To the Ends of the Earth

by William Golding

  We have had a spell of bad weather—not very bad, but sufficient to keep most of our ladies in their cabins. Mr Talbot keeps his. My servant assures me that the young man is not seasick, yet I have heard strange sounds emanating from behind his locked door. I had the temerity to offer my services and was both disconcerted and concerned to wring from the poor young gentleman the admission that he was wrestling with his soul in prayer! Far, far be it from me to blame him—no, no, I would not do so! But the sounds were those of enthusiasm! I much fear that the young man for all his rank has fallen victim to one of the extremer systems against which our Church has set her face! I must and will help him! But that can only be when he is himself again and moves among us with his customed ease. These attacks of a too passionate devotion are to be feared more than the fevers to which the inhabitants of these climes are subject. He is a layman; and it shall be my pleasant duty to bring him back to that decent moderation in religion which is, if I may coin a phrase, the genius of the Church of England!

  He has reappeared; and avoids me, perhaps in an embarrassment at having been detected at his too protracted devotions; I will let him be for the moment and pray for him while we move day by day, I hope, towards a mutual understanding. I saluted him from far off this morning as he walked on the quarterdeck but he affected to take no notice. Noble young man! He who has been so ready to help others will not deign, on his own behalf, to ask for help!

  This morning in the waist I have been spectator once again of that ceremony which moves me with a mixture of grief and admiration. A barrel is set on the deck. The seamen stand in line and each is given successively a mug of liquid from the barrel which he drains off after exclaiming, “The King! GOD bless him!” I would His Majesty could have seen it. I know of course that the liquid is the devil’s brew and I do not swerve one jot or tittle from my previous opinion that strong drink should be prohibited from use by the lower orders. For sure, ale is enough and too much—but let them have it!

  Yes here, here on the bounding main, under the hot sun and with a whole company of bronzed young fellows bared to the waist—their hands and feet hard with honest and dangerous toil—their stern yet open faces weathered by the storms of every ocean, their luxuriant curls fluttering from their foreheads in the breeze—here, if there was no overthrowing of my opinion, there was at least a modification and mitigation of it. Watching one young fellow in particular, a narrow-waisted, slim-hipped yet broad-shouldered Child of Neptune, I felt that some of what was malignant in the potion was cancelled by where and who was concerned with it. For it was as if these beings, these young men, or some of them at least and one of them in particular, were of the giant breed. I called to mind the legend of Talos, the man of bronze whose artificial frame was filled with liquid fire. It seemed to me that such an evidently fiery liquid as the one (it is rum) which a mistaken benevolence and paternalism provides for the sea-service was the proper ichor (this was the blood of the Grecian Gods, supposedly) for beings of such semi-divinity, of such truly heroic proportions! Here and there among them the marks of the discipline were evident and they bore these parallel scars with indifference and even pride! Some, I verily believe, saw them as marks of distinction! Some, and that not a few, bore on their frames the scars of unquestioned honour—scars of the cutlass, pistol, grape or splinter. None were maimed; or if they were, it was in such a minor degree, a finger, eye or ear perhaps, that the blemish hung on them like a medal. There was one whom I called in my mind my own particular hero! He had nought but four or five white scratches on the left side of his open and amiable countenance as if like Hercules he had struggled with a wild beast! (Hercules, you know, was fabled to have wrestled with the Nemaean Lion.) His feet were bare and his nether limbs—my young hero I refer to, rather than the legendary one! His nether garments clung to his lower limbs as if moulded there. I was much taken with the manly grace with which he tossed off his mug of liquor and returned the empty vessel to the top of the barrel. I had an odd fancy. I remembered to have read somewhere in the history of the union that when Mary, Queen of Scots, first came into her kingdom she was entertained at a feast. It was recorded that her throat was so slender and her skin so white that as she swallowed wine the ruby richness of the liquid was visible through it to the onlookers! This scene had always exercised a powerful influence over my infant spirits! It was only now that I remembered with what childish pleasure I had supposed my future spouse would exhibit some such particular comeliness of person—in addition of course to the more necessary beauties of mind and spirit. But now, with Mr Talbot shy of me, I found myself, in my kingdom of lobby, cabin and waist, unexpectedly dethroned and a new monarch elevated there! For this young man of bronze with his flaming ichor—and as he drank the liquor down it seemed to me that I heard a furnace roar and with my inward eye saw the fire burst forth—it seemed to me with my outer eye that he could be no other than the king! I abdicated freely and yearned to kneel before him. My whole heart went out in a passionate longing to bring this young man to OUR SAVIOUR, first and surely richest fruit of the harvest I am sent forth to garner! After he retired from the barrel, my eye followed him without my volition. But he went where I, alas, could not go. He ran out along that fourth mast laid more nearly horizontal, the bowsprit I mean, with its complication of ropes and tackles and chains and booms and sails. I was reminded of the old oak in which you and I were wont to climb. But he (the king) ran out there or up there and stood at the tip of the very thinnest spar and looked down into the sea. His whole body moved easily to counter our slight motion. Only his shoulder leaned against a rope, so that he lounged as he might against a tree! Then he turned, ran back a few paces and lay down on the surface of the thicker part of the bowsprit as securely as I might in my bed! Surely there is nothing so splendidly free as a young fellow in the branches of one of His Majesty’s travelling trees, as I may call them! Or forests, even! There lay the king, then, crowned with curls—but I grow fanciful.

  *

  We are in the doldrums. Mr Talbot still avoids me. He has been wandering round the ship and descending into her very bowels as if searching for some private place where, perhaps, he may continue his devotions without hindrance. I fear sadly that my approach was untimely and did more damage than good. I pray for him. What can I do more?

  We are motionless. The sea is polished. There is no sky but only a hot whiteness that descends like a curtain on every side, dropping, as it were, even below the horizon and so diminishing the circle of the ocean that is visible to us. The circle itself is of a light and luminescent blue. Now and then some sea creature will shatter the surface and the silence by leaping through it. Yet even when nothing leaps there is a constant shuddering, random twitches and vibrations of the surface, as if the water were not only the home and haunt of all sea creatures but the skin of a living thing, a creature vaster than Leviathan. The heat and dampness combined would be quite inconceivable to one who had never left that pleasant valley which was our home. Our own motionlessness—and this I believe you will not find mentioned in the accounts of sea voyages—has increased the effluvias that rise from the waters immediately round us. Yesterday morning there was a slight breeze but we were soon still again. All our people are silent, so that the striking of the ship’s bell is a loud and startling sound. Today the effluvias became intolerable from the necessary soiling of the water round us. The boats were hoisted out from the boom and the ship towed a little way from the odious place; but now if we do not get any wind it will all be to do again. In my cabin I sit or lie in shirt and breeches and even so find the air hardly to be borne. Our ladies and gentlemen keep their cabin in a like case, lying abed I think, in hope that the weather and the place may pass. Only Mr Talbot roams as if he can find no peace—poor young man! May GOD be with him and keep him! I have approached him once but he bowed slightly and distantly. The time is not yet.

  How next to impossible is the exercise of virtue! It requires a constant watchfulness, constant guard—oh my
dear sister, how much must you and I and every Christian soul rely at every moment on the operation of Grace! There has been an altercation! It was not, as you might expect, among the poor people in the front of the ship but here among the gentlemen, nay, among the very officers themselves!

  It was thus. I was sitting at my writing-flap and recutting a quill when I heard a scuffle outside in the lobby, then voices, soft at first but raised later.

  “You dog, Deverel! I saw you come from the cabin!”

  “What are you about then, Cumbershum, for your part, you rogue!”

  “Give it to me, sir! By G—I will have it!”

  “And unopened at either end—You sly dog, Cumbershum, I’ll read it, I swear I will!”

  The scuffle became noisy. I was in shirt and breeches, my shoes under the bunk, my stockings hung over it, my wig on a convenient nail. The language became so much more blasphemous and filthy that I could not let the occasion pass. Not thinking of my appearance I got up quickly and rushed out of the cabin, to find the two officers struggling violently for possession of a missive. I cried out.

  “Gentlemen! Gentlemen!”

  I seized the nearest to me by the shoulder. They stopped the fight and turned to me.

  “Who the devil is this, Cumbershum?”

  “It’s the parson, I think. Be off, sir, about your own business!”

  “I am about my business, my friends, and exhort you in a spirit of Christian Charity to cease this unseemly behaviour, this unseemly language, and make up your quarrel!”

  Lieutenant Deverel stood looking down at me with his mouth open.

  “Well by thunder!”

  The gentleman addressed as Cumbershum—another lieutenant—stuck his forefinger so violently towards my face that had I not recoiled, it would have entered my eye.

  “Who in the name of all that’s wonderful gave you permission to preach in this ship?”

  “Yes, Cumbershum, you have a point.”

  “Leave this to me, Deverel. Now, parson, if that’s what you are, show us your authority.”

  “Authority?”

  “D—n it man, I mean your commission!”

  “Commission!”

  “Licence they call it, Cumbershum, old fellow, licence to preach. Right parson—show us your licence!”

  I was taken aback, nay, confounded. The truth is, and I record it here for you to pass to any young clergyman about to embark on such a voyage, I had deposited the licence from my Lord Bishop with other private papers—not, as I supposed, needed on the voyage—in my trunk, which had been lowered somewhere into the bowels of the vessel. I attempted to explain this briefly to the officers but Mr Deverel interrupted me.

  “Be off with you, sir, or I shall take you before the captain!”

  I must confess that this threat sent me hurrying back into my cabin with some considerable trepidation. For a moment or two I wondered whether I had not after all succeeded in abating their mutual wrath, for I heard them both laughing loudly as they walked away. But I concluded that such heedless—I will not call them more—such heedless spirits were far more likely to be laughing at the sartorial mistake I had made and the result of the interview with which they had threatened me. It was clear that I had been at fault in allowing myself a public appearance less explicit than that sanctioned by custom and required by decorum. I began hurriedly to dress, not forgetting my bands, though my throat in the heat felt them as an unfortunate constriction. I regretted that my gown and hood were packed or, should I say, stowed away with my other impedimenta. At length, then, clothed in at least some of the visible marks of the dignity and authority of my calling, I issued forth from my cabin. But of course the two lieutenants were nowhere to be seen.

  But already, in this equatorial part of the globe, after being fully dressed for no more than a moment or two I was bathed in perspiration. I walked out into the waist but felt no relief from the heat. I returned to the lobby and my cabin determined to be more comfortable yet not knowing what to do. I could be, without the sartorial adornment of my calling, mistaken for an emigrant! I was debarred from intercourse with the ladies and gentlemen and had been given no opportunity other than that first one of addressing the common people. Yet to endure the heat and moisture in a garb appropriate to the English countryside seemed impossible. On an impulse derived, I fear, less from Christian practice than from my reading of the classical authors, I opened the Sacred Book and before I was well aware of what I was doing I had employed the moment in a kind of Sortes Virgilianae, or consultation of the oracle, a process I had always thought to be questionable even when employed by the holiest servants of the Lord. The words my eyes fell on were II Chronicles viii. 7–8. “The Hittites, and the Amorites, and the Perizzites, and the Hivites, and the Jebusites which were not of Israel”—words which in the next moment I had applied to Captain Anderson and Lieutenants Deverel and Cumbershum, then flung myself on my knees and implored forgiveness!

  I record this trivial offence merely to show the oddities of behaviour, the perplexities of the understanding, in a word, the strangeness of this life in this strange part of the world among strange people and in this strange construction of English oak which both transports and imprisons me! (I am aware, of course, of the amusing “paranomasia” in the word “transport” and hope the perusal of it will afford you some entertainment!)

  To resume. After a period at my devotions I considered what I had better do in order to avoid any future mistake as to my sanctified identity. I divested myself once more of all but shirt and breeches, and thus divested, I employed the small mirror which I have for use when shaving to examine my appearance. This was a process of some difficulty. Do you remember the knothole in the barn through which in our childish way we were wont to keep watch for Jonathan or our poor, sainted mother, or his lordship’s bailiff, Mr Jolly? Do you remember, moreover, how, when we were tired of waiting, we would see by moving our heads how much of the exterior world we could spy through the knot? Then we would pretend to be seized of all we saw, from Seven Acre right up to the top of the hill? In such a manner did I contort myself before the mirror and the mirror before me! But here I am—if indeed this letter should ever be sent—instructing a member of the Fair Sex in the employment of a mirror and the art of, dare I call it, “Self-admiration”? In my own case, of course, I use the word in its original sense of surprise and wonder rather than self-satisfaction! There was much to wonder at in what I saw but little to approve. I had not fully understood before how harshly the sun can deal with the male countenance that is exposed to its more nearly vertical rays.

  My hair, as you know, is of a light but indeterminate hue. I now saw that your cropping of it on the day before our parting—due surely to our mutual distress—had been sadly uneven. This unevenness seems to have been accentuated rather than diminished by the passage of time so that my head presented an appearance not unlike a patch of ill-reaped stubble. Since I had not been able to shave during my first nausea (the word indeed derives from the Greek word for a ship!) and had feared to do so in the later period when the ship was in violent motion—and at last have been dilatory, fearing the pain I should inflict on my sun-scorched skin, the lower part of my face was covered with bristles. They were not long, since my beard is of slow growth—but of varying hue. Between these two crop-yielding areas, as I may call them, of scalp and beard, king Sol had exerted his full sway. What is sometimes called a widow’s peak of rosy skin delineated the exact extent to which my wig had covered my forehead. Below that line the forehead was plum-coloured and in one place burst with the heat. Below that again, my nose and cheeks appeared red as on fire! I saw at once that I had deceived myself entirely if I supposed that appearing in shirt and breeches and in this guise I should exert the authority inhering in my profession. Nay—are these not of all people those who judge a man by his uniform? My “uniform”, as I must in all humility call it, must be sober black with the pure whiteness of bleached linen and bleached hair, the adornments o
f the Spiritual Man. To the officers and people of this ship, a clergyman without his bands and wig would be of no more account than a beggar.

  True, it was the sudden sound of an altercation and the desire to do good that had drawn me forth from my seclusion, but I was to blame. I drew in my breath with something like fear as I envisaged the appearance I must have presented to them—with a bare head, unshaven, sunblotched, unclothed! It was with confusion and shame that I remembered the words addressed to me individually at my ordination—words I must ever hold sacred because of the occasion and the saintly divine who spake them—“Avoid scrupulosity, Colley, and always present a decent appearance.” Was this that I now saw in the mirror of my imagination the figure of a labourer in that country where “the fields are white to harvest”? Among those with whom I now dwell, a respectable appearance is not merely a desideratum but a sine qua non. (I mean, my dear, not merely desirable but necessary.) I determined at once to take more care. When I walked in what I had thought of as my kingdom, I would not only be a man of GOD—I would be seen to be a man of GOD!

  Things are a little better. Lieutenant Summers came and begged the favour of a word with me. I answered him through the door, begging him not to enter as I was not yet prepared in clothes or visage for an interview. He assented, but in a low voice as if afraid that others would hear. He asked my pardon for the fact that there had been no more services in the passenger saloon. He had repeatedly sounded the passengers and had met with indifference. I asked him if he had asked Mr Talbot and he replied after a pause that Mr Talbot had been much occupied with his own affairs. But he, Mr Summers, thought that there might be a chance of what he called a small gathering on the next Sabbath. I found myself declaring through the door with a passion quite unlike my usual even temper—