The Last Ship (59 page)

He seemed almost shocked at the question; perhaps only shocked at the savage tone in which I had asked it, seeing what was happening in me.

“Oh, yes,” he said quietly. “She was that, Captain.”

Thurlow stayed at it, questioning all hands, requestioning. I could sense in him the absolute outrage, Navy-proud, that such a man calling himself a Navy sailor should be on a ship he was on. I came to admire him for his tenacity. “Whatever it takes,’’ I repeated to him. “Understood, sir,” he said with a cruel, wolfish look I had never seen in him. “Fully understood.” He would not let go; keeping to it as the ship parted the waters at that ridiculously slow speed, something funereal seeming now to hang over the ship, poisoning the joy that had been ours on coming into these free waters. Men and women, shipmates, seeming to go silently about their tasks. But also something good, stirring my soul. No break whatsoever as between them, I was reassured to see. The act seemed under the code of ships, of sailors, to be outside anything that might pertain to whether a shipmate was a man or a woman.

Two more days we continued. Reaching meridian 137. In another seventy-two hours the south tip of Australia would be off our port bow, our course taking us within forty miles of her. From there the appearance or absence of the familiar shroud of black murk would determine whether we would stay off or approach any closer to reconnoiter. The choice would not be ours. It would be that of Selmon’s instruments: They would say yes or they would say no. Bixby’s silence continued unbroken. I picked Girard to try, asked her to probe on the edges, not to press. I sensed her willingness, eagerness, to do a little more than that—her feeling that Bixby had a duty to tell, and now.

“I think she’s blacked it out, sir,” she reported back to me. “I confess I pressed pretty hard. Do you want me to press harder?”

She seemed more ready to do so than was I.

“No,” I said. “We’ll wait.”

All of ship’s company questioned, questioned again. Nothing. Then I returned to my cabin that night after checking the mid-watch. I had lingered awhile on the bridge wing, trying to gain sustenance from the night of great beauty, the ship proceeding through still seas, under multitudes of stars regnant in a cloudless sky; eyes resting longishly on the Southern Cross, still seeming strange to see it there, standing like some new queen of the night. Nothing helped. Something seemed to have stained, fouled the ship, ship’s company; as long as he remained aboard, each of us feeling that stain on us; the ship herself seeming disturbed at having him aboard, wanting to cast him off. The very thought of such a creature being on my ship: It would not let me alone; tore at me, ate at me, in a kind of pure fury. I went below to my cabin. My hand was on the cabin door when I saw a slip of paper sticking out from under it, only blank paper up. I opened the door, picked it up, closed the door, deliberately not looking. Knowing. I sat down at my desk and turned it over in the lamplight. It held a single name, a last name. Did not even give his rating. It was almost as if he deserved none, was no longer a Navy man. I breathed a deep sigh of unspeakable relief.

It was over within the hour. I summoned Thurlow to my cabin, gave him the piece of paper. He was the man for it. He was soon back. He had had to awaken him; took the man to his own stateroom before confronting him. He spoke quietly to me.

“He did it, Captain. He came right across.” I could imagine. I didn’t ask what devices Thurlow had used. I didn’t care. He spoke with that wolflike expression. “Shall I place him under arrest, sir?” It seemed a rhetorical question.

“No,” I said. “It isn’t necessary. The questioning was absolutely private? No one else knows?”

“Affirmative to both, sir.”

“Keep it that way. Leave it for now. And—thank you, Mr. Thurlow.”

He looked at me curiously, arose, stood there waiting.

“Good night, Mr. Thurlow.”

“Good night, Captain.”

 *  *  * 

I kept to my cabin nearly all of the following day, the ship slowly approaching Australian waters. My mind was quiet. I tried with some success to expel from it all emotion; of anger, of rage, yes, of anything resembling revenge. I tried to think only of the ship. What was best for the ship. I had almost ceased to think of
him,
as a person. Only the ship counted. Next morning, now but twenty-four hours from Australian sightings, I summoned to my cabin the following officers: Thurlow, Girard, doc, the chaplain. Announced my decision. They waited in longish silence. Then the Jesuit.

“Captain, you can’t do that. You have to come up with some other punishment.”

Everything was quiet; voices; all. The sound of a slowed-down ship moving through a quietened sea but a murmur through the ports.

“No,” I said, in those tones.

The Jesuit went on quietly; yet summoning, I knew, all his formidable powers of argument.

“How many of us are left, sir? We have lost so many. For that matter, how many known human beings—whole human beings—are there left anywhere? Not enough known about that that we can afford to dispose willfully, intentionally, of a single one.”

None of it reached me. On the contrary, I felt a kind of savage coldness in my ability to answer that with my own cogency.

“Why, that’s all the more reason, Chaplain. Anyone that much of a danger to whatever ones remain.”

He tried again. “The psychological stress he went through, Captain—during the sealed-up time . . .”

His voice faded off.

“I know,” I said, hardly hiding the contempt in my voice. “We’ve all been under psychological stress, haven’t we, Chaplain?”

The tenseness now of a sudden felt in the cabin, the Jesuit trying a final tack; something more bold by far than he had ever said to me.

“With all respect, sir. Do you have that power? Without a court-martial. Without anything?”

This was the easiest of all. Ordinarily I would have come down on that hard, even with him, this questioning of my authority. Now I simply looked at him, feeling the great gulf between us; simply wanting it over.

“I’m assuming it, Chaplain.”

“Captain, I would urge you with all the force in me not to do it. I dissent strongly from it.”

“Your dissent is noted, sir.” I was tired of this; for the first time in all our relationship tired of him. I seemed to want to cut this off, and to do so brutally; said without knowing I was saying it, “Chaplain, if we let things happen to the women, we won’t have to worry about having around those human beings you speak of, will we?”

I waited a moment, to give anyone else who so wished a chance to speak; I would not ask them. None did. I thought for a moment Girard was about to; didn’t. I turned to the navigator.

“The first land we pass, Mr. Thurlow. That’s all. Miss Girard, gentlemen.”

 *  *  * 

Twenty-four hours later, we raised Australia in the distance; the sight of the great vertigo of billowing smoke and soot obscuring it no surprise, seeming to us by now altogether normal. We continued past it, staying well out. I examined the charts and discovered that as we made our turn into the Tasman Sea, we would pass a small place called Three Hummock Island; not far off the mainland and therefore requiring us to pass well off with its area certain to be equally contaminated. I conferred with Selmon, informed him of my plan, enquired as to its risk. He received the information without emotion, as if it were not his affair, his duties lay elsewhere; pondered.

“We would have to test as we proceed into it, Captain. The probabilities are, if it is done quickly—very quickly—just in and out—the ship, ship’s company, should suffer no harm.”

At 0800 next morning we stood ten miles off, the island enshrouded in the same sooty vapors that entombed the nearby mainland. Selmon at my side, warning me of ascending readings but thus far tolerable, I had ordered all hands, women excepted, topside. They stood in the murk, along the port lifeline, watching in silence. Number 2 boat lowered, the Jacob’s ladder dropped, going down the ladder the following: Selmon; the chaplain; the man under a double armed guard; Preston and Brewster carrying two large boxes; myself. All except the prisoner wearing gas masks. The boat moved through the murk and the gloom, the ship’s riding lights soon lost to us. Presently we bumped ashore on a gravelly beach. It was darker than twilight, the air infinitely sooty, filthy. The place itself seemed like some blackish and rotting corpse of a piece of earth, ravaged, feral to an absolute, emanating an utter hostility to anything, plant, animal, that breathed.

“What’s the reading, Mr. Selmon?”

He held a flashlight to his counter meter. We had never stood in such high readings.

“We should leave immediately, sir.”

“Release him,” I said.

The men did so. The Jesuit quickly did his rituals; the liturgy, the rather distinct words of the priest, the murmured responses, both voices swallowed up in the gloom.

“Let’s embark,” I said the moment he had finished. To Meyer: “Open her up, Coxswain.”

As the boat started up and moved quickly out, for an instant we could just make out through the murk the dim shape of his form standing there, presumably watching us. He stood between the two large containers Preston and Brewster had fetched from the boat and set ashore: food rations for four weeks, the maximum time estimated by Selmon. We could not see the .45 caliber service pistol I had also left him. I thought I saw him raise his hand as if to say good-bye but in the miasmic vapors could not be sure. Otherwise he did not move. We turned and did not look back again. Soon we were being guided in by the riding lights of the ship. The men, also wearing gas masks, were still standing at the lifelines. Yes, I had ordered all hands there, excusing only the women, to witness punishment, as in olden days of ships. And for the same reason. I looked at my watch. We had been gone twenty-one minutes. I spoke to the officer of the deck.

“Mr. Sedgwick, dismiss the men. Get us underway at once. Straight out to sea.”

We stood off the island, came back into clear waters and resumed our N. by N.E. course well out into the Tasman Sea, crossed over Lord Howe Rise, made our starboard turn at Cape Maria Van Diemen, passed due east across the Kermadec Trench and as dawn broke entered the widest of oceans; believing in all hope that surely somewhere in all its vast reaches there was a place for us—a hope tempered by the stern and sobering knowledge that we had but six weeks to find it. In the end using up the major portion of our allotted time until that moment, under God’s grace, first light of a day in the fifth week, that Billy Barker, standing lookout watch on the bridge wing, sang out something that brought still the hearts of all within the sound of his voice.

“Birds off the starboard bow.”

T
he sea belongs not to man, but to itself. It is in that that it is most unlike the land. The land can be regarded as man’s in that it has been given him to do with as he pleases. For better or for worse he can rightly be called its master. Over the period of his existence man has subdued, improved, mutilated, ravished, rearranged, conquered the lands of the earth, altering them to his purpose. Over that same period he has not conquered in any real sense so much as a thimbleful of the sea. The sea has never known anything resembling a master, least of all man. The sea, when in a charitable mood, has let man use it, pass through its domains and dominions that connect the lands belonging to him. In its less charitable moods it has attacked him, overwhelmed him, destroyed him, eaten him and his ships alive. In either case the sea has remained as it was, unaffected, unchanged by man, as if he were a minnow. The greatest wisdom shown in the creation of the planet was that which deeded seven-tenths of it to the sea, leaving but three-tenths to the desires and whims of man. The only argument one might have with this decision is that perhaps man—avaricious, aggressive, dangerous as he is—was given an excess portion. For his own sake he might have come out better if all the earth had been made water, with, reserved for man, a single island perhaps the size of New Jersey perched in the middle of it. It was even possible that—with isolated exceptions here and there—this alteration in the original plan had effectively been executed; and—who can say?—intentionally so, by the original Architect, who, having seen the flaws and failure of His first plan, decided intelligently to throw it out and to try another, begin all over. It is the sea that is eternal.

 *  *  * 

Now dawn moved at its thousand-miles-per-hour pace across the earth, under the profound obscuration unseen by the greater portion of it, but at some point over the Pacific breaking free to shine down upon a particle of land in the vastness of waters and upon a settlement set high upon cliffs of Pompeiian red. Below the cliffs, in the lee of the shore, half a cable’s length out in fifty fathoms of water, a lean gray ship, beautiful to see, rode to her anchors. She was the guided missile destroyer USS
Nathan James
and her company was in the midst of moving from ship to settlement, as boats going back and forth told.

It was a remarkably handsome settlement, neatly laid out, well-built and shipshape, as might be expected of anything put together by Navy craftsmen; obviously nearing completion. Its centerpiece was a building much longer and larger than any of the others: mess hall, study hall, and general assembly hall for matters that ship’s company would need from time to time to discuss. This structure and the area around it formed a natural dividing line on one side of which were four dormitory-sized dwellings. On the other side, spaced among the tall, guardsmanlike trees so that the essential beauty of the place was preserved, arranged so as to be out of sight not only of these dwellings but of each other, sat twenty-six small structures.

One other feature was immediately noticeable in the settlement. Not far from the cliff’s edge a watchtower rose high above all else, above the island itself, so that it commanded across the dense green a 360-degree view to all horizons of the endless, empty Pacific. On the tower platform was emplaced Big Eyes, brought there from the ship, and manned twenty-four hours around by a two-man watch of lookout and messenger. Such constant vigil might seem excessive. It is instinctive in a man-of-war, in its people; and thus also in this circumstance—the island vulnerable on all sides.

 *  *  * 

Our community is flourishing beyond all expectations. Most important of all, as to food, we are eating not only abundantly but well, very well indeed. The Farm on the other side of the island now yields fructuously under the direction of Gunner’s Mate Amos Delaney, the Missouri farm boy, the vegetables as they ripen and as we need them ferried by boat around the island and hoisted up the cliffs to our mess hall. (A foot-path has also been hacked through the bush between farm and settlement.) The island itself is providing its interesting additions to the daily fare. Reconnoitering the island, Delaney has turned up breadfruit, plantains, wild yams, taro plants, ti roots, these edibles under the wizardry of our cook Palatti coming out surprisingly delicious. But perhaps chief bounty of all is the prodigal fishing grounds which seem to surround the island, particularly on the leeward side below and out from the high cliffs. Suspended from these now are two strong ladders down which our fishermen, under the charge of Boatswain’s Mate Angus Silva, the New Bedford trawlerman, go each morning to the boats berthed at the foot of the cliffs, go early, go in the dark, often, so fecund are the grounds, return quite early with the harvest of differing and highly palatable fish—albacore, mackerel, swordfish, rock cod. Men can do worse than dine daily on fish and vegetables caught or picked but hours before eating. Delaney’s farming and Silva’s fishing detail, along with the watch on the Lookout Tower and the skeleton crew aboard ship, are excused from work on the settlement, on which all others, under the astute guidance of Noisy Travis, our carpenter, are engaged. Today he and I gave it a fairly final once-over.

“I guess it’ll do,” he said, surprisingly loquaciously for him.

We had paused amid the larger buildings. They gave off an air of sturdiness and strength. We had already inspected the other ones invisible from here among the trees. They also were stalwartly built and, in their relative smallness, to my eye there was something curiously comely about them as if a special care and attention by the builders had touched their lines.

“It’ll very much do, Noisy,” I said. “How much longer?”

“One week, Cap’n.”

And I knew it would be exactly that, no more, no less. Two weeks ahead of schedule.

It is impossible to exaggerate how proud I am of the settlement, which means passionately proud of the men and women who have put it together. Proud of their workmanship and their dawn-to-dusk working hours which they themselves had insisted on. Of course, they have had goals to work toward.

 *  *  * 

In respect to the two matters I had foreseen might present the greatest difficulties to face us, the situation is this:

As to governance: At the moment we began to build on the island I gathered ship’s company in its usual assembly place on the after deck and addressing them from the usual place, the after missile launcher, announced my decision: We would continue under the traditional system of Navy and shipboard governance, that is to say, one-man rule by the ship’s captain, until such time—estimated at three months—that the settlement should be completed. That accomplished, we would gather in one of those buildings, the assembly hall, and as our first order of business ship’s company itself would decide under what system we were thereafter to be ruled. Deep inside me I have alternated between a determination to hold on to the captain’s sovereignty as the only method that will work, and a longing to be relieved once and for all of the fearful burden; to lay it down and be merely one among others of ship’s company.

As to the matter of the women, as reported earlier in these pages, I had made, after considerable agonizing—in the end all caveats coming up hard against the question and stopping there, “What is the alternative?”—the decision to leave absolutely and exclusively to them the matter as to what the arrangements would be in respect to themselves and the men; had directed them to conduct their discussions of the matter in totally secret sessions in which all men, myself included, would be excluded from participation of any kind; had informed them that their decision would then become in every sense law, unalterable even by their captain and to be enforced by him with the authority of matters covered by general court-martial; and finally had ordered them to have their decision—their terms—completed, ready to be put into execution also by the time the settlement should be completed. But one of these terms necessarily agreed upon by themselves and activated even as the building of the settlement commenced: the twenty-six separate structures, so widely scattered among the tall trees.