Denizens of the Deep

by Philip Wylie

  Out we went—on Harold Schmitt’s Neptune. It was winter and I have never seen a lousier winter day off Miami. The wind picked up in the morning from twenty-five to about forty. It was gray and cold. Low clouds scudded over a jagged, pitted, nasty sea with swells a good thirty or forty feet high, long troughs and a cross-chop that threw the Neptune around like a toy boat in a cement mixer. The civilian—Mr. “Something” he had muttered—watched eagerly while the boat took the formidable smashing at the exit from Government Cut. He fairly licked his lips when the careening mate put out baits. He selected a fishing chair and sat down in it just about the way the Rock of Gibraltar must have come to rest at the west end of the Mediterranean.

  Meantime, the two lieutenant commanders also took chairs and held rods. Both these gentlemen were, as I said, distinguished fliers. Both were stunt pilots and both had acted as test pilots. Both later distinguished themselves beyond all mortal praise in the war—which, then, had not yet been poured hot and wicked on U.S.A. One had been a football player and the other a boxer, at the Academy. They were both experienced men on battleships, aircraft carriers and even, in one case, on destroyers.

  But nobody had told them that there is something different about a thirty-eight-foot boat in a sea piled by a forty-knot wind and turned vile for the steadiest mariner by a cross-chop. Nobody, in other words, had explained that any man who claims to have fished in a number of oceans, in all weathers, over many years—without ever feeling a touch, at least of slavering, green-jowled mal de mer is a liar. I’ll go further: a damned liar. And I’d go still further, if editors weren’t so sparing of your manners.

  Maybe I should add that these two American officers wore the gold-braid loops of special “aides.” It suggested, strongly, that my British “civilian” was not exactly that. At any rate, as time passed, as the cold wind whistled, as rain fell in sullen spittings, as the outriggers whistled and the Neptune rode high, dropped low with elevator speed—and slewed and rolled in a thousand unexpectable ways, the two airmen slowly turned the warning saffron color that shows the onset of seasickness. Then, after a visible, long and very grim struggle, they began to show the greenish hue that betokens the more advanced stages.

  All that time, the Britisher trolled like part of the ship, his eyes bright as jewels and fixed on the bait, his cheeks as rubicund as apples. “Great day!” he said once. “Active! Should bring the fish up!”

  More time passed and I began to offer up sympathetic prayers for the pilots. After all, they were my countrymen. After all (I wagered myself), they could take up the Englishman in one of their fighters and make him as sick and frightened as a cat in a churn.

  I was wrong.

  When we’d stood about three hours of heaving, teetering, smacking down like a sledge from some wave-pinnacle and generally batting the Neptune into a full demonstration of her ruggedness, and yet no fish appeared, the Englishman began to ask questions. He asked them of me. He wanted to know how well acquainted I was with the Commanding Officer of the Naval Station. He wanted to know my views on the war and England. It happened I knew some Britishers he knew; it happened, too, that I had already been “tapped” by our Government for a certain job in the event of anything like—Pearl Harbor. Thus reassured, the gentleman abruptly confessed that he was an admiral in the British Navy.

  And not just any admiral—but one whose name everybody knew. And not just a so-called “battleship” admiral, for he had commanded an aircraft carrier. And not just that, but, if he’d been in uniform, he would have had such wings as my American colleagues had. He would also have seen combat in the air! And, finally, he was famed for thinking out and pulling off what was, at the time, the greatest single-carrier air raid in history. It had cost one of England’s two main enemies the bulk of their sea power. The admiral told me all these things in detail—confidentially, of course—and he told me something of the nature of his current mission in U.S.A.

  I could see that the lieutenant commanders were distressed at these “violations” of security. Indeed, later, when I was an “accredited” war correspondent for the Navy, they told me so. (Though in fact it was up to the admiral to decide what to say or what not to say to me.) Their distress at the admiral’s seeming “indiscretion” (I have always like to think, since then, that he was merely a gifted narrator and a good judge of people who could and would keep their mouths shut—though, possibly, the C.O. had told him I could be trusted) had a further bad effect on the officers. Both lieutenant commanders had barely been holding their own. Shock at the fact that the admiral was telling me the whole inside story of British naval strategy and giving me supersecret war information prevented them from holding on any further. They went to the gunwales, astern. Sadly and in vast humiliation, they became ill. And they stayed ill. By and by, they knelt on the decks and clung to the gunwales, unmindful of sluicing scuppers; it was convenient for them to be there, all the time.

  The admiral gave them no more than a vaguely interested glance—and went on with his story. The point of part of it was particularly interesting—to me: the admiral, all his life, had been a sports fisherman. Not in naval regalia but as a plain “Mr. So-and-so,” he had fished in and around most ports of the world, in most harbors and most other relevant waters. While fishing, he had made close note of naval matters, in every case.

  The main case happened to involve a harbor where, for many years, a fleet base was built up by one of the nations then at war with Great Britain. The harbor and the sea outside offered tuna fishing. So on a number of different years, the slightly disguised admiral had tuna-fished there. In the course of doing that, he had also noted the warships and ways, piers, docks, channels, berths, mooring places and other details bearing on the nation’s battle fleet. So, when war came, the admiral had been able to plan precisely how so many planes of such-and-such types, striking in succession, with such-and-such weapons, could “old boy, really mangle that base!”

  He—and his carrier—her men—her planes and their pilots, bombardiers and gunners—had truly “mangled” the main enemy fleet, some weeks before—as all the world knew. What the world didn’t know was how. And that was the fact—one set of facts—given me that rugged day. Needless to say, I was fascinated. Needless to say, I never mentioned the tale till the war was won. Because he talked in what my fellow-Americans deemed an “out-of-turn” way to me—an American, not Navy-connected—I have still kept his name in the dark. Naval historians, however, if any happen to read the above, will know who the angler and genius was, what port his aircraft struck, and that his single strike took the sting from the main naval arsenal of Mussolini.

  I’ve told you that fishermen were philosophers; I should have said quite a lot of them were darned smart, too. They have to be, to catch some kinds of fish!

  However—absorbing although I found the admiral’s confidences that day—I was host; and the other two of my “guests” were getting mighty sick. Still, the admiral didn’t suggest going in. That’s the maritime tradition.

  Harold Schmitt, my boatman-skipper and guide, several times whispered that we ought to take in those “poor devils.” And he agreed emphatically with my opinion that we were not going to get a fish that day. It was too cold. We were the only boat out—but a thousand wouldn’t have had a strike in such weather. Yet the admiral, hanging on, made me tell Harold to hope and pray for one fish, at least—which we could use as an excuse for abandoning a sea unfit for fish, let alone cruisers.

  There was—I must confess—another factor. I was sick, too. I’ve been sick at sea perhaps five times in many, many hundreds of trips. But that day, with the sight of two pilots dog-sick, with a host’s anxiety to take them inside where it was calm, with my embarrassment over their distress caused by the unfolding of a highly secret military narrative—or maybe just because it was so damned rough!—I got it. I made up my mind, though, that if I split, there was going to be one American on that boat besides mate and guide who didn’t show any signs of mal de mer
to the British hero.

  Occasionally all of us perform small deeds of private, invisible, unknown bravery that, as we know, will never be adequately appreciated. If, ever, I should perform some reward-worthy and spectacular act of heroism (which possibility I doubt), I’m going to want a medal not for that but for the day I sat on the deck beside that admiral, six careening hours, and by main force of will and national pride didn’t snap my cookies.

  In midafternoon, by the grace of the angered sea gods, the Neptune took an especially big one, teetered, and came down like a house pushed off from a bridge. The smack all but knocked out our teeth. And it split three planks in that sturdy vessel. We began to take more water than we could pump. There wasn’t any sane way to make repairs at sea. And even the admiral agreed we’d better high-tail for calm water, if not shore itself. Maybe he was a bum swimmer. Anyhow, you never saw two more relieved naval officers or one more grateful writer.

  That was one day when I desperately wanted fish—a fish anyhow, for the Englishman. And we got none whatsoever. We went in to calm water and fished for pan fish a while and ate a little food. The admiral basked contentedly and the pilots recovered (and so did I) but we didn’t get even a grunt or a sand perch.

  Sometimes it goes the other way.

  I’ve written a lot of fishing stories as well as four books which are collections of published and unpublished fishing yarns. (Readers who don’t know that last can regard the statement as an advertisement.) Anyhow, the next account concerns the descent upon me in my south Florida home of a VIP, a northern editor, who had been responsible for the publication of many of my narratives and essays. Let us call him Mr. Smith.

  It began with a “Dear Phil” letter from the said Mr. Smith. “I will be in Miami,” he said, “with my wife and son, over the entire day of the twelfth of next month. We’ll arrive on the eleventh and hope you and your wife and daughter will be our guests for dinner. It’s our hope that, on the twelfth, you’ll be able to arrange a day of fishing for us, as I want to find out about these lavish accounts of Gulf Stream angling which you produce for us.” It went on in that somewhat ironical vein. The above isn’t verbatim—but it’s a close approximation. A postscript added, “My wife and son—he’s twelve—don’t fish much and all I’ve ever caught is a few bullheads in Middle Western rivers.”

  You now get the idea:

  He and his wife—a comely and reasonable woman—with his son—an alert and good-looking young character—were giving yours truly one day, one short, arbitrary day, to “prove” all I’ve written about Gulf Stream angling. That includes the high spots of my own twenty years of it—and the peaks and dramatic valleys in the angling careers of hundreds of people known to me, heard of by me, and purely fictitious, too. Gulf Stream fishing is unpredictable, like all other fishing. If the urgent Mr. Smith had said he was going to be in Miami for a month and asked me to take out himself and family on three or four hand-picked days, days when the fishing was known to be “hot,” I’d have felt the proposition was hopeful.

  As it was, I didn’t. Who would, knowing the odds? Nevertheless, I chartered a fine boat, well ahead. I briefed up its skipper and mate for the big event. We were going to try everything short of dynamite to get fish, when the Smiths went down to sea in our ship.

  The month turned. Fishing fell off. In the days preceding the twelfth, not only did the sailfish apparently vanish from our area but all other fish besides—even the reef fish—so that, from the fifth to the twelfth, boats by the score came into Miami’s docks with no fish at all, or perhaps only one or two pickerel-size barracudas. Also, it blew steadily all that time—and I should add that Mr. Smith had stipulated he wanted a calm day. His family weren’t “good sailors” he said, and he intimated that he was a “landlubber” himself.

  It was blowing when we had our long-planned dinner together. All during that morbid meal I tried to explain that these “blank” periods happened—that our prospects for the next day were not just poor but almost hopeless—and that it would probably be pretty choppy, besides. Mr. Smith and his wife and son kept laughing off my statements. “Don’t alibi,” their attitude clearly said. “We’ve read your stories—in fact we’ve published scores of them. We know that everybody catches fish—from reading your stories!”

  I pointed out, obliquely, that you couldn’t have a fishing story without something being caught—and that the days—such as the days then current off Miami, when people trolled for twelve straight hours without a hit, didn’t make good stories or articles. The Smiths just laughed harder.

  I took my family home rather solemnly that breezy night and my folks shared my mood. If I had known anybody who practiced witchcraft I’d have paid them well, right then, to hex up even one minor fish. I slept very poorly that night.

  Morning came. This unrested author rose and stared out the window. A bright sun shone. The palm fronds were limp. It was a calm and lovely day. The worry over intense seasickness could be postponed, at least. I dressed, nervously. I put the hamper of lunch Mrs. Wylie had prepared in my car. I drove to the editor’s hotel and collected him and his family. My daughter went along. But Mrs. Wylie, a woman of discretion, stayed home because, I believe, she did not want to watch the spectacle of a beloved spouse suffering ever-greater agonies as the day passed and nothing happened.

  We proceeded to the dock, boarded the boat, went out through the Government Cut and baits were put over. Other boats, out earlier, reported via radiophone they had caught nothing, seen nothing, so far. I tried to give interest to the trip by pointing out landmarks on the Miami-Miami Beach skyline. But the Smiths were, one and all, concentrating on the skipping baits and on the rods they held. In about twenty minutes, the Smith youngster yawned loudly—and my spirits sank further as I wondered how he’d yawn after about eight empty hours.

  Just then, Mrs. Smith had a strike. A nice one. She hung and fought and we boated a dandy dolphin. All three Smiths were rather pleased—more excited, I suspected, than they revealed—but, on the other hand, they took the thing for granted. My stories said such things happened. A few minutes later, young Master Smith connected with a really powerful ’cuda. That was a scrap. The boy won it. And not ten minutes after that, his dad and my editor hung a sailfish!

  No fooling. Nobody—passenger, skipper or mate had even seen a sailfish in the area for days. But Mr. Smith had one on. He fought it rather dazedly but with a skill that grew under the mate’s coaching; he lost it, after many jumps, through no fault of his own but simply because even the most adroit anglers do lose sailfish all the time, one way or another. The event, however, elated the editor. He got blood in his eye. And we began catching lots of fish, all game, all on light tackle—bonitas, more dolphin, albacore, other barracudas and kingfish. Lunch was a triumph. But listen to this:

  In the middle of the afternoon another billfish rose—again, behind the editor’s bait. He dropped back properly and struck. Out of the purple sea crashed a big white marlin! And, so help me, Mr. Smith caught it, after a Homeric battle of an hour or more!

  When we and the other boats returned to the fishing pier that day it seemed as if we’d scoured the sea at the expense of everybody else. Nobody had half as many fish. Nobody had caught a marlin for a month. But I think the Smiths realized the enormity of their achievement only when, as the big catch was hung on the huge racks for photographing, a thousand pop-eyed bystanders crowded around to admire, praise, ask what that “gigantic” fish was—and to take hundreds of snapshots of their own.

  I have never since had trouble in convincing that particular editor (and former bullhead man) that the Gulf Stream is a terrific place to fish. Indeed, I suspect he’d think our fishing was a lead-pipe-cinch, except for that white marlin. Nobody who, alone, unaided and single-handed has caught eight feet of white marlin in one piece ever thinks deep-sea fishing is exactly a cinch.

  That was a day.

  But, golly! What days weren’t?

  My daughter (the only chip off
this block) didn’t fish much until she was about sixteen. She stayed at school in the winter and up north in the summer amongst non-anglers. And then, when I did begin to take her out, she had rather poor luck. It lasted a year or so and until one hot and dazzling morning when, alongside the isle of Bimini, she hit into a wahoo bigger than herself. Karen—that’s her name—caught the fish. It made quite a sensation on the Bimini docks: not even a local record, not by a long shot a world’s record—just a beauty of a wahoo. But what father, what “old man” of any youngster, wouldn’t give back to the sea, the lakes, the rivers and the brooks a hundred of his own best catches to be there when his kid made his, or her, first really good one?

  Fine moments?

  One of the most magnificent was a day when we quit fishing just to watch the fish. Ricky (that’s Mrs. Wylie) and a friend and I were trolling over the “big reef” outside Key Largo, south and west of Miami, when the wind dropped and the clear, cerulean water turned as flat as a frozen pond. The sun was high and we could see down forty feet, fifty—a hundred, perhaps. We could see every house-sized coral escarpment and all the flaming sponges that grew on it. Every abyss was discernible. In the lunar submarinescape we could admire the giant purple “sea fans” and the yellow fans, which are smaller, as well as the colored millepores and all the particular corals: those that branch like staghorns, those that rise in leafy folds, like lettuce, those with convoluted domes, so rightly called “brain corals”—and all the rest.

  Through this stone garden swam millions of fish and the word “millions” is to be taken literally. They were of every size from inch-long, blue and orange Beau Gregories to ten-foot sharks that lay on white sand beds between coral crags and stared up with wondering but indifferent eyes at our ship’s hull. They ranged through fish of the mackerel size. They included the incredibly bright-hued parrots. Sometimes schools of fish containing thousands of individuals—all of the same species and every one as bright as a Christmas-tree ball, with that same, near-incandescent color effect—drifted beneath us only to be followed by another school as big, of yet another species and another and another!