master, or it was hell. That is, there had to be this strange interflow
of master-and-man, the strange reciprocity of command and obedience.
The reciprocity of command and obedience is a state of unstable vital
equilibrium. Everything vital, or natural, is unstable, thank God.
The ship had been at sea many weeks. A great strain on master and men.
An increasing callous indifference in the men, an increasing
irritability in the master.
And then what?
A storm.
Don't expect me to say _why_ storms must be. They just are. Storms in
the air, storms in the water, storms of thunder, storms of anger. Storms
just are.
Storms are a sort of violent readjustment in some polarized flow. You
have a polarized circuit, a circuit of unstable equilibrium. The
instability increases till there is a crash. Everything seems to break
down. Thunder roars, lightning flashes. The master roars, the whip
whizzes. The sky sends down sweet rain. The ship knows a new strange
stillness, a readjustment, a refinding of equilibrium.
Ask the Lord Almighty why it is so. I don't know. I know it is so.
But flogging? Why flogging? Why not use reason or take away jam for tea?
Why not? Why not ask the thunder please to abstain from this physical
violence of crashing and thumping, please to swale away like thawing
snow.
Sometimes the thunder _does_ swale away like thawing snow, and then you
hate it. Muggy, sluggish, inert, dreary sky.
Flogging.
You have a Sam, a fat slow fellow, who has got slower and more slovenly
as the weeks wear on. You have a master who has grown more irritable in
his authority. Till Sam becomes simply wallowing in his slackness, makes
your gorge rise. And the master is on red hot iron.
Now these two men, Captain and Sam, are there in a very unsteady
equilibrium of command and obedience. A polarized flow. Definitely
polarized.
The poles of will are the great ganglia of the voluntary nerve system,
located beside the spinal column, in the back. From the poles of will in
the backbone of the Captain, to the ganglia of will in the back of the
sloucher Sam, runs a frazzled, jagged current, a staggering circuit of
vital electricity. This circuit gets one jolt too many, and there is an
explosion.
"Tie up that lousy swine!" roars the enraged Captain.
And whack! Whack! down on the bare back of that sloucher Sam comes the
cat.
What does it do? By Jove, it goes like ice-cold water into his spine.
Down those lashes runs the current of the Captain's rage, right into the
blood and into the toneless ganglia of Sam's voluntary system. Crash!
Crash! runs the lightning flame, right into the cores of the living
nerves.
And the living nerves respond. They start to vibrate. They brace up. The
blood begins to go quicker. The nerves begin to recover their vividness.
It is their tonic. The man Sam has a new clear day of intelligence, and
a smarty back. The Captain has a new relief, a new ease in his
authority, and a sore heart.
There is a new equilibrium, and a fresh start. The _physical_
intelligence of a Sam is restored, the turgidity is relieved from the
veins of the Captain.
It is a natural form of human coition, interchange.
It is good for Sam to be flogged. It is good, on this occasion, for the
Captain to have Sam flogged. I say so. Because they were both in that
physical condition.
Spare the rod and spoil the _physical_ child.
Use the rod and spoil the _ideal_ child.
There you are.
Dana, as an idealist, refusing the blood-contact of life, leaned over
the side of the ship powerless, and vomited: or wanted to. His solar
plexus was getting a bit of its own back. To him, Sam was an "ideal"
being, who should have been approached through the mind, the reason, and
the spirit. That lump of a Sam!
But there was another idealist on board, the seaman John, a Swede. He
wasn't named John for nothing, this Jack-tar of the Logos. John felt
himself called upon to play Mediator, Intercedor, Saviour, on this
occasion. The popular Paraclete.
"Why are you whipping this man, sir?"
But the Captain had got his dander up. He wasn't going to have his
natural passion judged and interfered with by these long-nosed
Salvationist Johannuses. So he had nosey John hauled up and whipped as
well.
For which I am very glad.
Alas, however, the Captain got the worst of it in the end. He smirks
longest who smirks lasts. The Captain wasn't wary enough. Natural anger,
natural passion has its unremitting enemy in the idealist. And the ship
was already tainted with idealism. A good deal more so, apparently, than
Herman Melville's ships were.
Which reminds us that Melville was once going to be flogged. In _White
Jacket._ And he, too, would have taken it as the last insult.
In my opinion, there are worse insults than floggings. I would rather be
flogged than have most people "like" me.
Melville too had an Intercedor: a quiet, self-respecting man, not a
saviour. The man spoke in the name of Justice. Melville was to be
unjustly whipped. The man spoke honestly and quietly. Not in any
Salvationist spirit. And the whipping did not take place.
Justice is a great and manly thing. Saviourism is a despicable thing.
Sam was justly whipped. It was a passional justice.
But Melville's whipping would have been a cold, disciplinary injustice.
A foul thing. Mechanical _justice_ even is a foul thing. For true
justice makes the heart's fibres quiver. You can't be cold in a matter
of real justice.
Already in those days it was no fun to be a captain. You had to learn
already to abstract yourself into a machine-part, exerting
machine-control. And it is a good deal bitterer to exert
machine-control, selfless, ideal control, than it is to have to obey,
mechanically. Because the idealists who mechanically obey almost always
hate the _man_ who must give the orders. Their idealism rarely allows
them to exonerate the man for the office.
Dana's captain was one of the real old-fashioned sort. He gave himself
away terribly. He should have been more wary, knowing he confronted a
shipful of enemies and at least two cold and deadly idealists, who hated
all "masters" on principle.
"As he went on, his passion increased, and he danced about on the deck,
calling out as he swung the rope, 'If you want to know what I flog you
for. I'll tell you. It's because I like to do it!--Because I like to do
it!--It suits me. That's what I do it for!'
"The man writhed under the pain. My blood run cold, I could look no
longer. Disgusted, sick and horror-stricken, I turned away and leaned
over the rail and looked down in the water. A few rapid thoughts of my
own situation, and the prospect of future revenge, crossed my mind; but
the falling of the blows, and the cries of the man called me back at
once. At length they ceased, and, turning round, I found that the Mate,
at a signal from the captain, had cut him down."
After all, it was not so terrible. The captain evidently did not exceed
the ordinary measure. Sam got no more than he asked for. It was a
natural event. All would have been well, save for the _moral_ verdict.
And this came from theoretic idealists like Dana and the seaman John,
rather than from the sailors themselves. The sailors understood
spontaneous _passional_ morality, not the artificial ethical. They
respected the violent readjustments of the naked force, in man as in
nature.
"The flogging was seldom, if ever, alluded to by us in the forecastle.
If anyone was inclined to talk about it, the other, with a delicacy
which I hardly expected to find among them, always stopped him, or
turned the subject."
Two men had been flogged: the second and the elder, John, for
interfering and asking the captain why he flogged Sam. It is while
flogging John that the captain shouts, "If you want to know what I flog
you for. I'll tell you----"
"But the behaviour of the two men who were flogged," Dana continues,
"toward one another, showed a delicacy and a sense of honour which would
have been worthy of admiration in the highest walks of life. Sam knew
that the other had suffered solely on his account, and in all his
complaints he said that if he alone had been flogged it would have been
nothing, but that he could never see that man without thinking that he
had been the means of bringing that disgrace upon him; and John never,
by word or deed, let anything escape him to remind the other that it was
by interfering to save his shipmate that he had suffered."
As a matter of fact, it was John who ought to have been ashamed for
bringing confusion and false feeling into a clear issue. Conventional
morality apart, John is the reprehensible party, not Sam or the captain.
The case was one of passional readjustment, nothing abnormal. And who
was the sententious Johannus, that he should interfere in this? And if
Mr. Dana had a weak stomach as well as weak eyes, let him have it. But
let this pair of idealists abstain from making all the other men feel
uncomfortable and fuzzy about a thing they would have left to its
natural course, if they had been allowed. No, your Johannuses and your
Danas have to be creating "public opinion," and mugging up the
life-issues with their sententiousness. O, idealism!
The vessel arrives at the Pacific coast, and the swell of the rollers
falls in our blood--the weary coast stretches wonderful, on the brink of
the unknown.
"Not a human being but ourselves for miles--the steep hill rising like a
wall, and cutting us off from all the world--but the 'world of waters.'
I separated myself from the rest, and sat down on a rock, just where the
sea ran in and formed a fine spouting-horn. Compared with the dull,
plain sand-beach of the rest of the coast, this grandeur was as
refreshing as a great rock in a weary land. It was almost the first time
I had been positively alone.... My better nature returned strong upon
me. I experienced a glow of pleasure at finding that what of poetry and
romance I had ever had in me had not been entirely deadened in the
laborious life I had been lately leading. Nearly an hour did I sit,
almost lost in the luxury of this entire new scene of the play in which
I was acting, when I was aroused by the distant shouts of my
companions."
So Dana sits and Hamletizes by the Pacific--chief actor in the play of
his own existence. But in him, self-consciousness is almost nearing the
mark of scientific indifference to self.
He gives us a pretty picture of the then wild, unknown bay of San
Francisco.--"The tide leaving us, we came to anchor near the mouth of
the bay, under a high and beautifully sloping hill, upon which herds of
hundreds of red deer, and the stag, with his high-branching antlers were
bounding about, looking at us for a moment, and then starting off
affrighted at the noises we made for the purpose of seeing the variety
of their beautiful attitudes and motions----"
Think of it now, and the Presidio! The idiotic guns.
Two moments of strong human emotion Dana experiences: one moment of
strong but impotent hate for the captain, one strong impulse of pitying
love for the Kanaka boy, Hope--a beautiful South Sea Islander sick of a
white man's disease, phthisis or syphilis. Of him Dana writes--"but the
other, who was my friend, and aikane--Hope--was the most dreadful object
I had ever seen in my life; his hands looking like claws; a dreadful
cough, which seemed to rack his whole shattered system; a hollow,
whispering voice, and an entire inability to move himself. There he lay,
upon a mat on the ground, which was the only floor of the oven, with no
medicine, no comforts, and no one to care for or help him but a few
Kanakas, who were willing enough, but could do nothing. The sight of him
made me sick and faint. Poor fellow! During the four months that I lived
upon the beach we were continually together, both in work and in our
excursions in the woods and upon the water. I really felt a strong
affection for him, and preferred him to any of my own countrymen there.
When I came into the oven he looked at me, held out his hand and said in
a low voice, but with a delightful smile, 'Aloha, Aikane! Aloha nui!' I
comforted him as well as I could, and promised to ask the captain to
help him from the medicine chest."
We have felt the pulse of hate for the captain--now the pulse of
Saviourlike love for the bright-eyed man of the Pacific, a real child of
the ocean, full of the mystery-being of that great sea. Hope is for a
moment to Dana what Chingachgook is to Cooper--the hearts-brother, the
answerer. But only for an ephemeral moment. And even then his love was
largely pity, tinged with philanthropy. The inevitable saviourism. The
ideal being.
Dana was mad to leave the California coast, to be back in the civilized
east. Yet he feels the poignancy of departure when at last the ship
draws off. The Pacific is his glamour-world: the eastern States his
world of actuality, scientific, materially real. He is a servant of
civilization, an idealist, a democrat, a hater of master, a KNOWER.
Conscious and self-conscious, without ever forgetting.
"When all sail had been set and the decks cleared up the _California_
was a speck in the horizon, and the coast lay like a low cloud along the
north-east. At sunset they were both out of sight, and we were once more
upon the ocean, where sky and water meet."
The description of the voyage home is wonderful. It is as if the sea
rose up to prevent the escape of this subtle explorer. Dana seems to
pass into another world, another life, not of this earth. There is first
the sense of apprehension, then the passing right into the black deeps.
Then the waters almost swallow him up, with his triumphant
consciousness.
"The days became shorter and shorter, the sun running lower in its
course each day, and giving less and less heat, and the nights so cold
as to prevent our sleeping on deck; the Magellan Clouds in sight of a
clear night; the skies looking cold and angry; and at times a long,
heavy, ugly sea, setting in from the Southward, told us what we were
coming to."
They were approaching Cape Horn, in the southern winter, passing into
the strange, dread regions of the violent waters.
"And there lay, floating in the ocean, several miles off, an immense
irregular mass, its top and points covered with snow, its centre a deep
indigo. This was an iceberg, and of the largest size. As far as the eye
could reach the sea in every direction was of a deep blue colour, the
waves running high and fresh, and sparkling in the light; and in the
midst lay this immense mountain-island, its cavities and valleys thrown
into deep shade, and its points and pinnacles glittering in the sun. But
no description can give any idea of the strangeness, splendour, and,
really, the sublimity of the sight. Its great size--for it must have
been two or three miles in circumference, and several hundred feet in
height; its slow motion, as its base rose and sunk in the water and its
points nodded against the clouds; the lashing of the waves upon it,
which, breaking high with foam, lined its base with a white crust; and
the thundering sound of the cracking of the mass, and the breaking and
the tumbling down of huge pieces; together with its nearness and
approach, which added a slight element of fear--all combined to give it
the character of true sublimity----"
But as the ship ran further and further into trouble, Dana became ill.
First it is a slight toothache. Ice and exposure cause the pains to take
hold of all his head and face. And then the face so swelled, that he
could not open his mouth to eat, and was in danger of lock-jaw. In this
state he was forced to keep his bunk for three or four days. "At the end
of the third day, the ice was very thick; a complete fog-bank covered
the ship. It blew a tremendous gale from the eastward, with sleet and
snow, and there was every promise of a dangerous and fatiguing night. At
dark, the captain called the hands aft, and told them that not a man was
to leave the deck that night; that the ship was in the greatest danger;
any cake of ice might knock a hole in her, or she might run on an island
and go to pieces. The look-outs were then set, and every man was put in
his station. When I heard what was the state of things, I began to put
on my things, to stand it out with the rest of them, when the mate came
below, and looking at my face ordered me back to my berth, saying if we
went down we should all go down together, but if I went on deck I might
lay myself up for life. In obedience to the mate's orders, I went back
to my berth; but a more miserable night I never wish to spend."
It is the story of a man pitted in conflict against the sea, the vast,
almost omnipotent element. In contest with this cosmic enemy, man finds
his further ratification, his further ideal vindication. He comes out
victorious, but not till the sea has tortured his living, integral body,
and made him pay something for his triumph in consciousness.
The horrific struggle round Cape Horn, homewards, is the crisis of the
Dana history. It is an entry into chaos, a heaven of sleet and black
ice-rain, a sea of ice and iron-like water. Man fights the element in
all its roused, mystic hostility to conscious life. This fight is the
inward crisis and triumph of Dana's soul. He goes through it all
consciously, enduring, _knowing._ It is not a mere overcoming of
obstacles. It is a pitting of the deliberate consciousness against all
the roused, hostile, anti-life waters of the Pole.
After this fight, Dana has achieved his success. He knows. He knows what
the sea is. He knows what the Cape Horn is. He knows what work is, work
before the mast. He knows, he knows a great deal. He has carried his
consciousness open-eyed through it all. He has won through. The ideal
being.
And from his book, we know too. He has lived this great experience for
us, we owe him homage.
The ship passes through the strait, strikes the polar death-mystery, and
turns northward, home. She seems to fly with new strong plumage, free.
"Every rope-yarn seemed stretched to the utmost, and every thread of the
canvas; and with this sail added to her the ship sprang through the
water like a thing possessed. The sail being nearly all forward, it
lifted her out of the water, and she seemed actually to jump from sea to
sea."
Beautifully the sailing-ship nodalizes the forces of sea and wind,
converting them to her purpose. There is no violation, as in a
steam-ship, only a winged centrality. It is this perfect adjusting of
ourselves to the elements, the perfect equipoise between them and us,
which gives us a great part of our life-joy. The more we intervene
machinery between us and the naked forces the more we numb and atrophy
our own senses. Every time we turn on a tap to have water, every time we
turn a handle to have fire or light, we deny ourselves and annul our
being. The great elements, the earth, air, fire, water are there like
some great mistress whom we woo and struggle with, whom we heave and
wrestle with. And all our appliances do but deny us these fine embraces,
take the miracle of life away from us. The machine is the great neuter.
It is the eunuch of eunuchs. In the end it emasculates us all. When we
balance the sticks and kindle a fire, we partake of the mysteries. But
when we turn on an electric tap there is as it were a wad between us and
the dynamic universe. We do not know what we lose by all our
labour-saving appliances. Of the two evils it would be much the lesser
to lose all machinery, every bit, rather than to have, as we have,
hopelessly too much.
When we study the pagan gods, we find they have now one meaning, now
another. Now they belong to the creative essence, and now to the
material-dynamic world. First they have one aspect, then another. The
greatest god has both aspects. First he is the source of life. Then he
is mystic dynamic lord of the elemental physical forces. So Zeus is
Father, and Thunderer.
Nations that worship the material-dynamic world, as all nations do in
their decadence, seem to come inevitably to worship the Thunderer. He is
Ammon, Zeus, Wotan and Thor, Shango of the West Africans. As the creator
of man himself, the Father is greatest in the creative world, the
Thunderer is greatest in the material world. He is the god of force and
of earthly blessing, the god of the bolt and of sweet rain.
So that electricity seems to be the first, intrinsic principle among the
Forces. It has a mystic power of readjustment. It seems to be the
overlord of the two naked elements, fire and water, capable of
mysteriously enchaining them, and of mysteriously sundering them from
their connections. When the two great elements become hopelessly
clogged, entangled, the sword of the lightning can separate them. The
crash of thunder is really not the clapping together of waves of air.
Thunder is the noise of the explosion which takes place when the waters
are loosed from the elemental fire, when old vapours are suddenly
decomposed in the upper air by the electric force. Then fire flies
fluid, and the waters roll off in purity. It is the liberation of the
elements from hopeless conjunction. Thunder, the electric force, is the
counterpart in the material-dynamic world of the life-force, the
creative mystery, itself, in the creative world.
Dana gives a wonderful description of a tropical thunderstorm.
"When our watch came on deck at twelve o'clock it was as black as
Erebus; not a breath was stirring; the sails hung heavy and motionless
from the yards; and the perfect stillness, and the darkness, which was
almost palpable, were truly appalling. Not a word was spoken, but
everyone stood as though waiting for something to happen. In a few
minutes the mate came forward, and in a low tone which was almost a
whisper, gave the command to haul down the jib.--When we got down we
found all hands looking aloft, and then, directly over where we had been
standing, upon the main top-gallant masthead, was a ball of light, which
the sailors name a corposant (_corpus sancti_). They were all watching
it carefully, for sailors have a notion that if the corposant rises in
the rigging, it is a sign of fair weather, but if it comes lower down,
there will be a storm. Unfortunately, as an omen, it came down and
showed itself on the top-gallant yard.
"In a few minutes it disappeared and showed itself again on the fore
top-gallant-yard, and, after playing about for some time, disappeared
again, when the man on the forecastle pointed to it upon the
flying-jib-boom-end. But our attention was drawn from watching this by
the falling of some drops of rain. In a few minutes low growling thunder
was heard, and some random flashes of lightning came from the southwest.
Every sail was taken in but the top-sail. A few puffs lifted the
top-sails, but they fell again to the mast, and all was as still as
ever. A minute more, and a terrific flash and peal broke simultaneously
upon us, and a cloud appeared to open directly over our heads and let
down the water in one body like a falling ocean. We stood motionless and
almost stupefied, yet nothing had been struck. Peal after peal rattled
over our heads with a sound which actually seemed to stop the breath in
the body. The violent fall of the rain lasted but a few minutes, and was
succeeded by occasional drops and showers; but the lightning continued
incessant for several hours, breaking the midnight darkness with
irregular and blinding flashes.
"During all this time hardly a Word was spoken, no bell was struck, and
the wheel was silently relieved. The rain fell at intervals in heavy
showers, and we stood drenched through, and blinded by the flashes,
which broke the Egyptian darkness with a brightness which seemed almost
malignant, while the thunder rolled in peals, the concussion of which
appeared to shake the very ocean. A ship is not often injured by
lightning, for the electricity is separated by the great number of
points she presents, and the quality of iron which she has scattered in
various parts. The electric fluid ran over our anchors, topsail-sheets
and ties; yet no harm was done to us. We went below at four o'clock,
leaving things in the same state."