The Sinking Ship

For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land

Sitting in a sailboat underway is like being inside a musical instrument. Even on some dud lake in the middle of the city, the lines snap and slacken and whistle a bit in the wind. The boom creaks and whines while swaying across the center of the boat. Duck under it; hear the sail overhead as it cracks and ruffles. A little boat is like a harp swanning across the water. But the feeling of that intricate machine is cataclysmic, too, the way fine glassware or a Fabergé egg can only make you think of crushing and shattering it. (Not that I have mishandled any jeweled eggs.) In high school, they taught a boat safety course, where you had to swamp a canoe in the pool. That seems about right: learn early that boats feel shattered, sunken, and gone. As a sardonic proverb has it, A boat is a hole in the water you throw money into. Or are screamingly sucked down with.

One of the many perverse satisfactions of literature is in the terror and beauty of reading about ships sinking, in storm or in stress. You feel you shouldn’t enjoy such things, not when you consider the pain and terror that’s been tricked out as art and amusement, but honestly you do enjoy them, the more hideous and fearful the better. No wonder Immanuel Kant used shipwrecks, seen from the safety of shore, as a vision of the sublime.

Joseph Conrad, a major distributor of sea adventures in the English language, wrote that he only wanted his stories “to make you see.” This is a famous literary principle and one to admire for its prescience, coming as it does from a writer whose descriptive powers always strike me as cinematic before cinema. He writes as if he’s not only seen films but felt them, rapt before the overwhelming light and sound. Conrad wrote on the cusp of the 20th century’s demented and dementing realisms: phenomenological, impressionistic, cubist, whatever: filtered through a descriptive consciousness rather than rendered clean, so to speak, for our reading comprehension. So Conrad’s “make you see” does not leave his readers ashore, perfectly safe, but instead more intimately draws us forward and draws us in, as if under the spell of an illusion. That visionary seeing is an immersive contact. And look at Conrad’s ships! Feel them, even. One of the most unforgettable has to be in his novella, Typhoon, as it approaches at night a storm darker than the dark:

The far-off blackness ahead of the ship was like another night seen through the starry night of the earth—the starless night of the immensities beyond the created universe, revealed in appalling stillness through a low fissure in the glittering sphere of which the earth is the kernel.

Conrad shows the earth to be flat, a shelf that this small ship is poised to be blown off, into the coldest reaches of outer space, through a “low fissure” chipped in the firmament. An old artificer, Conrad. He heightens the effect of his outer space-tending ship by relying on a geocentric model of the universe that, while scientifically outmoded, will probably feel poetically accurate forever. The earth, our kernel, the center of the universe.

What feels decisive in ships sinking on the page, at least the ones I have in mind, consists in the immensity that overshadows Conrad’s vessel as it’s blown into the dark. The distress of a ship afloat on our wave-washed planet teeters at the brink of creation. Hence that Conradian view “beyond the created universe.” This is because the ship ultimately sails at the border between the made and unmade. As Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote in his long poem, “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” the waters of the sea are “the widow-making unchilding unfathering deeps.” This sea, the unmaker of all. Or take Melville: “But not only is the sea such a foe to man who is alien to it, but it is also a fiend to its own offspring.” The unmaking is a general condition, a watery axe poised over everything.

There’s a memorable passage on this subject, or at least I’ve rather helplessly remembered it, in Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing, which is a landlubber’s novel if ever there were one. McCarthy scours a borderland between creation and uncreation. The passage I have in mind goes something like this: An old man tells a boy that “the boy should find that place where acts of God and those of man are of a piece. Where they cannot be distinguished.” He elaborates, which is helpful of him:

The old man said that it was not a question of finding such a place but rather of knowing it when it presented itself. He said that it was at such places that God sits and conspires in the destruction of that which he has been at such pains to create.

This is shipwrecks through and through. Man and god conspiring in the destruction of their unified creations.

Think of it as the making and the counter-making. Assemble bits of wood, rope, caulking, sail, or, alternatively, metal, rivets, joists, coal, and oil. By all means make the assembly strong. Strap the pieces together but then, in recognition of the old powers of the earth, set the assembled vessel out on the water. Submit this jointed scrap of wood and sail to the less than tender mercy of forces with which there’s comically limited negotiation. Was it Paul Virilio who wrote that those who first made ships were the inventors of shipwrecks? (I’m not looking it up, but it sounds French-ish). Every technology mints a new form of disaster.

But this is not really my point. Hopkins’s “endragonèd sea” is not a necessary element in the destruction of ships. Ships may rattle and shudder, fill up with water, burn and explode, or horribly sink, sucked down holes that don’t have to open up to admit them, all without the intervention of sublime storms. Or, at least, the cosmic forces might be a touch more pathetic. I like a touch of the pathetic in the portrayal of shipwrecks. That bit of humanizing irony in the distressing of well-laid plans is a spice all its own.

This all came to the surface weeks ago, when that maestro of literary salons, Paul Franz, hosted a discussion of two prose works by Stephen Crane: 1) Crane’s much-anthologized short story, “The Open Boat,” and 2) a piece of journalism, called “Stephen Crane’s Own Story,” that Crane wrote and published prior to “The Open Boat” and to which “The Open Boat” is really a sequel.

Crane’s “own” story recounts the sinking of the steamship Commodore, on which he was sailing as a correspondent-in-disguise during the ship’s gun-running passage to Cuba. No storm lashes the ship, though it does briefly and comically run aground on its way to sea. Mysteriously and rather abruptly taking on water once away from the coast, the vessel and its engine are fouled or ruined. In short order, the ship sinks. The crew scatters, many drown. Crane spent 30 hours in a small boat afterward, with three other men, trying to make his way back to shore. The latter experience he fictionalized in “The Open Boat.”

The sinking itself remains lodged in a deadpan piece of reporting, all the more powerful for it. As Crane writes, “There was no particular agitation at this time [water is filling the engine room], and even later there was never a panic on board the Commodore.” This shouldn’t be understood as resignation or inevitability, much less stoicism. Crane writes about the sinking ship simply as if he had nothing else to say at the time. He remained obedient instead to the protocols of the patient decision to abandon a lost boat.

You abandon ship slowly but inexorably. The boat is gone before it’s gone, in a sense. This is because sinking can be horribly slow. It’s an inverse of growth, an un-blooming rather than a discrete event. With the exception of one desperate sailor at the end, Crane’s account of the sinking lacks almost any sense of protest. Not that it’s especially accepting either. There are only things to do. When Crane and his small dinghy of survivors look back on the quiet sailors still aboard as the ship goes down, you sense everything has already happened. They’re already dead and gone at that exact moment, even as some make a final attempt to escape.

So the sinking of the Commodore strikes me as a very human sinking. Even so there’s a hellish quality to the slow melting away of all that makes ships a refuge from the immensity of water:

The engine room, by the way, represented a scene at this time taken from the middle kitchen of hades. In the first place, it was insufferably warm, and the lights burned faintly in a way to cause mystic and grewsome [sic] shadows. There was a quantity of soapish sea water swirling and sweeping and swishing among the machinery that roared and banged and clattered and steamed, and in the second place, it was a devil of a ways down below.

When the ship sinks, it almost seems to escape, as if it’s shedding at last its weary form. Or maybe the ship gives up the stress of maintaining shape and cohesion: “She lurched to windward, then swung afar back, righted and dove into the sea, and the rafts were suddenly swallowed by this frightful maw of the ocean.” Another entropy, not a being sucked into outer space.

I always felt a slight irritation at the offended dignity of T.S. Eliot’s “This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but a whimper.” Such eagerness to feel small and squashed. Vex not my ghost, to borrow a phrase from King Lear, and let me pass. The whimper is a bang, the bang a whimper. Everything’s already unmade.