The Sea: ‘What Is It That It Keeps On Saying?’

I pass like night, from land to land;
I have strange powers of speech …
                   —Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Charles Lamb was fifteen when he saw the sea for the first time. Many years later, in The Old Margate Hoy (1823), he would relate his sense of disappointment. As a boy his knowledge of the sea had been derived from books: tales of wanderers whose journeys were often laced with romance and poetry. He had read of the mystique in the depths of the great oceans, and also of tiny isolated islands and the wonders of far-off continents. And who could not help but be impressed by the dangers of fatal rocks and whirlpools, waterspouts and sunken ships with their treasures? Or terrified by reports of hideous monsters of the deep, or naked cannibals and their stewing pots? Other stories told of pearl divers and conch shells big enough to be blown as trumpets, smugglers and the coloured corals of the grottoes inhabited by mermaids. And yet what he was to find himself recalling in the popular holiday spot of Margate, was a line from Walter Savage Landor: “Is this the mighty ocean? Is this all?”

Lamb was unimpressed by cliffs he categorised as “artless”, drab fishermen’s huts, mackerel boats and windblown scrub, while the fishermen themselves he saw only as “poor victims to monotony”. He relates, however, that with time he came to realise that outsiders such as himself, more suited to the larger cities and their attendant rivers, had no true understanding of the sea. In his view, fashionable holiday-makers went to such coastal resorts only to say they had been. Arriving with an excess of “land luggage”, they pitched their bathing tents in the sand in complete ignorance of the “nature of the place”. He asks us to imagine the similar absurdity of a fisherman hauling his nets and lobster pots down a fashionable London street.

Yes, he concludes, if you don’t belong, it is best you stay home.

Still in the early nineteenth century, but on the other side of the North Atlantic, on the island known as Nantucket—just south of Cape Cod—and the place its first peoples knew as “the faraway land”, we should consider a mix of individuals who did belong. Herman Melville in Moby Dick or, The Whale (1851), while describing the island as “a mere hillock, and elbow of sand; all beach, without a background”, regards its residents as owning the sea, “as Emperors own empires”.

A Nantucketer lived in a dwelling that had a raised platform on the roof known as “a walk”. The sea needed to be constantly watched. A single street on the island could boast to have housed at one time or another, however itinerantly, 134 sea captains. As children these men had clambered up ship’s ratlines as if born for the purpose while whaling phrases would be spat from their mouths as soon as they had developed the capacity to speak. An episode of such a boy harpooning a family cat was remembered fondly and had reached the status of legend. Though one in every four women could expect the sea to make her a widow, daughters still risked the loss of credibility on wedding a lad whose livelihood was land-based. These women were proud of their reputation for Quaker orderliness, but a persistent reek of whale oil still pervaded the Nantucket township despite it. They too would readily hail a messmate, knew what it was to “bring to” and could tell you the span of a jibboom or the length of a mainstay. 

Big waves pound this island’s eastern shore, waves that have a 3000-mile fetch that extends to Portugal. The word nausea derives from the Greek naus, for ship; and in big seas even the most hardened sailors can experience seasickness. As a remedy, a Nantucketer would tie pork fat to a string, dangle and swallow the morsel, then pull hard on the string and repeat the exercise if need be. A Nantucketer also knew from experience the power of a whale’s flukes and of how one might find oneself clinging to a capsized boat in cold and dangerous water. Owen Chase, first mate on the ill-fated Essex—the ship twice charged and destroyed by a huge bull whale (an incident on which Melville partially based his epic novel)—would write of the confidence and self-possession that a Nantucketer felt on open water. The knowledge of its dangers “inured one, body and mind” and in a manner that outsiders considered, in his words, beyond belief.

And it was the Nantucketer, according to Melville, who:

in Bible language, goes down to his ships; to and fro ploughing it as his own special plantation. There is his home; there lies his business, which a Noah’s flood would not interrupt, though it overwhelmed all the millions in China.

The “Bible language” Melville refers to is contained in Psalm 107. Its verses 23 to 30 read as follows:

Those who go down to the sea in ships,
who do tasks in the mighty waters,
it is they who have seen the deeds of the Lord,
and His wonders in the deep.
He speaks and raises the stormwind
and it makes the waves loom high.
They go up to the heavens, come down to the depths,
their life-breath in hardship grows faint.
They reel and sway like a drunkard,
their wisdom is swallowed up.
And they cry to the Lord from their straits,
from their distress he brings them out.
He turns the storm into silence,
and its waves are stilled,
and they rejoice that these have grown quiet,
and He leads them to their bourn.

The biblical scholar Robert Alter tells us of the context in which “wisdom” here also means something akin to “craft”—so that not only is “the knowledge” of sailors open to testing, but more particularly their practical expertise. If the Lord wishes it, both may prove useless in the fury of a “stormwind”.

Edmund Burke in his treatise Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), decides that it is indubitably fear that provides the fascination, “either more openly or latently”, for “the Sublime”, adding that the ocean—as its prime example—strikes us as an “object of no small terror”. Joseph Addison, in a piece for the Spectator in 1712, observed that he knew of nothing that could affect the imagination more than the sea and added that its greatness could only have been the work of a supreme and divine being “neither circumscribed by time nor space”. He is specific about Psalm 107, reflecting that its ideas are “much more comfortable as well as rational” than the “pagan scheme of Virgil”—that which accords various gods to different causes. (Here as an aside, we recall in Homer’s Odyssey, that the delay in Odysseus’s return to Ithaca emanates from his blinding of Polyphemus and the anger that this arouses in the parents of the chief of the Cyclopes, Poseidon, the sea god and nymph Thoosa, herself a daughter of Phorcys, the warden of the waves. Odysseus’s problems are compounded by the family’s allegiance with Proteus, the old man of the sea. These salts, it seems, stick together.)

But to return to fear. The Book of Common Prayer offers this appeal for a storm at sea: 

O most powerful and glorious Lord God, at whose command the winds blow, and lift up the waves of the sea, and who stillest the rage thereof; We thy creatures, but miserable sinners, do in this our great distress cry unto thee for help: save, Lord, or else we perish. We confess, when we have been safe and seen all things quiet about us, we have forgot thee our God, and refused to hearken to the still voice of thy word, and to obey thy commandments: But now we see how terrible thou art in all thy works of wonder; the great God to be feared above all: and therefore we adore thy divine Majesty, acknowledging thy power, and imploring thy goodness. Help, Lord, and save us for thy mercies sake in Jesus Christ thy Son, our Lord.

Amen.

Another prayer in the collection places more emphasis on the “jaws of this death” about to “swallow us up” and “the raging winds” and “the roaring sea”.

W.H. Auden points out in The Enchafèd Flood (1951), that Starbuck, the most experienced of the mates on Melville’s Pequod—and a Nantucketer—

has a religious reverence for life and death: he knows that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. That is why he will have no man in his boat who is not afraid of the whale.

Auden cites the first chapter of the Book of Genesis, where we are told the earth was without form until the Spirit of God moved “upon the face of the waters”—and then—after the declaration that there should be light and the consequent making of “the firmament”, the waters were gathered “unto one place”, enabling dry land to appear. With this in mind, Auden describes the sea, therefore, as the great symbol of “primordial undifferentiated flux”—and furthermore:

that state of barbaric vagueness and disorder out of which civilization has emerged and into which, unless saved by the efforts of gods and men, it is always liable to relapse.

Indeed, by the time a prophet composes the Book of Revelation (circa 95 AD), the sea already is considered unfriendly enough to be absent from the vision of a new heaven and earth. In the new Jerusalem—where there is no more death, sorrow, crying or pain (21:4)—the very first thing the prophet notices is that there is “no more sea” (21:1).

Symbolism aside, Admiral Sir Francis Beaufort constructed a table of variance in the moods of the sea—the two extremes being calm and hurricane—as early as 1805. Remembered as the Beaufort Scale, it refers to a Force Nine event, for example, as one at sea where there are high waves, “dense streaks of foam” and sea-spray which significantly reduces visibility. Such an event is the product of a wind that on land is strong enough to disassemble slates from rooftops. Force One, on the other hand, describes the sea as a mirror, and in this circumstance on land, smoke would rise vertically from chimneys. Force Twelve, the other extreme, speaks of waves over fourteen metres high and winds that are rarely experienced on land.

Being seemingly stranded in mirror-like conditions—

As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean—

as Samuel Coleridge described it, or, in “a desert of water” as Charles Darwin experienced on HMS Beagle at one point in 1831, may lack drama by comparison with towering waves of fifty feet and more, but it still can present its own dangers for the crew of a craft dependent on the force of the wind. Even in the absence of danger, such a crew can come to resent the aptly named “dead calm”. In storm Darwin noted:

the albatross and little petrel fly as if [in] … their proper sphere, the water rises and sinks as if fulfilling its usual task, the ship alone and its inhabitants seem the object of wrath …

Before writing The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Coleridge had not been to sea. Rather than acute observation or reflection on his own experiences, he employed what he referred to as the “esamplastic power” of the imagination—the adjective one of his own making and describing the drawing of material from a variety of sources to make a unified whole. Those acquainted with the poem will know that it involves a ship that has crossed the equator and is driven by storms towards the southern pole before eventually being able to set a course for more temperate climes. The strange occurrences that befall the ship and its crew are related in the poem by the same seafarer who, arguably at the most memorable point in the tale, kills a great sea-bird—an albatross—as it emerges through fog. Originally from the Arabic al–qādās, the word albatross made its voyage into English by way of the Portuguese alcatraz (gannet) and was later modified by the Latin albus (white), so as to distinguish it from the frigate bird which happens to be black. Be that as it may, the arrival of the bird in the poem had seemed to herald much-needed southerly winds, enabling the ship’s crew to extricate themselves from still and freezing conditions. However, the gratuitous slaying of the bird then serves as a portent for what occurs as the poem progresses and despite the fact that sailors regularly killed albatrosses and found them good eating (see the 1772 James Cook journals, for instance), the killing of such a bird soon became a popular expression connected to the bringing of bad news or the bearing of a burden.

Joseph Conrad would have scoffed at the implication that any man’s actions, beliefs or theories could have a bearing on what he himself took for the ocean’s supreme ambivalence towards all who enter or sail upon it. For Conrad, the sea was “the formidable Work of the Seven Days, into which mankind seems to have blundered unbidden”. Yet he also described life at sea as the only world that counted, the true test of “manliness, of temperament, of courage and fidelity—and of love”.

In his novel The Shadow Line: A Confession, Conrad tells of a newly appointed ship’s captain, young and beset with both a youthful ambition and its concomitant naivety. He is yet to reach that demarcation point beyond which the romance of ideals must be put to the test and where many of these ideals must be left behind. The sea, as ever, proves an able educator.

The British philosopher Michael Oakeshott, in On Being Conservative (1956), makes reference to Conrad’s notion:  

For most [of us] there is what Conrad called the “shadow line”, which when we pass it, discloses a solid world of things, each with its fixed shape, each with its own point of balance, each with its price, a world of fact, not poetic image, where what we have spent on one thing we cannot spend on another; a world inhabited by others besides ourselves who cannot be reduced to mere reflections of our own emotions.

Oakeshott describes a reality which can seem harsh perhaps, yet is nowhere brought home so succinctly than when at sea. It is the reality of Santiago, the old Cuban fisherman who ventures into the Gulf Stream in Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea (1952). He cannot recall the precise moment, out on the water, that he first began to talk to himself aloud, yet he is alone, but for his catch and some interested sharks. He knows he needs the company.

In the Charles Dickens novel Dombey and Son, Floy Dombey is asked by her younger and ly ill brother Paul: “The sea, Floy, what is it that it keeps on saying?” Floy offers something ineffectual about it being merely the noise of the Brighton waves, yet Paul feels he knows better, he suspects these waves are always saying something.

The English painter J.M.W. Turner would have told Paul that the sea served as an example of what he called a “greater truth”, one that typically freed the imagination to separate itself from that which only addressed the eye. David Ansted in The Representation of Water (1863), advised that the sea imprinted on us most powerfully in the realisation that “the whole surface of the earth … almost every rock has been washed and worn by the waves, has been eaten into by marine currents”.

James Joyce provides the most effusive literary response to Paul Dombey’s question in Ulysses. Having already been told of Leopold Bloom’s admiration for water—“its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature”—more specifically, we are informed of Bloom’s wonderment regarding:

its unplumbed profundity in the Sundam trench of the Pacific exceeding 8000 fathoms: the restlessness of its waves and surface particles visiting in all points of the seaboard: the independence of its units: the variability of states of sea: its hydrostatic quiescence in calm: its hydrokinetic turgidity in neap and spring tides: its subsidence after devastation; its sterility in the circumpolar icecaps, arctic and antarctic: its climatic and commercial significance: its preponderance of 3 to 1 over the dry land of the globe: its indisputable hegemony extending in square leagues over all the region below the subequatorial tropic of Capricorn: the multisecular stability of its primeval basin: its luteofulvous bed: its capacity to dissolve and hold in solution all soluble substances including millions of tons of the most precious metals: its slow erosion of peninsulas and downwardtending promontories: its alluvial deposits: its weight and volume and density: its imperturbability in lagoons and highland tarns: its gradation of colours in the torrid temperate and frigid zones: its vehicular ramifications in continental lakecontained streams and confluent oceanflowing rivers with their tributaries and transoceanic currents: gulf-stream, north and south equatorial courses: its violence in seaquakes, waterspouts …

And so on. Joyce gives us almost fifty conversations to consider.

Walt Whitman, in Song of Myself, provides a deeply personal response:

You sea! I resign myself to you also—I guess what you mean,
I behold from the beach your crooked inviting fingers,
I believe you refuse to go back without feeling of me,
We must have a turn together, I undress, hurry me out of sight of the land,
Cushion me soft, rock me in billowy drowse,
Dash me with amorous wet, I can repay you.

The toil of the Nantucketer requires his own songs to be work songs:

So be cheery, my lads, let your hearts never fail,
While the bold harpooner is striking the whale!

Throughout the decline of his health, young Paul Dombey continues to ask: “The sea, Floy, what is it that it keeps on saying?” And in the nights before his death he dreams of rivers and streams and their desire and determination to meet with it.

At night, the Nantucketer, in Melville’s words, “out of sight of land, furls his sails … lays him to his rest, while under his very pillow rush herds of walruses and whales”.

Universally lauded as an expert of the oceans and its depths, at ease now in his bunk and seeking solace from the rigours of his day, the Nantucketer could not know, however, the origins of the strange noises that might seem to emanate from fathoms down from where he reclines and which in fact—not that he can know this either—are being amplified by the wooden hull of his ship. These eerie repetitions that perplex him—and perhaps his grandfather may have attributed these to a sea maiden or some other imagined creature—will not be identified as or termed whale songs, for more than another hundred years. It is plausible, current science tells us, that these songs would have journeyed, been heard and responded to over an average distance of some thousand miles. By way of example, this is the distance from Nantucket Island to Newfoundland. Even to a Nantucketer—and if we remember Owen Chase’s words—this would have been considered beyond belief.

As for Master Paul’s question, there appears but one answer.

I remain.

Barry Gillard has contributed several pieces of fiction and non-fiction to Quadrant recently. He lives in Geelong, on Corio Bay.