3 for the Sea: Details

This is the eleventh 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 extraordinary quality of observation.

Art is in the details. Consider this passage, one of my favourites in O’Hanlon’s Trawler: 

Smacked left, hard, against the steel plates of the inward bulging port-bow and right, hard, against the steel partition of the rusty shower, I pitched to my knees in front of the seatless bowl and held on to the rim with both hands, hard. On the floor to either side were two big circular iron valves, each stamped SCUPPER DISCHARGE O/BOARD. I lowered my face into the bowl. The head-torch lit up every ancient and modern shit-splatter: one, particularly old and black, in front of my nostrils, was shaped like a heart. And then I said goodbye to all that Guiness, to the pig’s supper at the Royal Hotel (£28 for two) and even, perhaps to a day-old bolus of breakfast at Bev’s Kitchen, Nairn.

I remember reading this for the first time, and thinking, oh god, he’s not actually going to do this. Then comes “I lowered my face into the bowl,” and I realize ugh, here we go! And then comes that transfixing, unforgettable bit of grossness: “The head-torch lit up every ancient and modern shit-splatter: one, particularly old and black, in front of my nostrils, was shaped like a heart.” 

Let’s consider another example. I mentioned earlier the artful way Raban, in Passage to Juneau, blends his account of his journey through the Inside Passage with that of Captain George Vancouver two hundred years previous. At one point, Raban describes a flogging that took place on Vancouver’s Discovery:

At six bells in the forenoon watch (eleven o’clock), all officers and midshipmen were ordered to present themselves in uniform and wearing swords, in the main cabin. The fifteen marines aboard were mustered on the quarterdeck under their lieutenant, standing at attention with muskets shouldered. The bosun’s mate carried the cat-o’-nine tails in his ceremonial red-plush bag. (Hence “to let the cat out of the bag.”)

Archibald Menzies, as ship’s naturalist, claimed the privilege of a civilian and kept to his private cabin, where he still could hear the intolerably long-drawn-out administration of the punishment. The drumlike construction of the ship’s hull made the sounds of John Noot’s footsteps, and each crack of the lash, reverberate between decks.

After the first dozen lashes was an interval. Blood trickled from the welts on Pitt’s narrow back; his body looked like a carcass hanging in a butcher’s shop. Mudge detached himself from the line of officers and went up to the boy, saying that if Pitt would vow to behave better in the future, he would plead with the captain to remit the final dozen lashes. 

With what was left of his words, the midshipman said something about “honour,” and then that he “would not begd off by Mr. Mudge.”

Noot laid on twelve more strokes of the cat.

That, for me, is one of the most memorable scenes in the book. What makes it memorable is the detail – the red-plush bag in which the cat-o’-nine tails is carried, the reverberation of the crack of the lash between decks, Pitt’s body like “a carcass hanging in a butcher shop.” The terse unflinching final line (“Noot laid on twelve more strokes of the cat”) is inspired.

McPhee’s selection of details in Looking for a Ship is masterful. Here’s his description of Stella’s mooring line – itself a detail not many people would notice:

Ships are tied up with what the rest of the world would call ropes. They look anachronistic – like rope you would see in a seaport museum, but larger. A good mooring line costs eight thousand dollars. Made of Dacron for strength and polypropylene for flexibility, it is six hundred feet long. We carry eighteen. As a mooring line payed out over the side and reached like a suspension cable in the direction of the pier, the ship was so askew that six hundred feet might not do. You marry one line to another if the need arises. In Genoa once, on the Almeria Lykes, Washburn married three lines and winched the ship more than a thousand feet. The one line spanned the distance here and was soon secured to bollards. A dugout canoe passed below it, moving smartly under a sail made of flour sacks. Very slowly against the wind – completing what Washburn would later call “one of the poorest dockings in marine history” – Stella reeled herself in. 

I relish that extra detail – “A dugout canoe passed below it, moving smartly under a sail made of flour sacks.” It shows McPhee’s avid eye for particulars. 

In next month’s post, the last in this series, I’ll try to sum up my experience rereading these three great books.