Between five and six the cry of ‘All starbowlines ahoyl’ summoned our watch on deck, and immediately all hands were called. A great cloud of a dark slate-colour was driving on us from the south-west; and we did our best to take in sail before we were in the midst of it. We had got the light-sails furled, the courses hauled up, and the top-sail reef-tackles hauled out, and were just mounting the forerigging when the storm struck us. In an instant the sea, which had been comparatively quiet, was running higher and higher; and it became almost as dark as night. The hail and sleet were harder than I had yet felt them, seeming almost to pin us down to the rigging.
It is in the dispassionate statement of plain material facts that Dana achieves his greatness. Dana writes from the remoter, non-emotional centres of being - not from thc passional emotional selœ
So the ship battles on, round Cape Horn, then into quieter seas. The island of Juan Fernandez, Crusoe’s island, rises like a dream from the sea, like a green cloud, and like a ghost Dana watches it, feeling only a faint, ghostly pang of regret for the life that was.
But the strain of the long sea-voyage begins to tell. The sea is a great disintegrative force. Its tonic quality is its disintegra- tive quality. It burns down the tissue, liberates energy. And after a long time, this burning-down is destructive. The psyche becomes destroyed, irritable, frayed, almost dehumanized.
So there is trouble on board the ship, irritating discontent, friction unbearable, and at last a flogging. This flogging rouses Dana for the first and last time to human and ideal passion.
Sam by this time was seized up - that is, placed against the shrouds, with his wrists made fast to the shrouds, his jacket off, and his back exposed. The captain stood on the break of the deck, a few feet from him, and a little raised, so as to have a good swing at him, and held in his hand the bight of a thick, strong rope. Thc officers stood round, and the crew grouped together in the waist. All these preparations made me feel sick and almost faint, angry and excited as I was. A man - a human being made in God’s likeness - fastened up and flogged like a beast! The first and almost uncontrollable impulse was resistance. But what was to be done ? - The time for it had gone by -
So Mr Dana couldn’t act. He could only lean over the side of the ship and spew.
Whatever made him vomit?
Why shall man not be whipped?
As long as man has a bottom, he must surely be whipped. It is as if the Lord intended it so.
Why? For lots of reasons.
Man doth not live by bread alone, to absorb it and to evacuate it.
What is the breath of life ? My dear, it is the strange current of interchange that flows between men and men, and men and women, and men and things. A constant current of interflow, a constant vibrating interchange. That is the breath of life.
And this interflow, this electric vibration is polarized. There is a positive and a negative polarity. This is a law of life, of vitalism.
Only ideas are final, finite, static, and single.
All life-interchange is a polarized communication. A circuit.
There are lots of circuits. Male and female, for example, and master and servant. The idea, the IDEA, that fixed gorgon monster, and the IDEAL, that great stationary engine, these two gods-of-the-machine have been busy destroying all natural reciprocity and natural circuits, for centuries. IDEAS have played the very old Harry with sex relationship, that is, with the great circuit of man and woman. Turned the thing into a wheel on which the human being in both is broken. And the IDEAL has mangled the blood-reciprocity of master and servant into an abstract horror.
Master and servant - or master and man relationship is, essentially, a polarized flow, like love. It is a circuit of vitalism which flows between master and man and forms a very precious nourishment to each, and keeps both in a state of subtle, quivering, vital equilibrium. Deny it as you like, it is so. But once you abstract both master and man, and make them both serve an idea: production, wage, efficiency, and so on: so that each looks on himself as an instrument performing a certain repeated evolution, then you have changed the vital. quivering circuit of master and man into a mechanical machine unison. Just another way of life: or anti-life.
You could never quite do this on a sailing ship. A master had to be master, or it was hell. That is, there had to be this strange interflow of master-and-man, the strange reciprocity of comand and obedience.
The reciprocity of command and obedience is a state of unstable vital equilibrium. Everything vital, or natural, is unstable, thank God.
The ship had been at sea many weeks. A great strain on master and men. An increasing callous indiflerence in the men, an increasing irritability in the master.
And then what?
A storm.
Don’t expect me to say why storms must be. They just are. Storms in the air, storms in the water, storms of thunder, storms of anger. Storms just are.
Storms are a sort of violent readjustment in some polarized flow. You have a polarized circuit, a circuit of unstable equilibrium. The instability increases till there is a crash. Everything seems to break down. Thunder roars, lightning flashes. The master roars, the whip whizzes. The sky sends down sweet rain. The ship knows a new strange stillness, a readjustment, a refinding of equilibrium.
Ask the Lord Almighty why it is so. I don’t know. I know it is so.
But flogging? Why flogging? Why not use reason or take away jam for tea?
Why not? Why not ask the thunder please to abstain from this physical violence of crashing and thumping, please to swale away like thawing snow.
Sometimes the thunder does swale away like thawing snow, and then you hate it. Muggy, sluggish, inert, dreary sky.
Flogging.
You have a Sam, a fat slow fellow, who has got slower and more slovenly as the weeks wear on. You have a master who has grown more irritable in his authority. Till Sam becomes simply wallowing in his slackness, makes your gorge rise. And the master is on red hot iron.
Now these two men, Captain and Sam, are there in a very unsteady equilibrium of command and obedience. A polarized flow. Definitely polarized.
The poles of will are the great ganglia of the voluntary nerve system, located beside the spinal column, in the back. From the poles of will in the backbone of the Captain, to the ganglia of will in the back of the sloucher Sam, runs a frazzled, jagged current, a staggering circuit of vital electricity. This circuit gets one jolt too many, and there is an explosion.
‘Tie up that lousy swine!’ roars the enraged Captain.
And whack! whack! down on the bare back of that sloucher Sam comes the cat.
What does it do? By Jove, it goes like ice-cold water into his spine. Down those lashes runs the current of the Captain’s rage, right into the blood and into the toneless ganglia of Sam’s voluntary system. Crash! Crash! runs the lightning flame, right into the cores of the living nerves.
And the living nerves respond. They start to vibrate. They brace up. The blood begins to go quicker. The nerves begin to recover their vividness. It is their tonic. The man Sam has a new clear day of intelligence, and a smarty back. The Captain has a new relief, a new ease in his authority, and a sore heart.
There is a new equilibrium, and a fresh start. The physical intelligence of a Sam is restored, the turgidity is relieved from the veins of the Captain.
It is a natural form of human coition, interchange.
It is good for Sam to be flogged. It is good, on this occasion, for the Captain to have Sam flogged. I say so. Because they were both in that physical condition.
Spare the rod and spoil the physical child.
Use the rod and spoil the ideal child.
There you are.
Dana, as an idealist, refusing the blood-contact of life, leaned over the side of the ship powerless, and vomited: or wanted to. His solar plexus was getting a bit of its own back. To him, Sam was an ‘ideal’ being, who should have been approached through the mind, the reason, and the spirit. That lump of a Sa
m!
But there was another idealist on board, the seaman John, a Swede. He wasn’t named John for nothing, this Jack-tar of the Logos. John felt himself called upon to play Mediator, Interceder, Saviour, on this occasion. The popular Paraclete.
‘Why are you whipping this man, sir?’
But the Captain had got his dander up. He wasn’t going to have his natural passion judged and interfered with by these long-nosed salvationists Johannuses. So he had nosy John hauled up and whipped as well.
For which I am very glad.
Alas, however, the Captain got the worst of it in the end. He smirks longest who smirks last. The Captain wasn’t wary enough. Natural anger, natural passion has its unremitting enemy in the idealist. And the ship was already tainted with idealism. A good deal more so, apparently, than Herman Melville’s ships were.
Which reminds us that Melville was once going to be flogged. In White Jacket. And he, too, would have taken it as the last insult.
In my opinion there are worse insults than floggings. I would rather be flogged than have most people ‘like’ me.
Melville too had an Interceder: a quiet, self-respecting man, not a saviour. The man spoke in the name of Justice. Melville was to be unjustly whipped. The man spoke honestly and quietly. Not in any salvationist spirit. And the whipping did not take place.
Justice is a great and manly thing. Saviourism is a despicable thing.
Sam was justly whipped. It was a passional justice. But Melville’s whipping would have been a cold, disciplinary injustice. A foul thing. Mechanical justice even is a foul thing. For true justice makes the heart’s fibres quiver. You can’t be cold in a matter of real justice.
Already in those days it was no fun to be a captain. You had to learn already to abstract yourself into a machine-part, exerting machine-control. And it is a good deal bitterer to exert machine-control, selfless, ideal control, than it is to have to obey, mechanically. Because the idealists who mechanically obey almost always hate the man who must give the orders. Their idealism rarely allows them to exonerate the man for the office.
Dana’s captain was one of the real old-fashioned sort. He gave himself away terribly. He should have been more wary, knowing he confronted a shipful of enemies and at least two cold and deadly idealists, who hated all ‘masters’ on principle.
As he went on, his passion increased, and he danced about the deck, calling out as he swung the rope, ‘If you want to know what I flog you for, I’ll tell you. It’s because I like to do it! - Because I like to do it! - It suits me. That’s what I do it for!’
The man writhed under the pain. My blood ran cold, I could look on no longer. Disgusted, sick and horror-stricken, I turned away and leaned over the rail and looked down in the water. A few rapid thoughts of my own situation, and of the prospect of future revenge, crossed my mind, but the falling of the blows, and the cries of the man called me back at once. At length they ceased, and, turning round, I found that the Mate, at a signal from the captain, had cut him down.
After all, it was not so terrible. The captain evidently did not exceed the ordinary measure. Sam got no more than he asked for. It was a natural event. All would have been well, save for the moral verdict. And this came from theoretic idealists like Dana and the seaman John, rather than from the sailors themselves. The sailors understood spontaneous passional morality, not the artificial ethical. They respected the violent readjustments of the naked force, in man as in nature.
The flogging was seldom, if ever, alluded to by us in the fore- castle. If any one was inclined to talk about it, the others, with a delicacy which I hardly expected to find among them, always stop- ped him, or turned the subject.
Two men had been flogged: the second and the elder, John, for interfering and asking the captain why he flogged Sam. It is while flogging John that the captain shouts, ‘If you want to know what I flog you for, I’ll tell you -’
‘But the behaviour of the two men who were flogged,’ Dana continues,
toward one another, showed a delicacy and a sense of honour which would have been worthy of admiration in the highest walks of life. Sam knew that the other had suffered solely on his account, and in all his complaints he said that if he alone had been flogged it would have been nothing, but that he never could see that man without thinking what had been the means of bringing that disgrace upon him; and John never, by word or deed, let anything escape him to remind the other that it was by interfering to save his shipmate that he had suffered.
As a matter of fact, it was John who ought to have been ashamed for bringing confusion and false feeling into a clear issue. Conventional morality apart, John is the reprehensible party, not Sam or the captain. The case was one of passional readjustment, nothing abnormal And who was the sententious Johannus, that he should interfere in this? And if Mr Dana had a weak stomach as well as weak eyes, let him have it. But let this pair of idealists abstain from making all the other men feel uncomfortable and fuzzy about a thing they would have left to its natural course, if they had been allowed. No, your Johannuses and your Danas have to be creating ‘public opinion’, and mugging up the life-issues with their sententiousness. O idealism!
The vessel arrives at the Pacific coast, and the swell of the rollers falls in our blood - the weary coast stretches wonderful, on the brink of the unknown.
Not a human being but ourselves for milesÄthe steep hill rising like a wall, and cutting us off from all the world - but the ‘world of waters’ I separated myself from the rest, and sat down on a rock, just where the sea ran in and formed a fine spouting-horn. Compared with the dull, plain sand-beach of the rest of the coast, this grandeur was as refreshing as a great rock in a weary land. It was almost the first time I had been positively alone.... My better nature returned strong upon me. I experienced a glow of pleasure at finding that what of poetry and romance I had ever had in me had not been entirely deadened in the laborious life I had been lately leading. Nearly an hour did I sit, almost lost in the luxury of this entire new scene of the play in which I was acting, when I was aroused by the distant shouts of my companions.
So Dana sits and Hamletizes by the Pacific - chief actor in the play of his own existence. But in him, self-consciousness is almost nearing the mark of scientific indifference to self.
He gives us a pretty picture of the then wild, unknown bay of San Francisco. - ‘The tide leaving us, we came to anchor near the mouth of the bay, under a high and beautifully sloping hill, upon which herds of hundreds of red deer and the stag with his high-branching antlers were bounding about, looking at us for a moment, and then starting offaffrighted at the noises we made for the purpose of seeing the variety of their beautiful attitudes and motions -’
Think of it now, and the Presidio! The idiotic guns.
Two moments of strong human emotion Dana experiences: one moment of strong but impotent hate for the captain, one strong impulse of pitying love for the Kanaka boy, Hope - a beautiful South Sea Islander sick of a white man’s disease, phthisis or syphilis. Of him Dana writes -
but the other, who was my friend, and Aikane - Hope - was the most dreadful object I had ever seen in my life; his hands looking like claws, a dreadful cough, which seemed to rack his whole shattered system; a hollow, whispering voice, and an entire in- ability to move himself. There he lay, upon a mat on the ground, which was the only floor of the oven, with no medicine, no com- forts, and no one to care for or help him but a few Kanakas, who were willing enough, but could do nothing. The sight of him made me sick and faint. Poor fellow! During the four months that I lived upon the beach we were continually together, both in work and in our excursions in the woods and upon the water. I really felt a strong affection for him, and preferred him to any of my own countrymen there. When I came into the oven he looked at mc, held out his hand and said in a low voice, but with a delightful smile, ‘Aloha, Aikane! Aloha nui!’ I comforted him as wcll as I could, and promised to ask the captain to help him from thc medicine chest.
; We have felt the pulse of hate for the captain - now the pulse of Saviour-like love for the bright-eyed man of the Pacific, a real child of the ocean, full of the mystery-being of that great sea. Hope is for a moment to Dana what Chingachgook is to Cooper - the heart’s brother, the answerer. But only for an ephemeral moment. And even then his love was largely pity, tinged with philanthropy. The inevitable saviourism. The ideal being.
Dana was mad to leave the California coast, to be back in the civilized east. Yet he feels the poignancy of departure when at last the ship draws off. The Pacific is his glamour- world: the eastern States his world of actuality, scientific, materially real. He is a servant of civilization, an idealist, a democrat, a hater of masters, a KNOWER. Conscious and self- conscious, without ever forgetting.
When all sail had been set and the decks cleared up, the California was a speck in the horizon. and the coast lay like a low cloud along the north-east. At sunset they were both out of sight, and we were once more upon the ocean, where sky and water meet.
The description of the voyage home is wonderful. It is as if the sea rose up to prevent the escape of this subtle explorer. Dana seems to pass into another world, another life, not of this earth. There is first the sense of apprehension, then the passing right into the black deeps. Then the waters almost swallow him up, with his triumphant consciousness.
The days became shorter and shorter, the sun running lower in its course each day, and giving less and less heat, and the nights so cold as to prevent our sleeping on deck; the Magellan Clouds in sight of a clear night; the skies looking cold and angry; and at times a long, heavy, ugly sea, setting in from the Southward, told us what we were coming to.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 958