Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (827 page)

The elderly, respectable seaman, withdrawing his gaze from that multitude of spars, gave me a glance to make sure of our fellowship in the craft and mystery of the sea.  We had met casually, and had got into contact as I had stopped near him, my attention being caught by the same peculiarity he was looking at in the rigging of an obviously new ship, a ship with her reputation all to make yet in the talk of the seamen who were to share their life with her.  Her name was already on their lips.  I had heard it uttered between two thick, red-necked fellows of the semi-nautical type at the Fenchurch Street Railway-station, where, in those days, the everyday male crowd was attired in jerseys and pilot-cloth mostly, and had the air of being more conversant with the times of high-water than with the times of the trains.  I had noticed that new ship’s name on the first page of my morning paper.  I had stared at the unfamiliar grouping of its letters, blue on white ground, on the advertisement-boards, whenever the train came to a standstill alongside one of the shabby, wooden, wharf-like platforms of the dock railway-line.  She had been named, with proper observances, on the day she came off the stocks, no doubt, but she was very far yet from “having a name.”  Untried, ignorant of the ways of the sea, she had been thrust amongst that renowned company of ships to load for her maiden voyage.  There was nothing to vouch for her soundness and the worth of her character, but the reputation of the building-yard whence she was launched headlong into the world of waters.  She looked modest to me.  I imagined her diffident, lying very quiet, with her side nestling shyly against the wharf to which she was made fast with very new lines, intimidated by the company of her tried and experienced sisters already familiar with all the violences of the ocean and the exacting love of men.  They had had more long voyages to make their names in than she had known weeks of carefully tended life, for a new ship receives as much attention as if she were a young bride.  Even crabbed old dock-masters look at her with benevolent eyes.  In her shyness at the threshold of a laborious and uncertain life, where so much is expected of a ship, she could not have been better heartened and comforted, had she only been able to hear and understand, than by the tone of deep conviction in which my elderly, respectable seaman repeated the first part of his saying, “Ships are all right . . .”

His civility prevented him from repeating the other, the bitter part.  It had occurred to him that it was perhaps indelicate to insist.  He had recognised in me a ship’s officer, very possibly looking for a berth like himself, and so far a comrade, but still a man belonging to that sparsely-peopled after-end of a ship, where a great part of her reputation as a “good ship,” in seaman’s parlance, is made or marred.

“Can you say that of all ships without exception?” I asked, being in an idle mood, because, if an obvious ship’s officer, I was not, as a matter of fact, down at the docks to “look for a berth,” an occupation as engrossing as gambling, and as little favourable to the free exchange of ideas, besides being destructive of the kindly temper needed for casual intercourse with one’s fellow-creatures.

“You can always put up with ‘em,” opined the respectable seaman judicially.

He was not averse from talking, either.  If he had come down to the dock to look for a berth, he did not seem oppressed by anxiety as to his chances.  He had the serenity of a man whose estimable character is fortunately expressed by his personal appearance in an unobtrusive, yet convincing, manner which no chief officer in want of hands could resist.  And, true enough, I learned presently that the mate of the
Hyperion
had “taken down” his name for quarter-master.  “We sign on Friday, and join next day for the morning tide,” he remarked, in a deliberate, careless tone, which contrasted strongly with his evident readiness to stand there yarning for an hour or so with an utter stranger.

“
Hyperion
,” I said.  “I don’t remember ever seeing that ship anywhere.  What sort of a name has she got?”

It appeared from his discursive answer that she had not much of a name one way or another.  She was not very fast.  It took no fool, though, to steer her straight, he believed.  Some years ago he had seen her in Calcutta, and he remembered being told by somebody then, that on her passage up the river she had carried away both her hawse-pipes.  But that might have been the pilot’s fault.  Just now, yarning with the apprentices on board, he had heard that this very voyage, brought up in the Downs, outward bound, she broke her sheer, struck adrift, and lost an anchor and chain.  But that might have occurred through want of careful tending in a tideway.  All the same, this looked as though she were pretty hard on her ground-tackle.  Didn’t it?  She seemed a heavy ship to handle, anyway.  For the rest, as she had a new captain and a new mate this voyage, he understood, one couldn’t say how she would turn out. . . .

In such marine shore-talk as this is the name of a ship slowly established, her fame made for her, the tale of her qualities and of her defects kept, her idiosyncrasies commented upon with the zest of personal gossip, her achievements made much of, her faults glossed over as things that, being without remedy in our imperfect world, should not be dwelt upon too much by men who, with the help of ships, wrest out a bitter living from the rough grasp of the sea.  All that talk makes up her “name,” which is handed over from one crew to another without bitterness, without animosity, with the indulgence of mutual dependence, and with the feeling of close association in the exercise of her perfections and in the danger of her defects.

This feeling explains men’s pride in ships.  “Ships are all right,” as my middle-aged, respectable quartermaster said with much conviction and some irony; but they are not exactly what men make them.  They have their own nature; they can of themselves minister to our self-esteem by the demand their qualities make upon our skill and their shortcomings upon our hardiness and endurance.  Which is the more flattering exaction it is hard to say; but there is the fact that in listening for upwards of twenty years to the sea-talk that goes on afloat and ashore I have never detected the true note of animosity.  I won’t deny that at sea, sometimes, the note of profanity was audible enough in those chiding interpellations a wet, cold, weary seaman addresses to his ship, and in moments of exasperation is disposed to extend to all ships that ever were launched — to the whole everlastingly exacting brood that swims in deep waters.  And I have heard curses launched at the unstable element itself, whose fascination, outlasting the accumulated experience of ages, had captured him as it had captured the generations of his forebears.

For all that has been said of the love that certain natures (on shore) have professed to feel for it, for all the celebrations it had been the object of in prose and song, the sea has never been friendly to man.  At most it has been the accomplice of human restlessness, and playing the part of dangerous abettor of world-wide ambitions.  Faithful to no race after the manner of the kindly earth, receiving no impress from valour and toil and self-sacrifice, recognising no finality of dominion, the sea has never adopted the cause of its masters like those lands where the victorious nations of mankind have taken root, rocking their cradles and setting up their gravestones.  He — man or people — who, putting his trust in the friendship of the sea, neglects the strength and cunning of his right hand, is a fool!  As if it were too great, too mighty for common virtues, the ocean has no compassion, no faith, no law, no memory.  Its fickleness is to be held true to men’s purposes only by an undaunted resolution and by a sleepless, armed, jealous vigilance, in which, perhaps, there has always been more hate than love. 
Odi
et amo
may well be the confession of those who consciously or blindly have surrendered their existence to the fascination of the sea.  All the tempestuous passions of mankind’s young days, the love of loot and the love of glory, the love of adventure and the love of danger, with the great love of the unknown and vast dreams of dominion and power, have passed like images reflected from a mirror, leaving no record upon the mysterious face of the sea.  Impenetrable and heartless, the sea has given nothing of itself to the suitors for its precarious favours.  Unlike the earth, it cannot be subjugated at any cost of patience and toil.  For all its fascination that has lured so many to a violent death, its immensity has never been loved as the mountains, the plains, the desert itself, have been loved.  Indeed, I suspect that, leaving aside the protestations and tributes of writers who, one is safe in saying, care for little else in the world than the rhythm of their lines and the cadence of their phrase, the love of the sea, to which some men and nations confess so readily, is a complex sentiment wherein pride enters for much, necessity for not a little, and the love of ships — the untiring servants of our hopes and our self-esteem — for the best and most genuine part.  For the hundreds who have reviled the sea, beginning with Shakespeare in the line

“More fell than hunger, anguish, or the sea,”

down to the last obscure sea-dog of the “old model,” having but few words and still fewer thoughts, there could not be found, I believe, one sailor who has ever coupled a curse with the good or bad name of a ship.  If ever his profanity, provoked by the hardships of the sea, went so far as to touch his ship, it would be lightly, as a hand may, without sin, be laid in the way of kindness on a woman.

XXXVI.

The love that is given to ships is profoundly different from the love men feel for every other work of their hands — the love they bear to their houses, for instance — because it is untainted by the pride of possession.  The pride of skill, the pride of responsibility, the pride of endurance there may be, but otherwise it is a disinterested sentiment.  No seaman ever cherished a ship, even if she belonged to him, merely because of the profit she put in his pocket.  No one, I think, ever did; for a ship-owner, even of the best, has always been outside the pale of that sentiment embracing in a feeling of intimate, equal fellowship the ship and the man, backing each other against the implacable, if sometimes dissembled, hostility of their world of waters.  The sea — this truth must be confessed — has no generosity.  No display of manly qualities — courage, hardihood, endurance, faithfulness — has ever been known to touch its irresponsible consciousness of power.  The ocean has the conscienceless temper of a savage autocrat spoiled by much adulation.  He cannot brook the slightest appearance of defiance, and has remained the irreconcilable enemy of ships and men ever since ships and men had the unheard of audacity to go afloat together in the face of his frown.  From that day he has gone on swallowing up fleets and men without his resentment being glutted by the number of victims — by so many wrecked ships and wrecked lives.  To-day, as ever, he is ready to beguile and betray, to smash and to drown the incorrigible optimism of men who, backed by the fidelity of ships, are trying to wrest from him the fortune of their house, the dominion of their world, or only a dole of food for their hunger.  If not always in the hot mood to smash, he is always stealthily ready for a drowning.  The most amazing wonder of the deep is its unfathomable cruelty.

I felt its dread for the first time in mid-Atlantic one day, many years ago, when we took off the crew of a Danish brig homeward bound from the West Indies.  A thin, silvery mist softened the calm and majestic splendour of light without shadows — seemed to render the sky less remote and the ocean less immense.  It was one of the days, when the might of the sea appears indeed lovable, like the nature of a strong man in moments of quiet intimacy.  At sunrise we had made out a black speck to the westward, apparently suspended high up in the void behind a stirring, shimmering veil of silvery blue gauze that seemed at times to stir and float in the breeze which fanned us slowly along.  The peace of that enchanting forenoon was so profound, so untroubled, that it seemed that every word pronounced loudly on our deck would penetrate to the very heart of that infinite mystery born from the conjunction of water and sky.  We did not raise our voices.  “A water-logged derelict, I think, sir,” said the second officer quietly, coming down from aloft with the binoculars in their case slung across his shoulders; and our captain, without a word, signed to the helmsman to steer for the black speck.  Presently we made out a low, jagged stump sticking up forward — all that remained of her departed masts.

The captain was expatiating in a low conversational tone to the chief mate upon the danger of these derelicts, and upon his dread of coming upon them at night, when suddenly a man forward screamed out, “There’s people on board of her, sir!  I see them!” in a most extraordinary voice — a voice never heard before in our ship; the amazing voice of a stranger.  It gave the signal for a sudden tumult of shouts.  The watch below ran up the forecastle head in a body, the cook dashed out of the galley.  Everybody saw the poor fellows now.  They were there!  And all at once our ship, which had the well-earned name of being without a rival for speed in light winds, seemed to us to have lost the power of motion, as if the sea, becoming viscous, had clung to her sides.  And yet she moved.  Immensity, the inseparable companion of a ship’s life, chose that day to breathe upon her as gently as a sleeping child.  The clamour of our excitement had died out, and our living ship, famous for never losing steerage way as long as there was air enough to float a feather, stole, without a ripple, silent and white as a ghost, towards her mutilated and wounded sister, come upon at the point of death in the sunlit haze of a calm day at sea.

With the binoculars glued to his eyes, the captain said in a quavering tone: “They are waving to us with something aft there.”  He put down the glasses on the skylight brusquely, and began to walk about the poop.  “A shirt or a flag,” he ejaculated irritably.  “Can’t make it out. . . Some damn rag or other!”  He took a few more turns on the poop, glancing down over the rail now and then to see how fast we were moving.  His nervous footsteps rang sharply in the quiet of the ship, where the other men, all looking the same way, had forgotten themselves in a staring immobility.  “This will never do!” he cried out suddenly.  “Lower the boats at once!  Down with them!”