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.