Work
I came on board thinking I would record the feel of the sea, the stars and darkness at night, the heat of the hold. In fact, it was an overcast night, cool day, calm sea, and foggy morning, and I found nothing unusual to feel or see. But what I learned the moment I tumbled out of my berth and clambered up on deck is that a ship is a place of work. I had known this intellectually, had read about it a good deal, and had written about it from the perspective of those books and my imagination, but now I could see it happening.
The work begins with language. Every line, mast, spar, and sail has an individual name. And the workers need to know them all. Indeed, a ship is nothing if not a glossary. And you would think it would be enough, to begin with, simply to know your glossary. But crewmember Mary K. Bercaw Edwards (also an acclaimed Melville scholar and Mystic Seaport Museum researcher) told me that the words for each line, mast, spar, and sail differ from language to language, and that once the professional crew had been hired—many coming from different ships hailing from different continents and maritime traditions—the first order of business was comparing their glossaries and deciding on which words to use for line, mast, spar, and sail. It’s a sea of words. Something an English prof might appreciate.
The deeper implication I sensed was how the sea is a multicultural nation unto itself. We think of the sea as an immense separator of nations, but it is in fact its own place. I suppose that is obvious and something, again, I had had some intellectual awareness of in reading about sea literature and culture. But watching workers speak their lingo, and learning that they had agreed to speak it together, gave me an experiential perspective; their work was making their language work, and you could see it happen on deck.
The sea is a place that draws together customs and cultures from all over, puts them into one cosmopolitan “vessel,” makes them come together. Put Palestinians and Israelis in a ship, I say, mix them equally in both watches as larbolins and starbolins, give them food and bunks, jobs, a space to share, a reason to work together. Ah, that would fix the world. But I see I am just channeling Melville too much. Or maybe not enough. True, Melville saw ships as multicultural vessels: the Neversink, the Pequod, the Fidèle, the Bellipotent. A place on the sea where humanity mixes. But he also saw obsession, corruption, tyranny, racism, deception, infamy, mutiny, and war on those ships. I need to snap out of this cosmopolitan romancing of work and the sea. [End Page 142]
Crewmember Aaron Gralnik at the wheel of the Charles W. Morgan.
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Crewmembers Geoff Kaufman, Bror Okerblom, Mary K. Bercaw Edwards, and Tim Clark hauling the braces aboard the Charles W. Morgan.
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Much of our morning was shrouded in fog, and we could barely make out the tug up ahead that was towing us into open waters. A high-pitched mechanical foghorn, up on the mizzenmast, began to sound in the usual woeful measure. Because of the low visibility, crewman Aaron Gralnik at the wheel in the stern could not make out the tug maybe 300 feet in front of the Morgan’s bow, which was itself 106 feet away from Aaron. So crewmember Randy Patterson stood at the prow, and with his back to Aaron and facing the tug, he signaled Aaron whenever the ship began to veer a point or two off the line attached to the tug. From my place at the bow, I could see the tug ahead and watched Randy’s gestures. Then I headed back to the stern to watch Aaron steer the ship, not by compass or his own eyes, but by Randy’s signal.
The Morgan’s immense rudder is moved right or left by a beam-like tiller upon which is attached a wheel that winds a line coiled on a stem behind it. The line is threaded through a set of pulleys and is attached to the sides of the ship. When the wheel turns, it pulls the line and moves both wheel and tiller back and forth on the narrow stern deck. Standing starboard of the wheel, Aaron would stare ahead into the fog, and, at Randy’s signal, he would change course, not through precise and leisurely adjustment of the wheel with hand and wrist as you might on some pleasure craft, but with his whole body: arm, shoulder, chest, and knees.
Here the entire ship comes down to two men working together, in tandem, as if one person: no language between them, just action.
Other times, the ship seems alive with the “call and repeat” yelling of mate and crew. This litany is by no means the call and response of church. Instead, the mate yells out a command to a watch or anyone or the whole crew, and instantly the right crewmembers know who is being addressed and repeat back the command. So the mate calls “Stand by the main braces” and the crew-members run to the ropes called braces that maneuver the sails into the wind and repeat back while running “Stand by the main braces.” Or when a sail is set to begin with, the mate will call “Sheet home,” and the crew will call back “Sheet home” as they pull on the lines called sheets, secured to the lower corners of the sails. The idea is that if the workers vocalize the work that they must do, they will know what they are to do, and their mate will know they know. And still other times, workers strain together on the lines in unison, without getting ahead of one another or falling behind with a simple “heave.” There is no thought, only word and action. And in all cases, at all stations, everywhere there is rope: lines in the air and on the deck. [End Page 145]
Work, it is said, is noble, but I don’t know what noble means. Work at sea is hard, focused, intense, perilous, immediate. On board this ship, many work as one to pull a line in a kind of mutual self-adjusting simultaneity that hints at connection. [End Page 146]
