3 for the Sea: People

This is the seventh 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 sense of people. 

There are dozens of people in McPhee’s Looking for a Ship – dispatchers, crew members, pilots, pirates, and stowaways. McPhee sketches many of them. But one man stands out: Stella’s captain, Paul McHenry Washburn. McPhee calls him “the most interesting person on the ship.” Here’s our first glimpse of him:

We hear a door open and close. Another opens. Captain Washburn comes into the wheelhouse. “Good morning, good morning,” he says. The first salutation may be for us, the second for the ship. The captain routinely talks to the ship. 

A few pages later, McPhee describes Washburn in more detail:

Now about to dock in a foreign city, he is wearing his more-or-less dress blues. His shoes and trousers are dark and naval. His white short-sleeved shirt, open at the collar, has epaulets striped with gold. There is gold braid on his visor. His glasses are rimmed with gold. As he moves back and forth on the bridge, he takes things in with the comprehensive gaze of a boxer. He leans forward like a boxer, his mouth and jaw set firm. His body is chunky, his paunch under control, like a trimmed spinnaker. Wisps of gray edge his cap. His face – beardless, full-featured – appears to have been the site of an epic battle, wherein the vitriol he speaks of has at last been subdued by humor.

McPhee tells Washburn’s family history (“Captain Washburn’s family name derives from Great Washburne, near Evesham, in the English Midlands”); he tells about the old skippers that Washburn sailed with when he was young (“The captain learned from Leadline Dunn, from Terrible Terry Harmon, from Dirty Shirt George Price”); he tells about his life (“Aged thirteen, fourteen, and upward, he rode freights as a hobo”); he visits him in his office on the boat deck, and listens to him talk (“Straightening up with a sheet of paper in his hand, Captain Washburn looks out a window past a lifeboat in its davits and over the blue sea. After a moment, he says, ‘I love going to sea. I do not love that sea out there, That is not my friend. That is my absolute twenty-four-hour-a-day sworn enemy’ ”); he visits him at his home in Jacksonville (“In the captain’s home, across town, the numerous religious calendars are outnumbered by the golfing trophies he has won in the pro-am tournaments of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes”); he plays golf with him (“Washburn tees up at Baymeadows, a quiet place under pines and palms”).

As ever with McPhee, action is character. Here he shows Washburn docking Stella: 

Now, in Buenaventura, the admiral decides to dock the ship himself, to ignore the hurt feelings of the pilot, to keep at a safe distance the incompetent tugs and reduce their crews to spectators, to rely on his own eye and his commands through the engine-order telegraph to solve this problem in very tight large-scale parallel parking. As an automobile driver, he may not know where he is. To watch him as a golfer, though, is to notice that the closer he gets to the pin the abler and more precise he becomes. Which of these characteristics will predominate here remains to be seen. His commands fall like rain, and in the same steady rhythm, with no revisions. With a few adjusting motions fore and aft, he goes into his berth as if were closing a drawer.

Those last two lines are inspired!

O’Hanlon’s Trawler is a boatload of distinctive “characters” – nine of them in total, including O’Hanlon. One way these men reveal their personalities is by their talk. O’Hanlon has a wonderful ear for dialogue. Here’s skipper Jason Schofield explaining to O’Hanlon what will happen if the Norlantean’s engines fail during the hurricane:

“Then what? Then what! Then, Redmond – we drown. It’s so simple. There’s no argument. I like that. I like that a lot. There’s no uncertainty about it. No bullshit. There’s no maybe this and maybe that, and on the other hand, and if you look at it from a different point of view, or perhaps percentage this and percentage that, and you could say it’s his rotten childhood or his bent social fucking worker or his great-fucking-granny, or come on, that Hitler, he only had one ball, so of course he had to invade Poland. No! Here there’s no bullshit! That’s not what it’s like here! You make a mistake? Simple. You drown.”

And here’s Robbie Stanger, “boss of the Greenland-halibut gutting unit,” talking to O’Hanlon on what it’s like working for Jason: 

“You’ll not know. You’ll think Jason’s the norm. Because you canna know any different unless I tell you. Well – he’s not. It’s true, maybe he doesna shout at us as much as usual because you’re on board. But he’s a focking miracle, really. That’s what he is. The real exception. I know you Redmond, your type, first-timers, people who want to be trawlermen, you know, straight out of college in Stromness, aye, and if not even their fathers were at the fishing, they’re starry-eyed, they talk about love-of-the-sea. Jeesus. So I’m telling you, being on a trawler, Redmond, you probably think the only problem is the weather. The weather! Who cares? You either die or you don’t – and you die all together. No, no – it’s the skipper. Because most of them are madder than the weather. More violent, you could say, more unpredictable. Now dinna get me wrong. I’m sure I’d be the same. Millions of pounds in debt. Like Jason. And then Jason has a wife and child at home to look after, and another on the way. I shouldn’t wonder. And there again, his father-in-law, the greatest Orkney trawlerman of the ;ast generation – skipper of the Viking, the Viking for Chrissake! And we all know what he says to himself every waking minute of every focking day – ‘my daughter, the loveliest daughter in the world’ (along with her sisters, of course, if she has any sisters) ‘– that Jason she married, is he a real man or just a no-good-slack-arsed-focking southerner?’ Aye. The strain of it. Being a skipper – that’s not for me. I’d go mad too, I know I would. But here’s the thing, Redmond. Jason, he’s quick as a focking ghost, one problem and he’s out the brown door of that wheelhouse quick as a focking ghost – and I’m telling you now, he’s sane.” 

Some of the book’s most absorbing (and humorous) dialogue is between O’Hanlon and his friend Luke Bullough. Bullough is a biologist at the Marine Laboratory, Aberdeen, and a member of the Aberdeen lifeboat crew. O’Hanlon says he’s “probably the toughest (and certainly the most modest) young man I’d ever met,” “a man with a vast experience of the real sea: as a research diver in Antarctica; as a Fisheries Patrol officer in the Falklands; on trawlers and research ships in the North Atlantic.”

O’Hanlon and Bullough are both talkers; they talk to each other about all kinds of things – fish, sex, marriage, evolution – but especially fish. Bullough loves fish. Here he’s talking to O’Hanlon about a lumpsucker:

“Aye! And guess what? The female makes her way up and ashore in April and lays up to 300,000 pink eggs between the mid-tide and low-water level, spread over a rock. And then? She fins it back out to sea, gone, buggered off, excuse me, she deserts and saves herself! And guess who stays and aerates the eggs? Who takes no food from April to November, his stomach distended with nothing but water? The male! Poor sod. So who’s in guard position when the tide is out and here come the gulls and crows and rats? Who’s not left his post (if he hasn’t been pecked or gnawed to death) when the tide comes in and he does his main job, aerating the eggs with his fins, bringing home that critical extra oxygen? Eh? The male! He stays there when the tide sweeps in with those hungry big, big fish! That’s the kind of father I’d like to be!”

Dialogue in Raban’s Passage to Juneau is sparse. Raban is sailing solo. The only chance he gets to speak to anyone in person is when he’s ashore. Most of those conversations are brief. Nevertheless, he does meet a variety of people: the Seattle electrician (John Munroe) who re-wires his boat; the lock-keeper at Ballard Locks; the captain of the ferry Vancouver Island Princess; two Sidney customs officers; the clerk in the Sidney bookstore; the yachtsman in Sidney marina; the mill-worker in Crofton; two Crofton beachcombers; the retired couple (“the Schmales”) at the Jolly Roger resort; the two brothers on the dock at Vananda; the bank clerk in Vananda; the woman in Vananda who asks for help to bury her goat (Raban refuses); the Vananda wharfinger; the resort owner on Blind Channel; the Indian fisherman on Minstrel Island; the manager of the Minstrel Island hotel; two members of a Minstrel Island logging crew; John and Wendy Walders, owners of the floathouse on Potts Lagoon; the pilot of the floatplane that flies Raban from Potts Lagoon to Port McNeill; the Raban family in Market Harborough – Raban’s mother, father, and three brothers; Raban’s wife (Jean) and daughter (Julia); Owen, the young man in Bella Bella who invites Raban to a party; the biologist in Klemtu; two Port Simpson men repairing a gill net; the man in Port Simpson who challenges Raban to a fight; the owner of a Port Simpson troller; the gill-netter in Revillagigedo Channel; the duty officer in Ketchikan; the couple (Simon and Monique) in the Ketchikan hotel dining room; the young woman on the Ketchikan boardwalk (“Yawannadate?”); Gloria, the Ketchikan cabdriver; the Compass Rose couple (Derek and Linda); the captain of the research vessel John A. Cobb; Bruce Finney, a scientist on the John A. Cobb; the kid named Rebecca on the Juneau dock; the fisherman named Joe on the boat docked next to Raban’s in Juneau.    

Compiling this list of people in Passage to Juneau expands my appreciation of the book’s circumstantial richness. So many scenes, incidents and images! 

For me, the most significant people in these three books are the authors themselves. Their “I”s are present on almost every page. What are they like as characters? Can these works be read as self-portraits? What are the implications of their first-person perspective? That’s the subject of my next post in this series.