The Sea in Literature

by SAMUEL ELIOT MORISON

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THE sea has been a delight to me ever since I learned to pull an oar and tend a sheet, and sea literature has fascinated me ever since I began to read. However, I should have declined this invitation to give my own views on the literature of the sea, but for a verse in the Odyssey which has been a great comfort to me during my labors on naval history. Odysseus, taunted by Euryalus in the Land of the Phaeacians, replies, “Much have I endured in passing through this man’s war, and the waves of the sea laden with suffering.”

That has been a recurrent motif in all sea literature, and the leading motif of the Greeks — “the waves of the sea laden with suffering.” The ancients accepted the sea as the source of daily bread, but they feared it. They were never the “lighthearted masters of the waves” as Matthew Arnold described them. The Mediterranean, the only sea that they knew intimately, is subject to sudden, fierce, and dangerous storms; and whatever poetry the ancients based on the sea is largely tragic or cautionary, or expresses relief at arriving ashore. Nor did the sea enter into their religion, except, insofar as Poseidon and the sea nymphs could be induced to protect poor sailors plying their lawful occasions. The Middle Ages, on the contrary, began to regard the sea as an element in or a vehicle for religion; and only very recently, as history goes, has man begun to look on the sea as romantic or as an element to sport with. Who ever heard of a Greek or Homan yacht, unless it was a sumptuous row-galley on a safe river or lake?

Hesiod, the earliest Greek author to make more than a passing mention of the sea, takes a very businesslike view of that element in his Works and Days, written in the eighth century B.C. He claims “neither skill in seafaring nor in ships” and admits that his only sea passage was to cross the Straits of Chalchis. Nevertheless, because the Muses have taught him to “sing in marvellous song,” he will instruct his ne’er-do-well brother Perses in the profitable use of the sea. Two seasons of the year, he says, are best for seafaring; the first is “spring, when leaves on the topmost shoot of a fig tree are as big as a crow’s foot. But I don’t like it then; you will hardly avoid trouble.” Early fall, “when the season of enervating heat has come to an end,” is the best, “for the winds then are steady and the sea is kind; but make haste to do your business and return home before the fierce southerly gales make up.” And that’s good advice still for the Aegean — or the Maine coast, for that matter. “Admire a small ship if you will,” Hesiod tells brother Perses, “but stow your freight in a big one; for the greater the cargo, the greater your gain.” In any case, “Leave most of your goods ashore, and lade only the lesser part; for it is bad business to meet with disaster among the waves of the sea, and it is terrible to die among the waves.” That note echoes all through Greek literature.

Homer’s attitude is something else again. For him the sea was an element, not devoid of beauty, which a man must accept and enjoy as best he may. In the Odyssey we find the sea endowed with poetic epithets that have echoed down the ages: the surging, the multitudinous, the unfilled. Yet, I wonder why Homer and the Other Greeks did not find more color in the sea. Oinops (wine-dark) and porphureos (dark-gleaming) are very well for the hour of sundown, when the Aegean turns a deep reddish-purple like port wine; but Homer never, to my knowledge, alludes 1o the deep sapphire blue of the Aegean under a summer sun, or to the shades of green that it turns in the shallows, reflecting the colors of the mountains.

Egocentric man loved the ships which he fashioned himself, before he came to love the sea on which they sailed. Homer was the first to admit it. His ships he calls vermilion-cheeked because their bows were painted red, well-benched because their primary motive power was the oar, wellmasted, shapely. And the description of her native city that he puts in the mouth of Nausieaä is as fair a one of a busy maritime community as you can find: —

“Here the men are busied with the rigging of their black ships, with lines and sails and shaping the slender oar-blades. For the Phaeacians care nought for bow and arrow, but for mast and oar and for the shapely ships, in which joyfully they cross the gray sea.”

To which Pallas Athene adds, “Their ships are swift as a bird on the wing, or as a thought.”

Homer’s power to set a maritime scene in a few words is a never-failing joy. Take, for example, his description of making a landlocked harbor in Sicily at night: —

In we sailed, and some god must have conned us through the dark night, for no one ashore showed a light, and a low mist lay all about the ships; and the moon, cloud covered, afforded no help from heaven. We missed the island at the entrance, and not until we ran our well-benched ships on the beach did we perceive the long, low swells rolling in. And when we had beached the ships we lowered the sails and on the shores of the sea we slept until the bright dawn.

Aeschylus, an Athenian naval officer during the classical age of Greek literature, knew the sea better than any other Greek poet, and he came nearer than any of the other ancients to painting its beauty as well as its horror. In the Agamemnon, there is a description of the dawn after Salami’s that reminds me poignantly of what morning so frequently brought to view in Ironbottom Sound, Guadalcanal, during World War II: “When the beaming light of the sun arose, we beheld the Aegean Sea flowering with the corpses of Achaeans, and with flotsam from the ships.” I remember a November morning in 1942 when, after a bloody night battle in which one of our cruisers went down, my ship, the Honolulu, steamed over the place where she sank, threading her way amid wreckage, corpses, and swimming sailors who waved to us and shouted. Pleasanter images are evoked by another perfect phrase of Aeschylus, in which he described the calm of a hot summer’s day. “The sea, all windless, sank to sleep upon his waveless noonday bed.” I recall an August day in the Aegean when our schooner was becalmed from dawn to dusk off the long, crested profile of Nikaria; how we lay almost motionless, on a gently palpitating sea, transparent as a vaporous emerald. A light westerly breeze sprang up out of the setting sun and bore us gently through a starlit night, to Patmos.

By and large, the Greeks felt that the best thing about a sea voyage was the harbor at the end. And the Romans were no different — always excepting Vergil. He felt the poetry of seafaring. Let us take but one example, that passage in the third book of the Aeneid where Palinurus, Aeneas’s weather-wise pilot, rises in the night and, like n modern sailor, turns his face this way and that to feel out the direction of the soft night airs. He observes the stars silently sailing their courses through the heavens, and when he is satisfied that the heavens portend fair weather, he mounts the quarterdeck and summons the Trojans to break camp and man their ships, in words that ring like a bugle call: dat clarum e puppi signum; nos castra movemus.

The ships spread their wings. For a day and a night they roar across the Ionian Sea. Vergil then gives us the finest record in all literature of the way a sailor’s heart leaps up at making a much desired landfall: “And now Aurora blushes red among the fading stars, when afar we make out faint hills and low-lying Italy. ‘Italy!’ first sings out Achates; ‘Italy!’ repeat my shipmates with joyful shouts.” Father Anchises breaks out a great bowl, fills it with wine, and erect on the quarterdeck invokes the gods: —

“Ye gods of the sea and the land, lords of the wind and the tempest, Grant us good passage we pray, send us fair breezes to follow!”

On sped the Trojan fleet, and Rome was founded.

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AND now we come to the Middle Ages, when the note of religion enters sea literature. During the dark ages that succeeded the bright light of classical antiquity, barbarian pirates swept the Mediterranean, seaboard cities withered away, merchant ships rotted, commerce died. Then the palm of sea knowledge and achievement passed northward to the Scandinavians and Irish.

The Irish of the fifth and eighth centuries of the Christian era were among the most daring seafarers in the world’s history — more so, perhaps, than any people except the Polynesians; in wickerframed coracles planked with hides they voyaged even to the Hebrides, the Shellands, and Iceland, which they were the first to discover and to people. Among the early Irish Christians there was a peculiar urge to “get away from it all” — to sail off somewhere and find an island where you could really live the Christian life in all simplicity and purity. The great literary expression of this Celtic urge to ocean solitude is the two versions of the voyage of St. Brendan, the Peregrinatio Sancti Brendani and the Vita Brendani, which became one of the most popular stories of the Middle Ages.

According to this story, St. Brendan and his first mate St. Malo, with a few monastic companions, made a voyage of discovery in the Allantic. They had many marvelous experiences. They landed on one island to build a fire, but discovered that the island was a whale which inconveniently submerged. They caught a fish that furnished them food for three months; they sighted icebergs and a volcanic island, and called at the Irish Elysian Fields, where fallen angels, turned into birds, talked to them and provided food. For seven years they continued to sail, returning annually to spend Good Friday on the Isle of Sheep, Easter near the Whaleback, Pentecost at the Isle of Birds, and Christmas on Ailbe where the church candles were lighted by miraculous fire.

Medieval poetry reached high water with Dante Alighieri; his Divine Comedy, suffused with the Christian religion, comprises some of the most beautiful sea poetry ever written. It proves, to my mind, that one does not have to be a seaman to write great, sea literature; it takes a poet, landlubber though he may be, to express in words the experiences and sensations of mariners, and the beauty and mystery of the ocean. Dante did not have to go to sea to write about it, any more than he had to go to hell to write the Inferno. His Divine Comedy is full of the play of light and shadow on the sea.

In the eighth book of the Purgaforio Dante gives marvelous expression to that feeling you have at the beginning of a long and uncertain voyage under sail, first day out, when night falls and sea and wind make up, and you wonder why you ever left your comfortable quarters ashore: —

Dante’s high point, for a lover of the sea, is his account in Book xxvi of the Inferno of Ulysses’ last voyage. Dante is listening to the shade of Ulysses, the aged seafarer who came to grief because he would make just one more voyage: —

Thus, Dante foreshadowed the great age of discovery; and that age, in due time, produced its own epic poet, Camoëns.

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THERE is very little that one can call literature in the narratives of the great discoverers, or in the works of the earliest historians of the New World, like Peter Martyr and Las Casas and Oviedo. To the conquistadors the ocean was a rugged obstacle to be surmounted rather than an element to be enjoyed.

Columbus, however, is an exception. His journals and letters show an appreciation of the sea in words and phrases almost Hellenic in their clarity and suggestiveness. Take this, in the Journal of his First Voyage: “The savor of the mornings was a great delight.”How that evokes memories of the fragrant, cool freshness of daybreak in the trade winds, the false dawn shooting up a pyramid of grayish-white light, the navigators trying to catch their favorite stars in the brief morning twilight of the tropics, the rosy light on the clouds as sunrise approaches, the sudden transformation of the sails from dark gray to ruddy gold, the smell of dew drying on the deck! Columbus, too, alludes to the joy of approaching land after a long voyage. “There came so fair and sweet a smell of flowers or trees from the land that it was the sweetest thing in the world,” he wrote in the Bahamas.

The Lusiads, by Luiz de Camoëns, is the only epic poem of the age of discovery. In the heroic style it celebrates the exploits of Vasco da Gama, Albuquerque, and the other architects of Portugal’s short-lived empire in the Far East. Camoëns made two voyages to the Far East and finished his great work around the year 1570 in Macao, where he died. Ilis central theme is the extension of Christianity to the Orient, but that work involved the difficult and tempestuous Cape passage to India, from which Camoëns culled certain experiences that endear him to mariners of all ages. Take, for instance, his account of a storm at sea on Vasco da Gama’s homeward voyage in 1499; a passage unequaled in sea poetry for its realism: —

And Camoëns could also relate the quieter aspects of seafaring. Nowhere, to my knowledge, is there a more true and beautiful description of the “Sailor’s Return” than in the 17th stanza of his 9th canto: —

Only in the nineteenth century do writers become sentimental about the sea. For the romantic poets, the sea and ships provided new and illimitable material. Observe the completely new note in this short poem of Wordsworth’s, written in 1806: —

“So what?” is the seaman’s reaction. Wordsworth paints a beautiful picture; but his attitude toward the ship is too much like Oscar Wilde’s toward a lily to suit a sailor.

Several degrees further removed from reality is the famous ballad of Allan Cunningham, which sets any sailor’s teeth on edge: —

Baloney! No real seaman likes high and heavy seas because they bring trouble and danger. His ideal is the trades — a good steady full-sail breeze that gives him the maximum of speed with the minimum of work.

Coming to the present century we have a true sailor’s poet in John Masefield, for he was a seaman first. His Dauber is one of the finest literary expressions of a Cape Horn Voyage under sail, with its feeling of brutality, bitter chill, and the struggle of man against the sea. His poem with the simple title “Ships” goes to a sailor’s heart: —

Some noble sea poetry has been written in our own day — like Roy Campbell’s “Tristan da Cunha” and his “Choosing a Mast,” and T. S. Eliot’s “Marina.”

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BUT the form of sea literature characteristic of the last hundred and fifty years is the novel.

When the first novel of the sea was written I do not know; but in the English language I have heard of none earlier than Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Smollett’s Roderick Random, In the nineteenth century, however, we have a flood of good sea novels: those of Clark Russell, of which The Wreck of the Grosvenor is perhaps the best; Tom Cringle’s Log by Michael Scott — the only book he ever wrote; J. Fenimore Cooper’s Pilot, Red Rover, and The Water Witch; Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped and The Wrecker; and, best of all, the works of Joseph Conrad and Herman Melville. Nobody has ever surpassed Conrad in ability to spin a sea yarn that holds your attention to the end; to tell a story of seafaring interspersed with the most true and beautiful descriptions of vessels under sail, of the ocean in all its moods, and of the effect of the sea on human character.

Melville’s fame would have been secure with Billy Budd, White Jacket, and Typee; but he rose to new heights in Moby Dick. That marvelous work, never appreciated in his lifetime, really is three books in one — an accurate account of old-time whaling out of New Bedford; a powerful sea story working up to a magnificent climax; and a symbolic treatise on man’s struggle against evil. There has never been anything like Moby Dick in all sea literature, and there is not likely to be.

Four other Americans belong with the immortals among writers on the sea. First, Rear Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan. His Influence of Sea Power on History and its sequels are not easy to read; but as history they are authentic, and as propaganda for a concept they were and still are unique. To Mahan more than to any other statesman except the two Roosevelts, who were powerfully affected by him, we owe the fact that the United States Navy has risen from a modest sixth or seventh place among the navies of the world to the most effective, the most powerful, aye, the most, glorious fleet of fighting ships the world has ever known.

Next to Mahan I would place Richard Henry Dana. His Two Years Before the Mast, written over a century ago as an unpretentious, modest narrative of a college student’s voyage in search of health, has a literary quality that eludes analysis, a feeling for the sea and sailors and ships that defies description. Two Years Before the Mast has been responsible for more British and American boys going to sea than any other work in all literature.

Third, I wish to nominate for a place among the immortals a book that had only one edition and is still little known: Captain Arthur H. Clark’s The Clipper Ship Era (1910). There have been more full, comprehensive, and accurate histories of the clipper ships since — Carl Cutler’s for instance — but none so good as Captain Clark’s, for he had commanded a clipper ship and he had an accurate memory and the gift of language.

Captain Clark, whom I had the privilege of knowing in his old age, was not much younger than the last, and in some respects the greatest, of all Americans who have written of the sea. I mean Walt Whitman. The rhythm of the sea runs through all his poetry. He once told it himself, in describing, his recurring dream; —

A stretch of interminable white-brown sand — with the ocean perpetually, grandly, rolling in upon it, with slow-measured sweep, with rustle and hiss and foam, and many a thump, as of low bass drums. This scene, this picture, I say, has risen before me at times for years. Sometimes I wake at night and can hear and see it. plainly —. In my youth it came to me that instead of any special lyrical or ethical or literary attempt, the sea-shore should be an invisible influence, a pervading gauge and tally for me, in my composition.

There, in Walt Whitman’s own words, is the clue to his meter. To close, let us try him out, just once, in his “Song for All Seas, All Ships,” whose scant score of lines seem to embrace the entire history of man’s dealings with the sea: —