 CHAPTER XIII. There has been a time when a ship's chief mate, pocketbook in hand, and pencil behind his ear, kept one eye aloft upon his rigors, and the other down the hatchway on the stevedores, and watching 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 dispatch, the very size of his ship, stand nowadays between the modern seamen 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 birth to birth without ballast. There is a point of perfection in a ship as a worker when she has spoken of as being able to sail without ballast. I have never met that sort of paragon myself, but I have seen those paragons advertised amongst ships for sail. Such excess of virtue and good nature on the part of a ship always provided my distrust. 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 prevailed 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 ship owner loves a profitable ship. The seamen 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 in weight. In its own world of coke on Littleton. Stevens is an agreeable writer, and as in 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 adherents to broad principles, he is ready to admit that no two ships can be treated exactly alike. Steve Adoring, which had been a skilled labor, is fast becoming a labor 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 the cloud of steam and a mess of cold dust. As long as you keep her propeller underwater 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 ill-spatch will allow you to do. CHAPTER 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 pulls 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 seamen. In those days the speed depended upon the seamen, 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 wasteland with here and there stacks of timber like the huts of a camp of some very miserable tribe, the long stretch of the handle-skade, 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 frosting 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 redden nose, informed me their cargoes were frozen in upcountry on barges and chutes. 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 roof. From afar at the end of Tsar Peter Strait, issued in the frosty air the tinkle of bells of the horse-tram cars 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 upcountry, 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 in very much alone. Directly I had joined I received of my owner's instructions to send all the ships 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 stole. That was attended to by a snuffy and mop-headed, inconceivably dirty and weirdly toothless Dutch shipkeeper 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 wasteland and shivering in glazed tram cars in order to write my evening letter to the owners in a gorgeous cafe in the center 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 just 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 tram cars, the strumbling over the snow-sprinkled wasteground, the visions of ships frozen in a row, appearing vaguely like corpses of black vessels in a white world, so silent, so lifeless, so soulless they seem 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 charters and clamor for the ship's cargo, to threaten them with the heaviest penalties of demure-age, 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 toward the North Pole, I would go ashore and roll shivering in a tram car 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, forever. That part of the expedition was easy enough, though the horses were painfully glistening with icicles, and the aspect of the tram conductor's faces presented a repulsive blending of crimson and purple, but as to frightening a bullying or even weedling some sort of answer out of Mr. Huedig, there was another matter altogether. He was a big, swarthy Netherlander, with black mustaches 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 an 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 quarreling with him it would have been stupid. The weather was too bitter for that. His office was so warm, his fire so bright, his side shook so heartily with laughter that I experienced always a great difficulty in making my mind to reach for my hat. At last the cargo did come. At first it came dribbling in by rails and trucks till the thaw set in, and then fast, in a multitude of barges, with a great rush of unbound waters. The gentlemaster Stevedor 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 humoring. They want humoring and handling, and if you mean to handle them well, they must have been humored in the distribution of the weight which you asked 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 to come with credit to herself and you through the roughened tumble of her life. 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 wastelands, boarded 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, and 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 described his luggage coming along, a real sailor's chest carried by means of rope beckots 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 the 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, scrutinizing me from head to foot, a sort of smiling vexation was visible on his ready 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 made of her for the two preceding passages 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 behavior, 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 rate 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 the ship's role 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 center of gravity is brought down too low in loading made everyone on board weary of keeping on his feet. I remember once overhearing 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, I, 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 would fix yourself in 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 dizzy fast sweep of her mass on every swing. It was a wonder that the men sent to loft were not flung off the yards, the yards not flung off the mass, the mass not flung overboard. The captain in his armchair, holding on grimly at the head of the table, with the soup terrine rolling on one side of the cabin, and the stewards 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 four-fold 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 mothers 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 man of fact. His manner was impressive enough. If his English was childishly imperfect when compared with the fluency of Mr. Huedig, 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 Huedig 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 cold black mustache 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 if 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 their 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 humored 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 seabird 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. CHAPTER 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 Pesati. 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 signaled at sea, name, port, wherefrom, wherebound 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 from 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 bark or brig so-and-so bound from such a port, with such and such a cargo, for such and other 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 elegance, 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 readiness 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 calamity, 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 desperados, 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 burst of an evil passion supremely satisfied on some wild night, perhaps, to the applauding clamor 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 dismastered, unmanageable, rolling heavily, her boats gone, her deck swept, had she wearied her men half to death with the unceasing labor 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. Chapter 17 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 grading, no life buoy, no piece of boat or branded ore 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 seem to have been cut and hacked by the keen edge of a southwest gale. Our craft, a Clyde-built bark of 1,000 tons, rolled so heavily that something a lot 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 carpet 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 bark, her decks full of water, her gear flying in bites, 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 four-yard, in the midst of our work, I felt my shoulder grip 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 a wash, 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 flow, 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 hurt aft, and we managed to clear the sunken flow, which had come all the way from the southern icecap to have at 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 taff rail, side by side, my captain and I, looking at it, hardly discernable 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 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. CHAPTER 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 borne 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 sky's more merciful, the sea's 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 coms, and of endless headgales, 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 toward 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. CHAPTER 19 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 wailer 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 honored 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 soul should be condemned to man the ghosts of disabled ships drifting forever 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 wailer'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 fifty degrees south, 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 harbor 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 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 hair 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 penciled lines without a meaning. But in that maze they 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 sickling, disheartening feeling which the men of some overdue ships that come into harbor at last under a jury rig must have felt combatted and overcome in the faithful discharge of their duty. It is difficult for a seaman to believe that his stranded ship does not feel as unhappy as an unnatural predicament of having no water under her keel as he is himself as feeling her stranded. Stranded is, indeed, the reverse of sinking. The sea does not close upon the waterlogged 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 ninety percent of them are occasions in which a sailor, without dishonor, may well wish himself dead. And I have no doubt that of those who had the experience of their ship taking the ground, ninety percent 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 a 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 seamen's calling is to keep ship's 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 seamen's memory and 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. Chapter 21 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, overconfidence 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 misfortunes shall forever 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, and 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 flavor in the mouth of the real abiding danger that lurks in all the forms of human existence. It is an acquisition to 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 feasts shall not henceforth have the same flavor. 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 today. I went into the cutty. 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 to rean. Nothing could have altered the rich color 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 maid can swallow the beastly stuff. I am sure the cooks ladled some salt water into it by mistake. The charge was so outrageous that the steward for all answered 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 exactly where I believed they would do the most good. On that occasion the bitter taste of astranding 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 got her off. CHAPTER 22, 23, and 24, by Joseph Conrad THE CHARACTER OF THE FOOL CHAPTER 22 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 greyness 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, lusterless, 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 infectionate 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 days and nights. 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 today without changing their nature, by the mere pudding forth of their might, become dangerous to moral, make for that sense of fellowship which modern sea men, 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 humoring 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 seaman of 300 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, of our yesterday? It is impossible to guess. But the seaman of the last generation brought into sympathy with the caravals of ancient time by his sailing ship, their lineal descendant, cannot look upon those lumbering forms navigating the naive 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 seaman of 300 years hence will probably be neither touched nor moved to derision, affection, or admiration. They will glance at the photogravus 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. Chapter 23 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 taught 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 to core. 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 Liouin, 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 well remember the captain of the wool clipper nodding at her with the words, fancy having to go about the sea and something 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 pretty little 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 a 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 onto 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 bark of four hundred 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 top sails and a reef foresail, the bark seemed to race with a long, steady sea that did not become her in the troughs. The solemn, thundering comers caught her up from a stern, 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 gym 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 in a stern. 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 extoll as a famous shove. And this is one of those gales whose memory and after years returns welcomed in dignified austerity as you would remember with pleasure the noble features of a stranger with whom you cross swords once in nightly 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 woe be gone misery. Others come back fiercely and weirdly like ghouls bent upon sucking your strength away. Others again have a catastrophic splendor. Some are unvenerated recollections as of spiteful wildcats 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 receive 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 worthwhile to specify in the closed neighborhood 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 pampereau 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 nearest drop in an ocean of noise and yet the character of the gale seemed contained in the recollection of one small not particularly impressive salo 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 pursue in our fierce and laborious exertions but all through the work the excitement the uproar in 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 clamored at last upon the poop he seemed to come out of that numbed composure and shouted to us downwind 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 is it is the memory of a very quiet silence that survives chapter 24 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 disheveled 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 cold black shape upon the gloomy blueness of the air i was a youngster then and suffering from weariness cold and imperfect oil skins which let water in at every scene i craved human companionship and coming off the poop took my place by the side of the boson a man whom i did not like in a comparatively dry spot where at worst we had water up only to our knees above our heads the explosive booming gusts of wind passed continuously justifying the sailors 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 boson his answer was i 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 became part and parcel of the gale the all of hue of hurricane clouds presents an aspect peculiarly appalling the inky ragged rack flying before a northwest wind makes you dizzy with its headlong speed that depicts the rush of the invisible air a hard southwestern 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 moanings 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 end of chapter 24