She must have looked ghostly enough, that broken-down steamer, rolling in that snowstorm—a dark apparition in a world of white snowflakes to the staring eyes of that whaler’s crew. Evidently they didn’t believe in ghosts, for on arrival into port her captain unromantically reported having sighted a disabled steamer in latitude somewhere about 50 degrees S. and a longitude still more uncertain. Other steamers came out to look for her, and ultimately towed her away from the cold edge of the world into a harbour with docks and workshops, where, with many blows of hammers, her pulsating heart of steel was set going again to go forth presently in the renewed pride of its strength, fed on fire and water, breathing black smoke into the air, pulsating, throbbing, shouldering its arrogant way against the great rollers in blind disdain of winds and sea.
The track she had made when drifting while her heart stood still within her iron ribs looked like a tangled thread on the white paper of the chart. It was shown to me by a friend, her second officer. In that surprising tangle there were words in minute letters—“gales,” “thick fog,” “ice”—written by him here and there as memoranda of the weather. She had interminably turned upon her tracks, she had crossed and recrossed her haphazard path till it resembled nothing so much as a puzzling maze of pencilled lines without a meaning. But in that maze there lurked all the romance of the “overdue” and a menacing hint of “missing.”
“We had three weeks of it,” said my friend, “just think of that!”
“How did you feel about it?” I asked.
He waved his hand as much as to say: It’s all in the day’s work. But then, abruptly, as if making up his mind:
“I’ll tell you. Towards the last I used to shut myself up in my berth and cry.”
“Cry?”
“Shed tears,” he explained briefly, and rolled up the chart.
I can answer for it, he was a good man—as good as ever stepped upon a ship’s deck—but he could not bear the feeling of a dead ship under his feet: the sickly, disheartening feeling which the men of some “overdue” ships that come into harbour at last under a jury-rig must have felt, combated, and overcome in the faithful discharge of their duty.
The Grip of the Land
XX
It is difficult for a seaman to believe that his stranded ship does not feel as unhappy at the unnatural predicament of having no water under her keel as he is himself at feeling her stranded.
Stranding is, indeed, the reverse of sinking. The sea does not close upon the waterlogged hull with a sunny ripple, or maybe with the angry rush of a curling wave, erasing her name from the roll of living ships. No. It is as if an invisible hand had been stealthily uplifted from the bottom to catch hold of her keel as it glides through the water.
More than any other event does “stranding” bring to the sailor a sense of utter and dismal failure. There are strandings and strandings, but I am safe to say that 90 percent of them are occasions in which a sailor, without dishonour, may well wish himself dead; and I have no doubt that of those who had the experience of their ship taking the ground, 90 percent did actually for five seconds or so wish themselves dead.
“Taking the ground” is the professional expression for a ship that is stranded in gentle circumstances. But the feeling is more as if the ground had taken hold of her. It is for those on her deck a surprising sensation. It is as if your feet had been caught in an imponderable snare; you feel the balance of your body threatened, and the steady poise of your mind is destroyed at once. This sensation lasts only a second, for even while you stagger something seems to turn over in your head, bringing uppermost the mental exclamation, full of astonishment and dismay, “By Jove! she’s on the ground!”
And that is very terrible. After all, the only mission of a seaman’s calling is to keep ships’ keels off the ground. Thus the moment of her stranding takes away from him every excuse for his continued existence. To keep ships afloat is his business; it is his trust; it is the effective formula of the bottom of all these vague impulses, dreams, and illusions that go to the making up of a boy’s vocation. The grip of the land upon the keel of your ship, even if nothing worse comes of it than the wear and tear of tackle and the loss of time, remains in a seaman’s memory an indelibly fixed taste of disaster.
“Stranded” within the meaning of this paper stands for a more or less excusable mistake. A ship may be “driven ashore” by stress of weather. It is a catastrophe, a defeat. To be “run ashore” has the littleness, poignancy, and bitterness of human error.
XXI
That is why your “strandings” are for the most part so unexpected. In fact, they are all unexpected, except those heralded by some short glimpse of the danger, full of agitation and excitement, like an awakening from a dream of incredible folly.
The land suddenly at night looms up right over your bows, or perhaps the cry of “Broken water ahead!” is raised, and some long mistake, some complicated edifice of self-delusion, overconfidence, and wrong reasoning is brought down in a fatal shock, and the heart-searing experience of your ship’s keel scraping and scrunching over, say, a coral reef. It is a sound, for its size, far more terrific to your soul than that of a world coming violently to an end. But out of that chaos your belief in your own prudence and sagacity reasserts itself. You ask yourself, Where on earth did I get to? How on earth did I get
