The men making room for him, he stood directly below me.
“If what you say is true, there is no government. There is no Navy that we know of. Who gives you the right to make these decisions? To decide the destinies of every one of us. By whose authority do you assume these powers for yourself?”
I felt no anger, was not even surprised at feeling none. It was almost as though I knew that this would have to come sooner or later. Felt rather something like relief at the inevitable having at last arrived, that whatever now happened it would not henceforth be hanging forever over me. It was to be settled, once and for all, one way or the other; knowing but one thing, that the ship would never be the same.
The words had fallen with a certain eloquence into that terrible quiescence, made so by a rational content even I could not deny: What indeed was now the source of my authority, my rule over these men? Words strengthened further by a case by no means without merit, indeed an entirely reasonable one—the Bosworth signal, the fact our own information was by nature far from absolute, urgent parts of it coming from what might be deemed suspect sources, dead Frenchman, recent-foe Russian; a case reasonable even to myself who had rejected it, bound to seem so to many hands, their thoughts unceasingly riveted to loved ones, wives, children, cruel and unacceptable that they not be allowed to go determine for themselves their fates. Before such forces my own weapons suddenly seemed shadowy, ephemeral, wholly vulnerable, quite capable of being swept away like sea foam before the wind, in a single sudden moment of upheaval by resolute men with so simple and so great a motivation as turning the ship around. Against the first, the challenge to my authority, I had remaining only my own will and an ancient law of the sea having to do with a captain’s unquestioned sovereignty off soundings; that and something others might rightly reduce to flagrant vanity and that even I viewed at times as but a prop to sustain me, a belief that only I could bring them through; against the second, my faith in Selmon’s determinations, that only death and horror waited at the end of the course this officer standing below me would choose for the ship.
These assessments aside, all made by visceral rather than mental processes and in the time span of a blinker’s flash, I felt that great current of raw fear, in nature unlike any previously known, in myself, equally in all who waited, a fear one could almost smell and perhaps idiosyncratic to what had happened with such swiftness: the unspoken cognition sensed to a certainty in every hand that, hardly realizing it, we, seamen all, had stepped across that line which is the most awesome and forbidding known to the world of the sea, by nature also with results no man could predict, that might in that hair-trigger air that had claimed each one of us the moment Chatham had spoken turn on something done, or even thought, in an instant’s flare of emotion. Hence, nothing more insistent than to exercise the most precise control over my own, to present insofar as possible a calm demeanor, while I calculated whatever course might be available to me. To gain time the first urgency. For all these reasons surely with great intention speaking so, my voice came to my own ears almost weirdly softened, bell-like, even duly inquisitive, in the fervent stillness.
“What is it you want, Mr. Chatham?”
“Take the ship home, sir.”
There was a movement, a surge among the men, at those words. Something felt rather than heard. That eerie, implacable silence: That was the scary part. The thought flashed through my mind like a warning buoy blinker set atop an underwater hazard on an unknown sea. Did he have sufficient men to take the ship? Followed instantly by an immense thankfulness for the decision I had made a while back to remove the small arms from this officer’s control: that armory securely locked now, myself in possession of the key. I simply stood waiting on the missile launcher platform, seeking clues as to their intention both in his own demeanor and that of the men, waiting to hear him out, voices carrying easily in the windless air, the stilled waters. For some reason I turned for a moment. Forward and high above me I could make out the ship’s commissioning pennant limp on the halyards, above it the national ensign, equally so. I looked now directly at him. There was a fire in his eyes. Other than that an air of the utmost composure, suggesting an officer whose mind as to course was irrefragably made up, who had entered with every consciousness of his acts on a purpose he had every aim of achieving. His voice, not a tremor in it, reached me in tones of unqualified resolve, and those of an officer now become a leader of men.
“There is life back there. We know that more than ever now. The Bosworth signals told us that. Our people, our families are there. Some of them may still be alive. Some of that land—our country”—a sudden almost ferocity of expression, more normal speech then resumed—“is habitable. We want to go and find out these things. We intend to do so. We don’t believe you have the lawful power to deny us that right. The ship is not yours, sir. Not any longer. No legal authority exists to give you that kind of power over us.”
I felt the time had come, whatever else I did, to fulfill a patent duty. I spoke quietly, carefully, nonetheless in a captain’s tone.
“Speaking of lawful powers and of legal authority, I must warn you, Mr. Chatham, that you are in the process of making a mutiny.” I spoke over him to the men. “I give the same warning to whichever of you may be considering joining this officer in this affair. All of you are familiar with the punishments dealing with that activity as contained in the Uniform Code of Military Justice. They have been read to you from time to time as required.” I turned back to him. “Mr. Chatham, I suggest very strongly that you abandon whatever it is you have in mind.”
“It is too late for that.” He spoke with his first touch of arrogance. “I say to you this final time, sir: We want this ship to come about and set a course for home.”
Now, I thought. Nothing I could speak into that fast-ascending tension was going to be without risk. But the barest opening had been presented me, in the form of a single word. Now. Move into it now.
“We?” I said.
“A very considerable number of us. To my personal knowledge. And perhaps many others unwilling to speak out; or afraid to do so.”
I could hear from among the men an almost keening murmur, something in it chillingly threatening, that seemed intended to support this spokesman, a strange, animallike sound; leaving me with the certainty that my time to act might be measured in minutes or less. I felt I had two things going for me. First, I did not believe he had in his camp as many men as his manner suggested; perhaps a score or so, no more. Second, I had somehow that captain’s sense that these, while men dedicated totally to a purpose, their minds invincibly made up, had no explicit, worked-out plan for achieving it; if so, they would have executed it, quickly and conclusively, got their work done. Yes, they had talked, planned, even conspired. But as, for instance, to the actual taking of the ship: I felt to a certainty that, even if they had the numbers to justify the attempt—allowing, too, for the possibility that they might hope to sweep up in their cause those men, of whom I knew the ship had not a few, who were still wavering on the question of whether or not the ship should make for home, bring along in the unleashed emotions of the event, the fire spreading, even those entirely neutral hands—even so, I felt sure that they had left such matters to the conditions of the moment, even that moment now abruptly forced upon them by my announcement that we were proceeding through Suez; no time to devise such a plan. They were feeling their way. Nothing worked so well against a nonplan as a plan and an intention specific to a detail; now, in an instant’s light of divination, mine took possession of me. I needed a moment. I felt immensely alone, a sense of utter pregnability. Suddenly, as though listening to another, I could hear my own voice ice-cold in the tense silence of the after-deck.
“To your personal knowledge, sir? Unwilling to speak out? Afraid to do so? You overflow with sources of intelligence, Mr. Chatham. One almost owes you a debt for educating a ship’s captain in matters aboard his ship.”
Perhaps it was that captain’s inner voice that had seldom failed me, circumventing those processes of normal reasoning thought, that surely would have said it was an absolutely unacceptable risk, to tell me now instead that it was my solitary hope, that none other was available; above all, telling me that if done at all it must be done at once, on the captain’s own initiative, before this explosive atmosphere ignited into more deadly alternatives than the one I now intended. I felt no assurance whatever but that an attempt to seize the ship, however unplanned, might be made in some headlong moment, before men brought to this pitch could even know what they were doing . . . determined men governed only by extreme passions all too readily understood, noble as could be imagined, convinced rightly that, the ship now come to Suez, they were dead up against their last chance to make certain they would see their homeland, their families: I could see their minds working; an attempt sure to be fiercely resisted by men of a counterview, or men only Navy-loyal to the ship and her captain, the consequences not bearing thinking of. I had to act before such events should occur, and do so decisively. I looked at the men. Something like a fever now visible in the faces of more of them than I wished to count, something tremulant, strained, about to give way, my time fast going. For one poised moment I felt the utter finality of it, the no turning back; then took the step I had made an oath to myself I would never take.
“A very considerable number? Very well. Let us find out how considerable.”
I could feel time rushing in upon me, some cruel chronometer counting down, my eighteen years at sea seeming to pass before me in the fraction of a second, as though I might extract some helpful suggestion from that long servitude, below me three hundred shipmates nerve-taut, and suddenly it seemed my most precious asset was that I knew sailors. I could see their faces looking up at me, caught off guard, and, if I read them aright, caught also in their own uncertainty, foreboding, at some unexpected turn of events, its nature inexact to them. I felt a momentary lift. Gone quickly in the eerie silence then resumed, that profound and unnerving mute waiting, a stillness so intense that the smallest wash of a softened sea could be heard against the ship’s sides and which seemed to conceal all the thoughts of men. Disregarding him, I spoke over the CSO to ship’s company, in a captain’s voice bent on making it straight and to the point, almost as if I were anxious to get it over with, to let them do whatever it was they wished to do; that I had no intention of standing in the way of it.
“Lieutenant Commander Chatham has spoken of ‘lawful powers.’ Asserting that I no longer have them over you. Perhaps he is right. One might think even in our circumstance—especially then, when every hand’s very life depends on a good functioning of the ship—that a ship’s captain possessed those powers until he did something or failed to do something that was a just cause for relieving him of them. What are those causes here? Negligence of duty? Cowardice in the face of the enemy? Incompetent seamanship? Dispensing illegal punishments on members of ship’s company? These are some known causes for removing a captain from his command. So far as I can tell I am not accused of any of these. The charge against me appears to be that I have decided, after careful consultation with responsible officers, indeed after talking with many of you, not to take this ship home. For reasons which have been explained to you in the most persistent detail and which I do not propose to repeat here. That decision is the act for which I am to be relieved of my captaincy. As for ‘legal authority,’ Mr. Chatham does not say where that prerogative resides. He suggests that it is now in ship’s company itself. Very well. Let it so be.”
They had been taken as unawares as it seemed to me men could be. That much was clear; the startlement in their faces, this time appearing to linger, showed it. I pressed it home on them.
“Since that is what you seem to want, you may have a choice, one I will abide by. Before you make it, let every hand understand the following matters as you have never understood anything.” I could hear my voice come hard. “One choice is this. I will remain your captain. If you so choose, you will have made the last choice you will ever make aboard this ship. I do not need to waste the time of sailors, of seamen, in giving reasons. Sailors know them. It would not work. Not on this ship. Not on any Navy ship. Since I do not claim perfection for myself, or infallibility, where doubts exist on any matter I will consult, ask for, consider advice, listen to anybody aboard this ship, as I have in this instance. I will continue to do so. And any man who has anything to say can come to me and say it. But, that done, decisions will then be made as they are always made on a Navy ship of the line. By the ship’s captain. I intend to be obeyed. There will be no more talk as to ‘lawful powers’ and ‘legal authority.’ Understand also that by that choice, this ship will go through that canal you see off the starboard beam and will proceed on a course for the southern oceans and ultimately, if it should come to that, for the Pacific until we find some piece of land that will accept us, sustain us. That is the only course on which I will take you and the Nathan James. If you turn this ship about and make a course for home you will not do so under this captain. That is one choice.”
I waited long enough only to let them fully grasp it.
“You have a second choice. It is that I cease from this day to be your captain. You may run this ship yourselves.” My words came now scornfully, almost contemptuously. “By whatever method you may decide. Either by choosing your own captain. Or by any other method of operating a Navy ship that may occur or be invented by the more clever among you. And you may take this ship where you please.”
I had finished.
“Are you men out of your minds?”
They turned as one in the direction of that voice. It was Boatswain’s Mate Preston, towering over all. His voice, always so even-cadenced, that curious contrast to his massive figure, now took on a tone of fury, of its own contempt.
“You call yourselves sailors. Do you think you can run this ship without a captain? And do you think yourselves fit to choose one like some frigging shore election. Sailors! Where do I see sailors?”
“You got it all wrong, Boats,” another voice came, whose I could not tell. “We don’t care who the captain is. All we want is to go home.”
It was as though a Babel had been released, other voices rising, the silence abruptly and rampantly broken, clamorous and opposing opinions erupting in an upheaval of heightening acrimony. I had had enough. My own voice came in a shout.
“Knock it off, all of you. Right now.” The silence returned, as complete as before. “There’s been enough talk. Too much. Let’s get on with it.”
I came down harshly. “Those of you who want the ship to go home, step to the port side. Those of you who want her to go to the Pacific, to the starboard.”
They remained motionless as statues. It was as though as sailors they were stunned equally by the strangeness and the enormity of what had suddenly been given them; something as foreign to them as could be; men accustomed to having their lives governed by a sure despotism, inured to a world of orders and commands, now told not just that they could resolve a matter themselves but one that would both utterly alter their present lives and the conduct of their affairs and determine forever their future lives. I spoke savagely.
“You heard me. That is what you wanted. In God’s name, move. Now.”
It began, even so with what seemed an infinite slowness, the first men to move proceeding to the starboard side of the ship, presently some moving to the port; others appeared clearly to hesitate, as though undecided to which side to go. Myself not realizing it was over until I became aware that I was looking down a long clear space to the open sea, men in numbers ranged on either side of it.
“Mr. Thurlow.”
“Sir?”
“Will you please count those on the port side of the ship.”
“Aye, sir.”
The navigator started walking along it. Then he had stepped back and stood looking up at me.
“One hundred and nine hands, sir.”
Now for the first time I looked straight at the contingent congregated along the ship’s port lifeline; eyes held helplessly there, in me room only for the profoundest shock. So there were so many as that set against the course I had decided on. A full third of ship’s company! Their numbers, the fact that they were now gathered together in such an ominous separation from their shipmates across from them, severed by that gaping space, the very physical partition making clear to all the terrible divisiveness in ship’s company . . . matters far worse than they had been before: Then, no one had really known the extent of it; now, the ship stood starkly, openly, visibly sundered. Chatham: he had won what he had set out to win: to show me, show us all, how split the ship was. I had fallen directly into his trap. I had not the least idea what he intended to do with his triumph. I became aware that he was speaking to me, his voice harder than before; those tones of something like arrogance returned, even of command.
“Captain, what we demand are boats. We want the gig and three lifeboats. They will accommodate us. To try to make it home.”
At first I did not comprehend what he had said. Caught by an inexpectation, an astonishment; stupefied by what I had heard. Never for a moment having counted on this. Then, looking into his face, the face of a determined officer, unflinching, knowing the reality. That much planning, and to the last detail, they had done. “To try to make it home.” It was that phrase that did it, the sorrowfulness, the heartbreak of it, suddenly slamming at me as I gazed now at the men arrayed along the port lifeline, studying individual faces, stared both in a kind of stunned dismay and an onslaught of agony, of pain, yes, of a kind of hopelessly poignant love for them, that their desire, their determination for home should have gone thus far. Chatham was right. There were things about my men I did not know. For a moment an overpowering compassion for them, a great pity, struck at my will; myself shaken, almost tottering on the launcher platform—wavering not just physically but in my resolve. Then a second horror hit me. I spoke as a seaman.
“How in God’s name do you propose doing it?”
“Very simply.” He spoke with a kind of arrogant defiance. “The gig will tow the lifeboats.”
“My God,” I said.
I could hear Chatham’s voice coming at me, in it now tones of insistence, hard, pressing, the voice almost of a superior; that, and what he had to say, yanking me violently back.
“Well, Captain. Do we get the boats? Of course, you still have the choice of turning the ship around.”
Suddenly I became aware that Lieutenant Girard had appeared from somewhere and had taken up a position squarely facing Chatham. From directly below me I could hear her.
“Mr. Chatham, this is an evil thing you’re doing.” Her voice cold and hard. “You’re taking these people to their deaths.”
“Stay out of this, Girard.” Chatham’s hardened voice was equally cold. “It’s no affair of yours.”
“The hell it isn’t.” I could feel the rage rising in her, the loathing for this officer. She spoke over him to the men on the port side, her voice not shrill but low, intent, carrying. “Are you mad, all of you? Do you have any idea what it will be like? Five thousand miles on the high seas in open boats. And that way—towed boats?”
I could hear a certain rustle of unease among the men. Her voice kept coming at them.
“Even if you make it back you’ll be like those people at Amalfi damned quick. Have you forgotten them? Aren’t there enough dead people? Are you so eager to join them? If you don’t care for yourselves, don’t you care for the idea that we need every live person we can hang on to?”
A terrible silence held for a moment. She turned her fury back on the CSO.
“You have no right. No right at all.”
“Leave it, Miss Girard,” I said.
I looked at the men on the port side who had reached that ghastly decision, their faces telling me this resolution was inflexible, not one of them moving from where they stood in the pitiless stillness, waiting only my reply as to whether I would now make possible the attempt. I looked then at those on the starboard side who had chosen the ship and as I did a knowledge that filled me with horror seized me: The hideous truth was, I had no other choice than that or the one Chatham had now reached such a point of arrogance, of insolence, as to offer me: Send them home in the boats or take them there in the ship. It was one or the other; conscious at the same instant of something brutally bitter: that he knew this full well, indeed that his every move had been dictated by that shrewd perception and the reasons it contained. There was no way in the world these two bodies of men could now abide on the same ship and ourselves go forward on the course I had chosen. The ship would simply not work; the ship herself would not allow it. The awful alternative was to cast men into open boats on a voyage across two great seas fraught with every peril . . . and not just any men: shipmates, men I had commanded, with whom I had been through so much, toward whom I had sworn the most solemn oaths of care and protection. Yet, as certain as the stars of night these same men, kept aboard, with their obsession nothing had been able to breach, would come back at us, perhaps having converted others to their cause, the ship at some point in her course torn apart, mortally so this time the greater rather than the lesser probability, by events far worse than what had happened this day. Our future at best full-laden with the gravest of incertitudes as we ventured now into a vast unknown, we would need every hand pulling together to have any chance at all of bringing the ship and ourselves to safe harbor. A ship with a crew so divided on a matter so fundamental as the ship’s very course, her destination: It was lunacy. No captain with a shred of sanity left would ever take such a ship off soundings had he the slightest opportunity to alter matters; least of all the captain of a destroyer with its inescapable intimacy. Well, that opportunity had come. It would not do so again. I must not fail to seize it. (As for that sole other choice I had, bringing the ship 180 degrees about, heading home: Did I for one desperate moment consider it yet once more? I cannot say; if I did, it was only instantly, viciously, to suppress it.) Survival itself demanded it: a ship’s company united, loyal to their captain, a loyalty but moments ago put to the severest test, that larger body of men by the starboard lifeline, wanting to go where he would take them. In a surge of savage ruthlessness I realized I wanted all others gone, off my ship; to the last hand.
I turned to him where he still stood, directly below me. I, thinking myself a judge of men and especially of sailors, knew now: I had always underestimated him, both as to his qualities of strength and as to other qualities less admirable. Only now did his achievement, and its execution, reach me in all its fullness. There had been something masterly, Machiavellian, about it. He had forced me skillfully into a position where I had to give him the boats—that, or take the ship home; he had seen into my mind better than I into his, seen there the unacceptability I would attach to keeping so many men on the ship who did not want to be there. He had to show me the numbers and I had even helped him do that. All the same I had helped myself; helped the ship: She would now be rid of men certain in time to endanger her. In that sense our purpose had been curiously identical, and each had realized his own. We were quits as it were. And as we looked now into each other’s eyes, I had an absolute sense that we both knew all of these things to the last detail, and that each knew the other knew it. Knew also, in a final truth, something far worse, the terrible knowledge that would go with each of us to his last day on earth: that we two had been the authors of the dread decisions that had this day been made in the lives of men. A flapping in the halyards, a sudden freshening of sea breeze, startled me like a portent, a great chill seeming to pass through me; then all came silent again. I gave him my answer, quietly enough, if in a coldness that said the matter was decided.
“In response to your ‘demand,’ Mr. Chatham. Permission granted. You may have the boats.”
I looked again at the men on the port side. In their faces there was something like rapture, as if they were already home, had simply obliterated any thought of the appalling passage intervening; this alleviated in others by a clear grimness as to what lay ahead. In all faces something beyond reaching, irredeemable: I knew, in an infinite anguish, that I had lost them. I looked again at their leader below me. In his eyes I saw triumph but also something else: that hard look of a sea officer already in the process of becoming a commander of men, a peculiar gleam, a look I knew well—for I possessed it myself. He wanted no doubts left.
“The boats to include the captain’s gig?”
I spoke curtly. “Aye, Mr. Chatham. You shall have the captain’s gig.”
“Then we will be ready to cast off at first light.”
I was startled at that. Twelve hours. Yes, they had planned it all.
“As you wish.” Now I allowed myself a brutal note. “For now, sir, you will go immediately to your stateroom and bring me your launch key, all keys to weapons systems and spaces. Preston!”
“Sir!”
“You will accompany Mr. Chatham. You are to stay with him until he has brought the keys to me. Is that clear?”
“Aye, Captain. Very clear, sir.”
The big boatswain’s mate stepped smartly forward from the starboard lifeline and took up a position close to the officer, eager, I felt, to keep an eye on him. A look half smile, half scorn crossed Chatham’s face.
“That was unnecessary, Captain.”
“Perhaps so,” I said. “But in this instance I felt it best to exercise my lawful powers.”
Then I spoke to all. “Ship’s company dismissed.”
From their port and starboard sides the parted men now moved, mingling again.
* * *
Chatham’s earnest desire for the captain’s gig was understandable. It carried forty-three men. Draft 3'19" fully loaded, length 41'6¼", full load displacement 28,800 pounds, fuel capacity 180 gallons, two 250 hp diesel engines. Sturdy, seaworthy—men had crossed oceans in boats less so. Equipped with provisions including sextant and nautical tables, radar, full sails rigging when the fuel gave out . . . towing lifeboats decidedly would not help . . . a fearsome voyage it would be. Still I believed skilled seamen had a chance. All our boats were supplied with exactingly chosen survival gear: bailers, flashlights with extra batteries, desalter kits, fishing kits, food packets, first aid kits, drinking water, Very pistols, signaling mirrors, portable radios, shark repellents, floatable knives, hatchet, signaling whistle, hand pumps. During the few hours I saw personally to it that they were further equipped as much as they could be with additional stores, food, water, other items; including small arms, ammunition, drums of diesel fuel—the reason for the third boat being these extra stores—that would give this arduous voyage its best chance.
* * *
Next morning, the sun just pushing over the horizon, every hand stood topside as the gig and the lifeboats were lowered away, then were laced together, the gig in the lead, the three boats astern her on short lines one after the other, the tents which could be raised over them in hard weather now lowered. It was a luminous day, a great serenity lying upon the waters under stainless skies of azure, everywhere the almost translucent stillness that had held these last days. I stood on the quarterdeck as each of the 109 passed by me before stepping onto the platform of the accommodation ladder in the order in which Lieutenant Commander Chatham had directed them, this also meticulously worked out by himself to place hands with the desired skills in respective boats. Each pausing a moment as he came abreast of me, starting to salute until they sensed that I did not want that; I shook a hand, pressed a shoulder: a man I had known as closely as I felt men could passed on, together we passed out of each other’s lives. My mind as I looked into their faces seeming like some endless kaleidoscope, unwinding back over my time with this man or that, fetching up an individual memory, something having to do with him. In every single case myself trying in that mind to discover, as he came before me, why that particular man was leaving, what had led him to his dread decision. Some even made sense. I found it almost weirdly natural that all three of the men who had married Norwegian girls back at our base in the Hardangerfjord went—Signalman First Brinton, Boatswain’s Mate Second Hubbard, Chief Quartermaster Hewlett, remembered myself standing up as best man for each of them in the little church of St. Peter’s-of-the-Sea, at Husnes, its steeple the last thing we saw standing out, the first returning from the Barents. I had somehow the feeling that they had vague, fanciful hopes of making it back to Norway—by what means I could not imagine, guessing that neither could they. More glad than not that Hewlitt was going. Other than Lieutenant Thurlow, he was the best navigator the James carried, would be invaluable to the voyage, perhaps crucial to its success. There were clear patterns I could understand. Most of those departing were men with families; wives, children. But then also a couple of women: one, Hospital Corpsman Lockridge, who had been closest of any of us to those wretched souls on the beaches at Amalfi and the other places along the littorals of Italy and France where we had stopped to render what little aid we could, herself giving direct physical help, bandages, medicines, where nothing could help, perhaps her sheer acts of emollience and care doing so for brief seconds to those spectral creatures looking at her out of sockets of eyes—myself, seeking any connection whatever, however tenuous, even farfetched, somehow tying that experience to her departure. It was all I could do to keep from asking some, Why, why? I asked none. There was no time, and the question would have been worse than senseless; yet unspoken and unspeakable thoughts heard between us in the remorseless silence. Ensign Jennings, the youngest officer aboard, a wife, a child he had never seen in Tulsa, Oklahoma, staying a moment in front of me; his lustrous eyes glaring like some bewildered son caught in events too large for him, in a mystery he could neither understand nor solve, into those of a father, as if I, whose relationship to him had not been unlike, might at this very last moment give him some answer; none to give, myself placing a hand on his shoulder, his moving on. Madness! I could only think as they passed by. Madness! And also silent, hoarded thoughts of a different kind, of the most immense thanksgiving as to the men who were not in that terrible line. Chief Delaney, the Missouri farm boy who seemed to know everything there was to know about growing things and who was so zealously tending the garden of seedlings he had started aboard that might one day make all the difference; Noisy Travis, the shipfitter, who one day might build us dwellings: these two men alone quite possibly indispensable to our survival. Others: Porterfield, our best helmsman and something else: if there was one man more than any other who had helped his shipmates to bear up, it was he—had almost willed some of them through after the launchings and down to now by some mysterious quality of the spirit he seemed to possess. It would have been sore to lose him. Thinking of times to come, I thanked God with all my heart that these, certain others, had chosen to stay with the ship.
Then the last hand was down, only their commander remaining, standing beside me on the quarterdeck. It was the first time since these happenings that we had been absolutely alone. For those of my ship’s company leaving I had feelings such that only the application of the last measure of self-control I possessed had enabled me to see them pass by and step onto that accommodation ladder. For the officer who now stood before me: I felt I had never known until now what anger was. Not so much for the mutiny as such as for taking them into what now lay before them. Knowing it would be as senseless as the other, I did all I could to suppress it as well. Not with a full success. We spoke in a kind of chill formality.
“I wish it could have been different, Captain,” he said.
“There was never any chance for that, Mr. Chatham. Once you started making demands of the captain of a Navy ship. Once you decided you knew best. I hope to God you know what you are doing, sir.”
“Naturally I believe I do.”
I had no patience with that; nor did I like his tone. I spoke with a cold rage. “I cannot forgive you for what you have done. I would have preferred to see you before a general court-martial had circumstances permitted. That is where you belong. Some of these men wanted to go on their own: That is true enough. But few enough I believe to cause the ship no harm. You did everything you could to encourage others. You misled them.”
“Not in my view, sir. Who is to say which of us is right?”
I was done with it. I looked down at the boats in the stilled waters, at their passengers, back to him. I wanted him out of my presence, gone. I spoke with an infinite disdain.
“Now, sir, you will get off my ship.”
He stepped onto the ladder platform, turned, facing upward, smartly saluted the national ensign high on the mainmast. The ancient Navy custom seeming a mockery; though I knew he did not intend it so, it was reflexive in him. Then he was moving down the ladder, stepping into the gig.
The little flotilla of gig and three lifeboats rode gently just behind the ship’s stern, hardly bobbing on the resting sea. The fantail of the James stood filled with sailors looking a last time down into the faces of shipmates numbering some of life’s closest friends. The men and the women in the boats looking up at us on the ship . . . it was almost more than the heart could bear. The Jesuit, standing on the very tip of the fantail, conducted a brief religious service, sprinkling holy water, saying a prayer over the boats and their passengers. “Our God and Ruler of the Deep who alone knowest the hearts of men, alone knowest the truth and meaning of thy servants’ decisions, guide these our shipmates on their long and difficult voyage over the great waters. Watch ever over them, give them calm seas and good passage. Great Navigator, bring them at last in thy everlasting mercy to safe harbor . . .”
Then simultaneously boats and ship were getting underway in opposite directions, the small and larger white wakes merging, hands of shipmates on both lifted in farewell. The Nathan James gathered way, proceeding slowly through the gently parting waters. All hands not on watch remained on the fantail, gazing as I did from the bridge wing at the four boats in column line, the gig towing the other three, moving away from us over a blue sea, glassy under the climbing sunlight, the stillness broken only by the quietened noises of gig and ship; the faces of all the occupants of the boats save only the coxswain at the helm of the gig seeming to me to the last turned toward the ship. Soon they were but specks on the vast and empty Mediterranean. Then they had vanished over the western horizon. I faced back, stepped into the pilot house.
“Right standard rudder,” I spoke to the helmsman, Porterfield.
“Right standard rudder, aye, sir.”
“Steady on course zero eight five.”
“Steady on course zero eight five, sir . . . Checking zero nine zero magnetic.”
I could see it up ahead. “Helmsman, take us through Suez.”
“Through Suez, sir.”