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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780819552921 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Wesleyan University Press |
| Publication date: | 07/26/1996 |
| Edition description: | Reprint |
| Pages: | 303 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.88(w) x 8.25(h) x 0.98(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Ausable Forks, N. Y. [I] January, 1929
«AND my son,» said Arthur Allen drawing back his shoulders, tilting on his heels, clasping his hands to the blaze behind him, looking beyond me as if he were smiling at God — «and my son — is going to sail to Greenland in a small boat.»
«God! May I go with him?»
«You may — if he is willing.»
Arthur S. Allen, Jr. [II] Born 1907, died 1929
SAM ALLEN came to my house. He was a beauty! Tall — over six feet, strong and lithe; slow moving, slow and courteous of speech, and calm. And if his calmness was phlegmatic it nevertheless lent his presence that dignity which is essential to commanders. Here was the captain — and a good one. He was an experienced sailor; and he had that serene self-confidence which happenings can bring to some men. He loved the sea and he was made for it. Sam Allen and the sea, two elements; they could well contemplate each other, endlessly; and neither ever know what other signified.
George B. Smith [III] Made in the U.S.A.
THERE was a certain man who lived in the suburbs of New York. And every weekday morning, for years, he took the 7:45 train to the great city; and every day on the 5:15 came home. He owned, we guess, a little house. It had a furnace to be his winter care and a front lawn for summer. He had a radio set and a motor car, and a wife. One night they would play bridge, another they would go to the movies; and on Sunday afternoon they would go motoring. It seemed as if things would go on and on like this, always; until at last he would die. And that would have been his life.
Now there are certain islands in the South Seas so far away that everyone believes them to be paradise. Summer is eternal there. And in the cool shadows of their groves recline fair youths and maidens happy in being and through happiness forever young.
When the vision of these islands broke upon the commuter suddenly the little round of his activities became unendurable. His imagination took fire and in the aura of the conflagration he saw himself sailing the broad Pacific, landing, a sunburned mariner, on those flowering coral shores. He closed his eyes; the newspaper fell from his hands. Love, love enveloped him; soft hands and lips caressed him; the air was laden with sweet perfume and the song of birds. Oh Paradise!
So he must build a boat; about them he knew nothing. He began to study. With unwearying purpose he gave himself to the reading of every authority on boat design, he filled himself with lore and facts. He studied catalogues, he looked at craft. And he came to know them. He came to know, moreover, what he wanted. It must be a small boat and a staunch boat; roomy and broad of beam. It must be a safe boat, seaworthy and able. And he drew a plan.
Her keel was laid in a little ship-yard on the Hudson; and from that day to the day of the boat's completion her designer watched her growth as only a man about to sail the seven seas for Paradise would watch his magic craft evolve. He combed the lumber yards for the soundest planks and timbers that the forests yielded. He followed them through the hands of the carpenters, saw the timbers cut and joined and bolted into place. No little detail could escape his scrutiny, no defect elude him.
And what it cost! And how he could have justified that cost at home! What could he say that would conceal the truth of his exalted plans?
And so in the growing excitement of the enterprise the years flew by; the boat was nearly done. What hope must then have beamed in the commuter's countenance, what intimation of approaching glory! If these signs sought concealment through a special tenderness at home, that tenderness was their betrayal. Was not the boat itself an unfoldment of his own spirit, an opening of the book of his own dreams, the materializing in such symbol as the world might understand of his most secret self? Just as all men must some day put off the drab clothes of this world to put on the shining raiment of immortality, and in that moment for a moment stand in nakedness revealed before their Maker, so at almost the very moment that this poor man was to step into his swan boat, his wife, we only guess, confronted him.
«What,» — arms akimbo — «do you think you're going to do in that boat?»
«I was going,» he answered with quiet determination, «to sail to Par — to the South Seas.»
«You're not.»
And there, true or not, ends one of the saddest stories in the world.
Length Over All, 33' 0" [IV] Draft 6' 0"
THE boat lay nearly built when Arthur Allen bought her; he took her finishing in hand. All that was good he bettered — and the best he doubled. And when the three ton iron shoe was bolted to her oaken keel we thought God help the rocks she hits! Then she was launched and named.
There was to me something forbidding about her name, ominous I could not then have said; however, subsequent events incline me now to read such meaning into it. The name, a proclamation of man's will, was an encroachment on the special and sole virtue of the Gods. Seem to be carefree, light of heart and gay — the very elements will love you. Call your ship Daisy or Bouncing Bess — and the sun of life will sparkle on that course where fair winds drive her laughingly along. «There is,» said Arthur Allen, «one most essential thing a man must have in life, DIRECTION. That's what we'll call the boat.»
And now Direction with her name in golden letters on her stern flanks lies moored in the broad river. The bright sunshine of early May glistens on varnished spars and polished brass. Her tawny sails flap idly in the breeze. All is on board — not stowed as yet, but there. And as Arthur Allen had given his care to the ship, so had I lavishly provisioned her.
For economy of space in stowing the provisions the bulk of them were in a raw state; we carried dried milk, fruit, beans, peas and other vegetables in preference to canned articles, though of these we had a small supply for use in such rough weather as might prohibit cooking. Of eggs we had twenty-four dozen, gathered fresh-laid from the countryside and preserved in water-glass. Potatoes, onions and cabbages we had in quantity; oranges, a crate; and sweets for luxury. We carried wood and coal for fuel, and kerosene for light; tobacco and cigarettes — no, these arrived too late. We loaded them in Nova Scotia.
So now for Nova Scotia the Direction sails. There we're to join her, Skipper Sam and I; there we're to recondition her, from there set sail. And yet this first departure was for Arthur Allen an event, a touching one. Few men in all their lives are moved to give so much to any enterprise as he had given here. The boat at last was his achievement — for his son. And it was above all in tribute to himself that Arthur Allen's friends stood around him there that day to see his boat depart.
The mate and two men are in charge. They cast off. The water widens in their wake. The mate goes below.
«Goodbye, goodbye!» cries everyone.
Suddenly the mate pops up again. «Say,» he bawls, «where in hell are those cigarettes?»
Paris to New York [V] New York to Baddeck
OUR crew, as Captain Sam at last made it, was to consist of three: him, me and one called Cupid. Cupid was in Paris. «Oh, well,» he wrote his friend, «I'll go with you this once.» And he bestirred himself at last and came. He was a big fellow, huge. His vast muscles were encased in fat. He had curly golden hair, a face like his name, and the expression of a petulant potato. He was an experienced and competent sailor. He would discourse on navigation with a familiarity that was disconcerting, and so bewildering a technical vocabulary that, amateur navigator as I had presumed to be, I could only stammer my incomprehension. And I was brought to wonder then why Sam, who knew his friend's accomplishments so well, had chosen me to be his navigator. Cupid, as the mate, proved grand; humanly he was offensive; while financially he was a disappointment and, at last, a liability.
We have left Direction following, at Cupid's whim, her nose to Nova Scotia. First she stuck it into a barge in the passage of Hell Gate and broke it; then she nosed into Westport for a few days' jamboree, into Provincetown for local color and to whine again for cigarettes, into Halifax that the mate might gild the lily of his navigation under the guidance of a local master; and at last, two days before us, she arrived in the Bradore lakes and anchored at Baddeck.
There for a week we worked. Direction was hauled out, repaired and scraped and painted. The skipper worked on the hull and rigging; I made shelves and racks for stores, and stowed provisions; my fair wife scrubbed and polished; and the mate heavily betook himself from one berth to the other, at request, and smoked. Inertness can infuriate as nothing else; not only were we daily confronted and hampered by that heavy presence, but the very disorder and dirt and the filthy utensils that we contended with were themselves the accumulation of a full month's sloth-fulness. Of slothfulness the ravaged stores were evidence: half of the eggs had been consumed and most of the canned goods; while perishable supplies had been left soaking in the water of the bilge.
The skipper showed himself temperamentally disinclined to meddle with ship's discipline even when riot and mutiny were imminent. They were. Here at the outset of an enterprise on which three men must live for weeks in the confinement of a little boat, to be day in and out each other's world of human kind, one man had proved so gross a shirker of responsibility and work as to endanger the morale of the expedition. If we could only sail, I thought, things may be different; and with the thought of removing at once the thorn that festered in my disposition and the mountain that obstructed our movements, I demanded that while I was on the boat the mate should stay off. Off he stayed. Now we could work! — and sing about it.
Clothes were washed and hung to dry. Bedding was aired. The soaked food was spread in the sun to dry, and packed again in tins, and stowed. We improved the conveniences of the main cabin and so remodeled the narrow dreary forecastle that was to be my quarters that only Direction's last convulsions could disturb the order of its shelves.
Too often is a boat's inside neglected although the value of living is conditional upon how. It is essential but hardly enough that a house roof be tight. We assume that, and proceed to the establishing of conveniences and comforts within, knowing well how closely they concern our happiness. Fundamentals are important — but they are merely what we build upon, and of themselves of little value. Of what use is it to build your house foundation on a rock if you don't build a house on the foundation; if you don't make a home of the house; lure a woman to the home, beget children and establish a line of archangels that will go on and on forever? What use in merely being safe at sea? Rear on that restless element your structure of non-fundamental all essential comfort so that you may at least occasionally think without a world of dishes, food and what-nots crashing on your head.
So, using the little time and the few tools and materials I had to the utmost, I did, during the hours of the mate's exclusion from the cabin, build myself so secure and comfortable a little retreat in the cramped forecastle of the boat that I could thereafter withdraw from his dull presence at every leisure moment, day and night, that came to me. And did.
Lat. 46° 08' 00" N. [VI] Long. 60° 30' 00" W.
AT FOUR-THIRTY in the afternoon of June 17th we sailed. The exasperating delay that had put off our sailing until that date, and on that date until that hour, the misgivings I had felt about the mate, all were forgotten in that moment of leave taking. The bright sun shone upon us; the lake was blue under the westerly breeze, and luminous, how luminous! the whole far world of our imagination. How like a colored lens the colored present! through it we see the forward vista of our lives. Here, in the measure that the water widened in our wake and heart strings stretched to almost breaking, the golden future neared us and enfolded us, made us at last — how soon! — oblivious to all things but the glamour of adventure. And while one world diminished, narrowed and then disappeared, before us a new world unrolled and neared us to display itself. Who can deny the human soul its everlasting need to make the unknown known; not for the sake of knowing, not to inform itself or be informed or wise, but for the need to exercise the need to know? What is that need but the imagination's hunger for the new and raw materials of its creative trade? Of things and facts assured to us and known we've got to make the best, and live with it. That humdrum is the price of living. We live for those fantastic and unreal moments of beauty which our thoughts may build upon the passing panorama of experience.
Soon all that we had ever seen before was left behind and a new land of fields and farms, pastures and meadows, woods and open lands and rolling hills was streaming by, all in the mellow splendor of late afternoon in June, all green and clean and beautiful. We stripped and plunged ahead into the blue water; and catching hold of a rope as it swept by, trailed in the wake. It was so warm — the water and the early summer air. So we shall live all summer naked, and get brown and magnificent!
I cooked supper: hot baking-powder biscuit and — I don't remember what. «You're a wonderful cook!» said everyone. So I washed the dishes and put the cabin in order.
«Oh,» thought I, «people are nice! the world is grand! I'm happy! God is good!»
June 17th, 1929 [VII] Cabot Strait
TWILIGHT, the ocean, eight o-clock have come; I take the helm on my watch. The wind has risen, the horizon is dark against a livid sky. It's cold. Never again for months to come do my thoughts run to nakedness. Nor do I see green fields, nor thriving homesteads, nor people long enough except to part from them; nor — though it's June — the summer; not for a thousand miles. And as it darkens and the stars come out, and the black sea appears unbroken everywhere save for the restless turbulence of its own plain, as the lights are extinguished in the cabin, — then I am suddenly alone. And almost terror grips me for I now feel the solitude; under the keel and overhead the depths, — and me, enveloped in immensity.
How strange to be here in a little boat! — and not by accident, not cast adrift here from a wreck, but purposely! What purpose, whose? And if I call to mind how I have read of Greenland and for years have longed to go there, how I have read and read again the Iceland sagas and been stirred by them, how I've been moved by the strange story of the Greenland settlements and their tragic end, by all the glamour and the mystery of those adventures, how I have followed in the wake of Leif and found America, and how by all of that I've come to need to know those countries, tread their soil, to touch the ancient stones of their enclosures, sail their seas to think myself a Viking like themselves, — then I may boast that purpose and my will have brought me here. And yet this very moment is the contradiction of it. The darkness and the wind! the imponderable immensity of space and elements! My frail hands grip the tiller; my eyes stare hypnotically at the stars beyond the tossing masthead or watch the bow wave as we part the seas. I hold the course. I have no thought or will, no power, to alter it.
So midnight comes; I rouse the captain. Chilled to the bone I go below, make coffee, wash up and turn in. Cold, but more tired, I sleep.
Cabot Strait [VIII] Course N. by E.
I CAME from my dim forecastle into a cabin illuminated by the morning sun. Beyond the open hatch, braced at the tiller, sat the mate, his yellow oilskins glistening under flying spray. Breakfast! «How about coffee?» and I reach out a cup to the mate.
«Just a moment,» says the mate in strangely muffled, hasty tones, and he leans suddenly over the side. «Good,» says he a moment later, wiping his mouth as he sits up again, «Now let's have the coffee.» And he drinks it up.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "N by E"
by .
Copyright © 1958 Rockwell Kent.
Excerpted by permission of Wesleyan University Press.
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