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The Mirror of the Sea

J >> Joseph Conrad >> The Mirror of the Sea



Transcribed by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk




The Mirror of the Sea




Contents:


I. Landfalls and Departures
IV. Emblems of Hope
VII. The Fine Art
X. Cobwebs and Gossamer
XIII. The Weight of the Burden
XVI. Overdue and Missing
XX. The Grip of the Land
XXII. The Character of the Foe
XXV. Rules of East and West
XXX. The Faithful River
XXXIII. In Captivity
XXXV. Initiation
XXXVII. The Nursery of the Craft
XL. The Tremolino
XLVI. The Heroic Age



CHAPTER I.



"And shippes by the brinke comen and gon,
And in swich forme endure a day or two."
The Frankeleyn's Tale.


Landfall and Departure mark the rhythmical swing of a seaman's life
and of a ship's career. From land to land is the most concise
definition of a ship's earthly fate.

A "Departure" is not what a vain people of landsmen may think. The
term "Landfall" is more easily understood; you fall in with the
land, and it is a matter of a quick eye and of a clear atmosphere.
The Departure is not the ship's going away from her port any more
than the Landfall can be looked upon as the synonym of arrival.
But there is this difference in the Departure: that the term does
not imply so much a sea event as a definite act entailing a
process--the precise observation of certain landmarks by means of
the compass card.

Your Landfall, be it a peculiarly-shaped mountain, a rocky
headland, or a stretch of sand-dunes, you meet at first with a
single glance. Further recognition will follow in due course; but
essentially a Landfall, good or bad, is made and done with at the
first cry of "Land ho!" The Departure is distinctly a ceremony of
navigation. A ship may have left her port some time before; she
may have been at sea, in the fullest sense of the phrase, for days;
but, for all that, as long as the coast she was about to leave
remained in sight, a southern-going ship of yesterday had not in
the sailor's sense begun the enterprise of a passage.

The taking of Departure, if not the last sight of the land, is,
perhaps, the last professional recognition of the land on the part
of a sailor. It is the technical, as distinguished from the
sentimental, "good-bye." Henceforth he has done with the coast
astern of his ship. It is a matter personal to the man. It is not
the ship that takes her departure; the seaman takes his Departure
by means of cross-bearings which fix the place of the first tiny
pencil-cross on the white expanse of the track-chart, where the
ship's position at noon shall be marked by just such another tiny
pencil cross for every day of her passage. And there may be sixty,
eighty, any number of these crosses on the ship's track from land
to land. The greatest number in my experience was a hundred and
thirty of such crosses from the pilot station at the Sand Heads in
the Bay of Bengal to the Scilly's light. A bad passage. . .

A Departure, the last professional sight of land, is always good,
or at least good enough. For, even if the weather be thick, it
does not matter much to a ship having all the open sea before her
bows. A Landfall may be good or bad. You encompass the earth with
one particular spot of it in your eye. In all the devious tracings
the course of a sailing-ship leaves upon the white paper of a chart
she is always aiming for that one little spot--maybe a small island
in the ocean, a single headland upon the long coast of a continent,
a lighthouse on a bluff, or simply the peaked form of a mountain
like an ant-heap afloat upon the waters. But if you have sighted
it on the expected bearing, then that Landfall is good. Fogs,
snowstorms, gales thick with clouds and rain--those are the enemies
of good Landfalls.



II.



Some commanders of ships take their Departure from the home coast
sadly, in a spirit of grief and discontent. They have a wife,
children perhaps, some affection at any rate, or perhaps only some
pet vice, that must be left behind for a year or more. I remember
only one man who walked his deck with a springy step, and gave the
first course of the passage in an elated voice. But he, as I
learned afterwards, was leaving nothing behind him, except a welter
of debts and threats of legal proceedings.

On the other hand, I have known many captains who, directly their
ship had left the narrow waters of the Channel, would disappear
from the sight of their ship's company altogether for some three
days or more. They would take a long dive, as it were, into their
state-room, only to emerge a few days afterwards with a more or
less serene brow. Those were the men easy to get on with.
Besides, such a complete retirement seemed to imply a satisfactory
amount of trust in their officers, and to be trusted displeases no
seaman worthy of the name.

On my first voyage as chief mate with good Captain MacW- I remember
that I felt quite flattered, and went blithely about my duties,
myself a commander for all practical purposes. Still, whatever the
greatness of my illusion, the fact remained that the real commander
was there, backing up my self-confidence, though invisible to my
eyes behind a maple-wood veneered cabin-door with a white china
handle.

That is the time, after your Departure is taken, when the spirit of
your commander communes with you in a muffled voice, as if from the
sanctum sanctorum of a temple; because, call her a temple or a
"hell afloat"--as some ships have been called--the captain's state-
room is surely the august place in every vessel.

The good MacW- would not even come out to his meals, and fed
solitarily in his holy of holies from a tray covered with a white
napkin. Our steward used to bend an ironic glance at the perfectly
empty plates he was bringing out from there. This grief for his
home, which overcomes so many married seamen, did not deprive
Captain MacW- of his legitimate appetite. In fact, the steward
would almost invariably come up to me, sitting in the captain's
chair at the head of the table, to say in a grave murmur, "The
captain asks for one more slice of meat and two potatoes." We, his
officers, could hear him moving about in his berth, or lightly
snoring, or fetching deep sighs, or splashing and blowing in his
bath-room; and we made our reports to him through the keyhole, as
it were. It was the crowning achievement of his amiable character
that the answers we got were given in a quite mild and friendly
tone. Some commanders in their periods of seclusion are constantly
grumpy, and seem to resent the mere sound of your voice as an
injury and an insult.

But a grumpy recluse cannot worry his subordinates: whereas the
man in whom the sense of duty is strong (or, perhaps, only the
sense of self-importance), and who persists in airing on deck his
moroseness all day--and perhaps half the night--becomes a grievous
infliction. He walks the poop darting gloomy glances, as though he
wished to poison the sea, and snaps your head off savagely whenever
you happen to blunder within earshot. And these vagaries are the
harder to bear patiently, as becomes a man and an officer, because
no sailor is really good-tempered during the first few days of a
voyage. There are regrets, memories, the instinctive longing for
the departed idleness, the instinctive hate of all work. Besides,
things have a knack of going wrong at the start, especially in the
matter of irritating trifles. And there is the abiding thought of
a whole year of more or less hard life before one, because there
was hardly a southern-going voyage in the yesterday of the sea
which meant anything less than a twelvemonth. Yes; it needed a few
days after the taking of your departure for a ship's company to
shake down into their places, and for the soothing deep-water ship
routine to establish its beneficent sway.

It is a great doctor for sore hearts and sore heads, too, your
ship's routine, which I have seen soothe--at least for a time--the
most turbulent of spirits. There is health in it, and peace, and
satisfaction of the accomplished round; for each day of the ship's
life seems to close a circle within the wide ring of the sea
horizon. It borrows a certain dignity of sameness from the
majestic monotony of the sea. He who loves the sea loves also the
ship's routine.

Nowhere else than upon the sea do the days, weeks and months fall
away quicker into the past. They seem to be left astern as easily
as the light air-bubbles in the swirls of the ship's wake, and
vanish into a great silence in which your ship moves on with a sort
of magical effect. They pass away, the days, the weeks, the
months. Nothing but a gale can disturb the orderly life of the
ship; and the spell of unshaken monotony that seems to have fallen
upon the very voices of her men is broken only by the near prospect
of a Landfall.

Then is the spirit of the ship's commander stirred strongly again.
But it is not moved to seek seclusion, and to remain, hidden and
inert, shut up in a small cabin with the solace of a good bodily
appetite. When about to make the land, the spirit of the ship's
commander is tormented by an unconquerable restlessness. It seems
unable to abide for many seconds together in the holy of holies of
the captain's state-room; it will out on deck and gaze ahead,
through straining eyes, as the appointed moment comes nearer. It
is kept vigorously upon the stretch of excessive vigilance.
Meantime the body of the ship's commander is being enfeebled by
want of appetite; at least, such is my experience, though
"enfeebled" is perhaps not exactly the word. I might say, rather,
that it is spiritualized by a disregard for food, sleep, and all
the ordinary comforts, such as they are, of sea life. In one or
two cases I have known that detachment from the grosser needs of
existence remain regrettably incomplete in the matter of drink.

But these two cases were, properly speaking, pathological cases,
and the only two in all my sea experience. In one of these two
instances of a craving for stimulants, developed from sheer
anxiety, I cannot assert that the man's seaman-like qualities were
impaired in the least. It was a very anxious case, too, the land
being made suddenly, close-to, on a wrong bearing, in thick
weather, and during a fresh onshore gale. Going below to speak to
him soon after, I was unlucky enough to catch my captain in the
very act of hasty cork-drawing. The sight, I may say, gave me an
awful scare. I was well aware of the morbidly sensitive nature of
the man. Fortunately, I managed to draw back unseen, and, taking
care to stamp heavily with my sea-boots at the foot of the cabin
stairs, I made my second entry. But for this unexpected glimpse,
no act of his during the next twenty-four hours could have given me
the slightest suspicion that all was not well with his nerve.



III.



Quite another case, and having nothing to do with drink, was that
of poor Captain B-. He used to suffer from sick headaches, in his
young days, every time he was approaching a coast. Well over fifty
years of age when I knew him, short, stout, dignified, perhaps a
little pompous, he was a man of a singularly well-informed mind,
the least sailor-like in outward aspect, but certainly one of the
best seamen whom it has been my good luck to serve under. He was a
Plymouth man, I think, the son of a country doctor, and both his
elder boys were studying medicine. He commanded a big London ship,
fairly well known in her day. I thought no end of him, and that is
why I remember with a peculiar satisfaction the last words he spoke
to me on board his ship after an eighteen months' voyage. It was
in the dock in Dundee, where we had brought a full cargo of jute
from Calcutta. We had been paid off that morning, and I had come
on board to take my sea-chest away and to say good-bye. In his
slightly lofty but courteous way he inquired what were my plans. I
replied that I intended leaving for London by the afternoon train,
and thought of going up for examination to get my master's
certificate. I had just enough service for that. He commended me
for not wasting my time, with such an evident interest in my case
that I was quite surprised; then, rising from his chair, he said:

"Have you a ship in view after you have passed?"

I answered that I had nothing whatever in view.

He shook hands with me, and pronounced the memorable words:

"If you happen to be in want of employment, remember that as long
as I have a ship you have a ship, too."

In the way of compliment there is nothing to beat this from a
ship's captain to his second mate at the end of a voyage, when the
work is over and the subordinate is done with. And there is a
pathos in that memory, for the poor fellow never went to sea again
after all. He was already ailing when we passed St. Helena; was
laid up for a time when we were off the Western Islands, but got
out of bed to make his Landfall. He managed to keep up on deck as
far as the Downs, where, giving his orders in an exhausted voice,
he anchored for a few hours to send a wire to his wife and take
aboard a North Sea pilot to help him sail the ship up the east
coast. He had not felt equal to the task by himself, for it is the
sort of thing that keeps a deep-water man on his feet pretty well
night and day.

When we arrived in Dundee, Mrs. B- was already there, waiting to
take him home. We travelled up to London by the same train; but by
the time I had managed to get through with my examination the ship
had sailed on her next voyage without him, and, instead of joining
her again, I went by request to see my old commander in his home.
This is the only one of my captains I have ever visited in that
way. He was out of bed by then, "quite convalescent," as he
declared, making a few tottering steps to meet me at the sitting-
room door. Evidently he was reluctant to take his final cross-
bearings of this earth for a Departure on the only voyage to an
unknown destination a sailor ever undertakes. And it was all very
nice--the large, sunny room; his deep, easy-chair in a bow window,
with pillows and a footstool; the quiet, watchful care of the
elderly, gentle woman who had borne him five children, and had not,
perhaps, lived with him more than five full years out of the thirty
or so of their married life. There was also another woman there in
a plain black dress, quite gray-haired, sitting very erect on her
chair with some sewing, from which she snatched side-glances in his
direction, and uttering not a single word during all the time of my
call. Even when, in due course, I carried over to her a cup of
tea, she only nodded at me silently, with the faintest ghost of a
smile on her tight-set lips. I imagine she must have been a maiden
sister of Mrs. B- come to help nurse her brother-in-law. His
youngest boy, a late-comer, a great cricketer it seemed, twelve
years old or thereabouts, chattered enthusiastically of the
exploits of W. G. Grace. And I remember his eldest son, too, a
newly-fledged doctor, who took me out to smoke in the garden, and,
shaking his head with professional gravity, but with genuine
concern, muttered: "Yes, but he doesn't get back his appetite. I
don't like that--I don't like that at all." The last sight of
Captain B- I had was as he nodded his head to me out of the bow
window when I turned round to close the front gate.

It was a distinct and complete impression, something that I don't
know whether to call a Landfall or a Departure. Certainly he had
gazed at times very fixedly before him with the Landfall's vigilant
look, this sea-captain seated incongruously in a deep-backed chair.
He had not then talked to me of employment, of ships, of being
ready to take another command; but he had discoursed of his early
days, in the abundant but thin flow of a wilful invalid's talk.
The women looked worried, but sat still, and I learned more of him
in that interview than in the whole eighteen months we had sailed
together. It appeared he had "served his time" in the copper-ore
trade, the famous copper-ore trade of old days between Swansea and
the Chilian coast, coal out and ore in, deep-loaded both ways, as
if in wanton defiance of the great Cape Horn seas--a work, this,
for staunch ships, and a great school of staunchness for West-
Country seamen. A whole fleet of copper-bottomed barques, as
strong in rib and planking, as well-found in gear, as ever was sent
upon the seas, manned by hardy crews and commanded by young
masters, was engaged in that now long defunct trade. "That was the
school I was trained in," he said to me almost boastfully, lying
back amongst his pillows with a rug over his legs. And it was in
that trade that he obtained his first command at a very early age.
It was then that he mentioned to me how, as a young commander, he
was always ill for a few days before making land after a long
passage. But this sort of sickness used to pass off with the first
sight of a familiar landmark. Afterwards, he added, as he grew
older, all that nervousness wore off completely; and I observed his
weary eyes gaze steadily ahead, as if there had been nothing
between him and the straight line of sea and sky, where whatever a
seaman is looking for is first bound to appear. But I have also
seen his eyes rest fondly upon the faces in the room, upon the
pictures on the wall, upon all the familiar objects of that home,
whose abiding and clear image must have flashed often on his memory
in times of stress and anxiety at sea. Was he looking out for a
strange Landfall, or taking with an untroubled mind the bearings
for his last Departure?

It is hard to say; for in that voyage from which no man returns
Landfall and Departure are instantaneous, merging together into one
moment of supreme and final attention. Certainly I do not remember
observing any sign of faltering in the set expression of his wasted
face, no hint of the nervous anxiety of a young commander about to
make land on an uncharted shore. He had had too much experience of
Departures and Landfalls! And had he not "served his time" in the
famous copper-ore trade out of the Bristol Channel, the work of the
staunchest ships afloat, and the school of staunch seamen?



IV.



Before an anchor can ever be raised, it must be let go; and this
perfectly obvious truism brings me at once to the subject of the
degradation of the sea language in the daily press of this country.

Your journalist, whether he takes charge of a ship or a fleet,
almost invariably "casts" his anchor. Now, an anchor is never
cast, and to take a liberty with technical language is a crime
against the clearness, precision, and beauty of perfected speech.

An anchor is a forged piece of iron, admirably adapted to its end,
and technical language is an instrument wrought into perfection by
ages of experience, a flawless thing for its purpose. An anchor of
yesterday (because nowadays there are contrivances like mushrooms
and things like claws, of no particular expression or shape--just
hooks)--an anchor of yesterday is in its way a most efficient
instrument. To its perfection its size bears witness, for there is
no other appliance so small for the great work it has to do. Look
at the anchors hanging from the cat-heads of a big ship! How tiny
they are in proportion to the great size of the hull! Were they
made of gold they would look like trinkets, like ornamental toys,
no bigger in proportion than a jewelled drop in a woman's ear. And
yet upon them will depend, more than once, the very life of the
ship.

An anchor is forged and fashioned for faithfulness; give it ground
that it can bite, and it will hold till the cable parts, and then,
whatever may afterwards befall its ship, that anchor is "lost."
The honest, rough piece of iron, so simple in appearance, has more
parts than the human body has limbs: the ring, the stock, the
crown, the flukes, the palms, the shank. All this, according to
the journalist, is "cast" when a ship arriving at an anchorage is
brought up.

This insistence in using the odious word arises from the fact that
a particularly benighted landsman must imagine the act of anchoring
as a process of throwing something overboard, whereas the anchor
ready for its work is already overboard, and is not thrown over,
but simply allowed to fall. It hangs from the ship's side at the
end of a heavy, projecting timber called the cat-head, in the bight
of a short, thick chain whose end link is suddenly released by a
blow from a top-maul or the pull of a lever when the order is
given. And the order is not "Heave over!" as the paragraphist
seems to imagine, but "Let go!"

As a matter of fact, nothing is ever cast in that sense on board
ship but the lead, of which a cast is taken to search the depth of
water on which she floats. A lashed boat, a spare spar, a cask or
what not secured about the decks, is "cast adrift" when it is
untied. Also the ship herself is "cast to port or starboard" when
getting under way. She, however, never "casts" her anchor.

To speak with severe technicality, a ship or a fleet is "brought
up"--the complementary words unpronounced and unwritten being, of
course, "to an anchor." Less technically, but not less correctly,
the word "anchored," with its characteristic appearance and
resolute sound, ought to be good enough for the newspapers of the
greatest maritime country in the world. "The fleet anchored at
Spithead": can anyone want a better sentence for brevity and
seamanlike ring? But the "cast-anchor" trick, with its affectation
of being a sea-phrase--for why not write just as well "threw
anchor," "flung anchor," or "shied anchor"?--is intolerably odious
to a sailor's ear. I remember a coasting pilot of my early
acquaintance (he used to read the papers assiduously) who, to
define the utmost degree of lubberliness in a landsman, used to
say, "He's one of them poor, miserable 'cast-anchor' devils."



V.



From first to last the seaman's thoughts are very much concerned
with his anchors. It is not so much that the anchor is a symbol of
hope as that it is the heaviest object that he has to handle on
board his ship at sea in the usual routine of his duties. The
beginning and the end of every passage are marked distinctly by
work about the ship's anchors. A vessel in the Channel has her
anchors always ready, her cables shackled on, and the land almost
always in sight. The anchor and the land are indissolubly
connected in a sailor's thoughts. But directly she is clear of the
narrow seas, heading out into the world with nothing solid to speak
of between her and the South Pole, the anchors are got in and the
cables disappear from the deck. But the anchors do not disappear.
Technically speaking, they are "secured in-board"; and, on the
forecastle head, lashed down to ring-bolts with ropes and chains,
under the straining sheets of the head-sails, they look very idle
and as if asleep. Thus bound, but carefully looked after, inert
and powerful, those emblems of hope make company for the look-out
man in the night watches; and so the days glide by, with a long
rest for those characteristically shaped pieces of iron, reposing
forward, visible from almost every part of the ship's deck, waiting
for their work on the other side of the world somewhere, while the
ship carries them on with a great rush and splutter of foam
underneath, and the sprays of the open sea rust their heavy limbs.

The first approach to the land, as yet invisible to the crew's
eyes, is announced by the brisk order of the chief mate to the
boatswain: "We will get the anchors over this afternoon" or "first
thing to-morrow morning," as the case may be. For the chief mate
is the keeper of the ship's anchors and the guardian of her cable.
There are good ships and bad ships, comfortable ships and ships
where, from first day to last of the voyage, there is no rest for a
chief mate's body and soul. And ships are what men make them:
this is a pronouncement of sailor wisdom, and, no doubt, in the
main it is true.

However, there are ships where, as an old grizzled mate once told
me, "nothing ever seems to go right!" And, looking from the poop
where we both stood (I had paid him a neighbourly call in dock), he
added: "She's one of them." He glanced up at my face, which
expressed a proper professional sympathy, and set me right in my
natural surmise: "Oh no; the old man's right enough. He never
interferes. Anything that's done in a seamanlike way is good
enough for him. And yet, somehow, nothing ever seems to go right
in this ship. I tell you what: she is naturally unhandy."

The "old man," of course, was his captain, who just then came on
deck in a silk hat and brown overcoat, and, with a civil nod to us,
went ashore. He was certainly not more than thirty, and the
elderly mate, with a murmur to me of "That's my old man," proceeded
to give instances of the natural unhandiness of the ship in a sort
of deprecatory tone, as if to say, "You mustn't think I bear a
grudge against her for that."

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