3 for the Sea: First Person

This is the eighth in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread my three favorite marine travel books – John McPhee’s Looking for a Ship (1990), Jonathan Raban’s Passage to Juneau (1999), Redmond O’Hanlon’s Trawler (2003) – and compare them. Today, I’ll focus on their use of the first person.

All three of these books are written in the first-person major. That, for me, is a compelling aspect of their style. They aren’t second-hand reports (except when they're recounting other people's stories or telling about historical events). McPhee, Raban, and O’Hanlon were actually there – on the Stella Lykes, in Guayaquil, as pirates climb up the anchor chain (McPhee); on the Penelope, as it spins through the “multibillion-gallon turmoil” of Deception Pass (Raban); on the Norlantean, as it wallows deep down in the waves of a North Atlantic hurricane (O’Hanlon). They’re writing from personal experience, which, for me, is the most concrete form of reality. 

But each of them has a distinctive way of “being there.” Their “I”s differ from each other. Raban and O’Hanlon are much more self-revealing than McPhee. Raban writes about his father’s death. He shows his marriage fall apart. He discloses his fears:

I am afraid of the sea. I fear the brushfire crackle of the breaking wave as it topples into foam; the inward suck of the tidal whirlpool; the loom of a big ocean swell, sinister and dark, in windless calm; the rip, the eddy, the race; the sheer abyssal depth of the water, as one floats like a trustful beetle on the surface tension. Rationalism deserts me at sea. I’ve seen the scowl of enmity and contempt on the face of a wave that broke from the pack and swerved to strike my boat. I have twice promised God that I would never again put out to sea, if only He would, just this once, let me reach harbour. I’m not a natural sailor, but a timid, weedy, cerebral type, never more out of my element than when I’m at sea.

O’Hanlon writes a transfixing form of interior monologue, often in parentheses, constantly revealing his inner thoughts. For example:

(So why hadn’t I noticed that? Why hadn’t I even registered that steel slide – big enough to stand in – leading to the steel gate of the scupper, where the light from the sea outside shone so white, where, I supposed, the gannets and the kittiwakes waited, and whence, as the Norlantean took those violent rolls to starboard, the cold fresh manic sea powered and swept across the deck? It’s OK, I said to myself, stop this nonsense, you’re in another world – you don’t need these self-imposed anxieties; you can’t expect to understand everything at once – relax; because there’s so much time ahead of you, so much genuine, external, comforting real fear – and it’s all coming your way …)

McPhee, in Looking for a Ship, doesn’t share many intimate thoughts. But his fascinating descriptions of life aboard the Stella Lykes sometimes include his personal response. For example:

I remember the first time I appeared in the officers’ dining room for dinner. The captain was there, and Andy Chase, and Bernie Tibbotts. All three had been served and were eating. No one else was present. Tibbotts sat alone at a table, facing the opposite wall. The captain, at his table, sat with his back to a third wall, looking into the room, and into the space between the turned backs of Chase and Tibbotts. Franz Kafka was up in the ceiling, crawling on a fluorescent tube. No one spoke. No one so much as nodded when I came in. I sat down where I was supposed to: at a fourth table, across the room from the captain, I looked at him through the slot between the other men’s backs. I did not have – I’m here to tell you – the temerity to speak.

All three of these books feature the kind of active first-person sentence I devour. Examples:

Sometimes I go on lookout with Peewee, Mac, or Calvin – go forward with a flashlight on the main deck at four, up the ladder to the fo’c’sle deck, around the windlasses and the anchor chains, and past the hawsepipes to the absolute point of the bow, where the lookout station conforms to the requirements of admiralty court, being “as far forward and as low down as conditions allow.” [Looking for a Ship]

At the fairway buoy, I killed the engine and unrolled the headsail, letting the boat drift north on the wind at a speed that could have been comfortably outstripped by a very old lady on a bicycle. [Passage to Juneau]

By the tail, which was not a fish-tail as you might imagine it, but several inches of raw-hide whip, I hoisted the 2-foot-long-huge-headed, slender-bodied, grey-silver, big-scaled, armour-plated, snub-snouted, underslung-mouthed pre-human fish to eye-level – and eye-to-eye it was truly disturbing, because its eyeball was three times the size of mine. [Trawler]

Below the bridge deck is the boat deck, and on the boat deck is Captain Washburn’s office. Nine A.M. I often sit here in the morning drinking coffee, reading manifests, and listening to him. [Looking for a Ship]

Using the depth-sounder like a blind man’s stick, I tap-tap-tapped around a broad apron of ground in a steady fourteen feet of water, where I let go the anchor, switched off the engine and found my hands were incapable of striking a match to light a cigarette. [Passage to Juneau]

I made my way round to him – hanging on to the edge of the conveyor to the hold, to the curve of the gutting table; I clambered over the hopper-conveyor; and I stood, beginning to slide, like the big slimy fish, port to starboard, starboard to port. [Trawler]

An active verb, a line of specific description, and the indispensable “I” – these are the ingredients of my favourite kind of sentence. These three books abound with them.

Postscript: Another aspect of these great books that I relish is their nature description. That will be the subject of my next post in this series.