Flying High

Lest anyone get the idea that I dislike air travel, I don’t. But I do need to clarify a few points.

In the early days, I often travelled by air between my home in New York and school in Maine. Afterwards, most of my airplane rides have taken place because of ships, usually either going away to join a ship or returning home from a ship. The science of flight—airmanship, navigation, and the principle of physics that makes it all possible—I find fascinating. The idea of holding a heavier-than-air object aloft by a difference in air pressure on the upper and lower wing surfaces is intriguing, a wonderful example of a highly abstract concept yielding very tangible and practical results. Aeronavigation, similar by nature and in practice to shipboard navigation, is also very interesting, as are the mechanical means by which a solid object is maneuvered through a fluid medium, whether air or water. The laws of physics and mathematics govern it all, hence both ship and airplane operations are rigorously logical disciplines.

What I dislike about air travel is not the travel itself but some of the human factors that have become part of it. I don’t like mob scenes at airports. I don’t appreciate being treated like a criminal by megalomaniacal security personnel. I don’t like the cattle car atmosphere of some airlines. And I don’t enjoy the company of seat mates who talk incessantly about nothing or who can’t keep their elbows out of my ribs. Otherwise, I really do enjoy flying, and I always have. With a window seat in the non-smoking section and fellow passengers who behave themselves, an aerial journey can be very pleasant indeed.

Some of my favorite flights took place with Bar Harbor Airlines in the 1970s. This company, now long gone, operated a fleet of small commuter airplanes between Boston and various points in Maine and Quebec. The mainstay of the fleet was the Beechcraft 99, an unpressurized, low-altitude, dual-propeller aircraft. It carried perhaps fifteen passengers in small single seats on each side of a narrow central aisle. It also had big windows and a cockpit open to the passenger cabin. Visibility was thus excellent. On takeoffs and landings, I could look out the front and share the pilots’ view of the approaches and navigational lights and runways ahead. Bar Harbor also named all its aircraft, which I thought was a nice personal touch. I travelled aboard airplanes with locally exotic names such as State of Maine, City of Bangor, The Portlander, Aroostook Flyer, La Ville de Quebec, and La Ville de Sherbrooke proudly emblazoned on their tails

I rode on these aircraft several times between Bangor and Boston, usually but not always with a stop in Augusta. My most memorable of these journeys took place on Friday, December 16, 1977, aboard The Portlander. This flight ran nonstop from Bangor to Boston in an hour and five minutes. After flying overland from Bangor to the coast, The Portlander then flew over the ocean parallel to and only a short distance from the shoreline. I had a seat on the starboard side, and with a clear sky and excellent visibility enjoyed a truly magnificent view of the coast line from about Wiscasset all the way to Boston. All the harbors, beaches, and rocky outcroppings of Maine, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts were visible in detail. As the plane flew past Bath, I could with ease pick out my brother’s old house on Wesley Street in back of the Methodist church. He had lived there a few years previously when stationed at the nearby Brunswick Naval Air Station, and it had been the site of several family gatherings. As I contemplated these memories, The Portlander flew on and finally landed at Boston Logan Airport, a tiny speck of an aircraft amid a sea of sprawling concrete runways and taxiways.

Less scenically interesting but more ambitious were a few long flights over the Atlantic Ocean. I’ve made a total of two and a half transatlantic flights. The two were commercial runs aboard 747s operated by Trans World Airlines, the old TWA, which is now long gone. On the first of these I was returning to New York from London after leaving the Wilkes in Southampton, England, on Friday evening, January 23, 1981. On the second, I was going overnight from New York to Italy to join the Waccamaw. This one left JFK on Tuesday, June 22, 1982, and arrived in Rome early the next morning. On both occasions it felt quite disconcerting to get across an ocean so quickly—too quickly, really—and be suddenly disgorged onto another continent with a different language, culture, monetary system, time zone, etc. But that’s another story.

The half transatlantic flight was really just that; it went halfway across the Atlantic. Enroute to join the General Hoyt S. Vandenberg, I travelled aboard a Air Force C-5 cargo airplane with four or five other new crewmen. This flight was operated by the Military Airlift Command from Patrick Air Force Base in Florida to Ascension Island with an intermediate stop in Antigua. The pilots, navigator, and engineer were commissioned Air Force officers. The passenger and cargo attendants were enlisted men.

I arrived at Patrick in mid-morning on Wednesday, September 12, 1979, many hours in advance of the flight’s departure time. No one would tell me when the plane was scheduled to leave, just “Be back here around 3:00 o’clock.” With about six hours to kill, I went to the beach, went to the base library, and went out to lunch, all of which were within walking distance of the air terminal. At 3:00pm I returned to the check-in spot for the flight and met the other fellows who were going to the Vandenberg. We got in line, turned in our paperwork, emptied our pockets, and put our suitcases up on tables where they were opened and inspected thoroughly. When they were repacked, we were led outside and across the tarmac to the waiting aircraft. The flight crew then directed us up the steps and aboard the airplane.

I realized quickly that I was not travelling first class. The passengers’ seats were situated just behind the cockpit. They did not recline. They faced backwards. There were no windows. The only view was of containers of cargo lashed to the deck and the fuselage. I had known that passenger airplanes were often referred to as cattle cars in the sky, but this was a baggage car! I discovered that if I turned around in my seat I could with difficulty see up the small aisle and out the windows in the front of the airplane. At least the pilots have windows, I thought. But even this small luxury did not last. At departure time they closed the cockpit door. The next daylight I saw was in Antigua when they let us off the plane for a break.

From the airstrip in Antigua we passengers were bused to a little village where we got a free dinner. It felt nice to dine al fresco in the tropics after being cooped up in the sky for so long. After a while we were bussed back to the airplane and it took off for the long haul to Ascension Island, midway between West Africa and Brazil. Since it was an overnight flight, I curled up as comfortably as possible and went to sleep. I didn’t have anything else to do anyway. After I woke up, at some point over the Atlantic, my fellow passengers expressed their envy of my youth and ability to sleep so soundly. They had been uncomfortably tossing and turning in their seats while I merrily slumbered on! The crew then distributed box lunches to us. In all fairness to the much maligned airline food, these were actually quite good.

Soon afterwards, the aircraft started its descent for Ascension, and it landed on time at 8:00am, Thursday, September 13. Emerging from the airplane once again, I beheld the looming brown mountains, all extinct volcanoes, of Ascension Island. I also felt very grateful that we’d had a good, competent navigator in the air crew. He had successfully found this tiny speck of an island in the midst of the vast blue reaches of the Atlantic. He knew his business and it showed!

I travelled only this one time with the Military Airlift Command. Closer to home, a company that I flew with regularly was Piedmont Airlines. Styling itself “The up and coming airline,” Piedmont connected the mid-Atlantic states with New York, Boston, and other major cities. It’s long gone now, though. I rode on Piedmont’s fleet of Boeing 737s going to and from the Rigel, the Mercury, and the Waccamaw. A few of these journeys were scenic standouts.

I recall several occasions when I took Piedmont between Norfolk, Virginia, and either LaGuardia or Newark Airports in the New York area. The nonstop flight took just over an hour and passed over the Delmarva Peninsula between the Chesapeake and Delaware Bays. From a window seat on the appropriate side of the aircraft, I gazed down upon the rural landscape that turned first to wetlands and then to sandy beaches interrupted by inlets. Then the broad Atlantic stretched eastward. It was always a very lovely sight, bracketed by Cape Charles to the south and Cape Henlopen to the north. It was also a calm and peaceful view, a quiet and sparsely populated area sandwiched by bays and far from the urban commotion of Norfolk, New Jersey, and New York. I followed this route about ten times between 1979 and 1983, and I never grew tired of it.

One evening, I did something different. During the Christmas and New Year’s holidays of 1982-1983, the Waccamaw remained idle at the Naval Supply Center piers in Norfolk. Able to take a few days off, I flew home for a brief family visit. I returned to the ship on New Year’s Day, 1983, on connecting Piedmont flights from Boston to Richmond to Norfolk. The first of these took off from Boston about 8:00pm, travelled southwest over Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Long Island, and then went out over the Atlantic toward New Jersey.  I had a window seat on the starboard side. Through the crystal clear night sky I beheld in magnificent illumination the western half of Long Island, New York City, and northern New Jersey. The ocean and harbor waterways contrasted in black with the incandescence of the city and its suburbs. It was a truly spectacular view, beyond comparison to any other view of New York. Unfortunately, it receded more quickly than I would have liked as the aircraft sped on toward Richmond. The rest of the journey, while comfortable and pleasant, was anticlimactic after this breathtaking sight.

Less dramatic and more routine were the domestic flights I made on Delta Air Lines in the 1970s and 80s. It was often aboard Delta 727s that I travelled between New York and Maine. Later on, I rode with Delta while assigned to the Victoria, the Comet, the Saturn, and the Bartlett. I always liked Delta, probably more for sentimental than sightseeing reasons. My very first airplane ride took place with Delta in January of 1976, from JFK to Bangor with a stop in Boston.¹ I recall my astonishment at arriving in Boston in about fifty minutes. Three weeks earlier, I had ridden the all-stops overnight train from Boston to New York. That had taken five hours.

Delta got me off to a good start, and in the end I made more flights on Delta than on any other airline. Many of these took place at night, and on a variety of airplanes including the Lockheed Tri-Star 1011, the largest aircraft in their fleet. I rode this one from Atlanta to New York to Boston in the midnight hours of Saturday, October 31, 1981, the night before Halloween. During the stop at JFK at about 3:00am, it seemed that the pilots had to taxi the plane all over the airport to reach the terminal. During this joyride I saw the British Airways’ Concorde for the first time. A sleek and elegant looking aircraft, she reposed under a battery of floodlights and was indeed an impressive sight. Years later, my children would take a liking to both the British and French Concordes when they would see them fly over their grandparents’ house while preparing to land at JFK.

Finally, I rode the famous Eastern Shuttle a few times between Boston and New York. In its day the shuttle was an aviation icon, but it’s been gone for a long while now. I remember one flight in particular, on a brilliantly clear and sunlit Sunday afternoon, May 25, 1985. I had a window seat on the port side as the plane took off from LaGuardia and headed east over Long Island. This gave me an unlimited view of the North Shore of Long Island, of Long Island Sound, and of coastal Connecticut and Rhode Island. It was truly beautiful. In about twenty minutes the aircraft reached Orient Point. Then it turned slightly northeastward and soon afterwards flew overland toward Boston. As I gazed down upon the Island, the Sound, and southern New England, I thought of how often my family and I had traversed this area by automobile, by train, by ship, and by airplane. In the future, my children would also traverse this area many times while going to and from their grandparents’ house. They would come to especially enjoy crossing Long Island Sound on the ferries between Connecticut and Long Island.

But while this family tradition still lay far in the future, the future had a way of coming very quickly. This Eastern Shuttle flight to Boston passed much too quickly, as did all the journeys of my vagabond youth. So many years have come and gone. So many airlines have come and gone with them. Delta has survived, but Piedmont, Eastern, Trans World, Bar Harbor, and numerous others have vanished. Likewise, many shipping companies have come and gone. Iconic names like American Export, American President, Moore-McCormack, United States Lines, and many others have disappeared. The passage of time has not always been kind to the transportation industry.

Nonetheless, it has been a privilege to travel across the vast globe by both sea and air, to see first-hand “the beauty of the earth”² on which we live as well as “the beauty of the skies.”³ While professionally I have no future in the transportation business, I can still happily sign on as a passenger from time to time and enjoy the benefits without the responsibilities!

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¹ This probably took place on Sunday afternoon, January 11, 1976, but I can’t say with certainty because I had not yet learned the virtue of meticulous record-keeping!
² Folliott S. Pierpont, “For the Beauty of the Earth,” in Hymns of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Salt Lake City: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1985.
³ Ibid.

The Shipping News

For many years The New York Times ran a daily page carrying news of the shipping industry. Located toward the back of the main section of the paper, this page contained news articles concerning merchant shipping and notices of the arrivals and departures of ships in New York Harbor. The news articles were fairly prosaic, involving freight rates, schedule changes, service adjustments, weather reports, and so on. The arrivals and departures were presented in tabular form. These tables listed every commercial ship and military transport vessel, its time and date of arrival or departure, its pier, and its voyage’s destination or port of origin. Sometimes entire itineraries would be listed if a ship was scheduled to make several port calls on the same voyage. In addition, it listed arrivals and departures for selected foreign and American West Coast ports.

There was nothing artistic or literary about this writing. It was strictly business. Today, however, it’s history. The names of the world famous passenger liners as well as the names of comparatively unknown freighters and tankers filled these pages as if they were a social register. In an era when the vast majority of the passengers, mail, and cargo crossed the oceans by ship instead of by airplane, the names of the ships and their times and piers of arrival and departure were important news items.

Here’s an example. Going back 56 years, we read that the passenger ship Nieuw Amsterdam of the Holland-America Line sailed at 12:00 noon on Friday, June 21, 1957, from Hoboken. She was scheduled to arrive at Southampton, England, on the following Friday, June 28, and then call at Le Havre, France, later that same day. Continuing her voyage, the ship would arrive at her home port of Rotterdam, the Netherlands, on Saturday, June 29.1

This routine transatlantic voyage interests me because my grandparents, Robert Burns and Julia Murphy, made this sailing in order for my grandfather to attend an engineering conference in Switzerland. They disembarked from the Nieuw Amsterdam in Le Havre, took a train to Paris, and after a few days there resumed their journey. When his business was completed, they travelled by train to Genova, Italy, where on Sunday, July 14, they embarked on the Italian Line’s Cristoforo Colombo. This vessel subsequently delivered them to the passenger piers on the West Side of Manhattan at 9:00am on Tuesday, July 23, 1957.

Day after day and voyage after voyage, this tabular data of arrivals and departures indicate that merchant shipping was a big business. The movement of passengers, merchandise, and mail across the world’s oceans commanded the attention of millions of people who had a personal or financial interest in the shipping. For my grandparents’ travels, this news was important to the family twice a year—the voyage out and the voyage back—for about thirteen years. For many others, it was a livelihood. Hence the importance of devoting daily an entire page of a major metropolitan newspaper to this information. But now, it’s history.

For me, it’s a very interesting history. The shipping news combines my family’s history and my affinity for the things of the sea. Big ships, long voyages, exciting destinations—these are some of the finest things in life! Sailing to Europe is always so much more enjoyable and adventurous, even if it takes longer, than strapping oneself into an airplane seat and getting there overnight. I have flown to Europe once and flown back from Europe once. I’ve sailed there and back many more times. Sailing is definitely better. My grandparents agreed. They certainly had the option of flying, and they did cross the Atlantic a few times by air in the mid 1960s, but they strongly preferred to travel by sea.

Here’s another example. In 1956 they sailed aboard the American Export Lines’ Constitution for the first time. Departing from Pier 84 at the foot of West 44th Street in Manhattan on Saturday, September 1, she called at Algeceras, Spain, on Friday, September 7, and at Cannes, France, and Genova, Italy, on Sunday, September 9. My grandparents disembarked in Genova.

They liked American Export and the Constitution so much that beginning in 1959 they sailed almost exclusively with this company. That year they returned to New York from Genova aboard the Independence, the Constitution’s twin sister. These are the ships that I remember from the 1960s. I was a small child then, but old enough to find everything about these great liners fascinating. On sailing day I spent hours wandering around these vessels with my family, examining everything and asking many questions before the ritual call of “All ashore that’s going ashore” was sounded.

But this is digression.² The shipping news pages in The New York Times call to mind a bygone era, when travel by sea was the norm, not the adventurous exception. It was a time when a person would speak literally of “when my ship comes in.” Shipping was a far-reaching business, a way of life, not just a vacation cruise or a novelty. From the humblest ferry crossing the Hudson River to the grand Queen Mary, vessels of all sizes, shapes, and purposes dominated the waterways. This changed as bridges and tunnels increasingly replaced ferries and the airlines became the mainstay for overseas travel. Ships do remain, of course, and they carry the freight and the petroleum the world uses, but so much of this is so far from public view that it is largely unknown. I’ve met people who honestly had no idea how all the Japanese automobiles arrived in the United States!

To read the shipping news, then, is to step back in time. Scrolling through reels of microfilm researching the ships and the voyages of my grandparents’ travels, I become absorbed by the lists of vessels arriving and departing from New York. The data, while tabular, is not impersonal. Merchant ships with names and personalities stand out on the pages. The American flagship United States; the two Queens of the Cunard Line; the –dam ships of Holland-America, including the Statendam, Noordam, Westerdam, and Nieuw Amsterdam, aboard all of which my grandparents sailed; the pragmatic Swedish Gripsholm and her fleet mates; the diminutive Atlantic; the several Export freighters; the numerous Esso tankers; the military troop transports including the good old Upshur³—these and dozens more connected New York with the rest of the world, and their comings and goings were important news to many, many people.

For some of us, the comings and goings of merchant ships remain very important. Something that was once a chosen career and a way of life for me does not lose its significance. Despite the passage of time, the yearning for the sea remains with me. While my seafaring days are regretfully long past, I can in some sense go to sea again by reading the old newspapers.

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¹ Rather than cite every last detail, I will simply note that all the voyage information comes from three sources: the shipping news pages on the appropriate dates in The New York Times, which are supplemental to my grandmother’s travel journals and my grandparents’ letters. They wrote frequently when they were away, and I consider this body of scripture a family heirloom.

² To continue the digression, see Leonard A. Stevens, The Elizabeth: Passage of a Queen, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968, for a fascinating and in-depth description of the workings of a passenger liner in commercial service between New York and Europe.

³ The Upshur later became the State of Maine, on which I sailed in 1976 and 1978 while studying for the license as third mate.

Pictures of Ships and Family

Some pictures of the family visiting the waterfront on various occasions between 1955 and 2012.   I took all but one of these photographs.  I think they convey a sense of the family's attachment to the sea and the ships that sail on it.  Click on each picture for a larger view.

The picture that started it all.  My grandparents, Robert Burns and Julia Murphy, aboard the American Export Lines' Independence at Pier 84 in New York on Monday morning, October 31, 1966, just prior to departing on their final transatlantic voyage.

The next generation.  The four children with their Mommy and Nana watch from Battery Park in Lower Manhattan as the Queen Elizabeth 2 proceeds to sea.

Steven, Michael, James, and Miss Karen visit the schoolship State of Maine at the State Pier in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on July 1, 1999.

Steven and Michael with the cable ship Global Mariner also at the State Pier in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on August 5, 2001.

My three sons with the Cunard Line's Caronia at the Block Falcon Cruise Terminal in Boston, Massachusetts, on August 13, 2001.

The three boys pose with the Dutch freighter Schippersgracht at the State Pier in Fall River, Massachusetts, on August 27, 2001.

Underway aboard the ferry Governor Herbert H. Lehman, the boys watch the outbound tanker Falcon and the inbound container ship Zim Mediterranean pass each other off St. George, Staten Island, New York, on a hazy August 23, 2002.

The next day, August 24, 2002, the three boys pose in the rain in front of the fabled United States at Pier 82 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Before my time.  My grandparents sailed from New York for Le Havre, France, aboard the United States on June 24, 1955.  My father took this photograph of them with my mother and older brother on sailing day.

Back to the younger generation.  Michael and Steven stand on the stone beach at Orient Point, Long Island, New York, on a cold April 26, 2003.  They have disembarked from the ferry Susan Anne after completing a voyage from New London, Connecticut.

The million dollar view.  Sunrise over Campobello Island, New Brunswick, seen from Eastport, Maine, on June 23, 2003.  The children arose very cheerfully at 3:15am in order to see this.  

A wedding aboard ship.  James poses in the Crow's Nest Lounge of the Holland America Line's  Nieuw Amsterdam in Port Everglades, Fort Lauderdale, Florida, on Sunday, February 5, 2012.  Behind him the container ship Melbourne Strait is departing.

The Nautical Library

A political phenomenon of the late twentieth century is the presidential library. After the torch is passed to the new head of state, the one just retired builds a library. In theory a repository of presidential papers intended for use by scholars and historians, the imposing new edifice usually seems as much a monument to a still-living and still self-aggrandizing great man as it does a research facility. The exception to this, of course, is the Library of Congress. Bequeathed to the nation by President Thomas Jefferson, it enjoys universal recognition as one of the greatest, largest, and most diverse collections of research materials in the world. My home library is not as ambitious as this, however, nor does it commemorate my political glory. Instead, it houses a very modest general collection and two more extensive specialized collections.

The first of these specialty areas supported my career in the Merchant Marine. Professional volumes such as Bowditch’s American Practical Navigator, Donn’s Meteorology, and Tate’s A Mariner’s Guide to the Rules of the Road line the shelves. While of little interest to a layman, these and other such tomes are critical components of a mate’s collection. I spent many intense hours with these and other volumes while studying for the various license exams. My favorite was George’s Stability and Trim for the Ship’s Officer. Filled with esoteric prose, complex technical diagrams, advanced mathematics, and applied physics—not exactly light reading—this book successfully saw me through the most difficult part of the chief mate’s exam, and for that I was very grateful. Subsequent to that, I consulted all these volumes regularly for license renewal exercises. To this day, I still refer to these resources, either to refresh my memory or to look up points of curiosity.

In addition to professional and technical books, I have several works on the history of seafaring, plus histories of famous ships. And as a library is not a collection of books only, I have an assortment of pictures—photographs, paintings, and pen-and-ink drawings—of all the ships that I sailed on, of the transatlantic liners that my grandparents sailed on, and of various historical vessels. A few of these are framed and on display; most are filed away for safekeeping, but hopefully, display at a later date. Then, there are my licenses. I keep these in a safe place, too, even though they’re no longer valid for sea service. I treasure them for the knowledge and the experience which they represent, and I admit to feeling somewhat sentimental about them. Finally, there is my sextant. I used this instrument many times aboard many ships to take sightings of the sun, moon, and stars, one of my favorite duties on long transoceanic voyages. Every so often someone asks if he may look at my sextant, and I’m always happy to show it off.

The second specialty area supports a more ongoing project in family history and genealogy. In addition to my interest in seafaring, I’ve long been collecting genealogical documentation and family-historical items. In the process of researching ancestors and relatives, I’ve amassed reams of documents that identify all the folks in the extended family. Who they are and how they’re related is the genealogy; where they lived and what they did is the family history. The two dovetail together naturally. The result is an ever-growing collection of official certificates, ecclesiastical records, written histories, newspaper articles, cemetery maps, and photographs. This assortment covers generations long deceased as well as the generation recently born. In what was perhaps an overindulgence with pen and camera, I’ve assembled dozens of photograph albums and almost as many notebooks depicting and detailing my children’s activities since their births. Some people may find this a bit much, but I like it. On a practical level, this collection always proves its worth. Whenever family members want to know when something took place and who was involved, they come to me as the authority on the matter. If I don’t have an event photographed or written down, then it didn’t happen!

This paper part of the family history and genealogical collection is organized into diverse volumes such as picture albums, binders, notebooks, and a few actual books, too, and this assortment occupies significant shelf space. But neither is this a collection of books only. Framed portraits of family members both living and deceased line the walls above the shelves and in several other rooms as well. Professional memorabilia and personal mementos from several of the deceased line the top shelf and fill several boxes. Once again, I admit to feeling sentimental about much of this material. One of my favorite items combines both seafaring and family history: a portrait of my grandparents in tuxedo and evening gown at the Captain’s party aboard the American Export Lines’ Independence at sea between New York and Casablanca in November of 1966.

In retrospect, I think their departure on this voyage aboard the Independence got me started in family history. I remember the day they left. Back then the passengers’ families were allowed to visit the ships prior to sailing. Armed with my first camera at the age of nine—a cheap kid’s toy that took very mediocre black-and-white photographs—I succeeded in getting on everyone’s nerves in a relentless picture-taking quest. Now, despite their dubious artistic value, these humble first attempts at family portraiture have become family heirlooms.

In addition to the genealogical, family-historical, and nautical materials, I have a modest humanities collection, chiefly in the areas of history, literature, and religion, as well as over fifty years of National Geographic. This includes many of the classics of our Western world, the scripture, both sacred and secular, bequeathed to us by our Greco-Roman Judeo-Christian heritage. These writings, from some of the best minds in history, enable us to acquire a broad spectrum of knowledge and wisdom and thereby raise our own minds to a higher level. Authors with names revered through the ages rank among our best friends and most interesting companions. Their ideas have shaped human history and thought for so long and to such an extent that it seems impossible to even imagine a world without them. These writers, while long dead, “whisper to us out of the dust” (2 Nephi 26:16) with “the words of them which have slumbered” (2 Nephi 27:6). Though dead, they continue to speak, as Professor Jastrow, a scholarly character in a contemporary classic describes:

There’s something personal and alive for me in this room.

These books speak to me. The authors are all my friends

and colleagues, though some of them crumbled to dust

fifteen centuries ago. I shall leave the villa with no regrets,

but it will hurt to leave these books behind.¹

Just as, for example, Plato and Augustine and Shakespeare, though dead, continue to speak to all who will listen, so also do my kin, though dead, speak to me. Through what they wrote and what others wrote about them, through their vital records, their photographs, their memorabilia, and the inscriptions on their gravestones, I have come to know them. I often feel a special unity with them. Their spirits, I believe, guide me in my research, and they are my friends and colleagues as well as my family. I treasure the time that I spend with them in my little library.

I also treasure the hours I spend with the rising generation, recording the children’s activities, compiling their photographs, and organizing their school memorabilia. While many others of my age are building large-scale political and business empires for themselves, I prefer the cloistered life that my library affords. I often think of Prospero, the Shakespearean character who fell out of political favor and lamented not the loss of his office but the loss of his library:

Me, poor man, my library

Was dukedom large enough.²

As is mine today. In my youth the sea was my dukedom—and it was plenty large enough—but now my library suffices. While my library naturally contains material concerning my career in the Merchant Marine, which is now part of our family history, I see it not as a monument to myself like a presidential library, but as a monument to all the members of my family. It commemorates their lives by archiving their histories, displaying their portraits, and enabling the present and future generations to know those of the past. It is bequeathed to the family of the future, to my children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren ad infinitum. My hope is that through this legacy the past generations, though dead, will speak to the future generations just as they have to me.

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¹ Herman Wouk, War and Remembrance, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1978, p. 198.
² William Shakespeare, The Tempest, I:i:109-110.

Fleeting Glimpses

On a rare Saturday off from work, I stood on a short stretch of sandy beach in Rockport, Massachusetts, and gazed eastward through a light mist and an intermittent rain at the great Atlantic Ocean. The horizon was only faintly visible; mostly it just blended with the overcast sky. It was neither a good day for a navigator taking celestial sightings and plotting sun lines nor for a summer tourist tanning in the sun or frolicking in the surf. Weatherwise, it was a bland day, no doubt a disappointment to many. I saw it differently, however. For any day that one can stand at the water’s edge and enjoy the privilege of looking upon the sea is very good day.

Normally, I work every weekend. It came as a very pleasant surprise, therefore, to unexpectedly be given a Saturday off. Wanting to make the most of this fortuitous opportunity, Miss Patty and I left the house early and drove away to the waterfront. We gazed upon the sea in Salem, Gloucester, and Rockport, and we visited the famous Fishermen’s Monument in Gloucester. It was a lovely day, far from the madding crowds of weekend shoppers, but it passed by much too quickly. Even though we spent hours at the seaside, this time was but a fleeting glimpse.

Life contains many such fleeting glimpses. Some of my favorites involving the sea take place aboard trains. Several times each year I ride Amtrak between Boston and New York in order to visit my parents. Aptly named the Shore Line, this stretch of railroad follows the coastline through Rhode Island and Connecticut into New York. It affords magnificent views of Narragansett Bay and Long Island Sound from a succession of vantage points. From East Greenwich, Mystic, New London, Niantic Beach, Rocky Neck, and Old Saybrook, I savor the sight of salt water, albeit briefly, as the trains hurry along toward their destinations. Rarely do they stop between stations. On one journey, though, I enjoyed a bonus as the train halted for several minutes at Niantic Beach because of track work. As the engineer awaited the signal to proceed, I watched the ferry John H sail placidly across the sound from Long Island to New London.

On Long Island, there are many waterfront sites where one can gaze upon either the open ocean or its estuaries. Family favorites include Captree, Fire Island, Point Lookout, Oyster Bay, and Port Jefferson. All beautiful locations, the times spent there are always much too short—mere fleeting glimpses. Once per summer we sail aboard the excursion boat Moon Chaser between Captree and the Fire Island Light, a round trip of an hour and a half. This also passes too quickly—another fleeting glimpse. Even a prolonged duration spent in the company of the sea is, in the end, too short. The week that the family spent aboard the Nieuw Amsterdam in February illustrates this perfectly. Everyone agreed that the voyage ended too quickly. Furthermore, accustomed as I had been to spending several months at a time aboard ship, seven days felt like nothing. It seemed that I had barely unpacked and settled in when it was time to disembark! Another fleeting glimpse.

All my life I have had an affinity for the sea. For me it is a creation of unsurpassable natural beauty, a place of peace and tranquility, and a source of inspiration. The sea possesses an intangible but unmistakable other-worldly quality that sets it apart from the secularized land masses. It seems more a part of the divine realm than the human one. When I gaze out to sea, whether from the deck of a ship or the edge of a continent, I feel that I am in a sense looking into eternity. But eternity is very large, and my time is very small and tightly scheduled. Sooner or later some compelling need calls me away from the sea. All I can achieve, then, are fleeting glimpses.

Most of my life I have had an affinity for family history and genealogy. Like the sea, these intimately interrelated subjects possess intangible but unmistakable other-worldly qualities that set them apart from our secularized society. Whether in a library, a municipal archive, a church office, a cemetery, or at home, genealogical and family-historical research opens windows into both the human past and the divine eternity. As the sea has a compelling quality that draws one in, so does this research. It is commonplace to completely forget the present while becoming engrossed in the events and personalities of the past and discovering new things that happened and new friends who lived many decades or even more than a century ago. But then, just as at the seashore, some urgent human need calls us rudely back to the present, and our fleeting glimpse into the higher realm is suddenly over.

Hunger, for example, is a compelling intruder. On one occasion Miss Patty and I were visiting the public library in Babylon, Long Island, and printing copies of microfilmed newspaper articles concerning my grandparents’ youth. Having gotten an early start, we spent all morning and part of the afternoon on this project, completely losing track of the time in the process. Suddenly feeling incredibly hungry, we looked at the clock and were astonished when we saw how late it had become! Still, for all those hours spent examining my grandparents’ formative years in an era now gone, we felt as though we had just scratched the surface, just glimpsed their youth wherein there must have been so much more that had gone unrecorded.

As wonderful as it has been to discover our ancestors and learn of their life experiences, there is an inherent frustration in the process, too: whatever we find in our research, it is never enough. While our grandparents’ lives are quite well documented, some gaps do remain. Of their parents, however, we know precious little. Going back in time, we have less and less information about each successive generation. The glimpses into the past become smaller and smaller until finally there are no more. In each case, though, whether we have full biographies or just names and dates of death, these views of past lives remain only glimpses. We always wish that we had more information and more photographs, as well as more time to do the research. Just like the view of the great Atlantic Ocean, the view of our ancestry is but a fleeting glimpse.

For that matter, life itself is a fleeting glimpse. In our family, the longest known lifespan is 97 years. In the history of the world, however, this is miniscule. It may sound like a long time, but it is still a finite window of opportunity. Just as the hours spent visiting the seashore and the hours spent researching family history are short and precious, so is life itself. Hence the need to use the time that we have wisely, for once used up it remains forever irretrievably gone.

Carpe diem, asserted the ancient Romans. Seize the day. Every day may be our last, and we would be wise to not waste the tremendous but limited opportunity of life on things of no value. Contemplating eternity and searching for eternal truth, whether at the oceanfront or the family history center, lead us to the things of ultimate value: to truth, light, knowledge, family, everlasting life—in short, the things of God. And when we have achieved this goal, it will not be just a fleeting glimpse but a permanent state.

The White Cross

One summer morning in Nashua, I took my four little children to a neighborhood playground.  Along the way we drove past the Edgewood Cemetery.  As the children gazed out the car windows, they spotted a bright white cross on a hill on the far side of the cemetery.  Their curiosity aroused, they asked if we could go in and see it up close.  Since we were on a fairly loose schedule that morning, I agreed and turned into the cemetery.

Along narrow winding roads and over gently rolling terrain, we proceeded slowly and reverently through the necropolis.  On the far north side we ascended the hill and stopped at the edge of the property near the white cross.  I got out with the four children and we walked the short distance to the stone.  Steven and Michael, the younger of the four, asked what it said, and I read the inscription to them.  The deceased was someone whom we had not known.  He was Scott Alan Brehm, and he lived from March 22, 1971, to April 6, 1995.  Lower down, near the base of the cross, was inscribed “Forever Young.”

Standing about four feet high and the only stone situated between two large pine trees, this white cross was obviously well attended.  A circle of pine bark formed the base of a garden around it.  Neatly arranged flowers of every color surrounded it, and there were no weeds.  Looking toward the south, the white cross commanded a view of the entire cemetery.  A universally recognized symbol of the Christian faith, it was easily visible from all quarters.

To the right of and in line with the white cross but on the other side of one of the pine trees stood a dark gray stone.  This marked the grave of someone we had known.  Herman Guiterman, described as a “Beloved Husband, Father, and Physician,” lived from April 2, 1938, to June 7, 1995.  The founder of Nashua Pediatrics, he had taken very good care of all our children.  James and Karen remembered him well; Steven and Michael less so.  The sight of his grave stone intrigued them.  Like the white cross, it stood near the top of the hill and beheld a view of the entire cemetery.  Also, atop the family name it bore the Star of David, a universally recognized symbol of the Jewish faith.

The home of these two graves, the Edgewood Cemetery, is an oasis of peace and quiet in a busy and noisy city.  Just outside its front gate lies the traffic-saturated intersection of Broad and Amherst Streets where the din of motor vehicles resounds all day and half the night.  Inside the gate beneath the pines and poplars this commotion seems very distant.  On the hill where the white cross stands the traffic jam is inaudible and, for that matter, mostly invisible.  Standing on this hill and taking in the view, one feels spiritually at ease.  The cemetery serves as a harbor of refuge from the secular world, a place of faith, hope, rest, and quiet contemplation.  One can feel the thinness of the veil that separates oneself from the deceased, and one can feel a closeness to them.  Since my first visit with the children all those years ago, I’ve gotten in the habit of visiting the Edgewood Cemetery a few times every summer.  I like it there.

On another hill far away there stands another white cross.  Overlooking the small seaport and village of Twillingate on the north coast of Newfoundland, this towering white cross was erected in 2003 by the Salvation Army as a monument to all the merchant seamen and fishermen from Twillingate who had been lost at sea.  From the cross’ base at the top of this high hill, one enjoys a magnificent view of the village, the harbor, the open sea, and the rugged countryside that rolls down from the sky to the waterfront.  Not a typical seaside resort, Twillingate and neighboring Crow Head are cold, foggy, overcast, and wet in the summer.  Nonetheless, the natural beauty of a place settled by man but not spoiled by him recommends it to anyone with a love of the sea.  The large hill where the tall white cross stands is a spiritual harbor of refuge, an oasis of peace and quiet, faith and hope, stillness and contemplation.  At the base of the hill to one side lies a small cemetery.  Hidden from view from the street, it is accessible only by a narrow dirt road.  A dirt trail leads up the hill to the white cross.  As spiritual havens, these two spots complement each other very well. 

Not an easy place to reach, Twillingate is very literally “far from the madding crowd”^[1] of the commotion-saturated secular world.  From the white cross on the hill it seems that the very edge of the Earth must be nearby.  Indeed, as one looks at the sea from this elevation, the thinness of the veil and the closeness to the deceased become obvious.  We visited the white cross and the cemetery in Twillingate on Wednesday and Thursday, June 23 and 24, 2004, while on a week-long family vacation in Newfoundland.  All of us felt the presence of the Spirit there.  Between this pleasant sensation of spiritual repose and the magnificent views in all directions, it was only with great reluctance that we came back down to the village to get dinner.

Just as Moses had come down from Mount Sinai only to face the problems of the secular world, I expected that we would feel a similar letdown.  But as all of Newfoundland is an island of peacefulness geographically removed from the commotion of the secular mainstream, we experienced no such disappointment.  Instead, the sensation of spiritual repose lingered with us, although less intensely than on the hill.

The deceased, of course, do not share this concern.  They repose quietly in hallowed ground and in a spiritual realm.  They never need to step down from the Mount and experience reentry into the material world.  In praying for the dead, believers of nearly all denominations ask that they be blessed with peace, rest, and light in the afterlife.  We would like these gifts for ourselves, too, for we know that this world is not always peaceful, restful, or bathed in light.  No matter how long we linger at the white cross in Twillingate or at the white cross and the Star of David in Nashua, we know that we must eventually return to secular society and leave the peace, rest, and light of these hallowed grounds behind.

An old Roman supplication for the dead expresses the heartfelt wish of the living for them:

            Eternal rest grant unto them, Oh Lord,           Requiem aeternam dona eis, O Domine,

            and let perpetual light shine upon them.         et lux perpetua luceat eis.

            May they rest in peace.  Amen.                       Requiescant in pace.  Amen.

           

These beautiful verses also remind us that eventually we ourselves want to share in these eternal blessings, that we want to join our brethren on the other side of the veil.  At the appropriate time we will inevitably do this.  Until then, however, we may visit them in the places of their earthly abode, and on their behalf perform the ordinance work in the House of the Lord.

There are no white crosses on any of the temples, but a few of the older buildings have suns, moons, and stars in their stonework to symbolize the heavenly realms.  From a navigational viewpoint this is beautiful imagery, as a mate aboard ship would use the sun, the moon, and numerous stars to fix his vessel’s position on the trackless sea.  There are no Stars of David on the temples^[2], either, yet this is also an apt symbol as one Jewish scholar explains:

Through the Jewish people’s long and often difficult history, we have

come to the realization that our only hope is to place our trust in God.

The six points of the Star of David symbolize God’s rule over the

universe in all six directions: north, south, east, west, up, and down.^[3]          

On many transoceanic voyages I navigated by the great celestial lights, and in doing so I recognized “God’s rule” in every direction.  From Polaris over the North Pole to the near-diametrically opposite Southern Cross, every celestial body is both subject to and symbolic of “God’s rule over the universe.”  Infallible as navigational aids, they form myriad parts of the immense universe.  The seaman who follows them faithfully always stays on course.

The Southern Cross has long been one of my favorite constellations.  Comprised of four stars and situated almost but not quite over the South Pole, it appears very distinctly as a bright white cross in the sky looking down upon the Earth.  If a single star can represent “God’s rule over the universe” for the Jewish people, then how much more can four stars in a cruciform constellation represent this for Christians?  In this celestial white cross, then, I see four Stars of David, symbolic both individually and collectively of the Lord’s rule in all directions over all his creation, and also symbolically combining the truths of both the Jewish and Christian faiths.

It is one of the terrible tragedies of history that these two great religious traditions, both of which recognize a Prince of Peace and whose teachings seek after peace, rest, and light, have all too often been mired in animosity and violence in their relationship with each other.  But there is hope for the future.

The Southern Cross shines down on the temples in one half of the Earth.  Atop each temple stands a depiction of the angel Moroni summoning the diverse peoples of the world to the House of their Lord.  At night this statue of Moroni is bathed in a soft white light which produces an aura of peacefulness as people gather and rest from their worldly labors.  As these good people come to the temples and participate in the ordinances for both themselves and their dead, the Southern Cross with its four Stars of David shines down upon them, verifying, as it were, the summons of Moroni to ensure permanently the blessings of peace, eternal rest, and perpetual light for all of God’s children.         

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^[1] Thomas Gray, “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” in The Norton Anthology of Poetry, New York: W.W. Norton and Company, Inc., 1970, p. 489.

^[2] Interestingly, there is a Star of David on the Assembly Hall on Temple Square in Salt Lake City.

^[3] Rabbi Shraga Simmons, “Star of David,” at http://www.aish.com/jl/sp/k/48942436.html.

Visiting the Royal Navy

The training ship State of Maine reposed quietly alongside the dock of the venerable Holland-America Line in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, on Monday, June 5, 1978. To all outward appearances, the ship seemed fairly quiet, but this was deceiving. She had been scheduled to sail that morning, but instead showed one of the vicissitudes of her age. A superheater tube in one of the boilers had ruptured, and this event, while repairable, decreed that the old ship would go nowhere until the next day. The repair work—shutting down and draining a boiler, cutting out the damaged section of pipe, welding new pipe in place, refilling and relighting the boiler, and pressure testing the new pipe and weld connections—kept the engine room crew busy for many hours. Good job training for those pursuing an engineering license, and a day off in Rotterdam for those of us pursuing a mate’s license.

Several of us wandered along the docks that afternoon until we happened upon the destroyer Sheffield of the British Royal Navy. Some of the Brits saw us admiring their ship, and they invited us aboard for a tour. Naturally, we accepted.

A dozen or so young British seamen greeted us at the head of the gangway and enthusiastically welcomed us aboard. They were about our ages, and they chatted excitedly, asking us what ship we were on, where we came from, and telling us about themselves. From our accents, of course, they recognized us as Americans. Then they wanted to show us around. Receiving official permission from the officer of the deck, they led us through every nook and cranny of the Sheffield, including the bridge, engine room, living quarters, recreational facilities, and to our great surprise, the combat operations center. Another officer gave his keys to one of our tour guides, and he unlocked a door worthy of a bank vault and led us into an inside room filled with radar screens, computer consoles, tracking charts, and communications gear. Several men were in there working, and they all paused to greet us and welcome us into their special world. Despite the sign on the bank vault door which told us that this room was top secret with absolutely no visitors permitted inside, we were ushered in without hesitation, and everyone there was very hospitable toward us.

The Sheffield was a very impressive ship. Built in the early 1970s by Vickers in Great Britain, she was 410 feet long, 47 feet wide, and powered by gas turbine engines capable of producing 30 knots—half the size and twice the speed of the old State of Maine! Everything on the Sheffield was state-of-the-art, and it showed. Her crew took and obvious pride in her, and their enthusiasm for their ship was unmistakable. We envied them. Sailing as we were aboard a tired old vessel that was constantly plagued with breakdowns, we practically drooled at the sight of everything that was shiny and sophisticated aboard this modern ship of the line. Most appealing to me were the almost deck-to-overhead bridge windows, the aircraft-style control console, the sparkling-new radar sets, and the compact yet fully stocked chartroom where every conceivable navigational need could easily be met. And it was all so spotlessly clean that it glistened. A very impressive ship indeed.

After a thoroughly enjoyable time aboard this lovely ship we thanked our hosts and returned ashore. The excitement of this impromptu visit aboard the Sheffield remained with us, so that returning to the old State of Maine later in the day seemed a letdown. But return we did, and with all the repair work completed, she sailed for Portsmouth, England, at 10:00am the next day.

Portsmouth was a quick stop. The State of Maine arrived at 9:00am and sailed again at 8:00pm. She moored at the Royal Naval Dockyard for the purpose of loading historical artifacts for transport to Maine. It had been announced that no one would be allowed ashore in this interval, but our English hosts quickly changed that. They invited all who were interested to take a guided tour of one of their national icons, Admiral Horatio Lord Nelson’s flagship Victory. No one with any interest in history, let alone any specialized interest in historic ships, could refuse such an invitation. So ashore we went. We had the honor of visiting the oldest commissioned naval vessel in the world, the ship that had led the British fleet under Admiral Nelson’s command against the combined French and Spanish fleets off Cape Trafalgar in October of 1805. Our hosts showed us the entire ship from stem to stern and explained everything in considerable detail. Most significantly—and even reverently—they showed us the well preserved and still bloodstained wooden planks on which Admiral Nelson lay bleeding after receiving his mortal sniper wound, as well as the equally carefully preserved bed on which he subsequently died. Another very impressive ship, but in a very different way.

Our hosts took the subject of the Battle of Trafalgar very seriously. Its favorable outcome saved Britain from the threat of foreign invasion, a legitimate concern in a part of the world where countries have routinely invaded and conquered each other for many centuries. It cost approximately 5,000 human lives—English, Spanish, and French combined. Plenty of food for thought there. I did not realize it at the time, but in three days I had visited two British warships, one famous from a past war, and the other to become famous in a future war.

Four short years later, the British became entangled in the Falkland Islands War with Argentina. The Sheffield, among other vessels, participated. On Tuesday, May 4, 1982, an Exocet missile fired from an Argentine aircraft struck the Sheffield amidships on her starboard side, breached the hull above the waterline, and started an enormous fire. Twenty British seamen perished. The ship burned ferociously and was abandoned by the survivors. A ruined but still floating hulk, the Sheffield was taken in tow toward South Georgia by the destroyer Yarmouth. While underway, however, the hull flooded, and the ship sank on Monday, May 10.¹ The Sheffield was the first of six British ships to be sunk in the Falkland Islands War, and the first British ship to be lost in combat since 1945.²

By this time, I was no longer sailing on the State of Maine, but was safely at home. I had left the Victoria in December of 1981 and gone on a working vacation. During the winter months I painted rooms in our recently purchased house in Nashua and studied for the second mate’s exams. I received my new license as second mate on Monday, March 29, and was ready to return to sea. The job market being poor, however, my vacation became extended. On the day the Sheffield was attacked, I was at home waiting for a ship. On the day she sank, I was undergoing a medical checkup at company headquarters. Finally, I joined the Waccamaw as third mate on Thursday, June 24. While I was sweating blood about getting a job and going back to sea, others were shedding blood in a war at sea. More food for thought.

And I did think about it. The destruction of the Sheffield came as a shock. Of course, I knew that the British and the Argentines had gone to war, that ships and airplanes would be lost, and that soldiers and seamen would be killed. But these facts were war in the abstract. When a ship that I had known became a casualty of even such a faraway war, it was no longer abstract but suddenly very personal. I had seen and visited and walked on the Sheffield. I had met several members of her crew, had accepted their kind hospitality and spoken with them and enjoyed their company. I felt grateful to them for their friendliness toward me and my colleagues from the State of Maine. I felt horrified at the thought of any of them coming to grief in a war. I wondered if any of the ones whom I had met were still on the ship when she was attacked, but there was no way of knowing. Despite my own preoccupations about getting a job and going back to sea, I could not shake off these thoughts. The shock of the Sheffield’s violent demise remained with me.

This is what we call the brotherhood of the sea. Despite differences in nationality, culture, language, politics, and religion, the sea serves as a tie that binds to those who follow it professionally. This is widely recognized, even among enemies in wartime. I had a love of the sea and the ships that sailed it in common with the fellows on the Sheffield. After the conclusion of the Falkland Islands War, an Argentine naval officer described the common bond that he felt with his British enemies. Previously he had expressed jubilation at the destruction of the Sheffield. Given time to reconsider, however, he came to regret this glee. As the Englishman to whom he expressed his remorse related the conversation,

For it had betrayed his principles as a navy man. Even though the British at the time were his enemies, he said, no sailor should ever take the kind of delight that he had taken in the foundering of another ship. No one should so ardently wish a vessel of any navy, or indeed any ship, ever to be sunk in the ocean. “I am a good sailor,” he kept saying. “There is no pleasure to be taken over a thing like this. There is a brotherhood of the sea.”³

A similar sentiment displayed itself in one of Great Britain’s earlier and larger wars with a different enemy. Two seamen, one British and one German, were buried at sea in a funeral service held aboard the British corvette Compass Rose in 1941. As the British Captain Ericson conducted the service,

the gentle words affected him: as he read, he thought of the dead, and of the young seaman who was Compass Rose’s first casualty. He found that sad: and the German captain, standing free of escort a yard from him, found his own role sad also. . . .  Close by him, he heard and felt the German captain tremble.⁴

After the bodies of the deceased had slipped overboard, Captain Ericson

put on his cap, and saluted. The German captain, watching him, did the same. When they faced each other, Ericson saw tears glittering in the pale eyes.

“Thank you, Captain,” said the German. “I appreciate all you have done.” He held out his hand awkwardly. “I would like—” 


Ericson shook his hand without saying anything. He was shy of his emotion, and of the thirty-odd members of Compass Rose’s crew watching them. 


The German captain said suddenly: “Comrades of the sea. . . .”⁵

How sad that that such comrades should be called upon by their governments to shoot at each other on the normally pristine and peaceful sea. More often than not, the casualties of these wars have been young men and often teenagers. With most of their natural lifespans still ahead of them, it seems almost a crime against Nature itself to cut them down with metal globs flung across or through vast stretches of water. But a realist voice reminds us:

Brotherhood or not, the Atlantic seabed is littered with the wrecks of many thousands of ships and the long-decayed skeletons of many millions of men. War has been a constant feature of the ocean’s experience, and wars have been fought on its surface ever since there has been iron with which to fight them.⁶

I was fortunate; I sailed in peacetime. Over the years there were peaceful visits to several ships of various nationalities. The Danish sailing vessel Danmark, the Russian sailing ship Kruzenshtern, the British oil tanker Lucellum, the Greek passenger ship Ellinis, the American aircraft carrier America, and the American container ship San Pedro come quickly to mind. I was welcomed as a guest aboard these ships as well as aboard the other ships of my own employer’s fleet because we were “comrades of the sea.” Whatever differences there were between us, there was the overarching commonality of men, ships, and the sea. This can be difficult to explain to a layman’s satisfaction, but it was undeniably there.

When the Sheffield was attacked and twenty of her crew killed, I felt their loss. While I had known the ship but not necessarily the men, it made no difference. The Sheffield, like every other vessel, carried her own persona, and that was enough. I did not need to know the seamen individually in order to grieve for them. The brotherhood of the sea transmuted the unvarnished news of their deaths into a genuine and personal sorrow. Their loss, coupled with the destruction of their ship which I had visited and gotten to know four years earlier, made a geographically distant war feel very close to home.

Yet war was the very purpose for which the Sheffield had been built. Likewise, Lord Nelson’s Victory had served this same master, as had innumerable others through the centuries and millennia. War has indeed been a “constant feature” not only of the sea, but of human life. I wonder, though. If Cain had not killed Abel (Gen. 4:8), if that first mortal combat had not taken place, would humans never have gone to war with each other but lived in peace instead? Had that been so, there never would have been any need for navies, only merchant fleets and fishermen—peaceful pursuits.

In his masterpiece novel of the Second World War, the great seaman and author Herman Wouk described a naval officer looking toward Heaven in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor:

Victor Henry turned his face from the hideous sight to the indigo arch of the sky, where Venus and the brightest stars still burned: Sirius, Capella, Procyon, the old navigation aids. The familiar religious awe came over him, the sense of a Presence above this pitiful little earth. He could almost picture God the Father looking down with sad wonder at this mischief. In a world so rich and lovely, could his children find nothing better to do than dig iron from the ground and work it into vast grotesque engines for blowing each other up? Yet this madness was the way of the world.⁷

No doubt “this madness” is part of the “opposition in all things” (2 Nephi 2:11). The dichotomy of war and peace thus seems inherent to the human condition, but not necessarily immutable. For it is an opposition that I’m certain almost all of us would be very happy to live without, and there are far better things that God’s children can find to do. The “comrades of the sea” can certainly attest to that.

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¹ Summary of events from http://wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Sheffield_(D80).
² Statistics from http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/may/4/newsid_2504000/2504155.stm.
³ Simon Winchester, Atlantic, New York: HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., 2010, p. 211.
⁴ Nicholas Monsarrat, The Cruel Sea, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988, p. 274. While officially a novel, this book is in reality the author’s wartime memoir thinly veiled as fiction.
⁵ Ibid.
⁶ Winchester, loc. cit.
⁷ Herman Wouk, The Winds of War, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1971, p. 887.