Sailor or landsman, there is some sort of Cape Horn for all. Boys! beware of it; prepare for it in time. Graybeards! thank God it has passed. And ye lucky livers, to whom, by whom, by some rare fatality, your Cape Horns are placid as Lake Lemans, flatter not yourselves that good luck is judgment and discretion; for all the yolk in your eggs, you might have foundered and gone down, had the Spirit of the Cape said the word.
~ Herman Melville Come back again
I want you to stay next time 'Cause sometimes the world ain't kind When people get lost like you and me I just made a friend A friend is someone you need But now that he had to go away I still feel the words that he might say Turn on your heartlight Let it shine whereever you go Let it make a happy glow For all the world to see Turn on your heartlight In the middle of a young boy's dream Don't wake me up too soon Gonna take a ride across the moon You and me He's lookin' for home 'Cause everyone needs a place And home's the most excellent place of all And I'll be right here if you should call me Turn on your heartlight Let it shine whereever you go Let it make a happy glow For all the world to see Turn on your heartlight In the middle of a young boy's dream Don't wake me up too soon Gonna take a ride across the moon You and me Turn on you heartlight now Turn on you heartlight now Neil DiamondBeautiful
bEAuTIfUL beautifuL BEAUTIFUL Bee You Tea Full B U T F uL beaUtiful “Ready, sir” the mate shouts from the bow.
“Lee-oh!” hollers the captain. “ease the helm down,” he says quietly to the helmsman. “Helm down” Aye aye, sir.” “Helm's-a-lee!” the captain bellows. The Beara Head turning to windward--capenter and mate easing the jib sheets a little, the doctor the foresheet, to spill some wind out of the sails. On the poop, the apprentices hauling the spanker and in hand—they'll provide wind leverage to help turn the barque like a weathercock—sails beginning to shake as the wind comes ahead. “Raise the tacks and sheets!” --the captain Seamen letting go main and crojack lines and hauling the sails up by their clewlines so they'll swing free; the coming up closer to the wind, sails flogging and rattling, lines flailing, masts vibrating—the seamen can feel it in their feet through the deck.... ... Once, part of the topgallant flicked back at Urbanski, catching him in the chest. He had no handhold, only his knee braced against the yard, and he lost his balance, beginning to teeter backwards into a fall as the footrope swayed out from under his centre of gravity. Beside him, the Dutchman reached out and grasped the Yankee's arm, pulling him back towards the yard and away from the hole opening up behind him. The two men glanced at each other and reached down again to grapple the sail. A strange, casual gift of life, Benjamin thought, and its mute acceptance. It must happen all the time up here in the high rigging.
After ten minutes or so, he was able to free one of his hands and began to pull at the sail with the other. Soon, he found he could haul with both, or at lest trap with his body weight the canvas the others had hauled up onto the yard while they dived down for more. The wind aloft had increased to close to forty -five, maybe fifty, knots, and it was a hard skirmish for the five men. It took nearly an hour to get the sail secured. When they climbed back down to the deck, the mate sent them up the mizzen to do the same thing to its flogging lower topgallant. Another hour of sweating, cursing, fisting, hauling bloody labour before the last gasket was passed around and tied off. Back on deck, Benjamin was so exhausted he could barely stand up. The ship still beat to windward, heading about Northwest under six topsails, two jibs, a jigger staysail and the spanker. The gale grew more severe, however, and almost right away, they had to haul down another jib, brail in the spanker and, to Benjamin's horror, lower the upper topsail yards, then clew up and furl their sails. ... My Zulu nanny was a person made for laughter, warmth and softness and before my life started properly she would clasp me to her breasts and stroke my golden curls with a hand so large it seemed to contain my whole head. My hurts were soothed with a song about a brave young warrior hunting a lion and a women's song about doing the washing down on the rock beside the river where, at sunset, the baboons would come out of the hills to drink.
My life proper started at the age of five when my mother had her nervous breakdown. I was torn from my black nanny with her big white smile and taken from my grandfather's farm and sent to boarding school. Then began a time of yellow wedges of pumpkin burned black and bitter at the edges; mashed potato with glassy lumps; meat aproned with gristle in gray gravy; diced carrots; warm, wet, flatulent cabbage; beds that wet themselves in the morning; and an entirely new sensation called loneliness. I was the youngest child in the school by two years and spoke only English while the other children spoke Afrikaans, the language of the Boers, which was the name for the Dutch settlers in South Africa. They called the English settlers Rooinecks, which means "Redneck,'' because in the Boer War, which had happened forty years before between the English and the Dutch settlers, the pale-skinned English troopers got very sunburned and their necks turned bright red. The seaman's interest in fine time divisions is evident in the breakdown of watches into smaller intervals. In an age where few people carried timepieces, the rhythm of life and work was based on the solar day or the gross intervals of the mine or factory: start, meal break, finish. No one needed to know more than that. Unlike other workers of the 1880's, however, sailors aboard ship lived in half-hour parcels of time, rung out by the ship's bell. In the afternoon watch, from noon to four, for example, one bell meant 12:30, two bell 1:00, three bells 1:30 and so on, until eight bells signalling four o'clock, and the end of that watch and the start of the next, when the bell sequence would start over again. (During the two-hour-long dogwatches four bells ended the first dogwatch and began the second.) The times of meals, the lookout's watch, the helmsman's trick – all were determined by the bell striking each half-hour section of the two- or four-hour watches.
Seamen did the never-ending work of setting, trimming and taking in sail, and of maintaining the thousands of interrelated parts of the wind ship's complex machinery. Often, however, the crew's main task was, literally, to watch- to make constant observation of sails and how they were set, of the lead and wear on line and gear, if sea and sky for signs of of how the inevitable coming change of wind and waves might actually unfold. Patient watchfulness and abundance of time are the stuff of normal life at sea. That's why thinking about things came naturally to seamen under sail- an unavoidable introspection. “Meditation and water are wedded forever” said Melville's Ishmael Sitting out here, solitaire
Wind on face and Sun glare Eye on chart Hand on wheel If you were here I'd cop a feel ...In fact, in the calm water, with only a slight swell on the beam, Benjemin was surprised by how easy the steering was. Looking forward, he saw the barque fade into the dark distance, only the gleam of the oil running lights showing faintly ahead. When the Elf stoppeed talking, in the silence of the ships smooth progress, Benjamin had the sensation that he was riding a huge machine down towards the dark centre of the Earth.
Above, he glipsed the sugesstion of the shapes of sails out of the corner of his eye, the way one caught sight of a faint star. In a swell, the barque would roll this wind right out of its canvass, but now there was just enough to put it to sleep. He had steered the little coasters at night, but they were nothing like this. It was hard to beleive that his own arms turning the wheel had any connection with the movement of this monumental ship, which, in the dark, seemed to occupy his entire horizon. The barques slow response to his efforts, a ponderous, reluctant swing to port or starboard, reinforced the feeling. He felt excited, too, and proud of himself. Here he was, his first night out, driving the barque; for an hour, he was responsible for its proper course, its well-being... |
Be Warned...
Mostly just streams of thought or snipes of 3am "inspiration"...taken to their disasterous conclusions... Archives
July 2012
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