Ships and Women
by
[Atlantic Monthly Press and Little, Brown, $2,50]
THERE are in this world three kinds of seafaring men. There are the drunks and misfits, the social errors who find in sea life a rich field for the exercise of their misanthropic talents, and ample proof that, for them, there is no justice. The demand for these heroes is diminishing as the sea becomes mechanized, and we shall find them on shore, like emery in the bearings and monkey wrenches in the gears of our industrial life.
Then there are those seamen to whom the sea is a vocation, something to be crossed with a cargo. These are my people, and I have yet to find any reason for despising them. The shipmasters of New England, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia nearly all came from the forecastle and the builders’ yards. They were neither misfits nor romantics, but professional transporters of freight. When they had the capital to go into business on shore they gave up the sea. If you had inquired whether they had a nostalgia for the ocean they would have thought you were insane.
The third class of seaman is the sentimental Jack Tar of fiction, the white-headed boy of the American public. He walks with a rolling gait, has a wife in every port, his arms are tattooed with hearts transfixed by arrows, and all the girls love him. To this category Bill Adams belongs by right of a Cape Horn apprenticeship and an incorrigibly romantic temperament.
Born of gentlefolk in England and going to sea in the old square-rigged Silberhorn, Adams grew to be a husky third mate of six foot three and 187 pounds in his pelt. He loved the sea. He had the ambition to be a master in sail. But while in California he developed asthma and had to abandon his career. He took to working on shore and sought alleviation of his complaint in the more salubrious valleys of the Golden State.
Bill Adams mourns the departure of the sailing ship because, having left deep water in his youth, he has a nostalgia for his lost career. He has, in spite of the honest attempt to tell the facts, so idealized the past that it corresponds exactly to the conventional illusions of landsmen about the sea. He tries also to give us the truth about a sailor’s sex life, but this requires a technical dexterity in writing beyond the simple resources of our author.
Yet there is undoubted value in the naive picture of untutored men alone on the deep. It will never happen again, of course, and some, like Bill Adams, will be sorry, whereas others, like his reviewer, will rejoice. Bill sets down in manly words of few syllables the way it was with him. This is his sea testament. One regrets, now and then, his obliviousness of the artistic possibilities of his material. There is the episode of the burial at sea, for instance, with the ship rolling, when the corpse takes charge and darts about the deck, clasped by determined but helpless living men, and the captain waits until the tussle is over, prayer book in hand. But of course Bill is a sailor, not a writer. He dreams of the simple life on the old ships ‘with hempen bridle and horse of tree.’ To a reader accustomed to the more complex life of our day it is like reading of the Stone Age. This, one thinks, is the way men thought and felt and acted in neolithic times.
WILLIAM MCFEE