In the Wake of Melville and Conrad: Writing the Modern Sea Novel

by David Poyer

That is, sea fiction; the vast literature of the sea; the timeless appeal of stories of men who go down to the sea in ships. And women too -- we WILL get to that point -- but not till we explore some other points, and themes, and challenges first.

First, what is a "sea novel?" Our first answer -- that it's a novel that takes place at sea, on a ship -- isn't as self-obviously right as it may sound at first. What about submarine novels? I think they're sea novels. Then, what about castaways? Is ROBINSON CRUSOE a sea novel? The novel only begins when the voyage ends, but I think it's a sea novel, mainly because disaster -- being lost at sea, being cast away -- is always at the edge of a mariner's consciousness. The actual experience, then, is well within the envelope of the concept. Well, what about HUCKLEBERRY FINN? FINN has a "ship" in it, Huck and Jim's raft. There's a voyage in it, the raft voyage down the Mississippi. But I don't think anyone would seriously try to call it a sea novel. Right? Well, then, how about HEART OF DARKNESS? It take place in a river too. Is it a sea novel? And what about a novel set on the Great Lakes? Then we'd have a ship, but it would be floating on fresh water.

So there are fuzzinesses around the edges of any definition. But basically, I don't think we can go far wrong if we expect our sea fiction to have either a ship in it somewhere or else, at least, take place around the sea. A proper sea novel should have a whiff of salt in it, and a ship.

The historical perspective can be carried far back in time -- beyond 931 BC; but if we're going to confine ourselves to fiction familiar to today's reading audience, I think that's the place to start. With the ODYSSEY, Homer's great epic poem of a sailor's long voyage back from Troy; lost, shipwrecked, cast away, making his way through foreign lands and many adventures, but at last finding his way home.

But the rest of the genre's backstory is surprisingly short. We don't really see sea fiction again until a few glimmerings dawn in the eighteenth century, with Jonathan Swift, Daniel Defoe, and Henry Fielding. None of their books took place entirely at sea, but significant sections or portions of the action were set there. The one disapppointing near-miss is a second-rank novelist named Tobias Smollett. Smollett, who had a smattering of medical education, went to sea with the Royal Navy in 1740 as a surgeon's mate, what would today be called a corpsman. He saw action at Cartagena before marrying a Jamaican heiress and giving up enlisted life at sea. His two picaresque novels, THE ADVENTURES OF RODERICK RANDOM and THE ADVENTURES OF PEREGRINE PICKLE contain some fairly graphic descriptions of British naval life of that era. But the sea portions were only used as a diversion from the heroes' fortune-hunting and misadventures ashore, and Smollett missed the chance to launch a whole new form of English fiction.

Aside from these four authors, what did get written in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was a mass of nonfiction on which a great deal that came later is based. These are what are called Voyage Literature; reports by voyagers of their travels and adventures. People like Sir Walter Raleigh who sailed to unknown parts of the world, came back, and reported on what they'd seen and done. There were useful memoirs by humble sailors too, such as Alexander Selkirk, the real-life castaway upon whom ROBINSON CRUSOE was based. There were compendiums, such as Captain Charles Johnson's A GENERAL HISTORY OF THE ROBBERIES AND MURDERS OF THE MOST NOTORIOUS PIRATES, John Esquemeling's THE BUCCANEERS OF AMERICA (1678), and William Dampier's A NEW VOYAGE AROUND THE WORLD, based on the personal journal of the gentleman-pirate Basil Ringrose. Books such as A NARRATIVE OF EVENTS IN THE LIFE OF JOHN BARTLETT OF BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS, IN THE YEARS 1790-1793, DURING VOYAGES TO CANTON, THE NORTHWEST COAST OF NORTH AMERICA, AND ELSEWHERE; THE ADVENTURES OF JOHN NICHOL, MARINER, DURING THIRTY YEARS AT SEA; and many others, usually published privately by the Vantage Presses of the day.

This tide of what we might call "naive" or "primitive" literature continued until the 1850's, when the last corners of the world were mapped. It was these unpolished but authoritative accounts that carried the tang of the sea to such landsmen as Swift, Defoe, and Fielding.

This is perhaps the place to mention too that not all nonfiction by seamen has been primitive work -- that some of the best sea literature has been nonfiction - Richard Henry Dana, TWO YEARS BEFORE THE MAST, Conrad, THE MIRROR OF THE SEA, Joshua Slocum, SAILING ALONE ROUND THE WORLD, Steinbeck, LOG OF THE SEA OF CORTEZ, John McPhee, LOOKING FOR A SHIP.

You'll note that almost all of these works of Voyage Literature were in English. And so, not coincidentally, has been almost all the fiction I'll discuss. Thomas Mann said English was "the classical tongue of the seafaring man." This is a genre that belongs to the English-speaking peoples, the seagoing peoples, the British and the Americans. There are occasional works in Dutch, in German, or in French, but it's worth noting that when even a Pole or a Dutchman truly commits himself to sea writing, like Conrad or de Hartog, they write in English rather than their native tongues.

The real flowering of the sea novel came in the early nineteenth century. They were the first books set at sea that really worked as novels. So we're going to have to spend some time with Cooper, Marryat, Melville, and Conrad. The nineteenth-century guys. So many of the genres we know today started then -- science fiction, horror, detective fiction, the western -- that the early 19th century was the great forcing-ground, the hotbed of new literature throughout the world.

The first real practitioner of the craft of sea fiction was James Fenimore Cooper. Dismissed from Yale for practical jokes, Cooper spent five years as a Navy midshipman, an experience that gave him the background for the first realistic portrayal of sea adventure. Mark Twain laughed at Cooper's Leatherstocking, but such old salts as Melville and Conrad admired his pictures of life at sea in THE PILOT, THE RED ROVER, and THE SEA LIONS. "Never before in prose fiction had the sea become not merely a theatre for, but the principal actor in, moral drama that celebrated man's courage and skill at the same time that it revealed him humbled by the forces of God's nature. As developed by Cooper, and later by Melville, the sea novel became a powerful vehicle for spiritual as well as moral exploration." (G.De., Encyc Brit, III.604.)

Almost contemporary with Cooper was his English counterpart, Captain Frederick Marryat. Marryat entered the Royal Navy at the age of 14 and retired in 1830 with captain's rank. He then embarked on a second career as a writer of straightforward, rousing, and often funny tales of sea adventure. Almost forgotten today, MR. MIDSHIPMAN EASY, PETER SIMPLE, THE KING'S OWN and POOR JACK are still great reading for any C.S. Forester or Patrick O'Brien fan.

The next and perhaps the greatest was Herman Melville, a writer who needs no introduction to anyone who went to high school. Melville began his sea career in 1839, served in merchant ships and whalers, jumped ship, was jailed for mutiny, served on more whalers, and finally returned to New York as an ordinary seaman in a US Navy frigate. In all, he spent about six years at sea. He wrote five minor sea novels before his masterpiece, MOBY-DICK. On one level, MOBY-DICK, OR THE WHALE is an authentic account of whaling. On another, it's about the defeat of all human endeavors, and the precarious balance between the creative and the murderous as we face the immense mystery of our lives. Here for the first time was masterly literature, set at sea.

The other great master abandoned his native Poland and served for nineteen years in the French and then English merchant services before being forced ashore unwillingly by the change from sail to steam. Joseph Conrad's LORD JIM, THE NIGGER OF THE NARCISSUS, YOUTH, CHANCE, and TYPHOON are, along with MOBY DICK, among the greatest works of literature in English.

Melville and Conrad were followed by novelists who need no real introduction because we all still read them today: Robert Louis Stevenson, Stephen Crane, Jack London, and on into the twentieth century with Erskine Childers, Nordhoff and Hall, Katharine Anne Porter, C.S. Forester, Herman Wouk, Sterling Hayden, Jan de Hartog, Nicholas Monserrat, Hammond Innes, Edward Beach, Charles Williams, Patrick O'Brien, and Douglas Reeman.

ELEMENTS or COMMON THEMES OF SEA NOVELS

Now, every sea novel worth its salt has not one, but several themes. Many of which will be the same that infuse any good novel. Thus, one theme of MOBY-DICK is revenge; a theme of BILLY BUDD is cruelty; and so forth.

In order to differentiate the sea novel from its shorebound brethren, we have to look for those themes that sea fiction specializes in; those themes unique to the genre, themes which are relatively uncommon among novels set ashore.

In cogitating on this subject, and in discussing it with friends and fellow workers in the craft -- among which the most influential is Herb Gilliland, professor of literature at Annapolis -- we've managed to separate out five major and four minor elements or themes common in sea novels. I think examining each in turn will give us a look deeper into the gears and shafts of the genre.

1. The first theme is separation. Human beings at sea are separated both literally and metaphorically from the rest of the world. There are two aspects to this separation, small-group and solitary. In the small-group setting, we deal with a set of people in very close quarters who can't get away from each other; they're at sea, or at best visiting an island or an unfamiliar port, but anyway, together for a very long time. Stephen Crane paints this in THE OPEN BOAT: "It would be difficult to describe the subtle brotherhood of men that was here established on the seas. No one said that it was so. No one mentioned it. But it dwelt in the boat, and each man felt it warm him. They were a captain, an oiler, a cook, and a correspondent, and they were friends, friends in a more curiously iron-bound degree than may be common. The hurt captain, lying against the water-jar in the bow, spoke always in a low voice and calmly, but he could never command a more ready and swiftly obedient crew than the motley three of the dingey. It was more than a mere recognition of what was best for the common safety. There was surely in it a quality that was personal and heartfelt. And after this devotion to the commander of the boat there was this comradeship that the correspondent, for instance, who had been taught to be cynical of men, knew even at the time was the best experience of his life."

The second form of separation is the solitary aspect; a work that treats one single person; Joshua Slocum, sailing alone around the world; Robinson Crusoe; Piers Paul Reid. That is, the lone sailor of a small craft, or the shipwrecked or castaway or adrift individual, left to his own devices, his own thoughts, his own resources for a prolonged period. This lone person may either overcome the hostility or indifference of Nature by his own efforts, like Slocum or Crusoe, or he may succumb to it, like Kurtz in HEART OF DARKNESS succumbs to the savagery, "the horror." The theme of separation has some marked effects on a piece of fiction. It makes the people involved seem more vivid, because they are viewed in isolation -- or at least that was my experience at sea. Also, it allows the writer to isolate, hedge in, almost experiment in a test tube with all the larger values and questions so confusedly intermixed with other issues and considerations ashore.

2. The second theme of sea fiction is command. This is a common theme to both 19th and 20th century fiction. The madness of command: Ahab in the Pequod, Heine & Wagner's treatment of the mad captain Vanderdecken in THE FLYING DUTCHMAN, and Wolf Larsen in Jack London's THE SEA WOLF. All these captains are perfectly in line with Marlowe's and Mann's interpretation of the Faust legend: a man of titanic ambition willingly parts company with law and sanity to follow the demonic compass within his own soul. Herman Wouk's Captain Philip Queeg and my own Isaac Sundstrom are pale shadows of these titanic figures, an example of Hannah Arendt's banality of evil.

But not all captains are evil or mad. Some are simply wrong. Conrad's Captain McWhirr in TYPHOON is simply too unimaginative to make the correct decision when confronted by a typhoon. His Captain Whalley in THE END OF THE TETHER is blind, but conceals it to keep his post until retirement.

My own character, Captain Jimmy John Packer in THE CIRCLE, makes one error -- saying "left rudder" instead of "right rudder" at night, in close maneuvers in company with a carrier -- which dooms the REYNOLDS RYAN and all who sail in her to a fiery death. The captain is more than master of his own fate; he controls the destiny, the very lives of all aboard his ship. Another, broader name for this same theme is discipline. In BILLY BUDD the captain must serve discipline by hanging Billy even though he knows the boy is innocent. And he does.

The lure of this theme for the writer is not that discipline must exist at sea. That's a given. The imperative is that each character must formulate his own attitude toward that discipline and that command. This, as much as anything, defines a character in a work set at sea; and it is either underlying or overt rebellion, mutiny, or disobedience, which is the dark or shadow side of the iron discipline of the ship. Thus, in THE NIGGER OF THE NARCISSUS, the tubercular James Waite uses his obvious illness to incite rebellion and destroy the unity of the crew; and in THE CIRCLE, the rebellious Seaman Slick Lassard confronts Dan Lenson, casting himself in the role of the rebellious slave; and in THE SAND PEBBLES the antiestablishmentarian hero has his own stormy relationship with his officers that ends in his rejection of their values; and in THE CAINE MUTINY each officer must confront and ultimately decide his own breaking point between obedience and mutiny.

Why does the theme of rebellion lie so close to the surface of the sea novel? I think it's simply because it's possible. Unlike the army, with its shadowy heirarchy stretching up and up, aboard ship only one, highly accessible man stands between the rebel and his liberation. If he be mad, cruel, or even just dangerously incompetent, the shadow of mutiny is never far from the mind of his crew. With certain captains even I have thought of murder, and I am the gentlest of men.

3. The third distinguishing theme of sea fiction is Technique, or what Professor Gilliland calls techné; the machinery, the mechanisms that are presumably mastered (or at least used) by the people in the stories. I think it's safe to assert that this has always been a distinguishing factor of sea fiction. The most complicated device existing in the 18th century was a fullrigged warship, and certainly its present-day successors, the carrier and the nuclear submarine, are rivals for the most complex devices of the 20th century. Think of THE SAND PEBBLES; if you took the machinery out of that book it wouldn't be a book. Or DELILAH, by Marcus Goodrich, the guys shoveling all that coal into the boilers. The hilarious passage in THE CAINE MUTINY when one of the officer candidates memorizes the passage describing the frictionless bearing. Under technique also certainly falls seamanship, the technical skill and artistry involved in steering the ship safely through changing weather and sea conditions.

4. Which leads us neatly into Theme 4: the Sea itself. Surrounding us as the unfeeling universe surrounds each human being, the sea is first of all a huge physical phenomenon. There it IS, and puny you are confronting it, experiencing it as an unyielding and sometimes overwhelming natural phenomena.

Today's sailor may go for days without seeing the sea, and the submariner may not see the smallest corner of the natural world for an entire six-month cruise. But whether seen or unseen, the sea is there, whispering just outside the steel walls. You have to deal with it at some level, you have to take some attitude toward it as a writer, simply because it's there. But what IS it that's there? Is it an empty physical structure, a metaphor, a symbol, or something else?

Bob Madison of USNA points out that water is one of the four classical elements. Earth and air, fire and water are all present in sea novels. Fire shows up in DELILAH, as the flames at the heart of the engines, and as the fire that drives guns. Earth is the land where the ship was born, from which it was fashioned; (quote, that most beautiful thing made by the hand of man, ship of war). But at sea the land is present mainly by its absence, or by occasional faint signs: As in THE OPEN BOAT:

"The brown mats of sea-weed that appeared from time to time were like islands, bits of earth."

Air is both the driving force in sailing ships and a punishing enemy during storms. It often represents life itself when one is sinking or submerged. Yet at sea the dominating element is water.

And at the next level, the sea is a manifestation of more than physical reality, and more than metaphor or symbol; it is a manifestation of the divine. In the ODYSSEY, the stormy ocean is literally divine: Poseidon is personally angry at Odysseus. If you don't believe that the sea is actually divine, then it becomes a creature of God. If you're a mystic, as I am, the sea takes on a powerful metaphorical value. As witness the conversation on the bridge between Dan Lenson and Alan Evlin in THE CIRCLE, as the sea is shaking the old REYNOLDS RYAN apart late one night north of the Arctic Circle:

"So what did you mean, about the sea?"
"About the sea?"
"One night -- before the storm -- remember, we were having a kind of philosophical discussion. You told me to look out at the sea, and think about it."
"Oh. I remember now. And did you?"
The grin felt strange on his face. He'd wanted to ask Evlin this for a long time. "I've done a lot of looking, but I've been too scared to think."
A messman clattered down bread, peanut butter and jelly, butter in plastic tubs, sugar cookies. "Soup in the galley. Drink it out of cups, you want some."
"Thank you," said Evlin.
"Anyway, what did you mean?"
"I'd rather have you tell me what you thought I meant."
Dan said slowly, "If I get you right -- you were comparing our individual lives to the waves. Not as separate, but a . . . conceptual subset, like in Boolean algebra." He paused, but Evlin kept silently impastoing bread with peanut butter. "And . . . so that even though each wave looks different from the rest, and it seems sometimes they die and the sea's calm, really nothing's created, and nothing dies . . . it's just the sea, always changing, but always still the same."
The ops officer took a bite. "Chunky. I prefer smooth."
"And that our existence is like that," Dan said. He felt silly, but at the same time very clear, as if this was what he was supposed to be talking about right now, right here, in this crowded, careening space, with this man.
"I never said that. Nothing is like anything else. Language forces us to think in similes. It works when you're discussing things in terms of other things. But when you're talking about areas outside everyday experience -- particle physics, for example -- you can't use words at all, not and have it mean anything corresponding to reality."
"But it makes sense, somehow. It's true in terms of matter and energy. They don't vanish. They just change forms."
"But are the spiritual and physical worlds separate? The medieval Christians thought all of Nature was a book revealing the intent of God."
Dan said slowly, keeping his voice below the hum of other voices, "But what good does it do you to believe that, Al?"
"What good. Well, how would people act if they really thought everyone else was part of himself? That his neighbor's not only like him, the Golden Rule, but actually another, separate self, looking out through other eyes?"
"It would make you a lot more tolerant." He thought about it. "And maybe, kinder."
"And if you believed you'd be back?"
"It would make you care more about a lot of things, stuff you just shrug about now, because you figure it'll be somebody else's problem."
"It would change the world," Evlin said.

If you don't believe in God at all, you see the sea as Crane does in THE OPEN BOAT -- a divine absence, a divine uncaring; or as Conrad called it, "the immense indifference of things." (3) As he says of the sea, it has "no compassion, no faith, no law, no memory...nothing can touch the bitterness of its heart." But as a writer, you have to take some attitude toward it, as does every person who goes to sea. And that attitude directly reflects your philosophy and your attitude toward the world.

5. The fifth distinguishing theme is the sea as the source of the unknown -- like the closet in a kid's bedroom where you don't know what's in there till it comes out, or till you go in, to find out what it is. In the nineteenth century it held giant squids, beautiful mermaids, pirates, mysterious islands, great whales that could stove in a whaleboat without warning. In the twentieth century it holds the sunken ship, the torpedo, the nuclear missile, barrels of toxic waste, and fewer and fewer fish.

Those, I think, are the major distinguishing themes of sea fiction. There are also minor ones, and here are a few:

1. Coming of age -- often you have the character who begins the story as an inexperienced, naive young person, and by his exposure to life at sea they grow up, fast. "Ishmael" in MOBY-DICK, Dana in TWO YEARS BEFORE THE MAST, Dan Lenson in THE CIRCLE, Jim in LORD JIM and the unnamed narrator in YOUTH.

2. Sea literature tends to be heavily male; those are the people who have traditionally gone to sea. So you have associated themes of male bonding, male rivalry, and so forth. The exception to that rule so far can be called the cruise liner novel. The greatest is Katherine Anne Porter's SHIP OF FOOLS, but we can also mention THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE and a number of shipboard romance novels. True, the romance is more important than the engines or the weather, but I don't see why that makes them less sea novels -- there's a place for romance at sea.

3. Exploration -- the voyage protoliterature from which sea fiction originally evolved led naturally into a fiction of exploration. Many eighteenth and nineteenth century sea novels used exploration as a major theme. But this soon gave way to another genre. The crossover point, and a beautiful example, is Jules Verne's 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA. We can clearly see in that work how science fiction became the natural inheritor of the voyage of discovery theme from sea literature. The whole idea of the voyage mutated through Darwin to A.E. Van Vogt and then into the current plethora of STAR TREK and its imitators. Today the voyage theme survives at sea only in such ironical treatments as John Barth's Chesapeake Bay cruising novels.

4. Combat -- and how sea combat differs from battles on land and thus what we might call army novels. The primary difference is obvious: there's no possibility of individual retreat. Even if you snap and start running around screaming you're still on the ship. When the CO decides the ship goes somewhere he and the crew all go, you can't opt out or run away or do a red badge of courage routine. Thus the actions of the ship are much more an expression of the captain's will than the actions, say, of a division ashore. (As an elaboration on this -- the common point that many land-combat novels make, that of the individual's motivation by the group, the squad, hardly exists at sea. The other members of one's work center are hardly mentioned, and certainly the motivation of one's action is NOT to impress them, or to feel responsible for them. Thus, the highest accolade James Jones gives to the footsoldier -- that, even wounded, he will go back to fight with his squad, out of a sense that he cannot abandon them -- does not exist at sea. For at sea there is no retreat from the front line even for the wounded. Even wounded, the sailor remains on his ship, in the line of fire.)

But the most notable difference between war fiction set at sea and that set ashore today is what Paul Fussell calls "the depersonalization which is the stigma of modern war." Fussell's argument is that "In days when one's fighting was done by other people or entrusted to a special military caste, there was less occasion for the brutal truth-telling to which modern war writing aspires." The victim of mass conscription and military discipline, the omnipresent horrors of the modern battlefield, and the loss or attenuation of religious belief all contributed to "a painful ironic consciousness little known to soldiers a couple of centuries ago." He points to Hemingway, Remarque, Wilfred Owen, Norman Mailer, and Kurt Vonnegut as exponents of this view that war is vile and criminal; or, as Hemingway said, "Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime."

The war fiction set at sea is different precisely because it still so strongly resembles Fussell's "fighting . . . entrusted to a special military caste." War at sea is horrible, but nowhere near as much so as land warfare has become in this century. Ironically, it seems modern land warfare is becoming more like sea warfare these days: entrusted to a small, highly trained, specialized caste apart. The mass armies of draftees of Iraq were decimated by the modern US army. On the other hand, we also see the growth of militias, the devolution of warfare in Yugoslavia and Ruanda nearly to the medieval model of looters and freebooters. Still, I think the point at issue remains clear: that war at sea will continue to be the province of a caste apart; will continue to be less cruel, criminal, destructive, and insane than warfare ashore; and in such degree, will continue to deal with what little remains in modern war of the ideals of courage, will, and the older military virtues.

5. To return to our subthemes: the fifth is the ship as a character -- the notion that the ship becomes an important element in the story. This is treated explicitly in THE MIRROR OF THE SEA and implicitly in such works as THE CRUEL SEA. In general, in 19th century fiction we live with the same ship throughout the novel; but Madison pointed out to me in a conversation the interesting fact that in 20th century sea literature we tend to lose the original ship in the middle of the story and get a new one, with a certain amount of crew reconstitution and replacement. Thinking back to THE CAPTAIN, RUN SILENT RUN DEEP, and THE CRUEL SEA, he's absolutely right. Madison suggests that this is because in the age of steam ships may come back to land much more readily. I believe that this is part of the explanation; another part is the historical pattern of World War Two, with its initial reverses, its shocking rate of losses to U-boats, and its eventual outproduction of the Axis powers. All the books noted above were set during World War Two, and looking at sea books written since that war, I don't see a continuation of that pattern.

But it's undeniable that the ship becomes a character in sea fiction. The question is, why? I've theorized that it has something to do with the absence of the feminine at sea to date. In the absence of women, the ship must serve as the containing, supportive entity, that for which everything else must be sacrificed, occasionally capricious and stubborn yet ultimately that which saves and sustains all life. But this may be pure sexism on my part. Again, the ship may simply become a character in the way God is seen as a person, because as human beings we can only reconcile complex and contradictory behavior as the result of a personality. Obviously I'm still thinking about this one, but it's definitely a continuing theme.

THE FUTURE OF SEA NOVELS

Now we've talked a little about its history, and quite a bit about its common themes. But two questions remain. What does sea fiction do for us? And, can it go on doing it?

First, the sea novel has always provided the MICROCOSM as metaphor for the world. Authors as dissimilar as Katherine Ann Porter and Jack London have used the ship as an explicit metaphor for the world itself. The Microcosm is born of Separation, shared experience, and a limited cast of characters.

Second, it lets us play God to our little captive Jobs. It provides the combination of challenges -- conflicts, they're usually called in high school writing classes -- that makes for rich plotting. When we go to sea we can face nature, our fellow crewman, our national enemy, and our own cowardice and other character flaws. While the courtroom thriller, the mystery, the romance novel, the medical thriller can present us with only a few of these obstacles, the sea novel has always been able to present our fictive other selves with the whole panoply of literary afflictions.

That said, the genre is undergoing some sea changes (sorry) that are going to alter it irrevocably in the years ahead. The first challenge is what I call the "bus company" problem -- that modern merchant navigation has become so safe, so rapid, and so mundane that there's little drama left in the passage. Quick turnarounds mean no prolonged time at sea; crew relief means crews are changed out every couple of weeks; even medical emergencies are handled pretty much as they are ashore, with helicopter evacuation and modern first aid and antibiotics. Who wants to read about the safe daily operation of a bus company? Note that the problem is not the commonplace character of what's done at sea. Even the most backbreaking work achieves a sort of mystical nobility in Melville, or in Rudyard Kipling's CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS. Nothing is more commonplace than commercial fishing. The whalers of the 1840's probably thought nothing was more commonplace than whaling. But though it was hard, rough work, hunting whales with hand-harpoons was dangerous. Fishing in a small boat before modern engines and navigation was dangerous. When danger goes, so does drama.

But when we search out those areas of modern seafaring that still retain an element of danger -- commercial oilfield diving, as in my book LOUISIANA BLUE; drug smuggling; commercial salvage; deep-sea exploration; sailing around the world in a twelve- foot boat; hunting the great white shark that terrifies the New Jersey coast -- then we revive again this tired corpse with a new and startling life, and all the old metaphors and situations and characters can leap once again to our reader's enjoyment and ours.

But overall, the only danger that can really threaten us at sea today is the threat of war. And that is why contemporary sea fiction is set almost exclusively aboard Navy ships.

Closely related to the turning of the oceans into bus routes is the demystification of the sea. Only the deepest depths still retain a hint of that "mystery of the dark closet," the sense that something new and wholly strange may appear. We know now that the Monster is not going to appear ahead of our bows one misty morning, the giant squid will never attack the Nautilus, that the mermaids are gone and the manatees are going. We will never again discover a new land, a new and uncharted island cried first by the lookout at our masttop. No more new races of noble and loving savages, nor violent and hungry cannibals, no mysterious new civilizations will enrich the pages of our logs.

Command, Discipline, the mad or power-mad captain theme -- will go away with instant communications and lawyers. Paul Fussell says, "The use of radio to convey military orders has had profound and eminently "modern" consequences on the self-respect and dignity of the high-ranking officer. Rapidity of communication tends to transform him from a self-reliant individual commander into a mere obeyer of orders received by radio." It's noteworthy that the last stand of the mad captain theme has been aboard that one type of modern ship that still lacks instant communication with the shore -- that is, the submarine.

The Complexity problem. The equipment has moved so far beyond the 18th century level of complexity that it's impossible to reconcile two conflicting demands: a) make the novel veracious. b) make it accessible. In Conrad's day most of his audience had at least a nodding familiarity with sailing ships, if only because they travelled in them. Today people travel by air; very few ever go to sea.

This is a problem I've struggled with for years in the Dan Lenson books. It's even more difficult for me because, as a naval engineer, I actually understand how most of the machinery and computers and so on work. This is especially vexing in dialogue. If my characters speak as officers and sailors would actually speak in a given situation, the bulk of my readers won't understand what's going on. But if I reduce their language to popular comprehensibility, I lose the confidence and interest of my seagoing public. Some writers use glossaries, but I've always felt that interrupted the fictive dream.

My own method has been to attempt to introduce seagoing words and concepts gradually, defining each by context in the course of the book, until halfway through, even the landlubber is reading and comprehending true sea-speech. But this is a slow and laborious method. In the end none of these solutions are wholly satisfactory, and we're left with the necessity to compromise somewhere -- a compromise that unavoidably weakens the book.

On the other hand, working in the opposite direction is the great Language Amalgamation of the late 20th century. The separateness and distinctness of sea language is declining. The much greater connectedness of ship life to shore life, the prevalence of sailors living at home instead of aboard ship, the coming of television at sea, the decline of poker and the sea story I notice every time I go on active duty these days, all are drawing the curtain on a long and ancient English jargon.

A parallel process now gathering steam is the broadening of the seagoing population from young white single men. The world of the sea has always been wider in one sense than the world of the mainstream English or American novel. That is, seafarers, and thus the seafaring novel, have rubbed shoulders and corners with a far wider section of the world's races and climes that those who stayed at home. So the Lascar, the Chinee, the heathen Queequeg -- these are what today would be termed minority figures; but they entered the imagination of the seafaring novelist as rounded and real characters long before they entered the drawing rooms of polite fiction.

True, in many cases they were set up as the enemy; one need only think of the famous scene in THE SEA WOLF where the passengers and officers confront the mutinous crew of cutthroat mixed-race subhumans; subhuman by reason of their blood, or as we would say today, their race. But at least as often they were seen as equals. Jeffrey Meyers, "The only men in HEART OF DARKNESS who show moral restraint, except for Marlow himself, are his cannibalistic crew...the only human relationship Marlow is able to establish is with his African helmsman." (192)

But today minorities are neither subhuman nor strangers; they are encompassed within the boundaries of the "us", those who the writer assumes identify with the creatures of his novel. Fiction will shortly follow the first women onboard warships. The woman as a seagoing person -- there's not much of that on the shelf right now. But there will be soon, following their entrance on the stage in mystery novels, crime, and science fiction.

The technological issue too will, I believe, gradually disappear as an obstacle as two trends operate. The first trend is that the differentiation between seagoing technology and shorebased technology, like the differentiation between seagoing and landbased English, is narrowing to the point of disappearance. Navigation by the stars was so arcane to the landsman as to be practically a magic art. Now I see ads for GPS systems to be installed in taxis. The means of navigation will shortly be exactly the same for land and sea travel, a situation that has not held in history since the days when memory and myth were the only guides wherever you were. Instead of sails, or a mysterious noisy engine turning live steam into dead steam, the modern vessel uses the same engine as the C-5 Galaxy, the same turbine that drives the Bullet Train or even the family car. The technological difference between ship and land will vanish.

The second trend is that technology as it advances passes through a stage of immediate comprehensibility, through increasingly dense stages of complexity, to reach at last a stage where it cannot be comprehended by the vast mass of its users; it is simply accepted as a kind of technological magic. There are such situations today. How many of us understand how the antibiotic we take operates to destroy a certain bacteria? We don't. We simply accept that "we take penicillin and we get better.". And more and more of our technology at sea (and ashore) is reaching this level.

The effect on literature, unfortunately, will be to rob us of many of the indirect means of making our points that we use at present. But on the other hand, it may make sea literature more comprehensible than it has ever been to the mass of average readers.

And, if the sea becomes like the land, that means we can write the same types of novels there we used to set ashore. The novel of flat anomie, the minimalist novel of boredom and random violence can move from the streets of New York out to sea. The range of the sea novel may increase as it loses its distinctiveness; it will blend more and more seamlessly into the entire united world of the 21st century, where all barriers fall and walls are eroded, walls between countries and languages, classes and occupations, between the land, too, and the sea.

So there are some challenges ahead. But there are some wonderful writers working out there at sea, and I have every confidence that they'll meet those challenges. Some work with historical fiction: Patrick O'Brien, Douglas Reeman, Dewey Lambdin, Thomas Fleming, Bill Mack. Some, though not many, work with contemporary merchant marine; Jan de Hartog and Wilbur Smith are the only ones that leap to mind. There are a few Navy novelists; most of them British; Hammond Innes, Douglas Reeman. There are those who take on the sea in boats so small that the adventure still lives; Hank Searls; Bernard Cornwell. But many of these writers are aging, and some have all but stopped work.

There's room for a new generation. Perhaps one or two of you will step in to take up the slack on the line -- and sail with me in the wake of Melville and Conrad.

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David Poyer is possibly the best known writer of American sea fiction alive today.  His most recent book is THAT ANVIL OF OUR SOULS (Simon & Schuster, July 2005).  Check out his work and career advice at the Home Page location below.
 

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