It is difficult to disconnect the idea of ships’ anchors from the idea of
the ship’s chief mate—the man who sees them go down clear and come up
sometimes foul; because not even the most unremitting care can always
prevent a ship, swinging to winds and tide, from taking an awkward turn
of the cable round stock or fluke. Then the business of “getting the
anchor” and securing it afterwards is unduly prolonged, and made a
weariness to the chief mate. He is the man who watches the growth of the
cable—a sailor’s phrase which has all the force, precision, and imagery
of technical language that, created by simple men with keen eyes for the
real aspect of the things they see in their trade, achieves the just
expression seizing upon the essential, which is the ambition of the
artist in words. Therefore the sailor will never say, “cast anchor,” and
the ship-master aft will hail his chief mate on the forecastle in
impressionistic phrase: “How does the cable grow?” Because “grow” is the
right word for the long drift of a cable emerging aslant under the
strain, taut as a bow-string above the water. And it is the voice of the
keeper of the ship’s anchors that will answer: “Grows right ahead, sir,”
or “Broad on the bow,” or whatever concise and deferential shout will fit
the case.
There is no order more noisily given or taken up with lustier shouts on
board a homeward-bound merchant ship than the command, “Man the
windlass!” The rush of expectant men out of the forecastle, the
snatching of hand-spikes, the tramp of feet, the clink of the pawls, make
a stirring accompaniment to a plaintive up-anchor song with a roaring
chorus; and this burst of noisy activity from a whole ship’s crew seems
like a voiceful awakening of the ship herself, till then, in the
picturesque phrase of Dutch seamen, “lying asleep upon her iron.”
For a ship with her sails furled on her squared yards, and reflected from
truck to water-line in the smooth gleaming sheet of a landlocked harbour,
seems, indeed, to a seaman’s eye the most perfect picture of slumbering
repose. The getting of your anchor was a noisy operation on board a
merchant ship of yesterday—an inspiring, joyous noise, as if, with the
emblem of hope, the ship’s company expected to drag up out of the depths,
each man all his personal hopes into the reach of a securing hand—the
hope of home, the hope of rest, of liberty, of dissipation, of hard
pleasure, following the hard endurance of many days between sky and
water. And this noisiness, this exultation at the moment of the ship’s
departure, make a tremendous contrast to the silent moments of her
arrival in a foreign roadstead—the silent moments when, stripped of her
sails, she forges ahead to her chosen berth, the loose canvas fluttering
softly in the gear above the heads of the men standing still upon her
decks, the master gazing intently forward from the break of the poop.
Gradually she loses her way, hardly moving, with the three figures on her
forecastle waiting attentively about the cat-head for the last order of,
perhaps, full ninety days at sea: “Let go!”
This is the final word of a ship’s ended journey, the closing word of her
toil and of her achievement. In a life whose worth is told out in
passages from port to port, the splash of the anchor’s fall and the
thunderous rumbling of the chain are like the closing of a distinct
period, of which she seems conscious with a slight deep shudder of all
her frame. By so much is she nearer to her appointed death, for neither
years nor voyages can go on for ever. It is to her like the striking of
a clock, and in the pause which follows she seems to take count of the
passing time.
This is the last important order; the others are mere routine directions.
Once more the master is heard: “Give her forty-five fathom to the water’s
edge,” and then he, too, is done for a time. For days he leaves all the
harbour work to his chief mate, the keeper of the ship’s anchor and of
the ship’s routine. For days his voice will not be heard raised about
the decks, with that curt, austere accent of the man in charge, till,
again, when the hatches are on, and in a silent and expectant ship, he
shall speak up from aft in commanding tones: “Man the windlass!”