Captains Courageous: Lost and Found at Sea
Captains Courageous by Rudyard Kipling is a great book. It is the story of half-dead boy — not half-dead from falling overboard off an ocean liner and almost drowned but half-dead because he is narrow-minded, spoiled, bored and selfish — who becomes fully alive, unspoiled, big-hearted, and absolutely loveable through hard work, fair treatment, and friendship. The bones of a moral tale are all here but Kipling does much, much more with his story than preach out on good and manly living.
First of all, Kipling gives us marvelous characters. Only the coldest heart could not be moved by the friendship between the young Harvey and Dan, or the guardianship over crew, ship, and catch exerted by the rarely mistaken in judgment Disko; the deep generosity of the savior Manuel the Portuguese and the prophecies and good food of the “black as coal” Doctor from Cape Breton; the sad history of the amnesiac Monrovian Pennsylvania and his keeper, farmer Salters, and the oft-repeated memories of Dan Troop and his time aboard the Ohio. Even the minor characters, such as Harvey’s father, self-made man, and mother silly but loving, Disko’s wife who hates the sea for all the people it has taken from her, and the citizens of Gloucester, are three-dimensional. There is a harrowing scene at the end of the book when the names of all the dead seamen from that one season at sea are announced to a gathered crowd and we, the readers, feel as if we are part of that crowd. When we hear “a low cry, as though a little animal had been hit”, we know the widow has heard the name of her husband, and tears come to our eyes.
But humans are not the only characters in the book.. The ships are presented as women throughout the book in wonderful paragraphs: “The little schooner was gambolling all around her anchor among the silver-tipped waves….she behaved like a puppy chewing a string, a clumsy woman in a side-saddle, a hen with her head cut off, or a cow stung by a hornet, exactly as the whims of the sea took her….She sat down in the moon-path on the water, courtseying with a flourish of pride impressive enough had not the wheel-gear sniggered mockingly in its box.” Or: “Now a bark is feminine beyond all other daughters of the sea, and this tall, hesitating creature, with her white and gilt figurehead, looked just like a bewildered woman half lifting her skirts to cross a muddy street under the jeers of bad little boys.” Or: “when she slid into a hollow she trampled like a woman tripped in her own silk dress, and came out, her jib wet half-way up yearning and peering for the twin-lights of Thatcher’s Island.” There are many, many more examples like this in Captains Courageous and it would be very interesting to write an analysis of the representations of “the female” of both boats and characters in this novel but that undertaking is for another day.
The sea, of course, is also a character and Kipling is perfect in his renderings. I’ve never read better depictions of the sea, ever. One example: : “the dry chorus of wave-tops turning over with a sound of incessant tearing; the hurry of the winds working across open spaces and herding the purple-blue cloud shadows; the splendid upheaval of the red sunrise; the folding and packing away of the morning mists, wall after wall withdrawn across the white floors; the thousands of dead, flat, square miles; the chilly blackening of everything at the day’s end; and the million wrinkles of the sea under the moonlight, when the jib-boom solemnly poked at the low stars….”
The characters of Captains Courageous and their boats and the sea come alive in Kipling’s words to create a place in time, an insulated moment in history, when men and boys went out to Georges Bank and caught fish. We will witness an end to that history in our time; due to commercial over fishing and climate change, cod fishery levels are dropping and limits on what can be taken from the sea have been set and re-set to try to bring the fishery back to health. The powerful A Perfect Storm captures the end of this era of fishing boats; it is interesting to note that Gloucester is the mainland setting for both A Perfect Storm andCaptains Courageous. We can know that history of man and boat only through books like the epic Moby Dick and A Perfect Storm, and through this small but vibrant and wonderful Captains Courageous. Read it as a homily against sloth and easy living, read it in praise of the honest working man, read it as a sea adventure or as a wonderful, living painting of the sea, or read it to understand the possibilities of friendship between boys and love between fathers and sons. Just make sure you do read this book.
