Sea Fever Read online

  Sea Fever

  Contents

  Introduction

  Erskine Childers: Hidden depths

  Joseph Conrad: Clipper ship captain turned literary titan

  James Fenimore Cooper: The first of the nautical novelists

  Ernest Hemingway: A strange fish

  Jack London: The call of the sea

  Captain Marryat: A forgotten hero of the Royal Navy

  John Masefield: The seasick sailor

  Herman Melville: Literary leviathan

  Arthur Ransome: In search of utopia

  Tobias Smollett: Grudging grandfather of the nautical novel

  Robert Louis Stevenson: Home is the sailor – the final voyage

  List of Plates

  eCopyright

  Introduction

  If you have never been at sea in a heavy gale, you can form no idea of the confusion of mind occasioned by wind and spray together. They blind, deafen, and strangle you, and take away all power of action or reflection.

  Edgar Allen Poe

  Given that our oceans and seas cover about two thirds of the planet’s surface, it is hardly surprising that their influence has always run strongly through literature. The waters of this world have swirled through storytelling ever since the Anglo-Saxons spun the tale of Beowulf and Homer narrated The Odyssey. To chart every reference to sea voyages in literature would have made for a very lengthy book indeed. But I had a different idea; I wanted to take the opposite view and look at how the sea itself had shaped some of our greatest writers and set them on a course that led to literary success. To this end, I re-read my favourite books of the sea; hypnotic yarns written by some of the greats: Melville, Marryat and Conrad, men who have written bona fide maritime classics, and looked at their relationship with the great waters of this world.

  It didn’t take long to realise that almost everyone who had written something truly meaningful about the sea had also enjoyed a remarkably close relationship with it. Of course it isn’t exactly a revelation that the men who knew the sea intimately through working on it were best placed to write the most compelling literature about it. But although this wasn’t terribly surprising, the adventures of some of these writers certainly were, in fact they were often more far fetched than the fiction their experiences helped to shape. Did you know that Joseph Conrad smuggled guns off the Catalan coast for the Carlist rebels? I did not. Nor did I realise that he later went on to command a clipper ship; the most refined and complex type of merchant sailing vessel ever built. And who would have thought that Jack London spent his youth as an oyster pirate, dodging rifle shots from the authorities while illegally dredging the mudflats of San Francisco Bay in his little yacht Dazzler? Meanwhile, Captain Frederick Marryat’s death-defying exploits during the Napoleonic Wars simply beggar belief, while Erskine Childers’ do-or-die piece of gun-running for the fledgling IRA was as breathtaking as it was bewildering. These were the revelations and the stories that needed to be told.

  In all, I have rounded up 12 authors who spent long enough at sea to know it inside out aboard either ships or yachts, and who convey that knowledge through their own works of fiction. This meant omitting a good few authors of nautical classics who only wrote autobiographical works; R. H. Dana (Two Years Before the Mast), Joshua Slocum (Sailing Alone Around the World) and Eric Newby (The Last Grain Race) are notable absentees. I also feel rather ashamed that I didn’t find space for Nicholas Monsarrat, whose The Cruel Sea must be up there as a nautical classic, and was shaped by his own naval experiences. Ultimately my selection could only be subjective and I am sure there will be many who can think of other worthy nominees for inclusion, but that is inevitable.

  There were also a handful of other authors of works of classic nautical fiction ruled out because the author in question did not really seem to have enough true seafaring experience to qualify by my criteria. Rudyard Kipling’s Captains Courageous was an obvious example. Kipling never served aboard any vessel and his facts for this nautical classic were gleaned second hand. Ironically, Edgar Allen Poe, quoted on the previous page, also does not appear in this book as he only made a few ocean going trips as a passenger. Then there were the marginal cases; Robert Louis Stevenson, for example, may have written a nautical classic in Treasure Island, but he had spent precious little time at sea when he wrote it. Yet this extraordinary man snuck into the book as I felt that his later cruises through the South Seas aboard the yacht Casco and trading schooner Equator had a profound effect on a number of his later – rather underrated – tales, such as The Ebb Tide and In the South Seas.

  So who was the first writer to channel their seafaring experience into something that resembled a nautical novel? Much trawling of the archives seemed to point to one Tobias Smollett as the most plausible originator. Smollett was a somewhat curmudgeonly surgeon serving aboard the HMS Chichester in 1740, and it was there that he gained his seafaring knowledge. His experiences – they were almost entirely negative – made up a large proportion of his first and most popular novel, Roderick Random. The tale is bawdy, crass and often very silly, but in Smollett’s hands the sea comes alive in a manner that no novelist had managed to convey before. Daniel Defoe had written of the sea in Robinson Crusoe in 1713 and given that Crusoe is marooned by it, the sea is an important element of the story, yet in his hands it is flat, uninteresting and utterly incidental – a means to an end. Crusoe sails from London and enjoys a ‘good voyage’ to Brazil and nothing more. Later, when a storm overwhelms his vessel, Defoe is utterly at a loss as to how to bring the scene to life and retreats into trite clichés, speaking of ‘the wild sea’. Smollett, writing a few decades later, had no such problems. Witness the language he uses to describe a storm that batters his ship in the early stages of his transatlantic voyage to South America:

  The sea was swelled into billows mountain-high, on the top of which our ship sometimes hung as if it were about to be precipitated to the abyss below! Sometimes we sank between two waves that rose on each side higher than our topmast-head, and threatened by dashing together to overwhelm us in a moment! Of all our fleet, consisting of a hundred and fifty sail, scarce twelve appeared, and these driving under their bare poles, at the mercy of the tempest. At length the mast of one of them gave way, and tumbled overboard with a hideous crash! Nor was the prospect in our own ship much more agreeable; a number of officers and sailors ran backward and forward with distraction in their looks, halloaing to one another, and undetermined what they should attend to first. Some clung to the yards, endeavouring to unbend the sails that were split into a thousand pieces flapping in the wind; others tried to furl those which were yet whole, while the masts, at every pitch, bent and quivered like twigs, as if they would have shivered into innumerable splinters!

  Finally here was an author who could fully convey the might of the ocean. Moreover, his descriptions of life below decks, and the coarse humour and camaraderie that existed among the ordinary seamen, bore the stamp of authenticity. There was more too; a frequent visitor in this and Smollett’s later novels was the old sea dog; washed up on land and stumping around in a state of bewilderment. If Jack Sparrow owes a lot to Keith Richards, he owes an equal debt to the quill of an eighteenth-century novelist. Yet Smollett never truly realised that he was teetering on the edge of creating an entirely new genre, and his later books, rather like the man himself, retreated many miles from the sea.

  It wasn’t until the 1820s that the nautical novel was developed, and it would be two men, James Fenimore Cooper and Captain Frederick Marryat, contemporaries in the US and Royal navies respectively, who set the template. Marryat we will meet later, but Cooper got there first. These days he is best remembered for The Last of the Mohicans, but in his time he published several nautical novels, kicking off with T
he Pilot in 1824. Cooper had written his first novel Precaution because the book his wife was reading at the time was so dull she challenged him to write a better one. It was a similar premise that led to the writing of The Pilot. Prior to picking up his pen, Cooper had been reading The Pirate by Sir Walter Scott, and became so irritated at the great Scotsman’s ineptitude and inaccuracy in describing the scenes set at sea that he decided to improve upon that work. He received very little encouragement in this undertaking and was frequently warned by friends and well-meaning advisors that it was a bad idea, as Cooper himself recalled:

  The author had many misgivings concerning the success of the undertaking, after he had made some progress in the work; the opinions of his different friends being anything but encouraging. One would declare that the sea could not be made interesting; that it was tame, monotonous, and without any other movement than unpleasant storms, and that, for his part, the less he got of it the better. The women very generally protested that such a book would have the odor of bilge water, and that it would give them the maladie de mer. Not a single individual among all those who discussed the merits of the project, within the range of the author’s knowledge, either spoke, or looked, encouragingly. It is probable that all these persons anticipated a signal failure.

  They were wrong. For all these dire predictions, The Pilot was a success and placed the nautical novel firmly on the literary map. Cooper also went on to coin the phrase ‘salty sea dog’ and picked up where Smollett left off in his affectionate depiction of an honest Jack Tar.

  Fenimore Cooper’s career as a sailor was relatively lacking in action, but he still enjoyed more adventure in one transatlantic round trip than most of us get in a lifetime; enduring harassment from pirates and the Royal Navy, the dramatic rescue of a drowning man and many storms along the way. Yet all this was nothing compared to some of the other literary sailors, and the more I explored their lives the more I found myself bewildered by the sheer breadth of their experiences at sea. I even started to wonder if some of the seminal pieces of seafaring fiction had been written not because of any great literary merit on the author’s part, but simply because the author had enjoyed such extraordinary adventures prior to writing the book. On reflection, I realised this was unfair. It is one thing to experience something remarkable and quite another to convey that experience beautifully in words. As I read more of their exploits, it was clear that all of these authors’ true life adventures had been narrated by a genuine storyteller and, as such, many had been shamelessly embellished. Melville was a very good case in point, and those who have endeavoured to chart his wanderings through the South Pacific have often struggled to untangle the truth from the tall tales. I wanted to avoid getting caught up in this untangling as much as was possible. This book is a celebration of the adventures of these remarkable writers and sailors. Whether said writer was actually somewhere at exactly such and such time is really neither here nor there in the grand scheme of the story. How long was Herman Melville captive in a Tahitian prison? I neither know nor care. He was there, and he was imprisoned sufficiently long to convey what captivity was like. That is all that matters to me. What harm can there be in a touch of self-mythologising as long as the substance is true?

  Narrating the tales of all of these literary mariners, I was also struck by the endless quirks of fate that seemed to connect them. As an example, in 1809 James Fenimore Cooper served under Captain Lawrence aboard the USS Wasp. He had a fairly dull time of it and then quit the navy. Shortly afterwards, Captain Lawrence transferred to the USS Hornet and war broke out between Britain and America. In 1812 Captain Lawrence’s latest command attacked and sank the HMS Peacock off Guyana. Not many miles off, the HMS Espiegle witnessed the attack and gave chase. Among her officers was Captain Frederick Marryat. Another strange coincidence was that the first vessel Joseph Conrad served in when he moved to Britain was The Skimmer of the Seas, presumably named after the James Fenimore Cooper novel. Conrad was a great admirer of Cooper.

  If these are nothing more than small coincidences there are other more obvious connections between some of these writers. No less than three of the authors (Herman Melville, Robert Louis Stevenson and Jack London) traversed almost exactly the same stretch of the South Seas on their voyages. Stevenson had met with Melville prior to departing on his trip, and one can only imagine how far the tales of the old whaling man influenced the wideeyed Scotsman before he set sail. Some years later, Jack London followed Stevenson and Melville’s route aboard his own yacht Snark and paid homage to them both on his trip; stopping first at Nuku Hiva in order to visit Melville’s paradisaical prison of Ty-Pee, and later anchoring off Samoa to visit the grave of the great Scottish author. Melville’s original book Ty-Pee therefore indirectly helped bring about the publication of classics such as Stevenson’s The Beach of Falesa and London’s South Sea Tales.

  There were other links too. When Joseph Conrad first ‘swallowed the anchor’ (sailors’ parlance for retiring from the sea) and took to writing he was taken under the wing of the wonderfully named Fanny Sitwell. Some years previously Robert Louis Stevenson had been infatuated with Sitwell, and she remained a close friend and confidant until his death. Meanwhile, John Masefield and Arthur Ransome were contemporaries and friends on the London literary scene and it was Masefield – already a successful author – who urged Ransome – then fiddling around with non-fiction – to write something new and original. This pair formed an interesting contrast; writing at roughly the same time, Ransome was a pure yachtsman while Masefield had served aboard the Gilcruix, a mighty Cape Horn windjammer and one of the last remnants of the great fleet of merchant sail. Ransome’s most salt-encrusted children’s classic Peter Duck certainly gives more than a nod the way of Masefield, and Stevenson for that matter, in its premise, backdrop, and certain points of style.

  Indeed, working my way through the literature of these authors (for the purposes of this book, I have presented them in alphabetical order), it was often striking how one had influenced another. One of the most obvious examples was between Smollett and Marryat:

  Smollett: At length we arrived in a bay to the windward of Carthagena, where we came to an anchor, and lay at our ease ten days longer… if I might be allowed to give my opinion of the matter, I would ascribe this delay to the generosity of our chiefs, who scorned to take any advantage that fortune might give them even over an enemy.

  Marryat: On the arrival of the squadron at the point of attack, a few more days were thrown away, – probably upon the same generous principle of allowing the enemy sufficient time for preparation.

  Perhaps this is simply a damning indictment of the Royal Navy’s failure to improve its practices in the 60 years that separated each respective author’s active service. A slightly more subtle example of influence can be seen in Stevenson’s Long John Silver, who owes a great deal to Smollett, Marryat and Cooper in his portrayal of the ultimate bluff old sea dog. I’m sure Stevenson would not have been ashamed to admit it either.

  The nautical novel could also be the forum for serious literary innovation. Marryat was one of the first authors to introduce the anti-hero, in Frank Mildmay, and it goes without saying that Herman Melville’s Moby Dick remains an extremely original and ambitious piece of work. I was also struck when reading Stevenson’s later South Sea works how daring they were; he was one of the few high profile authors of the late Victorian era to risk suggesting that the white colonist was certainly no more than the equal and often the lesser man to the native populace he so frequently treated with such contempt. I also found it fascinating, when reading The Ebb Tide, how the despotic megalomaniac Attwater, cat perched on his shoulder and rifle at his side, foreshadowed other literary villains, from Conrad’s General Kurtz through to any number of James Bond’s nemeses.

  There are two authors on this list who seem to stand alone, almost aloof from the party. These are Erskine Childers and Ernest Hemingway. Both wrote only one true nautical novel: The Riddle of the Sands and Th
e Old Man and the Sea respectively. While the books have little in common, I felt strongly that both broke the mould when they were written. They seem to owe very little to anyone but themselves and are both startlingly original.

  Although it was often possible to trace the influence of writers from one to the next, the differences in how life at sea was evoked were marked. Masefield to me was the most quixotic; he saw the beauty of the sea with wide-eyed wonder. He could convey the sheer joy and exhilaration of flying before the wind beneath great white wings with exhilarating abandon. Yet he was also hugely talented at bringing home the misery of life aboard a ship (this contradiction in his perception of the sea is explained thoroughly later). Conrad probably knew the drudgery and routine of maritime life better than anyone bar Marryat, as he served at sea for one of the longest terms of any author included in this book. He once noted that, ‘There is nothing more enticing, disenchanting, and enslaving than the life at sea.’ Few knew that better than Conrad. Some of that weariness – the perception of the sea as a workplace and a cruel enslaving mistress – subtly permeates his nautical work, and it is an important point. Yet he could also convey the fine art of ship handling and the satisfaction of doing this well, better than almost anyone. These are also elements that Melville – another man who put in many hours afloat – relates vividly. His meticulous documenting of the art of whaling in Moby Dick illustrates his admiration for this now departed skill perfectly, while his depiction of the restlessness and boredom of being at sea in Ty-Pee is also hugely evocative. Anyone who has worked for long stretches at sea feels some of that weariness. It is rare for a sailor, however much they love the sea, not to long for the next landfall.

  It is therefore interesting to contrast these weary, working sailors, who were occasionally overwhelmed by beauty amid the mundanity of life at sea, with the leisurely yachtsmen writers who followed. Arthur Ransome is a good case in point. For him, the sea certainly didn’t encapsulate enslavement; only escape, relaxation and joy. In the early days, this escape was from his demanding and often frustrating ‘proper’ job as a reporter on the Russian Revolution. In later years his Swallows and Amazons took up the theme by allowing readers, threatened by war and menaced by economic depression, to escape to a childhood utopia populated with boats. Jack London was another man to whom the sea represented little other than the tenets of freedom and escape, and this feeling permeated through all of his writing on the matter. He had once worked upon the sea as a youth, but, as a writer looking back, he approached it with nostalgia for those halcyon years and also as a yachtsman who understood the sea as a playground, not just a place of work.