Men Against the Sea
By and
[Atlantic Monthly Press and Little, Brown, $2.00]
ONE of the best meals ever served in literature is ‘Oysters Captain Bligh.’ The scene is the coast of New Holland, what we now call Queensland. The date, May 1789. There is a three-gallon copper pot, verdigrised with salt. A fire of driftwood on a hearth of stones. The oysters were prized off rocks with a cutlass. They and their juice fill the pot within four inches of the brim. Three quarters of a pound of crumbled bread*, a pound of fat pork cut into pieces. A quart of sea water to salten. Serve hot in Captain Bligh’s own coconut shell, known to hold exactly a pint. ( They had reason for knowing.) Ledyard, the surgeon, perhaps more delicate than some, had even whittled himself a spoon of driftwood.
’Damme, sir!‘ said Bligh. ’Many’s the time I’ve eaten worse than this on His Majesty’s ships.‘
But to have Bligh’s appetite you must have been twenty-six days at sea in an open boat; have sailed some 2500 miles of uncharted ocean (and a thousand yet to go), without firearms and past islands where you dared not land among hostile savages; have lived on two ounces of bread and a gill of water per day — with the blood and scraps of a sea bird it you could strike it down with a stick. Nineteen men in an open boat only twenty-three feet long, six foot nine inches beam; so overburdened that even in calm water the sea licked your hand on the gunwale. I should have said eighteen men: one was killed by the Indians on Tofoa. They did not land again until they got inside the Great Barrier Beef. And you will sharpen this appetite with memories of the turtle too big to hold, the fish they did not catch, canoes and arrows pursuing in the moonlight, and the face of Bligh at the tiller all night in the gale. That appetite and that meal, and much more besides, are waiting for you in Men Against the Sea.
I will not pretend to speak coldly of this grand book; yet I must not be too detailed lest I spoil some of its thrill. There was no reader of Mutiny on the Bounty who did not hanker to follow the adventures of Bligh and his men when they were cast adrift by the mutineers. Here we have their story. By some miracle of study or temperament Nordhoff and Hall have written two classics of the eighteenth century, and have set them permanently on the shelf of sea adventure. The wind and weather of the narrative, they tell us, are those of Bligh’s own log. The story is told in the person of Ledyard, flic ship’s surgeon. This was a shrewd stroke, for who more likely than the doctor to be a student of men? So, without ever an intrusion of ‘literature,’ we get pure experience. We live and suffer in the Bounty’s launch, love her faithful obedience, rejoice with her when she reaches friendly beach at last. We get to know those eighteen men well, the weaker and the stronger. Is there a reader who does not guess which one stole the piece of pork one night? And why though not precisely suggested — it was surely he? And who but Bligh would have insisted on being shaved? Yon may not have cared for Captain Bligh when you met him in the Bounty. Here he shows deeper. Mark him well in the quarrels with Purcell. This is more than merely a narrative of horror and hardship. It is drama and character study. Even in its most dreadful moments it is horror that nerves and braces. What more exquisitely human, even, one may respectfully say, humorous, than old Purcell, the burly carpenter, taking his infinitesimal ration — ‘one twenty-fifth of a pound of bread’ per meal: ‘No matter how miserable I might be, I found relief in watching him receive his tiny morsel. It was always with the same expression of amazement and injury. He would hold the bread in the palm of his huge hand for a few seconds, peering at it from under his shaggy eyebrows as though not quite certain it was there. Then he would clap it into his mouth with an expression of disgust still more comical, and roll up his eyes as though asking heaven to witness that he had not received his due allowance.’
Even the most physical detail of their misery gives no qualm, so completely simple is the tone. Ledyard’s professional interest in the matter of excreta, for instance. Wind and sun and sea have blown all nonsense away before you travel far in this book. You read it with the racing eye that will not pause; only afterward, perhaps, you realize to the full how much clear wisdom has been said, how much skill and restraint exercised. What indeed is the greatest tribute that can be paid? That thousands of people can read it without ever guessing that it is a great work of art. You would beg it to be twice as long, did you not remember that would double the crew’s ordeal.
So Men Against the Sea tows behind Mutiny on the Bounty like the launch itself at the ship’s stern; a necessary part of the story. Captain Bligh, but for the mutiny, would long ago have been forgotten; he lives for us now as hero of one of the world’s most extraordinary exploits. Like Surgeon Ledyard, we have almost a feeling of disappointment when, at length, we see him again trimmed and powdered and in clean uniform: —
‘It may be thought strange, but I liked him better as he was in the Bounty’s launch: rags hanging from his wasted limbs, his hand on the tiller, the great seas foaming up behind him, and the low scud flying close overhead. There he was unique, one man in ten thousand. On the after-deck of the Resource, he appeared to be merely one of the innumerable captains of His Majesty’s Navy.‘
Let me add that the end papers of the book give an excellent map on which even the landlubber can follow the voyage with understanding. I envy you the joy of that passage where they find the opening in the reef, land in a sandy bay, and get ready for the oyster stew. That’s reading!
CHRISTOPHER MORLEY