In the beginning was the sea - Homer's Greeks, in the Iliad, setting out across the wine-dark Aegean to recapture Helen from Troy, an event remembered at the commencement of Ezra Pound's Cantos, several thousand years later ("And then went down to the ship"). Next there's the Odyssey, concerning the king of Ithaca's protracted attempts to return home: "On stormy seas," translated Alexander Pope, "unnumber'd toils he bore" - the toils becoming a pattern for the plight of Leopold Bloom, who in James Joyce's Ulysses sails about the city of Dublin on a summer's day in 1904.
We might label this a heroic tradition (mock-heroic in Joyce's case): the ship as a man-made ingenious engine, the men who construct and command it superendowed and epic, the sea itself an oblivion to be conquered, wild nature to be challenged.
Beowulf, English literature's official advent, officially an epic, suggests a quite other maritime heritage. The poem starts with a Viking funeral and a burning boat. Scyld Scefing's body is placed in state upon a hringedstefna, a ring-prowed ship. Packed with treasures and mementos, the vessel is cast adrift. Men ne cunnon...hwa paem hlaeste onfeng. No man could say who received that cargo.
The ship as catafalque, the sea a realm of endless night: we might label such melancholy moods a romantic tradition.
Heroic and romantic, then, briny goings-on percolate the imagination. Some instances: The Ancient Mariner and The Flying Dutchman represent doomed sailor folk, solitaries waiting to be redeemed. Their spooky galleons, with rotting rigging hung with ice, turn up in Bram Stoker's Dracula, where the count's ship, crewless, arrives at Whitby; and in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, where the monster is tracked to the Artic: "He sprang from the cabin window...He was soon borne away by the waves and lost in darkness and distance." The vampire and the stitched creature, like Coleridge's fabulist and Wagner's Dutchman, are undead - cursed to wander and never to be at peace. The sea represents ugly eternity; they themselves are bound upon a wheel of fire, drifting for as long as forever is, like the yachts, wisps in the wind, in "The Dry Salvages" section of T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets.
The excitements of the sea, as opposed to its oppressive import, are signaled by Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island. Its bloodthirsty gaiety ("Yo ho ho, and a bottle of rum!"), and lovable pirates derive from Smollett's Roderick Random. Smollett was surgeon aboard HMS Chichester in 1741; the voyage he made to Jamaica he put to picaresque use. Roderick travels to the West Indies, and the tale is thickened with navy lore.
Thickening a tale with navy lore is the object of the heroic tradition - the lingo of an elite. William Golding, as any, is prone to bulwarks. Frederick Marryat's Mr. Midshipman Easy (1836) takes us through an officer's apprenticeship - circumstances duplicated by C.S. Forester's Captain Horatio Hornblower. Rudyard Kipling's Captains Courageous renders epic the technicalities of cod fishing at Gloucester, Massachusetts. The industry and bravery of the sailors are ennobling characteristics - as cocky, bumptious Harvey Cheyne eventually appreciates. Kipling's story, in fact, is a seafaring rewrite of The Jungle Books: the education of a boy, like Mowgli, through abrasive trial and error - a pedagogic, as against
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