Robbins On the Rim of the Sea

A Journey in Books
1. Auflage 2022
ISBN: 978-0-9978815-4-7
Verlag: BookBaby
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet/DL/kein Kopierschutz

E-Book, Englisch, 307 Seiten

How will the world see the 20th century a hundred years from now? For many, it was like living right on the edge of a turbulent ocean that threatened to engulf them; and sometimes it did. In this thoughtful book, Mike Robbins looks at the century just past through those who lived it, and the books they left behind. What was it like to crew the last great sailing ships? How did it feel to be an ordinary man-or a Chinese labourer-on the Western Front? How did a popular Jewish writer react to the rise of fascism? Who wrote detective novels in the 1930s, and who read them? And how has it all looked from the saddle of a bike? Come and stand on the edge of the ocean.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Robbins, Mike

Leseproben

The Last Days of Sail
  On March 17 1894, Scientific American had its usual varied diet for the curious and intelligent. There was a report on a cablecar service over the Tennessee River in Knoxville. Figurines in Oriental dress had been unearthed in Mexico’s Oaxaca state. The number of immigrants landing in New York had been down in 1893 (the largest group was Italian, at nearly 70,000). Tucked away in an inside page, however, was a story that was bigger than it seemed. The Arthur Sewell & Co. yard at Bath, Maine, had launched the Dirigo – the first steel sailing ship to be built in the USA. The article reported that she was 330ft overall, of 45ft beam, and was to carry 4,500 dwt in cargo. “The vessel is rigged as a four-masted ship … and will spread about 13,000 yards of canvas,” the Scientific American reported. “In the early spring she will be fitted for sea and will load at pier 19, East River, New York, for San Francisco, Cal.” Westward round the Horn, then, against the prevailing wind; a baptism of fire. But this was an important ship. Eugene Chamberlain, the USA’s Commissioner of Navigation, clearly thought so. Patricia M. Higgins, in her Hidden History of Midcoast Maine, quotes him as saying that the Dirigo’s construction represented “the beginning of a new industry in this country. The ship of the future is to be of steel, and the introduction of that material is necessary to the maintenance of, for foreign trade, a fleet of large sailing vessels.” But neither the Scientific American nor, probably, Chamberlain fully grasped that the iron or steel-hulled sailing ship, or windjammer, was not a new era for sail. It was its brilliant apotheosis. The windjammer’s time was brief. Today we celebrate them as “tall ships”, and those still at sea are usually training vessels. In their heyday, they were hard ships on which to work. Usually four-masted barques with steel hulls, their era started sometime in the late 19th century. They are not to be confused with the clippers, which were smaller but carried far bigger crews, enabling them to be driven hard in poor weather, and were therefore much faster; their time was already really over when the Dirigo was launched. The windjammer’s purpose was not to fly to Tilbury with the first of the year’s tea. It was to carry non-perishable bulk cargo such as coal, grain and nitrates at lower cost than the new steamships, by using the prevailing winds, and taking as long as they needed on the journey. When the windjammer era began, this made sense; steamers still needed frequent stops for water and bunkering, and were often quite slow. By the 1920s, much had changed – and in time the motorship appeared, cleaner, more economical and easier to run. The windjammers fought harder and harder to compete; costs were slashed, crews were small – sometimes almost too small to work the vessel – and the conditions on board were basic. Yet they represented the last flowering of a technology that had evolved from the time humans had gone to sea. They were also romantic; and they have left their mark on literature as no container ship will ever do.   *   The Dirigo played its part in this. In March 1911 writer Jack London and his second wife, Charmian Kittredge London, boarded her in Baltimore, bound westward round the Horn to Seattle. The voyage would provide the backdrop for one of London’s last novels. The Mutiny of the Elsinore. Written and edited with help from Kittredge, it was published in 1914, only two years before his death. It isn’t one of his most famous books, but it may deserve to be; it is memorable. The book’s plot (without spoilers) is as follows: It is March 1913 and a successful but world-weary young playwright, John Pathurst, seeks refreshment and inspiration by going round the Horn as a passenger on a windjammer from Baltimore to Seattle. He knows the Elsinore may take months over the voyage, but that’s fine. He has paid highly for his passage, and is accompanied by his manservant; he intends to be comfortable. But the rounding of the Horn is drawn-out and dangerous, and the ship is nearly lost. Moreover the regime aboard the Elsinore is harsh, and the crew are a bunch of no-good lowlifes who will eventually mutiny against it. Pathurst’s luxury passage will turn into a nightmare. The long voyage south-east towards West Africa and then south-west to the Horn is used to build up character and tension, so that by the time the Elsinore gets stuck in westerlies off the Horn, you know there’s a disaster waiting to happen. It helps that London does a fair job of evoking what life in a windjammer must have been like. He can do this because this book was drawn, at least in part, from life. London and Kittredge boarded in Baltimore very much as Pathurst does in the book, and Kittredge later described the voyage in Book of Jack London, a memoir of her husband that she published a few years after his death. The Elsinore is clearly the Dirigo and the novel includes a number of incidents that that are in Kittredge’s account. Most are trivial (London/Pathurst’s fox terrier, Possum; an attack of hives; the chickens in the hut amidships). One or two are major. For example, in the novel, the captain dies on passage off the Horn. On the Londons’ real voyage he did fall sick there, and died shortly after the ship reached Seattle. The captain and mate in the book also seem to match those of the Dirigo. The captain, according to Kitteredge, was: “The fast disappearing type of lean New England aristocrat, who always presented himself on deck immaculately attired… The calm kingliness of his character was in cool contrast to that of the Mate, Fred Mortimer, hot-hearted, determined … driver of a crew that was composed …of landlubbers and weaklings.” London takes these two officers and exaggerates their characteristics, and those of the crew too. As the latter board in Baltimore: “ …I encountered a few laggards who had not yet gone into the forecastle. These were the worse for liquor, and a more wretched, miserable, disgusting group of men I had never seen in any slum. Their clothes were rags. Their faces were bloated, bloody, and dirty. I won’t say they were villainous. They were merely filthy and vile. They were vile of appearance, of speech, and action.” And later: “I …wondered where such a mass of human wreckage could have been obtained. There was something wrong with all of them. Their bodies were twisted, their faces distorted, and almost without exception they were under-sized.” Long before the mutiny of the title, life on the Elsinore becomes a struggle of two worlds – the gracious, comfortable world of the officers and crew in the poop, dining pleasantly every night, the Mate, Pike, playing classical gramophone records with enthusiasm; and the forecastle, full of degenerate wretches that Pike controls with an iron fist and great savagery. Bit by bit the Elsinore seems to appear a microcosm of a divided, unfair society. Is this what Jack London was trying to say in this book? Or is there something more sinister being said? Pathurst is the narrator, and his sense of superiority expresses itself in a belief that the Captain and the Mate are superior beings, and the crew scum. His class is thus destined to dominate. Meanwhile a number of the crew meet with nasty ends even before the mutiny. During it, two die quite horribly, torn apart by giant albatrosses: “A great screeching and squawking arose from the winged things of prey as they strove for the living meat. And yet, somehow, I was not very profoundly shocked. These were the men whom I had seen eviscerate [a] shark and toss it overboard, and shout with joy as they watched it devoured alive by its brethren. They had played a violent, cruel game with the things of life, and the things of life now played upon them the same violent, cruel game.” Oh dear. Men born to rule over their inferiors, and nature red in tooth and claw. It’s the narrator’s voice, but London seems to use it with great enthusiasm (with references to the captain as a Samurai warrior, and occasional references to Nietzsche). It’s just a little too genuine, and Pathurst’s views are not discredited by the way the book ends. Jack London was a socialist all his life, but was there also a whiff of fascism about him? George Orwell thought so. Writing about an earlier London book, The Iron Heel, he commented that London was “temperamentally …very different from the majority of Marxists. With his love of violence and physical strength, his belief in ‘natural aristocracy’, his animal-worship and exaltation of the primitive, he had in him what one might fairly call a Fascist strain” (Prophecies of Fascism, 1940). In The Mutiny of the Elsinore, we see this; it’s also evident in his earlier and greater book, The Sea Wolf. However, Orwell didn’t say London actually was a fascist. Rather, he thought these traits made London better able to understand the nature of the ruling class, and that far from espousing fascism, he understood its dangers before it existed (The Iron Heel, published in 1908, describes a fascistic dystopia). It is more likely that London is using Pathurst to warn how the ruling class really think. Still, the earliest Nazis appealed to a certain type on the left as well as the right. Reading The Mutiny of the Elsinore, you do wonder whether, had London lived into the Fascist era, he might have been swept up in it...