XXI.

That is why your “strandings” are for the most part so unexpected.  In fact, they are all unexpected, except those heralded by some short glimpse of the danger, full of agitation and excitement, like an awakening from a dream of incredible folly.

The land suddenly at night looms up right over your bows, or perhaps the cry of “Broken water ahead!” is raised, and some long mistake, some complicated edifice of self-delusion, over-confidence, and wrong reasoning is brought down in a fatal shock, and the heart-searing experience of your ship’s keel scraping and scrunching over, say, a coral reef.  It is a sound, for its size, far more terrific to your soul than that of a world coming violently to an end.  But out of that chaos your belief in your own prudence and sagacity reasserts itself.  You ask yourself, Where on earth did I get to?  How on earth did I get there? with a conviction that it could not be your own act, that there has been at work some mysterious conspiracy of accident; that the charts are all wrong, and if the charts are not wrong, that land and sea have changed their places; that your misfortune shall for ever remain inexplicable, since you have lived always with the sense of your trust, the last thing on closing your eyes, the first on opening them, as if your mind had kept firm hold of your responsibility during the hours of sleep.

You contemplate mentally your mischance, till little by little your mood changes, cold doubt steals into the very marrow of your bones, you see the inexplicable fact in another light.  That is the time when you ask yourself, How on earth could I have been fool enough to get there?  And you are ready to renounce all belief in your good sense, in your knowledge, in your fidelity, in what you thought till then was the best in you, giving you the daily bread of life and the moral support of other men’s confidence.

The ship is lost or not lost.  Once stranded, you have to do your best by her.  She may be saved by your efforts, by your resource and fortitude bearing up against the heavy weight of guilt and failure.  And there are justifiable strandings in fogs, on uncharted seas, on dangerous shores, through treacherous tides.  But, saved or not saved, there remains with her commander a distinct sense of loss, a flavour in the mouth of the real, abiding danger that lurks in all the forms of human existence.  It is an acquisition, too, that feeling.  A man may be the better for it, but he will not be the same.  Damocles has seen the sword suspended by a hair over his head, and though a good man need not be made less valuable by such a knowledge, the feast shall not henceforth have the same flavour.

Years ago I was concerned as chief mate in a case of stranding which was not fatal to the ship.  We went to work for ten hours on end, laying out anchors in readiness to heave off at high water.  While I was still busy about the decks forward I heard the steward at my elbow saying:  “The captain asks whether you mean to come in, sir, and have something to eat to-day.”