The Last Ship: A Novel

by William Brinkley

  Equal to, perhaps exceeding even the enormous asset of our diversity of skills, spanning virtually the entire spectrum needed to sustain men physically, we bring with us another capital.

  It would appear that on coming of age a man is confronted with making one of two choices: the life of the imagination or the life of power. To these two I have sometimes felt that a third choice, so particularized is it, so discrete in virtually every respect, should be added: the life of the sea. I am not suggesting that this election is done necessarily in any directly conscious way, as, let us say, the way in which a religious takes vows. But I do feel the act to bear at least one similarity, in that, with so many sailors, it also proceeds from something deep and fundamental in them and against the grain of human life as practiced. Men who go to sea are different from men who stay ashore. To become a sailor, to choose the sea way, is more than anything else essentially to reject the values that drive so much of mankind. Sailors are almost entirely free of the smell of money, that aroma of avarice, that like some unpleasant body odor had come to afflict so much of human intercourse. The ritualized accumulation of possessions; that whole congeries of land barometers of “success” that goes under the general term of “material interests”: These are not of first importance to a true seaman. Were they, he would never take ship, for no vocation save possibly the priesthood runs in such an opposite direction from their fulfillments. Some think sailors innocent or even naive, like children, to leave behind such treasures, not comprehending that they leave behind also acquisitiveness, greed, covetousness, the manipulation for his own purposes one human being of another. Many see something almost unnatural in the choice: for example, in a man deliberately choosing to spend the great part of his life away from home. And they have a point. But it is one that itself marks sailors as men apart. And indeed there is a certain simplicity in naval sailors. But they are far from being naïve. In them resides a curious mixture of innocence and skepticism I have found nowhere else. They are remarkably discerning judges of character. Here it is impossible to fool them—no civilian, no shipmate, no captain can do so, and only a fool would attempt it. Seamen effortlessly see through pretense as through clear glass. It is a gift of the sea. They despise cant, hypocrisy, all insincerity, and can detect it in a moment. So precise is their perception in these matters that to this day I hardly understand why it should be so. It is as though in the act of rejecting certain normal or at least not infrequent human traits and motives for themselves, they had become experts at detecting them in others.

  The replacement for land’s icons—since men must value something—appears to me, after being among sailors for eighteen years now, to be an uncomplicated belief in, the giving of high marks to, two qualities: forthrightness in human dealings; and coping, simple and direct, with whatever his world, that being life at sea, presents. In the sailor’s catechism, his articles of faith, this twain marks the man. The necessity for both are self-evident: the first in the fact that sailors live so closely together (a tiny example: Thievery is almost unknown on ships, looked upon as a capital offense, since there is not the slightest defense against it, and the rare occasion it occurs, however minor, can turn a ship upside down); the second in the inherent condition of a ship’s isolation. The sea is a faithless thing: one never knows what she may bring, either in her ever-changing temperaments or as a bearer on or under her of forces with hostile intent toward one. Even with no assist from the sea, the hazards a distant ship on the waters may fall upon, within herself or her company, are numberless. Dealing with these, it is entirely common for a ship to come up short in this, that, or the other. This ever-present circumstance of their lives, itself against the grain since most men desire to store up every imaginable aid for every conceivable contingency, seems perversely to be a thing that attracts men of a certain kind to the sea and makes of them good sailors, Navy men. By nature sailors cope; by long experience they are virtuosos of making do with what is at hand, and if nothing is, creating it. It was a talent I counted greatly on in the times ahead. The other imperative is one that is never given a thought, being taken for granted in a sailor as much as is the fact that he has eyes, arms, legs: One assumes the possession of courage in a Navy man. Even if one had the opposite intention, or temptation, that of cravenness, of cowardice, there is no way to avail oneself of it: one may turn tail and run off a battlefield—this has been known; when harm comes calling, one part of a ship is as hazardous as another; one may not run off a ship without landing in the sea, which is very deep, and the shore customarily far away.

  A ship is like no other kind of life: set apart, dissevered—physically, spiritually, root and branch—from all other experiences. She is all alone; an extrinsic incarnation moving over great waters, a tiny principality, possessing of her own codes and worths having little kinship with those of the shore. Inherent, in her company, a comradeship of an order I take to be indigenous, idiosyncratic, to ships; members of a ship’s company being interlocked in a manner exceeding that even of families: from these one can also always walk away. On a ship only the same everlasting sea awaits. That mystic force: the feeling of shipmates for one another and for the ship that is, in sum entire, their home and life, their true country. Herein, it seems to me, lies the preeminent difference of all in the land and the sea way: that in the former, the graspings of men for their own interests are so often at the expense and even ill of others, almost, it would appear, necessarily so—if oneself is to rise, others must not; and that this process hardly exists on ships. Sailors are accustomed to thinking of the welfare of one’s shipmates equally with that of oneself.

  None of this is meant to claim the aspects of angels for men who go to sea. Far from it. Treachery has walked many a ship’s decks; vileness; stupid men; worse, stupid and arrogant officers; worst of all, stupid and selfish captains. Indeed the sea would seem to divulge these attributes as fully as it does their opposites.

  I have spoken at length about these matters, not because of their novelty (a thousand others, from Homer to Conrad, have said the same and legions of seamen know it in their blood), but in order to establish that nothing is more critical to our unknown future than this discrepant makeup of the body of men whom I lead into it. Their very nature, in character, in temperament, in everything that counts in the construction of that complex creature called a human being: Nothing sustains me more. There lies, however, another meaning in the same condition: the riddle which is not a riddle, the but seeming contradiction. By that nature also am I filled with my deepest foreboding; in the sense that, my best hope, it constitutes them as well able adversary—and a possibly dangerous one. Accustomed in the sea way to being ruled by captains with near sachemlike powers, they are paradoxically men of the most independent of minds. It is not by chance that man’s noblest deeds have occurred on the seas of the planet, far from any land, on the ships that course the great oceans; or that on these same ships, and for the identical reason, that of isolation beyond the reach of other forces, have been committed acts among man’s most profoundly evil. These antipodal directions for men to take seeming more potential in matters soon to be upon us.

  * * *

  First light was casting its glow, rose shading into carmine, over the island and across sky and waters, the annunciation of a tranquil day. I had sent upward of forty men chosen and indoctrinated by Gunner’s Mate Delaney ashore first. Now I stood at the top of the accommodation ladder with the deck watch and Delaney stood at the bottom as the sailors, each with infinite solicitude carrying a tray of seedlings in cut-down five-inch casings, filed by me and started gingerly down the ladder into the first of the boats, Coxswain Rachel Meyer standing amidships at the wheel. On the glassy water the boat bobbed hardly at all.

  “Steady as you go,” I kept saying as the men passed by me. “Take an even strain.”

  As the sailor reached the platform on the ladder’s bottom, Delaney received the tray from him, held it until the man had seated himself securely in the boat,
then gave it carefully back. “Hold it with both hands, mate,” I heard him say in his Ozark twang. “Straight up. In your lap.”

  Not until the entire boarding procedure had been completed but for one man did the gunner’s mate yell up to me. “Captain, we’re ready for another.”

  Thus the first boat filled with men, each with a tray of seedlings. “Stand off, Coxswain,” I called down.

  Meyer swung away smartly and the next boat came alongside. We filled three boats, including the farming gear—the grappling irons, the entrenching-tools, the lines—and then the flotilla got underway for the island lying half a league off.

  Ever since we first raised the island that morning now less than a week back, both sea and lagoon had preserved an unruffled stillness. I was particularly glad that, carrying our fragile and priceless cargo, the same shiny patina of waters bore us this day. As we moved in, the quiescence of sea and island seemed to envelop us in a solitude in which even a voice was a jarring thing, the reigning peacefulness appearing to silence the men, leaving them with their thoughts; they sat very straight, exceptionally solemn, each grasping the tray in his lap with both hands. Delaney had put the fear of God in them about those seedlings. Our flotilla came on line abreast, so as not to have them troubled even by a boat’s wake, and at one-quarter speed. Beyond the bow I could see the advance party standing on the beach, watching us approach, behind them the island’s prideful green rising. Together, as if choreographed, the boats slid up gently out of the green-on-azure lagoon and onto the fine pinkish sand and Delaney hopped out, the first one. Again under the gunner’s mate’s nursing ministrations, the men first handed the seedlings out to the beach party, then each debarked himself and took back the tray that was his charge and responsibility. It was a wonder, the somber, tender ritual in which these sea-fashioned men moved, as if knowing all too well the preciousness of their lading. Then we off-loaded the farming gear.

  The beach party picked up the gear and our company of sailors started off. Instead of cutting through the island with its tangled growth, which could trip a man carrying a tray of seedlings, we went straight down the beach, the sailors bearing the plants grouped in a body and the forty-odd shipmates behind and to each side, as though convoying them. Signalman Third Alice Bixby walked alongside me toting the portable signal light with which we could keep contact with the ship and they with us for any emergency or peril that might arise on sea or land. (As for the latter there had been murmurings among the crew, not entirely frivolous ones, that there might be eyes watching us from within the island’s deep growth. I could only reassure them that if so, there was nothing we could do about it but hope that they were more curious than hostile, since I was not about to mount a land campaign to sweep the island of imaginary unfriendlies. We were too in a hurry to have time for that.) Southerly we moved until we came to a path opening from the beach, cleared by a crew a couple of days back, in accordance with Delaney’s unstinting foresight, of the brush that blockaded the approach to the ridge. We went into it single file. Soon we were cutting around the clear-running stream where we could see the pebbles glistening on the bottom. We started up the hill and between the trees in the sweet early morning light, which nonetheless spoke of a cruder sun to come, and finally came out on the meadowlike plateau with its long silky lime-green grass, stirring ever so slightly now in a wisp of breeze coming over the duny cliff from the sea just beyond. There we could see our destroyer standing out, gray and motionless, the solitary mark on the endless ocean blue. Under a grove of green trees on ground which Delaney’s men, on the preparatory mission two days back, had cleared and leveled for the purpose, the gunner’s mate directed the men to place the trays gently down and soon they rested there, clusters in the shade of the trees. Their sailor-bearers sighed as if glad at last to be relieved of a fearsome responsibility. The seedlings stood safe and waiting alongside the soil which we hoped earnestly would accept them.

  With the exactitude we might render to any naval operation, Delaney had planned this one. He took charge now, radiating a knowledge of farming as conclusively as he might, in another context, of naval gunnery, of nuclear missiles. The sailors, as sailors always are, seemed glad to follow a man who knew what he was doing. His instructions came with a crisp precision; under his superintendence the men turned to with a will.

  First he made up four plowing teams, each astutely constituted. A pair of the biggest and strongest men in ship’s company, previously chosen, were hitched to a grapnel plow fashioned to Delaney’s specifications, navigated behind in each instance by a farm boy the gunner’s mate had found among the crew. The heart of the rig was a pair of strong boards, essentially two-by-fours, cut by Noisy Travis, one laid across the backs, at waist level, of the pulling men, the other attached to the grappling iron itself; connecting the two, Boatswain’s Mate Second Class Singer, who was a master of marlinspike seamanship, of moorings and hitches of all kind, secured and lashed lines around the pulling team’s hips and shoulders thence to the plow. The big sailors in the hitches stood patiently for Singer’s rigging, somber and curious as to their new employment. One of them was Boatswain’s Mate First Class Preston, imposing as a Santa Gertrudis bull. Machinist’s Mate First Class Andrew Brewster, an engine-room man as opposed to Preston’s weather-deck domain, stood by him as his plowmate. Both were thirty-year Navy men. I felt quite certain neither had ever seen a farm, certainly not seen one worked.

  “I’ll be watching close to see that you pull your weight, Boats,” Brewster said to his partner in the hitch. “Below decks, Preston, we know what to do with a man that caulks off.”

  Preston gave his shipmate a benign look. He was perhaps an inch taller. In weight and visible strength they could have been a matched pair.

  “I will pull like a mule,” Preston said gently. “Looking at you, Brewster, I won’t find it hard to imagine I’m hitched with one.”

  Waiting behind the improvised plow as Singer proceeded with his complex ritual of lashings and knots stood Jerome Hardy, a mere seaman apprentice and a farm boy who would be their driver. He was not much more than half the size of either man in his two-man hitch. None of this stopped him from putting in his word.

  “Now, men,” he said thoughtfully. “I’m not sure I’m going to permit you men in the ranks to talk. Might interfere with your pulling power. A little discipline here, if you please. Chief?”

  “Yep?” the gunner said, hardly hearing any of this, engaged as he was with getting the operation underway. “What is it, Hardy?”

  “In Georgia, if mules don’t pop along proper, we give them a little tap on the hind end with a stick or switch. I take it we can do the same here. Only if necessary of course.”

  Preston and Brewster turned and looked balefully at Hardy, rather like real mules in harness rotating their heads to regard the human being behind them, to size up whether he knew what he was doing, and above all whether he knew about mules.

  “We not anywhere near Georgia, son,” Preston said. “Pay heed you remember that.”

  Singer was finished with his hitch.

  “All right, men,” Hardy said with loud authority. “Mind your rudder. Let’s look alive there.” And they were off.

  The team started forward, Hardy skillfully dug in his grapnel plow, the soil under the willowy grass turned, and the first smell of parturience leapt from the earth. It was like attar. A distance away the same thing happened with the second team; then with the other two. Meanwhile Delaney, wasting no time, had put other men to following the plows, carrying off the grass, leveling the earth with their entrenching tools, used like hoes now, working backward so as not to trample the soil, the men bent over under the climbing sun. The stoop labor had begun.

  Those sailors stripped to the waist, showing even more how much their bodies were weakened and wasted, their white hats perched at jaunty angles, some inverted in protection against the sun, their bodies pouring sweat as they moved slowly down the meadow, turning up the soil, and rearra
nging it: they seemed to me actually to be enjoying these labors, almost exuberant in the chance to commit their bodies to a useful purpose after the months of being cooped up on the ship, though as the day wore on enjoyment became determination; exuberance, doggedness. Some were farm boys and some city boys who knew almost nothing of how food was brought into being, but whichever, to a man they seemed eager to do their share, the only difference being that Delaney had to show what and how to the latter group. Some of these seemed if anything more zealous than their farm-boy shipmates. It was killing work. The figures of the seamen stooped repeatedly. Now and then a man would pause to mop the drenching sweat from his face, with a handkerchief, his hand, or his sailor’s hat. Farm boys and city boys, I said. Meaning as well, of course, farm girls and city girls, for a half dozen of these were out there among the farming detail, men and women all, volunteers. No complaints rose from the field, even the cherished sailor’s bitching missing. It would surely come later. At one point I was standing at the end of a row when the Preston-Brewster mule team approached before making a turn. As they strained and struggled forward, I could make out on one Nelson at Trafalgar, the tattooed sea wet as with waves real; on the other, an equivalent sweat gleaming from that majestic black chest; Preston from the deck crew, Brewster from the engineroom: they seemed determined to outdo each other in effort as their mighty bent bodies moved down the rows and the grappling iron behind them turned earth. As the sun climbed the sky, and burned brutally over the plateau, I had the men spell each other, rest in the shade of the trees, and sent them down to the clear stream below the ridge to refresh themselves. That cold running water was our gift from the Lord, our balm in Gilead; we would not have made it without. The morning went on, the transformation of the plateau proceeding, the proportion of turned earth increasing as that of the willowy grass diminished.