 CHAPTER XI. LESS perhaps than any other book written by me or anybody else does this volume require a preface. Yet since all the others, including even the personal record, which is but a fragment of biography, are to have their authors' notes, I cannot possibly leave this one without, lest a false impression of indifference or weariness should be created. I can see only too well that it is not going to be an easy task. Necessity, the mother of invention, being even unthinkable in this case, I do not know what to invent in the way of discourse, and necessity being also the greatest possible incentive to exertion, I don't even know how to begin to exert myself. Here, too, the natural inclination comes in. I have been all my life averse from exertion. Under these discouraging circumstances I am, however, bound to proceed with a sense of duty. This note is a thing promised. In less than a minute's time, by a few incautious words, I entered into a bond which has lain in my heart heavily ever since. For, this book is a very intimate revelation, and what that is revealing can a few more pages add to some three hundred others of most sincere disclosures. I have attempted here to lay bare with the unreserve of a last hour's confession the terms of my relation with the sea, which, beginning mysteriously, like any great passion, the inscrutable gods send to the mortals, went on unreasoning and invincible, surviving the test of disillusion, defying the disenchantment that lurks in every day of a strenuous life, went on full of love's delight and love's anguish, facing them in open-eyed exultation without bitterness and without repining from the first hour to the last. Subjugated but never unmanned, I surrendered my being to that passion which various and great, like life itself, had also its periods of wonderful serenity, which even a fickle mistress can give sometimes on her soothed breast, full of wiles, full of fury, and yet capable of an enchanting sweetness. And if anybody suggests that this must be the lyric illusion of an old romantic heart, I can answer that for twenty years I had lived like a hermit with my passion. Beyond the line of the sea horizon the world for me did not exist, as assuredly as it does not exist for the mystics who take refuge on the tops of high mountains. I am speaking now of that innermost life containing the best and the worst that can happen to us in the temperamental depths of our being, where a man indeed must live alone but need not give up all hope of holding converse with his kind. This perhaps is enough for me to say on this particular occasion about these my parting words about this, my last mood in my great passion for the sea. I call it great because it was great to me. Others may call it a foolish infatuation. Those words have been applied to every love story. But whatever it may be the fact remains that it was something too great for words. This is what I always felt vaguely, and therefore the following pages rest like a true confession on matters of fact which to a friendly and charitable person may convey the inner truth of almost a lifetime. From sixteen to thirty-six cannot be called an age, yet it is a pretty long stretch of that sort of experience which teaches a man slowly to see and feel. It is for me a distinct period, and when I emerged from it into another air, as it were, and said to myself, now I must speak of these things or remain unknown to the end of my days, it was with the inerradicable hope that accompanies one through solitude as well as through a crowd of ultimately some day at some moment making myself understood. And I have been. I have been understood as completely as it is possible to be understood in this our world which seems to be mostly composed of riddles. There have been things said about this book which have moved me profoundly, the more profoundly because they were uttered by men whose occupation was avowedly to understand and analyze and expound in a word by literary critics. They spoke out according to their conscience and some of them said things that made me feel both glad and sorry of ever having entered upon my confession. Dimly or clearly they perceived the character of my intention and ended by judging me worthy to have made the attempt. They saw it was of a revealing character, but in some cases they thought that the revelation was not complete. One of them said, in reading these chapters one is always hoping for the revelation, but the personality is never quite revealed. We can only say that this thing happened to Mr. Conrad, that he knew such a man and that thus life passed him leaving those memories. They are the records of the events of his life, not in every instant striking or decisive events, but rather those haphazard events which for no definite reason impress themselves upon the mind and recur in memory long afterward as symbols of one knows not what sacred ritual taking place behind the veil. To this I can only say that this book written in perfect sincerity holds back nothing, unless the mere bodily presence of the writer. Within these pages I make a full confession not of my sins, but of my emotions. It is the best tribute my piety can offer to the ultimate shapers of my character, convictions, and in a sense destiny, to the imperishable sea, to the ships that are no more, and to the simple men who have had their day. J. C. 1919. Contents. Section 1. Landfalls and Departures. Section 2. Emblems of Hope. Section 3. The Fine Art. Section 4. Cobwebs and Gossamer. Section 5. The Weight of the Burden. Section 6. Overdue and Missing. Section 7. The Grip of the Land. Section 8. The Character of the Faux. Section 9. Rulers of East and West. Section 10. The Faithful River. Section 11. Incaptivity. Section 12. Initiation. Section 13. The Nursery of the Craft. Section 14. The Tremolino. Section 15. The Heroic Age. The Mirror of the Sea. And ships by the brink, coming, gone. And in switch form endure a day or two. The Frankalans' Tale. Chapter 1. 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 ships going away from her port any more than the landfall can be looked upon as the synonym of a rival. But there is this difference in the departure that the term does not imply so much a sea event as a definite act in tailing 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 goodbye. Henceforth he has done with the coast a stern 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 silly'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. May be 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 anteep 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. Chapter 2 Some commanders of ships take their departure from the home coast sadly, in a spirit of grief and discontent. They have a wife, and 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 the welter of debts and threats of legal proceedings. On the other hand I have no 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 semen worthy of the name. On my first voyage as chief mate with good captain Mac W., I remember that I felt quite flattered and went blightly 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 a sanctum sanctorum of a temple. Because, call her a temple or a helifloat, as some ships have been called, the captain's state room is surely the august place in every vessel. The good Mac W. would not even come out to his meals, and fed solidarily 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 semen, did not deprive captain Mac W. 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 birth, or lightly snoring, or fetching deep sighs, or splashing and blowing in his bathroom, 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 our 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 morose-ness 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 with an 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 or 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 twelve-month. 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 way. 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 to stern 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 in 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 stateroom. It will go out on deck and gaze ahead through straining eyes as the appointed moment comes nearer. It is kept vigorously upon the stretch of excessive vigilant. 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 exert that the man's semen-like 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 ass 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 twenty-four hours could have given me the slightest suspicion that all was not well with his nerve. CHAPTER 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 respect, 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-month voyage. It was in the dock in Dundee where he 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 goodbye. 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 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 traveled 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 crossbearings 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 grey-haired, sitting very erect on her chair with some sewing, from which she snatched sideglances 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 latecomer, 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 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 discussed of his early days in the abundant but thin flow of a willful, 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 Chilean coast, coal out and ore in, deep-loaded both ways, as if in wanton defiance of the great Cape Horn seas, aworked this for staunch ships and a great school of staunchness for west-country seamen. A whole fleet of copper-bottom barks, as strong in rib and planking, as well-found in gear as ever was sent upon the seas, manned by hearty crews and commanded by young masters, was engaged in that now long-defunct trade. That was the school I 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 seamen 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 trimes of stress and anxiety at sea. Was he looking out for a strange landfall, or taking, with an untroubled mind, the bearings of 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 signs of faltering in the sad 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 of float, and the school of staunch seamen? End of Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Before an anchor can ever be raised, it must be let go. And this perfectly makes it possible for a man to be able to go to the sea, and to be able to go to the sea, and to be able to go to the sea, and to be able to go to the sea. Truly obvious truism begins 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 was 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 catheads 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 jewel 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 side at the end of a heavy projecting timber called the cathead in the bite of a short thick chain whose end link is suddenly released by a blow from a top-mall 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 last 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 underway. She however never casts her anchor. To speak with severe technicality a ship or a fleet is brought up, the complimentary 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 a seaman-like ring? But the cast anchor trick with its affectation of being a sea phrase for why not write just as well through anchor, flung anchor, or shide 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 loverliness in a landsman, used to say he's one of them poor, miserable, cast-anchored devils. Chapter 5 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 folksal head lash 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 lookout man in the night watches. And as 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 boat swaying. We will get the anchors over this afternoon, or first thing tomorrow 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 need 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 neighborly call in dock, he added, he'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 seaman-like 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 to shore. 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 fore part 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 formast, his station for maneuvering 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 after-guard, who comes bustling forward at the cry of, all hands on deck. He is the sat-trap 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 range, 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-crown. 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 counselor. 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 seamen laboring 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 mustache, 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 flavor 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 criticize the absence, I should say he had a little too much of the sense of insecurity which is so invaluable in a seamen. 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 seamen 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 watched demeanor, 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 tonne bark, 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 pursing eye. It was good for one to be sure of that, when in an open road said, 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 bark 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 maneuvering of mine amongst the aisles 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 there in 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 teakwood rail of the little craft with a silk pocket-hankerchief, a present from Mrs. B, I believe. That was the effect of his love for the bark. 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. CHAPTER VI It is difficult to disconnect the idea of ship's 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 stalk or fluke. Then the business of getting the anchor and securing an 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 that 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 shipmaster aft will hail his chief mate on the folxel in impressionistic phrase, how does the cable grow? Because grow is the right word for the long drift of the cable emerging a slant under the strain taught 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 folxel, 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. A ship with her sails furrowed on her squared yards and reflected from truck to waterline in the smooth gleaming sheet of a landlocked harbor seems indeed to a seamen'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 birth, 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 folks all wading attentively about the cathead 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 anchors fall and the thunderous rumbling of the chain are like the closing of a distant period of which she seems conscious with a slight deep shutter of all her frame. By so much as she nearer to her appointed death for neither years nor voyages can go on forever. 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 fathoms to the water's edge, and then he too is done for a time. For days he leaves all the harbor 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 above 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 wind lasts! 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. Ouch! I came across an article upon the seasons CHAPTER VII The other year, looking through a newspaper of sound principles, but whose staff will persist in casting anchors, and going to see, on a ship, ow! 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 riders' 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 fifty-two-foot linear raiders, praised so much by the rider, 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 rider 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 fifty-two-foot linear raiders 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 rider of the article in question goes on to point out, with insight and justice, that for a great number of people, twenty thousand, 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 craftsman. 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 is 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 to 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 finest of her performances 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. CHAPTER 8 The sailing and racing of yachts has developed the class of four-and-aft sailors, men born and bred to the sea, fishing in winter and yachting in summer. One 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 four-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. This and concentrated power are the great qualities of four-and-aft rig. A fleet of four-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 four-and-aft rig in its simplicity and the beauty of its aspect under every angle of vision is, I believe, unapproachable. A schooner, yaw, 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. Nothing laughs with sheer pleasure at a piece of smart maneuvering as at a manifestation of a living creature's quick wit and graceful precision. Of these three varieties of four-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 yaw-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 yaw, 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 it 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 endeavor 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? Going from a teacher of high morality to a bag-man, 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's spirit, of the mob's 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 are 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 seem to have had eyes, or else I cannot understand on what ground a certain thousand-ton bark 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 oneself, to surrender all personal feeling in the service of that fine art, is the only way for a seamen to the faithful discharge of his trust. Such is the service of a fine art in 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 tomorrow, 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. One will awaken the same response of pleasurable emotion or conscientious endeavor, 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 around 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 than a more exact calling, less arduous, but all so 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 seasickness can be imagined to follow with content, without enthusiasm, with industry, without affection, punctuality is its watchword. The insertitude which attends closely every artistic endeavor 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 honor, and its rewards, its bitter anxieties, and its hours of ease. But each 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. Chapter 9 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 bred 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 in all, and they recognized 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 seeming like 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 jeweler, the name of the fourth was twenty-man, 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 their faces 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 may 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 the 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 as 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 a master's 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 skillful hands. One of those last I remember especially, 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 anchored after the meretricious glory of a showy performance. As rounding a dark wooden 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 folksal 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, Aye aye, sir, and verily believe 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 honor 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 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 mass 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 merchant'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 jib-boom 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 laugh 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 pretenses that will not put up with a bad art from their masters. CHAPTER XI On 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 be calmed 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 foul moth fruit-scooner, 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 mastheads, seven at most, perhaps, with a few more distant specks, hauled down beyond the magic ring of the horizon. The spell of the fair wind has subtle power to scatter a white-winged company of ships looking all the same way, each with its white filet 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 farther she can be seen, and her white tallness breathed upon by the wind first proclaims her size. The tall mass 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 mass of the pillars supporting the balanced planes that motionless and silent catch from the air the ship's motive power, as if it were a gift from heaven, vouchsafe 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 seamen. 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 guilt trucks which one had to tilt one's head back to sea, now falling into the lower plane of vision, must perforce hit the very edge of the horizon. Such inexperience 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 in 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 in 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 stocks, cobwebs, and gossamer? CHAPTER 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 vanished 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 plotting 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 did. 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 as 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 shipbuilding, 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 our colored glass skylight ends bearing the motto, let Glasgow flourish was certainly one of the most heavily spared 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 at 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 mates on deck, he's that deaf he can't tell how much wind there is. And indeed, poor Peay, quite young, and a smart seamen, 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 naive sort of astonishment when remonstrated with for what appeared a most daredevil performance. The only person, of course, that could remonstrate with telling effect was our captain, himself a man of daredevil 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, bare-headed, 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 storm going on in which you could detect strong language, pronounced in a tone of passion, in exculpatory protestations uttered with every possible inflection of injured innocence. Why 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 as 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. 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 marvelous 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 mailboat 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 teakwood throughout except the deck. She had a great shear, 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 that 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 endeavor 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 mass 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 favorable 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 currently, 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 stateroom. 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 far off. Why didn't you have your courses hauled up at once, then? He asked in a tune 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 stateroom 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 her 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, and 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 could never fathom. He asked for the lone 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 semen