The Mirror of the Sea E-Book

Joseph Conrad

• Herausgeber: Cheapest Books
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 318

Beschreibung

The Mirror of the Sea is a collection of autobiographical essays originally published variously in several magazines between 1904 and 1906. In discussing the work, Conrad described it as "a very intimate revelation . . . of my relation with the sea."Conveyed in his haunting, understated, and incisive prose, Conrad offers poignant and passionate observations on ships and their captains, oceans, hurricanes, departures, landfalls, and the broad range of sea-going topics he became intimately familiar with during the nearly twenty years he spent shipping out as a merchant sailor. The first of two autobiographical accounts, followed by A Personal Record in 1912, it was published to great critical acclaim in 1906 and endures as a classic memoir in literature.

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Table of Contents

I.

II.

III.

IV.

V.

VI.

VII.

VIII.

IX.

X.

XI.

XII.

XIII.

XIV.

XV.

XVI.

XVII.

XVIII.

XIX.

XX.

XXI.

XXII.

XXIII.

XXIV.

XXV.

XXVI.

XXVII.

XXVIII.

XXIX.

XXX.

XXXI.

XXXII.

XXXIII.

XXXIV.

XXXV.

XXXVI.

XXXVII.

XXXVIII.

XXXIX.

XL.

XLI.

XLII.

XLIII.

XLIV.

XLV.

XLVI.

XLVII.

XLVIII.

XLIX.

About Author

Joseph Conrad (born; Berdichev, Imperial Russia, 3 December 1857– 3 August 1924, Bishopsbourne, Kent, England) was a Polish author who wrote in English after settling in England. He was granted British nationality in 1886, but always considered himself a Pole. Conrad is regarded as one of the greatest novelists in English, though he did not speak the language fluently until he was in his twenties (and always with a marked accent). He wrote stories and novels, often with a nautical setting, that depict trials of the human spirit in the midst of an indifferent universe. He was a master prose stylist who brought a distinctly non-English tragic sensibility into English literature.

Early life

Joseph Conrad was born on 3 December 1857 in Berdichev, in Podolia, a part of modern Ukraine that had belonged to the Kingdom of Poland before the 1793 Second Partition of Poland. He was the only child of Apollo Korzeniowski and his wife Ewa Bobrowska. The father was a writer, translator, political activist and would-be revolutionary. Conrad, who would actually be known to his family as "Konrad" rather than "Józef", was christened Józef Teodor Konrad after his maternal grandfather Józef, his paternal grandfather Teodor, and the heroes (both named "Konrad") of two poems by Adam Mickiewicz, Dziady and Konrad Wallenrod.

Though the vast majority of the area's inhabitants were Ukrainians, the land was almost completely owned by the Polish szlachta (nobility) that Conrad's parents belonged to. Polish literature, particularly patriotic literature, was held in high esteem by the area's Polish population.

Because of the father's attempts at farming and his political activism, the family moved repeatedly. In May 1861 they moved to Warsaw, where Apollo joined the resistance against the Russian Empire. This led to his imprisonment in Pavilion X (Ten) of the Warsaw Citadel. Conrad would write: " In the courtyard of this Citadel – characteristically for our nation – my childhood memories begin." On 9 May 1862 Apollo and his family were exiled to Vologda, 500 kilometres north of Moscow and known for its bad climate. In January 1863 Apollo's sentence was commuted, and the family was sent to Chernihiv in northeast Ukraine, where conditions were much better. However, on 18 April 1865 Ewa died of tuberculosis.

Literary career

In 1894, aged 36, Conrad reluctantly gave up the sea, partly because of poor health and partly because he had become so fascinated with writing that he had decided on a literary career. His first novel, Almayer's Folly, set on the east coast of Borneo, was published in 1895. Its appearance marked his first use of the pen name "Joseph Conrad"; "Konrad" was, of course, the third of his Polish given names, but his use of it – in the anglicised version, "Conrad" – may also have been an homage to the Polish Romantic poet Adam Mickiewicz's patriotic narrative poem, Konrad Wallenrod.

Edward Garnett, a young publisher's reader and literary critic who would play one of the chief supporting roles in Conrad's literary career, had – like Unwin's first reader of Almayer's Folly, Wilfrid Hugh Chesson — been impressed by the manuscript, but Garnett had been "uncertain whether the English was good enough for publication." Garnett had shown the novel to his wife, Constance Garnett, later a well-known translator of Russian literature. She had thought Conrad's foreignness a positive merit.

Style

Conrad, an emotional man subject to fits of depression, self-doubt, and pessimism, disciplined his romantic temperament with an unsparing moral judgment. Despite the opinions even of some who knew him personally, such as fellow novelist Henry James, Conrad – even when he was only writing elegantly crafted letters to his uncle and acquaintances – was always at heart a writer who sailed, rather than a sailor who wrote. He used his sailor's experiences as a backdrop for many of his works, but he also produced works of similar world view, without the nautical motifs. The failure of many critics in his time to appreciate this caused him much frustration.

An October 1923 visitor to Oswalds, Conrad's then home – Cyril Clemens, a cousin of Mark Twain — quoted Conrad as saying: "In everything I have written there is always one invariable intention, and that is to capture the reader's attention."

Language

Conrad spoke both his native Polish language and the French language fluently from childhood and only acquired English in his twenties. Why then did he choose to write his books in, effectively, his third language? He states in his preface to A Personal Record that writing in English was for him "natural", and that the idea of his having made a deliberate choice between English and French, as some had suggested, was in error. He explained that, though he was familiar with French from childhood, "I would have been afraid to attempt expression in a language so perfectly 'crystallized'." In a 1915 conversation with American sculptor Jo Davidson, as he posed for his bust, in response to Davidson's question Conrad said: "Ah… to write French you have to know it. English is so plastic — if you haven't got a word you need you can make it, but to write French you have to be an artist like Anatole France." These statements, as so often happens in Conrad's "autobiographical" writings, are subtly disingenuous. In 1897 Conrad was paid a visit by a fellow Pole, Wincenty Lutosławski‬, who was intent on imploring Conrad to write in Polish and "to win Conrad for Polish literature". Lutosławski‬ recalls that during their conversation Conrad explained why he did not write in Polish: "I value too much our beautiful Polish literature to introduce into it my worthless twaddle. But for Englishmen my capacities are just sufficient: they enable me to earn my living". Perhaps revealingly, Conrad later wrote to Lutosławski‬ to keep his visit a secret.

More to the point is Conrad's remark in A Personal Record that English was "the speech of my secret choice, of my future, of long friendships, of the deepest affections, of hours of toil and hours of ease, and of solitary hours, too, of books read, of thoughts pursued, of remembered emotions—of my very dreams!" In 1878 Conrad's four-year experience in the French merchant marine had been cut short when the French discovered that he did not have a permit from the Imperial Russian consul to sail with the French. This, and some typically disastrous Conradian investments, had left him destitute and had precipitated a suicide attempt. With the concurrence of his uncle Bobrowski, who had been summoned to Marseilles, Conrad decided to seek employment with the British merchant marine, which did not require Russia's permission. Thus began Conrad's 16 years' seafarer's acquaintance with the British and with the English language.

* * * * *

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 seamanlike 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.”

The instances do not matter.  The point is that there are ships where things do go wrong; but whatever the ship—good or bad, lucky or unlucky—it is in the forepart of her that her chief mate feels most at home.  It is emphatically his end of the ship, though, of course, he is the executive supervisor of the whole.  There are his anchors, his headgear, his foremast, his station for manoeuvring when the captain is in charge.  And there, too, live the men, the ship’s hands, whom it is his duty to keep employed, fair weather or foul, for the ship’s welfare.  It is the chief mate, the only figure of the ship’s afterguard, who comes bustling forward at the cry of “All hands on deck!”  He is the satrap of that province in the autocratic realm of the ship, and more personally responsible for anything that may happen there.

There, too, on the approach to the land, assisted by the boatswain and the carpenter, he “gets the anchors over” with the men of his own watch, whom he knows better than the others.  There he sees the cable ranged, the windlass disconnected, the compressors opened; and there, after giving his own last order, “Stand clear of the cable!” he waits attentive, in a silent ship that forges slowly ahead towards her picked-out berth, for the sharp shout from aft, “Let go!”  Instantly bending over, he sees the trusty iron fall with a heavy plunge under his eyes, which watch and note whether it has gone clear.

For the anchor “to go clear” means to go clear of its own chain.  Your anchor must drop from the bow of your ship with no turn of cable on any of its limbs, else you would be riding to a foul anchor.  Unless the pull of the cable is fair on the ring, no anchor can be trusted even on the best of holding ground.  In time of stress it is bound to drag, for implements and men must be treated fairly to give you the “virtue” which is in them.  The anchor is an emblem of hope, but a foul anchor is worse than the most fallacious of false hopes that ever lured men or nations into a sense of security.  And the sense of security, even the most warranted, is a bad councillor.  It is the sense which, like that exaggerated feeling of well-being ominous of the coming on of madness, precedes the swift fall of disaster.  A seaman labouring under an undue sense of security becomes at once worth hardly half his salt.  Therefore, of all my chief officers, the one I trusted most was a man called B—.  He had a red moustache, a lean face, also red, and an uneasy eye.  He was worth all his salt.

On examining now, after many years, the residue of the feeling which was the outcome of the contact of our personalities, I discover, without much surprise, a certain flavour of dislike.  Upon the whole, I think he was one of the most uncomfortable shipmates possible for a young commander.