The Last Ship (2 page)

T
he island lay alone in the sea, moored in tranquil waters of turquoise, embraced in a radiant stillness, trees rising from it beyond the sienna beaches, and no sign whatever of life.

“Right standard rudder,” I said.

“Right standard rudder, aye, sir,” the helmsman repeated.

I could feel the ship swerve under me, elegantly responsive. “Steady on course two two five.”

“Steady on course two two five, aye, sir . . . Checking two two eight magnetic.”

The words needed little more than whispers in the undivided quiescence that reigned everywhere. I stepped out on the starboard bridge wing, the ship brought now line abreast to the land. Not a breath of wind stirred the morning. The last stars paled in the sky, the silent waters stretched away in a vast mirror, glittering in the oncoming sunlight, bringing with it the softened sky of low latitudes, sea and sky so deliquescing into one that I would have had difficulty taking a sextant bearing, making a horizon. I brought my binoculars up and slowly glassed the one object that broke the endless blue. It stood flat on a bearing N.E. to S.W., then rose sharply to a curious, shelflike protuberance before falling off again to the sea. The island was perhaps a dozen miles in length. The far side of the island was shrouded in low flocculent clouds, opaque cumulus, so that I could not make its breadth. I brought the binoculars down, returned to the pilot house, looked at the Fathometer, and gave the command to the lee helm.

“All engines stop.”

“All engines stop, aye, sir.” I heard the clank of the engine-order telegraph, then a slight shudder through the ship. Then she lay still in the water.

“You may resume the conn, Mr. Thurlow,” I said to my navigator. “Let go the anchor.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

I stepped back to the wing and looked over into the blue-green water, luminescent with sunlight. Then the anchor hit it in an explosion of turbulence. I could hear the long-drawn rumbling of the chain through the hawsepipe as the great cast-iron thing descended. Presently the ship gave another shudder, then settled, as the anchor payed out. I stepped back into the pilot house.

“Ship anchored, sir,” Thurlow reported. “Seventy fathoms on deck.”

“Mr. Woodward,” I said to the JOOD. “Take the conn. Mr. Thurlow. Will you please prepare a landing party. Yourself. Chief Delaney. Silva, Preston. Eight hands, marksmen. And myself. Number Two boat—Meyer, Barker. Bring a shovel. An ax. We’ve got a couple of machetes?”

“Aye, sir. A couple.”

“Officers to carry side arms. All others to sling carbines. Except Delaney and Travis.”

“When will we be shoving off, Captain?”

“Immediately. Look alive, Mr. Thurlow.”

“Yes,
sir.”

He disappeared with a quickstep out the pilot house. I glanced once more at the island; from the ocean rising, it looked like an emerald of unimagined beauty, worn as an adornment by the sea simply to relieve its vastness, its impossible loneliness. I went below to my cabin and strapped on the web belt and the service .45 and joined the others at the accommodation ladder. On the hushed water the boat bobbed hardly at all below us. The men descended. Then the chief. Then Thurlow. Then myself. We came over the mile of lagoon, the boat’s engine sounding shamelessly loud in the great stillness, and slid gently onto the sand. We debarked in reverse order, myself first. The Navy: officers last into the boat, first out, and by order of rank. We stood on the sand, feeling the immense strangeness of earth under our feet, saying not a word, regarding the island with the careful, suspicious appraisal one gives a stranger, credentials unknown, with whom one is required to have dealings. I looked at my watch. 0745.

“Mr. Thurlow. Single-file, couple paces apart. Steady as you go, men. Look about. Chief. Come along with me, if you will.”

Chief Gunner’s Mate Amos Delaney had grown up on a Missouri farm and had known farming as a first love, the sea as a second. I think perhaps he loved both farm and sea in equal measure, as a man might reasonably two women, differing in aspect rather than degree, both of high charms. He played the fiddle, quite well, and on good evenings, with the ship running a gentle sea, the men liked to gather round him on the fantail and listen to the old songs. If the sea was calm enough I could hear the music faintly from the bridge, and sometimes the low lilt of sailor voices drifting out over the water, telling of hills and loves far away.

With Thurlow and Delaney alongside or directly behind me at the lead, we entered into the island and commenced our reconnoitering. Its denseness closed quickly around us as we moved through an abrupt chillness of air, not unpleasant, thicket, shrub, and the high clashing branches of trees blotting out the day, so that soon looking back, the men in their dungarees, I could see only the sailor’s white hats strung out behind me through the foliage. Then a little farther on the curtain parted, the sunlight came leaping through the spiring trees in long dazzling white shafts, mote-sparkling, then sweet clearings, green grown as lawns, appeared, oases for a look at the cerulean island sky before plunging back into the forested caverns. In there seemed eerie, a mystery of hush; one wondered if man had ever before disturbed these dark silences. A seaman forgets: The myriad odors of the land sprang at us with a keen awareness after the long uniform smell of the sea. And in riotous flourishings the multicolors after the sea’s single one. Everywhere, in tree and shrub, in jubilant fertility, flared the discrete greens, a queen’s offering of shades, from yellowy lime to deepest tourmaline, and often the fragrance of strange flowers in lavish presentations, cerise, indigo, a royal lavender. It brought a soaring of my spirit to see the manner in which the men, in their state of debilitation not just physical but mental and emotional, too, were so marvelously lifted by all of this, by these sights, the smells, the sounds: that quick leap inside like an extra heartbeat when we saw the first bee, nuzzling into some bud, intent on its ancient business of pollination as if it were the most important work on earth. “Isn’t that a pretty sight, Captain?” Delaney said as we paused and watched it almost reverentially.

Exploring as we went, feeling our way with due tenderness, I was leading us to the island’s southmost end, our clear objective that shelflike eminence I had observed from the ship’s bridge, for if the island had what we were looking for it would in every likelihood have it there; or have it not at all. From within our darksome cover, we could hear just ahead a curious tinkling sound, not unlike wind chimes where no wind blew. We shouldered our way against the growth and broke through it onto a ravine that curled around the base of a hill.

A creek gleaming in the patches of shadow and light, the broken sunshine slanting through the trees that climbed the hillside, rippled through the ravine, clean and clear and washing over shining white and tan pebbles. I looked back and saw the men still single-filed. I motioned them up and we bunched around the creek and stood regarding it and listening to its gurgling sound as a kind of marvel. I kneeled, bent, and sipped. Then so did Delaney, then the men fell upon it, all of us lapping in the water with eager avarice.

“That is fine water,” I said, straightening up. After living for so long on the ship’s evaporator water, whose taste was that of a yet-to-be-discovered species of metal, it was nectar and achingly cold.

“As good as anything in the Ozarks,” Delaney said. This was the gunner’s mate’s metaphor for all heavenly things. “There have to be springs up there, Captain.”

We curved around the creek and started up, the sailors with their carbines slung loosely over their shoulders, through the stands of trees that held to the gently rising hillside, the shimmering bolts of sunlight penetrating the branches and seeming to draw us upward. Here and there we stopped at a tree and examined it. I called up Noisy Travis, the shipfitter and a first-rate carpenter. He was a tall, angular Maine man and so taciturn as to earn that nickname from the crew. But he communicated eloquently with wood. Delaney had spoken of the usefulness of stakes. And wood of a certain strength could have other employments.

With his ax Travis skillfully cut into the bark of a couple of the trees to reveal the white wood beneath and then cut into that. Into one the blade went much more deeply.

“Well, Noisy?” I said at last. He never volunteered information. You always had to ask.

“A kind of ash,” he said of the harder one. “Like. Couldn’t say the name. But it’s working wood.”

“I wonder if you could make a wheelbarrow out of that wood,” I said.

Travis gave the wood a somber, thoughtful look. “Aye, sir. Make about anything out of that wood, Cap’n,” he said.

We moved on, climbing slowly, inspecting various growths. Suddenly there appeared a large bush on which a small scarlet fruit hung in many clusters, at one of which a yellow-and-sapphire bird one could have enclosed in a hand hovered like a toy helicopter, wings flapping vigorously to keep him in place, long tail employed ingeniously as a rudder, while he pecked away at the fruit. We watched in rapt fascination, feeling the wonder and comic aspect of the sight. He seemed concerned not at all by our approach but continued pecking, independent as you please, as if he were not about to allow these vulgar and impolite newcomers to interfere with getting his fill. Having done so, he regarded us dismissively with his outsized orangeish eyes, emitted a burst of high-soprano song, and took his leave, sweeping swiftly upward through the trees. He had told us that the fruit was safe, and Delaney plucked one off and popped it in his mouth.

“Wild plum,” he said. “Something like. We’ve got them back home. Try one, Captain.”

He held it out. It had a lovely fresh tart taste.

“Why aren’t you men helping yourselves?” I said.

With that the sailors descended upon the bush, tasting the fruit, then coming back for more until the bush was stripped as naked as if a whole flight of birds had fallen upon it.

“I can’t remember the last time, Captain.” The voice had the depth and resonance of the sea itself. “Something fresh like that.”

It was Preston, boatswain’s mate first, a man of the Old Navy. He was not a man one could simply glance at and ignore. It was not just his size, his armory of biceps, musculature, rock-hardness, and the vast reserves of strength these suggested. There was a certain nobility of bearing in him, a seaman’s bearing—I think it would have been apparent to a stranger, perhaps in his case in a manner he did not understand, that here was a man apart. My feeling of this was of course bound up in the fact of his being the finest pure seaman we had aboard, as pure Navy as a man could be, a thirty-year man, knowing as much about those demanding, sentient structures called ships as it is possible to know. He had a deceptively sanguine face, as a roll call of liberty ports had discovered during my command of the ship. I had sometimes felt that the port itself should be warned that we were coming ashore with Preston, though in reality he was a gentle man unless aroused, and afterward, if at captain’s mast, sincerely contrite that he had been forced by those shore people to use his extraordinary strength to straighten them out on something or other. Under his sailor’s hat his shirt was open, and through the thick blackish hair I could view the full glory of the battle of Trafalgar. A delicately lettered “Sharon” was etched across a small heart in the great fold of a shoulder, and immediately above the nipples the artist had depicted two bluebirds, meant to guarantee that you would never drown: the bluebirds would bear you up. As Preston sometimes pointed out, he had never drowned. The Navy life had been the only one he had ever known, the sea his home as much as it was that of any fish, and only on the land did he have confrontational difficulties with his species, never with his shipmates. It was as though the shore were alien to him and existed largely to provoke him. Partly because of his seaman’s skills and partly because of his strength and his huge magnanimity concerning it—if anything heavy on the ship needed lifting someone would always say, “Get Preston”—I somehow counted on him in a special way in the times ahead. Looking at him now as he went for the fruit, I thought how that great body of his, as with the others, had been so depleted.

“Nothing could taste better, Boats,” I said. “Let’s see what’s up there.”

We pushed upward on a steepening grade, crested the hill, and came to an abrupt halt, as one man without the necessity of a command.

A sunlit plain, high above the sea, stood spread out before us, stretching to the island’s end until halted by the blue, and covered entirely in a long and glistening silky lime-green grass. A good dozen acres of it, I calculated, plain and growth seeming altogether unlike the rest of the undulating, thick-grown island we had just traversed, a pasture of promise and orderliness perched above the jungle wilderness. From off the sea came a faint southeasterly freshening, setting the willowy grass singing in the wind and bearing on it a scent half sea and half the tart fructuousness of earth in growth.

“Well, what do you know,” Delaney said.

We marched gingerly forward into it, the grass rustling around our shoe tops. Then the gunner’s mate stopped, knelt, shoved back his hat, and began to pull away the grass until he had exposed a patch about a foot square. Then he took the shovel and plunged into it, turning over a large bladeful of earth of a chocolate-brown dampness. From it rose an odor pungent and parturient. The gunner’s mate leaned nose to it.

“The smell is the first thing, Captain,” he said. “To tell you what you’ve got. This one’s farmer’s perfume.”

Delaney cupped a handful of earth. I was astonished to see him actually taste it, with the profound concentration of the winegrower sampling a new vintage. Then he let it dribble slowly out of his hand, squishing its texture with his fingers. When it was gone he held his hand straight up, like a man being sworn, to show how the soil clung to it.

“Porous. Moist. And notice how deep that shovel went with hardly no resistance, Captain?”