CHAPTER SEVEN
The Circle of Her Traverse of the Sea
Two days after Benjaminâs first gale blew itself out, the Beara Head picked up the Portuguese trades.
The wind had blown sour on them for weeks. When the Biscay gale finally moved on, the ship wallowed for a day in the big, leftover swells, the light and variable wind not enough to give it more than steerage way in the slop and spill of seas. Then a light northerly got them farther south by a hundred miles in the fast-calming water; the warming sun dried out men and gear. Now the trade winds appeared just where they should have at the time of year, but their reliability was, nevertheless, a pleasant surprise. Wind rarely enough showed up where and when it was supposed to that it was a cause for celebration when the pilot charts were right. The barque bowled along in the heel of the trades, full canvas again, sailing by and large and making ten knots on the port tack.
The Greek found the body when he went to relieve himself in the foâcâsâle toilet halfway through the forenoon watch. He sat on the seat over the opening straight down to the sea and, as he shit, contemplated the Clerkâs swinging corpse. The manâs face was contorted in the typical manner of the asphyxiated; his ragged suit was more white with salt stains than black, and he reeked. But this wasnât the smell of deathâthe job had been done not long beforeânor merely foâcâsâle odour, âthe comforting stench of comrades.â The suicide hadnât washed in three weeks, and he stank of feces and piss where he had soiled himself in terror of the ship and its mate. This was the mateâs doing, Kapellas thought. That bastard had just killed his first man of the voyage, but maybe not his last. The Greek finished up and went aft to report the event to the murderer himself.
The two mates and the captain came to look at the dead man. It was unusual for the captain to forsake his territory aft for any reason, and it took a calamity to draw him to the shipâs bow. Both watches were on deck in the fine tradewind weather, chipping, painting, overhauling lines, repairing gear damaged or chafed in the Biscay gale. In a temporary suspension of discipline, the entire crew abandoned work and crowded forward behind the officers.
Benjamin peered with the others into the small, dim space of the heads. He saw that the Clerk had hanged himself from an iron beam with a piece of gasket line, out of which even he had been able to fashion a reasonable knot, enough to take his meagre weight. Benjamin felt sick, appalled, guilty. Heâd seen death beforeâtwo infant sisters, and his grandfather laid out like a serene manikin in the front parlour while the family drank whiskey, told stories and sang the old songs around himâbut nothing like the Clerkâs grotesque, twisted grimace. Guilt roiled Benjaminâs guts. He had done nothing to try to help the man, to break through his isolated despair, to protest his treatment. None of them had. The Clerk was like a plague victim or a leper. The seamen manoeuvred around him as if he would contaminate them somehow and bring down the mateâs insane anger on them all. The Clerk had borne the assaults alone and in silence, until he could no longer tolerate them. Benjamin felt the chill of remorse and his own vulnerability on this hard-case barque.
âHeâs put a hand on himself, right enough,â said the captain. âHe was a dead horse the minute Fearnaught brung him aboard. The man wasnât worth a traneen. Cut him down and parcel him, Mr. MacNeill.â
âAye aye, sir.â
The elderly Yankee sailmaker, John Page, sewed a canvas bag for the dead man; heâd done it twenty times before, he said. By six bells of the forenoon watch, an hour after Kapellas found the body, the crew had gathered by the lee rail below the poop, the captain had read the burial service, the Clerk had been tipped into the sea and all hands were back at work. The dead man had no belongings to auction off, but his bunk became another drier space to stow sea chests clear of the slosh of heavy-weather water across the foâcâsâle deck.
âThe goddamn mate scuppered him,â said Kapellas.
No one disagreed.
No one was surprised either. They had a hot ship and a bucko mate, and that was that. He was a Bluenose and they were worse than Yankees. MacNeill had been a seaman and then a mate on Canadian schooners running down to Brazil in the fish trade, which was notorious for its tough drivers. They carried sail to the last and used up men like horses. Even yellow-jack epidemics in the Brazilian ports didnât keep them away. Limejuicers had to report the deaths of seamen resulting from assaults by mates and captainsâunlike Yankee vessels, and maybe Bluenoses too. Every sailor had heard scores of stories about Yankee mates killing men with impunity, using belaying-pins, knuckledusters, revolvers. The Clerk had killed himself, so the mate was safe from a formal inquiry; the captain noted the suicide in the official log (this was distinct from the deck log, which recorded weather, courses made good and sail handling). These were laconic enough chronicles of voyages; if nothing went seriously wrong, an official log was often empty. However, a suicide qualified as an event worth noting.
âThat mate ainât done with killing yet, neither,â said Kapellas.
âMaybe,â said Russell. âThe Clerk hadnât got any sand. If heâd have stood up to the mate, he would have backed down. The man wasnât worth a bosunâs damn. He couldnât go aloft. It wouldâve broke a snakeâs back to follow his wake when he was on the helm. He had Cape Horn fever.â
âAll the same, no need for the mate to ride him down all the time,â said Maguire, the labourer.
âMaybe not. But he still scuppered himself.â
âThe man was pressed,â said Benjamin, the first time he had ever spoken up during foâcâsâle wrangling. âAll he ever was was the last hough in the pot. Does a pressed man deserve to be hounded to despair?â
âItâs just the way she goes aboard ship,â said Russell. âThe captainâs king and the mateâs his executioner, if he needs one.â
There were such things as happy ships, although fewer of them as the century wound down and sail fell under close siege. Bigger, heavier vessels, pared-down crews, skimpy gear and provisions, dirty bulk cargoes given to shifting or burning, the disappearance of passenger liners under sail and the civilizing effects of carrying what Conrad called that âhonoured bale of highly sensitive goodsââall of these coarsened life aboard the wind ship. Nevertheless, at the time of the Beara Headâs voyage, there were still happy ships. One imagines that Conradâs Otago must have been one of them when he was captain; the Torrens too, since it was a passenger carrier and Conrad was the mate. There were many others. The ships Thomasina MacLellan (Tommy Mac, for short) and the British Ambassador kept their crews year after year. The Tommy Macâs sailmaker stayed aboard for ten years. Capt. A. Smith of the ship MacCallum More kept it up like a yacht, and he looked after his crews with the same care. So did Capt. W. D. Cassady of the beautiful little ship Greta. He fitted out his cabins in ash and black walnut, then filled them with pictures, flowers and his collection of curios from around the world. He kept orange trees, geraniums and other flowers in his mess room and trained Scotch ivy round the pillars. The captainâs care with his quarters extended to the foâcâsâle; âfull and plentyâ was the standard (although only in comparison with the standard stingy whack). The Ivanhoe spent years carrying passengers on the London-Melbourne run in the 1870s and 1880s. The ownersâ motto was âno stintâ for passengers and crew (although the phrase had a somewhat more limited meaning for the seamen). The lives of its sailors were so stable that many of them married, settled their families in Melbourne and stayed aboard for years. When a vacancy came up, fifty men applied. The Ivanhoeâs charmed, and charming, life held for forty-seven years, until it was wrecked at Honolulu in 1915. Capt. William Porter of the Ennerdale died on board his ship during a passage from San Francisco to Queenstown in 1881. He had been like the proverbial father to his men, and as the mate read the funeral service before the ensign-draped body slid into the sea, almost every man aboard wept.
Just after dawn on May 27, after twenty-two days at sea, the Beara Head passed to the west of the Portuguese island of Madeira, having made close to two hundred miles during the previous twenty-four hours. The ship stayed well clear of the land, as Ocean Passages for the World advised, avoiding the squalls and calms of the water close in. The captain got a shore bearing to confirm the accuracy of his sun sights and ensure the chronometerâs dependability. The trade winds were holding at twenty to twenty-five knots, strong for the time of year, and the barque was making the most of it, surging along with a bone in its teeth.
On deck after breakfast, Benjamin watched as the ship passed by the distant high island. Reared in the cold rain and mists of the north, where summer was often nothing but warmer rain, and having spent all his sea time in the narrow, grey-green waters of the British islands, he was enthralled by the trade winds, this intimation of the tropics: warm wind; a sea of bluesânavy, ink, indigo, cobalt, prussian, turquoiseâmutating from one to the next with the curl of waves; breaking crests brilliant in the sun; the high, puffy tradewind cumulus, like scattered cauliflowers.
Clouds are aesthetic correspondents of the weather. Ugly skies mean ugly times for the sailor. The pretty cumulus are guarantors of fine times in the only way that the seaman really cares about: nothing hazardous is in the offing; for now, he can relax.
In the trade winds, ships relax as well. Yards squared, the barque sailed almost dead downwind, crojack and mainsail clewed up to let clean air get through to the foresail, but otherwise every sail pulling, the wind direction constant enough that little or no brace or sheet pulley-hauley was required.
Benjamin loved his stints on the helm. With its long, slender shape and loaded hull deep in the water, the ship tracked along like a locomotive, almost sailing itself. The helmsman merely superintended the vesselâs self-rapt progress. Looking out at the blue sunlit sea and the shipâs grey-white canvas stretching before and above him, feeling the gentle pitch and roll, Benjamin thought that nothing in his life had ever been, or maybe ever would be, as fine as this hypnotic, ardent, serene, endless motion through the sea, its ecstatic elements brought together and guided by his own hands on the wheel. With the strange relativity of time and pleasure, his hour-long tricks went by in minutes. Then it was back to chipping iron, and those hours were hours long.
When Madeira dimmed and disappeared astern, the barque held its course a little south of southwest, towards the Cape Verde Islands.
The Beara Head was happy in its headway through the kindly sea, but its crew was not. There seemed to be a malign correspondence at work: the less enmity of wind and sea, the less amity aboard. The various personal wars, gone cold during the struggle to make southing, hotted up in the gentle weather. There were the usual irritations of men living and working in close quarters day after day, but everyone expected these; it was the universal run-of-the-mill stuff of families and work-places. It was different, however, in the case of two pairs: Grey, the cockney, and Russell, the Yankee; MacNeill, the first mate, and Jagger, the second.
On the Beara Headâs twenty-third day at sea, Grey tried to kill the Yankee. The ill will between the two had never let up. Grey was irritable in all things while he was at sea; it was his habit, and nothing could break it. His fear and loathing of the water never lessened. Even the genial warmth and seas of the trade winds didnât mollify him; he could still barely look past the rail. Russellâs self-assurance and humourâdid the Yankee mimic Grey, as well, when he was working aft or aloft?âhis assumption of the foâcâsâle leadership as if by right, the attraction of the other seamen and their glad deferenceâall this rankled Grey, and more and more, enraged him. During the gale, he had put it aside. He had worked with Russell, and the others, in necessary unity. The ship in its need had the power of reconciliation, but it was temporary.
Russell did indeed imitate the cockney whenever he had the chance, the manâs obsessive, harsh anger made comic in its pop-eyed exaggeration. Apart from that, he tried to tolerate Grey and made sure he never turned his back on the man. On other ships, the Yankee had been forced to do thisâkeep someone, or a few men, always in his mind, so that everything he did, everywhere he jogged or climbed aboard ship, always included an awareness of the other man, a constant calculation of the danger he might pose at any moment. He avoided getting next to such a seaman tailing on to a line, or on a yard; at night, he kept track of his movement on deck and, especially, aloft. During some of his earlier voyages, Russell had been able to maintain this uneasy watch and distance until the end of a passage, when the crew dissolved in drunkenness, shanghaiing and desertion. Other times, he had had to fight, although never to kill. He didnât resent this; it was merely the way she goes aboard shipâlike the mate riding a man down to his death.
In the middle of the gravy-eye, the port watch was trimming sails to a wind shift. Russell called to Grey to slack off the tack as the seamen were squaring the foreyard. It sounded to Grey like an order, and it pulled the trigger. Usually the loudest of men, Grey stared at Russell for a moment without a word. Then he turned and walked to the deck house, took his knife (the one with the point) from its hiding place in his donkeyâs breakfast and walked back towards Russell, holding the knife out of sight behind his hand and arm. The Yankee waited, appearing almost indifferent except for a slight crouch and a tensing of muscles. Benjamin and the other seamen of the watch stood motionless too. This confrontation seemed preordained, irresistible; to interfere with it would be a violation of the inevitable order of things. The cockney knew how to use a knife, and the Yankee was not an agile man. Grey lunged, stabbing Russell once on his left side and slashing his right arm twice as he tried to protect himself. All this in near silence and moonlight. The quick attack released the other seamen from their fatalistic stasis. Kapellas and Anderson jumped on the cockney and dragged him down, avoiding the blade. Benjamin remained paralyzed, his old fear of confrontation and his first view of a blade sliding into human flesh filling him with fear, rooting him to the barqueâs deck. Russellâs blood flowed out in a steady thin stream, not in spurts or gouts; he had defended himself efficiently, and the wounds were superficial.
Things were still quiet enoughâthis was foâcâsâle business and nothing to do with the officersâbut the mateâs ear on the poop caught the familiar grunts and thumps of combat above the static of wind and sea. He stamped along the deck without a word, his silence one of the most astonishing things the men had yet experienced aboard the Beara Head. âLet âim up,â he said to the seamen restraining the struggling Grey, breaking, finally, the wordlessness of the previous minutes.
As Grey began to rise up snarling bare-teethed like a dog, the mate kicked him several times, once hard in the head, flattening the man onto the deck again. He ordered Russell aft to the poop, where the captain would patch him up, and accompanied Grey, in the grip of his mates once more, to the foâcâsâle deck, where he handcuffed him to a pipe in the bosunâs locker.
Russell spent a week in his bunk and had light duties for two more weeks after that; three more scars were added to his marked, tattooed body. Grey remained in irons on half-rations, sleeping on a blanket on the dirty iron deck of the storeroom. The isolation seemed to calm him; he grew gaunt but quiet. The sea was invisible from his impromptu cell.
The violence was contagious. Less than a day after Greyâs attack, the mates clashed.
They had never reached an understanding or accommodation; the first mateâs personality foreclosed that. He was blank as a rock, adamant and obdurate, as if there were two worlds: his own, expansive and singular, and the lesser one in which all other men lived, inconsequentially. Jagger, for his part, had never found his place or voice aboard the Beara Head. MacNeill condescended to him at best, often insulting him with his offhand instructions; even the captainâs solicitudeâthe watchful commander trying to ensure his young officerâs morale and authorityârankled. The captain thought he still needed special treatment. Jagger was a competent junior officerâhe had his Board of Trade ticketâbut he lacked the furious energy, the fierce will of a true wind-ship ramrod. He knew it himself: when he led his watch aloft in the gale in the dark, he could feel the noise and wind and vicious motion sapping the fight out of him. He quailed under the seaâs a...