by John Hersey
We worked in silence that morning. It was a hot September day, with fog burning away to silvery haze before noon. Our heads were lowered over our jobs. All four of us were startled by a sudden thump, and our downturned eyes swept the deck to see its cause—a backpack thrown down onto it from the dock.
“Cap’n Gurr?” a voice asked.
I looked up and saw a fair imitation of Goliath. That package of beef would certainly have no trouble fetching the pots in over the side as they came up from the deep. This was our new mate. He had a big red beard, full lips, a nose as wide as a fist set in cheerful ruddy cheeks. But it seemed to me that there were empty places where the eyes should have been. You could not tell, looking at those hollows, that he was there. There was a flicker of something like a smile—or was it?—tucked in his beard around his mouth. My first thought was: He’s on something. This isn’t going to work.
But Caskie said, “I’m glad to see you. Come aboard.”
His name was Benson, he wanted to be called Ben. He’d heard about the site on Gannet from someone at Poole’s, and Caskie, in need of a hand, had accepted him over the phone. This was the first time the skipper had laid eyes on the man. Caskie had told us that Benson said he’d served in the fishery off Nova Scotia—out of Lunenburg, Port Medway, Sydney, Ingonish; rough, cold, sloppy work, the fellow must have liked it. Now Caskie’s unreadable eyes searched Benson’s vacant ones, and all Caskie said was “We’re shaping up to go out tonight. Bear a hand, would you?” He set Benson to splicing gangions into a new groundline—the short lengths of rope, branching off at intervals from the mile-long line of a trawl, to which individual pots would be tied. Not another word between them. I guess Caskie wanted to see if Benson knew anything. He did. His splices were perfect.
When we’d finished our chores about noontime, Caskie said he’d tune in to the 5 p.m. weather forecast, and if it sounded all right he’d telephone to each of us to come aboard. Pawkie and Drum went to their houses, and I to the stark roost I had rented in West Tisbury with a couple of other young adventurers, whose rites of passage involved hammers, Skilsaws, stapling guns. Benson stayed aboard; had no place to go, he said.
At suppertime, Caskie phoned and said the weather report was, as he put it, “on the edge of all right,” and he guessed we’d better take our chances and go out—the trawls had been set out there for nearly two weeks as it was. That statement had, wrapped in the folds of its succinctness, an unspoken rebuke to the vanished Cautinho for having caused several days’ delay while Caskie filled his site. I was young and brash, and before Caskie hung up I asked, “Is the new man going to be okay?”
I should have known better. There was a long, long pause—which I took to have a meaning: Mind your own business. “We’ll see,” he finally said.
When we got to the boat, I heard Pawkie murmur to Drum that he’d listened to the forecast, too, and he said, “Some real dirty stuff’s comin’ through tomorrer—wind backin’ to nawtheast, twenty to thirty.”
“It’ll be fine,” Drum said. “Cask wouldn’t do anythin’ dumb.”
We cast off at 9 p.m. sharp, glided out between the jetties, and steamed into the wide bight under a sky that was like a great city of lights. At first, a moderate southwest breeze gently rocked our fat-bellied Gannet as if she were a cradle. Then we rounded up into those mild airs and made for the open ocean. The big diesel Cat in the boat’s guts hummed. I was off watch until midnight, but I stayed out on the afterdeck until we rounded Gay Head and I could know, peering out ahead over the rail, that there was nothing but the vast reach of the sea between our tiny vessel and magical faraway anchorages of my imagination: Bilbao, Lisbon, Casablanca. I felt free out beyond Gay Head and Noman’s, on the wide waters of infinity, free from all the considerations ashore that tied one down—telephones, groceries, laundry, parents, the evening news, and, yes, even friends—free to exist without thinking, free to be afraid only of things that were really fearful. That last was a great gift of the sea. I filled my lungs, over and over, with air that I imagined was redolent, thanks to the great sweep of a dying fair-weather high, of the sweet flowers of Bermuda. After a while I went below and plunged into sleep in my clothes.
Caskie, who had taken the first watch to set our course solidly for our trawl lines, waked me at eight bells, and I took my turn in the pilothouse. Gannet steered herself, on auto, into the void. There was not much to do: check the compass now and then, take a turn on deck every half hour just to make sure that all was secure—and, well, you couldn’t call the gradual emptying of my mind daydreaming; it was dark out.
The skipper had assigned our new mate the dawn watch. I went down at 3:50 a.m. and put a hand on a big round arm, which felt as solid as a great sausage, and shook it. Benson came roaring up out of sleep, looming and pugnacious, his hands fisted, as if he’d had to spend his whole life defending himself. Then he evidently realized where he was and went limp on the bunk for a minute with his mouth open and working, drinking consciousness until he was full enough to get up. I went back to the pilothouse, and when he turned up, right on time, I showed where things were—loran, radar, radio, switches, fuses, button for the horn, all the junk. There was a small round seat on a stanchion behind the wheel, like a tall mushroom, and Benson heaved himself up on it and perched there in a massive Buddha’s calm. I still couldn’t find him in his eyes, but I’d obviously been wrong: he couldn’t have been drugged. He understood, he could deal with the electronics, he had handled the marlinspike when he was splicing with an old-time sailmaker’s precision.
“What happened with the other mate?” he asked me. His voice was mild and rather high-pitched, as if he housed an inner person who was less assertive, less rough-cut, than the exterior one. He wanted to know how come he had lucked into this site.
“He just up and left,” I said.
“I heard a rumor, some guy at Poole’s,” Ben said. “Somethin’ about the guy was fed up with the cap’n hangin’ on to lobsterin’ when all the rest of ’em give up and switched over to draggin’. Said the cap’n was stubborn as a stone.”
“I wouldn’t know,” I said.
“Said the cap’n was a peddler. Wasn’t no lobsters out there.”
“We’ve been getting a few,” I said.
Ben gave a resounding snort, deep and haunting, as if he had a conch shell for a nose. I felt uncomfortable hearing such words about the captain behind his back, and I sidled out of there and went below. But I got only an hour’s sleep, because Caskie had risen around five and, as usual, had steamed straight to the loran fix of his first trawl, south of the steamer lanes in fifty fathoms of water, on the shelf about midway between Block Canyon and Atlantis Canyon. He had picked up the radar buoy on the scope in no time, and had sent Ben down to roust the rest of us out.
The wind had freshened from the sou’west, and we were rolling. I pulled on my oilers and my metal-toed boots. Gannet had been converted from a seventy-two-foot Gulf shrimper, and her cedar planks clung to oak ribs that had been steam-bent to make a belly as round as a bait tub, unlike the deep-keeled draggers built for northern waters, so to tell the truth she wasn’t too sea-kindly. She wallowed in broadside waves. Caskie had gone down to Key West nineteen years ago and bought her for The Company for twenty thousand dollars; she’d be worth ten times that now. He’d had her hauled and done some work on her, and she was sound, though her white-painted topsides were grimy, chipped, and rust-streaked, and her bulwarks were draped with old tires, so she looked like an aging hooker of the sea. Who cared? Inboard she was roomier than the North Atlantic draggers, and we thought we lived in style. Pawkie called her “the Georgie’s Bank Hilton.”
In the gray half-light we were on deck trying to adjust our land legs to the argumentative gravity of the sea. Caskie came out to con the boat and run the hydraulic hauler from the auxiliary controls, abaft the deckhouse on the starboard side. He was cool. He swung the boat into the eye
of the wind with his usual skill, as if it were a toy in a tub, and eased up alongside the aluminum staff of the radar buoy marking the western end of the string. We were pitching a bit in the seaway, and Ben, in his first chore as bulwarkman, missed a grab at the flag with a gaff. Pawkie was standing by with a grappling hook in case it was needed, and he made as if to toss it, but Ben waved him off and, leaning out over the rail, managed to catch the staff. He hoisted it aboard, Drum detached the end line and served it through a block hung from the starboard boom, Pawkie fed the line into the hydraulic lift, Caskie started the winch, and we were in business. The half-inch polypropylene rope snaked and hissed through the sheaves of the hauler and coiled itself on the deck underneath it.
When the anchor of the end line came up—a sturdy bucket full of concrete, a hundred-pound weight—Benson lifted it aboard and stowed it as easily as if it were made of styrofoam. Finally the first pot appeared. Not a single lobster. Pawkie groaned. Benson heaved the heavy oaken trap on board with a power in the shoulders and a look of anger in the face that gave me a shiver. He detached the pot from its becket with a snort like the one I had heard from him in the night, when I’d said we were catching “a few.” After that we were all herky-jerky, retrieving this first string of pots. Big Ben knew what he was doing, all right, and he had strength to burn, but Pawkie and Drum didn’t know his moves, and they kept semi-interfering in efforts to ensure the continuity of rhythms that are a must in hauling pots. Each time they leaned or reached toward Benson to lend a hand, he shook them off with a guttural sound that wasn’t quite speech and wasn’t quite a growl, whereupon they fell back and got out of sync on what they were supposed to do next themselves.
The harvest was miserable. A good-sized but lonely lobbie now and then, and a few eels and crabs and trash fish—which we would keep and sell in New Bedford. My job was to peg, which in our case meant slipping rubber bands over the claws, and half the time I just stood around and waited. Caskie looked grim. From thirty pots in that first trawl we gleaned only twelve lobsters.
Drum served us breakfast after that trawl. Caskie stayed in the pilothouse. We ate silently. Toward the end of the string I had noticed that a human presence had finally made its appearance in Ben’s eyes, and that the persona of that presence was a peckish human being who had decided to hate our captain. It struck me that the eyes had been dead until bad blood infused them with a sparkling life. Between pots those eyes threw laser beams at Caskie. Everyone knows that there is a noble tradition, among seagoing men, of hating the captain. Captain-hating, even of good captains, goes very far back; the animals in the ark probably hated Noah, even though he was saving them from drowning. There were two troubles here. One was that Pawkie and Drum had learned over many years, perhaps not without pain, how not to hate Caskie—who would dare utter the word “love”?—and I could sense that there had been some mute emotional transactions going on out there on the deck between the old hands and Ben, which were as threatening as the turbulent dark clouds that had begun to loom over the landward horizon. The other was that this guy who had showed up in the hollows of Big Ben’s eyes looked like a born spoiler, who didn’t belong on a cockleshell of a boat out on the open sea.
The crazy thing was that when we started pulling up the next trawl, all five of us began working in perfect teamwork, with the marvelous harmonies of a string quintet playing “The Trout.” The gang meshed better than it had when Cautinho was aboard. As each pot came up, Caskie stopped the hauler; Big Ben reached out and swung the trap aboard and guided it onto the rail and untied it from its gangion; Caskie reengaged the hauler to bring up the next trap; Ben and Drum pushed the pot along the rail to the picking station; Pawkie opened it and, first off, stabbed eels that were trapped and dumped them writhing into the eel barrel; he and I dropped the lobbies, if any, in the lobster tank, the trash onto the culling table, and the crabs into the fish box; Drum rebaited the pot; Ben slid it aft along the rail and stacked it while Drum, standing at the culling table, threw eggers—females with roe—and shorts—sexually immature ones—overboard; I began banding; Pawkie threw the gurry into the sea and cleaned up; then we’d all be ready to receive the next trap. If anything got the slightest bit out of rhythm, perhaps after one of Pawkie’s hesitations, the guys would spontaneously jump to shift jobs without anything said. It was miraculous. It was as if this disdainful muscleman had been on the boat forever, and all of us could see that the smoothness of our work originated in his skill and alacrity—and anger. Whenever a pot would come up empty, the sounds in his throat now shaped themselves as words: “Shit, not again!” or, “Jesus, man,” or, “I can’t believe this.”
Caskie said he had decided not to reset the trawls in that lobster-forsaken area; he said he would wait and set them “inside”—in shallower water north of the ship lanes. “I should hope so,” Benson muttered. But as we resumed hauling, in the third and fourth strings, as the stack of empty traps built up on the afterdeck, the catch was a bit better—seemed to be improving as we followed the sets out to the eastward. Meanwhile, the wind had indeed begun to back around, as Pawkie had said it would, and had freshened; it was out of the east at that point. We had to widen our stance on the deck to keep from staggering around. As we got into the fourth trawl, Gannet was pitching like a hobbyhorse, the pots swung ominously from the boom when they came up, and the many hundred-pound traps tied down in a big stack athwartships strained dangerously at their lashings.
By the time we had shipped all the traps from that trawl, the wind was snarling in from the northeast with its teeth bared, chewing the tops off eight-foot seas. There was a gale brewing. Caskie, with his long habit of consultation with his gang, said, “How about it? Shall we pack it in?”
“Jesus cripes,” Benson shouted into the wind, “just when you’re catchin’ a few?” His echo of my words in the night gave me the shudders. But now when I think about it, I realize that what really shook me was Benson’s challenge to everything that I thought of as valuable in an orderly life. His tone of voice was a threat to the very idea of captaincy. Caskie was a mild island man of a certain age; he consulted out of courtesy but always made his decisions entirely on his own, and the serenity we had enjoyed when Cautinho was aboard, though possibly false, had rested squarely on the dependability of Caskie’s gentle authority. He had always got us back safely to Menemsha basin. Now this raw Benson had come down here off Newfoundland’s bitter waters to break the contract seamen invariably make, whether they like it or not, with skipperhood. You can hate a captain, but you obey him nevertheless. This wasn’t a generational thing; I was far closer to Big Ben’s age than to Caskie’s, but I had been raised to a reasoned life, and I think I was more frightened of mutiny than I was of drowning.
Caskie, his expressionless face soaked with spray, looked at Benson for a long time. “All right,” he finally said. “One more string, then we’ll see.” I was shocked by his yielding, and I saw Pawkie and Drum both literally step back away from Benson on the deck, as if he had raised a fist against them.
“Maybe it’s just a squall,” Drum stupidly said, so desirous of peace aboard Gannet that he lost all touch with mother wit.
You could hear, over the wind raking the rigging, that conch shell of a nose in a wild snort of derision.
Caskie had gone into the pilothouse to steam us to the next flag. It seemed to take us forever to get there. And sure enough, after a while, he came out on the careening deck and called out to us over the wind, “Flag ain’t there.”
“Damn Russians!” Pawkie shouted.
Of all times for this to happen! We always blamed snagged or lost trawls on the Russians, though there were also Japanese, German, Polish, Italian—and maybe Spanish, maybe Bulgarian—and probably other—vessels out there, huge factory ships with satellite boats dragging enormous nets on the bottom, ripping up the ecology of the shelf, slaughtering all God’s species with a greed and rapacity that gave no thought to times to c
ome. And ruining puny us, sure enough. Anytime we lost a whole string of forty pots—and it had happened more than once—The Company was out a couple of thousand bucks, and we were that much nearer to being out of work.
Caskie shouted that he was going to steam out to look for the tide balls at the other end of the busted line; maybe some of the pots could be salvaged. He went back in the pilothouse.
Pawkie was shaking his head. “How you going to find those damn floats in this shit?”
“Caskie’ll find ’em,” Drum said, putting his whole heart into his hoping.
And this time Drum was right. Caskie did. The fat hull pounded and shivered and wallowed out to the eastward. I was the first to see the orange spheres playing hide-and-seek in the spume-capped waves, and I called out the bearing at the pilothouse door. Caskie eased up to them. Out on deck Pawkie picked up the grappling iron and its line, but Benson grabbed it away from him and on a single throw caught one of the tide-ball lines and pulled the rope aboard. With all the strength of his anger, Benson got the first ball on deck, and then the second. By this time Caskie was again at the auxiliary controls, and between them Pawkie and Drum fed the end line into the winch sheaves.
