William Brinkley - The Last Ship

As to the power of it: It was not some piece of vanity to know that bringing this whole undertaking off, on this island and in any new life, counted greatly on their belief in me as their captain. I am tempted to say counted entirely. I can think of no body of men whose daily well-being or misery, and quite often safety or even survival, lies so fully in the hands of one man as does a ship’s company. The reason for the perdurability of this sea sovereignty against the grain of history is simple: No way has ever been found that permits a fighting ship to function other than by this one-man rule. It is certain that if such a system existed, it would long since have been discovered and installed in a world where the plebiscitary, the “democratic,” has been the onward wave. A rajah, a monarch of the seas. Of course, no ship’s captain of the slightest worth ever thought in those terms. Such authority on the high seas confers less of arrogance than the sense of ultimate responsibility, each new day presented, for the fate of others, living quiet in the soul as one’s very reason for being. Knowing also that this very coin of absolutism has its opposite side: the thin line trod every day by every ship’s captain the seas over. To the very degree that he holds power over them, a captain must have his men’s trust, which alone assures their love for the ship herself: Without this, his vessel can scarcely operate and danger lurks everywhere. And let that trust once be lost, it is never retrieved. It is lost forever. But no law of the sea, no good practice of ships decreed that the captain at every stage admit his crew into his soul. Indeed, the mind could without difficulty postulate circumstances wherein the blatancy of entire truth, the flaunting of full intentions, would be the worst treason of all toward them; an abject, even craven abdication of a captain’s responsibility. For included in his duties is this one: not to shift onto them, as sources of anxiety and fear, the burden that is his alone lawfully to bear.

Here was the fine, infinitely fastidious line: A captain is permitted almost anything where the safety and survival of his ship and her company are at issue. Cunning, schemery, artifice, maneuverance, stratagem, stopping always short of outright deceit. But these must all be seen by ship’s company not to be these things. They must take on, in that curious transmutation perhaps known only to seamen—deracinated as they are from the general world, a thing so remote as to be hardly existent, creatures of their indigenous ship-immured perceptions, canons, and indeed morality—the clothing of acts done by the captain solely in behalf of the ship and the men themselves, so that artifice becomes care, contrivance love for his men. And at the moment of announced decision, the course he chooses seen to be the only right course. The captain, fortressed in his deeds by the steel in him, seizing single-mindedly whatever befriends his one allegiance: that no harm within his power to prevent shall come to the company of his ship.

I had always accepted that power as part of being a ship’s captain and when I got my command lived easily with it. Only of late had I begun to be attacked at odd hours by doubts, expressible to no one. For a ship’s captain has also the loneliest job on earth or on all the seas, and the display of certain quite ordinary human emotions is entirely forbidden him. That divine despotic right unchallenged at sea: In truth it was not that I had become suspicious of its validity, other than wrestling with the enormity of 179 souls being in the hands of one man in the magnitude of present circumstances. It was rather that, in tremulous dialogue only with myself, I had begun to question whether that right, that power, already enhanced even further, would now hold fast, and even more so in realities certain to come. Unlike lesser dictators, a ship’s captain has no bodyguards, no armies to shield him. He is gravely outnumbered, his only armament being the sea’s ancient law of command and his own resolve. Therefore, the more crucial both the resolve and the unwavering assumption that it would be accepted wherever it might lead, whatever portend. Nelson’s band of brothers, to be sure, but also his “If I give an order I expect it to be obeyed.” Hence self-doubts of any kind were the very thing I must above all suppress. A calm presence, whatever tremblings I might feel inside. Calm presence: Sometimes I felt that in that considerable list of attributes indispensable to a ship’s captain, this was the most important of all.

Only once on our odyssey had that rule felt serious challenge; for one terrible moment we had come to the very brink. I had stood it down by the only weapon I had. There was no assurance that that governance would not be tested again and this time more formidably. And if it came, the weapon would be no different. I had had to harden myself; the departure, loss, of over a third of ship’s company on other seas affixing that indelible imprint—that absence of pause by which ruthlessness becomes but another resource where circumstances insist. In the end there is no substitute for will: Other men may have the choice of embracing that conviction, that banal option, or not. A ship’s captain, none. For him it is immutable fact. If he loses that, he loses all: Nothing must be permitted to deny it.

I had decided on the island as a place on whose land and near waters we would seek sustenance. But reason, craftiness, said one step at a time. Beyond that manifestly my first essential cunning was to keep to myself those other intentions I had for it—and for them.

Turning slightly, I looked with purpose across the star-caught water to the dark recumbent island, which alone shared the sea with us; feeling somehow there was something of importance about it we did not know, some unrevealed essence, perhaps favorable, perhaps otherwise; knowing, whichever, we stood committed to its strangeness, its unknownness. Nothing came forth. It stayed as slumbering as the sea itself, wrapped in mystery, harboring its secrets, reluctant to part with a single one. Then something pleasant. A sibilance of wind stirred, its brief plaintive sound through the halyards like some nightly orison, and before it as quickly vanished bore to me from somewhere forward the faintest scent of one of them, a barely discernible whisper of perfume, mingling with the sea smell, even before I saw her shadowy form crossing up the ladder to the bridge. Navy directives, you must take my word, had something to say even on that matter: “in good taste.” The Navy leaves nothing to chance. The affected hands had remained in line. Even so, to this day I had not become accustomed to that shipboard trace—the last thing from being unpleasant, only always still a surprise, that one should find it here of all places, on this man-of-war; the scents of women. Probably Seaman Thornberg, quartermaster striker, on her way to relieve the dog watch—yes, we kept a helmsman on watch even at anchor, by that unforgiving sea law that decrees that a ship must be ready to act instantly at any sign of danger, and to get underway at once. The quick intake of scent must have started it: I began consciously to think back over when it had begun, as though the history of that strange thing, turning inside out as it did the very texture of ships that had held from earliest voyages on great waters, might somehow now suggest an answer; a way through the hazardous difficulty that had begun to haunt me like a dark foreboding and whose tenacity seemed but to intensify, to resist all my mental efforts to stow it away until other, presumably more urgent, matters—food, for instance—were underway.

As I have recounted, I had strongly opposed their original admission into ships, for the rather high-flown reasons given; though in a more down-to-earth seaman’s view fearful that their presence would screw up, complicate in a thousand ways, some explicitly envisioned in one’s mind, some left to suspicious imagination, the already infinitely complex and delicate job of operating such a ship as this one. Now: In my heart of hearts I suppose I still stood opposed to it. At the same time I felt practically, as a ship’s captain, that if anything they made for a better, more efficient ship; as skillful sailors as any man in the performance of their shipboard duties and, to my mind, in not a few instances superior; more—I will not say intelligent, perhaps the phrase is somewhat more fiercely dedicated to their respective jobs, ratings, skills. Some of this, I would expect, due to tougher Navy standards, first in the selection of the women it permitted to enlist, and second in those it allowed to go to sea (among those applying, in the first instance the acceptance rate was said to be one in ten, in the second one in a hundred), checked out as few sailors had ever been; some to the singleness of purpose that brought them here, and once aboard to being more determined to hack it, to prove they could do it. For whatever reasons, they performed as well as men. They brought a number of surprises. First of these was that the younger of these women sailors appeared to be distinctly more mature emotionally than men sailors of similar ages; whether this was due to the nature of women or to the mentioned Navy’s stiffer selection process for them, especially those sent to sea, I did not know. They presented fewer disciplinary problems. They carried other advantages, some of them decidedly esoteric, entirely unforeseen: one of these being—something as a seaman I found interesting as a novelty, rather charming, as a captain grimly delighted—their faculty, due to smaller physical dimensions, of getting through hatches more quickly. This is more important an asset than one might think in modern sea-battle conditions, where the ability to come swiftly to battle stations can quite conceivably make all the difference in outcome to a ship about to be attacked by today’s weaponry, an extra second enabling her to dodge an SS-N-12 Sandbox missile instead of being blown up by it.