President Cleveland’s “twenty-inch gun” message was widely interpreted as a threat of war. What the president had done was to invoke, for the first time, the Monroe Doctrine—the view that in American affairs, the interests of the United States took priority over European concerns—as the basis of American foreign policy in the western hemisphere. Support for Cleveland’s belligerent stance was widespread in both political parties. Henry Cabot Lodge, the Massachusetts senator who dreamed of an American empire to rival Britain and Spain, led the call for war, along with his protégé, Theodore Roosevelt, who wildly imagined that the United States might lay claim to Canada as well. “This country needs a war,” Roosevelt wrote to Lodge in December 1895, and ascribed opposition to “a flabby, timid type of character which eats away at the great fighting qualities of our race.”
2.
Kipling was appalled by all the saber rattling. He felt betrayed by his friends in Washington, betrayed by his neighbors in Vermont, betrayed by his adopted country. “This folly puts an end to my good and wholesome life here,” he wrote on January 8, 1896. The Venezuela dispute struck him as personally insulting, as if, he told Charles Eliot Norton, he had been “aimed at with a decanter across a friendly dinner table.” Kipling had never liked President Cleveland. When John Hay had invited him, during his Washington visit, to meet the president and his cabinet, Kipling had found them “a colossal agglomeration of reeking bounders—awful; inexpressible; incredible.” This surprising response to the dignified and honest president—“the sole reasonable facsimile of a major President between Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt,” in the view of historian Richard Hofstadter—owed something to the social disdain that Henry Adams and his circle—fly fishermen all—had for Cleveland. And besides, Kipling’s dear friend Wolcott Balestier had written a campaign biography for Cleveland’s opponent, James Blaine.
As threats of war escalated, Kipling had wild thoughts of escaping over the border into Canada. He met with a lawyer to ensure that Carrie, pregnant with their second child, was provided for if he were to join the British navy. “If the American mine is sprung,” he wrote to Norton two weeks later, “it means dirt and slush and ultimately death [for me] either across the Canada border or in some disemboweled gunboat off Cape Hatteras.” Kipling had a great deal on his mind and so—just like the overworked president—he packed his rods and went fishing. His companion was James Conland, the family doctor, who presided over the birth of the Kiplings’ second daughter, Elsie, on February 2.
Kipling was particularly curious about Conland’s experiences as a teenager, thirty years earlier, in the fishing fleets of Gloucester, Massachusetts. An idea was taking shape in his imagination for a quintessentially American story, about the heroic old days of the New England mariner. He wanted to capture, as he wrote in Something of Myself, “a rather beautiful localized American atmosphere that was already beginning to fade.” The novel would also expose the current brash, bullying, moneygrubbing America that had stumbled into the Venezuelan crisis. He thought of calling the story, after its young hero, “Harvey Cheyne: Banker,” with a pun on fishermen of the Grand Banks (“bankers”) and the rich Cheyne family with its millions in the bank. Kipling titled the book Captains Courageous instead, borrowing a phrase from an old ballad of life at sea.
Captains Courageous was to be a fishing trip of the imagination, something to take Kipling’s mind off the Anglo-American crisis. Always obsessed with getting the details right, Kipling made sure that some real fishing, off the coast of Boston and the North Shore town of Gloucester, got mixed in. On one such trip, Dr. Conland showed him, with a surgeon’s skill, how cod was cut up and stowed in salt and ice, and got him aboard a fishing boat in Boston Harbor. Deeply seasick, Kipling watched the men hauling pollock from the surging sea before he fainted, only to be brought to his senses by the pungent smell of rotting fish, the smelling salts of the North Atlantic.
3.
Captains Courageous came quickly. As Carrie tended to the newborn baby down the hall, he had the whole story on paper within a month. He wrote proudly to his friend Robert Barr: “I’m most through with my first genuine out and out American story—a long one—. . . and oh Robert it is a beauty.” He summarized the plot of this “boy’s story” to the American writer Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward:
The son of a western millionaire going to Europe with his mother, badly spoiled, falls overboard from a liner and is picked up by a dory of a Gloucester schooner. He is carried to the boat and his statements about his father’s wealth and his own pocket-money are set down to the ravings of insanity. The schooner can’t leave the banks in May, and so he is set to work as a second boy and goes through all the Bank experiences from trawling to witnessing a collision, and the gathering of the fleet round the Virgin. The three months experience makes a man of him or rather—he is only 15 years old—teaches him how to appreciate his father.
The book had “no plot; no love making and no social problem,” Kipling insisted. “The boy works out his own salvation and learns discipline and duty.”
As Kipling saw it, wealthy Americans were bored in their steam-powered conveyances on the land and sea. They could travel faster, like young Harvey Cheyne on his luxury liner bound for his expensive schooling in Europe, but they had no meaningful destination. Their amusements were for distraction only, their cultivation of the habits of maturity as empty as extinguished cigars. The first sentence of the novel strikes the note of the air-conditioned nightmare: “The weather door of the smoking-room had been left open to the North Atlantic fog, as the big liner rolled and lifted, whistling to warn the fishing-fleet.” Harvey Cheyne begs a cigar and wonders aloud, with the sadistic boredom of privileged youth, what might lift the tedium. “Say, it’s thick outside. You can hear the fish-boats squawking all around us. Say, wouldn’t it be great if we ran down one?”
Sickened by the unfamiliar cigar, Harvey ventures onto the deserted deck and collapses against the guardrail. “Then a low, gray mother-wave swung out of the fog, tucked Harvey under one arm, so to speak, and pulled him off and away to leeward; the great green closed over him, and he went quietly to sleep.” Instead of running down a fishing boat, Harvey Cheyne is rescued by one. “I make a big fish of you,” says the kindly Portuguese fisherman, Manuel, who scoops him up from the waves like a squirming cod. With its rescued waif raised to responsible manhood, Kipling’s narrative recalls Mowgli’s toughening up in his adoptive family of wolves, with the “gray mother-wave” replacing Mowgli’s gray Mother Wolf and the skilled fishermen standing in for Baloo and Bagheera.
Harvey’s ensuing shipboard education goes beyond the learning of a manual (hence “Manuel”) trade. His lessons are both spiritual and aesthetic, a deep gauging of his place in the natural scheme of things. The skipper Disko steers the We’re Here through thick fog to “the edge of the barren Whale-deep, the blank hole of the Grand Bank.” The narrative turns gothic: “A whiteness moved in the whiteness of the fog with a breath like the breath of the grave, and there was a roaring, a plunging, and spouting.” Kipling’s wording, here and elsewhere, recalls Moby-Dick, and specifically Melville’s great chapter “The Whiteness of the Whale.”
Kipling wrote with relish of the rules and rituals on a fishing vessel, and some of his most imaginative writing conveys the ways in which these skilled fishermen pursued their quarry. “When Disko thought of cod he thought as a cod; and by some long-tested mixture of instinct and experience, moved the We’re Here from berth to berth, always with the fish, as a blindfolded chess-player moves on the unseen board.” Kipling isn’t quite finished with this ghostly metaphor. “But Disko’s board was the grand Bank—a triangle two hundred and fifty miles on each side—a waste of wallowing sea, cloaked with dank fog, vexed with gales, harried with drifting ice, scored by the tracks of the reckless liners, and dotted with the sails of the fishing-fleet.”
4.
It has been said that Harvey’s conversion f
rom spoiled brat to skilled fisherman happens too fast. But when Kipling assured Elizabeth Ward that there was no plot in Captains Courageous, he wasn’t conceding a weakness in the book. He was signaling its true nature, as a sequence of picaresque episodes transmuted into visual scenes. The narrative is deliberately impressionistic—“I tried to get it thin, and tinny, and without passion,” Kipling told Charles Eliot Norton, his art historian friend. It is a painterly book, and its closest analogy is not with the sentimental stories of Gloucester fisherfolk by Ward and others, but rather with the paintings of Winslow Homer, who depicted Gloucester and the Grand Banks in a trio of linked masterpieces. These three paintings—The Herring Net, The Fog Warning, and Lost on the Grand Banks—are the best guide to Captains Courageous. They comprise a powerful narrative sequence, as was immediately recognized when they were first exhibited together in 1885, and again, with even more éclat, at the World’s Fair in Chicago in 1893.
Winslow Homer, The Fog Warning (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston).
Fog is a clear and present danger in all three paintings, as it is in Kipling’s novel. The fishermen in their wave-tossed dories are separated by fogbanks from the safety of the “mother-ship.” But fog is also, for Homer, an invitation for loose, freehanded brushwork, invading—almost enshrouding—the monumental figures of the men going about their tasks: lifting herring from the laden nets, with the schooner visible on the distant horizon in the first painting; rowing desperately, huge halibut in tow, for the mother ship about to be engulfed by an ominous fogbank in the second; and, in the third painting, looking over the brow of the boat for any sign of the mother ship in the surrounding dark fog.
Captains Courageous evoked themes ubiquitous in American novels of the time. Mired in a deep economic depression, the country cast about for where things had gone wrong. There was a prevalent sense that the rising generation was “soft,” unworthy of the battle-tested heroic generation that had fought the Civil War. Teddy Roosevelt and his friends Owen Wister and Frederic Remington looked to the West for the “strenuous life” that might harden Americans for an uncharted future. Meanwhile, a surge in the number of immigrants made native-born white Americans anxious about their own status. That April of 1896, on a visit to New York where he took up the current fad of bicycling, Kipling met “Red-Badge-of-Courage” Stephen Crane, as Carrie dubbed him. Both Kipling and Crane were searching for new models of heroism; there are parallels between Crane’s battlefield courage and Kipling’s courageous fishermen.
But Captains Courageous is more than a simple outward-bound tale of the toughening up of a spoiled rich boy. Missing from Kipling’s summary to Elizabeth Ward is what one might call the “night side” of the novel, its evocation of dream and psychic inwardness, including the “second sight” ascribed to the sympathetically drawn African American cook. For what Harvey Cheyne receives aboard the We’re Here, along with manual training and lessons in teamwork, is an education of the senses, of aesthetic sensibility. Manliness, for Kipling, required something more than mere discipline and duty. It is on the return trip of the We’re Here, packed to capacity with iced cod, that Harvey learns to look at nature in a way other than the purely instrumental. “But since there was no fishing,” Kipling writes, “Harvey had time to look at the sea from another point of view.”
In a passage reminiscent of a series of Monet paintings—depicting a cathedral or a haystack in the differing light of dawn, midday, and dusk—Kipling allowed the ocean to teach young Harvey to look and to see. “The dullest of folk cannot see this kind of thing hour after hour through long days without noticing it,” Kipling wrote, “and Harvey, being anything but dull, began to comprehend and enjoy the dry chorus of wave-tops turning over with a sound of incessant tearing; the hurry of the winds working across open spaces and herding the purple-blue cloud-shadows; the splendid upheaval of the red sunrise; the folding and packing away of the morning mists, wall after wall withdrawn across the white floors; the salty glare and blaze of noon; the kiss of rain falling over thousands of dead, flat square miles; the chilly blackening of everything at the day’s end; and the million wrinkles of the sea under the moonlight, when the jib-boom solemnly poked at the low stars, and Harvey went down to get a doughnut from the cook.” The gently expanding metaphor of the white sheets, first tearing, then the glorious “folding and packing away of the morning mists, wall after wall withdrawn across the white floors,” and finally wrinkled, holds the passage together right through to its domestic close.
At the same time that his eye is sensitized, Harvey gets an education of the ear. He lives aboard ship in a world of poetry—not of the high, literary variety but rather of words in rhythm and meter that match the physical rhythms of an active life at sea. There are hymns for lost sailors, humiliating rhymes directed at passing ships, and seagoing chanteys and ballads. One of the ballads built into the structure of the narrative, like a lyrical accompaniment, is John Greenleaf Whittier’s “Skipper Ireson’s Ride,” once familiar to all educated New Englanders, and a popular text for public recitation. “Of all the rides since the birth of time, / Told in story or sung in rhyme,” Whittier begins, “The strangest ride that ever was sped / Was Ireson’s, out from Marblehead!” Ireson, as Whittier tells the story, was the captain of a fishing ship that foundered at sea, and who abandoned his crew on the doomed vessel in order to save himself. Kipling, who had already borrowed from Whittier’s ballad the title of his gothic tale “The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes,” evidently wanted readers to associate his own sea yarn, Captains Courageous, with tales of old New England like Whittier’s.
The reunion of Harvey Cheyne Jr. with his parents, after their mad dash across the American continent aboard Cheyne Sr.’s private railroad car, is the emotional high point of the novel, recalling Kipling’s own railroad journey in 1889. Something unsettling enters the picture as Kipling contrasts the luxury of the private car with the less privileged lives of those outside in the engulfing darkness.
At night the bunched electrics lit up that distressful palace of all the luxuries, and they fared sumptuously, swinging on through the emptiness of abject desolation. Now they heard the swish of a water-tank, and the guttural voice of a Chinaman, the click-clink of hammers that tested the Krupp steel wheels, and the oath of a tramp chased off the rear-platform; now the solid crash of coal shot into the tender; and now a beating back of noises as they flew past a waiting train. Now they looked out into great abysses, a trestle purring beneath their tread, or up to rocks that barred out half the stars. Now scaur and ravine changed and rolled back to jagged mountains on the horizon’s edge, and now broke into hills lower and lower, till at last came the true plains.
Kipling instills a cinematic immediacy into the racing train, punctuated by repetition of the word “now,” like telegraph poles flitting past. It is easy to miss the hints—the tramp chased off the platform, the Chinese worker, the “abject desolation”—that all is not well in the heartland, with an economic depression wracking the country, outraged workers striking in major cities, and millionaires like Harvey Cheyne making obscene amounts of money in the unregulated businesses of railroads, mining, and timber.
5.
Trouble was brewing in Brattleboro as well, with Beatty Balestier, Kipling’s wayward brother-in-law, the cause and catalyst. Accustomed to bailing out her wayward brother, Carrie decided, during the spring of 1896, that it was time for Beatty to learn a lesson. The Kiplings suggested a deal: they would assume the care of Beatty’s young daughter if Beatty would dry out and get a job. Humiliated, Beatty feared that the Kiplings had designs on his property next to Naulakha. He also suspected that Rudyard, from his perch in the drugstore on Brattleboro’s Main Street, had gossiped about Beatty’s precarious financial situation.
And then things came abruptly and disastrously to a head. Kipling was out for a bicycle ride, his new passion, when he took a spill. At precisely that moment, Beatty, driving his carriage and roa
ring drunk, loomed into view and demanded a talk. “If you have anything to say, say it to my lawyer,” Kipling replied. Beatty lost his temper. “By *****, this is no case for lawyers,” he bellowed. “If you don’t retract those ***** lies, I will punch the ***** soul out of you. I will give you a week in which to retract, and if you don’t, I will blow your ***** brains out.” Kipling filed a complaint through his lawyer, and Beatty was arrested for “assault with indecent and opprobrious names and epithets and threatening to kill.”
So great was the interest of the Brattleboro townspeople, and then the national press, that the proceedings, set for May 12, were moved to the largest assembly room in the town hall. Meeting over drinks with reporters, Beatty framed the dispute as a comic standoff between a Falstaffian ruffian and a priggish killjoy. “This sounds serious and dangerous,” wrote the reporter for the Boston Daily Globe, after Kipling had described Beatty’s menacing behavior. “But when the manner of the speaker is jovial and even humorous, when he winks to bystanders and laughs at the jests of counsel, one gathers the impression of a consummate actor rehearsing his part in a farce comedy.” The reporter’s conclusion was devastating for an insecure man like Kipling. “There is a feeling here . . . and notwithstanding the numerous debts which Beatty owes to local tradesmen, [that] he is the more manly man of the two.”
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