Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (876 page)

I assure you it is not for the vain pleasure of talking about my own poor experiences, but only to illustrate my point, that I will relate here a very unsensational little incident I witnessed now rather more than twenty years ago in Sydney, N.S.W.  Ships were beginning then to grow bigger year after year, though, of course, the present dimensions were not even dreamt of.  I was standing on the Circular Quay with a Sydney pilot watching a big mail steamship of one of our best-known companies being brought alongside.  We admired her lines, her noble appearance, and were impressed by her size as well, though her length, I imagine, was hardly half that of the
Titanic
.

She came into the Cove (as that part of the harbour is called), of course very slowly, and at some hundred feet or so short of the quay she lost her way.  That quay was then a wooden one, a fine structure of mighty piles and stringers bearing a roadway — a thing of great strength.  The ship, as I have said before, stopped moving when some hundred feet from it.  Then her engines were rung on slow ahead, and immediately rung off again.  The propeller made just about five turns, I should say.  She began to move, stealing on, so to speak, without a ripple; coming alongside with the utmost gentleness.  I went on looking her over, very much interested, but the man with me, the pilot, muttered under his breath: “Too much, too much.”  His exercised judgment had warned him of what I did not even suspect.  But I believe that neither of us was exactly prepared for what happened.  There was a faint concussion of the ground under our feet, a groaning of piles, a snapping of great iron bolts, and with a sound of ripping and splintering, as when a tree is blown down by the wind, a great strong piece of wood, a baulk of squared timber, was displaced several feet as if by enchantment.  I looked at my companion in amazement.  “I could not have believed it,” I declared.  “No,” he said.  “You would not have thought she would have cracked an egg — eh?”

I certainly wouldn’t have thought that.  He shook his head, and added: “Ah!  These great, big things, they want some handling.”

Some months afterwards I was back in Sydney.  The same pilot brought me in from sea.  And I found the same steamship, or else another as like her as two peas, lying at anchor not far from us.  The pilot told me she had arrived the day before, and that he was to take her alongside to-morrow.  I reminded him jocularly of the damage to the quay.  “Oh!” he said, “we are not allowed now to bring them in under their own steam.  We are using tugs.”

A very wise regulation.  And this is my point — that size is to a certain extent an element of weakness.  The bigger the ship, the more delicately she must be handled.  Here is a contact which, in the pilot’s own words, you wouldn’t think could have cracked an egg; with the astonishing result of something like eighty feet of good strong wooden quay shaken loose, iron bolts snapped, a baulk of stout timber splintered.  Now, suppose that quay had been of granite (as surely it is now) — or, instead of the quay, if there had been, say, a North Atlantic fog there, with a full-grown iceberg in it awaiting the gentle contact of a ship groping its way along blindfold?  Something would have been hurt, but it would not have been the iceberg.

Apparently, there is a point in development when it ceases to be a true progress — in trade, in games, in the marvellous handiwork of men, and even in their demands and desires and aspirations of the moral and mental kind.  There is a point when progress, to remain a real advance, must change slightly the direction of its line.  But this is a wide question.  What I wanted to point out here is — that the old
Arizona
, the marvel of her day, was proportionately stronger, handier, better equipped, than this triumph of modern naval architecture, the loss of which, in common parlance, will remain the sensation of this year.  The clatter of the presses has been worthy of the tonnage, of the preliminary pæans of triumph round that vanished hull, of the reckless statements, and elaborate descriptions of its ornate splendour.  A great babble of news (and what sort of news too, good heavens!) and eager comment has arisen around this catastrophe, though it seems to me that a less strident note would have been more becoming in the presence of so many victims left struggling on the sea, of lives miserably thrown away for nothing, or worse than nothing: for false standards of achievement, to satisfy a vulgar demand of a few moneyed people for a banal hotel luxury — the only one they can understand — and because the big ship pays, in one way or another: in money or in advertising value.

It is in more ways than one a very ugly business, and a mere scrape along the ship’s side, so slight that, if reports are to be believed, it did not interrupt a card party in the gorgeously fitted (but in chaste style) smoking-room — or was it in the delightful French café? — is enough to bring on the exposure.  All the people on board existed under a sense of false security.  How false, it has been sufficiently demonstrated.  And the fact which seems undoubted, that some of them actually were reluctant to enter the boats when told to do so, shows the strength of that falsehood.  Incidentally, it shows also the sort of discipline on board these ships, the sort of hold kept on the passengers in the face of the unforgiving sea.  These people seemed to imagine it an optional matter: whereas the order to leave the ship should be an order of the sternest character, to be obeyed unquestioningly and promptly by every one on board, with men to enforce it at once, and to carry it out methodically and swiftly.  And it is no use to say it cannot be done, for it can.  It has been done.  The only requisite is manageableness of the ship herself and of the numbers she carries on board.  That is the great thing which makes for safety.  A commander should be able to hold his ship and everything on board of her in the hollow of his hand, as it were.  But with the modern foolish trust in material, and with those floating hotels, this has become impossible.  A man may do his best, but he cannot succeed in a task which from greed, or more likely from sheer stupidity, has been made too great for anybody’s strength.

The readers of
The English Review
, who cast a friendly eye nearly six years ago on my Reminiscences, and know how much the merchant service, ships and men, has been to me, will understand my indignation that those men of whom (speaking in no sentimental phrase, but in the very truth of feeling) I can’t even now think otherwise than as brothers, have been put by their commercial employers in the impossibility to perform efficiently their plain duty; and this from motives which I shall not enumerate here, but whose intrinsic unworthiness is plainly revealed by the greatness, the miserable greatness, of that disaster.  Some of them have perished.  To die for commerce is hard enough, but to go under that sea we have been trained to combat, with a sense of failure in the supreme duty of one’s calling is indeed a bitter fate.  Thus they are gone, and the responsibility remains with the living who will have no difficulty in replacing them by others, just as good, at the same wages.  It was their bitter fate.  But I, who can look at some arduous years when their duty was my duty too, and their feelings were my feelings, can remember some of us who once upon a time were more fortunate.

It is of them that I would talk a little, for my own comfort partly, and also because I am sticking all the time to my subject to illustrate my point, the point of manageableness which I have raised just now.  Since the memory of the lucky
Arizona
has been evoked by others than myself, and made use of by me for my own purpose, let me call up the ghost of another ship of that distant day whose less lucky destiny inculcates another lesson making for my argument.  The
Douro
, a ship belonging to the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company, was rather less than one-tenth the measurement of the
Titanic
.  Yet, strange as it may appear to the ineffable hotel exquisites who form the bulk of the first-class Cross-Atlantic Passengers, people of position and wealth and refinement did not consider it an intolerable hardship to travel in her, even all the way from South America; this being the service she was engaged upon.  Of her speed I know nothing, but it must have been the average of the period, and the decorations of her saloons were, I dare say, quite up to the mark; but I doubt if her birth had been boastfully paragraphed all round the Press, because that was not the fashion of the time.  She was not a mass of material gorgeously furnished and upholstered.  She was a ship.  And she was not, in the apt words of an article by Commander C. Crutchley, R.N.R., which I have just read, “run by a sort of hotel syndicate composed of the Chief Engineer, the Purser, and the Captain,” as these monstrous Atlantic ferries are.  She was really commanded, manned, and equipped as a ship meant to keep the sea: a ship first and last in the fullest meaning of the term, as the fact I am going to relate will show.

She was off the Spanish coast, homeward bound, and fairly full, just like the
Titanic
; and further, the proportion of her crew to her passengers, I remember quite well, was very much the same.  The exact number of souls on board I have forgotten.  It might have been nearly three hundred, certainly not more.  The night was moonlit, but hazy, the weather fine with a heavy swell running from the westward, which means that she must have been rolling a great deal, and in that respect the conditions for her were worse than in the case of the
Titanic
.  Some time either just before or just after midnight, to the best of my recollection, she was run into amidships and at right angles by a large steamer which after the blow backed out, and, herself apparently damaged, remained motionless at some distance.

My recollection is that the
Douro
remained afloat after the collision for fifteen minutes or thereabouts.  It might have been twenty, but certainly something under the half-hour.  In that time the boats were lowered, all the passengers put into them, and the lot shoved off.  There was no time to do anything more.  All the crew of the
Douro
went down with her, literally without a murmur.  When she went she plunged bodily down like a stone.  The only members of the ship’s company who survived were the third officer, who was from the first ordered to take charge of the boats, and the seamen told off to man them, two in each.  Nobody else was picked up.  A quartermaster, one of the saved in the way of duty, with whom I talked a month or so afterwards, told me that they pulled up to the spot, but could neither see a head nor hear the faintest cry.

But I have forgotten.  A passenger was drowned.  She was a lady’s maid who, frenzied with terror, refused to leave the ship.  One of the boats waited near by till the chief officer, finding himself absolutely unable to tear the girl away from the rail to which she dung with a frantic grasp, ordered the boat away out of danger.  My quartermaster told me that he spoke over to them in his ordinary voice, and this was the last sound heard before the ship sank.

The rest is silence.  I daresay there was the usual official inquiry, but who cared for it?  That sort of thing speaks for itself with no uncertain voice; though the papers, I remember, gave the event no space to speak of: no large headlines — no headlines at all.  You see it was not the fashion at the time.  A seaman-like piece of work, of which one cherishes the old memory at this juncture more than ever before.  She was a ship commanded, manned, equipped — not a sort of marine Ritz, proclaimed unsinkable and sent adrift with its casual population upon the sea, without enough boats, without enough seamen (but with a Parisian café and four hundred of poor devils of waiters) to meet dangers which, let the engineers say what they like, lurk always amongst the waves; sent with a blind trust in mere material, light-heartedly, to a most miserable, most fatuous disaster.

And there are, too, many ugly developments about this tragedy.  The rush of the senatorial inquiry before the poor wretches escaped from the jaws of death had time to draw breath, the vituperative abuse of a man no more guilty than others in this matter, and the suspicion of this aimless fuss being a political move to get home on the M.T. Company, into which, in common parlance, the United States Government has got its knife, I don’t pretend to understand why, though with the rest of the world I am aware of the fact.  Perhaps there may be an excellent and worthy reason for it; but I venture to suggest that to take advantage of so many pitiful corpses, is not pretty.  And the exploiting of the mere sensation on the other side is not pretty in its wealth of heartless inventions.  Neither is the welter of Marconi lies which has not been sent vibrating without some reason, for which it would be nauseous to inquire too closely.  And the calumnious, baseless, gratuitous, circumstantial lie charging poor Captain Smith with desertion of his post by means of suicide is the vilest and most ugly thing of all in this outburst of journalistic enterprise, without feeling, without honour, without decency.

But all this has its moral.  And that other sinking which I have related here and to the memory of which a seaman turns with relief and thankfulness has its moral too.  Yes, material may fail, and men, too, may fail sometimes; but more often men, when they are given the chance, will prove themselves truer than steel, that wonderful thin steel from which the sides and the bulkheads of our modern sea-leviathans are made.

CERTAIN ASPECTS OF THE ADMIRABLE INQUIRY INTO THE LOSS OF THE TITANIC — 1912

I have been taken to task by a friend of mine on the “other side” for my strictures on Senator Smith’s investigation into the loss of the
Titanic
, in the number of
The English Review
for May, 1912.  I will admit that the motives of the investigation may have been excellent, and probably were; my criticism bore mainly on matters of form and also on the point of efficiency.  In that respect I have nothing to retract.  The Senators of the Commission had absolutely no knowledge and no practice to guide them in the conduct of such an investigation; and this fact gave an air of unreality to their zealous exertions.  I think that even in the United States there is some regret that this zeal of theirs was not tempered by a large dose of wisdom.  It is fitting that people who rush with such ardour to the work of putting questions to men yet gasping from a narrow escape should have, I wouldn’t say a tincture of technical information, but enough knowledge of the subject to direct the trend of their inquiry.  The newspapers of two continents have noted the remarks of the President of the Senatorial Commission with comments which I will not reproduce here, having a scant respect for the “organs of public opinion,” as they fondly believe themselves to be.  The absolute value of their remarks was about as great as the value of the investigation they either mocked at or extolled.  To the United States Senate I did not intend to be disrespectful.  I have for that body, of which one hears mostly in connection with tariffs, as much reverence as the best of Americans.  To manifest more or less would be an impertinence in a stranger.  I have expressed myself with less reserve on our Board of Trade.  That was done under the influence of warm feelings.  We were all feeling warmly on the matter at that time.  But, at any rate, our Board of Trade Inquiry, conducted by an experienced President, discovered a very interesting fact on the very second day of its sitting: the fact that the water-tight doors in the bulkheads of that wonder of naval architecture could be opened down below by any irresponsible person.  Thus the famous closing apparatus on the bridge, paraded as a device of greater safety, with its attachments of warning bells, coloured lights, and all these pretty-pretties, was, in the case of this ship, little better than a technical farce.