William Brinkley - The Last Ship

I could never have one of these conversations with Melville concerning our low fuel supply, and the unforgiving urgency of hoarding it, without my mind’s flashing helplessly back to that final session with the Russian submarine commander in the Strait of Gibraltar, to our agreement: ourselves to undertake to find a habitable place for both of us, him to go where he believed the nuclear fuel still to be that would free us from the prison that any place we found and settled on was certain otherwise to become. There had been a time when I hardly knew whether to long for his arrival more than anything on earth, the fuel being the greatest gift that could be made us, enabling us to go anywhere without the desperate calculations on which we were even now engaged; or to dread that same arrival for the reason of the awesome complications sure to be attendant on the integration of his ship’s company of 112 men into whatever community we might establish on whatever habitable space we might find, a difficult enough undertaking for ourselves alone; coming down at last on the former, believing we could somehow make it together; the matter long since become academic, his having vanished an almost forgotten time back from the frequencies on which we kept contact, presumably lost at sea in a manner we would never know. All of it seeming such a long shot even at the time that I had withheld the nature of his mission from all my officers save two, lest it distort our every planning. How wise that now seemed! Yet I still found my mind unwillingly admitting the thinnest possibility, catching myself at odd times gazing at the northern horizon to see if that immense low black profile known as the Pushkin would appear against it… the prospect of such an impossible bounty, a five-year fuel supply, making me for those instants hope’s fool. A road to madness. I turned back to Selmon.

“This is contingency, from your data.” I had to hear it again. “You don’t think we’d be forced out of here?”

“Not by that. Barring those two changes, or perhaps even one of them, negative. In my department I couldn’t imagine better atmosphere than right where we’re presently anchored, Captain.”

I waited again. I thought I heard the distant clatter. “What a pleasant change from your usual reports, Mr. Selmon.”

The j.g. smiled back almost boyishly. “I try to please, sir.”

“I never noticed it. Then, gentlemen,” I said, “let us rest it there for the present.”

Sure enough there was the ritualistic three knocks on the door. “Enter,” I said.

The lookout stood there.

“Silva, Captain. Boat’s coming alongside, sir.”

“Captain, the terns were right. Sea birds always are. All I had to do was follow them. That ocean,” he said, “is full of fish—great schools of fish…”

His blue Scot’s eyes shone against his bronze Portuguese skin. The exaltation there reflected in myself. A sense of the most immense relief. We stood on the quarterdeck at the top of the accommodation ladder. Just looking at each other. Above the emotion in me I could just hear him going on.

“Cantwell here…” He indicated the ship’s sailmaker who had followed him up the ladder from the boat “… says he can make casting nets from ship’s lines. We can have the first in three days. Big nets. And when the fuel runs out he can make us sails…”

Then had come Delaney. On top of Silva, it was almost as if that single ingenuity decided me, its affirmation of our one true strength; the light of hope it lit; a thing so seemingly small but in truth saying everything about the men I had under me.

“Grapnels,” the gunner’s mate said, “sir.”

His eyes filled with fervor.

“Captain, you’d be amazed how much like a harrow they are. Harrowing, sir, that’s about the most important part of farming there is . And these grapnels here, we’ve got fourteen of them. I and Mr. Thurlow tried this one out.”

Under the hot zenith sunshine we squatted on the fanfail, examining it, Silva there with us. Bits of island earth still clung to its flukes.

“Noisy says he can sharpen these flukes. Make them dig deeper.”

He waited, then exclaimed it again, as a thing of a certain wonder.

“Aye, sir, grapnels.”

It was simply a metal pole ending in a four-pronged anchor; an ancient tool of ships on the seas, little changed in thousands of years, with many and discrete uses; fishing objects—or people—off the bottom of the water; anchoring dories; in the old days of the sea, for holding an enemy ship alongside for hand-to-hand combat. I could not remember that ours had ever seen use, but somewhere in the holds of this ship Delaney had found them. I glanced at Thurlow. The navigator had something of the same look in his eyes, deriving from the excitement and astonishment, and the pure delight, one always feels at a device intended for one thing, or a series of things, being seen, possibly for the first time, by the intelligent mind—in this case, Delaney’s—as having application to altogether another. He gave an affirming nod.

“Grapnels: They’ll make all the difference,” the gunner’s mate was going on. “Fetched me up when I saw how much like they are to what our mules used to pull.”

“Where do we get the mules, Delaney?” I knew of course. I wanted to hear him say it, and, more important, how he was working it out.

He looked up, his eyes moving across the decks at some of the crew engaged in the work of the ship.

“Why, the men, naturally, Captain,” he said, as if I were a terribly ignorant person in these agricultural matters, a judgment which would not have been far off the mark. “Men like Preston. He may even be stronger’n a mule. Ship’s lines rigged from the grapnels, hitched around a man’s waist, shoulders. I been studying on it; begun a mule list already,” he said soberly. “Besides grapnels… we got some tools, Captain. Like this here.”

He pulled it from somewhere under him. Earth clung also to the blade.

“We got thirty-five of these entrenching tools.” These were meant for digging protective cover against people eager to harm you; by, for example, a trapped shore party; again never used. “Short handles. Other’n that, good as any shovel—or hoe. A man would just have to bend down more. But for stoop labor a short handle’s even better…”

The gunner’s mate’s bright-voiced zeal kept coming at me, bringing something like an exhilaration; outsized perhaps; almost certainly not that justified. But we had known so little of its portion of late that I let it flood in. He was going on. “… I thought I’d try in small patches, Captain. Everything we got plantings for in the greenhouse. See what takes. Then go for them…”

“Grapnels,” I said. “Entrenching tools. Beating swords into plowshares, Delaney?”

“Aye, sir. Come to think of it. And spears into pruninghooks,” the gunner said quietly, a touch of a smile. “Isaiah 2:4, sir.”

“You know your Bible, Gunner.”

“The Bible’s mighty big in the Ozarks, Captain.”

It was the favorable facts, of course, an edge in our favor or at least the odds made more even, suddenly proffered, since on nothing else can decision be based. But as much, too, was the belief in what such men could do. I felt an immense surge in me, the greatest in time remembered. I looked silently at Thurlow, at Silva, at Delaney. Then stood up, they with me. As one we turned and gazed across the lagoon at the island, as one followed down it until our eyes came to rest on the plateau which rose high above the sea on its southerly end; stopped there awhile, eyes fixed profoundly on it, as if in some final assessment; the island, hushed across the blue water, radiant in its greenness, seeming to await our decision as to whether we proposed to take it on. I looked at the boatswain’s mate then the gunner’s mate. Thought suddenly, wryly: now Silva the fisherman, Delaney the farmer.