Prologue

           

           

                                                                       To snatch in a moment of courage, from the

                                                                             remorseless rush of time, a passing phase of life ….

                                                                                                      Joseph Conrad, Preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus

           

          

Baltazar is anchored in a small bay on the east side of Isla Herschel on the Paso al Mar del Sur, almost exactly seven miles north-northeast of Cape Horn. We’re recording a sustained wind of over sixty knots at deck level and gusts of close to eighty — although they’re as much as thirty percent stronger at the masthead. The anchor is dug in to the sand bottom, good holding, with 200 feet of chain out and two nylon snubbing lines to absorb the shock of the waves.

    Before the front crossed over, the wind was out of the northeast. We were almost wide open in that direction, out into the Bahia Arquistade and beyond it, to the great Southern Ocean itself. For twelve hours, we pitched into seas eight-to-ten-feet high before the wind backed to the northwest and then west, rising to near-hurricane strength as it clocked round. By then, the low, grassy hills astern and on our sides gave us the protection we had counted on.

    Apart from the anchor, we have three lines out to shore, two secured to wind-carved dwarf trees 100 feet off our stern, and one running off our port side, shackled to a cable we have wrapped around a large rock. The lines are fouled with hundreds of pounds of cleaving kelp, broken away from its beds by the storm. The weight adds strain to the lines but also dampens down their surges as the wind slams into the hull and rigging of our fifty-foot steel boat.

    Two of us dragged the lines ashore in the rubber dinghy, paddling in frantic haste like commandos storming a beach. Baltazar was difficult to control in the rising and gusty wind and we had to get the stabilizing lines secured in a hurry. Our skipper, Bertrand, worked the engine to keep the boat off the close, encirling rocks. Twice, I scaled the low cliff behind the beach and tied off two lines. Such exertion was unusual in my sedentary life, and afterwards, I slumped on the rocks gasping, heart thumping much too fast. I wondered if it might be my destiny to die on some stony shore in Tierra del Fuego.

    Weatherfax maps limned the growth of the unfolding storm.  Twenty-four hours earlier, it had been an unremarkable, loose-structured low pressure system. We would keep an eye on it as we rounded the Horn, but we wouldn’t worry too much about it, maybe even using it to make a fast run across the Bahia Nassau and back to the Beagle Channel and shelter in this corner of inhospitable Tierra del Fuego. Then the barometer began to drop fast, going down at a sixty-degree angle until its line disappeared off the graph. The next weatherfax disclosed that the system had tightened up, its isobars bunching together until they almost merged, air pressure down to a frightening 950 millibars at the centre. The Chilean Navy broadcast a “Securité”, warning all vessels to get to shelter immediately. We began to see the cirrus and cirrocumulus clouds which signalled the depression — the “mare’s tail and mackerel sky” that makes any sailor apprehensive. After clearing the eastern tip of Isla Hornos, we ran hard for a haven.

    Bertrand is a fifteen-year veteran of these waters and of many voyages across Drake Passage to Antarctica. He’s never seen a storm that looks like this one, he tells us. And when the worst of the wind hits us, it is the strongest he’s ever experienced. That’s when the barometer begins to rise again, its tracing line reappearing on the graph and shooting up almost vertically. I didn’t know a barometer could do that.

    Fast rise after low foretells a stronger blow. With anxious fascination, we watch the wind lay our boat over on its side as if it were sailing close-hauled into a strong headwind.

    The Horn has lived up to its reputation again. In twelve hours, its malign influences have transformed an innocuous summer low coming in out of the Southern Ocean into the most dangerous of storms: what the old square-rigger sailors used to call a Cape Horn “snorter”.

    On deck for ten minutes to check shore lines for chafe, and to take photographs, dressed in my modern warm and impermeable foul weather gear, I can, nevertheless, feel the wind chill, fifteen or twenty, or more, below zero. The weight of wind is like a soft yet powerful, unyielding wall moulding itself to my body. It’s impossible to keep my eyes open looking to windward; raindrops are tiny blinding missiles. I must concentrate on not getting flipped off the deck and into the sea. Later, from our warm, dry cabin, I look out at the horizontal rain and hail, the fog of seawater as the wind lashes the sea’s surface into the air.

    I often think of the nineteenth-century square-rigger men during the two days we wait out the storm in our little bay of refuge. I say to Bertrand:

    “How could they have done it?”

    It’s the question I’ve been asking myself since the storm began. It’s the question I have come to Cape Horn to try to answer.

    Day after day, week after week, summer or winter, wind-ship sailors endured just the sort of battering wind and deluge we were comfortably observing. They went aloft a hundred feet or more on icy ratlines and footropes, up masts that could whip to and fro through ninety degrees of arc in a few seconds, to grapple with homicidal sails, certain death one small mistake, a slip, away. In leaky oilskins, always soaked, no heat or light in their squalid fo’c’s’les, foul water, malnourished, scurvy — the sailor’s ancient bane — still a possibility even at the end of the nineteenth century.

    One writer, a square-rigger sailor himself, coined the phrase, the “Cape Horn breed” to describe the men who worked the beautiful, widow-making deep-sea sailing ships in their dying days. It felt apt to me. Those seamen’s work was fraught with so much danger, their plane of discomfort true suffering, that the men who matter-of-factly did it seemed remote and alien, like shadowy warriors in old and vanished wars.

    I had a personal interest in these sailors. Some of my ancestors had been Cape Horn seamen. One of them was my great-great uncle, Benjamin Lundy, at sea in the 1880s. I had some of his letters; I knew what he looked like; I had met his descendants and become friends with them. I wanted to write about his voyage around the Horn. In that way, I thought I would come to better understand the men who sailed the last square-riggers, and what the experience had been like for them. Maybe I could answer the questions that had bubbled up with such urgency in our Cape Horn refuge.

    South from our storm anchorage, past the low sheltering headland lay the Horn, and beyond it, the Southern Ocean. That’s where the wind ships would have been a century ago: fifty or a hundred miles out, or several hundred, close to the Antarctic drift ice, beating endlessly into contrary and hostile wind and seas, mothering their cargoes — the only reason they were there at all — struggling to make their westing before they could finally turn north, clear of the continent’s lethal lee shore, towards benign seas, warmth, and harbour.

I’m looking at an old photograph, or to be more precise, a photograph of an old photograph, since the one I’m holding shows the wide, decorated wooden frame forming an oval around the original. The recent one was taken by my father on Salt Spring Island, British Columbia in 1985; the original dates from around 1895, and it was taken on Salt Spring Island as well. It shows my great, great uncle, a lean man with a moustache and sloping shoulders wearing a dark shirt buttoned to the neck and khaki-coloured pants, standing beside a deer he’s just shot, an antlered buck strung up beside him by a single hind leg from an overhead beam. Benjamin is looking directly at the camera, without a discernible expression, big hands holding a rifle whose barrel is cradled in the crook of his left arm; a black dog, which is also staring at the camera, sits beside him.

    Benjamin settled on this green, and motionless, island to grow apples and vegetables, raise chickens and whatever else would feed his wife, Annie, a part–aboriginal woman, their two young daughters and a son. The most remarkable thing to me about the photograph is that Benjamin in 1895 so much resembles my father, his great–nephew, at about the same age sixty or seventy years later. It’s as if someone had kitted out Alexander Lundy, low–level Cold War cipher clerk, and former naval petty officer, with a rifle, stetson and bushy bandido moustache, stood him up next to a dead deer and a live dog, and taken his picture.

    Among other things, the photograph demonstrates the startling persistence of living form through time. It made me feel connected to Benjamin through the intervening generations, truly part of a family line (an only child of a scattered immigrant family, I don’t often feel that), and also part of a tradition of “following the sea.” Benjamin was a seaman more than a century ago but my dead father’s face in his, clear and heart–wrenching in an old photograph, seems to bring Benjamin and the ships he sailed on much closer.

    It was quite a journey, when you came to think of it. Immigrants to North America, including my own family, had done it all the time — it was the quintessential immigrant experience — and that made it seem commonplace. But what an alchemy! The voyage away from the confines of European class, accent, religion, imperial dictat, the claustrophobic “close-togetherness” of everything, to the space and light of the New World, its even-handed presentation of the possibility of success and failure. It was like the first true deep breath of a person’s life. Although he hadn’t followed the immigrant’s usual route, at first, perhaps, hadn’t even intended to immigrate at all, Benjamin had eventually made that leap too. I wanted to find out more about the man in the photograph, and at least part of the story of his trek from a “two–up, two–down” worker’s house in the Irish Quarter of Carrickfergus, under the shadow of the Norman–English castle in occupied Ireland, to become a landowner on an edenic island in the northwest rainforest.

It seemed to me entirely apt that Benjamin’s self-displacement from one species of existence to another had taken place by means of a sea voyage under sail. He changed his life, made it new, by crossing oceans to a new world. At the same time, his journey of six months on a wind ship, like all such passages, was a sea-change in itself.

     In literature, the sea voyage has often been an overarching metaphor: “That unsounded ocean you gasp in, is life,” Melville wrote. And Conrad: “…there are those voyages that seem ordered for the illustration of life, that might stand for a symbol of existence.” Melville and Conrad were seamen before they became writers, and that early experience provided ample material for the writerly affinities they later created, or whose reality, perhaps, they merely confirmed, between the sea and human life. A third nineteenth-century seaman, who wrote a deceptively plain narrative of his voyage, completes a triumvirate of sailing informants. Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast, his account of his experiences as an ordinary seaman on a voyage around the Horn from Boston to California and back, was the unadorned voice from the fo’c’s’le. These three pre-eminent sea-writers — “sea brothers”, as Melville described himself and Dana after reading the latter’s book — were instrumental in telling shoreside society about seafaring culture. Without their writing, and the tradition of voyage narratives they inspired, life under sail would be an obscure, barely-known world.

    There’s a mundane purpose to sea voyages in either sailing ships or steamers. The ship and its company have a destination, and the rationale for their venture is to arrive there with people and cargo intact. But steamer passages are also homogeneous and predictable: the vessel merely slogs along a kind of watery highway, the care and feeding of its engines the only real concern. Melville, Dana and Conrad affirmed that a sea voyage under sail meant much more.

    Each one was unique. From the moment the sailing ship up-anchored or unmoored, or dropped its tow, and began to move under the force of wind on sails alone, everything was thrown into the balance. No one could foretell the incidence or shape of the great things to come: storms, fire, stranding, collision, ice, Cape Horn’s disposition, the severity and duration of the inevitable struggle ahead. Nor was it possible to predict from moment to moment what claims, burdens, ultimatums, the wind and waves would bring down on the ship and its crew. Every decision to take in or set more sail, each turn of the wheel in heavy seas, the speed and skill with which seamen hauled or furled, spliced or lashed, all the ways of devotion hour by hour, or even minute by minute, by which the ship was continually made able to sail on, or indeed to survive, in the endless chaos of the sea, all these were subject to chance and laden with the possibility of failure or ruin.

    Each sailing ship’s voyage, before it began, was an unknowable adventure, a great contingency, which could only be completed, as one seaman-writer said, “by the sea-cunning of men, not by the strength of machinery.” The archtypical sea voyage is the Odyssey, and its lineaments of knowledge-seeking and adventure have been reproduced in every deep-sea passage under sail. Homer often describes Odysseus himself as cunning. He had to be to get through his trials on land, but he also needed a sailor’s cunning to outwit and endure the hazards of the sea. On passages under sail, it’s always the men that count, what they do, what they have in them, and what the voyage teaches them along the way.   

Benjamin Lundy was at sea during the last twenty years of the nineteenth century. That was Conrad’s time. The young Polish exile shipped aboard his first square rigger — the French wooden barque, Mont Blanc, from Marseille to Martinique — as a passenger in 1874, and as an apprentice seaman the following year. He signed off the steamer, Adowa, in 1894, although it never sailed anywhere — the owners’ company failed. Conrad’s last real sea-berth was aboard the British wind ship, Torrens, from which he was officially discharged as first mate in 1893 after two voyages to Australia.

    The story of Benjamin’s Cape Horn passage begins in Liverpool in May, 1885. In April of the same year, the twenty-seven-year old Conrad signed on to the iron ship, Tilkhurst, as second mate for £5 a month. The vessel carried coal from Cardiff to Singapore. Someone from the Bible Society gave Conrad a miniature copy of the New Testament before the ship sailed. The small, flimsy paper was just right for rolling cigarettes, and Conrad used it for that purpose throughout the voyage. But first, before he smoked them, he read the pages, studied them, in fact. In this way, he absorbed into his unfolding English the prose of King James. The day before the ship left Singapore on its subsequent passage to Calcutta, one of the seamen got a severe head-blow in a fight. He became delirious and, nine days later, committed suicide by jumping overboard. A year earlier, Conrad was second mate aboard the wind ship Narcissus, and one of its crewmen, a black man from Georgia, died of illness during the passage from Bombay to Dunkirk. Conrad later drew upon both deaths for The Nigger of the Narcissus.

    Sailors face similar difficulties and dangers at sea in any time: a storm is a storm, a lee shore equally deadly, Cape Horn the worst of places, the gales and ice that Dana encountered in the Southern Ocean in the 1830s the same today. Yet, each epoch is different in some ways, and each sea-writer looks to his own horizons and meanings. Melville, the metaphysician of whales and men, has little interest in the practical or psychological aspects of handling a ship, or of describing storms at sea — neither of which is done convincingly, if at all, in Moby Dick. The eighteenth-century experience of beating through unknown waters in a small, hemp-rigged wooden caravel, racing for some landfall before scurvy got its hooks in deep, was unfamiliar to a sailor of Conrad’s time. He sailed aboard iron ships with polyglot crews carrying passengers or bulk cargoes when steam was in its inevitable ascendency. Conrad could see that the future of sail was no future. His sea writing is saturated with poignancy and nostalgia. When Conrad writes about the sea and ships, they are the stuff of Benjamin’s voyage, too, or of any man’s on any ship in those last days of sail. The sea experiences of Melville and Dana are intriguing context, but Conrad’s own life at sea, and his recollections of it, is the most useful set of minor variations on the theme of Benjamin’s story.

For years after he left the Royal Navy, my father referred to closets as lockers, walls as bulkheads. He would clean the heads and sweep the deck. He kept his gear squared away. Whenever there was any sewing to be done, he did it. He made a long, narrow bag for me to carry my recorder around in when I took group lessons in music class. The stitches were small, precise, evenly spaced, the work of a man who knew that each job, however small, had to be done absolutely right. Any shoddiness or carelessness could begin the slow, or quick, often irreversible, slide into disaster. So the bag was strong, overbuilt for its purpose; it had redundancy written all over it. I could have carried a recorder made out of lead in the bag and it would still have held together. It was an offshore, deep-sea bag. Even aboard a diesel-powered, twentieth-century warship, my father had learned the lesson that, at sea, there might be no margin for error.

    I can’t help thinking of my father and Benjamin Lundy in the same mental breath. It’s partly because of their close physical resemblance, the ghost of one a lingering apparition in the other. But also because they are sea-brothers of a sort themselves, not part of an immortal literary lineage like Dana and Melville, but of a modest family’s tradition, two separated generations out of many that followed the sea. The line stretches up to me from a darkening past: a great-grandfather aboard H.M.S. Thunderer 120 years ago, whose certification as a skilled shipwright in any vessel of the Queen-Empress hangs on the wall beside me; before him, intimations of other ancestors at sea aboard warships, or merchantmen round the Horn — the details petering out in the usual faded trail of anonymous lives — or building them in Belfast in the Protestant shipyard there (my grandfather hammered rivets into the Titanic); another who sailed aboard one of the Shamrocks of Sir Thomas Lipton, the Irish tea-magnate who challenged four times for the America’s Cup; great-great-uncle Benjamin himself, and his namesake nephew, my great-uncle, shot dead in 1921 on his brother’s doorstep in the uniform of the English king’s navy during the Irish Civil War; my father hunting submarines and picking up near-drowned merchant seamen in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans in H.M.S. Nigella, one of the eccentrically designated Flower-class corvettes; my young uncle, a twenty-year chief petty officer who specialized in the minutiae of Soviet submarine radio transmissions; my long-service cousins aboard British warships in the South Atlantic during the Falklands War; my own time under sail in small boats, and one passage in a twentieth-century square-rigger as well.

    What a bloodline is there in that long usage of the sea! I was aware of this family record, of course, but in a vague way and incompletely. In fact, the depth and duration of my family’s absorption with seagoing did not truly become part of my consciousness until after I first saw the photograph of Benjamin on Salt Spring, and found out that he had been a seaman. Later, I saw his sea chest as well, now used as a general storage box in a hallway of his grandson’s house on the island. It may have been with him aboard his first ship, lashed down next to his bunk, the small cache of all his belongings, table for salt horse and weevily biscuit, and for card games with shipmates.

    The photographic image and its startling likeness is an eloquent, if ambiguous, memento. So is the chest, with its smooth amber surface, the expert symmetry of its joints, the solid, sober longevity of the more-than-century-old wood. They seem to squeeze together the generations between Benjamin and me in a kind of time-lapse; with such incontrovertible, conspicuous evidence of his existence, the man himself cannot be long-gone. At the same time, the testimony is, in truth, paltry, conveying some impressions, making a few suggestions, but emphasizing how little time it takes for our ancestors to all but disappear from sight. Depending on the angle of my regard, I can feel close to Benjamin and his life at sea, or I can feel remote from it, a past lost and done for.

    In fact, Benjamin’s trail was almost cold. There isn’t near enough of it in the vague and fragmentary memories of living people, either in Ireland or on Salt Spring Island; it’s the same with most families. There are records — metres of shelves, rooms of boxes — but they are “organized” in a way that made them unhelpful for me. I spent time at the Public Records Office in Kew, on the border of London (where my father began his Cold War career, and an Underground stop away from where I lived for six years as a child and became, briefly, a little English boy). I searched in the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, and corresponded with Newfoundland’s Memorial University, which took most of the merchant seaman records when the British government wanted to destroy them (they took up too much space, and who cared?). If I knew the name of a ship that Benjamin sailed on, or an exact year, then it was possible I might eventually find him among the thousands of stored crew lists — although maybe not; the records are far from complete.

    Even if I found his name, it would tell me only that he was aboard that ship between the noted ports. Most of the official log books kept aboard sailing ships have been destroyed, unless they recorded a birth or a death, and, anyway, they were notoriously stingy with details. Except for a voyage record by some seaman or officer who kept a journal that became public, or who published a book — and there are only a handful of those from the nineteenth century — the stories of the thousands upon thousands of square-rigger passages are lost. All I had was a man’s name.

    A book about the exact circumstances of a specific voyage made by young Benjamin Lundy, or about any of the anonymous seamen of the past, can never be written. It’s an impossible book about almost all human beings a few generations, even one or two, after their lives, their stories, end. There’s no information, no records, no memory. So: a different kind of book, then: take the fragments of what I know about Benjamin and the great deal that’s known about square riggers, and life aboard them in his time, and create a voyage. It will be typical in its incidents, suffering and accomplishment. Its officers and crew will be representative seamen of that time and of those ships. The ship itself: an imaginary one, the Beara Head — the name of an Irish promontory — but an actual sister to the big iron Cape Horners in all other respects. I will imagine the tale of Benjamin’s voyage: not the voyage itself — that’s unrecoverable — but as it might have been, and emphatically, could have been. TheWay of a Ship is  the biography of a particular kind of journey, and in the telling, it is also the story of a man.

    Sea-voyage narratives have traditionally been variations on the Odyssey. Robert Foulke writes about this ancient epic and its descendants in The Sea Voyage Narrative, and he concludes: “Clearly, historical and literary voyage narratives are often nearly identical in structure and substance: Usually no clear demarcation exists between fact and fiction, experience and imagination.” Writing about selected nineteenth-century first-hand, purportedly non-fiction accounts of sea voyages (including Dana’s) Haskell Springer writes in, “Call Them All Ishmael? Fact and Form in Some Nineteenth-Century Sea Narratives,” that the authors use “strategies of presentation” that essentially make novelists out of them: “They report supposedly verbatim conversations, omit details for effect, collapse time, shift from past to present tense in scenes of action, characterize only selected shipmates, depart from chronology to make meaningful juxtapositions, dramatize incidents, forshadow events, adopt authorial omniscience, use literary quotation and allusion, interpolate material from other books without crediting the source, and even, in a few instances, create scenes out of virtually whole (sail) cloth.” Why sea writers have written in this way is a book in itself — in fact, there are several. I have merely written within the traditions and conventions that sea stories permit and condone.

    

Benjamin’s passage as a sailor before the mast aboard the Beara Head is, in part, the mere account of a young man learning the ropes, standing his watches, following orders, enduring cold, exhaustion and danger, helping to save the ship and himself, becoming a seaman. He is also a young man who, in the process of doing all that, learns the eternal lessons of the sea, which is to say that he finds out the sort of man he is, and that he is capable of doing things that, before or even after he did them, seem almost unimaginably difficult and perilous. And, although he is unaware of it, Benjamin’s voyage is freighted with the meanings and burdens of a whole world giving way to another.

Chapter 1

Down to the Seas

            … as a simple sailor, right before the mast, plumb

            down into the forecastle, aloft there to the royal

            mast-head.

                            Herman Melville, Moby Dick

Off the pitch of the Horn. Wind at full–gale strength, waves as high as the main tops, sometimes hail and then snow coming down thick, clouds so low they enfold the mastheads, spume and sky indistinguishable. The laden barque, down on its marks like a half–tide rock, labours to windward under three lower topsails and fore and mizzen staysails, seas sweeping the main deck like grapeshot. The hull twists, pitches and rolls; its iron plates grind and groan. The wind whistles, screams, as it encounters the vessel’s four masts and their dense network of standing and running rigging. The ship is close-hauled, heading as close as possible to the direction of the wind; it must contend for every inch to the west, although in this gale, these seas, all it can manage is a stubborn retreat, a slow, grudging slide to leeward, losing as little ground as it can until things improve.

    Like the other men of the off-watch, ordinary seaman Benjamin Lundy lies sleeping like a dead man in his sopping berth below. He turned in “all-standing” — still wearing his soaked oilskins and sea boots — two hours ago, after his watch on deck. His body heat under blankets has begun to dry out his clothes a little; a light mist rises off him, like steam, in the cold, dark fo’c’s’le. Seas boarding the maindeck spurt through the door and a foot of water sloshes from one side of the deck house to the other as the ship rolls, sometimes splashing up onto Benjamin in his lower bunk. But he sleeps through this and the deafening clamour of the storm.

    Only one thing can drag him out of his near-coma, and it happens now. The mate’s whistle sounds above the wind’s variations on the theme; someone hammers on the fo’c’s’le door.

    A hoarse roar: “All hands on deck to shorten sail!”

    No matter what its state of exhaustion, Benjamin’s brain long ago incorporated these words as an irresistible stimulus. Almost before he’s awake, he has rolled out of his bunk onto the flooded floor. Colliding with other shapes in the near-dark, he reels out onto the deck, and the familiar wallop of the wind and driven spray.

    “Clew up main and mizzen tops’ls!”

    In near pitch dark, the awakened men join the watch already on deck and with an unerring orientation, they find the lines they need to haul on, a few out of hundreds in the precise universal order of a wind ship’s running rigging. With the seaman’s coordinated jerk, they sweat up the sails, no shanties now for this hard-pressed crew. Other lines —  sheets and tacks — must be slackened off as the sails are gathered into looping folds, flogging in the wind with thunderclap explosions. Several times, the men must interrupt their hauling, belay the lines in a deft flash and jump for the lifelines, or rigging, anything that’s made fast to the ship, as a Southern Ocean greybeard breaks aboard, flooding the deck with tons of irresistible water. In these conditions, it’s as dangerous on the maindeck as it is aloft.

    “Now lay aloft and furl’em!”

    Ben joins his mates as they climb the weather ratlines on the main mast; the other watch will deal with the mizzen topsail. The wind sometimes presses against his body with such force that he must strain to bring his leg back against it to take the next step up. His hands, already numb with cold, get colder as they grip the rigging wire. Now he’s aware of the deep cuts and cracks in the skin, ravaged knuckles, the salt water burning away at them. He’s lost four of his fingernails, ripped away in earlier bloody skirmishes with recalcitrant sails. His oilskins, hard as metal, rub against the raw-chafed skin at his wrists and neck, the salt water boils throbbing. The men climb up seventy feet and fan out along the windward side of the yard, slithering on the icy footrope, dodging the flailing number-one storm canvas and gear of the topsail. A mere tip or nudge from the heavy sail and a man could be flicked off the yard like an insect, to die on the deck or in the sea.

    The crew of the Beara Head have been working the ship off the Horn for thirty-nine days, trying to get past this most troublesome of capes. They call it “Cape Stiff,” an evocative nickname of unknown origin. They began to win the war only a few days ago. In this austral winter of 1885, the westerly gales have come on them one after the other, no breathers in-between. The six-week campaign has changed the seamen. From a sometimes fractious and ill-sorted gang, the unending storms have sculpted a desperate but united and determined unit of men who suffer and work without complaint. The equation is simple: they will live only if the ship survives; and so they fight to save the ship. The ship is everything and, in the fierce tumult of wind and waves, paradoxically, they have learned one of the sailor’s most profound, and tender, lessons: what Conrad called the “serious relation in which a man stands to his ship.” They know in their guts, unconsciously and without articulation, that they owe the ship the fullest measure of their thought, skill, self-love. They may be, as Conrad described all crews, “a small knot of men upon the great loneliness of the sea,” but they will be saved by their instinctive devotion to the ship. Only then can it do its best for them, which may be good enough, maybe not. 

    On the main lower topsail yard, Benjamin and his soaked, frozen, half-starved watchmates begin their battle with a third-of-a-ton of wet, flogging canvas. The object is to gather it up and lash it to the yard before it blows itself to rags, or kills someone. This would take five minutes in a calm harbour; in a gale off the Horn, it’s a long, intense battle. Sometimes, it’s impossible to get even a grip on the material as the wind bellies it out, stiff as wood. When the ship does a heavy roll, the seamen must pause and hang on, with their bellies, eyelids, anything remotely flexible, as the yardarm end dips seaward at a forty-five degree angle. They could slide off and down with ease, their fall a graceful, effortless parabola into the sea. A week ago, a man did just that. The ship rolled and when it came back, he was gone. No one heard a sound from him. It was truly, as Melville described it, “the speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into eternity.” The unavoidable memory is in everyone’s mind as they wrestle with the topsail; it adds a superfluous pungency to the sweat they’re working up.

    The fight to control the sail becomes nightmarish toil without end. They get it half-muzzled; a gust rips it away from their fingers, many bleeding now. Several times, they almost have it, and the precarious balance is disrupted by the wind, or an awkward roll of the ship. The sail breaks free, and they must begin again. They fist the stiff canvas, trying to pound it into graspable shape; fresh blood oozes from their knuckles to join old stains. Each man has tried to secure his oilskins with “soul and body lashings” — light lines around wrists, ankles and waists to try to keep some water out, and to stop the wind blowing their clothes around their heads, or even right off their bodies. But the wind is about sixty knots or so, driving sleet and snow hard at them, and jumbling the leaking oilskins  around them anyway, hampering their movement, hog-tying them. When the men lean far down over the yard to grasp the canvas, their feet, jammed down onto the footrope, swing up high into the air behind them, higher than their bodies. It looks as it they’re diving down the forward side of the sail towards the deck. It’s a sensation Benjamin has long become accustomed to, although the first dozen times it happened, he nearly fainted with fear, indeed barely controlled his sphincter.

    “Keep yer arse tight,” his shipmates advised him.

    No one’s quiet now about the job they’re doing. Grunts, oaths, imprecations, curses, exclamations of encouragement or frustration, vigorous expressions of anger at shipmates whose clumsiness or weakness has allowed the goddamned, son-of-a-bitch-of-a-sail to break free again, fill the air about the small cooperative of men absorbed in their work.

    As with all the battles they’ve fought aloft, in the end, they win this one too. In fact, it’s inevitable that they will furl the sail eventually, or that it will blow itself out before they do (even then, they’ll gather in the remnants; nothing is wasted on a sailing ship). It’s unthinkable for them to come down from aloft without one or the other of these things happening. This time, it takes nearly one-and-a-half hours. When the main lower topsail on the barque Beara Head, 110 days out of Liverpool, bound for Valparaiso with a cargo of coal, is finally secure, the port watch climbs down to the sea-swept deck and musters at the break of the poop.

    The mate looks them over without emotion; the storms seem to have leached the viciousness out of him. The mizzen topsail was sorted out fifteen minutes before. The vessel is happier now under its three remaining sails.

    “That’ll do the watch,” he shouts over the wail of wind and growl of waves.

    Benjamin and the other seamen dodge forward along the maindeck to the fo’c’s’le. They have half-an-hour before the four-hour change of watch when they must turn out again to relieve the men officially on duty. In the still-pitch-dark, Benjamin climbs back into his bunk. He falls asleep in less than two minutes. The ship still drifts to the east, the direction they don’t want to go in, but, refreshed by its crew’s most recent devotion, gives ground more slowly, more grudgingly, than before.