Sea Fever Read online

  The following passage in Heart of Darkness puts things even more bluntly:

  I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place in an impalpable greyness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, without spectators, without clamour, without glory, without the great desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat, in a sickly atmosphere of tepid scepticism, without much belief in your own right, and still less in that of your adversary.

  When he finally made it back to London, it was clear that the experience had nearly destroyed him, and it was to be a return to his old friend and adversary, the sea, that restored him. It took him eight months to convalesce from his various ailments, but when he did he found that fortune had not completely turned her back on him after all. Captain Cope of the famous passenger clipper Torrens offered him the position of first mate. Initially Conrad expressed reservations about his health, but Cope admonished him by saying it was ‘no good moping around ashore’. It proved to be just the tonic he required. The Torrens was a very beautiful ship, which took passengers on the round trip from London to Adelaide. Unlike the wool clippers that Conrad had earlier served aboard, she was able to sail back to England by the slightly easier Cape of Good Hope route. This was to make life more comfortable for her passengers but also made things much more pleasant for the crew. The Torrens had established an excellent reputation for herself and, loaded down with passengers rather than cargo, she was a very comfortable and civilised ship. Basil Lubbock, unquestionably the foremost historian of clipper ships described her thus:

  She was without doubt one of the most successful ships ever built, besides being one of the fastest, and for many years she was the favourite passenger ship to Adelaide. A beautifully modelled ship and a splendid sea boat, she was very heavily sparred. In easting weather she would drive along as dry as a bone, making 300 miles a day without wetting her decks. But it was in light winds that she showed up best, her ghosting powers being quite extraordinary. The flap of her sails sent her along two or three knots, and in light airs she was accustomed to pass other clippers as if they were at anchor.

  Conrad served as mate for the duration of two round the world voyages aboard this thoroughbred and she seemed to go a long way to replenishing his diminished stocks of energy and wellbeing. There is a fascinating insight into the mate of the Torrens given by the writer John Galsworthy, who travelled aboard as a passenger in 1893:

  He was superintending the stowage of cargo when I first met him. Very dark he looked in the burning sunlight. Tanned with a peaked brown beard, almost black hair and dark brown eyes over which the lids were deeply folded. He was thin, not tall his arms very long, his shoulders broad. He spoke to me with a strong foreign accent. He seemed to me strange on an English ship.

  The chief mate bears the main burden of sailing a ship. All the first night he was fighting a fire in the hold. None of us seventeen passengers knew of it until long after. It was he who had most truck with that tail of a hurricane off Cape Leeuwin and later with another storm. He was a good seaman, watchful of the weather, quick in handling the ship – considerate with the apprentices – we had one unhappy Belgian among them, who took unhandily to the sea and dreaded going aloft and Conrad compassionately spared him all he could. With the crew he was popular; they were individuals to him, not a mere gang. He was respectful if faintly ironic with his whiskered stout old English Captain, for Conrad had commanded ships and his subordinate position was only due to the fact that he was still convalescent from the Congo experience which nearly killed him. Many evenings were spent on the poop, even then a great teller of a tale. He had already nearly twenty years of tales to tell. Tales of ships and storms of Polish revolution, of his youthful Carlist gun running adventure of the Malay seas and the Congo; and of men and men.

  This is a fine portrait of the final evolution of Conrad the sailor; affable yet a consummate professional and clearly at the top of his game. In 1891 he signed on for his last voyage aboard the Torrens and, although he had no idea at the time, it would be his final voyage as a professional seaman. He was only 36, yet had packed more adventure into those years afloat than most manage in a lifetime. He married a young lady named Jessie George three years later and the dream of the sea seemed to slowly fade as his writing career picked up. Still, his retirement from the sea was always somewhat half-hearted and his pining for it often screams out in his writing. His love of the sea was far from blind however: ‘There is nothing more enticing, disenchanting, and enslaving than the life at sea,’ he once observed. This is a man speaking of his work, but what a seductive workplace it was for him and what adventures it meted out to him along the way! For all that the sea was his career, he clearly longed for it in his later years and sums up the sense of loss he felt beautifully in Chance, the book which, in 1913, fully launched him as a literary titan. He describes Marlow thus:

  Marlow had retired from the sea in a sort of half hearted fashion some years. From year to year he dwelt on land as a bird rests on the branch of a tree, so tense with the power of brusque flight into its true element that it is incomprehensible why it should sit still minute after minute. The sea is the sailor’s true element and Marlow, lingering on shore, was to me an object of incredulous commiseration like a bird which, secretly should have lost its faith in the virtue of high flying.

  A sad epitaph to his seagoing life, yet his loss was our gain, for by turning to his pen he felt he became one of the last chroniclers of commercial sail’s pinnacle of elegance. His writings helped to record and bring alive a way of life that existed for centuries and was snuffed out in a matter of decades. His eloquence has helped at least keep the memory of these brave seafaring days alive, and make future generations aware of the great beauty we have lost in the pursuit of efficiency and utility. As he summed it up himself:

  History repeats itself, but the special call of an art which has passed away is never reproduced. It is as utterly gone out of the world as the song of a destroyed wild bird. A modern ship does not so much make use of the sea as exploit a highway with a thudding rhythm in her progress and the regular beat of her propeller, heard afar in the night with an august and plodding sound as of the march of an inevitable future. But in a gale, the silent machinery of a sailing-ship would catch not only the power, but the wild and exulting voice of the world’s soul.

  James Fenimore Cooper

  The first of the nautical novelists

  The seafaring novel is now such a well-established genre that it seems entirely natural that an author should create an entire story with ships, sailors and the sea as the focal point. The same could certainly not be said back in 1823 when James Fenimore Cooper sat down to write what is now recognised as the first true nautical novel. Some previous authors – most notably Tobias Smollett – may have devoted sections of a novel to the sea, but it was Cooper who saw the real potential of dedicating an entire book to the subject. The result was The Pilot, a book which proved to be an immediate success, both in Cooper’s homeland, America, and abroad.

  You could call Cooper a visionary for making the leap of imagination required to dream up a novel of the sea. Certainly The Pilot’s concept was outlandish and the author noted at the time that he was met with opinions from friends and advisors that were ‘anything but encouraging’, but he pressed on. So what made him persist? The answer is less to do with vision and more to do with stubbornness and a desire to show the world’s most successful novelist how it was done.

  It all came about when Cooper – now best remembered for his classic The Last of the Mohicans – was already rapidly establishing himself as a pioneer of the fledgling American literary scene, found himself in conversation with a friend over the merits of Sir Walter Scott’s bestselling novel, The Pirate. These days, Scott’s novels have recently fallen out of favour, but in the nineteenth century, his works were considered almost beyond reproach. While his friend was impressed with the accuracy with which Scott represented the s
ea, Cooper was not. The upshot was to have a profound effect on nautical literature, as Cooper noted:

  The result of this conversation was a sudden determination to produce a work which, if it had no other merit, might present truer pictures of the ocean and ships than any that are to be found in The Pirate. To this unpremeditated decision, purely an impulse, is not only The Pilot due, but a tolerably numerous school of nautical romances that have succeeded it.

  So it was nothing more than a quirk of fate and a bit of bloodymindedness that brought about the birth of a new genre. Yet if the starting point was a strange one, the results were impressive. Right from the start, the author showed that he was able to portray the sea in a manner beyond the ability of a landsman such as Scott. In his hands the sea came alive. Witness this early passage from the book:

  The short day of that high northern latitude was already drawing to a close, and the sun was throwing his parting rays obliquely across the waters, touching the gloomy waves here and there with streaks of pale light. The stormy winds of the ocean were apparently lulled to rest; and, though the incessant rolling of the surge on the shore heightened the gloomy character of the hour and the view, the light ripple that ruffled the sleeping billows was produced by a gentle air, that blew directly from the land. Notwithstanding this favorable circumstance, there was something threatening in the aspect of the ocean, which was speaking in hollow but deep murmurs, like a volcano on the eve of an eruption.

  It was clear that here was a man with a great deal of love, empathy and understanding of the sea, and there was good reason. Not only had Cooper served as an able seaman aboard a merchant ship, he had also been a midshipman in the US Navy. Furthermore at the time he was writing The Pilot, he was also the owner of a small whaling ship, the Union, a contemporary vessel of Herman Melville’s Acushnet. Here was a man who had an intimate knowledge of ships and the sea and was able to translate that understanding, both technical and emotional, onto the written page. He did just that with great success and went on to write a number of classics of the sea including The Red Rover, Afloat and Ashore, The Skimmer of the Sea and The Sea Lions. In the process, he was also responsible for coining the term ‘salty sea dog’ now firmly embedded in the English language and conjuring up the kind of hearty old tar that Cooper so enjoyed portraying in his books.

  Yet, if his seafaring credentials were impeccable by the time he sat down to write The Pilot in 1823, the signs certainly hadn’t looked very promising during his early childhood. He was born in 1789 in Burlington, New Jersey. He was not there long, for his father had been fortunate enough to inherit great swathes of land in the wake of the American War of Independence. Cooper Sr set about colonising some of his land, and determined to establish his very own settlement on the shores of Lake Otsego in New York State. This was Cooperstown, which is now best known to sports fans as the location of the National Baseball Hall of Fame. Cooper’s father built a sizeable mansion where the extended family was able to enjoy the rewards of their colonising work. They may have been pioneers, but they were very successful ones, and comfort and privilege were never far away as their children grew up. None of this steered young James towards the sea to any great extent. Certainly he grew to love and appreciate the great outdoors, and in particular Lake Otsego, but it is doubtful he even saw the great open expanse of the Atlantic until he was in his teens.

  Perhaps the turning point came when he blew up his schoolmate’s door. Cooper was attending Yale at the time and must have seriously fallen out with one of his classmates. The upshot was grave, for Cooper opted to surreptitiously shove a cloth funnel through the keyhole of his rival’s door and pour home-made gunpowder into it. Once full, he twisted the funnel tight and set it alight. The results were immediate and alarming, not only terrifying his classmate, but also causing considerable damage to the door. Combine this with other hellraising incidents, most notably locking a donkey into the recitation room of the school, and you will perhaps not be too surprised to learn that young Cooper was expelled. Our future author was gaining a reputation as a troublemaker and, back then, the natural course for such tearaways was to run away to sea. After several months spent languishing at home considering his options, this is exactly what Cooper decided to do. He was 16 and had no clear idea of what he wanted from life. There is no question that he was an adventurous soul and if there was one thing life at sea almost guaranteed, it was untold adventure as well as a chance to travel, visit foreign shores and observe different cultures. It was not long before young Cooper was scouring the wharves of Philadelphia in search of a vessel. Weeks of fruitless enquiries ensued and it wasn’t until he switched his search to New York that his luck changed, for he managed to secure a berth aboard the Sterling, a smart ship-rigged boat, which had been built the previous year in Maine. It is possible that it was a family connection that enabled him to secure the berth. If this is so, then clearly any parental objections to his going to sea had evaporated. Certainly, there is no mention in any of Cooper’s recollections of conflict between his family and himself, so it seems likely that they rapidly reconciled themselves to his career move.

  The ship was loading flour in New York and was bound for England. From here, her captain, a Mr Johnston, would have to scout around for the next cargo and see what he could get. Cooper signed on as an ordinary seaman. Aside from the ship’s boy, this was the lowest rank aboard, one rung below the able seamen, who were more experienced sailors and received slightly better pay. As such, life would have been tough aboard. Cooper would have messed with the rest of the ordinary and able seamen in the fo’c’sle, exposed to all the crudities and heartbreaking privations that were a sailor’s lot in 1806. No doubt this would have come as a shock to the genteel Yale boy, but he seems to have taken it all in his stride. The ship appears to have been friendly and well run, being family-owned by Captain Johnston, his father and his brother. Over the next few decades the American merchant marine was to gain a reputation for extremely tough and unsympathetic officers, but in 1806 this was not the case at all and Cooper, along with the other 16 members of the crew, could look forward to a relatively comfortable passage.

  I have read biographies of James Fenimore Cooper that have managed to cover his seagoing exploits in roughly two paragraphs. This is surprising because, while it is true that his seagoing life was not chock full of adventure, there is certainly enough incident on his passages in the Stirling to fill a decent-sized book. We are fortunate when looking into the details of the voyage that they were actually written about in full by one Ned Myers, a shipmate and friend of Cooper’s aboard the Stirling. This account was part of an autobiography published, with the help of Cooper, many years later in 1843. As such it gives a very good idea of the mixture of excitement and misery a sailor could look forward to when undertaking a passage in the early 1800s. It is also a remarkable insight into the maiden voyage of one of America’s most celebrated early authors. Although the book is based on Myers’ reminisces there is no question the pair pooled their memories to create the chapter on the Stirling.

  Things did not start out altogether well for either Cooper or Myers, for shortly after departing, they were sent aloft, with comical results, as Myers explained:

  That afternoon we lifted our anchor, and dropped down abreast of Governor’s Island, where we brought up. Next day all hands were called to get under way, and, as soon as the anchor was short, the mate told Cooper and myself to go up and loose the fore-top-sail. I went on one yard-arm and Cooper went on the other. In a few minutes the second mate came up, hallooing to us to ‘avast,’ and laughing. Cooper was hard at work at the ‘robins,’ and would soon have had his half of the sail down in the top, had he been let alone; while I was taking the gaskets from the yard, with the intention of bringing them carefully down on deck, where it struck me they would be quite safe. Luckily for us, the men were too busy heaving, and too stupid, to be very critical, and we escaped much ridicule. In a week we both knew better.

  This act
of attempting to untie the sails from the yards shows just how green the novice sailors were. The incident also illustrates the tolerant nature of the officers, and both boys appear to have enjoyed the trip across. Certainly there is precious little grousing in Myers’ journal and the entire Atlantic crossing is summed up in a couple of sentences:

  Our passage was long and stormy. The ship was on a bow-line [beating in to the wind] most of the time, and we were something like forty days from land to land. Nothing extraordinary occurred, however, and we finally made the Bill of Portland. The weather came on thick, but we found a pilot, and ran into St. Helen’s Roads and anchored. The captain got into his boat, and taking four men pulled ashore, to look for his orders at Cowes.

  The ship had sailed in the notoriously stormy month of October and it is little surprise that they received a bit of a dusting down. In terms of passage length, forty days was fairly normal for that time, although it was certainly nothing to write home about and other vessels more favoured by the wind could do it in half that time even back then. Nevertheless, it was a passage without any death or suffering en route and, in 1806, that was a real bonus. Cooper also found himself for the first time within sight of a foreign shore and the Stirling’s arrival off the English coast must have sent a thrill down the spine of a youngster hungry for exploits on foreign shores. If he was excited, he was soon to witness drama here that would instil within him a profound lack of trust in the English: a theme that ran through many of his novels.

  As the Stirling lay off Cowes awaiting orders, Cooper gazed across at the verdant slopes and low cliffs of the Isle of Wight. He knew he was looking at the land of his forefathers. Yet by 1806, the average American’s attitude towards the English was complex. America had declared independence in 1776 and only truly won it in the 1780s. This new nation was looked upon with great condescension by the English as troublesome upstarts who had exploited French hostility to the British in order to wriggle free from the yoke of imperialism. It was at sea that the arrogant attitude of the English was most apparent, and Cooper was soon to witness it first hand. The problem came about because Britain was still at war with France and there was a desperate need for able-bodied seamen to man the Royal Navy, which scoured their territorial waters looking to seize fit and able sailors from unsuspecting merchant vessels. They could only legally do this ‘press ganging’ if the sailor was British, and this was where the blur between American and British citizenship caused real problems. A man could have lived in America all his life and be in his heart American, but it was easy for the Royal Navy to prove that, at least technically, he was still British and force him to sign up for king and country. During the savage Napoleonic War, this was often as good as a death sentence and it is exactly what happened to the crew of the Stirling. The incident is described by Ned Myers: