Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (816 page)

The taller the ship, the further she can be seen; and her white tallness breathed upon by the wind first proclaims her size.  The tall masts holding aloft the white canvas, spread out like a snare for catching the invisible power of the air, emerge gradually from the water, sail after sail, yard after yard, growing big, till, under the towering structure of her machinery, you perceive the insignificant, tiny speck of her hull.

The tall masts are the pillars supporting the balanced planes that, motionless and silent, catch from the air the ship’s motive-power, as it were a gift from Heaven vouchsafed to the audacity of man; and it is the ship’s tall spars, stripped and shorn of their white glory, that incline themselves before the anger of the clouded heaven.

When they yield to a squall in a gaunt and naked submission, their tallness is brought best home even to the mind of a seaman.  The man who has looked upon his ship going over too far is made aware of the preposterous tallness of a ship’s spars.  It seems impossible but that those gilt trucks which one had to tilt one’s head back to see, now falling into the lower plane of vision, must perforce hit the very edge of the horizon.  Such an experience gives you a better impression of the loftiness of your spars than any amount of running aloft could do.  And yet in my time the royal yards of an average profitable ship were a good way up above her decks.

No doubt a fair amount of climbing up iron ladders can be achieved by an active man in a ship’s engine-room, but I remember moments when even to my supple limbs and pride of nimbleness the sailing-ship’s machinery seemed to reach up to the very stars.

For machinery it is, doing its work in perfect silence and with a motionless grace, that seems to hide a capricious and not always governable power, taking nothing away from the material stores of the earth.  Not for it the unerring precision of steel moved by white steam and living by red fire and fed with black coal.  The other seems to draw its strength from the very soul of the world, its formidable ally, held to obedience by the frailest bonds, like a fierce ghost captured in a snare of something even finer than spun silk.  For what is the array of the strongest ropes, the tallest spars and the stoutest canvas against the mighty breath of the infinite, but thistle stalks, cobwebs and gossamer?

XI.

Indeed, it is less than nothing, and I have seen, when the great soul of the world turned over with a heavy sigh, a perfectly new, extra-stout foresail vanish like a bit of some airy stuff much lighter than gossamer.  Then was the time for the tall spars to stand fast in the great uproar.  The machinery must do its work even if the soul of the world has gone mad.

The modern steamship advances upon a still and overshadowed sea with a pulsating tremor of her frame, an occasional clang in her depths, as if she had an iron heart in her iron body; with a thudding rhythm in her progress and the regular beat of her propeller, heard afar in the night with an august and plodding sound as of the march of an inevitable future.  But in a gale, the silent machinery of a sailing-ship would catch not only the power, but the wild and exulting voice of the world’s soul.  Whether she ran with her tall spars swinging, or breasted it with her tall spars lying over, there was always that wild song, deep like a chant, for a bass to the shrill pipe of the wind played on the sea-tops, with a punctuating crash, now and then, of a breaking wave.  At times the weird effects of that invisible orchestra would get upon a man’s nerves till he wished himself deaf.

And this recollection of a personal wish, experienced upon several oceans, where the soul of the world has plenty of room to turn over with a mighty sigh, brings me to the remark that in order to take a proper care of a ship’s spars it is just as well for a seaman to have nothing the matter with his ears.  Such is the intimacy with which a seaman had to live with his ship of yesterday that his senses were like her senses, that the stress upon his body made him judge of the strain upon the ship’s masts.

I had been some time at sea before I became aware of the fact that hearing plays a perceptible part in gauging the force of the wind.  It was at night.  The ship was one of those iron wool-clippers that the Clyde had floated out in swarms upon the world during the seventh decade of the last century.  It was a fine period in ship-building, and also, I might say, a period of over-masting.  The spars rigged up on the narrow hulls were indeed tall then, and the ship of which I think, with her coloured-glass skylight ends bearing the motto, “Let Glasgow Flourish,” was certainly one of the most heavily-sparred specimens.  She was built for hard driving, and unquestionably she got all the driving she could stand.  Our captain was a man famous for the quick passages he had been used to make in the old
Tweed
, a ship famous the world over for her speed.  The
Tweed
had been a wooden vessel, and he brought the tradition of quick passages with him into the iron clipper.  I was the junior in her, a third mate, keeping watch with the chief officer; and it was just during one of the night watches in a strong, freshening breeze that I overheard two men in a sheltered nook of the main deck exchanging these informing remarks.  Said one:

“Should think ‘twas time some of them light sails were coming off her.”

And the other, an older man, uttered grumpily: “No fear! not while the chief mate’s on deck.  He’s that deaf he can’t tell how much wind there is.”

And, indeed, poor P-, quite young, and a smart seaman, was very hard of hearing.  At the same time, he had the name of being the very devil of a fellow for carrying on sail on a ship.  He was wonderfully clever at concealing his deafness, and, as to carrying on heavily, though he was a fearless man, I don’t think that he ever meant to take undue risks.  I can never forget his naive sort of astonishment when remonstrated with for what appeared a most dare-devil performance.  The only person, of course, that could remonstrate with telling effect was our captain, himself a man of dare-devil tradition; and really, for me, who knew under whom I was serving, those were impressive scenes.  Captain S- had a great name for sailor-like qualities — the sort of name that compelled my youthful admiration.  To this day I preserve his memory, for, indeed, it was he in a sense who completed my training.  It was often a stormy process, but let that pass.  I am sure he meant well, and I am certain that never, not even at the time, could I bear him malice for his extraordinary gift of incisive criticism.  And to hear
him
make a fuss about too much sail on the ship seemed one of those incredible experiences that take place only in one’s dreams.

It generally happened in this way: Night, clouds racing overhead, wind howling, royals set, and the ship rushing on in the dark, an immense white sheet of foam level with the lee rail.  Mr. P-, in charge of the deck, hooked on to the windward mizzen rigging in a state of perfect serenity; myself, the third mate, also hooked on somewhere to windward of the slanting poop, in a state of the utmost preparedness to jump at the very first hint of some sort of order, but otherwise in a perfectly acquiescent state of mind.  Suddenly, out of the companion would appear a tall, dark figure, bareheaded, with a short white beard of a perpendicular cut, very visible in the dark — Captain S-, disturbed in his reading down below by the frightful bounding and lurching of the ship.  Leaning very much against the precipitous incline of the deck, he would take a turn or two, perfectly silent, hang on by the compass for a while, take another couple of turns, and suddenly burst out:

“What are you trying to do with the ship?”

And Mr. P-, who was not good at catching what was shouted in the wind, would say interrogatively:

“Yes, sir?”

Then in the increasing gale of the sea there would be a little private ship’s storm going on in which you could detect strong language, pronounced in a tone of passion and exculpatory protestations uttered with every possible inflection of injured innocence.

“By Heavens, Mr. P-!  I used to carry on sail in my time, but — ”

And the rest would be lost to me in a stormy gust of wind.

Then, in a lull, P-’s protesting innocence would become audible:

“She seems to stand it very well.”

And then another burst of an indignant voice:

“Any fool can carry sail on a ship — ”

And so on and so on, the ship meanwhile rushing on her way with a heavier list, a noisier splutter, a more threatening hiss of the white, almost blinding, sheet of foam to leeward.  For the best of it was that Captain S- seemed constitutionally incapable of giving his officers a definite order to shorten sail; and so that extraordinarily vague row would go on till at last it dawned upon them both, in some particularly alarming gust, that it was time to do something.  There is nothing like the fearful inclination of your tall spars overloaded with canvas to bring a deaf man and an angry one to their senses.

XII.

So sail did get shortened more or less in time even in that ship, and her tall spars never went overboard while I served in her.  However, all the time I was with them, Captain S- and Mr. P- did not get on very well together.  If P- carried on “like the very devil” because he was too deaf to know how much wind there was, Captain S- (who, as I have said, seemed constitutionally incapable of ordering one of his officers to shorten sail) resented the necessity forced upon him by Mr. P-’s desperate goings on.  It was in Captain S-’s tradition rather to reprove his officers for not carrying on quite enough — in his phrase “for not taking every ounce of advantage of a fair wind.”  But there was also a psychological motive that made him extremely difficult to deal with on board that iron clipper.  He had just come out of the marvellous
Tweed
, a ship, I have heard, heavy to look at but of phenomenal speed.  In the middle sixties she had beaten by a day and a half the steam mail-boat from Hong Kong to Singapore.  There was something peculiarly lucky, perhaps, in the placing of her masts — who knows?  Officers of men-of-war used to come on board to take the exact dimensions of her sail-plan.  Perhaps there had been a touch of genius or the finger of good fortune in the fashioning of her lines at bow and stern.  It is impossible to say.  She was built in the East Indies somewhere, of teak-wood throughout, except the deck.  She had a great sheer, high bows, and a clumsy stern.  The men who had seen her described her to me as “nothing much to look at.”  But in the great Indian famine of the seventies that ship, already old then, made some wonderful dashes across the Gulf of Bengal with cargoes of rice from Rangoon to Madras.

She took the secret of her speed with her, and, unsightly as she was, her image surely has its glorious place in the mirror of the old sea.

The point, however, is that Captain S-, who used to say frequently, “She never made a decent passage after I left her,” seemed to think that the secret of her speed lay in her famous commander.  No doubt the secret of many a ship’s excellence does lie with the man on board, but it was hopeless for Captain S- to try to make his new iron clipper equal the feats which made the old
Tweed
a name of praise upon the lips of English-speaking seamen.  There was something pathetic in it, as in the endeavour of an artist in his old age to equal the masterpieces of his youth — for the
Tweed’s
famous passages were Captain S-’s masterpieces.  It was pathetic, and perhaps just the least bit dangerous.  At any rate, I am glad that, what between Captain S-’s yearning for old triumphs and Mr. P-’s deafness, I have seen some memorable carrying on to make a passage.  And I have carried on myself upon the tall spars of that Clyde shipbuilder’s masterpiece as I have never carried on in a ship before or since.

The second mate falling ill during the passage, I was promoted to officer of the watch, alone in charge of the deck.  Thus the immense leverage of the ship’s tall masts became a matter very near my own heart.  I suppose it was something of a compliment for a young fellow to be trusted, apparently without any supervision, by such a commander as Captain S-; though, as far as I can remember, neither the tone, nor the manner, nor yet the drift of Captain S-’s remarks addressed to myself did ever, by the most strained interpretation, imply a favourable opinion of my abilities.  And he was, I must say, a most uncomfortable commander to get your orders from at night.  If I had the watch from eight till midnight, he would leave the deck about nine with the words, “Don’t take any sail off her.”  Then, on the point of disappearing down the companion-way, he would add curtly: “Don’t carry anything away.”  I am glad to say that I never did; one night, however, I was caught, not quite prepared, by a sudden shift of wind.

There was, of course, a good deal of noise — running about, the, shouts of the sailors, the thrashing of the sails — enough, in fact, to wake the dead.  But S- never came on deck.  When I was relieved by the chief mate an hour afterwards, he sent for me.  I went into his stateroom; he was lying on his couch wrapped up in a rug, with a pillow under his head.

“What was the matter with you up there just now?” he asked.

“Wind flew round on the lee quarter, sir,” I said.

“Couldn’t you see the shift coming?”

“Yes, sir, I thought it wasn’t very far off.”

“Why didn’t you have your courses hauled up at once, then?” he asked in a tone that ought to have made my blood run cold.

But this was my chance, and I did not let it slip.

“Well, sir,” I said in an apologetic tone, “she was going eleven knots very nicely, and I thought she would do for another half-hour or so.”

He gazed at me darkly out of his head, lying very still on the white pillow, for a time.

“Ah, yes, another half-hour.  That’s the way ships get dismasted.”

And that was all I got in the way of a wigging.  I waited a little while and then went out, shutting carefully the door of the state-room after me.

Well, I have loved, lived with, and left the sea without ever seeing a ship’s tall fabric of sticks, cobwebs and gossamer go by the board.  Sheer good luck, no doubt.  But as to poor P-, I am sure that he would not have got off scot-free like this but for the god of gales, who called him away early from this earth, which is three parts ocean, and therefore a fit abode for sailors.  A few years afterwards I met in an Indian port a man who had served in the ships of the same company.  Names came up in our talk, names of our colleagues in the same employ, and, naturally enough, I asked after P-.  Had he got a command yet?  And the other man answered carelessly: