The Last Ship (7 page)

“Grapnels: They’ll make all the difference,” the gunner’s mate was going on. “Fetched me up when I saw how much like they are to what our mules used to pull.”

“Where do we get the mules, Delaney?” I knew of course. I wanted to hear him say it, and, more important, how he was working it out.

He looked up, his eyes moving across the decks at some of the crew engaged in the work of the ship.

“Why, the men, naturally, Captain,” he said, as if I were a terribly ignorant person in these agricultural matters, a judgment which would not have been far off the mark. “Men like Preston. He may even be stronger’n a mule. Ship’s lines rigged from the grapnels, hitched around a man’s waist, shoulders. I been studying on it; begun a mule list already,” he said soberly. “Besides grapnels . . . we got some
tools,
Captain. Like this here.”

He pulled it from somewhere under him. Earth clung also to the blade.

“We got thirty-five of these entrenching tools.” These were meant for digging protective cover against people eager to harm you; by, for example, a trapped shore party; again never used. “Short handles. Other’n that, good as any shovel—or hoe. A man would just have to bend down more. But for stoop labor a short handle’s even better . . .”

The gunner’s mate’s bright-voiced zeal kept coming at me, bringing something like an exhilaration; outsized perhaps; almost certainly not that justified. But we had known so little of its portion of late that I let it flood in. He was going on. “. . . I thought I’d try in small patches, Captain. Everything we got plantings for in the greenhouse. See what takes. Then go for them . . .”

“Grapnels,” I said. “Entrenching tools. Beating swords into plowshares, Delaney?”

“Aye, sir. Come to think of it. And spears into pruninghooks,” the gunner said quietly, a touch of a smile. “Isaiah 2:4, sir.”

“You know your Bible, Gunner.”

“The Bible’s mighty big in the Ozarks, Captain.”

It was the favorable facts, of course, an edge in our favor or at least the odds made more even, suddenly proffered, since on nothing else can decision be based. But as much, too, was the belief in what such men could do. I felt an immense surge in me, the greatest in time remembered. I looked silently at Thurlow, at Silva, at Delaney. Then stood up, they with me. As one we turned and gazed across the lagoon at the island, as one followed down it until our eyes came to rest on the plateau which rose high above the sea on its southerly end; stopped there awhile, eyes fixed profoundly on it, as if in some final assessment; the island, hushed across the blue water, radiant in its greenness, seeming to await our decision as to whether we proposed to take it on. I looked at the boatswain’s mate then the gunner’s mate. Thought suddenly, wryly: now Silva the fisherman, Delaney the farmer.

Then let’s start,” I said quietly. “Tomorrow.”

 *  *  * 

As an afterthought I found Signalman Bixby and consulted her about her two goats. She also had had another look at the island.

“Best thing would be just to turn them loose over there for the time being,” she said.

“You mean they can take care of themselves?” I said.

She looked at me with the unuttered expression of how little I knew about goats.

“Once they get ashore, Captain, it’s the island that’d better watch out.”

Somehow this seemed a further reassurance of the island’s fecundity.

III: Night

I went out on deck. The sun sat, in immense fieriness, just above the horizon, the sea, glittering in great swatches of phosphorescent white, waiting to receive it. Then the blazing ball dived and was gone, swallowed in one big gulp by the hungry waters. Amazing how fast, once it got near it, the sun in these latitudes hastened into the sea. It was as though in such burning parallels it was anxious to take a dip and cool off, to wash down before showing itself again to us, pristine, fresh, at tomorrow’s dawn. And amazing how, once that happened, darkness, real darkness came on so swiftly with hardly any twilight at all. Though in truth there was no mystery to it. It means you are near the equator where the sun’s rays, falling more perpendicularly, bring on quicker real night. Only the sea, stretching before me to all horizons and beyond, seemed eternal, and somehow never more so than at this time between last light and true darkness when, having received the sun into its depths, it waits in majestic certainty the coming of the stars.

The ship rested in utter immobility, swinging not at all on her anchor, the air unstirred by the slightest breeze, the sea herself asleep. I stood aft by the lifeline in the great solitude and watched them as they came on in a rush, the constellations, old friends, never-failing guides of seamen, rendering themselves into their ancient choreography until the heavens stood filled with their numbers; studying, by habit, their arrangements I knew as a boy knows his school copybook, checking them out, as if to make certain they were where they were supposed to be. Red Antares, yellow Carina, on station, radiant in their assigned positions; others I knew by name, for over long years they had guided me across many seas. Tonight they seemed to flicker and preen themselves in an exceptionally dazzling manner as though in a personal reassurance, signaling zealously to me as clearly as a signalman’s blinker light, as if saying that in the dark loneliness, in the absolute silence which seemed to bring the load of oppressions pressing down on me as of some unbearable weight, I still had old and steadfast friends.

My eyes followed them down the sky and touched the top of the forward then the mainmast and moving, sought out our multiple articulation with the outside world: the top-hat antenna UHF, the two whip-antennas, the smaller VHF and the longest range of all, the big-whip HF, lingering there a moment; proceeded to the corresponding antennas for SATNAV, SATCOM, ESM and finally the radar antenna in its slow ghostly orbit; all unceasingly, almost ravenously, seeking some signature from beyond, some mute hail of life appearing as a green blip on a dark screen, a faint sound in a sailor’s ear; for some response, almost any would do. Joining these profound devices in their mission, I scanned the far waters as though expecting something actually visible to the human eye to appear there, an apparition flung forth from the horizon’s distant starlit curve. But nothing save our solitary ship broke the ocean vastness.

Gazing across it I thought how, far back as I could remember, to boyhood, I had wanted it. The sea, for herself, and to find what lay beyond her horizons, knowing full well that one never found it, that beyond each waited yet another horizon that would keep beckoning me. But that was the greatest summons of all; I would never run out of horizons to go to. Many who hear that call simply wish to leave behind the everlasting and immutable messinesses and clutter of the shore life. For these a wise Providence has provided the sea; otherwise I hardly know what would become of them. Even then I felt that life on the oceans was the only life worth living, the sea seeming to me, even at the earliest age—that surely but sensed dimly then, certainly put in no such grandiose terms; looking back I could but see the fledgling shoots for present, substantiated, full-grown certainty—to possess a purity, a simple straightforwardness, a rectitude, a scrupulousness, yes, a clear aristocracy, that stood in contradiction to the unnumbered corruptions of the churlish and plebeian land and the land life, with all its hustling, its tedious and incessant hype, its seemingly essential duplicities and deviousness, its insect busyness, its insatiable avarice, all in zealous pursuit of goals I did not judge worth having if, when, attained. I never hesitated and was off at the first chance, never looking back. Nothing that had happened since had shown wrong these early glimmerings, in any way of substance, any that mattered. That rare case perhaps where adult fact verifies boyish imagining. On present knowledge I would add this: The real call of the sea is in the life of the mind. I find myself unable to explain this. Perhaps it is that the mind, finding itself emptied of the unceasing flurry and enterprise, the all-devouring encumbrances of the shore, is simply rendered uncluttered and left free and pristine to explore, or merely to rest. The thoughts that the mind then engages may or may not be profound. The point is not to claim for sailors the musings of philosophers—the intelligences of seamen, as with other mortals, varies from the rudimentary to the exalted—rather it is to speculate that the mind is somehow rendered uncrippled, on its way to becoming healed, when the land is left behind and one is enclosed, on all sides, only by the immense and unfettered sea. From then on, of course, it is up to the individual man how he chooses to fill the space thus left empty. But perhaps this fact has to do with that other one: No place so surely brings self-discovery as a life at sea; so inescapably reveals to himself, and to others, what a man is made of.

And from the beginning also, the sweetest and most fervent of those longings had been to hold command of some ship that sailed the great waters, and now I had reached that pinnacle. In inner satisfaction, in the unqualified knowledge that this was right for me, that anything else would have been so wrong as to have tossed life away, it had all come out true as the long look ahead had envisioned it to be. I had liked commanding a ship. I was qualified for it. I was a good mariner. I knew the sea and her eternal inconstancy perhaps as well as a man ever can; that is to say, I was forever learning new things about her, with eagerness voracious and undimmed. I knew the ship on which I stood. I felt I knew my ship’s company as only one can who wishes above all to protect them, to give them a sense of security, to care for them. Knew, I felt, when to be gentle with men, when to come down hard; in short, to be a ship’s captain. Shipmates we were: In all the lexicon of the sea there is no word so sublime, so full of meaning. I do not believe there is any closer, more committed human relationship to be found on earth. The sea, the ship, the ship’s company: They were all, they were one, and embraced in its bosom, I stood as fulfilled in that unity as it seemed to me a man could be. All of this surely enhanced by a particularized love for the
Nathan James
herself. I was a plank-owner, present during her building stage in the Litton/Ingalls Shipbuilding yard at Pascagoula, Mississippi, and three years aboard as her two-striped navigator; after two years of shore duty in Naples assigned as XO on another DDG, shore duty in Washington, then with that tremendous surge not short of exaltation the
James
given back into my hands as her commanding officer.

As to the power of it: It was not some piece of vanity to know that bringing this whole undertaking off, on this island and in any new life, counted greatly on their belief in me as their captain. I am tempted to say counted entirely. I can think of no body of men whose daily well-being or misery, and quite often safety or even survival, lies so fully in the hands of one man as does a ship’s company. The reason for the perdurability of this sea sovereignty against the grain of history is simple: No way has ever been found that permits a fighting ship to function other than by this one-man rule. It is certain that if such a system existed, it would long since have been discovered and installed in a world where the plebiscitary, the “democratic,” has been the onward wave. A rajah, a monarch of the seas. Of course, no ship’s captain of the slightest worth ever thought in those terms. Such authority on the high seas confers less of arrogance than the sense of ultimate responsibility, each new day presented, for the fate of others, living quiet in the soul as one’s very reason for being. Knowing also that this very coin of absolutism has its opposite side: the thin line trod every day by every ship’s captain the seas over. To the very degree that he holds power over them, a captain must have his men’s trust, which alone assures their love for the ship herself: Without this, his vessel can scarcely operate and danger lurks everywhere. And let that trust once be lost, it is never retrieved. It is lost forever. But no law of the sea, no good practice of ships decreed that the captain at every stage admit his crew into his soul. Indeed, the mind could without difficulty postulate circumstances wherein the blatancy of entire truth, the flaunting of full intentions, would be the worst treason of all toward them; an abject, even craven abdication of a captain’s responsibility. For included in his duties is this one: not to shift onto them, as sources of anxiety and fear, the burden that is his alone lawfully to bear.

Here was the fine, infinitely fastidious line: A captain is permitted almost anything where the safety and survival of his ship and her company are at issue. Cunning, schemery, artifice, maneuverance, stratagem, stopping always short of outright deceit. But these must all be seen by ship’s company not to be these things. They must take on, in that curious transmutation perhaps known only to seamen—deracinated as they are from the general world, a thing so remote as to be hardly existent, creatures of their indigenous ship-immured perceptions, canons, and indeed morality—the clothing of acts done by the captain solely in behalf of the ship and the men themselves, so that artifice becomes care, contrivance love for his men. And at the moment of announced decision, the course he chooses seen to be the only right course. The captain, fortressed in his deeds by the steel in him, seizing single-mindedly whatever befriends his one allegiance: that no harm within his power to prevent shall come to the company of his ship.

I had always accepted that power as part of being a ship’s captain and when I got my command lived easily with it. Only of late had I begun to be attacked at odd hours by doubts, expressible to no one. For a ship’s captain has also the loneliest job on earth or on all the seas, and the display of certain quite ordinary human emotions is entirely forbidden him. That divine despotic right unchallenged at sea: In truth it was not that I had become suspicious of its validity, other than wrestling with the enormity of 179 souls being in the hands of one man in the magnitude of present circumstances. It was rather that, in tremulous dialogue only with myself, I had begun to question whether that right, that power, already enhanced even further, would now hold fast, and even more so in realities certain to come. Unlike lesser dictators, a ship’s captain has no bodyguards, no armies to shield him. He is gravely outnumbered, his only armament being the sea’s ancient law of command and his own resolve. Therefore, the more crucial both the resolve and the unwavering assumption that it would be accepted wherever it might lead, whatever portend. Nelson’s band of brothers, to be sure, but also his “If I give an order I expect it to be obeyed.” Hence self-doubts of any kind were the very thing I must above all suppress. A calm presence, whatever tremblings I might feel inside. Calm presence: Sometimes I felt that in that considerable list of attributes indispensable to a ship’s captain, this was the most important of all.