The freighter Mercury was sailing southeast in beautiful tropical weather several
miles off the coast of Mexico in June of 1980.
She was bound from San Diego to
the Panama Canal with a load of military vehicles which were on their way to
the Marine Corps base near Wilmington, North Carolina. Because of the military nature of this cargo,
the Mercury carried a military
officer to superintend it on this voyage.
He was a Navy lieutenant in his mid-twenties, which made him a few years
older than myself. He had previously sailed
aboard Navy ships and had become a fully qualified surface warfare officer of
the unrestricted line. His voyage aboard
the Mercury, however, was his first
experience of a civilian cargo vessel, and it astonished him.
Lieutenant Mike was an affable shipmate. He seemed to blend in reasonably well with
the Merchant Marine crew, and he displayed a healthy interest in the workings
of the ship. Some of our ways puzzled
him, but he never criticized us or our methods.
This trait alone would have endeared him to the crew. Above and beyond that, though, he was a genuinely
friendly fellow and a good dining room companion. He loved to eat, and he remarked over almost
every meal, “This is even better than the Navy chow!”
One morning when I was on watch, the lieutenant
came up to the bridge. Opening the door
slightly, he poked his head through the opening and politely requested
“permission to come on the bridge.” I
of course bid him enter, and he came in and stood by me and chatted for a
bit. As we talked he looked around at
everything with a somewhat confused expression on his face.
The Mercury
had a very spacious bridge. From where
we stood, we could see everything, including out the large plate glass windows
to the sea beyond and out the side doors to the also very spacious bridge
wings. The lieutenant took all of this
in and realized that until he arrived, I had been all alone up there. I was a very young third mate, all of 22
years old, and I was in charge of the ship’s movements with no one to assist or
supervise me. His astonishment at this
situation soon became obvious,
In a stammering voice, the lieutenant
asked me, “There’s no one else here?
There’s no helmsman?”
“It’s on automatic,” I started to reply.
But he continued as if this hadn’t
registered. “You do everything
here? You do your own radar
plotting? You do your own
navigation? You’re your own
lookout? What if something happens? And the weather observations? Do you do that, too?” And so on and so forth. He was clearly flabbergasted—and possibly
terrified, too—at finding one solitary third mate on the bridge of a large cargo
ship underway at sea. This did not fit
in with his Navy experience, where an army of crewmen swarmed a much smaller
bridge.
I explained that this situation was
perfectly normal. We were in open water
with good weather and no traffic. Since
they were not needed on the bridge, the three unlicensed seamen on my watch
were working with the bosun on deck.
With my license, I was fully qualified as the mate of the watch and could
do everything he asked about and more.
There really was no cause for concern.
I’m not sure that he believed me, though.
After a short interval, the lieutenant
turned to go below. He wished me well,
but as he left he muttered uncomprehendingly to himself, “I don’t get
this. Only one man on the bridge? I can’t understand these guys. How do they do it?” And so on and so forth as he disappeared down
the stairs.
A few years later, when I was the second
mate aboard the Waccamaw, something
similar took place. The ship was docked
in Norfolk, Virginia, one weekend in October of 1982, and a large group of
naval reservists came aboard for a tour.
These men held full-time civilian jobs and did part-time military
work. They were middle-aged in dress
blue uniforms with numerous gold stripes on their sleeves. To facilitate the sightseeing, the group split
in half. The chief mate led one tour,
and I led the other. We took them
through the entire ship, from bow to stern and from bridge to engine room. They followed closely, listened attentively,
and asked intelligent questions. A few
times, though, they seemed confused by the answers they received.
Down in the pump room, one reserve
commander asked several questions, and then exclaimed, “I don’t understand how
you fellows can run a ship this size with such a small crew!” He went on to explain that compared to a Navy
ship, we had “so few officers” and “so few crewmen” that he just couldn’t see
how we got the job done. This led to
some lively discussion, and it came out that several of the other reservists
felt the same way.
Through no fault of their own, these men
had been taught the Navy way of doing things and not the Merchant Marine
way. And there is a difference. A commercial ship must operate efficiently and
turn a profit in order to survive, while a military ship relies on the
bottomless pit of government funding.
Also, the Navy sees a ship primarily as a floating gun platform, whereas
in the Merchant Marine a ship is transportation. These financial and operational dichotomies
lead to two completely different ways of thinking and working. One might say
that “never the twain shall meet,”[1]
but they did in our fleet and usually with the result that the Navy men and the
Merchant Marine fellows simply could not understand each other. Each group looked at the world from its own
point of view and found the other’s viewpoint incomprehensible.
One of our Church officials, Elder Dallin
H. Oaks, recently made a similar observation:
Each of us has a personal lens through
which we view the world. Our lens gives
its special tint to all we see. It can
suppress some features and emphasize others.
It can also reveal things otherwise invisible.[2]
My experiences as a merchant seaman
crafted my personal lens many years ago.
My subsequent academic career as a college librarian and student of the
humanities reinforced and enhanced this
personal lens So, after all these years, I still view the
world as if I were standing on the bridge wing of a cargo ship. I like this view. I see everything quite clearly from this
vantage point.
Quite naturally, people do think in terms
of what they know and understand, and of course this colors their view of
everything outside their own corner of the world. And when people are confronted with something
radically different and completely alien to everything within their range of
understanding, they typically respond with astonishment and often say the most
outlandish things.
This is reflected in some of the remarks
that people ashore have made to me about seafaring. They’ve ranged from the bizarre—“Do you sleep
in hammocks?” and “Do you have flush toilets?”—to the uncomprehending—“Oh, how
exciting! You work on a cruise ship!”—to the demeaning—”How can you stand to
live like that?!”—to the sadly inevitable and inappropriate jokes about
shipwrecks. While these remarks grow
very tiresome very quickly, they do serve to illustrate the gulf that separates
the merchant seamen from the laymen.
Captain Paul McHenry Washburn, the Master
of the container ship Stella Lykes and
a literary figure, asserted the opposite point of view:
But there are a lot of us who are here
because this is where we fit in, and we don’t fit in anywhere else. We seem to be out of step. The square peg in the round hole. I was out of place as a child, and now I am
not looking forward to retirement. I
dread it.[3]
Furthermore, he added as he looked toward
land from the Stella Lykes:
I would rather be here for the worst that
could be here than over there for the best that could be there. I’ve never felt comfortable or secure
anywhere else.[4]
Admittedly, this is an extreme opinion
that seems to border on solipsism. After
all, Captain Washburn did have a family ashore, and he cared for them all very
much. Nonetheless, his remarks do summarize
the situation well. The merchant fleet
is a culture unto itself, separate and apart from life in any other profession,
including the Navy. A landsman, or for
that matter a naval officer, stepping
aboard a cargo ship would experience culture shock just as much as a seaman
going ashore and taking up a new occupation would. Some things, like the proverbial oil and
water, just don’t mix.
It is precisely for this reason that the
seaman-turned-playwright Eugene O’Neill penned his famous lines:
It was a great mistake, my being born a
man. I would have been much more successful as a sea gull or a
fish. As it is, I will always be a
stranger who never feels at home, who does not really want and is not really
wanted, who can never belong, who must always be a little in love with death![5]
Another extreme position, this one not
only borders on solipsism but also leans toward misanthropy. Still, the author makes his point well, and I
have thought similarly many times in social and business situations over the
years. In the end, I’ve just had to
resign myself to the simple fact that going to sea has made me immutably
different. Thus, both Mr. O’Neill’s and
Captain Washburn’s assessments are correct.
Yet there remains one further point which
these gentlemen did not address. In his
trial before the Athenian court, Socrates asserted that “the unexamined life is
not worth living.”[6]
Sea gulls and fish, with their inherently
limited capabilities, cannot know how fortunate they are. Unable to think and reason, they cannot ponder
the higher matters of life. They cannot
read and study the classics of literature and history and philosophy and
theology or master the natural and applied sciences. At first glance, their lives may look more
attractive than that of the social outcast who can’t fit in anywhere except at
sea, but the intellectual limitations of the sea gull and the fish would inevitably
become intolerably crippling. Humans,
including merchant seamen, are created in the image of their Creator, and as
such, they share in his characteristics, including intelligence, which enables
them to learn, enrich themselves, and achieve so much more than animals. What an honor this is, since the scriptures
inform us that “The glory of God is intelligence, or, in other words, light and
truth” (D&C 93:36). Even the most
socially misfit, solipsistic, and misanthropic merchant seaman shares
intelligence, light, and truth with God.
Furthermore, with these divine qualities,
there is no need to dread retirement. I’m
actually looking forward to it. I
anticipate a robust retirement filled with grandchildren, academic studies,
church activities, and occasional cruise ship voyages!
Before I leave for work in the predawn
hours, I often step out onto the porch and gaze upon the stars. The constellation Orion stands out in the
south. Betelgeuse shines on the east flank, Rigel on the west,
and Sirius below. I smile as I remember
standing with my sextant on the bridge wing of the Rigel, taking sights of her heavenly namesake. Thoughts of ships, voyages, and even sea gulls
and fish crowd upon my mind, too. But
the great celestial majesty above me transcends these idle reminiscences. Thus enlightened, my mind recalls in the
great celestial language, Gloria Dei est
intellegentia.
[1] Rudyard Kipling, ‘The
Ballad of East and West,” in A Victorian
Anthology, 1837-1895, ed. Edmond Clarence Steckman, at www.bartleby.com.
[2] Quoted in “Spiritual
awareness” (sic), Church News, June
25, 2017, p. 16.
[3] Quoted in John McPhee, Looking for a Ship, New York: Farrar
Straus Giroux, 1990, p. 157.
[4] Op. cit., p. 155-156.
[5] Eugene O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey into Night, New
Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989, pp. 153-154.
[6] Plato, The Apology of Socrates, tr. Benjamin
Jowett, in The Norton Anthology of World
Masterpieces, vol. 1, 6th ed., New York: W.W. Norton &
Company, 1992, p. 824.
