1897 Leaving Jacksonville, Florida, for Cuba, the ship struck a sandbar that damaged the hull and started a leak in the boiler room. When the pumps failed she settled in the water and finally sank some sixteen miles offshore. Aboard was Stephen Crane, poet and novelist, renowned author of Maggie, a Girl of the Streets (1893) and The Red Badge of Courage (1895). When the crew took to the lifeboats, Crane found himself in a ten-foot dinghy along with the injured ship’s captain, its cook and an engine-room oiler.
What followed was his best-remembered short story, ‘The Open Boat’, which he would publish in Scribner’s Magazine just four months later. The narrative is freighted with portentous, third-person irony to reflect the seriousness of the men’s situation. Only the oiler Billie is named; the others are just ‘the correspondent’ (Crane’s stand-in), ‘the captain’ and ‘the cook’.
‘None of them knew the color of the sky’, as the famous opening words have it. Crane is good on contrasting points of view. ‘Viewed from a balcony, the whole thing would doubtlessly have been weirdly picturesque’, but what the men see are the huge waves that threaten to swamp them if not kept a close eye on. They know the colour of those all right.
The men support each other, taking turns at the oars without complaint, doing their best to steer in the heaving seas. But set against the fellowship of comrades is the indifference of nature. They catch sight of land but it’s out of reach. ‘If I am going to be drowned – if I am going to be drowned – if I am going to be drowned, why in the name of the seven mad gods who rule the sea, was I allowed to come thus far and contemplate sand and trees?’ Nature’s answer to this question – as to all others – is a ‘high cold star on a winter’s night’. Finally they get ashore, but only after the dinghy has capsized in the surf, forcing the men to swim for it. Billie is drowned. The nameless ones survive.
The truth fell short of this elemental struggle between nature and humanity. In real life the Commodore, not much larger than an inshore trawler, had been loaded to the gunwales with munitions for the Cuban insurrection against Spain. Crane had been sent along as a reporter for the Bacheller-Johnson newspaper syndicate to get the story. The whole adventure took just a day and a night. Just four days after the Commodore went down, Stephen Crane was back in the arms of his new girlfriend, a brothel madam named Cora Taylor whom he had met in Jacksonville before leaving for Cuba.