Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (813 page)

It was a distinct and complete impression, something that I don’t know whether to call a Landfall or a Departure.  Certainly he had gazed at times very fixedly before him with the Landfall’s vigilant look, this sea-captain seated incongruously in a deep-backed chair.  He had not then talked to me of employment, of ships, of being ready to take another command; but he had discoursed of his early days, in the abundant but thin flow of a wilful invalid’s talk.  The women looked worried, but sat still, and I learned more of him in that interview than in the whole eighteen months we had sailed together.  It appeared he had “served his time” in the copper-ore trade, the famous copper-ore trade of old days between Swansea and the Chilian coast, coal out and ore in, deep-loaded both ways, as if in wanton defiance of the great Cape Horn seas — a work, this, for staunch ships, and a great school of staunchness for West-Country seamen.  A whole fleet of copper-bottomed barques, as strong in rib and planking, as well-found in gear, as ever was sent upon the seas, manned by hardy crews and commanded by young masters, was engaged in that now long defunct trade.  “That was the school I was trained in,” he said to me almost boastfully, lying back amongst his pillows with a rug over his legs.  And it was in that trade that he obtained his first command at a very early age.  It was then that he mentioned to me how, as a young commander, he was always ill for a few days before making land after a long passage.  But this sort of sickness used to pass off with the first sight of a familiar landmark.  Afterwards, he added, as he grew older, all that nervousness wore off completely; and I observed his weary eyes gaze steadily ahead, as if there had been nothing between him and the straight line of sea and sky, where whatever a seaman is looking for is first bound to appear.  But I have also seen his eyes rest fondly upon the faces in the room, upon the pictures on the wall, upon all the familiar objects of that home, whose abiding and clear image must have flashed often on his memory in times of stress and anxiety at sea.  Was he looking out for a strange Landfall, or taking with an untroubled mind the bearings for his last Departure?

It is hard to say; for in that voyage from which no man returns Landfall and Departure are instantaneous, merging together into one moment of supreme and final attention.  Certainly I do not remember observing any sign of faltering in the set expression of his wasted face, no hint of the nervous anxiety of a young commander about to make land on an uncharted shore.  He had had too much experience of Departures and Landfalls!  And had he not “served his time” in the famous copper-ore trade out of the Bristol Channel, the work of the staunchest ships afloat, and the school of staunch seamen?

IV.

Before an anchor can ever be raised, it must be let go; and this perfectly obvious truism brings me at once to the subject of the degradation of the sea language in the daily press of this country.

Your journalist, whether he takes charge of a ship or a fleet, almost invariably “casts” his anchor.  Now, an anchor is never cast, and to take a liberty with technical language is a crime against the clearness, precision, and beauty of perfected speech.

An anchor is a forged piece of iron, admirably adapted to its end, and technical language is an instrument wrought into perfection by ages of experience, a flawless thing for its purpose.  An anchor of yesterday (because nowadays there are contrivances like mushrooms and things like claws, of no particular expression or shape — just hooks) — an anchor of yesterday is in its way a most efficient instrument.  To its perfection its size bears witness, for there is no other appliance so small for the great work it has to do.  Look at the anchors hanging from the cat-heads of a big ship!  How tiny they are in proportion to the great size of the hull!  Were they made of gold they would look like trinkets, like ornamental toys, no bigger in proportion than a jewelled drop in a woman’s ear.  And yet upon them will depend, more than once, the very life of the ship.

An anchor is forged and fashioned for faithfulness; give it ground that it can bite, and it will hold till the cable parts, and then, whatever may afterwards befall its ship, that anchor is “lost.”  The honest, rough piece of iron, so simple in appearance, has more parts than the human body has limbs: the ring, the stock, the crown, the flukes, the palms, the shank.  All this, according to the journalist, is “cast” when a ship arriving at an anchorage is brought up.

This insistence in using the odious word arises from the fact that a particularly benighted landsman must imagine the act of anchoring as a process of throwing something overboard, whereas the anchor ready for its work is already overboard, and is not thrown over, but simply allowed to fall.  It hangs from the ship’s side at the end of a heavy, projecting timber called the cat-head, in the bight of a short, thick chain whose end link is suddenly released by a blow from a top-maul or the pull of a lever when the order is given.  And the order is not “Heave over!” as the paragraphist seems to imagine, but “Let go!”

As a matter of fact, nothing is ever cast in that sense on board ship but the lead, of which a cast is taken to search the depth of water on which she floats.  A lashed boat, a spare spar, a cask or what not secured about the decks, is “cast adrift” when it is untied.  Also the ship herself is “cast to port or starboard” when getting under way.  She, however, never “casts” her anchor.

To speak with severe technicality, a ship or a fleet is “brought up” — the complementary words unpronounced and unwritten being, of course, “to an anchor.”  Less technically, but not less correctly, the word “anchored,” with its characteristic appearance and resolute sound, ought to be good enough for the newspapers of the greatest maritime country in the world.  “The fleet anchored at Spithead”: can anyone want a better sentence for brevity and seamanlike ring?  But the “cast-anchor” trick, with its affectation of being a sea-phrase — for why not write just as well “threw anchor,” “flung anchor,” or “shied anchor”? — is intolerably odious to a sailor’s ear.  I remember a coasting pilot of my early acquaintance (he used to read the papers assiduously) who, to define the utmost degree of lubberliness in a landsman, used to say, “He’s one of them poor, miserable ‘cast-anchor’ devils.”

V.

From first to last the seaman’s thoughts are very much concerned with his anchors.  It is not so much that the anchor is a symbol of hope as that it is the heaviest object that he has to handle on board his ship at sea in the usual routine of his duties.  The beginning and the end of every passage are marked distinctly by work about the ship’s anchors.  A vessel in the Channel has her anchors always ready, her cables shackled on, and the land almost always in sight.  The anchor and the land are indissolubly connected in a sailor’s thoughts.  But directly she is clear of the narrow seas, heading out into the world with nothing solid to speak of between her and the South Pole, the anchors are got in and the cables disappear from the deck.  But the anchors do not disappear.  Technically speaking, they are “secured in-board”; and, on the forecastle head, lashed down to ring-bolts with ropes and chains, under the straining sheets of the head-sails, they look very idle and as if asleep.  Thus bound, but carefully looked after, inert and powerful, those emblems of hope make company for the look-out man in the night watches; and so the days glide by, with a long rest for those characteristically shaped pieces of iron, reposing forward, visible from almost every part of the ship’s deck, waiting for their work on the other side of the world somewhere, while the ship carries them on with a great rush and splutter of foam underneath, and the sprays of the open sea rust their heavy limbs.

The first approach to the land, as yet invisible to the crew’s eyes, is announced by the brisk order of the chief mate to the boatswain: “We will get the anchors over this afternoon” or “first thing to-morrow morning,” as the case may be.  For the chief mate is the keeper of the ship’s anchors and the guardian of her cable.  There are good ships and bad ships, comfortable ships and ships where, from first day to last of the voyage, there is no rest for a chief mate’s body and soul.  And ships are what men make them: this is a pronouncement of sailor wisdom, and, no doubt, in the main it is true.

However, there are ships where, as an old grizzled mate once told me, “nothing ever seems to go right!”  And, looking from the poop where we both stood (I had paid him a neighbourly call in dock), he added: “She’s one of them.”  He glanced up at my face, which expressed a proper professional sympathy, and set me right in my natural surmise: “Oh no; the old man’s right enough.  He never interferes.  Anything that’s done in a seamanlike way is good enough for him.  And yet, somehow, nothing ever seems to go right in this ship.  I tell you what: she is naturally unhandy.”

The “old man,” of course, was his captain, who just then came on deck in a silk hat and brown overcoat, and, with a civil nod to us, went ashore.  He was certainly not more than thirty, and the elderly mate, with a murmur to me of “That’s my old man,” proceeded to give instances of the natural unhandiness of the ship in a sort of deprecatory tone, as if to say, “You mustn’t think I bear a grudge against her for that.”

The instances do not matter.  The point is that there are ships where things
do
go wrong; but whatever the ship — good or bad, lucky or unlucky — it is in the forepart of her that her chief mate feels most at home.  It is emphatically
his
end of the ship, though, of course, he is the executive supervisor of the whole.  There are
his
anchors,
his
headgear, his foremast, his station for manoeuvring when the captain is in charge.  And there, too, live the men, the ship’s hands, whom it is his duty to keep employed, fair weather or foul, for the ship’s welfare.  It is the chief mate, the only figure of the ship’s afterguard, who comes bustling forward at the cry of “All hands on deck!”  He is the satrap of that province in the autocratic realm of the ship, and more personally responsible for anything that may happen there.

There, too, on the approach to the land, assisted by the boatswain and the carpenter, he “gets the anchors over” with the men of his own watch, whom he knows better than the others.  There he sees the cable ranged, the windlass disconnected, the compressors opened; and there, after giving his own last order, “Stand clear of the cable!” he waits attentive, in a silent ship that forges slowly ahead towards her picked-out berth, for the sharp shout from aft, “Let go!”  Instantly bending over, he sees the trusty iron fall with a heavy plunge under his eyes, which watch and note whether it has gone clear.

For the anchor “to go clear” means to go clear of its own chain.  Your anchor must drop from the bow of your ship with no turn of cable on any of its limbs, else you would be riding to a foul anchor.  Unless the pull of the cable is fair on the ring, no anchor can be trusted even on the best of holding ground.  In time of stress it is bound to drag, for implements and men must be treated fairly to give you the “virtue” which is in them.  The anchor is an emblem of hope, but a foul anchor is worse than the most fallacious of false hopes that ever lured men or nations into a sense of security.  And the sense of security, even the most warranted, is a bad councillor.  It is the sense which, like that exaggerated feeling of well-being ominous of the coming on of madness, precedes the swift fall of disaster.  A seaman labouring under an undue sense of security becomes at once worth hardly half his salt.  Therefore, of all my chief officers, the one I trusted most was a man called B-.  He had a red moustache, a lean face, also red, and an uneasy eye.  He was worth all his salt.

On examining now, after many years, the residue of the feeling which was the outcome of the contact of our personalities, I discover, without much surprise, a certain flavour of dislike.  Upon the whole, I think he was one of the most uncomfortable shipmates possible for a young commander.  If it is permissible to criticise the absent, I should say he had a little too much of the sense of insecurity which is so invaluable in a seaman.  He had an extremely disturbing air of being everlastingly ready (even when seated at table at my right hand before a plate of salt beef) to grapple with some impending calamity.  I must hasten to add that he had also the other qualification necessary to make a trustworthy seaman — that of an absolute confidence in himself.  What was really wrong with him was that he had these qualities in an unrestful degree.  His eternally watchful demeanour, his jerky, nervous talk, even his, as it were, determined silences, seemed to imply — and, I believe, they did imply — that to his mind the ship was never safe in my hands.  Such was the man who looked after the anchors of a less than five-hundred-ton barque, my first command, now gone from the face of the earth, but sure of a tenderly remembered existence as long as I live.  No anchor could have gone down foul under Mr. B-’s piercing eye.  It was good for one to be sure of that when, in an open roadstead, one heard in the cabin the wind pipe up; but still, there were moments when I detested Mr. B- exceedingly.  From the way he used to glare sometimes, I fancy that more than once he paid me back with interest.  It so happened that we both loved the little barque very much.  And it was just the defect of Mr. B-’s inestimable qualities that he would never persuade himself to believe that the ship was safe in my hands.  To begin with, he was more than five years older than myself at a time of life when five years really do count, I being twenty-nine and he thirty-four; then, on our first leaving port (I don’t see why I should make a secret of the fact that it was Bangkok), a bit of manoeuvring of mine amongst the islands of the Gulf of Siam had given him an unforgettable scare.  Ever since then he had nursed in secret a bitter idea of my utter recklessness.  But upon the whole, and unless the grip of a man’s hand at parting means nothing whatever, I conclude that we did like each other at the end of two years and three months well enough.