The capitalist shipping industry is full of facts of this sort. Take, for example, the “Plimsoll line.” There was an English workingman who became a rich manufacturer, and did not forget his class, but devoted his life to trying to save the seamen and officers who were sent out in these “coffin ships.” He was elected to Parliament, and brought in a bill providing that ships should not be loaded beyond a certain line—the “Plimsoll line,” it was called. When his fellow-members voted it down, he shook his fist at them and called them “villains.” Of course they were shocked, and wanted to expel him, but they didn’t quite dare; they gave him ten days to think it over, and then he apologized, and they passed his bill—a most admirable form of compromise for a reformer!
For a generation after this, as cold statistics showed, some thousands of British seamen and officers escaped all the cruelties of Nature, the stealthy Nemesis of Joseph Conrad. For years this “Plimsoll line” served these thousands of seamen and officers in place of the Holy Trinity, the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, the Gentle Jesus meek and mild, the Virgin Mary, Mother of God, and likewise all the Saints in the calendar, the glorious company of the Apostles, the goodly fellowship of the Prophets, the noble Army of Martyrs, the heavenly choir of Angels and Archangels, the Cherubim and Seraphim, and the Holy Church throughout all the world. But this divine supervision cost British shipping owners a certain number of millions of pounds of profit every year, and so they paid the campaign funds of their Tory and Liberal parties and got their henchman, David Lloyd-George, in authority and repealed that law; so now those thousands of seamen and officers are once more falling victims to the stealthy Nemesis!
And Joseph Conrad—what has he to say about this? As a man of the sea, he knows the facts; and in “The Nigger of the Narcissus,” that most cruel-souled book, he takes occasion to pour his jeering scorn upon those who try to save the lives of seamen. You have to read the actual text to get the full effect of his venom. A seaman is talking:
“I mind I once seed in Cardiff the crew of an overloaded ship—leastways she weren’t overloaded, only a fatherly old gentleman with a white beard and an umbreller came along the quay and talked to the hands. Said as how it was crool hard to be drownded in winter just for the sake of a few pounds more for the owner—he said. Nearly cried over them—he did; and he had a square mainsail coat, and a gaff-topsail hat too—all proper. So they chaps, they said they wouldn’t go to be drownded in winter—depending upon that ’ere Plimsoll man to see ’em through the court. They thought to have a bloomin’ lark and two or three days’ spree. And the beak giv’ ’em six weeks—coss the ship warn’t overloaded. Anyways they made it out in court that she wasn’t. There wasn’t one overloaded ship in Penarth Dock at all. ‘Pears that old coon he was only on pay and allowance for some kind people, under orders to look for overloaded ships, and he couldn’t see no further than the length of his umbreller. Some of us in the boarding-house, where I live when I’m looking for a ship in Cardiff, stood by to duck that old weeping spunger in the dock. We kept a good look out, too—but he topped his boom directly he was outside the court.... Yes. They got six weeks’ hard....”
The coast of California, near which I live, is a favored lurking place of the stealthy Nemesis. The entire coast is a line of jagged rocks, with very few harbors, and vessels continually strike upon the rocks and are pounded to pieces. Sometimes they are great passenger steamers, and hundreds of people are in danger and have to be taken off on tugs; the newspapers give us hourly bulletins of what is happening, and their correspondents perform prodigies of daring and speed to get us photographs of the disaster in the first editions. The public reads of these tragedies, and is awed by the spectacle of man struggling in vain against the stealthy Nemesis.
What is the fact about this matter? It is very simple: the Nemesis here consists of the fact that the Pacific Coast from Seattle to San Diego makes a convex curve; so ships of all sorts, the great lumber schooners, the little salmon steamers, the great passenger liners, have to go a few miles farther out to sea in order to be safe. But that additional distance at sea means so many million dollars a year out of the pockets of the owners. It means not merely that more fuel has to be burned, it means that more of the ship’s time has to be taken, and more wages paid to officers and crew; in the case of the great liners it means that several hundred passengers have to be fed an additional meal!
So naturally the owners, being fully covered by insurance, are clamorous in their demands, and the ship’s officers are bending all their energies to save every yard of distance and every second of time. Always and everywhere up and down the coast they are gliding past the rocky points, and in the darkness and fogs and storms they risk an inch too much. To me this seems an eminently “romantic” situation; I can imagine a great imaginative artist rearing it into a tremendous symbol of human guilt. But this artist would make the discovery that the principal magazines on the Pacific Coast are published by the railroad companies which own and operate the steamship lines!
Every hour the progress of science increases man’s control over nature, and therefore the safety of travel at sea. If it were not for private ownership and the blind race for profits, these dangers would be largely a memory, and the stealthy Nemesis of Conrad, like the gods of the Polish Catholic and the Anglican Protestant churches, would shrivel up and crumble and blow away as dust. Would Conrad like that? Or would he feel the irritation of an old man who has staked his reputation upon a bad guess? He gives you the answer in “The Nigger of the Narcissus,” a whole novel written to satirize the altruistic impulse, and expose it as a destroyer of discipline and character. He assigns the role of “agitator” at sea to an odious little Cockney rat; and when this creature has got the poor crew stirred up to mutiny, what sport Conrad has with them! Such lofty sarcasm:
Our little world went on its curved and unswerving path carrying a discontented and aspiring population. They found comfort of a gloomy kind in an interminable and conscientious analysis of their unappreciated worth; and inspired by Donkin’s hopeful doctrines they dreamed enthusiastically of the time when every lonely ship would travel over a serene sea, manned by a wealthy and well-fed crew of satisfied skippers.
In the chapter on Matthew Arnold I mentioned Paul Elmer More as a critic who has based his reputation upon the thesis of man’s helplessness in the presence of the universe; I explained Matthew Arnold as a poet who finds his ideal both moral and poetical in a dignified and mournful resignation to the evils of life. And here is another of these Great Mourners, a zealot of Pessimism. Woe to you, if in his Agnostic Sunday school you venture to breathe a hope for mankind! Woe to you if you commit the supreme offense of art, the suggesting of a happy ending for a novel! Woe to you, beyond all land-woes; for now you are in Neptune’s empire, and there is no Bill of Rights, no freedom of speech, press or assemblage; he who murmurs an optimistic thought hears the dread word Mutiny—and the “beak” gives him “six months hard!”