bow. It is the calm
that brings ships mysteriously together; it is your wind that is the
great separator.
The taller the ship, the further she can be seen; and her white tallness
breathed upon by the wind first proclaims her size. The tall masts
holding aloft the white canvas, spread out like a snare for catching the
invisible power of the air, emerge gradually from the water, sail after
sail, yard after yard, growing big, till, under the towering structure of
her machinery, you perceive the insignificant, tiny speck of her hull.
The tall masts are the pillars supporting the balanced planes that,
motionless and silent, catch from the air the ship’s motive-power, as it
were a gift from Heaven vouchsafed to the audacity of man; and it is the
ship’s tall spars, stripped and shorn of their white glory, that incline
themselves before the anger of the clouded heaven.
When they yield to a squall in a gaunt and naked submission, their
tallness is brought best home even to the mind of a seaman. The man who
has looked upon his ship going over too far is made aware of the
preposterous tallness of a ship’s spars. It seems impossible but that
those gilt trucks which one had to tilt one’s head back to see, now
falling into the lower plane of vision, must perforce hit the very edge
of the horizon. Such an experience gives you a better impression of the
loftiness of your spars than any amount of running aloft could do. And
yet in my time the royal yards of an average profitable ship were a good
way up above her decks.
No doubt a fair amount of climbing up iron ladders can be achieved by an
active man in a ship’s engine-room, but I remember moments when even to
my supple limbs and pride of nimbleness the sailing-ship’s machinery
seemed to reach up to the very stars.
For machinery it is, doing its work in perfect silence and with a
motionless grace, that seems to hide a capricious and not always
governable power, taking nothing away from the material stores of the
earth. Not for it the unerring precision of steel moved by white steam
and living by red fire and fed with black coal. The other seems to draw
its strength from the very soul of the world, its formidable ally, held
to obedience by the frailest bonds, like a fierce ghost captured in a
snare of something even finer than spun silk. For what is the array of
the strongest ropes, the tallest spars and the stoutest canvas against
the mighty breath of the infinite, but thistle stalks, cobwebs and
gossamer?
XI.
Indeed, it is less than nothing, and I have seen, when the great soul of
the world turned over with a heavy sigh, a perfectly new, extra-stout
foresail vanish like a bit of some airy stuff much lighter than gossamer.
Then was the time for the tall spars to stand fast in the great uproar.
The machinery must do its work even if the soul of the world has gone
mad.
The modern steamship advances upon a still and overshadowed sea with a
pulsating tremor of her frame, an occasional clang in her depths, as if
she had an iron heart in her iron body; with a thudding rhythm in her
progress and the regular beat of her propeller, heard afar in the night
with an august and plodding sound as of the march of an inevitable
future. But in a gale, the silent machinery of a sailing-ship would
catch not only the power, but the wild and exulting voice of the world’s
soul. Whether she ran with her tall spars swinging, or breasted it with
her tall spars lying over, there was always that wild song, deep like a
chant, for a bass to the shrill pipe of the wind played on the sea-tops,
with a punctuating crash, now and then, of a breaking wave. At times the
weird effects of that invisible orchestra would get upon a man’s nerves
till he wished himself deaf.
And this recollection of a personal wish, experienced upon several
oceans, where the soul of the world has plenty of room to turn over with
a mighty sigh, brings me to the remark that in order to take a proper
care of a ship’s spars it is just as well for a seaman to have nothing
the matter with his ears. Such is the intimacy with which a seaman had
to live with his ship of yesterday that his senses were like her senses,
that the stress upon his body made him judge of the strain upon the
ship’s masts.
I had been some time at sea before I became aware of the fact that
hearing plays a perceptible part in gauging the force of the wind. It
was at night. The ship was one of those iron wool-clippers that the
Clyde had floated out in swarms upon the world during the seventh decade
of the last century. It was a fine period in ship-building, and also, I
might say, a period of over-masting. The spars rigged up on the narrow
hulls were indeed tall then, and the ship of which I think, with her
coloured-glass skylight ends bearing the motto, “Let Glasgow Flourish,”
was certainly one of the most heavily-sparred specimens. She was built
for hard driving, and unquestionably she got all the driving she could
stand. Our captain was a man famous for the quick passages he had been
used to make in the old _Tweed_, a ship famous the world over for her
speed. The _Tweed_ had been a wooden vessel, and he brought the
tradition of quick passages with him into the iron clipper. I was the
junior in her, a third mate, keeping watch with the chief officer; and it
was just during one of the night watches in a strong, freshening breeze
that I overheard two men in a sheltered nook of the main deck exchanging
these informing remarks. Said one:
“Should think ’twas time some of them light sails were coming off her.”
And the other, an older man, uttered grumpily: “No fear! not while the
chief mate’s on deck. He’s that deaf he can’t tell how much wind there
is.”
And, indeed, poor P—, quite young, and a smart seaman, was very hard of
hearing. At the same time, he had the name of being the very devil of a
fellow for carrying on sail on a ship. He was wonderfully clever at
concealing his deafness, and, as to carrying on heavily, though he was a
fearless man, I don’t think that he ever meant to take undue risks. I
can never forget his naïve sort of astonishment when remonstrated with
for what appeared a most dare-devil performance. The only person, of
course, that could remonstrate with telling effect was our captain,
himself a man of dare-devil tradition; and really, for me, who knew under
whom I was serving, those were impressive scenes. Captain S— had a great
name for sailor-like qualities—the sort of name that compelled my
youthful admiration. To this day I preserve his memory, for, indeed, it
was he in a sense who completed my training. It was often a stormy
process, but let that pass. I am sure he meant well, and I am certain
that never, not even at the time, could I bear him malice for his
extraordinary gift of incisive criticism. And to hear _him_ make a fuss
about too much sail on the ship seemed one of those incredible
experiences that take place only in one’s dreams.
It generally happened in this way: Night, clouds racing overhead, wind
howling, royals set, and the ship rushing on in the dark, an immense
white sheet of foam level with the lee rail. Mr. P—, in charge of the
deck, hooked on to the windward mizzen rigging in a state of perfect
serenity; myself, the third mate, also hooked on somewhere to windward of
the slanting poop, in a state of the utmost preparedness to jump at the
very first hint of some sort of order, but otherwise in a perfectly
acquiescent state of mind. Suddenly, out of the companion would appear a
tall, dark figure, bareheaded, with a short white beard of a
perpendicular cut, very visible in the dark—Captain S—, disturbed in his
reading down below by the frightful bounding and lurching of the ship.
Leaning very much against the precipitous incline of the deck, he would
take a turn or two, perfectly silent, hang on by the compass for a while,
take another couple of turns, and suddenly burst out:
“What are you trying to do with the ship?”
And Mr. P—, who was not good at catching what was shouted in the wind,
would say interrogatively:
“Yes, sir?”
Then in the increasing gale of the sea there would be a little private
ship’s storm going on in which you could detect strong language,
pronounced in a tone of passion and exculpatory protestations uttered
with every possible inflection of injured innocence.
“By Heavens, Mr. P-! I used to carry on sail in my time, but—”
And the rest would be lost to me in a stormy gust of wind.
Then, in a lull, P—’s protesting innocence would become audible:
“She seems to stand it very well.”
And then another burst of an indignant voice:
“Any fool can carry sail on a ship—”
And so on and so on, the ship meanwhile rushing on her way with a heavier
list, a noisier splutter, a more threatening hiss of the white, almost
blinding, sheet of foam to leeward. For the best of it was that Captain
S— seemed constitutionally incapable of giving his officers a definite
order to shorten sail; and so that extraordinarily vague row would go on
till at last it dawned upon them both, in some particularly alarming
gust, that it was time to do something. There is nothing like the
fearful inclination of your tall spars overloaded with canvas to bring a
deaf man and an angry one to their senses.
XII.
So sail did get shortened more or less in time even in that ship, and her
tall spars never went overboard while I served in her. However, all the
time I was with them, Captain S— and Mr. P— did not get on very well
together. If P— carried on “like the very devil” because he was too deaf
to know how much wind there was, Captain S— (who, as I have said, seemed
constitutionally incapable of ordering one of his officers to shorten
sail) resented the necessity forced upon him by Mr. P—’s desperate goings
on. It was in Captain S—’s tradition rather to reprove his officers for
not carrying on quite enough—in his phrase “for not taking every ounce of
advantage of a fair wind.” But there was also a psychological motive
that made him extremely difficult to deal with on board that iron
clipper. He had just come out of the marvellous _Tweed_, a ship, I have
heard, heavy to look at but of phenomenal speed. In the middle sixties
she had beaten by a day and a half the steam mail-boat from Hong Kong to
Singapore. There was something peculiarly lucky, perhaps, in the placing
of her masts—who knows? Officers of men-of-war used to come on board to
take the exact dimensions of her sail-plan. Perhaps there had been a
touch of genius or the finger of good fortune in the fashioning of her
lines at bow and stern. It is impossible to say. She was built in the
East Indies somewhere, of teak-wood throughout, except the deck. She had
a great sheer, high bows, and a clumsy stern. The men who had seen her
described her to me as “nothing much to look at.” But in the great
Indian famine of the seventies that ship, already old then, made some
wonderful dashes across the Gulf of Bengal with cargoes of rice from
Rangoon to Madras.
She took the secret of her speed with her, and, unsightly as she was, her
image surely has its glorious place in the mirror of the old sea.
The point, however, is that Captain S—, who used to say frequently, “She
never made a decent passage after I left her,” seemed to think that the
secret of her speed lay in her famous commander. No doubt the secret of
many a ship’s excellence does lie with the man on board, but it was
hopeless for Captain S— to try to make his new iron clipper equal the
feats which made the old _Tweed_ a name of praise upon the lips of
English-speaking seamen. There was something pathetic in it, as in the
endeavour of an artist in his old age to equal the masterpieces of his
youth—for the _Tweed’s_ famous passages were Captain S—’s masterpieces.
It was pathetic, and perhaps just the least bit dangerous. At any rate,
I am glad that, what between Captain S—’s yearning for old triumphs and
Mr. P—’s deafness, I have seen some memorable carrying on to make a
passage. And I have carried on myself upon the tall spars of that Clyde
shipbuilder’s masterpiece as I have never carried on in a ship before or
since.
The second mate falling ill during the passage, I was promoted to officer
of the watch, alone in charge of the deck. Thus the immense leverage of
the ship’s tall masts became a matter very near my own heart. I suppose
it was something of a compliment for a young fellow to be trusted,
apparently without any supervision, by such a commander as Captain S—;
though, as far as I can remember, neither the tone, nor the manner, nor
yet the drift of Captain S—’s remarks addressed to myself did ever, by
the most strained interpretation, imply a favourable opinion of my
abilities. And he was, I must say, a most uncomfortable commander to get
your orders from at night. If I had the watch from eight till midnight,
he would leave the deck about nine with the words, “Don’t take any sail
off her.” Then, on the point of disappearing down the companion-way, he
would add curtly: “Don’t carry anything away.” I am glad to say that I
never did; one night, however, I was caught, not quite prepared, by a
sudden shift of wind.
There was, of course, a good deal of noise—running about, the shouts of
the sailors, the thrashing of the sails—enough, in fact, to wake the
dead. But S— never came on deck. When I was relieved by the chief mate
an hour afterwards, he sent for me. I went into his state-room; he was
lying on his couch wrapped up in a rug, with a pillow under his head.
“What was the matter with you up there just now?” he asked.
“Wind flew round on the lee quarter, sir,” I said.
“Couldn’t you see the shift coming?”
“Yes, sir, I thought it wasn’t very far off.”
“Why didn’t you have your courses hauled up at once, then?” he asked in a
tone that ought to have made my blood run cold.
But this was my chance, and I did not let it slip.
“Well, sir,” I said in an apologetic tone, “she was going eleven knots
very nicely, and I thought she would do for another half-hour or so.”
He gazed at me darkly out of his head, lying very still on the white
pillow, for a time.
“Ah, yes, another half-hour. That’s the way ships get dismasted.”
And that was all I got in the way of a wigging. I waited a little while
and then went out, shutting carefully the door of the state-room after
me.
Well, I have loved, lived with, and left the sea without ever seeing a
ship’s tall fabric of sticks, cobwebs and gossamer go by the board.
Sheer good luck, no doubt. But as to poor P—, I am sure that he would
not have got off scot-free like this but for the god of gales, who called
him away early from this earth, which is three parts ocean, and therefore
a fit abode for sailors. A few years afterwards I met in an Indian port
a man who had served in the ships of the same company. Names came up in
our talk, names of our colleagues in the same employ, and, naturally
enough, I asked after P—. Had he got a command yet? And the other man
answered carelessly:
“No; but he’s provided for, anyhow. A heavy sea took him off the poop in
the run between New Zealand and the Horn.”
Thus P— passed away from amongst the tall spars of ships that he had
tried to their utmost in many a spell of boisterous weather. He had
shown me what carrying on meant, but he was not a man to learn discretion
from. He could not help his deafness. One can only remember his cheery
temper, his admiration for the jokes in _Punch_, his little oddities—like
his strange passion for borrowing looking-glasses, for instance. Each of
our cabins had its own looking-glass screwed to the bulkhead, and what he
wanted with more of them we never could fathom. He asked for the loan in
confidential tones. Why? Mystery. We made various surmises. No one
will ever know now. At any rate, it was a harmless eccentricity, and may
the god of gales, who took him away so abruptly between New Zealand and
the Horn, let his soul rest in some Paradise of true seamen, where no
amount of carrying on will ever dismast a ship!
XIII.
THERE has been a time when a ship’s chief mate, pocket-book in hand and
pencil behind his ear, kept one eye aloft upon his riggers and the other
down the hatchway on the stevedores, and watched the disposition of his
ship’s cargo, knowing that even before she started he was already doing
his best to secure for her an easy and quick passage.
The hurry of the times, the loading and discharging organization of the
docks, the use of hoisting machinery which works quickly and will not
wait, the cry for prompt despatch, the very size of his ship, stand
nowadays between the modern seaman and the thorough knowledge of his
craft.
There are profitable ships and unprofitable ships. The profitable ship
will carry a large load through all the hazards of the weather, and, when
at rest, will stand up in dock and shift from berth to berth without
ballast. There is a point of perfection in a ship as a worker when she
is spoken of as being able to _sail_ without ballast. I have never met
that sort of paragon myself, but I have seen these paragons advertised
amongst ships for sale. Such excess of virtue and good-nature on the
part of a ship always provoked my mistrust. It is open to any man to say
that his ship will sail without ballast; and he will say it, too, with
every mark of profound conviction, especially if he is not going to sail
in her himself. The risk of advertising her as able to sail without
ballast is not great, since the statement does not imply a warranty of
her arriving anywhere. Moreover, it is strictly true that most ships
will sail without ballast for some little time before they turn turtle
upon the crew.
A shipowner loves a profitable ship; the seaman is proud of her; a doubt
of her good looks seldom exists in his mind; but if he can boast of her
more useful qualities it is an added satisfaction for his self-love.
The loading of ships was once a matter of skill, judgment, and knowledge.
Thick books have been written about it. “Stevens on Stowage” is a portly
volume with the renown and weight (in its own world) of Coke on
Littleton. Stevens is an agreeable writer, and, as is the case with men
of talent, his gifts adorn his sterling soundness. He gives you the
official teaching on the whole subject, is precise as to rules, mentions
illustrative events, quotes law cases where verdicts turned upon a point
of stowage. He is never pedantic, and, for all his close adherence to
broad principles, he is ready to admit that no two ships can be treated
exactly alike.
Stevedoring, which had been a skilled labour, is fast becoming a labour
without the skill. The modern steamship with her many holds is not
loaded within the sailor-like meaning of the word. She is filled up.
Her cargo is not stowed in any sense; it is simply dumped into her
through six hatchways, more or less, by twelve winches or so, with
clatter and hurry and racket and heat, in a cloud of steam and a mess of
coal-dust. As long as you keep her propeller under water and take care,
say, not to fling down barrels of oil on top of bales of silk, or deposit
an iron bridge-girder of five ton or so upon a bed of coffee-bags, you
have done about all in the way of duty that the cry for prompt despatch
will allow you to do.
XIV.
The sailing-ship, when I knew her in her days of perfection, was a
sensible creature. When I say her days of perfection, I mean perfection
of build, gear, seaworthy qualities and ease of handling, not the
perfection of speed. That quality has departed with the change of
building material. No iron ship of yesterday ever attained the marvels
of speed which the seamanship of men famous in their time had obtained
from their wooden, copper-sheeted predecessors. Everything had been done
to make the iron ship perfect, but no wit of man had managed to devise an
efficient coating composition to keep her bottom clean with the smooth
cleanness of yellow metal sheeting. After a spell of a few weeks at sea,
an iron ship begins to lag as if she had grown tired too soon. It is
only her bottom that is getting foul. A very little affects the speed of
an iron ship which is not driven on by a merciless propeller. Often it
is impossible to tell what inconsiderate trifle puts her off her stride.
A certain mysteriousness hangs around the quality of speed as it was
displayed by the old sailing-ships commanded by a competent seaman. In
those days the speed depended upon the seaman; therefore, apart from the
laws, rules, and regulations for the good preservation of his cargo, he
was careful of his loading,—or what is technically called the trim of his
ship. Some ships sailed fast on an even keel, others had to be trimmed
quite one foot by the stern, and I have heard of a ship that gave her
best speed on a wind when so loaded as to float a couple of inches by the
head.
I call to mind a winter landscape in Amsterdam—a flat foreground of waste
land, with here and there stacks of timber, like the huts of a camp of
some very miserable tribe; the long stretch of the Handelskade; cold,
stone-faced quays, with the snow-sprinkled ground and the hard, frozen
water of the canal, in which were set ships one behind another with their
frosty mooring-ropes hanging slack and their decks idle and deserted,
because, as the master stevedore (a gentle, pale person, with a few
golden hairs on his chin and a reddened nose) informed me, their cargoes
were frozen-in up-country on barges and schuyts. In the distance, beyond
the waste ground, and running parallel with the line of ships, a line of
brown, warm-toned houses seemed bowed under snow-laden roofs. From afar
at the end of Tsar Peter Straat, issued in the frosty air the tinkle of
bells of the horse tramcars, appearing and disappearing in the opening
between the buildings, like little toy carriages harnessed with toy
horses and played with by people that appeared no bigger than children.
I was, as the French say, biting my fists with impatience for that cargo
frozen up-country; with rage at that canal set fast, at the wintry and
deserted aspect of all those ships that seemed to decay in grim
depression for want of the open water. I was chief mate, and very much
alone. Directly I had joined I received from my owners instructions to
send all the ship’s apprentices away on leave together, because in such
weather there was nothing for anybody to do, unless to keep up a fire in
the cabin stove. That was attended to by a snuffy and mop-headed,
inconceivably dirty, and weirdly toothless Dutch ship-keeper, who could
hardly speak three words of English, but who must have had some
considerable knowledge of the language, since he managed invariably to
interpret in the contrary sense everything that was said to him.
Notwithstanding the little iron stove, the ink froze on the swing-table
in the cabin, and I found it more convenient to go ashore stumbling over
the arctic waste-land and shivering in glazed tramcars in order to write
my evening letter to my owners in a gorgeous café in the centre of the
town. It was an immense place, lofty and gilt, upholstered in red plush,
full of electric lights and so thoroughly warmed that even the marble
tables felt tepid to the touch. The waiter who brought me my cup of
coffee bore, by comparison with my utter isolation, the dear aspect of an
intimate friend. There, alone in a noisy crowd, I would write slowly a
letter addressed to Glasgow, of which the gist would be: There is no
cargo, and no prospect of any coming till late spring apparently. And
all the time I sat there the necessity of getting back to the ship bore
heavily on my already half-congealed spirits—the shivering in glazed
tramcars, the stumbling over the snow-sprinkled waste ground, the vision
of ships frozen in a row, appearing vaguely like corpses of black vessels
in a white world, so silent, so lifeless, so soulless they seemed to be.
With precaution I would go up the side of my own particular corpse, and
would feel her as cold as ice itself and as slippery under my feet. My
cold berth would swallow up like a chilly burial niche my bodily shivers
and my mental excitement. It was a cruel winter. The very air seemed as
hard and trenchant as steel; but it would have taken much more than this
to extinguish my sacred fire for the exercise of my craft. No young man
of twenty-four appointed chief mate for the first time in his life would
have let that Dutch tenacious winter penetrate into his heart. I think
that in those days I never forgot the fact of my elevation for five
consecutive minutes. I fancy it kept me warm, even in my slumbers,
better than the high pile of blankets, which positively crackled with
frost as I threw them off in the morning. And I would get up early for
no reason whatever except that I was in sole charge. The new captain had
not been appointed yet.
Almost each morning a letter from my owners would arrive, directing me to
go to the charterers and clamour for the ship’s cargo; to threaten them
with the heaviest penalties of demurrage; to demand that this assortment
of varied merchandise, set fast in a landscape of ice and windmills
somewhere up-country, should be put on rail instantly, and fed up to the
ship in regular quantities every day. After drinking some hot coffee,
like an Arctic explorer setting off on a sledge journey towards the North
Pole, I would go ashore and roll shivering in a tramcar into the very
heart of the town, past clean-faced houses, past thousands of brass
knockers upon a thousand painted doors glimmering behind rows of trees of
the pavement species, leafless, gaunt, seemingly dead for ever.
That part of the expedition was easy enough, though the horses were
painfully glistening with icicles, and the aspect of the tram-conductors’
faces presented a repulsive blending of crimson and purple. But as to
frightening or bullying, or even wheedling some sort of answer out of Mr.
Hudig, that was another matter altogether. He was a big, swarthy
Netherlander, with black moustaches and a bold glance. He always began
by shoving me into a chair before I had time to open my mouth, gave me
cordially a large cigar, and in excellent English would start to talk
everlastingly about the phenomenal severity of the weather. It was
impossible to threaten a man who, though he possessed the language
perfectly, seemed incapable of understanding any phrase pronounced in a
tone of remonstrance or discontent. As to quarrelling with him, it would
have been stupid. The weather was too bitter for that. His office was
so warm, his fire so bright, his sides shook so heartily with laughter,
that I experienced always a great difficulty in making up my mind to
reach for my hat.
At last the cargo did come. At first it came dribbling in by rail in
trucks, till the thaw set in; and then fast, in a multitude of barges,
with a great rush of unbound waters. The gentle master stevedore had his
hands very full at last; and the chief mate became worried in his mind as
to the proper distribution of the weight of his first cargo in a ship he
did not personally know before.
Ships do want humouring. They want humouring in handling; and if you
mean to handle them well, they must have been humoured in the
distribution of the weight which you ask them to carry through the good
and evil fortune of a passage. Your ship is a tender creature, whose
idiosyncrasies must be attended to if you mean her to come with credit to
herself and you through the rough-and-tumble of her life.
XV.
So seemed to think the new captain, who arrived the day after we had
finished loading, on the very eve of the day of sailing. I first beheld
him on the quay, a complete stranger to me, obviously not a Hollander, in
a black bowler and a short drab overcoat, ridiculously out of tone with
the winter aspect of the waste-lands, bordered by the brown fronts of
houses with their roofs dripping with melting snow.
This stranger was walking up and down absorbed in the marked
contemplation of the ship’s fore and aft trim; but when I saw him squat
on his heels in the slush at the very edge of the quay to peer at the
draught of water under her counter, I said to myself, “This is the
captain.” And presently I descried his luggage coming along—a real
sailor’s chest, carried by means of rope-beckets between two men, with a
couple of leather portmanteaus and a roll of charts sheeted in canvas
piled upon the lid. The sudden, spontaneous agility with which he
bounded aboard right off the rail afforded me the first glimpse of his
real character. Without further preliminaries than a friendly nod, he
addressed me: “You have got her pretty well in her fore and aft trim.
Now, what about your weights?”
I told him I had managed to keep the weight sufficiently well up, as I
thought, one-third of the whole being in the upper part “above the
beams,” as the technical expression has it. He whistled “Phew!”
scrutinizing me from head to foot. A sort of smiling vexation was
visible on his ruddy face.
“Well, we shall have a lively time of it this passage, I bet,” he said.
He knew. It turned out he had been chief mate of her for the two
preceding voyages; and I was already familiar with his handwriting in the
old log-books I had been perusing in my cabin with a natural curiosity,
looking up the records of my new ship’s luck, of her behaviour, of the
good times she had had, and of the troubles she had escaped.
He was right in his prophecy. On our passage from Amsterdam to Samarang
with a general cargo, of which, alas! only one-third in weight was stowed
“above the beams,” we had a lively time of it. It was lively, but not
joyful. There was not even a single moment of comfort in it, because no
seaman can feel comfortable in body or mind when he has made his ship
uneasy.
To travel along with a cranky ship for ninety days or so is no doubt a
nerve-trying experience; but in this case what was wrong with our craft
was this: that by my system of loading she had been made much too stable.
Neither before nor since have I felt a ship roll so abruptly, so
violently, so heavily. Once she began, you felt that she would never
stop, and this hopeless sensation, characterizing the motion of ships
whose centre of gravity is brought down too low in loading, made everyone
on board weary of keeping on his feet. I remember once over-hearing one
of the hands say: “By Heavens, Jack! I feel as if I didn’t mind how soon
I let myself go, and let the blamed hooker knock my brains out if she
likes.” The captain used to remark frequently: “Ah, yes; I dare say
one-third weight above beams would have been quite enough for most ships.
But then, you see, there’s no two of them alike on the seas, and she’s an
uncommonly ticklish jade to load.”
Down south, running before the gales of high latitudes, she made our life
a burden to us. There were days when nothing would keep even on the
swing-tables, when there was no position where you could fix yourself so
as not to feel a constant strain upon all the muscles of your body. She
rolled and rolled with an awful dislodging jerk and that dizzily fast
sweep of her masts on every swing. It was a wonder that the men sent
aloft were not flung off the yards, the yards not flung off the masts,
the masts not flung overboard. The captain in his armchair, holding on
grimly at the head of the table, with the soup-tureen rolling on one side
of the cabin and the steward sprawling on the other, would observe,
looking at me: “That’s your one-third above the beams. The only thing
that surprises me is that the sticks have stuck to her all this time.”
Ultimately some of the minor spars did go—nothing important:
spanker-booms and such-like—because at times the frightful impetus of her
rolling would part a fourfold tackle of new three-inch Manilla line as if
it were weaker than pack-thread.
It was only poetic justice that the chief mate who had made a
mistake—perhaps a half-excusable one—about the distribution of his ship’s
cargo should pay the penalty. A piece of one of the minor spars that did
carry away flew against the chief mate’s back, and sent him sliding on
his face for quite a considerable distance along the main deck.
Thereupon followed various and unpleasant consequences of a physical
order—“queer symptoms,” as the captain, who treated them, used to say;
inexplicable periods of powerlessness, sudden accesses of mysterious
pain; and the patient agreed fully with the regretful mutters of his very
attentive captain wishing that it had been a straightforward broken leg.
Even the Dutch doctor who took the case up in Samarang offered no
scientific explanation. All he said was: “Ah, friend, you are young yet;
it may be very serious for your whole life. You must leave your ship;
you must quite silent be for three months—quite silent.”
Of course, he meant the chief mate to keep quiet—to lay up, as a matter
of fact. His manner was impressive enough, if his English was childishly
imperfect when compared with the fluency of Mr. Hudig, the figure at the
other end of that passage, and memorable enough in its way. In a great
airy ward of a Far Eastern hospital, lying on my back, I had plenty of
leisure to remember the dreadful cold and snow of Amsterdam, while
looking at the fronds of the palm-trees tossing and rustling at the
height of the window. I could remember the elated feeling and the
soul-gripping cold of those tramway journeys taken into town to put what
in diplomatic language is called pressure upon the good Hudig, with his
warm fire, his armchair, his big cigar, and the never-failing suggestion
in his good-natured voice: “I suppose in the end it is you they will
appoint captain before the ship sails?” It may have been his extreme
good-nature, the serious, unsmiling good-nature of a fat, swarthy man
with coal-black moustache and steady eyes; but he might have been a bit
of a diplomatist, too. His enticing suggestions I used to repel modestly
by the assurance that it was extremely unlikely, as I had not enough
experience. “You know very well how to go about business matters,” he
used to say, with a sort of affected moodiness clouding his serene round
face. I wonder whether he ever laughed to himself after I had left the
office. I dare say he never did, because I understand that diplomatists,
in and out of the career, take themselves and their tricks with an
exemplary seriousness.
But he had nearly persuaded me that I was fit in every way to be trusted
with a command. There came three months of mental worry, hard rolling,
remorse, and physical pain to drive home the lesson of insufficient
experience.
Yes, your ship wants to be humoured with knowledge. You must treat with
an understanding consideration the mysteries of her feminine nature, and
then she will stand by you faithfully in the unceasing struggle with
forces wherein defeat is no shame. It is a serious relation, that in
which a man stands to his ship. She has her rights as though she could
breathe and speak; and, indeed, there are ships that, for the right man,
will do anything but speak, as the saying goes.
A ship is not a slave. You must make her easy in a seaway, you must
never forget that you owe her the fullest share of your thought, of your
skill, of your self-love. If you remember that obligation, naturally and
without effort, as if it were an instinctive feeling of your inner life,
she will sail, stay, run for you as long as she is able, or, like a
sea-bird going to rest upon the angry waves, she will lay out the
heaviest gale that ever made you doubt living long enough to see another
sunrise.
XVI.
Often I turn with melancholy eagerness to the space reserved in the
newspapers under the general heading of “Shipping Intelligence.” I meet
there the names of ships I have known. Every year some of these names
disappear—the names of old friends. “Tempi passati!”
The different divisions of that kind of news are set down in their order,
which varies but slightly in its arrangement of concise headlines. And
first comes “Speakings”—reports of ships met and signalled at sea, name,
port, where from, where bound for, so many days out, ending frequently
with the words “All well.” Then come “Wrecks and Casualties”—a longish
array of paragraphs, unless the weather has been fair and clear, and
friendly to ships all over the world.
On some days there appears the heading “Overdue”—an ominous threat of
loss and sorrow trembling yet in the balance of fate. There is something
sinister to a seaman in the very grouping of the letters which form this
word, clear in its meaning, and seldom threatening in vain.
Only a very few days more—appallingly few to the hearts which had set
themselves bravely to hope against hope—three weeks, a month later,
perhaps, the name of ships under the blight of the “Overdue” heading
shall appear again in the column of “Shipping Intelligence,” but under
the final declaration of “Missing.”
“The ship, or barque, or brig So-and-so, bound from such a port, with
such and such cargo, for such another port, having left at such and such
a date, last spoken at sea on such a day, and never having been heard of
since, was posted to-day as missing.” Such in its strictly official
eloquence is the form of funeral orations on ships that, perhaps wearied
with a long struggle, or in some unguarded moment that may come to the
readiest of us, had let themselves be overwhelmed by a sudden blow from
the enemy.
Who can say? Perhaps the men she carried had asked her to do too much,
had stretched beyond breaking-point the enduring faithfulness which seems
wrought and hammered into that assemblage of iron ribs and plating, of
wood and steel and canvas and wire, which goes to the making of a ship—a
complete creation endowed with character, individuality, qualities and
defects, by men whose hands launch her upon the water, and that other men
shall learn to know with an intimacy surpassing the intimacy of man with
man, to love with a love nearly as great as that of man for woman, and
often as blind in its infatuated disregard of defects.
There are ships which bear a bad name, but I have yet to meet one whose
crew for the time being failed to stand up angrily for her against every
criticism. One ship which I call to mind now had the reputation of
killing somebody every voyage she made. This was no calumny, and yet I
remember well, somewhere far back in the late seventies, that the crew of
that ship were, if anything, rather proud of her evil fame, as if they
had been an utterly corrupt lot of desperadoes glorying in their
association with an atrocious creature. We, belonging to other vessels
moored all about the Circular Quay in Sydney, used to shake our heads at
her with a great sense of the unblemished virtue of our own well-loved
ships.
I shall not pronounce her name. She is “missing” now, after a sinister
but, from the point of view of her owners, a useful career extending over
many years, and, I should say, across every ocean of our globe. Having
killed a man for every voyage, and perhaps rendered more misanthropic by
the infirmities that come with years upon a ship, she had made up her
mind to kill all hands at once before leaving the scene of her exploits.
A fitting end, this, to a life of usefulness and crime—in a last outburst
of an evil passion supremely satisfied on some wild night, perhaps, to
the applauding clamour of wind and wave.
How did she do it? In the word “missing” there is a horrible depth of
doubt and speculation. Did she go quickly from under the men’s feet, or
did she resist to the end, letting the sea batter her to pieces, start
her butts, wrench her frame, load her with an increasing weight of salt
water, and, dismasted, unmanageable, rolling heavily, her boats gone, her
decks swept, had she wearied her men half to death with the unceasing
labour at the pumps before she sank with them like a stone?
However, such a case must be rare. I imagine a raft of some sort could
always be contrived; and, even if it saved no one, it would float on and
be picked up, perhaps conveying some hint of the vanished name. Then
that ship would not be, properly speaking, missing. She would be “lost
with all hands,” and in that distinction there is a subtle
difference—less horror and a less appalling darkness.
XVII.
The unholy fascination of dread dwells in the thought of the last moments
of a ship reported as “missing” in the columns of the _Shipping Gazette_.
Nothing of her ever comes to light—no grating, no lifebuoy, no piece of
boat or branded oar—to give a hint of the place and date of her sudden
end. The _Shipping Gazette_ does not even call her “lost with all
hands.” She remains simply “missing”; she has disappeared enigmatically
into a mystery of fate as big as the world, where your imagination of a
brother-sailor, of a fellow-servant and lover of ships, may range
unchecked.
And yet sometimes one gets a hint of what the last scene may be like in
the life of a ship and her crew, which resembles a drama in its struggle
against a great force bearing it up, formless, ungraspable, chaotic and
mysterious, as fate.
It was on a gray afternoon in the lull of a three days’ gale that had
left the Southern Ocean tumbling heavily upon our ship, under a sky hung
with rags of clouds that seemed to have been cut and hacked by the keen
edge of a sou’-west gale.
Our craft, a Clyde-built barque of 1,000 tons, rolled so heavily that
something aloft had carried away. No matter what the damage was, but it
was serious enough to induce me to go aloft myself with a couple of hands
and the carpenter to see the temporary repairs properly done.
Sometimes we had to drop everything and cling with both hands to the
swaying spars, holding our breath in fear of a terribly heavy roll. And,
wallowing as if she meant to turn over with us, the barque, her decks
full of water, her gear flying in bights, ran at some ten knots an hour.
We had been driven far south—much farther that way than we had meant to
go; and suddenly, up there in the slings of the foreyard, in the midst of
our work, I felt my shoulder gripped with such force in the carpenter’s
powerful paw that I positively yelled with unexpected pain. The man’s
eyes stared close in my face, and he shouted, “Look, sir! look! What’s
this?” pointing ahead with his other hand.
At first I saw nothing. The sea was one empty wilderness of black and
white hills. Suddenly, half-concealed in the tumult of the foaming
rollers I made out awash, something enormous, rising and
falling—something spread out like a burst of foam, but with a more
bluish, more solid look.
It was a piece of an ice-floe melted down to a fragment, but still big
enough to sink a ship, and floating lower than any raft, right in our
way, as if ambushed among the waves with murderous intent. There was no
time to get down on deck. I shouted from aloft till my head was ready to
split. I was heard aft, and we managed to clear the sunken floe which
had come all the way from the Southern ice-cap to have a try at our
unsuspecting lives. Had it been an hour later, nothing could have saved
the ship, for no eye could have made out in the dusk that pale piece of
ice swept over by the white-crested waves.
And as we stood near the taffrail side by side, my captain and I, looking
at it, hardly discernible already, but still quite close-to on our
quarter, he remarked in a meditative tone:
“But for the turn of that wheel just in time, there would have been
another case of a ‘missing’ ship.”
Nobody ever comes back from a “missing” ship to tell how hard was the
death of the craft, and how sudden and overwhelming the last anguish of
her men. Nobody can say with what thoughts, with what regrets, with what
words on their lips they died. But there is something fine in the sudden
passing away of these hearts from the extremity of struggle and stress
and tremendous uproar—from the vast, unrestful rage of the surface to the
profound peace of the depths, sleeping untroubled since the beginning of
ages.
XVIII.
But if the word “missing” brings all hope to an end and settles the loss
of the underwriters, the word “overdue” confirms the fears already born
in many homes ashore, and opens the door of speculation in the market of
risks.
Maritime risks, be it understood. There is a class of optimists ready to
reinsure an “overdue” ship at a heavy premium. But nothing can insure
the hearts on shore against the bitterness of waiting for the worst.
For if a “missing” ship has never turned up within the memory of seamen
of my generation, the name of an “overdue” ship, trembling as it were on
the edge of the fatal heading, has been known to appear as “arrived.”
It must blaze up, indeed, with a great brilliance the dull printer’s ink
expended on the assemblage of the few letters that form the ship’s name
to the anxious eyes scanning the page in fear and trembling. It is like
the message of reprieve from the sentence of sorrow suspended over many a
home, even if some of the men in her have been the most homeless mortals
that you may find among the wanderers of the sea.
The reinsurer, the optimist of ill-luck and disaster, slaps his pocket
with satisfaction. The underwriter, who had been trying to minimize the
amount of impending loss, regrets his premature pessimism. The ship has
been stauncher, the skies more merciful, the seas less angry, or perhaps
the men on board of a finer temper than he has been willing to take for
granted.
“The ship So-and-so, bound to such a port, and posted as ‘overdue,’ has
been reported yesterday as having arrived safely at her destination.”
Thus run the official words of the reprieve addressed to the hearts
ashore lying under a heavy sentence. And they come swiftly from the
other side of the earth, over wires and cables, for your electric
telegraph is a great alleviator of anxiety. Details, of course, shall
follow. And they may unfold a tale of narrow escape, of steady ill-luck,
of high winds and heavy weather, of ice, of interminable calms or endless
head-gales; a tale of difficulties overcome, of adversity defied by a
small knot of men upon the great loneliness of the sea; a tale of
resource, of courage—of helplessness, perhaps.
Of all ships disabled at sea, a steamer who has lost her propeller is the
most helpless. And if she drifts into an unpopulated part of the ocean
she may soon become overdue. The menace of the “overdue” and the
finality of “missing” come very quickly to steamers whose life, fed on
coals and breathing the black breath of smoke into the air, goes on in
disregard of wind and wave. Such a one, a big steamship, too, whose
working life had been a record of faithful keeping time from land to
land, in disregard of wind and sea, once lost her propeller down south,
on her passage out to New Zealand.
It was the wintry, murky time of cold gales and heavy seas. With the
snapping of her tail-shaft her life seemed suddenly to depart from her
big body, and from a stubborn, arrogant existence she passed all at once
into the passive state of a drifting log. A ship sick with her own
weakness has not the pathos of a ship vanquished in a battle with the
elements, wherein consists the inner drama of her life. No seaman can
look without compassion upon a disabled ship, but to look at a
sailing-vessel with her lofty spars gone is to look upon a defeated but
indomitable warrior. There is defiance in the remaining stumps of her
masts, raised up like maimed limbs against the menacing scowl of a stormy
sky; there is high courage in the upward sweep of her lines towards the
bow; and as soon as, on a hastily-rigged spar, a strip of canvas is shown
to the wind to keep her head to sea, she faces the waves again with an
unsubdued courage.
XIX.
The efficiency of a steamship consists not so much in her courage as in
the power she carries within herself. It beats and throbs like a
pulsating heart within her iron ribs, and when it stops, the steamer,
whose life is not so much a contest as the disdainful ignoring of the
sea, sickens and dies upon the waves. The sailing-ship, with her
unthrobbing body, seemed to lead mysteriously a sort of unearthly
existence, bordering upon the magic of the invisible forces, sustained by
the inspiration of life-giving and death-dealing winds.
So that big steamer, dying by a sudden stroke, drifted, an unwieldy
corpse, away from the track of other ships. And she would have been
posted really as “overdue,” or maybe as “missing,” had she not been
sighted in a snowstorm, vaguely, like a strange rolling island, by a
whaler going north from her Polar cruising ground. There was plenty of
food on board, and I don’t know whether the nerves of her passengers were
at all affected by anything else than the sense of interminable boredom
or the vague fear of that unusual situation. Does a passenger ever feel
the life of the ship in which he is being carried like a sort of honoured
bale of highly sensitive goods? For a man who has never been a passenger
it is impossible to say. But I know that there is no harder trial for a
seaman than to feel a dead ship under his feet.
There is no mistaking that sensation, so dismal, so tormenting and so
subtle, so full of unhappiness and unrest. I could imagine no worse
eternal punishment for evil seamen who die unrepentant upon the earthly
sea than that their souls should be condemned to man the ghosts of
disabled ships, drifting for ever across a ghostly and tempestuous ocean.
She must have looked ghostly enough, that broken-down steamer, rolling in
that snowstorm—a dark apparition in a world of white snowflakes to the
staring eyes of that whaler’s crew. Evidently they didn’t believe in
ghosts, for on arrival into port her captain unromantically reported
having sighted a disabled steamer in latitude somewhere about 50 degrees
S. and a longitude still more uncertain. Other steamers came out to look
for her, and ultimately towed her away from the cold edge of the world
into a harbour with docks and workshops, where, with many blows of
hammers, her pulsating heart of steel was set going again to go forth
presently in the renewed pride of its strength, fed on fire and water,
breathing black smoke into the air, pulsating, throbbing, shouldering its
arrogant way against the great rollers in blind disdain of winds and sea.
The track she had made when drifting while her heart stood still within
her iron ribs looked like a tangled thread on the white paper of the
chart. It was shown to me by a friend, her second officer. In that
surprising tangle there were words in minute letters—“gales,” “thick
fog,” “ice”—written by him here and there as memoranda of the weather.
She had interminably turned upon her tracks, she had crossed and
recrossed her haphazard path till it resembled nothing so much as a
puzzling maze of pencilled lines without a meaning. But in that maze
there lurked all the romance of the “overdue” and a menacing hint of
“missing.”
“We had three weeks of it,” said my friend, “just think of that!”
“How did you feel about it?” I asked.
He waved his hand as much as to say: It’s all in the day’s work. But
then, abruptly, as if making up his mind:
“I’ll tell you. Towards the last I used to shut myself up in my berth
and cry.”
“Cry?”
“Shed tears,” he explained briefly, and rolled up the chart.
I can answer for it, he was a good man—as good as ever stepped upon a
ship’s deck—but he could not bear the feeling of a dead ship under his
feet: the sickly, disheartening feeling which the men of some “overdue”
ships that come into harbour at last under a jury-rig must have felt,
combated, and overcome in the faithful discharge of their duty.
XX.
IT is difficult for a seaman to believe that his stranded ship does not
feel as unhappy at the unnatural predicament of having no water under her
keel as he is himself at feeling her stranded.
Stranding is, indeed, the reverse of sinking. The sea does not close
upon the water-logged hull with a sunny ripple, or maybe with the angry
rush of a curling wave, erasing her name from the roll of living ships.
No. It is as if an invisible hand had been stealthily uplifted from the
bottom to catch hold of her keel as it glides through the water.
More than any other event does stranding bring to the sailor a sense of
utter and dismal failure. There are strandings and strandings, but I am
safe to say that 90 per cent. of them are occasions in which a sailor,
without dishonour, may well wish himself dead; and I have no doubt that
of those who had the experience of their ship taking the ground, 90 per
cent. did actually for five seconds or so wish themselves dead.
“Taking the ground” is the professional expression for a ship that is
stranded in gentle circumstances. But the feeling is more as if the
ground had taken hold of her. It is for those on her deck a surprising
sensation. It is as if your feet had been caught in an imponderable
snare; you feel the balance of your body threatened, and the steady poise
of your mind is destroyed at once. This sensation lasts only a second,
for even while you stagger something seems to turn over in your head,
bringing uppermost the mental exclamation, full of astonishment and
dismay, “By Jove! she’s on the ground!”
And that is very terrible. After all, the only mission of a seaman’s
calling is to keep ships’ keels off the ground. Thus the moment of her
stranding takes away from him every excuse for his continued existence.
To keep ships afloat is his business; it is his trust; it is the
effective formula of the bottom of all these vague impulses, dreams, and
illusions that go to the making up of a boy’s vocation. The grip of the
land upon the keel of your ship, even if nothing worse comes of it than
the wear and tear of tackle and the loss of time, remains in a seaman’s
memory an indelibly fixed taste of disaster.
“Stranded” within the meaning of this paper stands for a more or less
excusable mistake. A ship may be “driven ashore” by stress of weather.
It is a catastrophe, a defeat. To be “run ashore” has the littleness,
poignancy, and bitterness of human error.
XXI.
That is why your “strandings” are for the most part so unexpected. In
fact, they are all unexpected, except those heralded by some short
glimpse of the danger, full of agitation and excitement, like an
awakening from a dream of incredible folly.
The land suddenly at night looms up right over your bows, or perhaps the
cry of “Broken water ahead!” is raised, and some long mistake, some
complicated edifice of self-delusion, over-confidence, and wrong
reasoning is brought down in a fatal shock, and the heart-searing
experience of your ship’s keel scraping and scrunching over, say, a coral
reef. It is a sound, for its size, far more terrific to your soul than
that of a world coming violently to an end. But out of that chaos your
belief in your own prudence and sagacity reasserts itself. You ask
yourself, Where on earth did I get to? How on earth did I get there?
with a conviction that it could not be your own act, that there has been
at work some mysterious conspiracy of accident; that the charts are all
wrong, and if the charts are not wrong, that land and sea have changed
their places; that your misfortune shall for ever remain inexplicable,
since you have lived always with the sense of your trust, the last thing
on closing your eyes, the first on opening them, as if your mind had kept
firm hold of your responsibility during the hours of sleep.
You contemplate mentally your mischance, till little by little your mood
changes, cold doubt steals into the very marrow of your bones, you see
the inexplicable fact in another light. That is the time when you ask
yourself, How on earth could I have been fool enough to get there? And
you are ready to renounce all belief in your good sense, in your
knowledge, in your fidelity, in what you thought till then was the best
in you, giving you the daily bread of life and the moral support of other
men’s confidence.
The ship is lost or not lost. Once stranded, you have to do your best by
her. She may be saved by your efforts, by your resource and fortitude
bearing up against the heavy weight of guilt and failure. And there are
justifiable strandings in fogs, on uncharted seas, on dangerous shores,
through treacherous tides. But, saved or not saved, there remains with
her commander a distinct sense of loss, a flavour in the mouth of the
real, abiding danger that lurks in all the forms of human existence. It
is an acquisition, too, that feeling. A man may be the better for it,
but he will not be the same. Damocles has seen the sword suspended by a
hair over his head, and though a good man need not be made less valuable
by such a knowledge, the feast shall not henceforth have the same
flavour.
Years ago I was concerned as chief mate in a case of stranding which was
not fatal to the ship. We went to work for ten hours on end, laying out
anchors in readiness to heave off at high water. While I was still busy
about the decks forward I heard the steward at my elbow saying: “The
captain asks whether you mean to come in, sir, and have something to eat
to-day.”
I went into the cuddy. My captain sat at the head of the table like a
statue. There was a strange motionlessness of everything in that pretty
little cabin. The swing-table which for seventy odd days had been always
on the move, if ever so little, hung quite still above the soup-tureen.
Nothing could have altered the rich colour of my commander’s complexion,
laid on generously by wind and sea; but between the two tufts of fair
hair above his ears, his skull, generally suffused with the hue of blood,
shone dead white, like a dome of ivory. And he looked strangely untidy.
I perceived he had not shaved himself that day; and yet the wildest
motion of the ship in the most stormy latitudes we had passed through,
never made him miss one single morning ever since we left the Channel.
The fact must be that a commander cannot possibly shave himself when his
ship is aground. I have commanded ships myself, but I don’t know; I have
never tried to shave in my life.
He did not offer to help me or himself till I had coughed markedly
several times. I talked to him professionally in a cheery tone, and
ended with the confident assertion:
“We shall get her off before midnight, sir.”
He smiled faintly without looking up, and muttered as if to himself:
“Yes, yes; the captain put the ship ashore and we got her off.”
Then, raising his head, he attacked grumpily the steward, a lanky,
anxious youth with a long, pale face and two big front teeth.
“What makes this soup so bitter? I am surprised the mate can swallow the
beastly stuff. I’m sure the cook’s ladled some salt water into it by
mistake.”
The charge was so outrageous that the steward for all answer only dropped
his eyelids bashfully.
There was nothing the matter with the soup. I had a second helping. My
heart was warm with hours of hard work at the head of a willing crew. I
was elated with having handled heavy anchors, cables, boats without the
slightest hitch; pleased with having laid out scientifically bower,
stream, and kedge exactly where I believed they would do most good. On
that occasion the bitter taste of a stranding was not for my mouth. That
experience came later, and it was only then that I understood the
loneliness of the man in charge.
It’s the captain who puts the ship ashore; it’s we who get her off.
XXII.
IT seems to me that no man born and truthful to himself could declare
that he ever saw the sea looking young as the earth looks young in
spring. But some of us, regarding the ocean with understanding and
affection, have seen it looking old, as if the immemorial ages had been
stirred up from the undisturbed bottom of ooze. For it is a gale of wind
that makes the sea look old.
From a distance of years, looking at the remembered aspects of the storms
lived through, it is that impression which disengages itself clearly from
the great body of impressions left by many years of intimate contact.
If you would know the age of the earth, look upon the sea in a storm.
The grayness of the whole immense surface, the wind furrows upon the
faces of the waves, the great masses of foam, tossed about and waving,
like matted white locks, give to the sea in a gale an appearance of hoary
age, lustreless, dull, without gleams, as though it had been created
before light itself.
Looking back after much love and much trouble, the instinct of primitive
man, who seeks to personify the forces of Nature for his affection and
for his fear, is awakened again in the breast of one civilized beyond
that stage even in his infancy. One seems to have known gales as
enemies, and even as enemies one embraces them in that affectionate
regret which clings to the past.
Gales have their personalities, and, after all, perhaps it is not
strange; for, when all is said and done, they are adversaries whose wiles
you must defeat, whose violence you must resist, and yet with whom you
must live in the intimacies of nights and days.
Here speaks the man of masts and sails, to whom the sea is not a
navigable element, but an intimate companion. The length of passages,
the growing sense of solitude, the close dependence upon the very forces
that, friendly to-day, without changing their nature, by the mere putting
forth of their might, become dangerous to-morrow, make for that sense of
fellowship which modern seamen, good men as they are, cannot hope to
know. And, besides, your modern ship which is a steamship makes her
passages on other principles than yielding to the weather and humouring
the sea. She receives smashing blows, but she advances; it is a slogging
fight, and not a scientific campaign. The machinery, the steel, the
fire, the steam, have stepped in between the man and the sea. A modern
fleet of ships does not so much make use of the sea as exploit a highway.
The modern ship is not the sport of the waves. Let us say that each of
her voyages is a triumphant progress; and yet it is a question whether it
is not a more subtle and more human triumph to be the sport of the waves
and yet survive, achieving your end.
In his own time a man is always very modern. Whether the seamen of three
hundred years hence will have the faculty of sympathy it is impossible to
say. An incorrigible mankind hardens its heart in the progress of its
own perfectability. How will they feel on seeing the illustrations to
the sea novels of our day, or of our yesterday? It is impossible to
guess. But the seaman of the last generation, brought into sympathy with
the caravels of ancient time by his sailing-ship, their lineal
descendant, cannot look upon those lumbering forms navigating the naïve
seas of ancient woodcuts without a feeling of surprise, of affectionate
derision, envy, and admiration. For those things, whose
unmanageableness, even when represented on paper, makes one gasp with a
sort of amused horror, were manned by men who are his direct professional
ancestors.
No; the seamen of three hundred years hence will probably be neither
touched nor moved to derision, affection, or admiration. They will
glance at the photogravures of our nearly defunct sailing-ships with a
cold, inquisitive and indifferent eye. Our ships of yesterday will stand
to their ships as no lineal ancestors, but as mere predecessors whose
course will have been run and the race extinct. Whatever craft he
handles with skill, the seaman of the future shall be, not our
descendant, but only our successor.
XXIII.
And so much depends upon the craft which, made by man, is one with man,
that the sea shall wear for him another aspect. I remember once seeing
the commander—officially the master, by courtesy the captain—of a fine
iron ship of the old wool fleet shaking his head at a very pretty
brigantine. She was bound the other way. She was a taut, trim, neat
little craft, extremely well kept; and on that serene evening when we
passed her close she looked the embodiment of coquettish comfort on the
sea. It was somewhere near the Cape—_The_ Cape being, of course, the
Cape of Good Hope, the Cape of Storms of its Portuguese discoverer. And
whether it is that the word “storm” should not be pronounced upon the sea
where the storms dwell thickly, or because men are shy of confessing
their good hopes, it has become the nameless cape—the Cape _tout court_.
The other great cape of the world, strangely enough, is seldom if ever
called a cape. We say, “a voyage round the Horn”; “we rounded the Horn”;
“we got a frightful battering off the Horn”; but rarely “Cape Horn,” and,
indeed, with some reason, for Cape Horn is as much an island as a cape.
The third stormy cape of the world, which is the Leeuwin, receives
generally its full name, as if to console its second-rate dignity. These
are the capes that look upon the gales.
The little brigantine, then, had doubled the Cape. Perhaps she was
coming from Port Elizabeth, from East London—who knows? It was many
years ago, but I remember well the captain of the wool-clipper nodding at
her with the words, “Fancy having to go about the sea in a thing like
that!”
He was a man brought up in big deep-water ships, and the size of the
craft under his feet was a part of his conception of the sea. His own
ship was certainly big as ships went then. He may have thought of the
size of his cabin, or—unconsciously, perhaps—have conjured up a vision of
a vessel so small tossing amongst the great seas. I didn’t inquire, and
to a young second mate the captain of the little pretty brigantine,
sitting astride a camp stool with his chin resting on his hands that were
crossed upon the rail, might have appeared a minor king amongst men. We
passed her within earshot, without a hail, reading each other’s names
with the naked eye.
Some years later, the second mate, the recipient of that almost
involuntary mutter, could have told his captain that a man brought up in
big ships may yet take a peculiar delight in what we should both then
have called a small craft. Probably the captain of the big ship would
not have understood very well. His answer would have been a gruff, “Give
me size,” as I heard another man reply to a remark praising the handiness
of a small vessel. It was not a love of the grandiose or the prestige
attached to the command of great tonnage, for he continued, with an air
of disgust and contempt, “Why, you get flung out of your bunk as likely
as not in any sort of heavy weather.”
I don’t know. I remember a few nights in my lifetime, and in a big ship,
too (as big as they made them then), when one did not get flung out of
one’s bed simply because one never even attempted to get in; one had been
made too weary, too hopeless, to try. The expedient of turning your
bedding out on to a damp floor and lying on it there was no earthly good,
since you could not keep your place or get a second’s rest in that or any
other position. But of the delight of seeing a small craft run bravely
amongst the great seas there can be no question to him whose soul does
not dwell ashore. Thus I well remember a three days’ run got out of a
little barque of 400 tons somewhere between the islands of St. Paul and
Amsterdam and Cape Otway on the Australian coast. It was a hard, long
gale, gray clouds and green sea, heavy weather undoubtedly, but still
what a sailor would call manageable. Under two lower topsails and a
reefed foresail the barque seemed to race with a long, steady sea that
did not becalm her in the troughs. The solemn thundering combers caught
her up from astern, passed her with a fierce boiling up of foam level
with the bulwarks, swept on ahead with a swish and a roar: and the little
vessel, dipping her jib-boom into the tumbling froth, would go on running
in a smooth, glassy hollow, a deep valley between two ridges of the sea,
hiding the horizon ahead and astern. There was such fascination in her
pluck, nimbleness, the continual exhibition of unfailing seaworthiness,
in the semblance of courage and endurance, that I could not give up the
delight of watching her run through the three unforgettable days of that
gale which my mate also delighted to extol as “a famous shove.”
And this is one of those gales whose memory in after-years returns,
welcome in dignified austerity, as you would remember with pleasure the
noble features of a stranger with whom you crossed swords once in
knightly encounter and are never to see again. In this way gales have
their physiognomy. You remember them by your own feelings, and no two
gales stamp themselves in the same way upon your emotions. Some cling to
you in woebegone misery; others come back fiercely and weirdly, like
ghouls bent upon sucking your strength away; others, again, have a
catastrophic splendour; some are unvenerated recollections, as of
spiteful wild-cats clawing at your agonized vitals; others are severe,
like a visitation; and one or two rise up draped and mysterious, with an
aspect of ominous menace. In each of them there is a characteristic
point at which the whole feeling seems contained in one single moment.
Thus there is a certain four o’clock in the morning in the confused roar
of a black and white world when coming on deck to take charge of my watch
I received the instantaneous impression that the ship could not live for
another hour in such a raging sea.
I wonder what became of the men who silently (you couldn’t hear yourself
speak) must have shared that conviction with me. To be left to write
about it is not, perhaps, the most enviable fate; but the point is that
this impression resumes in its intensity the whole recollection of days
and days of desperately dangerous weather. We were then, for reasons
which it is not worth while to specify, in the close neighbourhood of
Kerguelen Land; and now, when I open an atlas and look at the tiny dots
on the map of the Southern Ocean, I see as if engraved upon the paper the
enraged physiognomy of that gale.
Another, strangely, recalls a silent man. And yet it was not din that
was wanting; in fact, it was terrific. That one was a gale that came
upon the ship swiftly, like a parnpero, which last is a very sudden wind
indeed. Before we knew very well what was coming all the sails we had
set had burst; the furled ones were blowing loose, ropes flying, sea
hissing—it hissed tremendously—wind howling, and the ship lying on her
side, so that half of the crew were swimming and the other half clawing
desperately at whatever came to hand, according to the side of the deck
each man had been caught on by the catastrophe, either to leeward or to
windward. The shouting I need not mention—it was the merest drop in an
ocean of noise—and yet the character of the gale seems contained in the
recollection of one small, not particularly impressive, sallow man
without a cap and with a very still face. Captain Jones—let us call him
Jones—had been caught unawares. Two orders he had given at the first
sign of an utterly unforeseen onset; after that the magnitude of his
mistake seemed to have overwhelmed him. We were doing what was needed
and feasible. The ship behaved well. Of course, it was some time before
we could pause in our fierce and laborious exertions; but all through the
work, the excitement, the uproar, and some dismay, we were aware of this
silent little man at the break of the poop, perfectly motionless,
soundless, and often hidden from us by the drift of sprays.
When we officers clambered at last upon the poop, he seemed to come out
of that numbed composure, and shouted to us down wind: “Try the pumps.”
Afterwards he disappeared. As to the ship, I need not say that, although
she was presently swallowed up in one of the blackest nights I can
remember, she did not disappear. In truth, I don’t fancy that there had
ever been much danger of that, but certainly the experience was noisy and
particularly distracting—and yet it is the memory of a very quiet silence
that survives.
XXIV.
For, after all, a gale of wind, the thing of mighty sound, is
inarticulate. It is man who, in a chance phrase, interprets the
elemental passion of his enemy. Thus there is another gale in my memory,
a thing of endless, deep, humming roar, moonlight, and a spoken sentence.
It was off that other cape which is always deprived of its title as the
Cape of Good Hope is robbed of its name. It was off the Horn. For a
true expression of dishevelled wildness there is nothing like a gale in
the bright moonlight of a high latitude.
The ship, brought-to and bowing to enormous flashing seas, glistened wet
from deck to trucks; her one set sail stood out a coal-black shape upon
the gloomy blueness of the air. I was a youngster then, and suffering
from weariness, cold, and imperfect oilskins which let water in at every
seam. I craved human companionship, and, coming off the poop, took my
place by the side of the boatswain (a man whom I did not like) in a
comparatively dry spot where at worst we had water only up to our knees.
Above our heads the explosive booming gusts of wind passed continuously,
justifying the sailor’s saying “It blows great guns.” And just from that
need of human companionship, being very close to the man, I said, or
rather shouted:
“Blows very hard, boatswain.”
His answer was:
“Ay, and if it blows only a little harder things will begin to go. I
don’t mind as long as everything holds, but when things begin to go it’s
bad.”
The note of dread in the shouting voice, the practical truth of these
words, heard years ago from a man I did not like, have stamped its
peculiar character on that gale.
A look in the eyes of a shipmate, a low murmur in the most sheltered spot
where the watch on duty are huddled together, a meaning moan from one to
the other with a glance at the windward sky, a sigh of weariness, a
gesture of disgust passing into the keeping of the great wind, become
part and parcel of the gale. The olive hue of hurricane clouds presents
an aspect peculiarly appalling. The inky ragged wrack, flying before a
nor’-west wind, makes you dizzy with its headlong speed that depicts the
rush of the invisible air. A hard sou’-wester startles you with its
close horizon and its low gray sky, as if the world were a dungeon
wherein there is no rest for body or soul. And there are black squalls,
white squalls, thunder squalls, and unexpected gusts that come without a
single sign in the sky; and of each kind no one of them resembles
another.
There is infinite variety in the gales of wind at sea, and except for the
peculiar, terrible, and mysterious moaning that may be heard sometimes
passing through the roar of a hurricane—except for that unforgettable
sound, as if the soul of the universe had been goaded into a mournful
groan—it is, after all, the human voice that stamps the mark of human
consciousness upon the character of a gale.
XXV.
THERE is no part of the world of coasts, continents, oceans, seas,
straits, capes, and islands which is not under the sway of a reigning
wind, the sovereign of its typical weather. The wind rules the aspects
of the sky and the action of the sea. But no wind rules unchallenged his
realm of land and water. As with the kingdoms of the earth, there are
regions more turbulent than others. In the middle belt of the earth the
Trade Winds reign supreme, undisputed, like monarchs of long-settled
kingdoms, whose traditional power, checking all undue ambitions, is not
so much an exercise of personal might as the working of long-established
institutions. The intertropical kingdoms of the Trade Winds are
favourable to the ordinary life of a merchantman. The trumpet-call of
strife is seldom borne on their wings to the watchful ears of men on the
decks of ships. The regions ruled by the north-east and south-east Trade
Winds are serene. In a southern-going ship, bound out for a long voyage,
the passage through their dominions is characterized by a relaxation of
strain and vigilance on the part of the seamen. Those citizens of the
ocean feel sheltered under the ægis of an uncontested law, of an
undisputed dynasty. There, indeed, if anywhere on earth, the weather may
be trusted.
Yet not too implicitly. Even in the constitutional realm of Trade Winds,
north and south of the equator, ships are overtaken by strange
disturbances. Still, the easterly winds, and, generally speaking, the
easterly weather all the world over, is characterized by regularity and
persistence.
As a ruler, the East Wind has a remarkable stability; as an invader of
the high latitudes lying under the tumultuous sway of his great brother,
the Wind of the West, he is extremely difficult to dislodge, by the
reason of his cold craftiness and profound duplicity.
The narrow seas around these isles, where British admirals keep watch and
ward upon the marches of the Atlantic Ocean, are subject to the turbulent
sway of the West Wind. Call it north-west or south-west, it is all one—a
different phase of the same character, a changed expression on the same
face. In the orientation of the winds that rule the seas, the north and
south directions are of no importance. There are no North and South
Winds of any account upon this earth. The North and South Winds are but
small princes in the dynasties that make peace and war upon the sea.
They never assert themselves upon a vast stage. They depend upon local
causes—the configuration of coasts, the shapes of straits, the accidents
of bold promontories round which they play their little part. In the
polity of winds, as amongst the tribes of the earth, the real struggle
lies between East and West.
XXVI.
The West Wind reigns over the seas surrounding the coasts of these
kingdoms; and from the gateways of the channels, from promontories as if
from watch-towers, from estuaries of rivers as if from postern gates,
from passage-ways, inlets, straits, firths, the garrison of the Isle and
the crews of the ships going and returning look to the westward to judge
by the varied splendours of his sunset mantle the mood of that arbitrary
ruler. The end of the day is the time to gaze at the kingly face of the
Westerly Weather, who is the arbiter of ships’ destinies. Benignant and
splendid, or splendid and sinister, the western sky reflects the hidden
purposes of the royal mind. Clothed in a mantle of dazzling gold or
draped in rags of black clouds like a beggar, the might of the Westerly
Wind sits enthroned upon the western horizon with the whole North
Atlantic as a footstool for his feet and the first twinkling stars making
a diadem for his brow. Then the seamen, attentive courtiers of the
weather, think of regulating the conduct of their ships by the mood of
the master. The West Wind is too great a king to be a dissembler: he is
no calculator plotting deep schemes in a sombre heart; he is too strong
for small artifices; there is passion in all his moods, even in the soft
mood of his serene days, in the grace of his blue sky whose immense and
unfathomable tenderness reflected in the mirror of the sea embraces,
possesses, lulls to sleep the ships with white sails. He is all things
to all oceans; he is like a poet seated upon a throne—magnificent,
simple, barbarous, pensive, generous, impulsive, changeable,
unfathomable—but when you understand him, always the same. Some of his
sunsets are like pageants devised for the delight of the multitude, when
all the gems of the royal treasure-house are displayed above the sea.
Others are like the opening of his royal confidence, tinged with thoughts
of sadness and compassion in a melancholy splendour meditating upon the
short-lived peace of the waters. And I have seen him put the pent-up
anger of his heart into the aspect of the inaccessible sun, and cause it
to glare fiercely like the eye of an implacable autocrat out of a pale
and frightened sky.
He is the war-lord who sends his battalions of Atlantic rollers to the
assault of our seaboard. The compelling voice of the West Wind musters
up to his service all the might of the ocean. At the bidding of the West
Wind there arises a great commotion in the sky above these Islands, and a
great rush of waters falls upon our shores. The sky of the westerly
weather is full of flying clouds, of great big white clouds coming
thicker and thicker till they seem to stand welded into a solid canopy,
upon whose gray face the lower wrack of the gale, thin, black and
angry-looking, flies past with vertiginous speed. Denser and denser
grows this dome of vapours, descending lower and lower upon the sea,
narrowing the horizon around the ship. And the characteristic aspect of
westerly weather, the thick, gray, smoky and sinister tone sets in,
circumscribing the view of the men, drenching their bodies, oppressing
their souls, taking their breath away with booming gusts, deafening,
blinding, driving, rushing them onwards in a swaying ship towards our
coasts lost in mists and rain.
The caprice of the winds, like the wilfulness of men, is fraught with the
disastrous consequences of self-indulgence. Long anger, the sense of his
uncontrolled power, spoils the frank and generous nature of the West
Wind. It is as if his heart were corrupted by a malevolent and brooding
rancour. He devastates his own kingdom in the wantonness of his force.
South-west is the quarter of the heavens where he presents his darkened
brow. He breathes his rage in terrific squalls, and overwhelms his realm
with an inexhaustible welter of clouds. He strews the seeds of anxiety
upon the decks of scudding ships, makes the foam-stripped ocean look old,
and sprinkles with gray hairs the heads of ship-masters in the
homeward-bound ships running for the Channel. The Westerly Wind
asserting his sway from the south-west quarter is often like a monarch
gone mad, driving forth with wild imprecations the most faithful of his
courtiers to shipwreck, disaster, and death.
The south-westerly weather is the thick weather _par excellence_. It is
not the thickness of the fog; it is rather a contraction of the horizon,
a mysterious veiling of the shores with clouds that seem to make a
low-vaulted dungeon around the running ship. It is not blindness; it is
a shortening of the sight. The West Wind does not say to the seaman,
“You shall be blind”; it restricts merely the range of his vision and
raises the dread of land within his breast. It makes of him a man robbed
of half his force, of half his efficiency. Many times in my life,
standing in long sea-boots and streaming oilskins at the elbow of my
commander on the poop of a homeward-bound ship making for the Channel,
and gazing ahead into the gray and tormented waste, I have heard a weary
sigh shape itself into a studiously casual comment:
“Can’t see very far in this weather.”
And have made answer in the same low, perfunctory tone
“No, sir.”
It would be merely the instinctive voicing of an ever-present thought
associated closely with the consciousness of the land somewhere ahead and
of the great speed of the ship. Fair wind, fair wind! Who would dare to
grumble at a fair wind? It was a favour of the Western King, who rules
masterfully the North Atlantic from the latitude of the Azores to the
latitude of Cape Farewell. A famous shove this to end a good passage
with; and yet, somehow, one could not muster upon one’s lips the smile of
a courtier’s gratitude. This favour was dispensed to you from under an
overbearing scowl, which is the true expression of the great autocrat
when he has made up his mind to give a battering to some ships and to
hunt certain others home in one breath of cruelty and benevolence,
equally distracting.
“No, sir. Can’t see very far.”
Thus would the mate’s voice repeat the thought of the master, both gazing
ahead, while under their feet the ship rushes at some twelve knots in the
direction of the lee shore; and only a couple of miles in front of her
swinging and dripping jib-boom, carried naked with an upward slant like a
spear, a gray horizon closes the view with a multitude of waves surging
upwards violently as if to strike at the stooping clouds.
Awful and threatening scowls darken the face of the West Wind in his
clouded, south-west mood; and from the King’s throne-hall in the western
board stronger gusts reach you, like the fierce shouts of raving fury to
which only the gloomy grandeur of the scene imparts a saving dignity. A
shower pelts the deck and the sails of the ship as if flung with a scream
by an angry hand; and when the night closes in, the night of a
south-westerly gale, it seems more hopeless than the shade of Hades. The
south-westerly mood of the great West Wind is a lightless mood, without
sun, moon, or stars, with no gleam of light but the phosphorescent
flashes of the great sheets of foam that, boiling up on each side of the
ship, fling bluish gleams upon her dark and narrow hull, rolling as she
runs, chased by enormous seas, distracted in the tumult.
There are some bad nights in the kingdom of the West Wind for
homeward-bound ships making for the Channel; and the days of wrath dawn
upon them colourless and vague like the timid turning up of invisible
lights upon the scene of a tyrannical and passionate outbreak, awful in
the monotony of its method and the increasing strength of its violence.
It is the same wind, the same clouds, the same wildly racing seas, the
same thick horizon around the ship. Only the wind is stronger, the
clouds seem denser and more overwhelming, the waves appear to have grown
bigger and more threatening during the night. The hours, whose minutes
are marked by the crash of the breaking seas, slip by with the screaming,
pelting squalls overtaking the ship as she runs on and on with darkened
canvas, with streaming spars and dripping ropes. The down-pours thicken.
Preceding each shower a mysterious gloom, like the passage of a shadow
above the firmament of gray clouds, filters down upon the ship. Now and
then the rain pours upon your head in streams as if from spouts. It
seems as if your ship were going to be drowned before she sank, as if all
atmosphere had turned to water. You gasp, you splutter, you are blinded
and deafened, you are submerged, obliterated, dissolved, annihilated,
streaming all over as if your limbs, too, had turned to water. And every
nerve on the alert you watch for the clearing-up mood of the Western
King, that shall come with a shift of wind as likely as not to whip all
the three masts out of your ship in the twinkling of an eye.
XXVII.
Heralded by the increasing fierceness of the squalls, sometimes by a
faint flash of lightning like the signal of a lighted torch waved far
away behind the clouds, the shift of wind comes at last, the crucial
moment of the change from the brooding and veiled violence of the
south-west gale to the sparkling, flashing, cutting, clear-eyed anger of
the King’s north-westerly mood. You behold another phase of his passion,
a fury bejewelled with stars, mayhap bearing the crescent of the moon on
its brow, shaking the last vestiges of its torn cloud-mantle in
inky-black squalls, with hail and sleet descending like showers of
crystals and pearls, bounding off the spars, drumming on the sails,
pattering on the oilskin coats, whitening the decks of homeward-bound
ships. Faint, ruddy flashes of lightning flicker in the starlight upon
her mastheads. A chilly blast hums in the taut rigging, causing the ship
to tremble to her very keel, and the soaked men on her decks to shiver in
their wet clothes to the very marrow of their bones. Before one squall
has flown over to sink in the eastern board, the edge of another peeps up
already above the western horizon, racing up swift, shapeless, like a
black bag full of frozen water ready to burst over your devoted head.
The temper of the ruler of the ocean has changed. Each gust of the
clouded mood that seemed warmed by the heat of a heart flaming with anger
has its counterpart in the chilly blasts that seem blown from a breast
turned to ice with a sudden revulsion of feeling. Instead of blinding
your eyes and crushing your soul with a terrible apparatus of cloud and
mists and seas and rain, the King of the West turns his power to
contemptuous pelting of your back with icicles, to making your weary eyes
water as if in grief, and your worn-out carcass quake pitifully. But
each mood of the great autocrat has its own greatness, and each is hard
to bear. Only the north-west phase of that mighty display is not
demoralizing to the same extent, because between the hail and sleet
squalls of a north-westerly gale one can see a long way ahead.
To see! to see!—this is the craving of the sailor, as of the rest of
blind humanity. To have his path made clear for him is the aspiration of
every human being in our beclouded and tempestuous existence. I have
heard a reserved, silent man, with no nerves to speak of, after three
days of hard running in thick south-westerly weather, burst out
passionately: “I wish to God we could get sight of something!”
We had just gone down below for a moment to commune in a battened-down
cabin, with a large white chart lying limp and damp upon a cold and
clammy table under the light of a smoky lamp. Sprawling over that
seaman’s silent and trusted adviser, with one elbow upon the coast of
Africa and the other planted in the neighbourhood of Cape Hatteras (it
was a general track-chart of the North Atlantic), my skipper lifted his
rugged, hairy face, and glared at me in a half-exasperated,
half-appealing way. We have seen no sun, moon, or stars for something
like seven days. By the effect of the West Wind’s wrath the celestial
bodies had gone into hiding for a week or more, and the last three days
had seen the force of a south-west gale grow from fresh, through strong,
to heavy, as the entries in my log-book could testify. Then we
separated, he to go on deck again, in obedience to that mysterious call
that seems to sound for ever in a shipmaster’s ears, I to stagger into my
cabin with some vague notion of putting down the words “Very heavy
weather” in a log-book not quite written up-to-date. But I gave it up,
and crawled into my bunk instead, boots and hat on, all standing (it did
not matter; everything was soaking wet, a heavy sea having burst the poop
skylights the night before), to remain in a nightmarish state between
waking and sleeping for a couple of hours of so-called rest.
The south-westerly mood of the West Wind is an enemy of sleep, and even
of a recumbent position, in the responsible officers of a ship. After
two hours of futile, light-headed, inconsequent thinking upon all things
under heaven in that dark, dank, wet and devastated cabin, I arose
suddenly and staggered up on deck. The autocrat of the North Atlantic
was still oppressing his kingdom and its outlying dependencies, even as
far as the Bay of Biscay, in the dismal secrecy of thick, very thick,
weather. The force of the wind, though we were running before it at the
rate of some ten knots an hour, was so great that it drove me with a
steady push to the front of the poop, where my commander was holding on.
“What do you think of it?” he addressed me in an interrogative yell.
What I really thought was that we both had had just about enough of it.
The manner in which the great West Wind chooses at times to administer
his possessions does not commend itself to a person of peaceful and
law-abiding disposition, inclined to draw distinctions between right and
wrong in the face of natural forces, whose standard, naturally, is that
of might alone. But, of course, I said nothing. For a man caught, as it
were, between his skipper and the great West Wind silence is the safest
sort of diplomacy. Moreover, I knew my skipper. He did not want to know
what I thought. Shipmasters hanging on a breath before the thrones of
the winds ruling the seas have their psychology, whose workings are as
important to the ship and those on board of her as the changing moods of
the weather. The man, as a matter of fact, under no circumstances, ever
cared a brass farthing for what I or anybody else in his ship thought.
He had had just about enough of it, I guessed, and what he was at really
was a process of fishing for a suggestion. It was the pride of his life
that he had never wasted a chance, no matter how boisterous, threatening,
and dangerous, of a fair wind. Like men racing blindfold for a gap in a
hedge, we were finishing a splendidly quick passage from the Antipodes,
with a tremendous rush for the Channel in as thick a weather as any I can
remember, but his psychology did not permit him to bring the ship to with
a fair wind blowing—at least not on his own initiative. And yet he felt
that very soon indeed something would have to be done. He wanted the
suggestion to come from me, so that later on, when the trouble was over,
he could argue this point with his own uncompromising spirit, laying the
blame upon my shoulders. I must render him the justice that this sort of
pride was his only weakness.
But he got no suggestion from me. I understood his psychology. Besides,
I had my own stock of weaknesses at the time (it is a different one now),
and amongst them was the conceit of being remarkably well up in the
psychology of the Westerly weather. I believed—not to mince matters—that
I had a genius for reading the mind of the great ruler of high latitudes.
I fancied I could discern already the coming of a change in his royal
mood. And all I said was:
“The weather’s bound to clear up with the shift of wind.”
“Anybody knows that much!” he snapped at me, at the highest pitch of his
voice.
“I mean before dark!” I cried.
This was all the opening he ever got from me. The eagerness with which
he seized upon it gave me the measure of the anxiety he had been
labouring under.
“Very well,” he shouted, with an affectation of impatience, as if giving
way to long entreaties. “All right. If we don’t get a shift by then
we’ll take that foresail off her and put her head under her wing for the
night.”
I was struck by the picturesque character of the phrase as applied to a
ship brought-to in order to ride out a gale with wave after wave passing
under her breast. I could see her resting in the tumult of the elements
like a sea-bird sleeping in wild weather upon the raging waters with its
head tucked under its wing. In imaginative precision, in true feeling,
this is one of the most expressive sentences I have ever heard on human
lips. But as to taking the foresail off that ship before we put her head
under her wing, I had my grave doubts. They were justified. That long
enduring piece of canvas was confiscated by the arbitrary decree of the
West Wind, to whom belong the lives of men and the contrivances of their
hands within the limits of his kingdom. With the sound of a faint
explosion it vanished into the thick weather bodily, leaving behind of
its stout substance not so much as one solitary strip big enough to be
picked into a handful of lint for, say, a wounded elephant. Torn out of
its bolt-ropes, it faded like a whiff of smoke in the smoky drift of
clouds shattered and torn by the shift of wind. For the shift of wind
had come. The unveiled, low sun glared angrily from a chaotic sky upon a
confused and tremendous sea dashing itself upon a coast. We recognised
the headland, and looked at each other in the silence of dumb wonder.
Without knowing it in the least, we had run up alongside the Isle of
Wight, and that tower, tinged a faint evening red in the salt wind-haze,
was the lighthouse on St. Catherine’s Point.
My skipper recovered first from his astonishment. His bulging eyes sank
back gradually into their orbits. His psychology, taking it all round,
was really very creditable for an average sailor. He had been spared the
humiliation of laying his ship to with a fair wind; and at once that man,
of an open and truthful nature, spoke up in perfect good faith, rubbing
together his brown, hairy hands—the hands of a master-craftsman upon the
sea:
“Humph! that’s just about where I reckoned we had got to.”
The transparency and ingenuousness, in a way, of that delusion, the airy
tone, the hint of already growing pride, were perfectly delicious. But,
in truth, this was one of the greatest surprises ever sprung by the
clearing up mood of the West Wind upon one of the most accomplished of
his courtiers.
XXVIII.
The winds of North and South are, as I have said, but small princes
amongst the powers of the sea. They have no territory of their own; they
are not reigning winds anywhere. Yet it is from their houses that the
reigning dynasties which have shared between them the waters of the earth
are sprung. All the weather of the world is based upon the contest of
the Polar and Equatorial strains of that tyrannous race. The West Wind
is the greatest king. The East rules between the Tropics. They have
shared each ocean between them. Each has his genius of supreme rule.
The King of the West never intrudes upon the recognised dominion of his
kingly brother. He is a barbarian, of a northern type. Violent without
craftiness, and furious without malice, one may imagine him seated
masterfully with a double-edged sword on his knees upon the painted and
gilt clouds of the sunset, bowing his shock head of golden locks, a
flaming beard over his breast, imposing, colossal, mighty-limbed, with a
thundering voice, distended cheeks and fierce blue eyes, urging the speed
of his gales. The other, the East king, the king of blood-red sunrises,
I represent to myself as a spare Southerner with clear-cut features,
black-browed and dark-eyed, gray-robed, upright in sunshine, resting a
smooth-shaven cheek in the palm of his hand, impenetrable, secret, full
of wiles, fine-drawn, keen—meditating aggressions.
The West Wind keeps faith with his brother, the King of the Easterly
weather. “What we have divided we have divided,” he seems to say in his
gruff voice, this ruler without guile, who hurls as if in sport enormous
masses of cloud across the sky, and flings the great waves of the
Atlantic clear across from the shores of the New World upon the hoary
headlands of Old Europe, which harbours more kings and rulers upon its
seamed and furrowed body than all the oceans of the world together.
“What we have divided we have divided; and if no rest and peace in this
world have fallen to my share, leave me alone. Let me play at quoits
with cyclonic gales, flinging the discs of spinning cloud and whirling
air from one end of my dismal kingdom to the other: over the Great Banks
or along the edges of pack-ice—this one with true aim right into the
bight of the Bay of Biscay, that other upon the fiords of Norway, across
the North Sea where the fishermen of many nations look watchfully into my
angry eye. This is the time of kingly sport.”
And the royal master of high latitudes sighs mightily, with the sinking
sun upon his breast and the double-edged sword upon his knees, as if
wearied by the innumerable centuries of a strenuous rule and saddened by
the unchangeable aspect of the ocean under his feet—by the endless vista
of future ages where the work of sowing the wind and reaping the
whirlwind shall go on and on till his realm of living waters becomes a
frozen and motionless ocean. But the other, crafty and unmoved, nursing
his shaven chin between the thumb and forefinger of his slim and
treacherous hand, thinks deep within his heart full of guile: “Aha! our
brother of the West has fallen into the mood of kingly melancholy. He is
tired of playing with circular gales, and blowing great guns, and
unrolling thick streamers of fog in wanton sport at the cost of his own
poor, miserable subjects. Their fate is most pitiful. Let us make a
foray upon the dominions of that noisy barbarian, a great raid from
Finisterre to Hatteras, catching his fishermen unawares, baffling the
fleets that trust to his power, and shooting sly arrows into the livers
of men who court his good graces. He is, indeed, a worthless fellow.”
And forthwith, while the West Wind meditates upon the vanity of his
irresistible might, the thing is done, and the Easterly weather sets in
upon the North Atlantic.
The prevailing weather of the North Atlantic is typical of the way in
which the West Wind rules his realm on which the sun never sets. North
Atlantic is the heart of a great empire. It is the part of the West
Wind’s dominions most thickly populated with generations of fine ships
and hardy men. Heroic deeds and adventurous exploits have been performed
there, within the very stronghold of his sway. The best sailors in the
world have been born and bred under the shadow of his sceptre, learning
to manage their ships with skill and audacity before the steps of his
stormy throne. Reckless adventurers, toiling fishermen, admirals as wise
and brave as the world has ever known, have waited upon the signs of his
westerly sky. Fleets of victorious ships have hung upon his breath. He
has tossed in his hand squadrons of war-scarred three-deckers, and
shredded out in mere sport the bunting of flags hallowed in the
traditions of honour and glory. He is a good friend and a dangerous
enemy, without mercy to unseaworthy ships and faint-hearted seamen. In
his kingly way he has taken but little account of lives sacrificed to his
impulsive policy; he is a king with a double-edged sword bared in his
right hand. The East Wind, an interloper in the dominions of Westerly
weather, is an impassive-faced tyrant with a sharp poniard held behind
his back for a treacherous stab.
In his forays into the North Atlantic the East Wind behaves like a subtle
and cruel adventurer without a notion of honour or fair play. Veiling
his clear-cut, lean face in a thin layer of a hard, high cloud, I have
seen him, like a wizened robber sheik of the sea, hold up large caravans
of ships to the number of three hundred or more at the very gates of the
English Channel. And the worst of it was that there was no ransom that
we could pay to satisfy his avidity; for whatever evil is wrought by the
raiding East Wind, it is done only to spite his kingly brother of the
West. We gazed helplessly at the systematic, cold, gray-eyed obstinacy
of the Easterly weather, while short rations became the order of the day,
and the pinch of hunger under the breast-bone grew familiar to every
sailor in that held-up fleet. Every day added to our numbers. In knots
and groups and straggling parties we flung to and fro before the closed
gate. And meantime the outward-bound ships passed, running through our
humiliated ranks under all the canvas they could show. It is my idea
that the Easterly Wind helps the ships away from home in the wicked hope
that they shall all come to an untimely end and be heard of no more. For
six weeks did the robber sheik hold the trade route of the earth, while
our liege lord, the West Wind, slept profoundly like a tired Titan, or
else remained lost in a mood of idle sadness known only to frank natures.
All was still to the westward; we looked in vain towards his stronghold:
the King slumbered on so deeply that he let his foraging brother steal
the very mantle of gold-lined purple clouds from his bowed shoulders.
What had become of the dazzling hoard of royal jewels exhibited at every
close of day? Gone, disappeared, extinguished, carried off without
leaving a single gold band or the flash of a single sunbeam in the
evening sky! Day after day through a cold streak of heavens as bare and
poor as the inside of a rifled safe a rayless and despoiled sun would
slink shamefacedly, without pomp or show, to hide in haste under the
waters. And still the King slept on, or mourned the vanity of his might
and his power, while the thin-lipped intruder put the impress of his cold
and implacable spirit upon the sky and sea. With every daybreak the
rising sun had to wade through a crimson stream, luminous and sinister,
like the spilt blood of celestial bodies murdered during the night.
In this particular instance the mean interloper held the road for some
six weeks on end, establishing his particular administrative methods over
the best part of the North Atlantic. It looked as if the easterly
weather had come to stay for ever, or, at least, till we had all starved
to death in the held-up fleet—starved within sight, as it were, of
plenty, within touch, almost, of the bountiful heart of the Empire.
There we were, dotting with our white dry sails the hard blueness of the
deep sea. There we were, a growing company of ships, each with her
burden of grain, of timber, of wool, of hides, and even of oranges, for
we had one or two belated fruit schooners in company. There we were, in
that memorable spring of a certain year in the late seventies, dodging to
and fro, baffled on every tack, and with our stores running down to
sweepings of bread-lockers and scrapings of sugar-casks. It was just
like the East Wind’s nature to inflict starvation upon the bodies of
unoffending sailors, while he corrupted their simple souls by an
exasperation leading to outbursts of profanity as lurid as his blood-red
sunrises. They were followed by gray days under the cover of high,
motionless clouds that looked as if carved in a slab of ash-coloured
marble. And each mean starved sunset left us calling with imprecations
upon the West Wind even in its most veiled misty mood to wake up and give
us our liberty, if only to rush on and dash the heads of our ships
against the very walls of our unapproachable home.
XXIX.
In the atmosphere of the Easterly weather, as pellucid as a piece of
crystal and refracting like a prism, we could see the appalling numbers
of our helpless company, even to those who in more normal conditions
would have remained invisible, sails down under the horizon. It is the
malicious pleasure of the East Wind to augment the power of your
eyesight, in order, perhaps, that you should see better the perfect
humiliation, the hopeless character of your captivity. Easterly weather
is generally clear, and that is all that can be said for it—almost
supernaturally clear when it likes; but whatever its mood, there is
something uncanny in its nature. Its duplicity is such that it will
deceive a scientific instrument. No barometer will give warning of an
easterly gale, were it ever so wet. It would be an unjust and ungrateful
thing to say that a barometer is a stupid contrivance. It is simply that
the wiles of the East Wind are too much for its fundamental honesty.
After years and years of experience the most trusty instrument of the
sort that ever went to sea screwed on to a ship’s cabin bulkhead will,
almost invariably, be induced to rise by the diabolic ingenuity of the
Easterly weather, just at the moment when the Easterly weather,
discarding its methods of hard, dry, impassive cruelty, contemplates
drowning what is left of your spirit in torrents of a peculiarly cold and
horrid rain. The sleet-and-hail squalls following the lightning at the
end of a westerly gale are cold and benumbing and stinging and cruel
enough. But the dry, Easterly weather, when it turns to wet, seems to
rain poisoned showers upon your head. It is a sort of steady,
persistent, overwhelming, endlessly driving downpour, which makes your
heart sick, and opens it to dismal forebodings. And the stormy mood of
the Easterly weather looms black upon the sky with a peculiar and amazing
blackness. The West Wind hangs heavy gray curtains of mist and spray
before your gaze, but the Eastern interloper of the narrow seas, when he
has mustered his courage and cruelty to the point of a gale, puts your
eyes out, puts them out completely, makes you feel blind for life upon a
lee-shore. It is the wind, also, that brings snow.
Out of his black and merciless heart he flings a white blinding sheet
upon the ships of the sea. He has more manners of villainy, and no more
conscience than an Italian prince of the seventeenth century. His weapon
is a dagger carried under a black cloak when he goes out on his unlawful
enterprises. The mere hint of his approach fills with dread every craft
that swims the sea, from fishing-smacks to four-masted ships that
recognise the sway of the West Wind. Even in his most accommodating mood
he inspires a dread of treachery. I have heard upwards of ten score of
windlasses spring like one into clanking life in the dead of night,
filling the Downs with a panic-struck sound of anchors being torn
hurriedly out of the ground at the first breath of his approach.
Fortunately, his heart often fails him: he does not always blow home upon
our exposed coast; he has not the fearless temper of his Westerly
brother.
The natures of those two winds that share the dominions of the great
oceans are fundamentally different. It is strange that the winds which
men are prone to style capricious remain true to their character in all
the various regions of the earth. To us here, for instance, the East
Wind comes across a great continent, sweeping over the greatest body of
solid land upon this earth. For the Australian east coast the East Wind
is the wind of the ocean, coming across the greatest body of water upon
the globe; and yet here and there its characteristics remain the same
with a strange consistency in everything that is vile and base. The
members of the West Wind’s dynasty are modified in a way by the regions
they rule, as a Hohenzollern, without ceasing to be himself, becomes a
Roumanian by virtue of his throne, or a Saxe-Coburg learns to put the
dress of Bulgarian phrases upon his particular thoughts, whatever they
are.
The autocratic sway of the West Wind, whether forty north or forty south
of the Equator, is characterized by an open, generous, frank, barbarous
recklessness. For he is a great autocrat, and to be a great autocrat you
must be a great barbarian. I have been too much moulded to his sway to
nurse now any idea of rebellion in my heart. Moreover, what is a
rebellion within the four walls of a room against the tempestuous rule of
the West Wind? I remain faithful to the memory of the mighty King with a
double-edged sword in one hand, and in the other holding out rewards of
great daily runs and famously quick passages to those of his courtiers
who knew how to wait watchfully for every sign of his secret mood. As we
deep-water men always reckoned, he made one year in three fairly lively
for anybody having business upon the Atlantic or down there along the
“forties” of the Southern Ocean. You had to take the bitter with the
sweet; and it cannot be denied he played carelessly with our lives and
fortunes. But, then, he was always a great king, fit to rule over the
great waters where, strictly speaking, a man would have no business
whatever but for his audacity.
The audacious should not complain. A mere trader ought not to grumble at
the tolls levied by a mighty king. His mightiness was sometimes very
overwhelming; but even when you had to defy him openly, as on the banks
of the Agulhas homeward bound from the East Indies, or on the outward
passage round the Horn, he struck at you fairly his stinging blows (full
in the face, too), and it was your business not to get too much
staggered. And, after all, if you showed anything of a countenance, the
good-natured barbarian would let you fight your way past the very steps
of his throne. It was only now and then that the sword descended and a
head fell; but if you fell you were sure of impressive obsequies and of a
roomy, generous grave.
Such is the king to whom Viking chieftains bowed their heads, and whom
the modern and palatial steamship defies with impunity seven times a
week. And yet it is but defiance, not victory. The magnificent
barbarian sits enthroned in a mantle of gold-lined clouds looking from on
high on great ships gliding like mechanical toys upon his sea and on men
who, armed with fire and iron, no longer need to watch anxiously for the
slightest sign of his royal mood. He is disregarded; but he has kept all
his strength, all his splendour, and a great part of his power. Time
itself, that shakes all the thrones, is on the side of that king. The
sword in his hand remains as sharp as ever upon both its edges; and he
may well go on playing his royal game of quoits with hurricanes, tossing
them over from the continent of republics to the continent of kingdoms,
in the assurance that both the new republics and the old kingdoms, the
heat of fire and the strength of iron, with the untold generations of
audacious men, shall crumble to dust at the steps of his throne, and pass
away, and be forgotten before his own rule comes to an end.
XXX.
THE estuaries of rivers appeal strongly to an adventurous imagination.
This appeal is not always a charm, for there are estuaries of a
particularly dispiriting ugliness: lowlands, mud-flats, or perhaps barren
sandhills without beauty of form or amenity of aspect, covered with a
shabby and scanty vegetation conveying the impression of poverty and
uselessness. Sometimes such an ugliness is merely a repulsive mask. A
river whose estuary resembles a breach in a sand rampart may flow through
a most fertile country. But all the estuaries of great rivers have their
fascination, the attractiveness of an open portal. Water is friendly to
man. The ocean, a part of Nature furthest removed in the
unchangeableness and majesty of its might from the spirit of mankind, has
ever been a friend to the enterprising nations of the earth. And of all
the elements this is the one to which men have always been prone to trust
themselves, as if its immensity held a reward as vast as itself.
From the offing the open estuary promises every possible fruition to
adventurous hopes. That road open to enterprise and courage invites the
explorer of coasts to new efforts towards the fulfilment of great
expectations. The commander of the first Roman galley must have looked
with an intense absorption upon the estuary of the Thames as he turned
the beaked prow of his ship to the westward under the brow of the North
Foreland. The estuary of the Thames is not beautiful; it has no noble
features, no romantic grandeur of aspect, no smiling geniality; but it is
wide open, spacious, inviting, hospitable at the first glance, with a
strange air of mysteriousness which lingers about it to this very day.
The navigation of his craft must have engrossed all the Roman’s attention
in the calm of a summer’s day (he would choose his weather), when the
single row of long sweeps (the galley would be a light one, not a
trireme) could fall in easy cadence upon a sheet of water like
plate-glass, reflecting faithfully the classic form of his vessel and the
contour of the lonely shores close on his left hand. I assume he
followed the land and passed through what is at present known as Margate
Roads, groping his careful way along the hidden sandbanks, whose every
tail and spit has its beacon or buoy nowadays. He must have been
anxious, though no doubt he had collected beforehand on the shores of the
Gauls a store of information from the talk of traders, adventurers,
fishermen, slave-dealers, pirates—all sorts of unofficial men connected
with the sea in a more or less reputable way. He would have heard of
channels and sandbanks, of natural features of the land useful for
sea-marks, of villages and tribes and modes of barter and precautions to
take: with the instructive tales about native chiefs dyed more or less
blue, whose character for greediness, ferocity, or amiability must have
been expounded to him with that capacity for vivid language which seems
joined naturally to the shadiness of moral character and recklessness of
disposition. With that sort of spiced food provided for his anxious
thought, watchful for strange men, strange beasts, strange turns of the
tide, he would make the best of his way up, a military seaman with a
short sword on thigh and a bronze helmet on his head, the pioneer
post-captain of an imperial fleet. Was the tribe inhabiting the Isle of
Thanet of a ferocious disposition, I wonder, and ready to fall with
stone-studded clubs and wooden lances hardened in the fire, upon the
backs of unwary mariners?
Amongst the great commercial streams of these islands, the Thames is the
only one, I think, open to romantic feeling, from the fact that the sight
of human labour and the sounds of human industry do not come down its
shores to the very sea, destroying the suggestion of mysterious vastness
caused by the configuration of the shore. The broad inlet of the shallow
North Sea passes gradually into the contracted shape of the river; but
for a long time the feeling of the open water remains with the ship
steering to the westward through one of the lighted and buoyed
passage-ways of the Thames, such as Queen’s Channel, Prince’s Channel,
Four-Fathom Channel; or else coming down the Swin from the north. The
rush of the yellow flood-tide hurries her up as if into the unknown
between the two fading lines of the coast. There are no features to this
land, no conspicuous, far-famed landmarks for the eye; there is nothing
so far down to tell you of the greatest agglomeration of mankind on earth
dwelling no more than five and twenty miles away, where the sun sets in a
blaze of colour flaming on a gold background, and the dark, low shores
trend towards each other. And in the great silence the deep, faint
booming of the big guns being tested at Shoeburyness hangs about the
Nore—a historical spot in the keeping of one of England’s appointed
guardians.
XXXI.
The Nore sand remains covered at low-water, and never seen by human eye;
but the Nore is a name to conjure with visions of historical events, of
battles, of fleets, of mutinies, of watch and ward kept upon the great
throbbing heart of the State. This ideal point of the estuary, this
centre of memories, is marked upon the steely gray expanse of the waters
by a lightship painted red that, from a couple of miles off, looks like a
cheap and bizarre little toy. I remember how, on coming up the river for
the first time, I was surprised at the smallness of that vivid object—a
tiny warm speck of crimson lost in an immensity of gray tones. I was
startled, as if of necessity the principal beacon in the water-way of the
greatest town on earth should have presented imposing proportions. And,
behold! the brown sprit-sail of a barge hid it entirely from my view.
Coming in from the eastward, the bright colouring of the lightship
marking the part of the river committed to the charge of an Admiral (the
Commander-in-Chief at the Nore) accentuates the dreariness and the great
breadth of the Thames Estuary. But soon the course of the ship opens the
entrance of the Medway, with its men-of-war moored in line, and the long
wooden jetty of Port Victoria, with its few low buildings like the
beginning of a hasty settlement upon a wild and unexplored shore. The
famous Thames barges sit in brown clusters upon the water with an effect
of birds floating upon a pond. On the imposing expanse of the great
estuary the traffic of the port where so much of the world’s work and the
world’s thinking is being done becomes insignificant, scattered,
streaming away in thin lines of ships stringing themselves out into the
eastern quarter through the various navigable channels of which the Nore
lightship marks the divergence. The coasting traffic inclines to the
north; the deep-water ships steer east with a southern inclination, on
through the Downs, to the most remote ends of the world. In the widening
of the shores sinking low in the gray, smoky distances the greatness of
the sea receives the mercantile fleet of good ships that London sends out
upon the turn of every tide. They follow each other, going very close by
the Essex shore. Such as the beads of a rosary told by business-like
shipowners for the greater profit of the world they slip one by one into
the open: while in the offing the inward-bound ships come up singly and
in bunches from under the sea horizon closing the mouth of the river
between Orfordness and North Foreland. They all converge upon the Nore,
the warm speck of red upon the tones of drab and gray, with the distant
shores running together towards the west, low and flat, like the sides of
an enormous canal. The sea-reach of the Thames is straight, and, once
Sheerness is left behind, its banks seem very uninhabited, except for the
cluster of houses which is Southend, or here and there a lonely wooden
jetty where petroleum ships discharge their dangerous cargoes, and the
oil-storage tanks, low and round with slightly-domed roofs, peep over the
edge of the fore-shore, as it were a village of Central African huts
imitated in iron. Bordered by the black and shining mud-flats, the level
marsh extends for miles. Away in the far background the land rises,
closing the view with a continuous wooded slope, forming in the distance
an interminable rampart overgrown with bushes.
Then, on the slight turn of the Lower Hope Reach, clusters of factory
chimneys come distinctly into view, tall and slender above the squat
ranges of cement works in Grays and Greenhithe. Smoking quietly at the
top against the great blaze of a magnificent sunset, they give an
industrial character to the scene, speak of work, manufactures, and
trade, as palm-groves on the coral strands of distant islands speak of
the luxuriant grace, beauty and vigour of tropical nature. The houses of
Gravesend crowd upon the shore with an effect of confusion as if they had
tumbled down haphazard from the top of the hill at the back. The
flatness of the Kentish shore ends there. A fleet of steam-tugs lies at
anchor in front of the various piers. A conspicuous church spire, the
first seen distinctly coming from the sea, has a thoughtful grace, the
serenity of a fine form above the chaotic disorder of men’s houses. But
on the other side, on the flat Essex side, a shapeless and desolate red
edifice, a vast pile of bricks with many windows and a slate roof more
inaccessible than an Alpine slope, towers over the bend in monstrous
ugliness, the tallest, heaviest building for miles around, a thing like
an hotel, like a mansion of flats (all to let), exiled into these fields
out of a street in West Kensington. Just round the corner, as it were,
on a pier defined with stone blocks and wooden piles, a white mast,
slender like a stalk of straw and crossed by a yard like a
knitting-needle, flying the signals of flag and balloon, watches over a
set of heavy dock-gates. Mast-heads and funnel-tops of ships peep above
the ranges of corrugated iron roofs. This is the entrance to Tilbury
Dock, the most recent of all London docks, the nearest to the sea.
Between the crowded houses of Gravesend and the monstrous red-brick pile
on the Essex shore the ship is surrendered fairly to the grasp of the
river. That hint of loneliness, that soul of the sea which had
accompanied her as far as the Lower Hope Reach, abandons her at the turn
of the first bend above. The salt, acrid flavour is gone out of the air,
together with a sense of unlimited space opening free beyond the
threshold of sandbanks below the Nore. The waters of the sea rush on
past Gravesend, tumbling the big mooring buoys laid along the face of the
town; but the sea-freedom stops short there, surrendering the salt tide
to the needs, the artifices, the contrivances of toiling men. Wharves,
landing-places, dock-gates, waterside stairs, follow each other
continuously right up to London Bridge, and the hum of men’s work fills
the river with a menacing, muttering note as of a breathless,
ever-driving gale. The water-way, so fair above and wide below, flows
oppressed by bricks and mortar and stone, by blackened timber and grimed
glass and rusty iron, covered with black barges, whipped up by paddles
and screws, overburdened with craft, overhung with chains, overshadowed
by walls making a steep gorge for its bed, filled with a haze of smoke
and dust.
This stretch of the Thames from London Bridge to the Albert Docks is to
other watersides of river ports what a virgin forest would be to a
garden. It is a thing grown up, not made. It recalls a jungle by the
confused, varied, and impenetrable aspect of the buildings that line the
shore, not according to a planned purpose, but as if sprung up by
accident from scattered seeds. Like the matted growth of bushes and
creepers veiling the silent depths of an unexplored wilderness, they hide
the depths of London’s infinitely varied, vigorous, seething life. In
other river ports it is not so. They lie open to their stream, with
quays like broad clearings, with streets like avenues cut through thick
timber for the convenience of trade. I am thinking now of river ports I
have seen—of Antwerp, for instance; of Nantes or Bordeaux, or even old
Rouen, where the night-watchmen of ships, elbows on rail, gaze at
shop-windows and brilliant cafés, and see the audience go in and come out
of the opera-house. But London, the oldest and greatest of river ports,
does not possess as much as a hundred yards of open quays upon its river
front. Dark and impenetrable at night, like the face of a forest, is the
London waterside. It is the waterside of watersides, where only one
aspect of the world’s life can be seen, and only one kind of men toils on
the edge of the stream. The lightless walls seem to spring from the very
mud upon which the stranded barges lie; and the narrow lanes coming down
to the foreshore resemble the paths of smashed bushes and crumbled earth
where big game comes to drink on the banks of tropical streams.
Behind the growth of the London waterside the docks of London spread out
unsuspected, smooth, and placid, lost amongst the buildings like dark
lagoons hidden in a thick forest. They lie concealed in the intricate
growth of houses with a few stalks of mastheads here and there
overtopping the roof of some four-story warehouse.
It is a strange conjunction this of roofs and mastheads, of walls and
yard-arms. I remember once having the incongruity of the relation
brought home to me in a practical way. I was the chief officer of a fine
ship, just docked with a cargo of wool from Sydney, after a ninety days’
passage. In fact, we had not been in more than half an hour and I was
still busy making her fast to the stone posts of a very narrow quay in
front of a lofty warehouse. An old man with a gray whisker under the
chin and brass buttons on his pilot-cloth jacket, hurried up along the
quay hailing my ship by name. He was one of those officials called
berthing-masters—not the one who had berthed us, but another, who,
apparently, had been busy securing a steamer at the other end of the
dock. I could see from afar his hard blue eyes staring at us, as if
fascinated, with a queer sort of absorption. I wondered what that worthy
sea-dog had found to criticise in my ship’s rigging. And I, too, glanced
aloft anxiously. I could see nothing wrong there. But perhaps that
superannuated fellow-craftsman was simply admiring the ship’s perfect
order aloft, I thought, with some secret pride; for the chief officer is
responsible for his ship’s appearance, and as to her outward condition,
he is the man open to praise or blame. Meantime the old salt
(“ex-coasting skipper” was writ large all over his person) had hobbled up
alongside in his bumpy, shiny boots, and, waving an arm, short and thick
like the flipper of a seal, terminated by a paw red as an uncooked
beef-steak, addressed the poop in a muffled, faint, roaring voice, as if
a sample of every North-Sea fog of his life had been permanently lodged
in his throat: “Haul ’em round, Mr. Mate!” were his words. “If you don’t
look sharp, you’ll have your topgallant yards through the windows of that
’ere warehouse presently!” This was the only cause of his interest in
the ship’s beautiful spars. I own that for a time I was struck dumb by
the bizarre associations of yard-arms and window-panes. To break windows
is the last thing one would think of in connection with a ship’s
topgallant yard, unless, indeed, one were an experienced berthing-master
in one of the London docks. This old chap was doing his little share of
the world’s work with proper efficiency. His little blue eyes had made
out the danger many hundred yards off. His rheumaticky feet, tired with
balancing that squat body for many years upon the decks of small
coasters, and made sore by miles of tramping upon the flagstones of the
dock side, had hurried up in time to avert a ridiculous catastrophe. I
answered him pettishly, I fear, and as if I had known all about it
before.
“All right, all right! can’t do everything at once.”
He remained near by, muttering to himself till the yards had been hauled
round at my order, and then raised again his foggy, thick voice:
“None too soon,” he observed, with a critical glance up at the towering
side of the warehouse. “That’s a half-sovereign in your pocket, Mr.
Mate. You should always look first how you are for them windows before
you begin to breast in your ship to the quay.”
It was good advice. But one cannot think of everything or foresee
contacts of things apparently as remote as stars and hop-poles.
XXXII.
The view of ships lying moored in some of the older docks of London has
always suggested to my mind the image of a flock of swans kept in the
flooded backyard of grim tenement houses. The flatness of the walls
surrounding the dark pool on which they float brings out wonderfully the
flowing grace of the lines on which a ship’s hull is built. The
lightness of these forms, devised to meet the winds and the seas, makes,
by contrast with the great piles of bricks, the chains and cables of
their moorings appear very necessary, as if nothing less could prevent
them from soaring upwards and over the roofs. The least puff of wind
stealing round the corners of the dock buildings stirs these captives
fettered to rigid shores. It is as if the soul of a ship were impatient
of confinement. Those masted hulls, relieved of their cargo, become
restless at the slightest hint of the wind’s freedom. However tightly
moored, they range a little at their berths, swaying imperceptibly the
spire-like assemblages of cordage and spars. You can detect their
impatience by watching the sway of the mastheads against the motionless,
the soulless gravity of mortar and stones. As you pass alongside each
hopeless prisoner chained to the quay, the slight grinding noise of the
wooden fenders makes a sound of angry muttering. But, after all, it may
be good for ships to go through a period of restraint and repose, as the
restraint and self-communion of inactivity may be good for an unruly
soul—not, indeed, that I mean to say that ships are unruly; on the
contrary, they are faithful creatures, as so many men can testify. And
faithfulness is a great restraint, the strongest bond laid upon the
self-will of men and ships on this globe of land and sea.
This interval of bondage in the docks rounds each period of a ship’s life
with the sense of accomplished duty, of an effectively played part in the
work of the world. The dock is the scene of what the world would think
the most serious part in the light, bounding, swaying life of a ship.
But there are docks and docks. The ugliness of some docks is appalling.
Wild horses would not drag from me the name of a certain river in the
north whose narrow estuary is inhospitable and dangerous, and whose docks
are like a nightmare of dreariness and misery. Their dismal shores are
studded thickly with scaffold-like, enormous timber structures, whose
lofty heads are veiled periodically by the infernal gritty night of a
cloud of coal-dust. The most important ingredient for getting the
world’s work along is distributed there under the circumstances of the
greatest cruelty meted out to helpless ships. Shut up in the desolate
circuit of these basins, you would think a free ship would droop and die
like a wild bird put into a dirty cage. But a ship, perhaps because of
her faithfulness to men, will endure an extraordinary lot of ill-usage.
Still, I have seen ships issue from certain docks like half-dead
prisoners from a dungeon, bedraggled, overcome, wholly disguised in dirt,
and with their men rolling white eyeballs in black and worried faces
raised to a heaven which, in its smoky and soiled aspect, seemed to
reflect the sordidness of the earth below. One thing, however, may be
said for the docks of the Port of London on both sides of the river: for
all the complaints of their insufficient equipment, of their obsolete
rules, of failure (they say) in the matter of quick despatch, no ship
need ever issue from their gates in a half-fainting condition. London is
a general cargo port, as is only proper for the greatest capital of the
world to be. General cargo ports belong to the aristocracy of the
earth’s trading places, and in that aristocracy London, as it is its way,
has a unique physiognomy.
The absence of picturesqueness cannot be laid to the charge of the docks
opening into the Thames. For all my unkind comparisons to swans and
backyards, it cannot be denied that each dock or group of docks along the
north side of the river has its own individual attractiveness. Beginning
with the cosy little St. Katherine’s Dock, lying overshadowed and black
like a quiet pool amongst rocky crags, through the venerable and
sympathetic London Docks, with not a single line of rails in the whole of
their area and the aroma of spices lingering between its warehouses, with
their far-famed wine-cellars—down through the interesting group of West
India Docks, the fine docks at Blackwall, on past the Galleons Reach
entrance of the Victoria and Albert Docks, right down to the vast gloom
of the great basins in Tilbury, each of those places of restraint for
ships has its own peculiar physiognomy, its own expression. And what
makes them unique and attractive is their common trait of being romantic
in their usefulness.
In their way they are as romantic as the river they serve is unlike all
the other commercial streams of the world. The cosiness of the St.
Katherine’s Dock, the old-world air of the London Docks, remain impressed
upon the memory. The docks down the river, abreast of Woolwich, are
imposing by their proportions and the vast scale of the ugliness that
forms their surroundings—ugliness so picturesque as to become a delight
to the eye. When one talks of the Thames docks, “beauty” is a vain word,
but romance has lived too long upon this river not to have thrown a
mantle of glamour upon its banks.
The antiquity of the port appeals to the imagination by the long chain of
adventurous enterprises that had their inception in the town and floated
out into the world on the waters of the river. Even the newest of the
docks, the Tilbury Dock, shares in the glamour conferred by historical
associations. Queen Elizabeth has made one of her progresses down there,
not one of her journeys of pomp and ceremony, but an anxious business
progress at a crisis of national history. The menace of that time has
passed away, and now Tilbury is known by its docks. These are very
modern, but their remoteness and isolation upon the Essex marsh, the days
of failure attending their creation, invested them with a romantic air.
Nothing in those days could have been more striking than the vast, empty
basins, surrounded by miles of bare quays and the ranges of cargo-sheds,
where two or three ships seemed lost like bewitched children in a forest
of gaunt, hydraulic cranes. One received a wonderful impression of utter
abandonment, of wasted efficiency. From the first the Tilbury Docks were
very efficient and ready for their task, but they had come, perhaps, too
soon into the field. A great future lies before Tilbury Docks. They
shall never fill a long-felt want (in the sacramental phrase that is
applied to railways, tunnels, newspapers, and new editions of books).
They were too early in the field. The want shall never be felt because,
free of the trammels of the tide, easy of access, magnificent and
desolate, they are already there, prepared to take and keep the biggest
ships that float upon the sea. They are worthy of the oldest river port
in the world.
And, truth to say, for all the criticisms flung upon the heads of the
dock companies, the other docks of the Thames are no disgrace to the town
with a population greater than that of some commonwealths. The growth of
London as a well-equipped port has been slow, while not unworthy of a
great capital, of a great centre of distribution. It must not be
forgotten that London has not the backing of great industrial districts
or great fields of natural exploitation. In this it differs from
Liverpool, from Cardiff, from Newcastle, from Glasgow; and therein the
Thames differs from the Mersey, from the Tyne, from the Clyde. It is an
historical river; it is a romantic stream flowing through the centre of
great affairs, and for all the criticism of the river’s administration,
my contention is that its development has been worthy of its dignity.
For a long time the stream itself could accommodate quite easily the
oversea and coasting traffic. That was in the days when, in the part
called the
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