Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (818 page)

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 a ship roll 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 centre of gravity is brought down too low in loading, made everyone on board weary of keeping on his feet.  I remember once over-hearing 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: “Ah, 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 could fix yourself 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 dizzily fast sweep of her masts on every swing.  It was a wonder that the men sent aloft were not flung off the yards, the yards not flung off the masts, the masts not flung overboard.  The captain in his armchair, holding on grimly at the head of the table, with the soup-tureen rolling on one side of the cabin and the steward 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 fourfold 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 mutters 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 matter of fact.  His manner was impressive enough, if his English was childishly imperfect when compared with the fluency of Mr. Hudig, 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 Hudig, 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 coal-black moustache 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 whether 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 the 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 humoured 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 sea-bird 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.

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 passati!”

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 signalled at sea, name, port, where from, where bound 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 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 barque, or brig So-and-so, bound from such a port, with such and such cargo, for such another 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 eloquence 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 readiest 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 calumny, 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 desperadoes 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 outburst of an evil passion supremely satisfied on some wild night, perhaps, to the applauding clamour 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, dismasted, unmanageable, rolling heavily, her boats gone, her decks swept, had she wearied her men half to death with the unceasing labour 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.

XVII.

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 grating, no lifebuoy, no piece of boat or branded oar — 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 seemed to have been cut and hacked by the keen edge of a sou’-west gale.

Our craft, a Clyde-built barque of 1,000 tons, rolled so heavily that something aloft 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 carpenter 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 barque, her decks full of water, her gear flying in bights, 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 foreyard, in the midst of our work, I felt my shoulder gripped 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 awash, 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-floe 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 heard aft, and we managed to clear the sunken floe which had come all the way from the Southern ice-cap to have 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 taffrail side by side, my captain and I, looking at it, hardly discernible 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 how 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.

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 born in many homes ashore, and opens the door of speculation in the market of risks.