XXXV.
"Ships!" exclaimed an elderly seaman in clean shore togs. "Ships"-
-and his keen glance, turning away from my face, ran along the
vista of magnificent figure-heads that in the late seventies used
to overhang in a serried rank the muddy pavement by the side of the
New South Dock--"ships are all right; it's the men in 'em. . ."
Fifty hulls, at least, moulded on lines of beauty and speed--hulls
of wood, of iron, expressing in their forms the highest achievement
of modern ship-building--lay moored all in a row, stem to quay, as
if assembled there for an exhibition, not of a great industry, but
of a great art. Their colours were gray, black, dark green, with a
narrow strip of yellow moulding defining their sheer, or with a row
of painted ports decking in warlike decoration their robust flanks
of cargo-carriers that would know no triumph but of speed in
carrying a burden, no glory other than of a long service, no
victory but that of an endless, obscure contest with the sea. The
great empty hulls with swept holds, just out of dry-dock, with
their paint glistening freshly, sat high-sided with ponderous
dignity alongside the wooden jetties, looking more like unmovable
buildings than things meant to go afloat; others, half loaded, far
on the way to recover the true sea-physiognomy of a ship brought
down to her load-line, looked more accessible. Their less steeply
slanting gangways seemed to invite the strolling sailors in search
of a berth to walk on board and try "for a chance" with the chief
mate, the guardian of a ship's efficiency. As if anxious to remain
unperceived amongst their overtopping sisters, two or three
"finished" ships floated low, with an air of straining at the leash
of their level headfasts, exposing to view their cleared decks and
covered hatches, prepared to drop stern first out of the labouring
ranks, displaying the true comeliness of form which only her proper
sea-trim gives to a ship. And for a good quarter of a mile, from
the dockyard gate to the farthest corner, where the old housed-in
hulk, the President (drill-ship, then, of the Naval Reserve), used
to lie with her frigate side rubbing against the stone of the quay,
above all these hulls, ready and unready, a hundred and fifty lofty
masts, more or less, held out the web of their rigging like an
immense net, in whose close mesh, black against the sky, the heavy
yards seemed to be entangled and suspended.
It was a sight. The humblest craft that floats makes its appeal to
a seaman by the faithfulness of her life; and this was the place
where one beheld the aristocracy of ships. It was a noble
gathering of the fairest and the swiftest, each bearing at the bow
the carved emblem of her name, as in a gallery of plaster-casts,
figures of women with mural crowns, women with flowing robes, with
gold fillets on their hair or blue scarves round their waists,
stretching out rounded arms as if to point the way; heads of men
helmeted or bare; full lengths of warriors, of kings, of statesmen,
of lords and princesses, all white from top to toe; with here and
there a dusky turbaned figure, bedizened in many colours, of some
Eastern sultan or hero, all inclined forward under the slant of
mighty bowsprits as if eager to begin another run of 11,000 miles
in their leaning attitudes. These were the fine figure-heads of
the finest ships afloat. But why, unless for the love of the life
those effigies shared with us in their wandering impassivity,
should one try to reproduce in words an impression of whose
fidelity there can be no critic and no judge, since such an
exhibition of the art of shipbuilding and the art of figure-head
carving as was seen from year's end to year's end in the open-air
gallery of the New South Dock no man's eye shall behold again? All
that patient, pale company of queens and princesses, of kings and
warriors, of allegorical women, of heroines and statesmen and
heathen gods, crowned, helmeted, bare-headed, has run for good off
the sea stretching to the last above the tumbling foam their fair,
rounded arms; holding out their spears, swords, shields, tridents
in the same unwearied, striving forward pose. And nothing remains
but lingering perhaps in the memory of a few men, the sound of
their names, vanished a long time ago from the first page of the
great London dailies; from big posters in railway-stations and the
doors of shipping offices; from the minds of sailors, dockmasters,
pilots, and tugmen; from the hail of gruff voices and the flutter
of signal flags exchanged between ships closing upon each other and
drawing apart in the open immensity of the sea.
The elderly, respectable seaman, withdrawing his gaze from that
multitude of spars, gave me a glance to make sure of our fellowship
in the craft and mystery of the sea. We had met casually, and had
got into contact as I had stopped near him, my attention being
caught by the same peculiarity he was looking at in the rigging of
an obviously new ship, a ship with her reputation all to make yet
in the talk of the seamen who were to share their life with her.
Her name was already on their lips. I had heard it uttered between
two thick, red-necked fellows of the semi-nautical type at the
Fenchurch Street Railway-station, where, in those days, the
everyday male crowd was attired in jerseys and pilot-cloth mostly,
and had the air of being more conversant with the times of high-
water than with the times of the trains. I had noticed that new
ship's name on the first page of my morning paper. I had stared at
the unfamiliar grouping of its letters, blue on white ground, on
the advertisement-boards, whenever the train came to a standstill
alongside one of the shabby, wooden, wharf-like platforms of the
dock railway-line. She had been named, with proper observances, on
the day she came off the stocks, no doubt, but she was very far yet
from "having a name." Untried, ignorant of the ways of the sea,
she had been thrust amongst that renowned company of ships to load
for her maiden voyage. There was nothing to vouch for her
soundness and the worth of her character, but the reputation of the
building-yard whence she was launched headlong into the world of
waters. She looked modest to me. I imagined her diffident, lying
very quiet, with her side nestling shyly against the wharf to which
she was made fast with very new lines, intimidated by the company
of her tried and experienced sisters already familiar with all the
violences of the ocean and the exacting love of men. They had had
more long voyages to make their names in than she had known weeks
of carefully tended life, for a new ship receives as much attention
as if she were a young bride. Even crabbed old dock-masters look
at her with benevolent eyes. In her shyness at the threshold of a
laborious and uncertain life, where so much is expected of a ship,
she could not have been better heartened and comforted, had she
only been able to hear and understand, than by the tone of deep
conviction in which my elderly, respectable seaman repeated the
first part of his saying, "Ships are all right . . ."
His civility prevented him from repeating the other, the bitter
part. It had occurred to him that it was perhaps indelicate to
insist. He had recognised in me a ship's officer, very possibly
looking for a berth like himself, and so far a comrade, but still a
man belonging to that sparsely-peopled after-end of a ship, where a
great part of her reputation as a "good ship," in seaman's
parlance, is made or marred.
"Can you say that of all ships without exception?" I asked, being
in an idle mood, because, if an obvious ship's officer, I was not,
as a matter of fact, down at the docks to "look for a berth," an
occupation as engrossing as gambling, and as little favourable to
the free exchange of ideas, besides being destructive of the kindly
temper needed for casual intercourse with one's fellow-creatures.
"You can always put up with 'em," opined the respectable seaman
judicially.
He was not averse from talking, either. If he had come down to the
dock to look for a berth, he did not seem oppressed by anxiety as
to his chances. He had the serenity of a man whose estimable
character is fortunately expressed by his personal appearance in an
unobtrusive, yet convincing, manner which no chief officer in want
of hands could resist. And, true enough, I learned presently that
the mate of the Hyperion had "taken down" his name for quarter-
master. "We sign on Friday, and join next day for the morning
tide," he remarked, in a deliberate, careless tone, which
contrasted strongly with his evident readiness to stand there
yarning for an hour or so with an utter stranger.
"Hyperion," I said. "I don't remember ever seeing that ship
anywhere. What sort of a name has she got?"
It appeared from his discursive answer that she had not much of a
name one way or another. She was not very fast. It took no fool,
though, to steer her straight, he believed. Some years ago he had
seen her in Calcutta, and he remembered being told by somebody
then, that on her passage up the river she had carried away both
her hawse-pipes. But that might have been the pilot's fault. Just
now, yarning with the apprentices on board, he had heard that this
very voyage, brought up in the Downs, outward bound, she broke her
sheer, struck adrift, and lost an anchor and chain. But that might
have occurred through want of careful tending in a tideway. All
the same, this looked as though she were pretty hard on her ground-
tackle. Didn't it? She seemed a heavy ship to handle, anyway.
For the rest, as she had a new captain and a new mate this voyage,
he understood, one couldn't say how she would turn out. . . .
In such marine shore-talk as this is the name of a ship slowly
established, her fame made for her, the tale of her qualities and
of her defects kept, her idiosyncrasies commented upon with the
zest of personal gossip, her achievements made much of, her faults
glossed over as things that, being without remedy in our imperfect
world, should not be dwelt upon too much by men who, with the help
of ships, wrest out a bitter living from the rough grasp of the
sea. All that talk makes up her "name," which is handed over from
one crew to another without bitterness, without animosity, with the
indulgence of mutual dependence, and with the feeling of close
association in the exercise of her perfections and in the danger of
her defects.
This feeling explains men's pride in ships. "Ships are all right,"
as my middle-aged, respectable quartermaster said with much
conviction and some irony; but they are not exactly what men make
them. They have their own nature; they can of themselves minister
to our self-esteem by the demand their qualities make upon our
skill and their shortcomings upon our hardiness and endurance.
Which is the more flattering exaction it is hard to say; but there
is the fact that in listening for upwards of twenty years to the
sea-talk that goes on afloat and ashore I have never detected the
true note of animosity. I won't deny that at sea, sometimes, the
note of profanity was audible enough in those chiding
interpellations a wet, cold, weary seaman addresses to his ship,
and in moments of exasperation is disposed to extend to all ships
that ever were launched--to the whole everlastingly exacting brood
that swims in deep waters. And I have heard curses launched at the
unstable element itself, whose fascination, outlasting the
accumulated experience of ages, had captured him as it had captured
the generations of his forebears.
For all that has been said of the love that certain natures (on
shore) have professed to feel for it, for all the celebrations it
had been the object of in prose and song, the sea has never been
friendly to man. At most it has been the accomplice of human
restlessness, and playing the part of dangerous abettor of world-
wide ambitions. Faithful to no race after the manner of the kindly
earth, receiving no impress from valour and toil and self-
sacrifice, recognising no finality of dominion, the sea has never
adopted the cause of its masters like those lands where the
victorious nations of mankind have taken root, rocking their
cradles and setting up their gravestones. He--man or people--who,
putting his trust in the friendship of the sea, neglects the
strength and cunning of his right hand, is a fool! As if it were
too great, too mighty for common virtues, the ocean has no
compassion, no faith, no law, no memory. Its fickleness is to be
held true to men's purposes only by an undaunted resolution and by
a sleepless, armed, jealous vigilance, in which, perhaps, there has
always been more hate than love. Odi et amo may well be the
confession of those who consciously or blindly have surrendered
their existence to the fascination of the sea. All the tempestuous
passions of mankind's young days, the love of loot and the love of
glory, the love of adventure and the love of danger, with the great
love of the unknown and vast dreams of dominion and power, have
passed like images reflected from a mirror, leaving no record upon
the mysterious face of the sea. Impenetrable and heartless, the
sea has given nothing of itself to the suitors for its precarious
favours. Unlike the earth, it cannot be subjugated at any cost of
patience and toil. For all its fascination that has lured so many
to a violent death, its immensity has never been loved as the
mountains, the plains, the desert itself, have been loved. Indeed,
I suspect that, leaving aside the protestations and tributes of
writers who, one is safe in saying, care for little else in the
world than the rhythm of their lines and the cadence of their
phrase, the love of the sea, to which some men and nations confess
so readily, is a complex sentiment wherein pride enters for much,
necessity for not a little, and the love of ships--the untiring
servants of our hopes and our self-esteem--for the best and most
genuine part. For the hundreds who have reviled the sea, beginning
with Shakespeare in the line
"More fell than hunger, anguish, or the sea,"
down to the last obscure sea-dog of the "old model," having but few
words and still fewer thoughts, there could not be found, I
believe, one sailor who has ever coupled a curse with the good or
bad name of a ship. If ever his profanity, provoked by the
hardships of the sea, went so far as to touch his ship, it would be
lightly, as a hand may, without sin, be laid in the way of kindness
on a woman.
