Four Years Before the Mast

“It wasn’t a mutiny. It was the bone-weary ship’s crew selecting – by voice vote – a new captain, one whose brusque nature and laudable transparency in speech gave them hope of precisely the rigorous captainhood the increasing stormy seas obliged. There were trifling misgivings. 

“The gentleman had been captain once before and had acquitted himself with at times mercurial behavior. In one memorable instance he’d commanded the boatswain to walk the length of the ship swinging a cutlass, the better to clear a path to the fo’c’sle where the captain would strike a memorable figure, he clutching the Good Book, and be recorded with pen and paper by the ship’s surgeon thus – posing with the Word and wearing a stern expression. This struck some of the crew as curious, while others loudly celebrated the captain’s demonstrated fealty to Christ our Lord. 

“More troubling for some of the crew was the captain’s belligerence at change of command. The gentleman had let it be known that, were he to be replaced as ship’s commander according to centuries-long maritime protocol, that order would issue from a corrupt and dastardly institution bent on his personal destruction. Conversely, were he to be re-posted as captain, the occasion would signal a virtuous outcome, drenched in the sunlight of an approving providence. Certain of the crew regarded these pronouncements those of a dunce, or a man in the early grip of the mind-twisting beriberi. Other crew saw genius and intransigent bravery in the gentleman’s words. 

“In the event, the captain lost his post – by popular vote of the crew – to a successor. At that moment the former captain rallied his supporters on deck and encouraged them with fiery rhetoric to ‘fight like the very dickens!’ To his reported surprise, the men he’d thus infused with flame swarmed the wheelhouse, pouring into its previously sacrosanct confines to seize control of the ship and, in several sorry instances, make off with the sextant, the spyglass, and whatever else could be prised from the walls and carried. The wheelhouse was thus desecrated for several ruinous hours. The outgoing captain arose from his quarters then amid a cacophony of desperate entreaties, and with visible reluctance bade his supporters stand down. ‘Ye are loved, aye,’  he’d reassured them. ‘I prithee, stand down that we may continue the struggle on another reach.’ Many of the offenders, ultimately found to have violated longstanding maritime law, were grumblingly confined to the brig. 

“His successor as ship’s commander, a firm but kindly gentleman of the sea and long engaged with ship’s mastery – interested by his nature in an egalitarian treatment of the crew from cabin boy to First Mate – lacked the shouting vigor of the captain he’d replaced and was thought by some crew too docile by half. The while the former captain, having been put ashore, began a public campaign of declamation, remarking at every turn the deep-seated and cloaked treachery that had stolen from him command of the ship, though his demotion be emergent from the expressed will of his own crew. Another clanging theme was the depthless corruption of his successor in the wheelhouse. Many of the remaining crew threw their lot in with the former captain, whose words seemed to gain purchase through stentorian repetition, though some surmised that the merits of the gentleman’s case were not improved upon by his ongoing and increasingly reckless oratory. 

“Now the former captain has regained his position, ascended the gangplank, and ensconced himself anew in the very wheelhouse his advocates, in the name of maritime honor, violently stripped of its hardware. His outgoing predecessor welcomed him graciously aboard according to the rules of maritime order, the ceremonial juxtaposition with his own failed melee utterly lost on the gentleman. Still, seamen weary of the numbing maritime institutions and hoping for a new day have reappointed the former captain by voice vote. 

“Some momentary dismay attended his first public comments as captain, wherein he ordered, as if from the ramparts of creation itself, the renaming of the world’s oceans to ‘William.’ Further, he will be reducing the crew’s pay and sending the savings ashore to the shipyard owners. Lastly, he has disarmed those crew identified as having protested too fitfully his earlier orchestrated disturbance, coincident with releasing from the ship’s brig those marauders who stormed the wheelhouse, and are now, at the moment of release, vowing revenge.” 

At this the graying man of honor turned to me, dewy eyed and disconsolate of expression. 

“In a fortnight my son puts to sea with this gentleman, and for a voyage of four long years. If this bible-clutching brigand be so mad as to make such pronouncements while anchored at harbor, what does it portend for my son, indeed for my family? For us all?”

Having no ready reply, I placed a hand on the man’s shoulder. From across the quay, carried by that curiously amplifying character of evening dockyard mist, a ragged voice cried out amid a squall of jovial laughter. “Aye! William it is, then!”