3 for the Sea: Structure

This is the fourth 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 structure. 

McPhee’s Looking for a Ship has a curious structure. Unlike most travelogues, it doesn’t follow the journey as it was made through time and space. The book consists of seventeen untitled chapters. The first two, written in the past tense, are set in Charleston, South Carolina, where McPhee and his friend Andy Chase, second mate, look for a ship. They eventually find one, the Stella Lykes, that takes them on a forty-two-day run through the Panama Canal and down the coast of South America, with stops to unload and pick up freight at such ports as Cartagena, Valparaiso, Balboa, Buenaventura, Lima, and Guayaquil. Chapter 3, written in the present tense, plunges us directly into life aboard Stella. The date is August 10, “the twentieth day of the voyage.” Stella is six days out of Guayaquil, Ecuador, heading for Valparaiso, Chile. What happened to the previous nineteen days? What about the ports before Guayaquil – Cartagena, Balboa, Buenaventura? What about the Panama Canal? No mention of any of them. We jump from Charleston to Valparaiso. But be patient; keep reading. McPhee has his own artful way of proceeding. All these ports of call eventually enter the narrative: Valparaiso in Chapter 3; Cartagena in Chapter 4; Guayaquil in Chapters 5, 12, and 13; Balboa and Panama Canal in Chapter 11; Lima in Chapter 12; Buenaventura in Chapter 15.

Looking for a Ship’s structure isn’t determined by chronology. It’s theme-driven. One of its main themes is the strong character and superb seamanship of Stella’s captain – Paul McHenry Washburn. McPhee calls him “the most interesting person on the ship.” Washburn appears in almost every chapter. McPhee describes him on the bridge, interviews him in his office, shows him docking Stella in some tight spots, tells about his personal history, visits him at his home in Jacksonville, shows him outwitting a Caribbean storm, describes him dealing with pirates, stowaways, and Stella’s burners going out. 

Captain Washburn is one of McPhee’s themes. Another is the decline of the American Merchant Marine. It’s this theme that generates the ending of the book, with Stella dead in the water. When I first read Looking for a Ship many years ago, I found this ending abrupt and unsatisfying. The journey seemed prematurely terminated (even though there’s at least one clue – the reference in Chapter 17 to the inspection of Stella’s hull in Port Newark – indicating the ship did make it back to where it started). But, on second reading recently, the ending strikes me as perfect. Stella, floating dead in the water, is a marvellous symbol of the United States Merchant Marine’s predicament. McPhee’s final sentence is consummate:

With our lemons and lollipops and terrycloth towels, our three thousand cases of wine, with out ninety drums of passion-fruit juice, our onions, umbrellas, bone glue, and balsa wood, our kiln-dried radiata pine, with our glass Nativity scenes and our peach chips, we are dead in the water.

Unlike Looking for a Ship, Jonathan Raban’s Passage to Juneau unfolds in a straight chronological line. Events are described in the order they happened. There are no flashbacks. But there is a neat structural wrinkle. Raban braids two narratives: (1) his journey through the Inside Passage; (2) Captain George Vancouver’s 1792 exploratory voyage through the same body of water. The two strands are beautifully interlaced. At times, it’s almost as if Captain Van is sailing right there with him (“I’d planned that day to sail up Admiralty Inlet and cross the strait, meeting Vancouver’s expedition as his small boats made their way south into the sound”). 

The primary narrative – Raban’s account of his trip – moves in the most natural way, day by day, noting details, logging impressions. I relish this journal-like form of writing. The book consists of eight chapters. The first begins in Seattle, in March. The last ends back in Seattle, in August. Chapter 5 contains a surprise, a break in the narrative line. Raban suspends his trip, docks his boat in Potts Lagoon, approximately midway on his voyage, and returns to his Seattle home, where he learns that his father is seriously ill. Raban flies to England to be with him. We go from the labyrinthine channels, mercurial tides, and boiling whirlpools of the Inside Passage to the lawns and gardens of Market Harborough and the modest brick bungalow where his mother and father live. We’re plunged directly into Raban’s personal life, his sometimes prickly relations with his parents and siblings. Raban describes his father’s death, funeral, and cremation. The chapter, called “Rite of Passage,” is forty-six pages long. Its content contrasts sharply with the rest of the book. At the chapter’s end, Raban flies back to Potts Lagoon and resumes his voyage. But his mood has changed (“There was no avoiding my father now”). 

Earlier, I described Chapter 5 as a break in the narrative. But, on reflection, I don’t think it is. It’s part of the chronology of events that happened during the voyage. By including it, Raban shows his fidelity to real life. 

Redmond O’Hanlon’s Trawler is interestingly structured. The first three chapters are chronological; the remaining eleven are thematic. The book begins at O’Hanlon’s home in Oxfordshire. He receives an excited call from his friend Luke Bullough:

Redmond, you’ve got to get up here, fast. There’s a storm coming in, big style! I have the satellite maps. Force 11, maybe more. Straight for Orkney. And Jason, the Norlantean skipper – he’s called on Cellnet. He’s north-west of Shetland. He says the weather’s horrendous. And getting worse. Perfect! Just what you wanted! He says we sign on at Scrabster, Saturday, two days’ time, 7 a.m., no later. OK? Good. So pick me up at home – 19 Pilot Square, Fittie. Be there! And remember – nothing green.

The first three chapters tell about O’Hanlon’s trip to Fittie to pick up Luke, and then about the two of them continuing on to Scrabster, where they board the Norlantean. The ship then makes a short trip to Stromness, where it takes on supplies and ice, and where O’Hanlon, Luke, and some of the crewmen visit a couple of bars. Then back aboard the Norlantean, and away she goes, away, away to the wild North Atlantic fishing-grounds. In one of my favourite sentences, O’Hanlon describes her departure this way:

The next day, in full, black, northern winter night of four o’clock in the afternoon, in a constant, unvarying wind of such violence that I found it almost impossible to stand on deck, the Norlantean, spotlights blazing, left Stromness.

The rest of the book takes place on the Norlantean. We say goodbye to chronological narration. The trip becomes a series of pungent, vivid, humorous set pieces. For example, Chapter 4 takes place in the fish-room, where O’Hanlon learns to gut Greenland halibut (“my gloves only just got a grip on its smooth slimy skin”). Chapter 5 shows him in the galley, eating clapshot (“I decided that I actually liked minced sheep’s-oesophagus-and-stomach, both lengths of colon, the rectum, the entire alimentary canal, as long as it had that reassuringly acrid background taste of gunpowder”). Chapter 6 describes being in the wheelhouse during a Force 12, Category One hurricane (“I was silent, mesmerized by the lines of foam streaking towards the bow window, lit by the bow searchlight, flying seawater whipped into white by winds gone berserk, like snow in a blizzard, except that the snowflakes had got together, coagulated, as if they were whole long lines of detached wave-crests, coming at me in a solid weighted mass”). 

Each of Trawler's chapters describes a particular aspect of shipboard life. Time seems measured not in days or hours, but in hauls. 

To sum up, Passage to Juneau is chronological; Looking for a Ship is thematic; Trawler is partly chronological and partly thematic. All three structures contain an immense amount of action. That’s the subject of my next post in this series.