Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (819 page)

Maritime risks, be it understood.  There is a class of optimists ready to reinsure an “overdue” ship at a heavy premium.  But nothing can insure the hearts on shore against the bitterness of waiting for the worst.

For if a “missing” ship has never turned up within the memory of seamen of my generation, the name of an “overdue” ship, trembling as it were on the edge of the fatal heading, has been known to appear as “arrived.”

It must blaze up, indeed, with a great brilliance the dull printer’s ink expended on the assemblage of the few letters that form the ship’s name to the anxious eyes scanning the page in fear and trembling.  It is like the message of reprieve from the sentence of sorrow suspended over many a home, even if some of the men in her have been the most homeless mortals that you may find among the wanderers of the sea.

The reinsurer, the optimist of ill-luck and disaster, slaps his pocket with satisfaction.  The underwriter, who had been trying to minimize the amount of impending loss, regrets his premature pessimism.  The ship has been stauncher, the skies more merciful, the seas less angry, or perhaps the men on board of a finer temper than he has been willing to take for granted.

“The ship So-and-so, bound to such a port, and posted as ‘overdue,’ has been reported yesterday as having arrived safely at her destination.”

Thus run the official words of the reprieve addressed to the hearts ashore lying under a heavy sentence.  And they come swiftly from the other side of the earth, over wires and cables, for your electric telegraph is a great alleviator of anxiety.  Details, of course, shall follow.  And they may unfold a tale of narrow escape, of steady ill-luck, of high winds and heavy weather, of ice, of interminable calms or endless head-gales; a tale of difficulties overcome, of adversity defied by a small knot of men upon the great loneliness of the sea; a tale of resource, of courage — of helplessness, perhaps.

Of all ships disabled at sea, a steamer who has lost her propeller is the most helpless.  And if she drifts into an unpopulated part of the ocean she may soon become overdue.  The menace of the “overdue” and the finality of “missing” come very quickly to steamers whose life, fed on coals and breathing the black breath of smoke into the air, goes on in disregard of wind and wave.  Such a one, a big steamship, too, whose working life had been a record of faithful keeping time from land to land, in disregard of wind and sea, once lost her propeller down south, on her passage out to New Zealand.

It was the wintry, murky time of cold gales and heavy seas.  With the snapping of her tail-shaft her life seemed suddenly to depart from her big body, and from a stubborn, arrogant existence she passed all at once into the passive state of a drifting log.  A ship sick with her own weakness has not the pathos of a ship vanquished in a battle with the elements, wherein consists the inner drama of her life.  No seaman can look without compassion upon a disabled ship, but to look at a sailing-vessel with her lofty spars gone is to look upon a defeated but indomitable warrior.  There is defiance in the remaining stumps of her masts, raised up like maimed limbs against the menacing scowl of a stormy sky; there is high courage in the upward sweep of her lines towards the bow; and as soon as, on a hastily-rigged spar, a strip of canvas is shown to the wind to keep her head to sea, she faces the waves again with an unsubdued courage.

XIX.

The efficiency of a steamship consists not so much in her courage as in the power she carries within herself.  It beats and throbs like a pulsating heart within her iron ribs, and when it stops, the steamer, whose life is not so much a contest as the disdainful ignoring of the sea, sickens and dies upon the waves.  The sailing-ship, with her unthrobbing body, seemed to lead mysteriously a sort of unearthly existence, bordering upon the magic of the invisible forces, sustained by the inspiration of life-giving and death-dealing winds.

So that big steamer, dying by a sudden stroke, drifted, an unwieldy corpse, away from the track of other ships.  And she would have been posted really as “overdue,” or maybe as “missing,” had she not been sighted in a snowstorm, vaguely, like a strange rolling island, by a whaler going north from her Polar cruising ground.  There was plenty of food on board, and I don’t know whether the nerves of her passengers were at all affected by anything else than the sense of interminable boredom or the vague fear of that unusual situation.  Does a passenger ever feel the life of the ship in which he is being carried like a sort of honoured bale of highly sensitive goods?  For a man who has never been a passenger it is impossible to say.  But I know that there is no harder trial for a seaman than to feel a dead ship under his feet.

There is no mistaking that sensation, so dismal, so tormenting and so subtle, so full of unhappiness and unrest.  I could imagine no worse eternal punishment for evil seamen who die unrepentant upon the earthly sea than that their souls should be condemned to man the ghosts of disabled ships, drifting for ever across a ghostly and tempestuous ocean.

She must have looked ghostly enough, that broken-down steamer, rolling in that snowstorm — a dark apparition in a world of white snowflakes to the staring eyes of that whaler’s crew.  Evidently they didn’t believe in ghosts, for on arrival into port her captain unromantically reported having sighted a disabled steamer in latitude somewhere about 50 degrees S. and a longitude still more uncertain.  Other steamers came out to look for her, and ultimately towed her away from the cold edge of the world into a harbour with docks and workshops, where, with many blows of hammers, her pulsating heart of steel was set going again to go forth presently in the renewed pride of its strength, fed on fire and water, breathing black smoke into the air, pulsating, throbbing, shouldering its arrogant way against the great rollers in blind disdain of winds and sea.

The track she had made when drifting while her heart stood still within her iron ribs looked like a tangled thread on the white paper of the chart.  It was shown to me by a friend, her second officer.  In that surprising tangle there were words in minute letters — ”gales,” “thick fog,” “ice” — written by him here and there as memoranda of the weather.  She had interminably turned upon her tracks, she had crossed and recrossed her haphazard path till it resembled nothing so much as a puzzling maze of pencilled lines without a meaning.  But in that maze there lurked all the romance of the “overdue” and a menacing hint of “missing.”

“We had three weeks of it,” said my friend, “just think of that!”

“How did you feel about it?” I asked.

He waved his hand as much as to say: It’s all in the day’s work.  But then, abruptly, as if making up his mind:

“I’ll tell you.  Towards the last I used to shut myself up in my berth and cry.”

“Cry?”

“Shed tears,” he explained briefly, and rolled up the chart.

I can answer for it, he was a good man — as good as ever stepped upon a ship’s deck — but he could not bear the feeling of a dead ship under his feet: the sickly, disheartening feeling which the men of some “overdue” ships that come into harbour at last under a jury-rig must have felt, combated, and overcome in the faithful discharge of their duty.

XX.

It is difficult for a seaman to believe that his stranded ship does not feel as unhappy at the unnatural predicament of having no water under her keel as he is himself at feeling her stranded.

Stranding is, indeed, the reverse of sinking.  The sea does not close upon the water-logged hull with a sunny ripple, or maybe with the angry rush of a curling wave, erasing her name from the roll of living ships.  No.  It is as if an invisible hand had been stealthily uplifted from the bottom to catch hold of her keel as it glides through the water.

More than any other event does stranding bring to the sailor a sense of utter and dismal failure.  There are strandings and strandings, but I am safe to say that 90 per cent. of them are occasions in which a sailor, without dishonour, may well wish himself dead; and I have no doubt that of those who had the experience of their ship taking the ground, 90 per cent. did actually for five seconds or so wish themselves dead.

“Taking the ground” is the professional expression for a ship that is stranded in gentle circumstances.  But the feeling is more as if the ground had taken hold of her.  It is for those on her deck a surprising sensation.  It is as if your feet had been caught in an imponderable snare; you feel the balance of your body threatened, and the steady poise of your mind is destroyed at once.  This sensation lasts only a second, for even while you stagger something seems to turn over in your head, bringing uppermost the mental exclamation, full of astonishment and dismay, “By Jove! she’s on the ground!”

And that is very terrible.  After all, the only mission of a seaman’s calling is to keep ships’ keels off the ground.  Thus the moment of her stranding takes away from him every excuse for his continued existence.  To keep ships afloat is his business; it is his trust; it is the effective formula of the bottom of all these vague impulses, dreams, and illusions that go to the making up of a boy’s vocation.  The grip of the land upon the keel of your ship, even if nothing worse comes of it than the wear and tear of tackle and the loss of time, remains in a seaman’s memory an indelibly fixed taste of disaster.

“Stranded” within the meaning of this paper stands for a more or less excusable mistake.  A ship may be “driven ashore” by stress of weather.  It is a catastrophe, a defeat.  To be “run ashore” has the littleness, poignancy, and bitterness of human error.

XXI.

That is why your “strandings” are for the most part so unexpected.  In fact, they are all unexpected, except those heralded by some short glimpse of the danger, full of agitation and excitement, like an awakening from a dream of incredible folly.

The land suddenly at night looms up right over your bows, or perhaps the cry of “Broken water ahead!” is raised, and some long mistake, some complicated edifice of self-delusion, over-confidence, and wrong reasoning is brought down in a fatal shock, and the heart-searing experience of your ship’s keel scraping and scrunching over, say, a coral reef.  It is a sound, for its size, far more terrific to your soul than that of a world coming violently to an end.  But out of that chaos your belief in your own prudence and sagacity reasserts itself.  You ask yourself, Where on earth did I get to?  How on earth did I get there? with a conviction that it could not be your own act, that there has been at work some mysterious conspiracy of accident; that the charts are all wrong, and if the charts are not wrong, that land and sea have changed their places; that your misfortune shall for ever remain inexplicable, since you have lived always with the sense of your trust, the last thing on closing your eyes, the first on opening them, as if your mind had kept firm hold of your responsibility during the hours of sleep.

You contemplate mentally your mischance, till little by little your mood changes, cold doubt steals into the very marrow of your bones, you see the inexplicable fact in another light.  That is the time when you ask yourself, How on earth could I have been fool enough to get there?  And you are ready to renounce all belief in your good sense, in your knowledge, in your fidelity, in what you thought till then was the best in you, giving you the daily bread of life and the moral support of other men’s confidence.

The ship is lost or not lost.  Once stranded, you have to do your best by her.  She may be saved by your efforts, by your resource and fortitude bearing up against the heavy weight of guilt and failure.  And there are justifiable strandings in fogs, on uncharted seas, on dangerous shores, through treacherous tides.  But, saved or not saved, there remains with her commander a distinct sense of loss, a flavour in the mouth of the real, abiding danger that lurks in all the forms of human existence.  It is an acquisition, too, that feeling.  A man may be the better for it, but he will not be the same.  Damocles has seen the sword suspended by a hair over his head, and though a good man need not be made less valuable by such a knowledge, the feast shall not henceforth have the same flavour.

Years ago I was concerned as chief mate in a case of stranding which was not fatal to the ship.  We went to work for ten hours on end, laying out anchors in readiness to heave off at high water.  While I was still busy about the decks forward I heard the steward at my elbow saying: “The captain asks whether you mean to come in, sir, and have something to eat to-day.”

I went into the cuddy.  My captain sat at the head of the table like a statue.  There was a strange motionlessness of everything in that pretty little cabin.  The swing-table which for seventy odd days had been always on the move, if ever so little, hung quite still above the soup-tureen.  Nothing could have altered the rich colour of my commander’s complexion, laid on generously by wind and sea; but between the two tufts of fair hair above his ears, his skull, generally suffused with the hue of blood, shone dead white, like a dome of ivory.  And he looked strangely untidy.  I perceived he had not shaved himself that day; and yet the wildest motion of the ship in the most stormy latitudes we had passed through, never made him miss one single morning ever since we left the Channel.  The fact must be that a commander cannot possibly shave himself when his ship is aground.  I have commanded ships myself, but I don’t know; I have never tried to shave in my life.

He did not offer to help me or himself till I had coughed markedly several times.  I talked to him professionally in a cheery tone, and ended with the confident assertion:

“We shall get her off before midnight, sir.”

He smiled faintly without looking up, and muttered as if to himself:

“Yes, yes; the captain put the ship ashore and we got her off.”

Then, raising his head, he attacked grumpily the steward, a lanky, anxious youth with a long, pale face and two big front teeth.