The Last Ship: A Novel

by William Brinkley

  “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 ch
oose 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.”