THE age of sail did not end with the coming of steam; it simply assumed new forms. Wisdom had it that some things were still best done by sail and for decades they were. Charting the seas was one. Charles Darwin’s voyage in the Beagle is remembered for shaking perceptions on the very nature of human existence, but it started with a commission to survey the southern tip of America. Another charting expedition, by the Rattlesnake to the Great Barrier Reef and New Guinea, followed a few years later. Fast-sailing remained the domain of canvas even longer. Britain’s most famous ship after the Victory, the Cutty Sark, was only built in 1869.
Love of the old ways endured of course, as evidenced by a yearning that runs through British culture from Turner to Ralph Vaughan Williams, from the shanties sung up and down the coast to the poetry of John Masefield. The sea was actually a troubled habitat for Masefield, who was an indifferent sailor, being once shipped home in distress. Yet Salt-Water Ballads set him on the path to the poet laureateship, and the combination of his lyrics and John Ireland’s setting rendered ‘Sea Fever’ a much-loved condition.
But with change came a sense of loss. An old captain lamented that in 1839 there was not a single vessel sailing out of Dover. The same story was told up and down the coast, where ‘the packets are all steamers’. The Navy had been pared down to 30,000 men, and the hands of old replaced by ratings who joined, often as boys. ‘The spirit of the men is broken,’ the captain went on. ‘You no longer hear a ship’s company boasting with pride of the dexterity and quickness of their evolutions.’ Gone was the contest, ‘for a joke or a wager’, between foretop men and maintop men.1 The tribe had been dispersed.
Ultimately, the sea would always draw a certain type of character. The tribe had been dispersed but aspects of tribal living survived – a rude equality, simplicity, a sense of identity and belonging. Thomas Hodgkin, a Quaker physician who campaigned against impressment, observed that seafaring appealed to the adventurous because it was ‘spirit-stirring and not dull and deadening, like throwing a shuttle or twisting a cotton thread’.2 There would always be those like Henry Jervis of the Pylades who, in irons for disobedience, shook a fist at a master’s mate, saying if he caught him ashore ‘he would give him a Bloody Thundering good Walloping’, and might eat him too but supposed he should be ‘a very tough bit’.3
What was lost with the passing of sail was a culture, and a language. Elements of Jack’s lingo have been absorbed into the mainstream, from ‘taken aback’ to ‘cut and run’, from ‘by and large’ to ‘at loggerheads’. But instructions on, for example, how ‘To Furl a Royal’ from The Seaman’s Friend of 1841 by Richard Henry Dana, author of Two Years Before the Mast, might as well be in a foreign tongue: ‘Make a skin of the upper part of the body of the sail, large enough to come down well abaft, and cover the whole bunt when the sail is furled. Lift the skin up and put into the bunt the slack of the clews (not too taut) the leech and foot-rope and body of the sail.’
Somewhere, in that blend of canvas and words, may lie an answer to one mystery. Jack, this narrative has tried to show, had been nourished by encounters with distant lands and strange people. It did not take a voyage to the South Seas, however, for a plain seaman to glimpse and reach out for the sublime. Something about his immense environment and his labours imbued poetry. A sailor might be illiterate yet still describe his ship as: ‘Snug as a duck in a ditch, never straining as much as a rope-yarn aloft and as tight as a bottle below.’4
Visions from aloft may have been part of it. Men have always ascended the heights for a perspective of life and the world. In biblical times, it was to encounter God. Since what the Romantics described as the discovery of mountains in the nineteenth century, climbers of the Alps and fell walkers in the Lake District have sought to master ‘the mount sublime’ and put the sensation into words, Samuel Taylor Coleridge among them. Risk, striving, attainment, exhilaration – these were also the experiences of the topman. Samuel Kelly, a mariner of the eighteenth century, saw it thus:
I have read somewhere that seamen are neither reckoned among the living nor the dead, their whole lives being spent in jeopardy. No sooner is one peril over, but another comes rolling on, like the waves of a full grown sea.5
Today the vast majority of world trade is moved by sea, so ships and sailors are more vital to the international economy than ever. Yet it is hard to see the crewman of a container vessel reflecting with Robert Hay: ‘The qualities of a ship are to a seaman what the charms of a mistress are to a poet.’ Or with Aaron Thomas, on entering a stormy bay:
All is calm, there is no uproar, nor no voice heard but the man heaving the lead. Every soul thinks what a slender barrier there is between them and eternity. They pause, the ship still driving on . . . The sea roars, the masts crack, the winds whistle, the elements in tumult, but the man at the lead, lashed to the chains, sings, ‘By the lead, five’.6
Jack could be moved, as we have seen, to try to convey these sensations – working above an elemental space that shifted from a quiet eternal majesty to buffeting madness, from blue serenity to black peril. He and his fellows failed of course, though it is testimony to the power of this binding force that they felt such a compulsion. It took a Polish seaman, born Konrad Korzeniowski, who found his true calling under canvas in British clippers and became one of the greatest writers in the English language, to note that a passion for the sea was ‘something too great for words’.7
Joseph Conrad did, however, late in life, decide ‘to lay bare with the unreserve of a last hour’s confession the terms of my relation to the sea’. This was ‘the best tribute my piety can offer to the ultimate shapers of my character, convictions and, in a sense, destiny – to the imperishable sea, to the ships that are no more, and to the simple men who have had their day’.8 These, as he wrote elsewhere, were:
Men who knew toil, privation, violence, debauchery – but knew not fear, and had no desire of spite in their hearts. Men hard to manage, but easy to inspire; voiceless men – but men enough to scorn in their hearts the sentimental voices that bewailed the hardness of their fate. It was a fate unique and their own; the capacity to bear it appeared to them the privilege of the chosen! Their generation lived inarticulate and indispensable, without knowing the sweetness of affections or the refuge of a home – and died free from the dark menace of a narrow grave. They were the everlasting children of the mysterious sea.9
The last word rightly belongs to one of those who shared a berth with the likes of Jacob Nagle and John Nicol. A seaman of the Minotaur, William Thorpe kept a record of Trafalgar which he passed late in life ‘to my Dear Sarah as a memorial’. Thorpe ended with a verse, a medium for which Jack had a special fondness. It came from a song, one of obscure origin, which he set down as a valediction for his shipmates:
Heedless of danger, to the Scene
Of War, the lowly hero came
There fell unnoticed and unknown –
The World’s a stranger to his name.
Scorn not to think on one so Poor;
Worth oft adorns the Humble mind;
Oft in a common sailor’s breast
Dwell virtues of no common kind.10