Captain Dobbin

CAPTAIN Dobbin, having retired from the South Seas

In the dumb tides of , with a handful of shells,

A few poisoned arrows, a cask of pearls,

And five thousand pounds in the colonial funds,

Now sails the street in a brick villa, "Laburnum Villa",

In whose blank windows the harbour hangs

Like a fog against the glass,

Golden and smoky, or stoned with a white glitter,

And boats go by, suspended in the pane,

Blue Funnel, Red Funnel, Messageries Maritimes,

Lugged down the port like sea-beasts taken alive

That scrape their bellies on sharp sands,

Of which particulars Captain Dobbin keeps

A ledger sticky with ink,

Entries of time and weather, state of the moon,

Nature of cargo and captain's name,

For some mysterious and awful purpose

Never divulged.

For at night, when the stars mock themselves with lanterns,

So late the chimes blow loud and faint

Like a hand shutting and unshutting over the bells,

Captain Dobbin, having observed from bed

The lights, like a great fiery snake, of the Comorin

Going to sea, will note the hour

For subsequent recording in his gazette.

But the sea is really closer to him than this,

Closer to him than a dead, lovely woman,

For he keeps bits of it, like old letters,

Salt tied up in bundles

Or pressed flat,

What you might call a lock of the sea's hair,

So Captain Dobbin keeps his dwarfed memento,

His urn-burial, a chest of mummied waves,

Gales fixed in print, and the sweet dangerous countries

Of shark and casuarina-tree,

Stolen and put in coloured maps,

Like a flask of seawater, or a bottled ship,

A schooner caught in a glass bottle;

But Captain Dobbin keeps them in books,

Crags of varnished leather

Pimply with gilt, by learned mariners

And masters of hydrostatics, or the childish tales

Of simple heroes, taken by Turks or dropsy.

So nightly he sails from shelf to shelf

Or to the quadrants, dangling with rusty screws,

Or the hanging-gardens of old charts,

So old they bear the authentic protractor-lines,

Traced in faint ink, as fine as Chinese hairs.

Over the flat and painted atlas-leaves

His reading-glass would tremble,

Over the fathoms, pricked in tiny rows,

Water shelving to the coast.

Quietly the bone-rimmed lens would float

Till, through the glass, he felt the barbèd rush

Of bubbles foaming, spied the albicores,

The blue-fined admirals, heard the wind-swallowed cries

Of planters running on the beach

Who filched their swags of yams and ambergris,

Birds' nests and sandalwood, from pastures numbed

By the sun's yellow, too meek for honest theft;

But he, less delicate robber, climbed the walls,

Broke into dozing houses

Crammed with black bottles, marish wine

Crusty and salt-corroded, fading prints,

Sparkle-daubed almanacs and playing cards,

With rusty cannon, left by the French outside,

Half-buried in sand,

Even to the castle of Queen Pomaree

In the Yankee's footsteps, and found her throne-room piled

With golden candelabras, mildewed swords,

Guitars and fowling-pieces, tossed in heaps

With greasy cakes and flung-down calabashes.

Then Captain Dobbin's eye,

That eye of wild and wispy scudding blue,

Voluptuously prying, would light up

Like mica scratched by gully-suns,

And he would be fearful to look upon

And shattering in his conversation;

Nor would he tolerate the harmless chanty,

No "Shenandoah", or the dainty mew

That landsmen offer in a silver dish

To Neptune, sung to pianos in candlelight.

Of these he spoke in scorn,

For there was but one way of singing "Stormalong",

He said, and that was not really singing,

But howling, rather—shrieked in the wind's jaws

By furious men; not tinkled in drawing-rooms

By lap-dogs in clean shirts.

And, at these words,

The galleries of photographs, men with rich beards,

Pea-jackets and brass buttons, with folded arms,

Would scowl approval, for they were shipmates, too,

Companions of no cruise by reading-glass,

But fellows of storm and honey from the past—

"The Charlotte, Java, ',"

"Knuckle and Fred at Port au Prince,"

"William in his New Rig,"

Even that notorious scoundrel, Captain Baggs,

Who, as all knew, owed Dobbin Twenty Pounds

Lost at fair cribbage, but he never paid,

Or paid "with the slack of the tops'l sheets"

As Captain Dobbin frequently expressed it.

There were their faces, grilled a trifle now,

Cigar-hued in various spots

By the brown breath of sodium-eating years,

On quarter-decks long burnt to the water's edge,

A resurrection of the dead by chemicals.

And the voyages they had made,

Their labours in a country of water,

Were they not marked by inadequate lines

On charts tied up like skins in a rack?

Or his own Odysseys, his lonely travels,

His trading days, an autobiography

Of angles and triangles and lozenges

Ruled tack by tack across the sheet,

That with a single scratch expressed the stars,

Merak and Alamak and Alpherat,

The wind, the moon, the sun, the clambering sea,

Sails bleached with light, salt in the eyes,

Bamboos and Tahiti oranges,

From some forgotten countless day,

One foundered day from a forgotten month,

A year sucked quietly from the blood,

Dead with the rest, remembered by no more

Than a scratch on a dry chart—

Or when the return grew too choking bitter-sweet

And laburnum-berries manifestly tossed

Beyond the window, not the fabulous leaves

Of Hotoo or canoe-tree or palmetto,

There were the wanderings of other keels,

Magellan, Bougainville and Cook,

Who found no greater a memorial

Than footprints over a lithograph.

For Cook he worshipped, that captain with the sad

And fine white face, who never lost a man

Or flinched a peril; and of Bougainville

He spoke with graceful courtesy, as a rival

To whom the honours of the hunting-field

Must be accorded. Not so with the Spaniard,

Sebastian Juan del Cano, at whom he sneered

Openly, calling him a fool of fortune

Blown to a sailors' abbey by chance winds

And blindfold currents, who slept in a fine cabin,

Blundered through five degrees of latitude,

Was bullied by mutineers a hundred more,

And woke and found himself across the world.

Coldly in the window,

Like a fog rubbed up and down the glass

The harbour, bony with mist

And ropes of water, glittered; and the blind tide

That crawls it knows not where, nor for what gain,

Pushed its drowned shoulders against the wheel,

Against the wheel of the mill.

Flowers rocked far down

And white, dead bodies that were anchored there

In marshes of spent light.

Blue Funnel, Red Funnel,

The ships went over them, and bells in engine-rooms

Cried to their bowels of flaring oil,

And stokers groaned and sweated with burnt skins,

Clawed to their shovels.

But quietly in his room,

In his little cemetery of sweet essences

With fond memorial-stones and lines of grace,

Captain Dobbin went on reading about the sea.