I have left to the last a description of a young gentleman whom I trust and pray will become my friend as the voyage advances. He is a member of the aristocracy, with all the consideration and nobility of bearing that such birth implies. I have made so bold as to salute him on a number of occasions and he has responded graciously. His example may do much among the other passengers.
This morning I have been out on deck again. A breeze had sprung up during the night and helped us on our way but now it has fallen calm again. Our sails hang down and there is a vaporous dimness everywhere, even at noon. Once more and with that same terrifying instantaneity came flashes of lightning in the mist that were awful in their fury! I fled to my cabin with such a sense of our peril from these warring elements, such a return of my sense of our suspension over this liquid profundity, that I could scarce get my hands together in prayer. However, little by little I came to myself and to peace though all outside was turmoil. I reminded myself, as I should have done before, that one good soul, one good deed, good thought, and more, one touch of Heaven’s Grace was greater than all these boundless miles of rolling vapour and wetness, this intimidating vastness, this louring majesty! Indeed, I thought, though with some hesitation, that perhaps bad men in their ignorant deaths may find here the awfulness in which they must dwell by reason of their depravity. You see, my dear sister, that the strangeness of our surroundings, the weakness consequent on my prolonged nausea and a natural diffidence that has led me too readily to shrink into my shell has produced in me something not unlike a temporary disordering of the intellects! I found myself thinking of a seabird crying as one of those lost souls to whom I have alluded! I thanked GOD humbly that I had been allowed to detect this fantasy in myself before it became a belief.
I have roused myself from my lethargy. I have seen at least one possible reason for the indifference with which I feel myself treated. I have not made myself known to our captain and this may well have been thought a slight upon him! I am determined to undo this misapprehension as soon as possible. I shall approach him and express my sincere regret for the lack of Sabbath observance that my indisposition has occasioned in the ship, for she carries no chaplain. I must and will eradicate from my mind the ungenerous suspicion that on reaching or joining the ship I received less courtesy from the officers than is due to my cloth. Our Stout-hearted Defenders cannot, I am sure, be of such a sort. I will walk a little on deck now in preparation before readying myself to visit the captain. You remember my old diffidence at approaching the face of Authority and will feel for me!
I have been into the waist again and spoken once more with our sailing master. He was standing on the left-hand side of the vessel and staring with his particular intentness at the horizon; or rather, where the horizon ought to have been.
“Good morning, Mr Smiles! I should be happier if this vapour were to clear away!”
He smiled at me with that same mysterious remoteness.
“Very well, sir. I will see what can be done.”
I laughed at the quip. His good humour restored me completely to myself. So that I might exorcise those curious feelings of the strangeness of the world I went to the side of the vessel and leaned against the railings (the bulwarks as they are called) and looked down where the timbers of our enormous vessel bulge out past her closed gunports. Her slight progress made a tiny ripple in that sea which I made myself inspect coldly, as it were. My sense of its depth—but how am I to say this? I have seen many a millpond or corner of a river seem as deep! Nor was there a spot or speck in it where our ship divided it, a closing furrow in the poet Homer’s “Unfurrowed ocean”. Yet I found myself facing a new puzzle—and one that would not have presented itself to the poet! (You must know that Homer is commonly supposed to have been blind.) How then can water added to water reproduce an opacity? What impediment to the vision can colourlessness and transparency spread before us? Do we not see clear through glass or diamond or crystal? Do we not see the sun and moon and those fainter luminaries (I mean the stars) through unmeasured heights of pendant atmosphere? Yet here, what was glittering and black at night, grey under the racing clouds of awful tempest, now began little by little to turn blue and green under the sun that at last broke through the vapour!
Why should I, a cleric, a man of GOD, one acquainted with the robust if mistaken intellects of this and the preceding century and able to see them for what they are—why, I say, should the material nature of the globe so interest, so trouble and excite me? They that go down to the sea in ships! I cannot think of our Dear Country without finding myself looking not over the horizon (in my imagination, of course) but trying to calculate that segment of water and earth and terrible deep rock that I must suppose myself to stare through in order to look in your direction and that of our—let me say our—village! I must ask Mr Smiles, who will be well enough acquainted with the angles and appropriate mathematics of the case, as to the precise number of degrees it is necessary to look beneath the horizon! How immeasurably strange it will be at the Antipodes to stare (near enough I think) at the buckles of my shoes and suppose you—forgive me, I am off in a fantasy again! Do but think that there the very stars will be unfamiliar and the moon stood on her head!
Enough of fantasy! I will go now and make myself known to our captain! Perhaps I may have some opportunity of entertaining him with the idle fancies I have alluded to above.
I have approached Captain Anderson and will narrate the plain facts to you if I can. My fingers are almost nerveless and will scarcely allow me to hold the pen. You may deduce that from the quality of this handwriting.
Well then, I attended to my clothes with more than usual care, came out of my cabin and ascended the flights of stairs to that highest deck where the captain commonly stations himself. At the front end of this deck and rather below it are the wheel and compass. Captain Anderson and the first lieutenant, Mr Summers, were staring together at the compass. I saw the moment was unpropitious and waited for a while. At last the two gentlemen finished their conversation. The captain turned away and walked to the very back end of the vessel and I followed him, thinking this my opportunity. But no sooner had he reached the rail at the back than he turned round again. As I was following closely I had to leap sideways in what must have appeared a manner hardly consonant with the dignity of my sacred office. Scarcely had I recovered my balance when he growled at me as if I had been at fault rather than he. I uttered a word or two of introduction which he dismissed with a grunt. He then made a remark which he did not trouble to modify with any show of civility.
“Passengers come to the quarterdeck by invitation. I am not accustomed to these interruptions in my walk, sir. Go forrard if you please and keep to looard.”
“Looard, captain?”
I found myself drawn forcibly sideways. A young gentleman was pulling me to the wheel whence he led me—I complying—to the opposite side of the ship to where Captain Anderson was. He positively hissed in my ear. That side of the deck, whichever it may be, from which the wind blows is reserved to the captain. I had therefore made a mistake but could not see how I was at fault but by an ignorance natural in a gentleman who had never been at sea before. Yet I am deeply suspicious that the surliness of the captain towards me is not to be explained so readily. Is it perhaps sectarianism? If so, as a humble servant of the Church of England—the Catholic Church of England—which spreads its arms so wide in the charitable embrace of sinners, I cannot but deplore such divisive stubbornness! Or if it is not sectarianism but a social contempt, the situation is as serious—nay, almost as serious! I am a clergyman, bound for an honourable if humble situation at the Antipodes. The captain has no more business to look big on me—and indeed less business—than the canons of the Close or those clergy I have met twice at my Lord Bishop’s table! I have determined therefore to emerge more frequently from my obscurity and exhibit my cloth to this gentleman and the passengers in general so that even if they do not respect me they may respect it! I may surely hope for
some support from the young gentleman, Mr Edmund Talbot, from Miss Brocklebank and Miss Granham—It is evident I must return to the captain, offer him my sincere apologies for my inadvertent trespass, then raise the question of Sabbath Observance. I would beg to offer Communion to the ladies and gentlemen—and of course to the common people who should desire it. There is, I fear, only too plainly room for much improvement in the conduct of affairs aboard the vessel. There is (for example) a daily ceremony of which I had heard and would now wish to prevent—for you know how paternally severe my Lord Bishop has been in his condemnation of drunkenness among the lower orders! Yet here it is only too true! The people are indeed given strong drink regularly! A further reason for instituting worship must be the opportunities it will afford for animadverting on the subject! I shall return to the captain and proceed by a process of mollification. I must indeed be all things to all men.
I have attempted to be so and have failed abjectly, humiliatingly. It was, as I wrote before, in my mind to ascend to the captain’s deck, apologize for my previous trespass, beg his permission to use it and then raise the question of regular worship. I can scarcely bring myself to recount the truly awful scene that followed on my well-meant attempt to bring myself to the familiar notice of the officers and gentlemen. As soon as I had written the foregoing paragraph I went up to the lower part of the quarterdeck where one of the lieutenants stood by the two men at the wheel. I lifted my hat to him and made an amiable comment.
“We are now in finer weather, sir.”
The lieutenant ignored me. But this was not the worst of it. There came a kind of growling roar from the back rail of the ship.
“Mr Colley! Mr Colley! Come here, sir!”
This was not the kind of invitation I had looked for. I liked neither the tone nor the words. But they were nothing to what followed as I approached the captain.
“Mr Colley! Do you wish to subvert all my officers?”
“Subvert, sir?”
“It was my word, sir!”
“There is some mistake—”
“It is yours then, sir. Are you aware of the powers of a captain in his own ship?”
“They are rightly extensive. But as an ordained minister—”
“You are a passenger, sir, neither more nor less. What is more, you are not behaving as decent as the rest—”
“Sir!”
“You are a nuisance, sir. You was put aboard this ship without a note to me. There is more courtesy shown me about a bale or a keg, sir. Then I did you the credit to suppose you could read—”
“Read, Captain Anderson? Of course I can read!”
“But despite my plainly written orders, no sooner had you recovered from your sickness than you have twice approached and exasperated my officers—”
“I know nothing of this, have read nothing—”
“They are my Standing Orders, sir, a paper prominently displayed near your quarters and those of the other passengers.”
“My attention was not drawn—”
“Stuff and nonsense, sir. You have a servant and the orders are there.”
“My attention—”
“Your ignorance is no excuse. If you wish to have the same freedom as the other passengers enjoy in the after part of the vessel—or do you wish not to live among ladies and gentlemen, sir? Go—examine the paper!”
“It is my right—”
“Read it, sir. And when you have read it, get it by heart.”
“How, sir! Will you treat me like a schoolboy?”
“I will treat you like a schoolboy if I choose, sir, or I will put you in irons if I choose or have you flogged at the gratings if I choose or have you hanged at the yardarm if I choose—”
“Sir! Sir!”
“Do you doubt my authority?”
I saw it all now. Like my poor young friend Josh—you remember Josh—Captain Anderson was mad. Josh was always well enough in his wits except when frogs were in question. Then his mania was clear for all to hear, and later, alas, for all to see. Now here was Captain Anderson, well enough for the most part, but by some unfortunate chance fixing on me in his mania for an object to be humiliated—as indeed I was. I could do nothing but humour him for there was, mad or no, that in his enraged demeanour which convinced me he was capable of carrying out at least some of his threats. I answered him as lightly as possible but in a voice, I fear, sadly tremulous.
“I will indulge you in this, Captain Anderson.”
“You will carry out my orders.”
I turned away and withdrew silently. Directly I was out of his presence I found my body bathed in perspiration yet strangely cold, though my face, by some contrast, was as strangely hot. I discovered in myself a deep unwillingness to meet any eye, any face. As for my own eyes—I was weeping! I wish I could say they were tears of manly wrath but the truth is they were tears of shame. On shore a man is punished at the last by the Crown. At sea the man is punished by the captain who is visibly present as the Crown is not. At sea a person’s manhood suffers. It is a kind of contest—is that not strange? So that men—but I wander in my narrative. Suffice it to say that I found, nay, groped my way back to the neighbourhood of my cabin. When my eyes had cleared and I had come to myself a little I searched for the captain’s written Orders. They were indeed displayed on a wall near the cabins! Now I did remember too that during the convulsions of my sickness Phillips had talked to me about Orders and even the captain’s Orders; but only those who have suffered as I can understand how slight an impression the words had made on my fainting spirits. But here they were. It was unfortunate, to say the least. I had, by the most severe standards, been remiss. The Orders were displayed in a case. The glass was somewhat blurred on the inside by a condensation of atmospheric water. But I was able to read the writing, the material part of which I copy here.
Passengers are in no case to speak to officers who are executing some duty about the ship. In no case are they to address the officer of the watch during his hours of duty unless expressly enjoined to do so by him.
I saw now what a hideous situation I was in. The officer of the watch, I reasoned, must have been the first lieutenant, who had been with the captain, and at my second attempt the lieutenant who had stood by the men at the wheel. My fault was quite inadvertent but none the less real. Even though the manner of Captain Anderson to me had not been and perhaps never would be that of one gentleman to another, yet some form of apology was due to him and through him to those other officers whom I might have hindered in the execution of their duty. Then too, forbearance must be in the very nature of my calling. I therefore easily and quickly committed the essential words to memory and returned at once to the raised decks which are included in the seaman’s term “Quarterdeck”. The wind was increased somewhat. Captain Anderson paced up and down the side, Lieutenant Summers talked to another lieutenant by the wheel, where two of the ship’s people guided our huge vessel creaming over the billows. Mr Summers pointed to some rope or other in the vast complication of the rigging. A young gentleman who stood behind the lieutenants touched his hat and skipped nimbly down the stairs by which I had ascended. I approached the captain’s back and waited for him to turn.
Captain Anderson walked through me!
I could almost wish that he had in truth done so—yet the hyperbole is not inapt. He must have been very deep in thought. He struck me on the shoulder with his swinging arm and then his chest struck me in the face so that I went reeling and ended by measuring my length on the white-scrubbed planking of the deck!
I got my breath back with difficulty. My head was resounding from a concussive encounter with the wood. Indeed, for a moment it appeared that not one but two captains were staring down at me. It was some time before I realized that I was being addressed.
“Get up, sir! Get up at once! Is there no end to your impertinent folly?”
I was scrabbling on the deck for my hat and wig. I had little enough breath for a rejoinder.
“Captain And
erson—you asked me—”
“I asked nothing of you, sir. I gave you an order.”
“My apology—”
“I did not ask for an apology. We are not on land but at sea. Your apology is a matter of indifference to me—”
Rites of Passage Page 16