To the Ends of the Earth

by William Golding

*

  Next day.

  I am indeed stronger and more able to eat. Phillips says that soon all will be well with me. Yet the weather is somewhat changed. Where yesterday there was a blueness and brightness, there is today little or no wind and the sea is covered with a white haze. The bowsprit—which in earlier days had brought on attack after attack of nausea if I was so rash as to fix my attention on it—stands still. Indeed, the aspect of our little world has changed at least three times since our Dear Country sank—nay, appeared to sink—into the waves! Where, I ask myself, are the woods and fertile fields, the flowers, the grey stone church in which you and I have worshipped all our lives, that churchyard in which our dear parents—nay, the earthly remains of our dear parents, who have surely received their reward in heaven—where, I ask, are all the familiar scenes that were for both of us the substance of our lives? The human mind is inadequate to such a situation. I tell myself there is some material reality which joins the place where I am to the place where I was, even as a road joins Upper and Nether Compton. The intellect assents but the heart can find no certainty in it. In reproof I tell myself that OUR LORD is here as much as there; or rather that here and there may be the same place in HIS EYES!

  I have been on deck again. The white mist seemed denser, yet hot. Our people are dimly to be seen. The ship is utterly stopped, her sails hanging down. My footsteps sounded unnaturally loud and I did not care to hear them. I saw no passengers about the deck. There is no creak from all our wood and when I ventured to look over the side I saw not a ripple, not a bubble in the water.

  *

  Well, I am myself again—but only just!

  I had not been out in the hot vapour for more than a few minutes when a thunderbolt of blinding white dropped out of the mist on our right hand and struck into the sea. The clap came with the sight and left my ears ringing. Before I had time to turn and run, more claps came one on the other and rain fell—I had almost said in rivers! But truly it seemed they were the waters of the earth! Huge drops leapt back a yard off the deck. Between where I had stood by the rail and the lobby was but a few yards, yet I was drenched before I got under cover. I disrobed as far as decency permits, then sat at this letter but not a little shaken. For the last quarter of an hour—would that I had a timepiece!—the awful bolts have dropped and the rain cascaded.

  Now the storm is grumbling away into the distance. The sun is lighting what it can reach of our lobby. A light breeze has set us groaning, washing and bubbling on our way. I say the sun has appeared; but only to set.

  What has remained with me apart from a lively memory of my apprehensions is not only a sense of HIS AWFULNESS and a sense of the majesty of HIS creation. It is a sense of the splendour of our vessel rather than her triviality and minuteness! It is as if I think of her as a separate world, a universe in little in which we must pass our lives and receive our reward or punishment. I trust the thought is not impious! It is a strange thought and a strong one!

  It is with me still for, the breeze dying away, I ventured forth again. It is night now. I cannot tell you how high against the stars her great masts seem, how huge yet airy her sails, nor how far down from her deck the night-glittering surface of the waters. I remained motionless by the rail for I know not how long. While I was yet there, the last disturbance left by the breeze passed away so that the glitter, that image of the starry heavens, gave place to a flatness and blackness, a nothing! All was mystery. It terrified me and I turned away to find myself staring into the half-seen face of Mr Smiles, the sailing master. Phillips tells me that Mr Smiles, under the captain, is responsible for the navigation of our vessel.

  “Mr Smiles—tell me how deep these waters are!”

  He is a strange man, as I know already. He is given to long thought, constant observation. He is aptly named, too, for he has a kind of smiling remoteness which sets him apart from his fellow men.

  “Who can say, Mr Colley?”

  I laughed uneasily. He came closer and peered into my face. He is smaller even than I, and you know I am by no means a tall man.

  “These waters may be more than a mile deep—two miles—who can say? We might sound at such a depth but commonly we do not. There is not the necessity.”

  “More than a mile!”

  I was almost overcome with faintness. Here we are, suspended between the land below the waters and the sky like a nut on a branch or a leaf on a pond! I cannot convey to you, my dear sister, my sense of horror, or shall I say, my sense of our being living souls in this place where surely, I thought, no man ought to be!

  *

  I wrote that last night by the light of a most expensive candle. You know how frugal I must be. Yet I am forced in on myself and must be indulged in a light if nothing else. It is in circumstances such as these present that a man (even if he make the fullest use of the consolations of religion that are available to his individual nature), that a man, I say, requires human companionship. Yet the ladies and gentlemen at this end of the ship do not respond with any cheerful alacrity to my greetings. I had thought at first that they were, as the saying is, “shy of a parson”. I pressed Phillips again and again as to the meaning of this. Perhaps I should not have done so! He need not be privy to social divisions that are no concern of his. But he did mutter it was thought among the common people that a parson in a ship was like a woman in a fishing boat—a kind of natural bringer of bad luck. This low and reprehensible superstition cannot apply to our ladies and gentlemen. It is no kind of explanation. It seemed to me yesterday that I might have a clue as to their indefinable indifference to me. We have with us the celebrated, or let me say, the notorious free thinker, Mr Prettiman, that friend of Republicans and Jacobins! He is regarded by most, I think, with dislike. He is short and stocky. He has a bald head surrounded by a wild halo—dear me, how unfortunate my choice of words has been—a wild fringe of brown hair that grows from beneath his ears and round the back of his neck. He is a man of violent and eccentric movements that spring, we must suppose, from some well of his indignations. Our young ladies avoid him and the only one who will give him countenance is a Miss Granham, a lady of sufficient years and, I am sure, firmness of principle to afford her security even in the heat of his opinions. There is also a young lady, a Miss Brocklebank, of outstanding beauty, of whom—I say no more or you will think me arch. I believe she, at least, does not look on your brother unkindly! But she is much occupied with the indisposition of her mother, who suffers even more than I from mal de mer.

  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!”