Spindrift, page 28
Scenarios like these mean lengthy periods of tension, sudden shocks of fear, and instants of high excitement—albeit tempered by the joys and challenges of being at sea—but they do not inflame the blood. There are no mass charges by wild hordes sticking bayonets into fellow humans. There can be pain and suffering, but no vast scenes of carnage. And, ordinarily, there is no call for hatred.
—from A Leaf Upon the Sea: A Small Ship in the Mediterranean, 1941–1943 (1988)
The Sea Is My Enemy
Hugh Garner (1913–1979)
During World War II—from 1939 to 1945—Canada’s navy had to draw on many young and inexperienced personnel. In response to the demands of war the naval force grew from four ships and some nineteen hundred personnel to over four hundred ships and ninety thousand personnel. Under such conditions, recruits unfamiliar with the ways of the sea—and who had perhaps never even seen it before— became professional seamen in astonishingly short order. They had to in order to survive. Wartime service in the Naval Reserve was a rite of passage. In Garner’s novel one such recruit sets off to sea in 1943 aboard a Flower Class corvette on his first tour of convoy duty across the Atlantic.
The pre-dawn air was chill with the wind which swept off the blue-glass ice shelf of Greenland a few hundred miles to the north-west, and the cold black sea was raised into sullen, turgid ridges, its fringe of white petit-point blown away with each gust of wind.
Ordinary Seaman Clark, nineteen years old, Royal Canadian Naval Volunteer Reserve, stepped quickly through the sliding door of the wheel-house, shutting it behind him, and stood in the darkness on the narrow platform staring out at the noisy, heaving sea. He looked up into the darkened sky, catching a glimpse now and again of a patch of star-studded heaven as it dipped and curtsied behind and between the wider ceiling of scudding clouds. The whole cosmos revolved around an axis formed by the jutting bow and fo’castlehead of the small ship, and the whistle of the wind through the struts and halyards accompanied the pirouette of the fading night.
As he stood still, fastening the top toggle of his woolen duffle coat against the wind, he became aware of the dark, dreadful loneliness of the sea. He was suddenly afraid, and he tuned his ears to the more familiar sounds of the ship and his fellows. From below him came the clatter of pans in the galley as the assistant cook, who had been baking his nightly batch of bread, cleaned up before his mate arrived to prepare breakfast. Up ahead the four-inch gun strained at its lashings with every rise and fall of the gun deck, and the shells clanked mournfully in their racks. There was the sound of feet being stamped on the boards above his head as the port look-out changed his position on the wing of the bridge. The noises from aft were swept away with the wind.
The sounds of the ship only accentuated the noisy quietude of the limitless expanse of the sea, so that the boy shivered, and his hands gripped the railing beside him. Suddenly he was afraid of losing his grip on this heaving thing which was his only connection with security, and he feared to be cast away into the sea which hissed and foamed as it reached with white-nailed fingers upon the free-board below.
Standing there he realized that the sea cannot be loved; it is an enemy upon which men sail their puny craft—an alien thing armed with a multitude of claws ready to pull them beneath it with scarcely a ripple or a trace. It is too vast and too black and too uncomprehending to be loved. It gives neither succor nor hope nor life to those who must depend upon it. It is beautiful and terrifying, and gigantic and insatiable; a desert of water over which men travel through necessity.
He no longer thought of submarines and torpedoes, for now his fears were those which have followed men from the dawn of time; the primeval fears of the elements: of wind, of lightning, of the sea.
He strained his eyes aft to try to catch a glimpse of the look-out on the ack-ack platform; to find another human being with whom to share his terror; but the man could not be seen; he was alone. He fought with himself against the dread which rose through his fibres like a scream. With a desperate urgency he stumbled down the steep steps of the ladder, his heavy coat buckling around his thighs and his hands sliding down the wet railings, not allowing himself to look at the water, his eyes fixed on the swiftly falling stern of the ship. Half-way to the bottom his rubber sea-boot slipped from the serrated step, and his hands lost their grip upon the rails. With a soft thud, and an imperceptible swoosh of clothing, he fell the remainder of the way to the steel deck, and lay there, one arm doubled behind him, and his terrified eyes hidden behind their curtained lids. To his unhearing ears came the slap of the stoical sea as the tips of its tentacles caressed him through the drains along the scuppers.
—from Storm Below (1949)
A Memory of the Merchant Marine
Alan Easton (1902–2001)
Having served in both the Merchant Marine and the wartime Canadian navy, Alan Easton well knew the character of seafarers and the challenges they faced. From his own perspective of having commanded warships throughout the Battle of the Atlantic (1939–1945) he ponders the courage of those seamen who manned the cumbersome, often unarmed merchant ships that he had escorted across enemy-infested seas.
I finished this voyage with the sober realization that it was the merchant seamen who took the real onslaught of the enemy at sea. Their ships could hardly fight back against the elusive submarine and, due to their ponderous bulk, could not manoeuvre quickly to avoid their attacker. They always presented the best targets.
The men who lived in these ships could not have been unaware of their vulnerability. They pushed their ships along, never knowing when they would be singled out for extinction. In convoy they had little knowledge of how the enemy was deployed, and not much more when travelling alone. They lived, as it were, on the edge of a volcano. The constant suspense must have been awful.
These men may have tramped from Cape Town to Rio alone and unprotected save for an old heavy gun, crossing an ocean where powerful German surface raiders roamed. Up the Brazilian coast and through the Indies, still alone, to North America, where soon there was to be such devastation that upwards of a hundred ships (half a million tons) a month would be lost. Then in convoy across their familiar Western Ocean where their lives were in constant jeopardy, not only from the enemy but from the perils of the sea. On the coasts of the United Kingdom they would be haunted by torpedo-firing E-boats and hidden mines, and hunted by the bombers of the Luftwaffe who might well bring to an abrupt end, under the very lee of their home port, their ten thousand mile voyage.
In the semi-silence of war few people knew of the colossal tasks these unsung, un-uniformed and unnoticed heroes achieved. If any became known, too often they were overshadowed by the epics of the fighting men who had done no more and probably less. None but their families really knew how dangerous were their missions. If they came home—which 30,000 British merchant sailors failed to do—they soon had to turn again and face the same onerous conditions.
We who served under the White Ensign did not go through the torments they went through, nor did the other fighting services. A merchant seaman could fortify himself with nothing but hope and courage. Most of them must have been very afraid, not for days and nights but for months and years. Who is the greater hero, the man who performs great deeds by swift action against odds which he hardly has time to recognize or greatly fear, or the man who lives for long periods in constant, nagging fear of death, yet has the fortitude and endurance to face it indefinitely and carry on?
There was a motto in my old boyhood training ship: “Quit ye like men, be strong.” It may have helped those who had been weaned to the sea by this foster mother and who could still remember it.
—from 50 North: An Atlantic Battleground (1963)
Finale
George Whalley (1915–1983)
Narratives about war at sea often indulge in a kind of romanticism untenable on land. For in land wars, the debris of mortal combat scars the earth. Not so at sea where the bloody battles between ships on the high seas leaves neither trace of carnage nor sites for national shrines. George Whalley’s poem “Battle Pattern,” of which this excerpt forms part of the seventh and final canto, puts the lie to that notion. Written to mark the sinking of Germany’s battleship Bismarck by Allied forces on 27 May 1941, the poem is marked by its realism and mythic dimension. This reflects Whalley’s own experience of war at sea as a Canadian naval reserve officer.
There is not elegy enough in all
the winds and waves of the world to sing the ships,
to sing the seamen to their rest, down
through the slow shimmering drift of crepuscule,
sinking through emerald green, through opal dimness
to darkness. Not all laving of all the world’s
oceans, loving moonwash of warm
tropic seas can ever heal the hearts
smashed to fragments of desolated darkness.
Sink now, life ended, down through the haunts
of trumpetfish and shark and spermwhale, down
to the still siltless floor of the ocean where
no light sifts or spills through the liquid drifting
of darkness, where no eye sees the delicate
dark-wrought flowers that open to no moon.
—from The Collected Poems of George Whalley (1986)
The old men I saw in my drives around the bay, sitting side-on to their windows, looking out across the water that was often separated from them by nothing more than a stretch of beach, there and not there depending on the tide—I fancied that I understood them now. Each putting-out to sea you could imagine was the start of some journey that, though endless, was not pointless, the point being simply to go and keep on going. They sat, these men, looking out at the sea they were now too old to fish or even venture out onto. But still they were held fast, sea-spellbound.
— Wayne Johnston, from The Colony of Unrequited Dreams (1998)
Chapter X
Portraits
The art of portraiture aims at capturing the defining character of persons, and often the situations in which they find themselves. Whether with deft brush strokes on a broad canvas, in the fine lines of a pencil sketch or in a well-crafted poem, portraiture captures fleeting moments—a gesture, a cast of mind, some deeply personal hint at an inner world. It ponders facial features which, according to convention, lead through the eyes to the soul. There are many faces in the nautical world: the face of “those who go down to the sea in ships,” the face of those they leave behind and the face of the deep itself. Significantly, the tools of literary portraiture—the use of figures of speech, for example—function the same way as the painter’s brush. Here, the sea often emerges as a metaphor for what contemplatives call the interior life. Whether playfully, wistfully or in its darker moods, the sea resonates with the most primal intuitions of the human mind.
I Was Born by the Sea
Una H. Morris MacKinnon (1853–1947)
I was born by the sea!
My cradle song
Was sung by the waves to me,
The old song,
The low song,
The song of the ancient sea;
Over and over they sang to me
Their sweet, soft, drowsy melody;
Sweetly I slept without a fear,
Dear was the song to my infant ear;—
The old song,
The low song,
The song of the ancient sea.
I was born by the sea!
My fairy tales
By each roving wave were told;—
Wild tales,
Weird tales,
Tales of the brave and bold;—
Tales of the seas by winds distressed,
Of coral caves where sailors rest;
Tales of the maids with sea-green hair,
Singing the songs that lured them there.
Wild tales,
Weird tales,
Tales of the brave and bold.
—from The Tides of the Missiquash (1928)
Old Slocum
Pierre Berton (1920–2004)
Attracted to the sea and seafaring very early in life, the legendary Joshua Slocum was born on 20 February 1844 in Annapolis County, Nova Scotia. Gaining experience in a range of vessels from cabin-boy on a fishing schooner to captain of a commercial freighter, he sailed what were then known as the Seven Seas. At the age of fifty-four he became the first to circumnavigate the world alone. After restoring the once derelict 37-foot yawl Spray, he had departed Nova Scotia in July 1898. Then, in November 1909, he set sail once again on one of his regular winter cruises and was lost at sea.
Old Slocum sits hidden in his book-lined cabin aboard the Spray, totally alone, as he has been since he departed Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, the previous July. Old? Actually he is fifty-two. It is just that his face is leathered by the sea and the winds—the skin nut brown and crinkled, the chin and ears a little grizzled—that his hands are gnarled and knobby, that his body is all bone and muscle, and that he has already lived a lifetime and more. Supple as a bobcat, agile as a monkey, he is the most experienced saltwater man of his age, but also an anachronism—a committed sailor in a world that has done with sail. The days of the clippers have ended. The bustling ports of Saint John, Lunenburg and Halifax have wound down. The big rafts of squared timbers have all but vanished from the Ottawa River and life is beginning to speed up …
He is acutely aware of being alone—alone with the vastness of the horizons, the play of the winds, the wells and currents of the sea, the moving sun and the wheeling stars. The very coral reefs, he will write, keep him company. His living companions are the flying fish that slap onto the glistening deck each night, the whales that cruise majestically past, the sharks, whom he calls “the tigers of the sea,” and the birds: the men o’war soaring high above him, the red-billed tropic birds wheeling and arcing in the sky, the gulls and boobies screeching in his wake and settling on his mast.
With the sun rising astern and the Southern Cross abeam every night, he sprawls out in his cabin (for the Spray, which he has fashioned with his own hands, miraculously steers herself), reading his way through his library (Lamb, Addison, Gibbon, Coleridge, Cervantes, Darwin, Burns, Longfellow and his two greatest favourites, Robert Louis Stevenson and Mark Twain), poking about in his galley (trying his hand at fish stew and hot biscuits to lighten his regular diet of potatoes and salt cod) and occasionally (very occasionally) digging out his sextant to check his latitude.
Carried forward as if on a vast, mysterious stream, he is at one with his surroundings, feeling “the buoyancy of His hand who made all the worlds”—Old Slocum, veteran of a hundred sea adventures, survivor of a dozen murderous encounters, master of the ocean’s finest sailing vessels (gone, now, every last one of them, sunk, beached, stove in, ravished, abandoned to the rot); Old Slocum on the greatest adventure of all, an adventure no one else has dared; Old Slocum, owner, master, mate and crew of a cockleshell, sailing all by himself around the world. Forty-six thousand miles. Three full years. Another lifetime …
So here he is, all alone as he prefers to be—Joshua Slocum, a Bay of Fundy boy from Annapolis County, Nova Scotia, born in 1844 into the age of the clipper ships: a seaman at sixteen, a first mate at eighteen, master of his own ship at twenty-five and at thirty-seven, captain of the Northern Light, the finest sailing vessel afloat. Joshua Slocum, master mariner, washed up at fifty, stubbornly refusing to come to any accommodation with steam power or iron hulls, preferring to work as a carpenter in a shipyard but forced out of that, too, for want of a fifty-dollar union fee. Joshua Slocum, picking up odd jobs on Boston harbour boats and hating it, dreaming of the great days of canvas, when he was king of the ocean, dreaming and hating his work until, on one black day, an entire load of coal mixed with dirt (“Cape Horn berries” they call it) half-buries him. In that moment, Slocum, casting his mind back to the Northern Light (two thousand tons, three decks, 233 feet long, full-rigged), can stand it no more. He quits his job and determines to return to the sea. He will make the longest possible voyage in the smallest possible craft and he will do it all alone.
—from My Country: The Remarkable Past (1976)
Charlottetown Harbour
Milton Acorn (1923–1986)
An old docker with gutted cheeks
time arrested in the used-up-knuckled hands
crossed on his lap, sits
in a spell of the glinting water.
He dreams of times in the cider sunlight
when masts stood up like stubble;
but now a gull cries, lights
flounces its wings ornately, folds them
and the waves slop among the weed-grown piles.
—from In a Springtime Instant: Selected Poems (1975)
Eastern Shore
Charles Bruce (1906–1971)
He stands and walks as if his knees were tensed
To a pitching dory. When he looks far off
You think of trawl-kegs rolling in the trough
Of swaying waves. He wears a cap against
The sun on water, but his face is brown
As an old mainsail, from the eyebrows down.
