The English May was slipping into June

With heralds that the spring had never known.

Black cavalry were astride the air;

The Downs awoke to find their faces slashed;

There was blood on the hawthorn,

And song had died in the nightingales’ throats.

Appeasement is in its grave: it sleeps well.

The mace had spiked the parchment seals

And pulverized the hedging ifs and wherefores,

The wheezy adverbs, the gutted modifiers.

Churchill and Bevin have the floor,

Whipping snarling nouns and action-verbs

Out of their lairs in the lexicon,

Bull-necked adversatives that bit and clawed,

An age before gentility was cubbed.

A call came in from the Channel

Like the wash of surf on sand,

Borne in by the winds against the chalk escarpments,

Into the harbours, up the rivers, along the estuaries,

And but one word in the call.

Three hundred thousand on the beaches,

Their spirit-level vision training West!

A vast patience in their eyes,

They had fought pig-iron, manganese, tungsten, cobalt;

And their struggle with hunger, thirst,

And the drug of sleep,

Had multiplied the famine in their cheeks

For England,

By forty miles divided from her brood.

Seven millions on the roads in France,

Set to a pattern of chaos

Fashioned through years for this hour.

Inside the brain of the planner

No tolerance befogged the reason—

The reason with its clear-swept halls,

Its brilliant corridors,

Where no recesses with their healing dusk

Offered asylum for a fugitive.

The straightedge ruled out errors,

The tremors in the sensory nerves,

Pity and the wayward impulses,

The liberal imbecilities.

The reason reckoned that the allied guns

Would not be turned upon the roads

To clear the path for the retreat.

It reasoned well.

Millenniums it had taken to make their stock.

Piltdown hung on the frontals of their fathers.

They had lain as sacrifices

Upon the mortuary slabs of Stonehenge.

Their souls had come to birth out of their racial myths.

The sea was their school; the storm, their friend.

Foot by foot and hand to hand

They had met the legions

On the beaches and in the surf.

Great names had been delivered unto them;

Caractacus,

Taking his toll of the invaders

In his retreat to the fens and hills;

Boadicea,

The storming of Londinium and Verulamium,

And the annihilation of the Roman ninth;

Alban, Alfred, Athelney, Edington!

And in the march of their survival

They had fought the poll-tax and burned

The manor rolls under Ball and Tyler.

They had led the riots against the Enclosures.

They had sung ballads to the rhythms of the gibbets.

The welts had been around their necks and ankles.

They had swept the Main with Hawkins and Drake.

Morgan-mouthed vocabularians,

Lovers of the beef of language,

They had carved with curse and cutlass

Castilian grandees in the Caribbean.

They had signed up with Frobisher,

Had stifled cries in the cockpits of Trafalgar.

They had emptied their veins into the Marne.

Freedom to them was like the diver’s lust for air.

Children of oaths and madrigals,

They had shambled out of caves

To write the clauses of the Charters,

To paint the Channel mists,

To stand hushed before the Canterbury tapers.

The Royal Yacht squadrons of the Thames and Cowes,

Those slim and rakish models of the wave-line theory,

Flying the ensign with their Club devices—

Grand-daughters of Genesta and the Galatea

Whose racing spinnakers

Outsilvered and outflow the sea-gulls off the Isle of Wight.

Cutters, the pride of Folkestone and Sheerness

With their press balloon-jibs,

Their billows of flax and hemp

Smothering their single masts

And straight-running bowsprits.

Excursion paddlers—

Last of the family known as the fleet of the butterflies,

Purveyors of moonlight sonatas and Sunday siestas.

The fireboats from the London Fire Brigade.

Luggers with four-sided sails bent to the yards

And slung obliquely to the masts,

Smelling of the wharves of Deal.

Smacks that built the Grimsby name.

Yawls with their handy mizzen-sails—

The Jacks-of-all-trades on the English coast.

Barges spritsail-rigged with jigger booms.

Bluff-bowed billyboys and Norfolk wherries,

Skiffs that stank of herring roes and Yarmouth.

Dutch scoots and square-stemmed bawleys rank

With kelp, fish-scales and the slime of eels.

And with them all, the merchantmen,

Three-funnel liners turbine-driven,

Cabin cruisers, with whaleboats, rafts and dories

Tied to the grimy tails of barges drawn by tugs.

A Collingwood came from Newcastle-on-Tyne,

Trelawney and Grenville of the Cornish Line,

And Raleigh and Gilbert from the Devon Seas

With a Somerset Blake. They met at the quays—

McCluskey, Gallagher, Joe Millard,

Three riveters red from Dumbarton Yard,

And Peebles of Paisley, a notary clerk,

Two joiners from Belfast, Mahaffy and Burke,

Blackstone and Coke of Lincoln’s Inn,

A butcher from Smithfield, Toby Quinn,

Jonathan Wells, a Sheffield bricklayer,

Tim Thomas of Swansea, a borough surveyor,

Jack Wesley, a stoker, by way of South Shields,

And Snodgrass and Tuttle from Giles-in-the-Fields,

Young Bill of Old Bill with Hancock and Reid,

Two sons of a bishop from Berwick-on-Tweed,

A landscape gardener of Tunbridge, Kent,

Povey, a draper from Stoke-on-Trent,

Arthur Cholmondeley Bennington-Grubbe

With Benbow of the Boodles Club,

A Ralph Abercrombie, a Fetherstonehaugh

With Smith, and Ibbs, and Jones, and Buggs—

They met on the liners, yachts and tugs:

The Princess Maud, the Massy Shaw,

The Crested Eagle, the Nicholas Drew,

The Gurgling Jean and the Saucy Sue.

Two prefects from Harrow—Dudley and Fraser,

Fresh in their gray flannel trousers and blazer,

Helping two tanners, Muggins and Day,

To rig up a sail at a mizzen stay,

Were hailed by a Cambridge stroke—“Ahoy!

Will you let me go on your billyboy?”

A curate from Cardiff, the Reverend Evans,

Inspired with zeal by a speech of Bevin’s,

Called on a Rochester verger named Burchall,

Likewise inflamed by a speech from Churchill—

Together they went to a Greenwich jetty

And boarded a lighter—the Bouncing Betty.

Meadows, the valet, tapped at the door

Of Colonel Ramsbottom, late of Lahore:

’Twas dawn, and the Colonel was sick with a head;

“The Dean and his lordship, the Bishop, are here,

And your sloop, sir, is ready down at the pier,

And may I go with you?” Meadows said—

“No,” roared the Colonel, as he creaked out of bed,

Blasting out damns with a spot of saliva,

Yet the four of them boarded the Lady Godiva.

A Captain with a Cape Horn face,

Being down on his luck without a ship,

Had spent ten years in his own disgrace

As skipper of a river ferry—

To-night he was taking his finest trip

As master of a Norfolk wherry.

The Junior partner, Davie Scott,

Of MacTavish, MacEachren, MacGregor, and Scott,

Conspired with Murdoch, MacNutt and MacPhail

To go to Gravesend that evening and sail

For the Beach in Mr. MacTavish’s yacht.

“I’ve been in a bit of a muss, mesen,

With my game left leg,” said Eddie Glen,

“And every night my faintin’ spells,

Contracted in the Dardanelles.”

“My floatin’ kidney keeps me ’ome,

My shoulder too ’as never ’ealed.”

Quoth Rufus Stirk of ’Uddersfield,

Cracked with shrapnel at Bapaume.

“Ow, wot’s a kidney, look at me,

A bleedin’ boulder in my lung,”

Said ’Umphrey ’Iggins of Bermondsey;

“A ’Igh Explosive ’ad me strung

On the top of a ruddy poplar tree

For thirty hours at Armenteers,

’Aven’t spit straight nigh twenty years.”

“Now, my old woman,” said Solomon Pike,

“Says ’Itler’s such a fidget like;

’E steals the cows and ’ens from the Danes,

’E rummages France, ’e chases the Poles,

And comes over ’ere with ’is blinkin’ planes

To drive us to the ’Yde Park ’oles

Where there’s nary a roof that isn’t leakin’,

Swipin’ the pillows right under our ’eads,

Shooin’ us out from our ’umble beds.”

“ ’E’s a mug, I says, in a manner o’ speakin’.”

Out on the Channel—laughter died.

Casual understatement

Was driven back from its London haunts

To its clinical nakedness

Along the banks of the Ilissus.

In front of the crew were rolling mountains of smoke

Spilling fire from their Vesuvian rims;

The swaying fringes of Borealis blue;

The crimson stabs through the curtains;

The tracers’ fiery parabolas,

The falling pendants of green from the Verey lights;

The mad colours of the murals of Dunkirk.

Space, time, water, bread, sleep,

Above all—sleep;

Commodities beyond the purchase of the Rand.

Space—a thousand pounds per foot! Not up for sale

In the cabin suites or on the floors of the lighters.

The single Mole was crammed with human termites,

Stumbling, falling on the decks of the destroyers,

Sleeping, dying on the decks of the transports

Strung along the seaward end.

The solid black queues on the sand waited their turn

To file along the bridgehead jetties

Improvised from the army lorries,

Or waded out to swim

Or clutch at drifting gangplanks, rafts and life-belts.

Time—Days, weeks of the balance of life

Offered in exchange for minutes now.

Stuff of the world’s sagas in the heavens!

Spitfires were chasing Heinkels, one to twenty.

The nation’s debt unpaid, unpayable,

Was climbing up its pyramid,

As the Hurricanes took on the Messerschmitts.

Motor launches from the Port of London,

Life-boats from the liners,

Whale-boats, bottoms of shallow draught,

Rammed their noses into the silt,

Packed their loads and ferried them to scoots and drifters.

Blood and oil smut on their faces,

The wounded, dying and dead were hauled up

Over the rails of the hospital carriers

In the nets and cargo slings.

From Dover to Dunkirk,

From Dunkirk to Ramsgate,

And back to the dunes.

Power boats of the enemy

Were driving torpedoes into transports and colliers,

Lifting the engines clear from their beds,

Blowing the boilers, sheering the sterns,

And the jettisoned loads gathered up from the sea

Were transferred to other decks

And piled in steep confusion

On the twisted steel of the listed destroyers,

On the rough planks of the barges,

Into the hatches of the freighters,

Jammed against bulkheads and riddled ventilators,

On the coils of the cables,

On quarterdecks and in the fo’c’sles,

On the mess-tables and under them.

“Was that roar in the North from the Rodney?

We hope to God it was.”

Drip of the leadlines on the bows—

“Two fathoms, sir, four feet, three and a half.”

“Wake up, you dead end. You’re not on the feathers now.

Make room for this ’ere bloke.”

“Stiff as cement ’e is.” “Git a gait on,

Or the Stukas’ll be raisin’ boils on your necks.”

“Ahoy, skipper, a can of petrol.”

“Compass out of gear—Give us the line to Ramsgate.”

“Follow the skoots.”

The great birds, carrying under their wings

The black distorted crosses,

Plunged, straightened out.

Laid their eggs in air,

Hatched them in fountains of water,

In craters of sand,

To the leap of flame,

To the roar of avalanche.

And in those hours,

When Death was sweating at his lathe,

When heads and legs and arms were blown from their trunks,

When the seventh day on the dunes became the eighth,

And the eighth slumped into the dawn of the ninth,

When the sand’s crunch and suck under the feet

Were sounds less to be endured than the crash of bombs

In that coma and apathy of horror—

It was then that the feel of a deck,

The touch of a spar or a halyard,

Was like a hold on the latch of the heart of God.

It’s the Navy’s job!

It’s their turn now,

From the Beach to the ports.

Let the Stukas break their bloody necks on the Mole;

Let the fires scorch the stars—

For now, whether on the burnished oak of the cabins,

Or on the floor-boards of the punts,

Or in the cuddies of the skiffs,

Sleep at last has an even game with Death.

The blessed fog—

Ever before this day the enemy,

Leagued with the quicksands and the breakers—

Now mercifully masking the periscope lenses,

Smearing the hair-lines of the bomb-sights,

Hiding the flushed coveys.

And with it the calm on the Channel,

The power that drew the teeth from the storm,

The peace that passed understanding,

Soothing the surf, allaying the lop on the swell.

Out of the range of the guns of Nieuport,

Away from the immolating blasts of the oil-tanks,

The flotillas of ships were met by flotillas of gulls

Whiter than the cliffs of Foreland;

Between the lines of the Medway buoys

They steamed and sailed and rowed,

Back to the roadsteads, back to the piers

Inside the vigilant booms,

Back to the harbours,

Back to the River of London, to England,

Saved once again by the tread of her keels.

This is the castle of peace,

And this its quietest hour;

There isn’t a cry from the gathering dusk,

There isn’t a stir in the mist;

The fog has scarfed the moon and stars,

The curtains are drawn on the tides;

There isn’t a wave at the curve of the shore;

A granite-gray silence covers the land,

And the gulls are asleep on a soundless swell.

Nor is there a sign that under this Rock,

At the heart of the earth, the volcanoes

Await the word of the Lord of Misrule

To renew their ancient carnival;

Nor is there a sign above the Rock

That the earth responds to the whip of the sun,

Directing its pace and its orbit.

This is the cloister of the world,

Reduced to a cell in the fortress of peace

In the midst of anonymous, infinite darkness.

A slight turn of a dial,

And night and space and the silence

Thronged and tongued with life—

As the hosts might swarm through a lens

From a blood drop

Or a spot of dust in the heavens.

Out of the void they came

To storm the base of the tower,

To hammer the walls of the cell

And tap at the mullioned panes.

Polaris, the scout of Orion,

Was frigidly, jealously

Watching a speck on the frontier.

Adjusting a monocle,

He focused a stare which had often congealed

The blood of explorers,

And frozen their hands to the sextants

Till their bodies starched on the parallels.

He flashed to his chief

That a pair of Muscovite eagles

Had taken his stare without blinking,

Had rifled the pole right under his nose,

And, southward advancing, had brushed with their wings

One-half the floor of the world.

Nor would it be long, he predicted,

Before complaints would come from the stars,

All the way from zenith to nadir,

That their eyes had been blinded by grit,

The moment those birds had swept

All the dust from the planet Tellurian

With one whiff of their insolent tails.

A civilized group from the west,

Lithe, sleek and genteel

And ambassadorial,

Silked from their speech to the rim of their cuffs,

Were joined by a rout from the east:

Battered, uncouth and down at the heel,

Reeking with smoke from Nanking,

Weathering typhoons off Shanghai and Burma,

They filled the night with their clamour,

And spattered the shirts of the Cabinet Ministers

With sludge from the bed of the Yangzte.

From the south, south-east and south-west

Came the ghosts of the master of rapture,

Invoked by their master executants.

Through larynx and fingers and lips,

From catgut and silver and brass,

They were harassed by spirits still in the flesh

Who strove through auditions

With tap-dance and croon, with yodel and bleat,

To grind out an art cacophonic.

And choirs arrayed in white robes

Who had heard of blood that redeemed,

Of fires that refined

And of glory that sanctified dying,

Were massed in their anthem formation

To peal forth their late Hallelujahs

To a sovereign of love, law and order.

The moon waxed and waned,

And came again to the full,

Till the sea arose to the equinox.

But only ferrets of sound

Came out of the fog

To worm themselves through the cracks in the cobbles.

The waters leaped at the splayed bastions—

The might of the waters

Against the weight of the concrete,

Against the strength of the steel—

But only the dull reverberation of their paws

Disturbed the insulation of the tower;

Only the faintest echoes seeped through the copper roof

As the gulls screamed around the weather-vane.

The dial swung to the 69,

And with the sprint of light

On the last lap of the kilocycles

Blew in the great syllabic storm of the age.

Slow in the deep bass started the overture,

Heavy with guttural chords

And growling consonants that raked the cuspids

With timed explosions.

A crash of the dental mutes

Was followed by the pour of the open vowels

Along a huge Teutonic corridor.

And when the serried sibilants struck High G,

A child ran from the room of the tower,

An Alsatian bristled his neck,

A Dachshund slunk under a chair;

And the period ended with the frenzy

Of thirty thousand voices orchestrated

To reduce the Götterdämerung

To a trundle lullaby.

O master mason! What was wrong with the mortar

That, built to withstand the siege of the sea,

Should crumble beneath the roar from a throat?

Another turn, and the static combined

With the music of march and the roll of drums,

To prelude the close of a civilized aeon.

With a new salute and macabre step,

Chaos came in at the call of the horns.

No longer did news pause to rest on the journey,

Relayed through the stations in story and comment,

To be combed and groomed by the censors

In the leisured light of the studios:

But straight from the rape of the liners,

From the listed decks of the cruisers,

From trenches and plants and fields,

Came the grind from the lurch of the life-boats,

The sputter of salt from the throats,

The caterpillar crunch of the tanks,

The cries that out-blared the burst of the shells,

And the wheeze from the lungs that followed the sirens

In the smother of black-outs that covered the world.

Then Time shedding his mask,

His lazy hour-glass, his rusty scythe,

And all his tattered mortalities

Curved over bowed decrepit shoulders,

Assumed the stature of a young Apollyon.

He rose to be the Paragon of power.

A set of golden keys

Closing all doors of life,

Fitting the wards of death,

Hung from a girdle at his waist;

And as he led his mad aerial legions

Around the turret,

What thunders tarried in his fists!

What voltage in the dark tips of his wings!

Willy-nilly, he comes or goes, with the clown’s logic,

Comic in epitaph, tragic in epithalamium,

And unseduced by any mused rhyme.

However blow the winds over the pollen,

Whatever the course of the garden variables,

He remains the constant,

Ever flowering from the poppy seeds.

There was a time he came in formal dress,

Announced by Silence tapping at the panels

In deep apology.

A touch of chivalry in his approach,

He offered sacramental wine,

And with acanthus leaf

And petals of the hyacinth

He took the fever from the temples

And closed the eyelids,

Then led the way to his cool longitudes

In the dignity of the candles.

His mediaeval grace is gone—

Gone with the flame of the capitals

And the leisured turn of the thumb

Leafing the manuscripts,

Gone with the marbles

And the Venetian mosaics,

With the bend of the knee

Before the rose-strewn feet of the Virgin.

The paternosters of his priests,

Committing clay to clay,

Have rattled in their throats

Under the gride of his traction tread.

One night we heard his footfall—one September night—

In the outskirts of a village near the sea.

There was a moment when the storm

Delayed its fist, when the surf fell

Like velvet on the rocks—a moment only;

The strangest lull we ever knew!

A sudden truce among the oaks

Released their fratricidal arms;

The poplars straightened to attention

As the winds stopped to listen

To the sound of a motor drone—

And then the drone was still.

We heard the tick-tock on the shelf,

And the leak of valves in our hearts.

A calm condensed and lidded

As at the core of a cyclone ended breathing.

This was the monologue of Silence

Grave and unequivocal.

What followed was a bolt

Outside the range and target of the thunder,

And human speech curved back upon itself

Through Druid runways and the Piltdown scarps,

Beyond the stammers of the Java caves,

To find its origins in hieroglyphs

On mouths and eyes and cheeks

Etched by a foreign stylus never used

On the outmoded page of the Apocalypse.

There is no silence upon the earth or under the earth like the silence under the sea;

No cries announcing birth,

No sounds declaring death.

There is silence when the milt is laid on the spawn in the weeds and fungus of the rock-clefts;

And silence in the worth and struggle for life.

The bonitoes pounce upon the mackerel,

And are themselves caught by the barracudas,

The sharks kill the barracudas

And the great molluscs rend the sharks,

And all noiselessly—

Though swift be the action and final the conflict,

The drama is silent.

There is no fury upon the earth like the fury under the sea.

For growl and cough and snarl are the tokens of spendthrifts who know not the ultimate economy of rage.

Moreover, the pace of the blood is too fast.

But under the waves the blood is sluggard and has the same temperature as that of the sea.

There is something pre-reptilian about a silent kill.

Two men may end their hostilities just with their battle-cries.

“The devil take you,” says one.

“I’ll see you in hell first,” says the other.

And these introductory salutes followed by a hail of gutturals and sibilants are often the beginning of friendship, for who would not prefer to be lustily damned than to be half-heartedly blessed?

No one need fear oaths that are properly enunciated, for they belong to the inheritance of just men made perfect, and, for all we know, of such may be the Kingdom of Heaven.

But let silent hate be put away for it feeds upon the heart of the hater.

To-day I watched two pairs of eyes. One pair was black and the other grey. And while the owners thereof, for the space of five seconds, walked past each other, the grey snapped at the black and the black riddled the grey.

One looked to say—“The cat,”

And the other—“The cur.”

But no words were spoken;

Not so much as a hiss or a murmur came through the perfect enamel of the teeth; not so much as a gesture of enmity.

If the right upper lip curled over the canine, it went unnoticed.

The lashes veiled the eyes not for an instant in the passing.

And as between the two in respect to candour of intention or eternity of wish, there was no choice, for the stare was mutual and absolute.

A word would have dulled the exquisite edge of the feeling,

An oath would have flawed the crystallization of the hate.

For only such culture could grow in a climate of silence,—

Away back before the emergence of fur or feather, back to the unvocal sea and down deep where the darkness spills its wash on the threshold of light, where the lids never close upon the eyes, where the inhabitants slay in silence and are as silently slain.

Pure blood domestic, guaranteed,

Soft-mannered, musical in purr,

The ribbon had declared the breed,

Gentility was in the fur.

Such feline culture in the gads

No anger ever arched her back—

What distance since those velvet pads

Departed from the leopard’s track!

And when I mused how Time had thinned

The jungle strains within the cells,

How human hands had disciplined

Those prowling optic parallels;

I saw the generations pass

Along the reflex of a spring,

A bird had rustled in the grass,

The tab had caught it on the wing:

Behind the leap so furtive-wild

Was such ignition in the gleam,

I thought an Abyssinian child

Had cried out in the whitethroat’s scream.

From stone to bronze, from bronze to steel

Along the road-dust of the sun,

Two revolutions of the wheel

From Java to Geneva run.

The snarl Neanderthal is worn

Close to the smiling Aryan lips,

The civil polish of the horn

Gleams from our praying finger tips.

The evolution of desire

Has but matured a toxic wine,

Drunk long before its heady fire

Reddened Euphrates or the Rhine.

Between the temple and the cave

The boundary lies tissue-thin:

The yearlings still the altars crave

As satisfaction for a sin.

The road goes up, the road goes down—

Let Java or Geneva be—

But whether to the cross or crown,

The path lies through Gethsemane.

They brought their youth up on the lore

Of the Phoenix and the pyre,

Of birth from death and gold from fire

And the myth of the Aryan spore.

They measured life in metric tons,

Assessed both man and beast,

And with their patriot sweat they greased

The breechblocks of their guns.

They took their parables from mud—

How pure the crocus grows!

See how the fragrance of a rose

May spring from buried blood!

Now if a brier should here be born

In some ironic hour,

Let life infect both leaf and flower

But death preserve the thorn.

Comes not the spring-time here,

  Though the snowdrop came,

And the time of the cowslip is near,

  For a yellow flame

Was found in a tuft of green;

  And the joyous shout

  Of a child rang out

That a cuckoo’s eggs were seen.

Comes not the summer here,

  Though the cowslip be gone,

Though the wild rose blow as the year

  Draws faithfully on;

Though the face of the poppy be red

  In the morning light,

  And the ground be white

With the bloom of the locust shed.

Comes not the autumn here,

  Though someone said

He found a leaf in the sere

  By an aster dead;

And knew that the summer was done,

  For a herdsman cried

That his pastures were brown in the sun,

  And his wells were dried.

Nor shall the winter come,

  Though the elm be bare,

And every voice be dumb

  On the frozen air;

But the flap of a waterfowl

  In the marsh alone,

Or the hoot of a horned owl

  On a glacial stone.

To the poets who have fled

To pools where little breezes dusk and shiver,

Who need still life to deliver

Their souls of their songs,

We offer roses blanched of red

In the Orient gardens,

With April lilies to limn

On the Japanese urns—

And time, be it said,

For a casual hymn

To be sung for the hundred thousand dead

In the mud of the Yellow River.

And if your metric paragraphs

Incline to Western epitaphs,

Be pleased to return to a plain

Where a million lie

Under a proletarian sky,

Waiting to trouble

Your lines on the scorched Ukrainian stubble.

On the veined marble of their snows

Indite a score to tether

The flight of your strain;

Or should you need a rougher grain

That will never corrode with weather,

Let us propose

A stone west of the bend where the Volga flows

To lick her cubs on the Stalingrad rubble.

Hasten, for time may pass you by,

Mildew the reed and rust the lyre;

Look—that Tunisian glow will die

As died the Carthaginian fire!

To-day the autumn tints are on

The trampled grass at Marathon.

Here are the tales to be retold,

Here are the songs to be resung.

Go, find a cadence for that field-grey mould

Outcropping on the Parthenon.

Invoke, in other than the Latin tongue,

A Mediterranean Muse

To leave her pastoral loves—

The murmurs of her soft Theocritean fold,

Mimosa, oleander,

Dovecotes and olive groves,

And court the shadows where the night bedews

A Roman mausoleum hung

Upon the tides from Candia to Syracuse.

The microscope was at a loss to tell

The composition of his brain and glands—

Why blood should be like catnip to his smell,

And paws be given him instead of hands.

What toxins in a mammal’s milk could serve

To manufacture luxuries out of pains,

Anaesthetize the sympathetic nerve

Or turn to sleet the fluids of his veins?

Much less could it explain those pointed ears

That caught the raptures of a werewolf’s howl,

The allegretto strains in human tears,

The hallelujahs in a tiger’s growl.

Worry had crept into the old man’s face.

Why did he have to tilt the hour-glass

So often? Strange, he thought, this hurried pace

Of the atoms as they strove to pass

From bulb to bulb, fighting their way

From life to death in an unexplained stampede.

He had measured many tempos in his season,

But never cared for speed.

He always liked the sanitary, slow,

Grave manner of the mountains.

He had seen them flow

In rivulets of crystal grains

Down through this very corridor

To the deltas of the ocean shore.

He had watched the plants and trees turn into coal;

The marks of the fronds were in the veins

Resembling those of his own hands and temples.

He remembered how he used to while

Away the aeons, pondering the roll

Of the Amazon and Nile.

The curve of the sand dunes of Sahara,

The depositions of the layers of gneiss,

The march of the granite boulders

Under the control

Of dynasties of ice.

He thought of the prehistoric file

Of the saurians, one long and leisured day,

On the crumbling bridges from Australia to Malay.

And now this new adventurer—

Which called itself a soul,

With its mélange of pride,

Courage, honour, suicide,

Pursuing an eternal goal—

Had come along to wreck

His cool pre-Cambrian sense of sequence.

He shot a last glance at the trek

Of the human granules through the bottleneck,

Then rose and smashed the glass, and with the dust

Christened the knoll—

SEBASTOPOL!

The pundit lectured that the world was young

As ever, frisking like a spring-time colt

Around the sun, his mother. The class hung

Upon his words. I listened like a dolt,

And muttered that I saw the wastrel drawn

Along a road with many a pitch and bump

By spavined mules—this very day at dawn!

And heading for an ammunition dump.

The savant claimed I heckled him, but—Hell!

I saw the fellow in a tumbril there,

Tattered and planet-eyed and far from well,

With Winter roosting in his Alpine hair.

He ascended the rostrum after the fashion of the Caesars:

His arm, a baton raised oblique,

Answering the salute of the thunder,

Imposed a silence on the Square.

For three hours

A wind-theme swept his laryngeal reeds,

Pounded on the diaphragm of a microphone,

Entered, veered, ran round a coil,

Emerged, to storm the passes of the ether,

Until, impinging on a hundred million ear-drums,

It grew into the fugue of Europe.

Nickel, copper and steel rang their quotations to the skies,

And down through the diatonic scale

The mark hallooed the franc,

The franc bayed the lira,

With the three in full flight from the pound.

And while the diapasons were pulled

On the Marseillaise,

The Giovinezza

And the Deutschlandlied,

A perfect stretto was performed

As the Dead March boomed its way

Through God Save The King

And the Star Spangled Banner.

Then the codetta of the clerics

(Chanting a ritual over the crosses of gold tossed into the crucibles to back the billion credit)

Was answered by

The clang of the North Sea against the bows of the destroyers,

The ripple of surf on the periscopes.

The grunt of the Mediterranean shouldering Gibraltar,

And the hum of the bombing squadrons in formation under Orion.

And the final section issued from the dials,

WHEN—

Opposed by contrapuntal blasts

From the Federated Polyphonic Leagues

Of Gynecologists,

Morticians,

And the Linen Manufacturers—

The great Baritone,

Soaring through the notes of the hymeneal register,

Called the brides and the grooms to the altar,

To be sent forth by the Recessional Bells

To replenish the earth,

And in due season to produce

Magnificent crops of grass on the battlefields.

They were the oaks and beeches of our species.

Their roots struck down through acid loam

To weathered granite and took hold

Of flint and silica, or found their home

With red pyrites—fools’ mistake for gold.

Their tunics, stoles and togas were like watersheds,

Splitting the storm, sloughing the rain.

Under such cloaks the morrow could not enter—

Their gravitas had seized a geologic centre

And triumphed over subcutaneous pain.

Aurelius! What direction did you take

To find your hermitage?

We have tried but failed to make

That cool unflawed retreat

Where the pulses slow their beat

To an aspen-yellow age.

To-day we cannot discipline

The ferments ratting underneath our skin.

Where is the formula to win

Composure from defeat?

And what specific can unmesh

The tangle of civilian flesh

From the traction of the panzers?

And when our children cry aloud

At screaming comets in the skies, what serves

The head that’s bloody but unbowed?

What are the Stoic answers

To those who flag us at the danger curves

Along the quivering labyrinth of nerves?

Where do you bank such fires as can transmute

This granite-fact intransigence of life,

Such proud irenic faith as can refute

The upstart logic of this world of strife—

Its come-and-go of racial dust, its strum

Of windy discords from the seven seas,

Its scream of fifes and din of kettle-drum

That lead the march towards our futurities?

The proof, that slays the reason, has no power

To stem your will, corrode your soul—though lime

Conspire with earth and water to devour

The finest cultures from the lust of slime;

Though crumbled Tartar hordes break through their sod

To blow their grit into the eyes of God.

Steady, the heart!

Can you not see

You must not break

Incredulously?

The dead has come back,

He is here at the sill;

Try to believe

The miracle.

Give me more breath,

Or I may not withstand

The thrill of his voice

And the clasp of his hand.

Be quiet, my heart,

Can you not see

In the beat of my pulse

Mortality?

Back to the earth would we come

In the fullness of years,

As we return home at dusk

When our eyes are dim with day

And our feet tired with stubble.

We would come with slow step

Along the cool loam of lanes,

Home to your heart

With the mellow toll of bells in the west.

But not as to-day would we come

To the trumpet’s unnatural summons,

With our loins girt for a longer race

And our faces set for a different goal,

With our feet strung to the measures of life,

To a riot of bells in the east.

This is the season for blood-root and bud-break,

For freshets and resinous airs,

For the mating migrations

Of swallows and whitethroats.

For the scaling of crags,

For the plangent call of the surf

Where ospreys are building their nests.

Then why should we come out of season

To take the long lease of your heart,

When the swift irresponsible trespass

Of our feet above ground

Is cut short by the halt of the sentry?—

There are months still to go for the autumn,

And months for the poppies to bloom,

Though hate and greed have grown to their harvest,

Though tolerance, forgiveness and love are forgotten

Like scars on the body of Christ—

Too soon in the morning for youth

To take the deep draught of your opiate!

When Genghis and his captains

Built their pyramids of skulls

Outside Bokhara and Herat,

And sacked Otrar and Samarcand,

There was no sophistry between the subject and the verb;

For what the Khan said, he meant.

Behind the dust were the hoofs of his cavalry,

Behind the smoke was his fire.

And when Mohammed and Jehal-ud-Din,

In their flight from the Indus to the Caspian,

Appealed to Allah for protection,

Even the Great God of Islam

Could find no escape for the faithful,

When he knew the flight was regimented

To the paces of a Mongol syllogism.

Now when the delegates met around the tables

And lifted up their voices,

The subjects were their civilizing tasks,

The fulfilment of historic missions,

The redemption of the national honour,

And the emancipation of the slaves.

But flaws were hidden in the predicates,

And in the pips of the adverbials,

And the rhetorical adjectives

Assumed the protective colouring

Of the great cats against the jungle grass—

THEREFORE,

In all the wealth of their possessive pronouns,

Not a syllable was spared

For the oil reported in the foreign shales.

The young lieutenant in command

Of the famous submarine, the K-

148, had scanned

The sea circumference all day:

A thousand times or so his hand

Revolved the prism in the hope

That the image of the ship expected,

But overdue, might be reflected

Through the lenses of his periscope.

’Twas getting late, and not a mark

Had troubled the monotony

Of every slow expanding arc

Of the horizon. Suddenly

His grip froze to the handle! What

Was that amorphous yellow spot

To the north-east? Was it the lift

Of a wave, a curl of foam, a drift

Of cloud? Too slow for foam, too fast

For cloud. A minute more. At last

The drift was taking shape; his stroke

Of luck had fallen—it was SMOKE!

An hour of light in the western sky,

And thirty seconds for descent;

The quarry ten miles off. Stand-by!

The valves were opened—flood and vent—

And the water like a rumble of thunder

Entered the tanks. Two generators

Sparked her fins and drove her under

Down the ocean escalators.

No forebear of the whale or shark,

No saurian of the Pleiocene,

Piercing the sub-aquatic dark

Could rival this new submarine.

The evolution of the sea

Had brought forth many specimens

Conceived in horror—denizens

Whose vast inside economy

Not only reproduced their broods,

But having shot them from their wombs,

Devoured them in their family feuds

And passed them through their catacombs.

But was there one in all their race

Combined such terror with such grace,

As this disturber of the glooms,

This rapid sinuous oval form

Which knew unerringly the way

To sound and circumvent a storm

Or steal a march upon her prey?

No product she of Nature’s dower,

No casual selection wrought her

Or gave her such mechanic power

To breathe above or under water.

In her thoracic cavities

One hundred tons of batteries

Were ready, on the dive, to start

The musculation of the heart.

And where outside a Ming museum

Could any antiquarian find

An assemblage such as here was shrined

Within the vault of her peritoneum?

Electric switches, indicators.

Diving alarm-horns, oscillators,

Rudder controls, and tubes and dials,

Yellow, white, magenta vials,

Pipes to force out battery gases,

Pressure gauges, polished brasses,

Surrounded human figures caught

At their positions, silent, taut,

Like statues in the tungsten light,

While just outside the cell was night

And a distant engine’s monotone

Tapping at a telephone.

And now two hundred feet below

She held her bearings towards her foe,

While silence and the darkness flowed

Along an unnavigated road.

In half an hour she stopped and blew

The water ballast with her air,

Rose stealthily to surface where

Upon the mirror in full view,

Cutting an Atlantic swarth

The trail of smoke turned out to be

A fat mammalian of the sea,

Set on a course north-east by north,

And heavy with maternity.

Within her frame-work iron-walled

A thousand bodies were installed,

A snug and pre-lacteal brood

Drawing from her warmth and food,

Awaiting in two days or three

A European delivery.

Blood of tiger, blood of shark,

What a prey to stalk and strike

From an ambush in the dark

Thicket of the sea!

                  Now like

The tiger-shark viviparous

Who with her young grown mutinous

Before the birth-hour with the smell

Of blood inside the mother, will expel

Them from her body to begin

At once the steerage of the fin,

The seizure of the jaw, the click

Of serried teeth fashioned so well

Pre-natally to turn the trick

Upon a shoal of mackerel—

So like the shark, the submarine

Ejected from her magazine

The first one of her foetal young.

It ran along the trolley, swung

Into a flooded tube and there

Under a jet of compressed air

It found the sea. A trip-latch in

The tube a second later sprung

A trigger, and the turbine power

Acting on the driving fin

Paced it at fifty miles per hour.

So huge and luscious was this feast,

The 148 released

Three others to offset the chance

Of some erratic circumstance

Of aim or speed or tide or weather.

And during this time nothing was seen

Except to an eye in the submarine

Of that bevy of sharks on the sea together,

So accurately spaced one after the other,

And driven by thirst derived from the mother.

Each seemed on the glass a tenuous feather

Of gold such as a curlew in flight

Would make with its nether wing skimming the swell;

Not a hint of a swerve to the left or right,

The gyros were holding the balance so well.

The rich-ripe mammal was swimming straight

On the course of her chart with unconcerned leisure,

Her steady keel and uniform rate

Combining so perfectly with the deep black

Of the hull—silhouette against the back-

Drop of the sunset to etch and measure

The target—when three of those shafts of foam

At the end of their amber stretch struck home.

The first one barely missed—to plough

A harmless path across her bow:

The next tore like a scimitar

Through flesh to rip the jugular;

Boilers and bulkheads broke apart

When the third torpedo struck the heart;

And with what logic did the fourth

Cancel the course north-east by north,

Hitting abaft the beam to rut

The exploding nitrates through her gut.

The young commander’s time was short

To log the items for report.

Upon the mirror he descried

Three cavernous wounds in the mammal’s side—

Three crumbled dykes through which the tide

Of a gluttonous Atlantic poured;

A heavy starboard list with banks

Of smoke fluted with steam which soared

From a scramble of pipes within her flanks;

Twin funnel-nostrils belching red,

A tilting stern, a plunging head,

The foundering angle in position,

And the sea’s reach for a thousand souls

In the last throe of the parturition.

Now with her hyper-sensitive feel

Of her master’s hands on the controls—

A pull of a switch, a turn of a wheel,

The submarine, like the deep-sea shark,

Went under cover, away from the light

And limn of the sunset, from the sight

Of the stars, to a native lair as dark

As a kraken’s grave. She took her course

South-west by south—for what was the source

Of that hum to the port picked up by the oscillator?

A rhythm too rapid, too hectic for freighter

Or liner! This was her foe, not her prey:

Faster and louder, and heading her way!

Beyond the depth where the tanks could flood ’er,

She drove her nose down with the diving rudder,

Far from the storm of shells or thrust

Of the ram, away from the gear-wrenching zone

Of the depth-bomb, away from the scent and lust

Of a killer whose might was as great as her own.

The winds of God were blowing over France,

Kindling the hearths and altars, changing vows

Of rote into an alphabet of flame.

The air was charged with song beyond the range

Of larks, with wings beyond the stretch of eagles.

Skylines unknown to maps broke from the mists

And there was laughter on the seas. With sound

Of bugles from the Roman catacombs,

The saints came back in their incarnate forms.

Across the Alps St. Francis of Assisi

In his brown tunic girt with hempen cord,

Revisited the plague-infected towns.

The monks were summoned from their monasteries,

Nuns from their convents; apostolic hands

Had touched the priests; foundlings and galley slaves

Became the charges of Vincent de Paul;

Francis de Sales put his heroic stamp

Upon his order of the Visitation.

Out of Numidia by way of Rome,

The architect of palaces, unbuilt

Of hand, again was busy with his plans,

Reshaping for the world his City of God.

Out of the Netherlands was heard the call

Of Kempis through the Imitatio

To leave the dusty marts and city streets

And stray along the shores of Galilee.

The flame had spread across the Pyrenees—

The visions of Theresa burning through

The adorations of the Carmelites;

The very clouds at night to John of the Cross

Being cruciform—chancel, transept and aisle

Blazing with light and holy oracle.

Xavier had risen from his knees to drive

His dreams full-sail under an ocean compass.

Loyola, soldier-priest, staggering with wounds

At Pampeluna, guided by a voice,

Had travelled to the Montserrata Abbey

To leave his sword and dagger on an altar

That he might lead the Company of Jesus.

The story of the frontier like a saga

Sang through the cells and cloisters of the nation,

Made silver flutes out of the parish spires,

Troubled the ashes of the canonized

In the cathedral crypts, soared through the nave

To stir the foliations on the columns,

Roll through the belfries, and give deeper tongue

To the Magnificat in Notre Dame.

It brought to earth the prophets and apostles

Out of their static shrines in the stained glass.

It caught the ear of Christ, reveined his hands

And feet, bidding his marble saints to leave

Their pedestals for chartless seas and coasts

And the vast blunders of the forest glooms.

So, in the footsteps of their patrons came

A group of men asking the hardest tasks

At the new outposts of the Huron bounds

Held in the stern hand of the Jesuit Order.

And in Bayeux a neophyte while rapt

In contemplation saw a bleeding form

Falling beneath the instrument of death,

Rising under the quickening of the thongs,

Stumbling along the Via Dolorosa.

No play upon the fancy was this scene,

But the Real Presence to the naked sense.

The fingers of Brébeuf were at his breast,

Closing and tightening on a crucifix,

While voices spoke aloud unto his ear

And to his heart—Per ignem et per aquam.

Forests and streams and trails thronged through his mind.

The painted faces of the Iroquois,

Nomadic bands and smoking bivouacs

Along the shores of western inland seas,

With forts and palisades and fiery stakes.

The stories of Champlain, Brulé, Viel,

Sagard and Le Caron had reached his town—

The stories of those northern boundaries

Where in the winter the white pines could brush

The Pleiades, and at the equinoxes

Under the gold and green of the auroras

Wild geese drove wedges through the zodiac.

The vows were deep he laid upon his soul.

“I shall be broken first before I break them.”

He knew by heart the manual that had stirred

The world—the clarion calling through the notes

Of the Ignatian preludes. On the prayers,

The meditations, points and colloquies,

Was built the soldier and the martyr programme.

This is the end of man—Deum laudet,

To seek and find the will of God, to act

Upon it for the ordering of life,

And for the soul’s beatitude. This is

To do, this not to do. To weigh the sin;

The interior understanding to be followed

By the amendment of the deed through grace;

The abnegation of the evil thought

And act; the trampling of the body under;

The daily practice of the counter virtues.

“In time of desolation to be firm

And constant in the soul’s determination,

Desire and sense obedient to the reason.”

The oath Brébeuf was taking had its root

Firm in his generations of descent.

The family name was known to chivalry—

In the Crusades; at Hastings; through the blood

Of the English Howards; called out on the rungs

Of the siege ladders; at the castle breaches;

Proclaimed by heralds at the lists, and heard

In Council Halls:—the coat-of-arms a bull

In black with horns of gold on a silver shield.

So on that toughened pedigree of fibre

Were strung the pledges. From the novice stage

To the vow-day he passed on to the priesthood,

And on the anniversary of his birth

He celebrated his first mass at Rouen.

And the first clauses of the Jesuit pledge

Were honoured when, embarking at Dieppe,April 26 1625

Brébeuf, Massé and Charles Lalemant

Travelled three thousand miles of the Atlantic,

And reached the citadel in seven weeks.

A month in preparation at Notre Dame

Des Anges, Brébeuf in company with Daillon

Moved to Three Rivers to begin the journey.

Taking both warning and advice from traders,

They packed into their stores of altar-ware

And vestments, strings of coloured beads with knives,

Kettles and awls, domestic gifts to win

The Hurons’ favour or appease their wrath.

There was a touch of omen in the warning,

For scarcely had they started when the fate

Of the Franciscan mission was disclosed—

News of Viel, delivered to Brébeuf,—

Drowned by the natives in the final league

Of his return at Sault-au-Récollet!

Back to Quebec by Lalemant’s command;

A year’s delay of which Brébeuf made use

By hardening his body and his will,

Learning the rudiments of the Huron tongue,

Mastering the wood-lore, joining in the hunt

For food, observing habits of speech, the ways

Of thought, the moods and the long silences.

Wintering with the Algonquins, he soon knew

The life that was before him in the cabins—

The troubled night, branches of fir covering

The floor of snow; the martyrdom of smoke

That hourly drove his nostrils to the ground

To breathe, or offered him the choice of death

Outside by frost, inside by suffocation;

The forced companionship of dogs that ate

From the same platters, slept upon his legs

Or neck; the nausea from sagamite,

Unsalted, gritty, and that bloated feeling,

The February stomach touch when acorns,

Turk’s cap, bog-onion bulbs dug from the snow

And bulrush roots flavoured with eel skin made

The menu for his breakfast-dinner-supper.

Added to this, the instigated taunts

Common as daily salutations; threats

Of murderous intent that just escaped

The deed—the prologue to Huronia!

Midsummer and the try again—Brébeuf,July 1626

Daillon, de Nouë just arrived from France;

Quebec up to Three Rivers; the routine

Repeated; bargaining with the Indians,

Axes and beads against the maize and passage;

The natives’ protest when they saw Brébeuf,

High as a totem-pole. What if he placed

His foot upon the gunwale, suddenly

Shifted an ounce of those two hundred pounds

Off centre at the rapids! They had visions

Of bodies and bales gyrating round the rocks,

Plunging like stumps and logs over the falls.

The Hurons shook their heads: the bidding grew;

Kettles and porcelain necklaces and knives,

Till with the last awl thrown, upon the heap,

The ratifying grunt came from the chief.

Two Indians holding the canoe, Brébeuf,

Barefooted, cassock pulled up to his knees,

Planted one foot dead in the middle, then

The other, then slowly and ticklishly

Adjusted to the physics of his range

And width, he grasped both sides of the canoe,

Lowered himself and softly murmuring

An Ave, sat, immobile as a statue.

So the flotilla started—the same route

Champlain and Le Caron eleven years

Before had taken to avoid the swarm

Of hostile Iroquois on the St. Lawrence.

Eight hundred miles—along the Ottawa

Through the steep gorges where the river narrowed.

Through calmer waters where the river widened,

Skirting the island of the Allumettes,

Thence to the Mattawa through lakes that led

To the blue waters of the Nipissing,

And then southward a hundred tortuous miles

Down the French River to the Huron shore.

The record of that trip was for Brébeuf

A memory several times to be re-lived;

Of rocks and cataracts and portages,

Of feet cut by the river stones, of mud

And stench, of boulders, logs and tangled growths,

Of summer heat that made him long for night,

And when he struck his bed of rock—mosquitoes

That made him doubt if dawn would ever break.

’Twas thirty days to the Georgian Bay, then south

One hundred miles threading the labyrinth

Of islands till he reached the western shore

That Banked the Bay of Penetanguishene.

Soon joined by both his fellow priests he followed

The course of a small stream and reached Toanché,

Where for three years he was to make his home

And turn the first sod of the Jesuit mission.

’Twas ploughing only—for eight years would pass

Before even the blades appeared. The priests

Knew well how barren was the task should signs,

Gestures and inarticulate sounds provide

The basis of the converse. And the speech

Was hard. De Nouë set himself to school,

Unfalteringly as to his Breviary,

Through the long evenings of the fall and winter.

But as light never trickled through a sentence,

Either the Hurons’ or his own, he left

With the spring’s expedition to Quebec,

Where intermittently for twenty years

He was to labour with the colonists,

Travelling between the outposts, and to die

Snow-blind, caught in the circles of his tracks

Between Three Rivers and Fort Richelieu.

Daillon migrated to the south and west

To the country of the Neutrals. There he spent

The winter, fruitless. Jealousies of trade

Awoke resentment, fostered calumnies,

Until the priest under a constant threat

That often issued in assault, returned

Against his own persuasion to Quebec.

Brébeuf was now alone. He bent his mind

To the great end. The efficacious rites

Were hinged as much on mental apprehensions

As on the disposition of the heart.

For that the first equipment was the speech.

He listened to the sounds and gave them letters,

Arranged their sequences, caught the inflections,

Extracted nouns from objects, verbs from actions

And regimented rebel moods and tenses.

He saw the way the chiefs harangued the clans,

The torrent of compounded words, the art

Concealed within the pause, the look, the gesture.

Lacking all labials, the open mouth

Performed a double service with the vowels

Directed like a battery at the hearers.

With what forebodings did he watch the spell

Cast on the sick by the Arendiwans:

The sorcery of the Huron rhetoric

Extorting bribes for cures, for guarantees

Against the failure of the crop or hunt!

The time would come when steel would clash on steel,

And many a battle would be won or lost

With weapons from the armoury of words.

Three years of that apprenticeship had won

The praise of his Superior and no less

Evoked the admiration of Champlain.

That soldier, statesman, navigator, friend,

Who had combined the brain of Richelieu

With the red blood of Cartier and Magellan,

Was at this time reduced to his last keg

Of powder at the citadel. Blockade,

The piracy of Kirke on the Atlantic,

The English occupation of Quebec,

And famine, closed this chapter of the Mission.1629

Four years at home could not abate his zeal.

Brébeuf, absorbed within his meditations,

Made ready to complete his early vows.

Each year in France but served to clarify

His vision. At Rouen he gauged the height

Of the Cathedral’s central tower in terms

Of pines and oaks around the Indian lodges.

He went to Paris. There as worshipper,

His eyes were scaling transepts, but his mind,

Straying from window patterns where the sun

Shed rose ellipses on the marble floor,

Rested on glassless walls of cedar bark.

To Rennes—the Jesuits’ intellectual home,

Where, in the Summa of Aquinas, faith

Laid hold on God’s existence when the last

Link of the Reason slipped, and where Loyola

Enforced the high authoritarian scheme

Of God’s vicegerent on the priestly fold.

Between the two nostalgic fires Brébeuf

Was swung—between two homes; in one was peace

Within the holy court, the ecstasy

Of unmolested prayer before the Virgin,

The daily and vicarious offering

On which no hand might dare lay sacrilege:

But in the other would be broken altars

And broken bodies of both Host and priest.

Then of which home, the son? From which the exile?

With his own blood Brébeuf wrote his last vow—

“Lord Jesus! Thou didst save me with thy blood;

By thy most precious death; and this is why

I make this pledge to serve thee all my life

In the Society of Jesus—never

To serve another than thyself. Hereby

I sign this promise in my blood, ready

To sacrifice it all as willingly

As now I give this drop.”—Jean de Brébeuf.

Nor did the clamour of the Thirty Years,

The battle-cries at La Rochelle and Fribourg,

Blow out the flame. Less strident than the names

Of Richelieu and Mazarin, Condé,

Turenne, but just as mighty, were the calls

Of the new apostolate. A century

Before had Xavier from the Indies summoned

The world to other colours. Now appeals

Were ringing through the history of New France.

Le Jeune, following the example of Biard

And Charles Lalemant, was capturing souls

By thousands with the fire of the Relations:

Noble and peasant, layman, priest and nun

Gave of their wealth and power and personal life.

Among his new recruits were Chastellain,

Pijart, Le Mercier, and Isaac Jogues,

The Lalemants—Jerome and Gabriel—

Jerome who was to supervise and write,

With Ragueneau, the drama of the Mission;

Who told of the survivors reaching France

When the great act was closed that “all of them

Still hold their resolution to return

To the combat at the first sound of the trumpets.”

The other, Gabriel, who would share the crown

With Jean Brébeuf, pitting the frailest body

Against the hungers of the wilderness,

The fevers of the lodges and the fires

That slowly wreathed themselves around a stake.

Then Garnier, comrade of Jogues. The winds

Had fanned to a white heat the hearth and placed

Three brothers under vows—the Carmelite,

The Capuchin, and his, the Jesuit.

The gentlest of his stock, he had resolved

To seek and to accept a post that would

Transmit his nurture through a discipline

That multiplied the living martyrdoms

Before the casual incident of death.

To many a vow did Chabanel subject

His timid nature as the evidence

Of trial came through the Huronian records.

He needed every safeguard of the soul

To fortify the will, for every day

Would find him fighting, mastering his revolt

Against the native life and practices.

Of all the priests he could the least endure

The sudden transformation from the Chair

Of College Rhetoric to the heat and drag

Of portages, from the monastic calm

To the noise and smoke and vermin of the lodges,

And the insufferable sights and stinks

When, at the High Feast of the Dead, the bodies

Lying for months or years upon the scaffolds

Were taken down, stripped of their flesh, caressed,

Strung up along the cabin poles and then

Cast in a pit for common burial.

The day would come when in the wilderness.

The weary hand protesting, he would write

This final pledge—“I, Noel Chabanel,

Do vow, in presence of the Sacrament

Of Thy most precious blood and body, here

To stay forever with the Huron Mission,

According to commands of my Superiors.

Therefore I do beseech Thee to receive me

As Thy perpetual servant and to make

Me worthy of so sublime a ministry.”

And the same spirit breathed on Chaumonot,

Making his restless and undisciplined soul

At first seek channels of renunciation

In abstinence, ill health and beggary.

His months of pilgrimages to the shrines

At Rome and to the Lady of Loretto,

The static hours upon his knees had sapped

His strength, turning an introspective mind

Upon the weary circuit of its thoughts,

Until one day a letter from Brébeuf

Would come to burn the torpors of his heart

And galvanize a raw novitiate.

New France restored! Champlain, Massé, Brébeuf1633

Were in Quebec, hopes riding high as ever.

Davost and Daniel soon arrived to join

The expedition west. Midsummer trade,

The busiest the Colony had known,

Was over: forty-three canoes to meet

The hazards of return; the basic sense

Of safety, now Champlain was on the scene;

The joy of the Toanché Indians

As they beheld Brébeuf and heard him speak

In their own tongue, was happy augury.

But as before upon the eve of starting

The path was blocked, so now the unforeseen

Stepped in. A trade and tribal feud long-blown

Between the Hurons and the Allumettes

Came to a head when the Algonquin chief

Forbade the passage of the priests between

His island and the shore. The Hurons knew

The roughness of this channel, and complied.

In such delays which might have been construed

By lesser wills as exits of escape,

As providential doors on a light latch,

The Fathers entered deeper preparation.

They worked incessantly among the tribes

In the environs of Quebec, took hold

Of Huron words and beat them into order.

Davost and Daniel gathered from the store

Of speech, manners, and customs that Brébeuf

Had garnered, all the subtleties to make

The bargain for the journey. The next year

Seven canoes instead of forty! Fear

Of Iroquois following a recent raid

And massacre; growing distrust of priests;

The sense of risk in having men aboard

Unskilled in fire-arms, helpless at the paddles

And on the portages—all these combined

To sharpen the terms until the treasury

Was dry of presents and of promises.

The ardours of his trip eight years before1634

Fresh in his mind, Brébeuf now set his face

To graver peril, for the native mood

Was hostile. On the second week the corn

Was low, a handful each a day. Sickness

Had struck the Huron, slowing down the blades,

And turning murmurs into menaces

Against the Blackrobes and their French companions.

The first blow hit Davost. Robbed of his books,

Papers and altar linens, he was left

At the Island of the Allumettes; Martin^[A]

Was put ashore at Nipissing; Baron^[A]

And Daniel were deserted, made to take

Their chances with canoes along the route,

Yet all in turn, tattered, wasted, with feet

Bleeding—broken though not in will, rejoined

Their great companion after he had reached

The forest shores of the Fresh Water Sea,

And guided by the sight of smoke had entered

The village of Ihonatiria.

A year’s success flattered the priestly hope

That on this central field seed would be sown

On which the yield would be the Huron nation

Baptized and dedicated to the Faith;

And that a richer harvest would be gleaned

Of duskier grain from the same seed on more

Forbidding ground when the arch-foes themselves

Would be re-born under the sacred rites.

For there was promise in the auspices.

Ihonatiria received Brébeuf

With joy. Three years he had been there, a friend

Whose visit to the tribes could not have sprung

From inspiration rooted in private gain.

He had not come to stack the arquebuses

Against the mountains of the beaver pelts.

He had not come to kill. Between the two—

Barter and battle—what was left to explain

A stranger in their midst? The name Echon^[B]

Had solved the riddle.

                            So with native help

The Fathers built their mission house—the frame

Of young elm-poles set solidly in earth;

Their supple tops bent, lashed and braced to form

The arched roof overlaid with cedar-bark.

“No Louvre or palace is this cabin,” wrote

Brébeuf, “no stories, cellar, garret, windows,

No chimney—only at the top a hole

To let the smoke escape. Inside, three rooms

With doors of wood alone set it apart

From the single long-house of the Indians.

The first is used for storage; in the second

Our kitchen, bedroom and refectory;

Our bedstead is the earth; rushes and boughs

For mattresses and pillows; in the third,

Which is our chapel, we have placed the altar,

The images and vessels of the Mass.”

It was the middle room that drew the natives,

Day after day, to share the sagamite

And raisins, and to see the marvels brought

From France—marvels on which the Fathers built

A basis of persuasion, recognizing

The potency of awe for natures nurtured

On charms and spells, invoking kindly spirits

And exorcising demons. So the natives

Beheld a mass of iron chips like bees

Swarm to a lodestone: was it gum that held

Them fast? They watched the handmill grind the corn;

Gaped at a lens eleven-faceted

That multiplied a bead as many times,

And at a phial where a captive flea

Looked like a beetle. But the miracle

Of all, the clock! It showed the hours; it struck

Or stopped upon command. Le Capitaine

Du Jour which moved its hands before its face,

Called up the dawn, saluted noon, rang out

The sunset, summoned with the count of twelve

The Fathers to a meal, or sent at four

The noisy pack of Indians to their cabins.

“What did it say?” “Yo eiouahaoua—

Time to put on the cauldron.” “And what now?”

“Time to go home at once and close the door.”

It was alive: an oki dwelt inside,

Peering out through that black hub on the dial.

As great a mystery was writing—how

A Frenchman fifteen miles away could know

The meaning of black signs the runner brought.

Sometimes the marks were made on peel of bark,

Sometimes on paper—in itself a wonder!

From what strange tree was it the inside rind?

What charm was in the ink that transferred thought

Across such space without a spoken word?

This growing confirmation of belief

Was speeded by events wherein good fortune

Waited upon the priestly word and act.

A moon eclipse was due—Brébeuf had known it—Aug. 27 1635

Had told the Indians of the moment when

The shadow would be thrown across the face.

Nor was there wastage in the prayers as night,

Uncurtained by a single cloud, produced

An orb most perfect. No one knew the lair

Or nest from which the shadow came; no one

The home to which it travelled when it passed.

Only the vague uncertainties were left—

Was it the dread invasion from the south?

Such portent was the signal for the braves

To mass themselves outside the towns and shoot

Their multitudes of arrows at the sky

And fling their curses at the Iroquois.

Like a crow’s wing it hovered, broodily

Brushing the face—five hours from rim to rim

While midnight darkness stood upon the land.

This was prediction baffling all their magic.

Again, when weeks of drought had parched the land

And burned the corn, when dancing sorcerers

Brought out their tortoise shells, climbed on the roofs,

Clanging their invocation to the Bird

Of Thunder to return, day after day,

Without avail, the priests formed their processions,

Put on their surplices above their robes,

And the Bird of Thunder came with heavy rain,

Released by the nine masses at Saint Joseph.

Nor were the village warriors slow to see

The value of the Frenchmen’s strategy

In war. Returning from the eastern towns,

They told how soldiers had rebuilt the forts,

And strengthened them with corner bastions

Where through the embrasures enfilading fire

Might flank the Iroquois bridging the ditches,

And scaling ramparts. Here was argument

That pierced the thickest prejudice of brain

And heart, allaying panic ever present,

When with the first news of the hated foe

From scouts and hunters, women with their young

Fled to the dubious refuge of the forest

From terror blacker than a pestilence.

On such a soil tilled by those skilful hands

Those passion flowers and lilies of the East,

The Aves and the Paternosters bloomed.

The Credos and the Thou-shalt-nots were turned

By Daniel into simple Huron rhymes

And taught to children, and when points of faith

Were driven hard against resistant rock,

The Fathers found the softer crevices

Through deeds which readily the Indian mind

Could grasp—where hands were never put to blows

Nor the swift tongues used for recrimination.

Acceptance of the common lot was part

Of the original vows. But that the priests

Who were to come should not misread the text,

Brébeuf prepared a sermon on the theme

Of Patience:—“Fathers, Brothers, under call

Of God! Take care that you foresee the perils,

Labours and hardships of this Holy Mission.

You must sincerely love the savages

As brothers ransomed by the blood of Christ.

All things must be endured. To win their hearts

You must perform the smallest services.

Provide a tinder-box or burning mirror

To light their fires. Fetch wood and water for them;

And when embarking never let them wait

For you; tuck up your habits, keep them dry

To avoid water and sand in their canoes. Carry

Your load on portages. Always appear

Cheerful—their memories are good for faults.

Constrain yourselves to eat their sagamite

The way that they prepare it, tasteless, dirty.”

And by the priests upon the ground all dots

And commas were observed. They suffered smoke

That billowed from the back-draughts at the roof,

Smothered the cabin, seared the eyes; the fire

That broiled the face, while frost congealed the spine;

The food from unwashed platters where refusal

Was an offence; the rasp of speech maintained

All day by men who never learned to talk

In quiet tones; the drums of the Diviners

Blasting the night—all this without complaint!

And more—whatever sleep was possible

To snatch from the occasional lull of cries

Was broken by uncovenanted fleas

That fastened on the priestly flesh like hornets.

Carving the curves of favour on the lips,

Tailoring the man into the Jesuit coat,

Wrapping the smiles round inward maledictions,

And sublimating hoary Gallic oaths

Into the Benedicite when dogs

And squaws and reeking children violated

The hours of rest, were penances unnamed

Within the iron code of good Ignatius.

Was there a limit of obedience

Outside the jurisdiction of this Saint?

How often did the hand go up to lower

The flag? How often by some ringing order

Was it arrested at the halliard touch?

How often did Brébeuf seal up his ears

When blows and insults woke ancestral fifes

Within his brain, blood-cells, and viscera,

Is not explicit in the written story.

But never could the Indians infer

Self-gain or anything but simple courage

Inspired by a zeal beyond reproof,

As when the smallpox spreading like a flame

Destroying hundreds, scarifying thousands,

The Fathers took their chances of contagion,

Their broad hats warped by rain, their moccasins

Worn to the kibes, that they might reach the huts,

Share with the sick their dwindled stock of food—

A sup of partridge broth or raisin juice,

Inscribe the sacred sign of the cross, and place

A touch of moisture from the Holy Water

Upon the forehead of a dying child.

Before the year was gone the priests were shown

The way the Hurons could prepare for death

A captive foe. The warriors had surprised

A band of Iroquois and had reserved

The one survivor for a fiery pageant.

No cunning of an ancient Roman triumph,

Nor torment of a Medici confession

Surpassed the subtle savagery of art

Which made the dressing for the sacrifice

A ritual of mockery for the victim.

What visions of the past came to Brébeuf,

And what forebodings of the days to come,

As he beheld this weird compound of life

In jest and intent taking place before

His eyes—the crude unconscious variants

Of reed and sceptre, robe and cross, brier

And crown! Might not one day baptismal drops

Be turned against him in a rain of death?

Whatever the appeals made by the priests,

They could not break the immemorial usage

Or vary one detail. The prisoner

Was made to sing his death-song, was embraced,

Hailed with ironic greetings, forced to state

His willingness to die.

                              “See how your hands

Are crushed. You cannot thus desire to live.

No.

          Then be of good courage—you shall die.

True!—What shall be the manner of my death?

By fire.

        When shall it be?

                            To-night.

                                          What hour?

At sunset.

              All is well.”

                              Eleven fires

Were lit along the whole length of the cabin.

His body smeared with pitch and bound with belts

Of bark, the Iroquois was forced to run

The fires, stopped at each end by the young braves,

And swiftly driven back, and when he swooned,

They carried him outside to the night air,

Laid him on fresh damp moss, poured cooling water

Into his mouth, and to his burns applied

The soothing balsams. With resuscitation

They lavished on him all the courtesies

Of speech and gesture, gave him food and drink,

Compassionately spoke of his wounds and pain.

The ordeal every hour was resumed

And halted, but, with each recurrence, blows

Were added to the burns and gibes gave place

To yells until the sacrificial dawn,

Lighting the scaffold, dimming the red glow

Of the hatchet collar, closed the festival.

Brébeuf had seen the worst. He knew that when

A winter pack of wolves brought down a stag

There was no waste of time between the leap

And the business click upon the jugular.

Such was the forthright honesty in death

Among the brutes. They had not learned the sport

Of dallying around the nerves to halt

A quick despatch. A human art was torture,

Where Reason crept into the veins, mixed tar

With blood and brewed its own intoxicant.

Brébeuf had pleaded for the captive’s life,

But as the night wore on, would not his heart,

Colliding with his mind, have wished for death?

The plea refused, he gave the Iroquois

The only consolation in his power.

He went back to his cabin, heavy in heart.

To stem that viscous melanotic current

Demanded labour, time, and sacrifice.

Those passions were not altered over-night.

Two plans were in his mind—the one concerned

The seminary started in Quebec.

The children could be sent there to be trained

In Christian precepts, weaned from superstition

And from the savage spectacle of death.

He saw the way the women and their broods

Danced round the scaffold in their exaltation.

How much of this was habit and how much

Example? Curiously Brébeuf revolved

The facets of the Indian character.

A fighting courage equal to the French—

It could be lifted to crusading heights

By a battle speech. Endurance was a code

Among the braves, and impassivity.

Their women wailing at the Feast of Death,

The men sat silent, heads bowed to the knees.

“Never in nine years with but one exception,”

Wrote Ragueneau, “did I see an Indian weep

For grief.” Only the fires evoked the cries,

And these like scalps were triumphs for the captors.

But then their charity and gentleness

To one another and to strangers gave

A balance to the picture. Fugitives

From villages destroyed found instant welcome

To the last communal share of food and land.

Brébeuf’s stay at Toanché gave him proof

Of how the Huron nature could respond

To kindness. But last night upon that scaffold!

Could that be scoured from the heart? Why not

Try out the nurture plan upon the children

And send the boys east, shepherded by Daniel?

The other need was urgent—labourers!

The villages were numerous and were spread

Through such a vast expanse of wilderness

And shore. Only a bell with a bronze throat

Must summon missionaries to these fields.

With the last cry of the captive in his ears,

Brébeuf strode from his cabin to the woods

To be alone. He found his tabernacle

Within a grove, picked up a stone flat-faced,

And going to a cedar-crotch, he jammed

It in, and on this table wrote his letter.

“Herein I show you what you have to suffer.

I shall say nothing of the voyage—that

You know already. If you have the courage

To try it, that is only the beginning,

For when after a month of river travel

You reach our village, we can offer you

The shelter of a cabin lowlier

Than any hovel you have seen in France.

As tired as you may be, only a mat

Laid on the ground will be your bed. Your food

May be for weeks a gruel of crushed corn

That has the look and smell of mortar paste.

This country is the breeding place of vermin.

Sandflies, mosquitoes haunt the summer months.

In France you may have been a theologian,

A scholar, master, preacher, but out here

You must attend a savage school; for months

Will pass before you learn even to lisp

The language. Here barbarians shall be

Your Aristotle and Saint Thomas. Mute

Before those teachers you shall take your lessons.

What of the winter? Half the year is winter.

Inside your cabins will be smoke so thick

You may not read your Breviary for days.

Around your fireplace at mealtime arrive

The uninvited guests with whom you share

Your stint of food. And in the fall and winter,

You tramp unbeaten trails to reach the missions,

Carrying your luggage on your back. Your life

Hangs by a thread. Of all calamities

You are the cause—the scarcity of game,

A fire, famine or an epidemic.

There are no natural reasons for a drought

And for the earth’s sterility. You are

The reasons, and at any time a savage

May burn your cabin down or split your head.

I tell you of the enemies that live

Among our Huron friends. I have not told

You of the Iroquois our constant foes.

Only a week ago in open fight

They killed twelve of our men at Contarea,

A day’s march from the village where we live.

Treacherous and stealthy in their ambuscades,

They terrorize the country, for the Hurons

Are very slothful in defence, never

On guard and always seeking flight for safety.

“Wherein the gain, you ask, of this acceptance?

There is no gain but this—that what you suffer

Shall be of God: your loneliness in travel

Will be relieved by angels overhead;

Your silence will be sweet for you will learn

How to commune with God; rapids and rocks

Are easier than the steeps of Calvary.

There is a consolation in your hunger

And in abandonment upon the road,

For once there was a greater loneliness

And deeper hunger. As regards the soul

There are no dangers here, with means of grace

At every turn, for if we go outside

Our cabin, is not heaven over us?

No buildings block the clouds. We say our prayers

Freely before a noble oratory.

Here is the place to practise faith and hope

And charity where human art has brought

No comforts, where we strive to bring to God

A race so unlike men that we must live

Daily expecting murder at their hands,

Did we not open up the skies or close

Them at command, giving them sun or rain.

So if despite these trials you are ready

To share our labours, come; for you will find

A consolation in the cross that far outweighs

Its burdens. Though in many an hour your soul

Will echo—‘Why hast Thou forsaken me,’

Yet evening will descend upon you when,

Your heart too full of holy exultation,

You call like Xavier—‘Enough, O Lord!’ ”

This letter was to loom in history,

For like a bulletin it would be read

In France, and men whose bones were bound for dust

Would find that on those jagged characters

Their names would rise from their oblivion

To flame on an eternal Calendar.

Already to the field two young recruits

Had come—Pijart, Le Mercier; on their way

Were Chastellain with Garnier and Jogues

Followed by Ragueneau and Du Peron.

On many a night in lonely intervals,

The priest would wander to the pines and build

His oratory where celestial visions

Sustained his soul. As unto Paul and John

Of Patmos and the martyr multitude

The signs were given—voices from the clouds,

Forms that illumined darkness, stabbed despair,

Turned dungeons into temples and a brand

Of shame into the ultimate boast of time—

So to Brébeuf had Christ appeared and Mary.

One night at prayer he heard a voice command—

“Rise, Read!” Opening the Imitatio Christi,

His eyes “without design” fell on the chapter,

Concerning the royal way of the Holy Cross,

Which placed upon his spirit “a great peace”.

And then, day having come, he wrote his vow—

“My God, my Saviour, I take from thy hand

The cup of thy sufferings. I invoke thy name;

I vow never to fail thee in the grace

Of martyrdom, if by thy mercy, Thou

Dost offer it to me. I bind myself,

And when I have received the stroke of death,

I will accept it from thy gracious hand

With all pleasure and with joy in my heart;

To thee my blood, my body and my life.”

The labourers were soon put to their tasks,—

The speech, the founding of new posts, the sick:

Ihonatiria, a phantom town,

Through plague and flight abandoned as a base,

The Fathers chose the site—Teanaostayé,

To be the second mission of St. Joseph.

But the prime hope was on Ossossané,

A central town of fifty cabins built

On the east shore of Nottawasaga Bay.

The native council had approved the plans.

The presence of the priests with their lay help

Would be defence against the Iroquois.

Under the supervision of Pijart

The place was fortified, ramparts were strengthened,

And towers of heavy posts set at the angles.

And in the following year the artisans

And labourers from Quebec with Du Peron,

Using broad-axe and whipsaw built a church,

The first one in the whole Huronian venture

To be of wood. Close to their lodge, the priests

Dug up the soil and harrowed it to plant

A mere handful of wheat from which they raised

A half a bushel for the altar bread.

From the wild grapes they made a cask of wine

For the Holy Sacrifice. But of all work

The hardest was instruction. It was easy

To strike the Huron sense with sound and colour—

The ringing of a bell; the litanies

And chants; the surplices worn on the cassocks;

The burnished ornaments around the altar;

The pageant of the ceremonial.

But to drive home the ethics taxed the brain

To the limit of its ingenuity.

Brébeuf had felt the need to vivify

His three main themes of God and Paradise

And Hell. The Indian mind had let the cold

Abstractions fall: the allegories failed

To quicken up the logic. Garnier

Proposed the colours for the homilies.

The closest student of the Huron mind,

He had observed the fears and prejudices

Haunting the shadows of their racial past;

Had seen the flaws in Brébeuf’s points; had heard

The Indian comments on the moral law

And on the Christian scheme of Paradise.

Would Iroquois be there? Yes, if baptized.

Would there be hunting of the deer and beaver?

No. Then starvation. War? And Feasts? Tobacco?

No. Garnier saw disgust upon their faces,

And sent appeals to France for pictures—one

Only of souls in bliss: of âmes damnées

Many and various—the horned Satan,

His mastiff jaws champing the head of Judas;

The plummet fall of the unbaptized pursued

By demons with their fiery forks; the lick

Of flames upon a naked Saracen;

Dragons with scarlet tongues and writhing serpents

In ambush by the charcoal avenues

Just ready at the Judgment word to wreak

Vengeance upon the unregenerate.

The negative unapprehended forms

Of Heaven lost in the dim canvas oils

Gave way to glows from brazier pitch that lit

The visual affirmatives of Hell.

Despite the sorcerers who laid the blame

Upon the French for all their ills—the plague,

The drought, the Iroquois—the Fathers counted

Baptisms by the hundreds, infants, children

And aged at the point of death. Adults

In health were more intractable, but here

The spade had entered soil in the conversion

Of a Huron in full bloom and high in power

And counsel, Tsiouendaentaha

Whose Christian name—to aid the tongue—was Peter.

Being the first, he was the Rock on which

The priests would build their Church. He was baptized

With all the pomp transferable from France

Across four thousand miles combined with what

A sky and lake could offer, and a forest

Strung to the aubade of the orioles.

The wooden chapel was their Rheims Cathedral.

In stole and surplice Lalemant intoned—

“If therefore thou wilt enter into life,

Keep the commandments. Thou shalt love the Lord

Thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul,

With all thy might, and thy neighbour as thyself.”

With salt and water and the holy chrism,

And through the signs made on his breast and forehead

The Huron was exorcised, sanctified,

And made the temple of the Living God.

The holy rite was followed by the Mass

Before the motliest auditory known

In the annals of worship. Oblates from Quebec,

Blackrobes, mechanics, soldiers, labourers,

With almost half the village packed inside,

Or jammed with craning necks outside the door.

The warriors lean, lithe, and elemental,

“As naked as your hand”^[C] but for a skin

Thrown loosely on their shoulders, with their hair

Erect, boar-brushed, matted, glued with the oil

Of sunflower larded thickly with bear’s grease;

Papooses yowling on their mothers’ backs,

The squatting hags, suspicion in their eyes,

Their nebulous minds relating in some way

The smoke and aromatics of the censer,

The candles, crucifix and Latin murmurs

With vapours, sounds and colours of the Judgment.

The migrant habits of the Indians1639

With their desertion of the villages

Through pressure of attack or want of food

Called for a central site where undisturbed

The priests with their attendants might pursue

Their culture, gather strength from their devotions,

Map out the territory, plot the routes,

Collate their weekly notes and write their letters.

The roll was growing—priests and colonists,

Lay brothers offering services for life.

For on the ground or on their way to place

Themselves at the command of Lalemant,

Superior, were Claude Pijart, Poncet,

Le Moyne, Charles Raymbault, René Menard

And Joseph Chaumonot: as oblates came

Le Coq, Christophe Reynaut, Charles Boivin,

Couture and Jean Guérin. And so to house

Them all the Residence—Fort Sainte Marie!

Strategic as a base for trade or war

The site received the approval of Quebec,

Was ratified by Richelieu who saw

Commerce and exploration pushing west.

Fulfilling the long vision of Champlain—

“Greater New France beyond those inland seas.”

The fort was built, two hundred feet by ninety,

Upon the right bank of the River Wye:

Its north and eastern sides of masonry,

Its south and west of double palisades,

And skirted by a moat, ran parallel

To stream and lake. Square bastions at the corners,

Watch-towers with magazines and sleeping posts,

Commanded forest edges and canoes

That furtively came up the Matchedash,

And on each bastion was placed a cross.

Inside, the Fathers built their dwelling house,

No longer the bark cabin with the smoke

Ill-trained to work its exit through the roof,

But plank and timber—at each end a chimney

Of lime and granite field-stone. Rude it was

But clean, capacious, full of twilight calm.

Across the south canal fed by the river,

Ringed by another palisade were buildings

Offering retreat to Indian fugitives

Whenever war and famine scourged the land.

The plans were supervised by Lalemant,

Assigning zones of work to every priest.

He made a census of the Huron nation;

Some thirty villages—twelve thousand persons.

Nor was this all: the horizon opened out

On larger fields. To south and west were spread

The unknown tribes—the Petuns and the Neutrals.

In late November Jogues and Garnier1640-1641

Set out on snow-obliterated trails

Towards the Blue Hills south of the Nottawasaga,

A thirty mile journey through a forest

Without a guide. They carried on their backs

A blanket with the burden of the altar.

All day confronting swamps with fallen logs,

Tangles of tamarack and juniper,

They made detours to avoid the deep ravines

And swollen creeks. Retreating and advancing,

Ever in hope their tread was towards the south,

Until, “surprised by night in a fir grove”,

They took an hour with flint and steel to nurse

A fire from twigs, birch rind and needles of pine;

And flinging down some branches on the snow,

They offered thanks to God, lay down and slept.

Morning—the packs reshouldered and the tramp

Resumed, the stumble over mouldering trunks

Of pine and oak, the hopeless search for trails,

Till after dusk with cassocks torn and “nothing

To eat all day save each a morsel of bread”,

They saw the smoke of the first Indian village.

And now began a labour which for faith

And triumph of the spirit over failure

Was unsurpassed in records of the mission.

Famine and pest had struck the Neutral tribes,

And fleeing squaws and children had invaded

The Petun villages for bread and refuge,

Inflicting on the cabins further pest

And further famine. When the priests arrived,

They found that their black cassocks had become

The symbols of the scourge. Children exclaimed—

“Disease and famine are outside.” The women

Called to their young and fled to forest shelters,

Or hid them in the shadows of the cabins.

The men broke through a never-broken custom,

Denying the strangers right to food and rest.

Observing the two priests at prayer, the chief

Called out in council voice—“What are these demons

Who take such unknown postures, what are they

But spells to make us die—to finish those

Disease had failed to kill inside our cabins?”

Driven from town to town with all doors barred,

Pursued by storms of threats and flying hatchets,

The priests sought refuge through the forest darkness

Back to the palisades of Sainte Marie.

As bleak an outlook faced Brébeuf when he

And Chaumonot took their November tramp—

Five forest days—to the north shores of Erie,

Where the most savage of the tribes—the Neutrals—

Packed their twelve thousand into forty towns.

Evil report had reached the settlements

By faster routes, for when upon the eve

Of the new mission Chaumonot had stated

The purpose of the journey, Huron chiefs,

Convinced by their own sorcerers that Brébeuf

Had laid the epidemic on the land,

Resolved to make the Neutral leaders agents

Of their revenge: for it was on Brébeuf,

The chieftain of the robes, that hate was centred.

They had the reason why the drums had failed

The hunt, why moose and deer had left the forest,

And why the Manitou who sends the sun

And rain upon the corn, lures to the trap

The beaver, trains the arrow on the goose,

Had not responded to the chants and cries.

The magic of the “breathings” had not cured

The sick and dying. Was it not the prayers

To the new God which cast malignant spells?

The rosary against the amulet?

The Blackrobes with that water-rite performed

Upon the children—with that new sign

Of wood or iron held up before the eyes

Of the stricken? Did the Indian not behold

Death following hard upon the offered Host?

Was not Echon Brébeuf the evil one?

Still, all attempts to kill him were forestalled,

For awe and fear had mitigated fury:

His massive stature, courage never questioned,

His steady glance, the firmness of his voice,

And that strange nimbus of authority,

In some dim way related to their gods,

Had kept the bowstrings of the Hurons taut

At the arrow feathers, and the javelin poised

And hesitant. But now cunning might do

What fear forbade. A brace of Huron runners

Were sped to the Neutral country with rich bribes

To put the priests to death. And so Brébeuf

And his companion entered the first town

With famine in their cheeks only to find

Worse than the Petun greetings—corn refused,

Whispers of death and screams of panic, flight

From incarnated plague, and while the chiefs

In closest council on the Huron terms

Voted for life or death, the younger men

Outside drew nearer to the priests, cursed them,

Spat at them while convulsive hands were clutching

At hatchet helves, waiting impatiently

The issue of that strident rhetoric

Shaking the cabin bark. The council ended,

The feeling strong for death but ruled by fears,

For if those foreign spirits had the power

To spread the blight upon the land, what could

Their further vengeance not exact? Besides,

What lay behind those regimental colours

And those new drums reported from Quebec?

The older men had qualified the sentence—

The priests at once must leave the Neutral land,

All cabins to be barred against admission,

No food, no shelter, and return immediate.

Defying threats, the Fathers spent four months,

Four winter months, besieging half the towns

In their pursuit of souls, for days their food

Boiled lichens, ground-nuts, star-grass bulbs and roots

Of the wild columbine. Met at the doors

By screams and blows, they would betake themselves

To the evergreens for shelter over-night.

And often, when the body strength was sapped

By the day’s toil and there were streaks of blood

Inside the moccasins, when the last lodge

Rejected them as lepers and the welts

Hung on their shoulders, then the Fathers sought

The balm that never failed. Under the stars,

Along an incandescent avenue

The visions trembled, tender, placid, pure,

More beautiful than the doorway of Rheims

And sweeter than the Galilean fields.

For what was hunger and the burn of wounds

In those assuaging, healing moments when

The clearing mists revealed the face of Mary

And the lips of Jesus breathing benedictions?

At dawn they came back to the huts to get

The same rebuff of speech and club. A brave

Repulsed them at the palisade with axe

Uplifted—“I have had enough,” he said,

“Of the dark flesh of my enemies. I mean

To kill and eat the white flesh of the priests.”

So close to death starvation and assault

Had led them and so meagre of result

Were all their ministrations that they thought

This was the finish of the enterprise.

The winter ended in futility.

And on their journey home the Fathers took

A final blow when March leagued with the natives

Unleashed a northern storm, piled up the snow-drifts,

Broke on the ice the shoulder of Brébeuf,

And stumbled them for weeks before she sent

Them limping through the postern of the fort.

Upon his bed that night Brébeuf related

A vision he had seen—a moving cross,

Its upright beam arising from the south—

The country of the Iroquois: the shape

Advanced along the sky until its arms

Cast shadow on the Huron territory,

“And huge enough to crucify us all”.

Bad days had fallen on Huronia.

A blight of harvest, followed by a winter

In which unusual snowfall had thinned out

The hunting and reduced the settlements

To destitution, struck its hardest blow

At Sainte Marie. The last recourse in need,

The fort had been a common granary

And now the bins were empty. Altar-ware,

Vessels, linens, pictures lost or damaged;

Vestments were ragged, writing paper spent.

The Eucharist requiring bread and wine,

Quebec eight hundred miles away, a war

Freshly renewed—the Iroquois (Dutch-armed

And seething with the memories of Champlain)

Arrayed against the French and Huron allies.

The priests assessed the perils of the journey,

And the lot fell on Jogues to lead it. He,1642

Next to Brébeuf, had borne the heaviest brunt—

The Petun mission, then the following year,

The Ojibway where, after a hundred leagues,

Canoe and trail, accompanied by Raymbault,

He reached the shores of Lake Superior,

“And planted a great cross, facing it west”.

The soundest of them all in legs, he gathered

A band of Huron traders and set out,

His task made double by the care of Raymbault

Whose health was broken mortally. He reached

Quebec with every day of the five weeks

A miracle of escape. A few days there,

With churches, hospitals, the Indian school

At Sillery, pageant and ritual,

Making their due impression on the minds

Of the Huron guides, Jogues with his band of forty

Packed the canoes and started back. Mohawks,

Enraged that on the east-bound trip the party

Had slipped their hands, awaited them, ambushed

Within the grass and reeds along the shore.

A family of the Wolf Clan having lost

A son in battle, Jogues as substitute

Was taken in, half-son, half-slave, his work

The drudgery of the village, bearing water,

Lighting the fires, and clad in tatters made

To join the winter hunt, bear heavy packs

On scarred and naked shoulders in the trade

Between the villages. His readiness

To execute his tasks, unmurmuring,

His courage when he plunged into a river

To save a woman and a child who stumbled

Crossing a bridge made by a fallen tree,

Had softened for a time his master’s harshness.

It gained him scattered hours of leisure when

He set his mind to work upon the language

To make concrete the articles of Faith.

At intervals he stole into the woods

To pray and meditate and carve the Name

Upon the bark. Out of the Mohawk spoils

At the first battle he had found and hid

Two books—The Following of Christ and one

Of Paul’s Epistles, and with these when “weary

Even of life and pressed beyond all measure

Above his strength” he followed the “running waters”

To quench his thirst. But often would the hate

Of the Mohawk foes flame out anew when Jogues

Was on his knees muttering the magic words,

And when a hunting party empty-handed

Returned or some reverse was met in battle,

Here was the victim ready at their door.

Believing that a band of warriors

Had been destroyed, they seized the priest and set

His day of death, but at the eleventh hour,

With the arrival of a group of captives,

The larger festival of torture gave

Him momentary reprieve. Yet when he saw

The holocaust and rushed into the flames

To save a child, a heavy weight laid hold

Upon his spirit lasting many days—

“My life wasted with grief, my years with sighs;

Oh wherefore was I born that I should see

The ruin of my people! Woe is me!

But by His favour I shall overcome

Until my change is made and He appear.”

This story of enslavement had been brought

To Montmagny, the Governor of Quebec,

And to the outpost of the Dutch, Fort Orange.

Quebec was far away and, short of men,

Could never cope with the massed Iroquois,

Besides, Jogues’ letter begged the Governor

That no measures “to save a single life”

Should hurt the cause of France. To the Provincial

He wrote—“Who in my absence would console

The captives? Who absolve the penitent?

Encourage them in torments? Who baptize

The dying? On this cross to which our Lord

Has nailed me with Himself am I resolved

To live and die.”

                        And when the commandant

Of the Dutch fort sent notice that a ship

At anchor in the Hudson would provide

Asylum, Jogues delayed that he might seek

Counsel of God and satisfy his conscience,

Lest some intruding self-preserving thought

Conflict with duty. Death was certain soon.

He knew it—for that mounting tide of hate

Could not be checked: it had engulfed his friends;

’Twould take him next. How close to suicide

Would be refusal? Not as if escape

Meant dereliction: no, his early vows

Were still inviolate—he would return.

He pledged himself to God there on his knees

Before two bark-strips fashioned as a cross

Under the forest trees—his oratory.

And so, one night, the Indians asleep,

Jogues left the house, fumbling his darkened way,

Half-walk, half-crawl, a lacerated leg

Making the journey of one-half a mile

The toil of half a night. By dawn he found

The shore, and, single-handed, pushed a boat

Stranded by ebb-tide, down the slope of sand

To the river’s edge and rowed out to the ship,

Where he was lifted up the side by sailors

Who, fearful of the risk of harbouring

A fugitive, carried him to the hatch

And hid him with the cargo in the hold,

The outcry in the morning could be heard

Aboard the ship as Indians combed the cabins,

Threatened the guards and scoured the neighbouring woods,

And then with strong suspicion of the vessel

Demanded of the officers their captive.

After two days Jogues with his own consent

Was taken to the fort and hid again

Behind the barrels of a store. For weeks

He saw and heard the Mohawks as they passed,

Examining cordage, prying into casks,

At times touching his clothes, but missing him

As he lay crouched in darkness motionless.

With evidence that he was in the fort,

The Dutch abetting the escape, the chiefs

Approached the commandant—“The prisoner

Is ours. He is not of your race or speech.

The Dutch are friends: the Frenchmen are our foes.

Deliver up this priest into our hands.”

The cries were countered by the officer—

“He is like us in blood if not in tongue.

The Frenchman here is under our protection.

He is our guest. We treat him as you treat

The strangers in your cabins, for you feed

And shelter them. That also is our law,

The custom of our nation.” Argument

Of no avail, a ransom price was offered,

Refused, but running up the bargain scale,

It caught the Mohawks at three hundred livres,

And Jogues at last was safely on the Hudson.

The tale of Jogues’ first mission to the Hurons

Ends on a sequel briefly sung but keyed

To the tune of the story, for the stretch

Home was across a wilderness, his bed

A coil of rope on a ship’s open deck

Swept by December surge. The voyage closed

At Falmouth where, robbed by a pirate gang,

He wandered destitute until picked up

By a French crew who offered him tramp fare.

He landed on the shore of Brittany

On Christmas Eve, and by New Year he reached

The Jesuit establishment at Rennes.

The trumpets blew once more, and Jogues returned

With the spring expedition to Quebec.

Honoured by Montmagny, he took the post

Of peace ambassador to hostile tribes,

And then the orders came from Lalemant

That he should open up again the cause

Among the Mohawks at Ossernenon.

Jogues knew that he was travelling to his death,

And though each hour of that former mission

Burned at his finger stumps, the wayward flesh

Obeyed the summons. Lalemant as well

Had known the peril—had he not re-named

Ossernenon, the Mission of the Martyrs?

So Jogues, accompanied by his friend Lalande

Departed for the village—his last letter

To his Superior read: “I will return

Cost it a thousand lives. I know full well

That I shall not survive, but He who helped

Me by His grace before will never fail me

Now when I go to do His holy will.”

And to the final consonant the vow

Was kept, for two days after they had struck

The town, their heads were on the palisades,

And their dragged bodies flung into the Mohawk.1646

The western missions waiting Jogues’ return

Were held together by a scarlet thread.

The forays of the Iroquois had sent

The fugitive survivors to the fort.

Three years had passed—and where was Jogues? The scant

Supplies of sagamite could never feed

The inflow from the stricken villages.

The sparse reports had filtered to Quebec

And the command was given to Bressani

To lead the rescue band to Sainte Marie.

Leaving Three Rivers in the spring when ice

Was on the current, he was caught like Jogues,

With his six Hurons and a French oblate,

A boy of twelve; transferred to Iroquois’

Canoes and carried up the Richelieu;

Disbarked and driven through the forest trails

To Lake Champlain; across it; and from there

Around the rocks and marshes to the Hudson.

And every time a camp was built and fires

Were laid the torment was renewed; in all

The towns the squaws and children were regaled

With evening festivals upon the scaffolds.

Bressani wrote one day when vigilance

Relaxed and his split hand was partly healed—

“I do not know if your Paternity

Will recognize this writing for the letter

Is soiled. Only one finger of the hand

Is left unburned. The blood has stained the paper.

My writing table is the earth; the ink

Gunpowder mixed with water.” And again—

This time to his Superior—“I could

Not have believed it to be possible

That a man’s body was so hard to kill.”

The earlier fate of Jogues was his—enslaved,

But ransomed at Fort Orange by the Dutch;

Restored to partial health; sent to Rochelle

In the autumn, but in April back again

And under orders for the Huron mission,

Where he arrived this time unscathed to take

A loyal welcome from his priestly comrades.

Bressani’s presence stimulated faith

Within the souls of priests and neophytes.

The stories burned like fuel of the faggots—

Jogues’ capture and his rock stability,

And the no less triumphant stand Eustache

Had made showing the world that native metal

Could take the test as nobly as the French.

And Ragueneau’s letter to his General stated—

“Bressani ill-equipped to speak the Huron

Has speech more eloquent to capture souls:

It is his scars, his mutilated hands.

‘Only show us,’ the neophytes exclaim,

‘The wounds, for they teach better than our tongues

Your faith, for you have come again to face

The dangers. Only thus we know that you

Believe the truth and would have us believe it.’ ”

In those three years since Jogues’ departure doubts

Though unexpressed had visited the mission.

For death had come to several in the fold—

Raymbault, Goupil, Eustache, and worse than death

To Jogues, and winter nights were bleaker, darker

Without the company of Brébeuf. Lion

Of limb and heart, he had entrenched the faith,

Was like a triple palisade himself.

But as his broken shoulder had not healed,

And ordered to Quebec by Lalemant,

He took the leave that seven years of work

Deserved. The city hailed him with delight.

For more than any other did he seem

The very incarnation of the age—

Champlain the symbol of exploring France,

Tracking the rivers to their lairs, Brébeuf

The token of a nobler chivalry.

He went the rounds of the stations, saw the gains

The East had made in converts—Sillery

For Indians and Notre Dame des Anges

For the French colonists; convents and schools

Flourished. Why should the West not have the same

Yield for the sowing? It was labourers

They needed with supplies and adequate

Defence. St. Lawrence and the Ottawa

Infested by the Iroquois were traps

Of death. Three bands of Hurons had been caught

That summer. Montmagny had warned the priest

Against the risk of unprotected journeys.

So when the reinforcements came from France,

Brébeuf set out under a guard of soldiers

Taking with him two young recruits—Garreau

And Chabanel—arriving at the fort

In the late fall. The soldiers wintered there

And supervised defensive strategy.

Replaced the forlorn feelings with fresh hopes,

And for two years the mission enterprise

Renewed its lease of life. Rumours of treaties

Between the French and Mohawks stirred belief

That peace was in the air, that other tribes

Inside the Iroquois Confederacy

Might enter—with the Hurons sharing terms.

This was the pipe-dream—was it credible?

The ranks of missionaries were filling up:

At Sainte Marie, Brébeuf and Ragueneau,

Le Mercier, Chastellain and Chabanel;

St. Joseph—Garnier and René Menard;

St. Michel—Chaumonot and Du Peron;

The others—Claude Pijart, Le Moyne, Garreau

And Daniel.

                    What validity the dream

Possessed was given by the seasonal

Uninterrupted visits of the priests

To their loved home, both fort and residence.

Here they discussed their plans, and added up

In smiling rivalry their tolls of converts:

They loitered at the shelves, fondled the books,

Running their fingers down the mellowed pages

As if they were the faces of their friends.

They stood for hours before the saints or knelt

Before the Virgin and the crucifix

In mute transfiguration. These were hours

That put the bandages upon their hurts,

Making their spirits proof against all ills

That had assailed or could assail the flesh,

Turned winter into spring and made return

To their far mission posts an exaltation.

The bell each morning called the neophytes

To Mass, again at evening, and the tones

Lured back the memories across the seas.

And often in the summer hours of twilight

When Norman chimes were ringing, would the priests

Forsake the fort and wander to the shore

To sing the Gloria while hermit thrushes

Rivalled the rapture of the nightingales.

The native register was rich in name

And number. Earlier years had shown results

Mainly among the young and sick and aged,

Where little proof was given of the root

Of faith, but now the Fathers told of deeds

That flowered from the stems. Had not Eustache

Bequeathed his record like a Testament?

The sturdiest warriors and chiefs had vied

Among themselves within the martyr ranks:—

Stories of captives led to sacrifice,

Accepting scaffold fires under the rites,

Enduring to the end, had taken grip

Of towns and clans. St. Joseph had its record

For Garnier reported that Totiri,

A native of high rank, while visiting

St. Ignace when a torture was in progress,

Had emulated Jogues by plunging through

The flaming torches that he might apply

The Holy Water to an Iroquois.

Garreau and Pijart added lists of names

From the Algonquins and the Nipissings,

And others told of Pentecostal meetings

In cabins by the Manitoulin shores.

Not only was the faith sustained by hopes

Nourished within the bosom of their home

And by the wish-engendered talk of peace,

But there outside the fort was evidence

Of tenure for the future. Acres rich

In soil extended to the forest fringe.

Each year they felled the trees and burned the stumps,

Pushing the frontier back, clearing the land,

Spading, hoeing. The stomach’s noisy protest

At sagamite and wild rice found a rest

With bread from wheat, fresh cabbages and pease,

And squashes which when roasted had the taste

Of Norman apples. Strawberries in July,

October beechnuts, pepper roots for spice,

And at the bottom of a spring that flowed

Into a pond shaded by silver birches

And ringed by marigolds was water-cress

In chilled abundance. So, was this the West?

The Wilderness? That flight of tanagers;

Those linguals from the bobolinks; those beeches,

Roses and water-lilies; at the pools

Those bottle-gentians! For a time the fields

Could hypnotize the mind to scenes of France.

Within five years the change was wrought. The cocks

Were crowing in the yards, and in the pasture

Were sheep and cows and pigs that had been brought

As sucklings that immense eight hundred miles

In sacks—canoed, and portaged on the shoulders.

The traders, like the soldiers, too, had heard

Of a great ocean larger than the Huron.

Was it the western gateway to Cathay?

The Passage? Master-theme of song and ballad;

The myth at last resolved into the fact!

Along that route, it was believed, French craft

Freighted with jewels, spices, tapestries,

Would sail to swell the coffers of the Bourbons.

Such was the dream though only buffalo roamed

The West and autumn slept upon the prairies.

This dream was at its brightest now, Quebec

Was building up a western citadel

In Sainte Marie. With sixty Frenchmen there,

The eastern capital itself had known

Years less auspicious. Might the fort not be

The bastion to one-half the continent,

New France expanding till the longitudes

Staggered the daring of the navigators?

The priests were breathless with another space

Beyond the measure of the astrolabe—

A different empire built upon the pulses,

Where even the sun and moon and stars revolved

Around a Life and a redemptive Death.

They pushed their missions to the north and west

Further into Algonquin territories,

Among the Ottawas at Manitoulin,

And towards the Ojibways at Sault Sainte Marie.

New village groups were organized in stations—

St. Magdalen, St. Jean, and St. Matthias.

Had Chabanel, ecstatic with success,

Not named one fort the Village of Believers?

Brébeuf was writing to his General—

“Peace, union and tranquillity are here

Between the members of our Order. We need

More workers for the apostolic field,

Which more than ever whitens for the harvest.”

And to this call came Gabriel Lalemant,

Bonin, Daran, Greslon, besides a score

Of labourers and soldiers. In one year

Twelve hundred converts, churches over-crowded,

With Mass conducted in the open air!

And so the seasons passed. When the wild ducks

Forsook the Huron marshes for the south,

It was the signal for the priests to pack

Their blankets. Not until the juncos came,

And flickers tapped the crevices of bark,

And the blood-root was pushing through the leaf-mould,

Would they reset their faces towards their home.

While Ragueneau’s Relations were being sent

Homeward, picturing the promise of the west,

The thunder clouds were massing in the east

Under the pounding drums. The treaty signed

Between the Iroquois and Montmagny

Was broken by the murder of Lalande

And Jogues. The news had drifted to the fort—

The prelude only to the heavier blows

And deeper treachery. The Iroquois,

Infesting lake and stream, forest and shore,

Were trapping soldiers, traders, Huron guides:

The whole confederacy was on the march.

Both waterways were blocked, the quicker route—

St. Lawrence, and the arduous Ottawa.

They caught the Hurons at their camps, surprised

Canoe-fleets from the reeds and river bends

And robbed them, killed them on the portages.

So widespread were their forays, they encountered

Bands of Algonquins on the hunt, slew them,

Dispersed them from their villages and sent

Survivors to the northern wilderness.

So keen their lust for slaughter, they enticed

The Huron chieftains under pledge of truce

And closed negotiations with their scalps.

As the months passed the pressure of attack

Moved grimly towards the west, making complete

The isolation of Huronia.

No commerce with Quebec—no traveller

For a whole year came to the Residence.

But constant was the stream of fugitives

From smaller undefended villages,

Fleeing west and ever west. The larger towns,

The deluge breaking down their walls, drove on

The surplus to their neighbours which, in turn,

Urged on the panic herd to Sainte Marie.

This mother of the missions felt the strain

As one by one the buffers were destroyed,

And the flocks came nearer for their pasturage.

There could be only one conclusion when

The priests saw the migration of the missions—

That of St. Jean four times abandoning

Its stations and four times establishing

New centres with a more improved defence;

That of St. Ignace where a double raid

That slaughtered hundreds, lifted bodily

Both town and mission, driving to their last

Refuge the ragged remnants. Yet Ragueneau

Was writing—“We are here as yet intact

But all determined to shed blood and life

If need be. In this Residence still reigns

The peace and love of Heaven. Here the sick

Will find a hospital, the travellers

A place of rest, the fugitives, asylum.

During the year more than three thousand persons

Have sought and found shelter under our roof.

We have dispensed the Bread of Life to all

And we have fed their bodies, though our fare

Is down to one food only, crushed corn boiled

And seasoned with the powder of smoked fish.”

Despite the perils, Sainte Marie was sending

Her missionaries afield, revisiting

The older sites, establishing the new,

With that same measure of success and failure

Which tested courage or confirmed a faith.

Garreau, sick and expecting death, was brought

By Pijart and a French assistant back

From the Algonquin wastes, for thirteen days

Borne by a canoe and by his comrades’ shoulders.

Recovering even after the last rites

Had been administered, he faced the task

Again. Fresh visits to the Petun tribes

Had little yield but cold and starving days,

Unsheltered nights, the same fare at the doors,

Savoured by Jogues and Garnier seven years

Before. And everywhere the labourers worked

Under a double threat—the Iroquois,

And the Huron curse inspired by sorcerers

Who saw black magic in the Jesuit robes

And linked disaster with their ritual.

Between the hammer and the anvil now

Huronia was laid and the first priest

To take the blow was Daniel.

                              Fourteen years

This priest had laboured at the Huron mission.

Following a week of rest at Sainte Marie

He had returned to his last post, St. Joseph,

Where he had built his church and for the year

Just gone had added to his charge the hundreds

Swarming from villages stormed by the foe.

And now in that inexorable order,

Station by station, town by town, it was

St. Joseph’s turn. Aware that the main force

Of Huron warriors had left the town,

The Iroquois had breached the palisade

And, overwhelming the defenders, sacked

And burned the cabins. Mass had just been offered,

When the war yells were heard and Daniel came

Outside. Seeing the panic, fully knowing

Extinction faced the town with this invasion,

And that ten precious minutes of delay

Might give his flock the refuge of the woods,

He faced the vanguard of the Iroquois,

And walked with firm selective dignity

As in the manner of a parley. Fear

And wonder checked the Indians at the sight

Of a single dark-robed, unarmed challenger

Against arrows, muskets, spears and tomahawks.

That momentary pause had saved the lives

Of hundreds as they fled into the forest,

But not the life of Daniel. Though afraid

At first to cross a charmed circumference

To take a struggle hand-to-hand, they drove

Their arrows through him, then in frenzied rush

Mastering their awe, they hurled themselves upon

The body, stripped it of its clothes and flung it

Into the burning church. By noon nothing

Remained but ashes of the town, the fort,

The cabins and their seven hundred dead.July 1648

Ragueneau was distraught. He was shepherd-priest.

Daniel was first to die under his care,

And nigh a score of missionaries were lost

In unprotected towns. Besides, he knew

He could not, if he would, resist that mob

That clamoured at the stockades, day by day.

His moral supervision was bound up

With charity that fed and warmed and healed.

And through the winter following Daniel’s death

Six thousand Indians sought shelter there.

The season’s crops to the last grain were garnered

And shared. “Through the kind Providence of God,

We managed, as it were, to draw both oil

And honey from the very stones around us.

The obedience, patience of our missionaries

Excel reward—all with one heart and soul

Infused with the high spirit of our Order;

The servants, boys, and soldiers day and night

Working beyond their strength! Here is the service

Of joy, that we will take whatever God

Ordains for us whether it be life or death.”

The challenge was accepted, for the spring

Opened upon the hardest tragic blows

The iron in the human soul could stand.

St. Louis and St. Ignace still remained

The flying buttresses of Sainte Marie.

From them the Residence received reports

Daily of movements of the Iroquois.

Much labour had been spent on their defence.

Ramparts of pine fifteen feet high enclosed

St. Louis. On three sides a steep ravine

Topped by the stakes made nigh impregnable

St Ignace; then the palisaded fourth,

Subject alone to a surprise assault,

Could rally the main body of defenders.

The Iroquois, alert as eagles, knew

The weakness of the Hurons, the effect

On the morale of unexpected raids

Committing towns to fire and pushing back

The eastern ramparts. Piece by piece, the rim

Was being cracked and fissures driven down

The bowl: and stroke by stroke the strategy

Pointed to Sainte Marie. Were once the fort

Now garrisoned by forty Frenchmen taken,

No power predicted from Quebec could save

The Huron nation from its doom. St. Ignace

Lay in the path but during the eight months

After St. Joseph’s fall the enemy

Had leisurely prepared their plans. Their scouts

Reported that one-half of the town’s strength

Was lost by flight and that an apathy,

In spite of all the priests could do to stem it,

Had seized the invaded tribes. They knew that when

The warriors were hunting in the forest

This weaker palisade was scalable.

And the day came in March when the whole fate

That overtook St. Joseph in July

Swept on St. Ignace—sudden and complete.

The Mohawks and the Senecas uniting,

A thousand strong, the town bereft of fighters,

Four hundred old and young inside the stakes,

The assault was made two hours before the dawn.

But half-aroused from sleep, many were killed

Within their cabins. Of the four hundred three

Alone managed to reach the woods to scream

The alarm to the drowsed village of St. Louis.

At nine o’clock that morning—such the speed

Of the pursuit—a guard upon the hill

Behind the Residence was watching whiffs

Of smoke to the south, but a league away.

Bush fires? Not with this season’s depth of snow.

The Huron bivouacs? The settlements

Too close for that. Camps of the Iroquois?

Not while cunning and stealth controlled their tactics.

The smoke was in the town. The morning air,

Clearing, could leave no doubt of that, and just

As little that the darkening pall could spring

Out of the vent-holes from the cabin roofs.

Ragueneau rushed to the hill at the guard’s call;

Summoned Bressani; sheets and tongues of flame

Leaping some fifty feet above the smoke

Meant to their eyes the capture and the torch—

St. Louis with Brébeuf and Lalemant!

Less than two hours it took the Iroquois

To capture, sack and garrison St. Ignace,

And start then for St. Louis. The alarm

Sounded, five hundred of the natives fled

To the mother fort only to be pursued

And massacred in the snow. The eighty braves

That manned the stockades perished at the breaches;

And what was seen by Ragueneau and the guard

Was smoke from the massed fire of cabin bark.

Brébeuf and Lalemant were not numbered

In the five hundred of the fugitives.

They had remained, infusing nerve and will

In the defenders, rushing through the cabins

Baptizing and absolving those who were

Too old, too young, too sick to join the flight.

And when, resistance crushed, the Iroquois

Took all they had not slain back to St. Ignace,

The vanguard of the prisoners were the priests.

Three miles from town to town over the snow,March 16 1649

Naked, laden with pillage from the lodges,

The captives filed like wounded beasts of burden,

Three hours on the march, and those that fell

Or slowed their steps were killed.

                                      Three days before

Brébeuf had celebrated his last mass.

And he had known it was to be the last.

There was prophetic meaning as he took

The cord and tied the alb around his waist,

Attached the maniple to his left arm

And drew the seamless purple chasuble

With the large cross over his head and shoulders,

Draping his body: every vestment held

An immediate holy symbol as he whispered—

“Upon my head the helmet of Salvation.

So purify my heart and make me white;

With this cincture of purity gird me,

O Lord.

        May I deserve this maniple

Of sorrow and of penance.

                            Unto me

Restore the stole of immortality.

My yoke is sweet, my burden light.

                                  Grant that

I may so bear it as to win Thy grace.”

Entering, he knelt before as rude an altar

As ever was reared within a sanctuary,

But hallowed as that chancel where the notes

Of Palestrina’s score had often pealed

The Assumpta est Maria through Saint Peter’s.

For, covered in the centre of the table,

Recessed and sealed, a hollowed stone contained

A relic of a charred or broken body

Which perhaps a thousand years ago or more

Was offered as a sacrifice to Him

Whose crucifix stood there between the candles.

And on the morrow would this prayer be answered:—

“Eternal Father, I unite myself

With the affections and the purposes

Of Our Lady of Sorrows on Calvary.

And now I offer Thee the sacrifice

Which Thy Beloved Son made of Himself

Upon the Cross and now renews on this,

His holy altar . . .

                              Graciously receive

My life for His life as he gave His life

For mine . . .

                  This is my body.

                                  In like manner . . .

Take ye and drink—the chalice of my blood.”

No doubt in the mind of Brébeuf that this was the last

Journey—three miles over the snow. He knew

That the margins as thin as they were by which he escaped

From death through the eighteen years of his mission toil

Did not belong to this chapter: not by his pen

Would this be told. He knew his place in the line,

For the blaze of the trail that was cut on the bark by Jogues

Shone still. He had heard the story as told by writ

And word of survivors—of how a captive slave

Of the hunters, the skin of his thighs cracked with the frost,

He would steal from the tents to the birches, make a rough cross

From two branches, set it in snow and on the peel

Inscribe his vows and dedicate to the Name

In “litanies of love” what fragments were left

From the wrack of his flesh; of his escape from the tribes;

Of his journey to France where he knocked at the door of the College

Of Rennes, was gathered in as a mendicant friar,

Nameless, unknown, till he gave for proof to the priest

His scarred credentials of faith, the nail-less hands

And withered arms—the signs of the Mohawk fury.

Nor yet was the story finished—he had come again

Back to his mission to get the second death.

And the comrades of Jogues—Goupil, Eustache and Couture,

Had been stripped and made to run the double files

And take the blows—one hundred clubs to each line—

And this as the prelude to torture, leisured, minute,

Where thorns on the quick, scallop shells to the joints of the thumbs,

Provided the sport for children and squaws till the end.

And adding salt to the blood of Brébeuf was the thought

Of Daniel—was it months or a week ago?

So far, so near, it seemed in time, so close

In leagues—just over there to the south it was

He faced the arrows and died in front of his church.

But winding into the greater artery

Of thought that bore upon the coming passion

Were little tributaries of wayward wish

And reminiscence. Paris with its vespers

Was folded in the mind of Lalemant,

And the soft Gothic lights and traceries

Were shading down the ridges of his vows.

But two years past at Bourges he had walked the cloisters,

Companioned by Saint Augustine and Francis,

And wrapped in quiet holy mists. Brébeuf,

His mind a moment throwing back the curtain

Of eighteen years, could see the orchard lands,

The cidreries, the peasants at the Fairs,

The undulating miles of wheat and barley,

Gardens and pastures rolling like a sea

From Lisieux to Le Havre. Just now the surf

Was pounding on the limestone Norman beaches

And on the reefs of Calvados. Had dawn

This very day not flung her surplices

Around the headlands and with golden fire

Consumed the silken argosies that made

For Rouen from the estuary of the Seine?

A moment only for that veil to lift—

A moment only for those bells to die

That rang their matins at Condé-sur-Vire.

Now three o’clock, and capping the height of the passion,

Confusing the sacraments under the pines of the forest,

Under the incense of balsam, under the smoke

Of the pitch, was offered the rite of the font. On the head,

The breast, the loins and the legs, the boiling water!

While the mocking paraphrase of the symbols was hurled

At their faces like shards of flint from the arrow heads—

“We baptize thee with water . . .

                                  That thou mayest be led

To Heaven . . .

                    To that end we do anoint thee.

We treat thee as a friend: we are the cause

Of thy happiness; we are thy priests; the more

Thou sufferest, the more thy God will reward thee,

So give us thanks for our kind offices.”

The fury of taunt was followed by fury of blow.

Why did not the flesh of Brébeuf cringe to the scourge,

Respond to the heat, for rarely the Iroquois found

A victim that would not cry out in such pain—yet here

The fire was on the wrong fuel. Whenever he spoke,

It was to rally the soul of his friend whose turn

Was to come through the night while the eyes were uplifted in prayer,

Imploring the Lady of Sorrows, the mother of Christ,

As pain brimmed over the cup and the will was called

To stand the test of the coals. And sometimes the speech

Of Brébeuf struck out, thundering reproof to his foes,

Half-rebuke, half-defiance, giving them roar for roar.

Was it because the chancel became the arena,

Brébeuf a lion at bay, not a lamb on the altar,

As if the might of a Roman were joined to the cause

Of Judaea? Speech they could stop for they girdled his lips,

But never a moan could they get. Where was the source

Of his strength, the home of his courage that topped the best

Of their braves and even out-fabled the lore of their legends?

In the bunch of his shoulders which often had carried a load

Extorting the envy of guides at an Ottawa portage?

The heat of the hatchets was finding a path to that source.

In the thews of his thighs which had mastered the trails of the Neutrals?

They would gash and beribbon those muscles. Was it the blood?

They would draw it fresh from its fountain. Was it the heart?

They dug for it, fought for the scraps in the way of the wolves.

But not in these was the valour or stamina lodged;

Nor in the symbol of Richelieu’s robes or the seals

Of Mazarin’s charters, nor in the stir of the lilies

Upon the Imperial folds; nor yet in the words

Loyola wrote on a table of lava-stone

In the cave of Manresa—not in these the source—

But in the sound of invisible trumpets blowing

Around two slabs of board, right-angled, hammered

By Roman nails and hung on a Jewish hill.

The wheel had come full circle with the visions

In France of Brébeuf poured through the mould of St. Ignace.

Lalemant died in the morning at nine, in the flame

Of the pitch belts. Flushed with the sight of the bodies, the foes

Gathered their clans and moved back to the north and west

To join in the fight against the tribes of the Petuns.

There was nothing now that could stem the Iroquois blast.

However undaunted the souls of the priests who were left,

However fierce the sporadic counter attacks

Of the Hurons striking in roving bands from the ambush,

Or smashing out at their foes in garrison raids,

The villages fell before a blizzard of axes

And arrows and spears, and then were put to the torch.

The days were dark at the fort and heavier grew

The burdens on Ragueneau’s shoulders. Decision was his.

No word from the east could arrive in time to shape

The step he must take. To and fro—from altar to hill,

From hill to altar, he walked and prayed and watched.

As governing priest of the Mission he felt the pride

Of his Order whipping his pulse, for was not St. Ignace

The highest test of the Faith? And all that torture

And death could do to the body was done. The Will

And the Cause in their triumph survived. Loyola’s mountains,

Sublime at their summits, were scaled to the uttermost peak.

Ragueneau, the Shepherd, now looked on a battered fold.

In a whirlwind of fire St. Jean, like St. Joseph, crashed

Under the Iroquois impact. Firm at his post,

Garnier suffered the fate of Daniel. And now

Chabanel, last in the roll of the martyrs, entrapped

On his knees in the woods met death at apostate hands.

The drama was drawing close to its end. It fell

To Ragueneau’s lot to perform a final rite—

To offer the fort in sacrificial fire!

He applied the torch himself. “Inside an hour,”

He wrote, “we saw the fruit of ten years’ labour

Ascend in smoke,—then looked our last at the fields,

Put altar-vessels and food on a raft of logs,

And made our way to the island of St. Joseph.”

But even from there was the old tale retold—

Of hunger and the search for roots and acorns;

Of cold and persecution unto death

By the Iroquois; of Jesuit will and courage

As the shepherd-priest with Chaumonot led back

The remnant of a nation to Quebec.

Three hundred years have passed, and the winds of God

Which blew over France are blowing once more through the pines

That bulwark the shores of the great Fresh Water Sea.

Over the wastes abandoned by human tread,

Where only the bittern’s cry was heard at dusk;

Over the lakes where the wild ducks built their nests,

The skies that had banked their fires are shining again

With the stars that guided the feet of Jogues and Brébeuf.

The years as they turned have ripened the martyrs’ seed,

And the ashes of St. Ignace are glowing afresh.

The trails, having frayed the threads of the cassocks, sank

Under the mould of the centuries, under fern

And brier and fungus—there in due time to blossom

Into the highways that lead to the crest of the hill

Which havened both shepherd and flock in the days of their trial.

For out of the torch of Ragueneau’s ruins the candles

Are burning to-day in the chancel of Sainte Marie.

The Mission sites have returned to the fold of the Order.

Near to the ground where the cross broke under the hatchet,

And went with it into the soil to come back at the turn

Of the spade with the carbon and calcium char of the bodies,

The shrines and altars are built anew; the Aves

And prayers ascend, and the Holy Bread is broken.

Break we the bread once more,

  The cup we pass around—

No, rather let us pour

  This wine upon the ground;

And on the salver lay

  The bread—there to remain.

Perhaps, some other day,

  Shrovetide will come again.

Blurred is the rubric now,

  And shadowy the token,

When blood is on the brow,

  And the frail body broken.

Some passionate hour before my own deep stripe

Has taken on its healing, I shall trace

Him out, and with clean linen I shall wipe

The stain from that raw cut upon his face;

And with the hand that smote him I shall turn

The audit strong against him, offering

Once more a wound for wound and burn for burn

Out of the heart’s own codeless bargaining.

And he, with wound adjuring wound, shall draw

His equal measure to the sacrament

From an old well to which some mortals went

When, with their thirsts ablaze, they looked and saw

An Orient form uplifted in the skies,

And quenched their hate in his forgiving eyes.

I know that were my soul to-night

Strung to the silence of this room,

I’d hear remembered footfalls light

As wayward drift of lotus bloom.

Nor would it just be make-believe,

Were I to find her in this chair,

Or catch the rustle of her sleeve,

Or note the glint upon her hair.

Say, would you blame me if I knelt

To put faith to its enterprise?

So surely must her touch be felt

In liquid coolness on my eyes.

Now listen! If the veil should part

Within this holy ritual,

You’ll hear a voice call to my heart

More lovely than a madrigal.

Wiser than thought, more intimate than breath,

More ancient than the plated rust of Mars,

Beyond the light geometry of stars,

Yet closer than our web of life and death—

This sergeant of the executing squads

Calls night from dawn no less than dawn from night;

This groom that teams the wolf and hare for flight

Is obstetrician at the birth of gods.

Around this crimson source of human fears,

Where rites and myths have built their scaffoldings,

With smoke of hecatombs upon her wings,

And chased by shadows of the coming years,

Our planet-moth tries blindly to survive

Her spinning vertigo as fugitive.

But stronger than its terror is the deep

Allurement, primary to our blood, which holds

Safety and warmth in unimpassioned folds,

Night and the candle-quietness of sleep;

With the day’s bugles silent, when the will,

That feeds the tumult of our natures, rests

Along the broken arteries of its quests.

So, let the yellowing world revolve until

The old Sun’s ultimate expatriate

On this exotic hearth leans forth to claim

Promethean virtue from a dying flame,

His fingers tapered—less to mitigate

The chilling accident of his sojourn

Than to invoke his ultimate return.

The hammers silent and the derricks still,Harland & Wolff Works, Belfast, May 31, 1911

And high-tide in the harbour! Mind and will

In open test with time and steel had run

The first lap of a schedule and had won.

Although a shell of what was yet to be

Before another year was over, she,

Poised for the launching signal, had surpassed

The dreams of builder or of navigator.

The Primate of the Lines, she had out-classed

That rival effort to eliminate her

Beyond the North Sea where the air shots played

The laggard rhythms of their fusilade

Upon the rivets of the Imperator.

The wedges in, the shores removed, a girl’s

Hand at a sign released a ribbon braid;

Glass crashed against the plates; a wine cascade,

Netting the sunlight in a shower of pearls,

Baptized the bow and gave the ship her name;

A slight push of the rams as a switch set free

The triggers in the slots, and her proud claim

On size—to be the first to reach the sea—

Was vindicated, for whatever fears

Stalked with her down the tallow of the slips

Were smothered under by the harbour cheers,

By flags strung to the halyards of the ships.

Completed! Waiting for her trial spin—March 31, 1912

Levers and telegraphs and valves within

Her intercostal spaces ready to start

The power pulsing through her lungs and heart.

An ocean life-boat in herself—so ran

The architectural comment on her plan.

No wave could sweep those upper decks—unthinkable!

No storm could hurt that hull—the papers said so.

The perfect ship at last—the first unsinkable,

Proved in advance—had not the folders read so?

Such was the steel strength of her double floors

Along the whole length of the keel, and such

The fine adjustment of the bulkhead doors

Geared to the rams, responsive to a touch,

That in collision with iceberg or rock

Or passing ship she could survive the shock,

Absorb the double impact, for despite

The bows stove in, with forward holds aleak,

Her aft compartments buoyant, watertight,

Would keep her floating steady for a week.

And this belief had reached its climax when,

Through wireless waves as yet unstaled by use,

The wonder of the ether had begun

To fold the heavens up and reinduce

That ancient hubris in the dreams of men,

Which would have slain the cattle of the sun,

And filched the lightnings from the fist of Zeus.

What mattered that her boats were but a third

Of full provision—caution was absurd;

Then let the ocean roll and the winds blow

While the risk at Lloyds remained a record low.

Calved from a glacier near Godhaven coast,

It left the fiord for the sea—a host

Of white flotillas gathering in its wake,

And joined by fragments from a Behring floe,

Had circumnavigated it to make

It centre of an archipelago.

Its lateral motion on the Davis Strait

Was casual and indeterminate,

And each advance to southward was as blind

As each recession to the north. No smoke

Of steamships nor the hoist of mainsails broke

The polar wastes—no sounds except the grind

Of ice, the cry of curlews and the lore

Of winds from mesas of eternal snow;

Until caught by the western undertow,

It struck the current of the Labrador

Which swung it to its definite southern stride.

Pressure and glacial time had stratified

The berg to the consistency of flint,

And kept inviolate, through clash of tide

And gale, façade and columns with their hint

Of inward altars and of steepled bells

Ringing the passage of the parallels.

But when with months of voyaging it came

To where both streams—the Gulf and Polar—met,

The sun which left its crystal peaks aflame

In the sub-arctic noons, began to fret

The arches, flute the spires and deform

The features, till the batteries of storm,

Playing above the slow-eroding base,

Demolished the last temple touch of grace.

Another month, and nothing but the brute

And palaeolithic outline of a face

Fronted the transatlantic shipping route.

A sloping spur that tapered to a claw

And lying twenty feet below had made

It lurch and shamble like a plantigrade;

But with an impulse governed by the raw

Mechanics of its birth, it drifted where

Ambushed, fog-gray, it stumbled on its lair,

North forty-one degrees and forty-four,

Fifty and fourteen west the longitude,

Waiting a world-memorial hour, its rude

Corundum form stripped to its Greenland core.

An omen struck the thousands on the shore—Southampton, Wednesday, April 10, 1912

A double accident! And as the ship

Swung down the river on her maiden trip,

Old sailors of the clipper decades, wise

To the sea’s incantations, muttered fables

About careening vessels with their cables

Snapped in their harbours under peaceful skies.

Was it just suction or fatality

Which caused the New York at the dock to turn,

Her seven mooring ropes to break at the stern

And writhe like anacondas on the quay,

While tugs and fenders answered the collision

Signals with such trim margin of precision?

And was it backwash from the starboard screw

Which, tearing at the big Teutonic, drew

Her to the limit of her hawser strain,

And made the smaller tethered craft behave

Like frightened harbour ducks? And no one knew

For many days the reason to explain

The rise and wash of one inordinate wave,

When a sunken barge on the Southampton bed

Was dragged through mire eight hundred yards ahead.

As the Titanic passed above its grave.

But many of those sailors wise and old,

Who pondered on this weird mesmeric power,

Gathered together, lit their pipes and told

Of portents hidden in the natal hour,

Told of the launching of some square-rigged ships,

When water flowed from the inverted tips

Of a waning moon, of sun-hounds, of the shrieks

Of whirling shags around the mizzen peaks.

And was there not this morning’s augury

For the big one now heading for the sea?

So long after she passed from landsmen’s sight,

They watched her with their Mother Carey eyes

Through Spithead smoke, through mists of Isle of Wight,

Through clouds of sea-gulls following with their cries.

Electric elements were glowing downWednesday evening

In long galley passages where scores

Of white-capped cooks stood at the oven doors

To feed the population of a town.

Cauldrons of stock, purées and consommés,

Simmered with peppercorns and marjoram.

The sea-shore smells from bisque and crab and clam

Blended with odours from the fricassées.

Refrigerators, hung with a week’s toll

Of the stockyards, delivered sides of lamb

And veal, beef quarters to be roasted whole,

Hundreds of capons and halibut. A shoal

Of Blue-Points waited to be served on shell.

The boards were loaded with pimolas, pails

Of lobster coral, jars of Béchamel,

To garnish tiers of rows of chilled timbales

And aspics. On the shelves were pyramids

Of truffles, sprigs of thyme and water-cress,

Bay leaf and parsley, savouries to dress

Shad roes and sweetbreads broiling on the grids.

And then in diamond, square, crescent and star,

Hors d’oeuvres were fashioned from the toasted bread,

With paste of anchovy and caviare,

Paprika sprinkled and pimento spread,

All ready, for the hour was seven!

                                        Meanwhile,

Rivalling the engines with their steady tread,

Thousands of feet were taking overhead

The fourth lap round the deck to make the mile.

Squash racquet, shuffle board and quoits; the cool

Tang of the plunge in the gymnasium pool,

The rub, the crisp air of the April night,

The salt of the breeze made by the liner’s rate,

Worked with an even keel to stimulate

Saliva for an ocean appetite;

And like storm troops before a citadel,

At the first summons of a bugle, soon

The army massed the stairs towards the saloon,

And though twelve courses on the cards might well

Measure themselves against Falstaffian juices,

But few were found presenting their excuses,

When stewards offered on the lacquered trays

The Savoy chasers and the canapés.

The dinner gave the sense that all was well:

That touch of ballast in the tanks; the feel

Of peace from ramparts unassailable,

Which, added to her seven decks of steel,

Had constituted the Titanic less

A ship than a Gibraltar under heel.

And night had placed a lazy lusciousness

Upon a surfeit of security.

Science responded to a button press.

The three electric lifts that ran through tiers

Of decks, the reading lamps, the brilliancy

Of mirrors from the tungsten chandeliers,

Had driven out all phantoms which the mind

Had loosed from ocean closets, and assigned

To the dry earth the custody of fears.

The crowds poured through the sumptuous rooms and halls,

And tapped the tables of the Regency;

Smirked at the caryatids on the walls;

Talked Jacobean-wise; canvassed the range

Of taste within the Louis dynasty.

Gray-templed Cæsars of the world’s Exchange

Swallowed liqueurs and coffee as they sat

Under the Georgian carved mahogany,

Dictating wireless hieroglyphics that

Would on the opening of the Board Rooms rock

The pillared dollars of a railroad stock.

A group had gathered round a mat to watchIn the gymnasium

The pressure of a Russian hammerlock,

A Polish scissors and a German crotch,

Broken by the toe-hold of Frank Gotch;

Or listened while a young Y.M.C.A.

Instructor demonstrated the left-hook,

And that right upper-cut which Jeffries took

From Johnson in the polished Reno way.

By midnight in the spacious dancing hall,

Hundreds were at the Masqueraders’ Ball,

The high potential of the liner’s pleasures,

Where mellow lights from Chinese lanterns glowed

Upon the scene, and the Blue Danube flowed

In andantino rhythms through the measures.

By three the silence that proceeded from

The night-caps and the soporific hum

Of the engines was far deeper than a town’s:

The starlight and the low wash of the sea

Against the hull bore the serenity

Of sleep at rural hearths with eiderdowns.

The quiet on the decks was scarcely less

Than in the berths: no symptoms of the toil

Down in the holds; no evidence of stress

From gears drenched in the lubricating oil.

She seemed to swim in oil, so smooth the sea.

And quiet on the bridge: the great machine

Called for laconic speech, close-fitting, clean,

And whittled to the ship’s economy.

Even the judgment stood in little need

Of reason, for the Watch had but to read

Levels and lights, meter or card or bell

To find the pressures, temperatures, or tell

Magnetic North within a binnacle,

Or gauge the hour of docking; for the speed

Was fixed abaft where under the Ensign,

Like a flashing trolling spoon, the log rotator

Transmitted through a governor its fine

Gradations on a dial indicator.

Morning of Sunday promised cool and clear,

Flawless horizon, crystal atmosphere;

Not a cat’s paw on the ocean, not a guy

Rope murmuring: the steamer’s columned smoke

Climbed like extensions of her funnels high

Into the upper zones, then warped and broke

Through the resistance of her speed—blue sky,

Blue water rifted only by the wedge

Of the bow where the double foam line ran

Diverging from the beam to join the edge

Of the stern wake like a white unfolding fan.

Her maiden voyage was being sweetly run,

Adding a half-knot here, a quarter there,

Gliding from twenty into twenty-one.

She seemed so native to her thoroughfare,

One turned from contemplation of her size,

Her sixty thousand tons of sheer flotation,

To wonder at the human enterprise

That took a gamble on her navigation—

Joining the mastiff strength with whippet grace

In this head-strained, world-watched Atlantic race:

Her less than six days’ passage would combine

Achievement with the architect’s design.

A message from Caronia: advice9 a.m.

From ships proceeding west; sighted field ice

And growlers; forty-two north; forty-nine

To fifty-one west longitude. S.S.

Mesaba of Atlantic Transport Line

Reports encountering solid pack: would guess

The stretch five miles in width from west to east,

And forty-five to fifty miles at least

In length.

          Amerika obliged to slow1 p.m.

Down: warns all steamships in vicinity

Presence of bergs, especially of three

Upon the southern outskirts of the floe.

The Baltic warns Titanic: so Tourraine;1.42 p.m.

Reports of numerous icebergs on the Banks,

The floe across the southern traffic lane.

The Californian and Baltic again5 p.m.

Present their compliments to Captain.

“Titanic”

                                                Thanks.

“That spark’s been busy all the afternoon—Three men talking on deck

Warnings! The Hydrographic charts are strewn

With crosses showing bergs and pack-ice all

Along the routes, more south than usual

For this time of the year.”

                            “She’s hitting a clip

Instead of letting up while passing through

This belt. She’s gone beyond the twenty-two.”

“Don’t worry—Smith’s an old dog, knows his ship,

No finer in the mercantile marine

Than Smith with thirty years of service, clean

Record, honoured with highest of all commands,

Majestic, than Olympic on his hands,

Now the Titanic.”

                    “ ’Twas a lucky streak

That at Southampton dock he didn’t lose her,

And the Olympic had a narrow squeak

Some months before rammed by the British Cruiser,

The Hawke.”

          “Straight accident. No one to blame:

’Twas suction—Board absolved them both. The same

With the Teutonic and New York. No need

To fear she’s trying to out-reach her speed.

There isn’t a sign of fog. Besides by now

The watch is doubled at crow’s nest and bow.”

“People are talking of that apparition,

When we were leaving Queenstown—that head showing

Above the funnel rim, and the fires going!

A stoker’s face—sounds like a superstition.

But he was there within the stack, all right;

Climbed up the ladder and grinned. The explanation

Was given by an engineer last night—

A dummy funnel built for ventilation.”

“That’s queer enough, but nothing so absurd

As the latest story two old ladies heard

At a rubber o’ bridge. They nearly died with fright;

Wanted to tell the captain—of all things!

The others sneered a bit but just the same

It did the trick of breaking up the game.

A mummy from The Valley of the Kings

Was brought from Thebes to London. Excavators

Passed out from cholera, black plague or worse.

Egyptians understood—an ancient curse

Was visited on all the violators.

One fellow was run over, one was drowned,

And one went crazy. When in time it found

Its way to the Museum, the last man

In charge—a mothy Aberdonian—

Exploding the whole legend with a laugh,

Lost all his humour when the skeleton

Appeared within the family photograph,

And leered down from a corner just like one

Of his uncles.”

                              “Holy Hades!”

                                          “The B.M.

Authorities themselves were scared and sold

It to New York. That’s how the tale is told.”

“The joke is on the Yanks.”

                                “No, not on them,

Nor on The Valley of the Kings. What’s rummy

About it is—we’re carrying the mummy.”

Green Turtle!7.30 p.m.

                    Potage Romanoff!At a table in the dining saloon

                                            “White Star

Is out this time to press Cunarders close,

Got them on tonnage—fifty thousand gross.

Preferred has never paid a dividend.

The common’s down to five—one hundred par.

The double ribbon—size and speed—would send

Them soaring.”

                    “Speed is not in her design,

But comfort and security. The Line

Had never advertised it—’twould be mania

To smash the record of the Mauretania.”

Sherry!

              “The rumour’s out.”

                                  “There’s nothing in it.”

“Bet you she docks on Tuesday night.”

                                          “I’ll take it.”

“She’s hitting twenty-two this very minute.”

“That’s four behind—She hasn’t a chance to make it.”

Brook Trout!

                  Fried Dover Sole!

                                  “Her rate will climb

From twenty-two to twenty-six in time.

The Company’s known never to rush their ships

At first or try to rip the bed-bolts off.

They run them gently half-a-dozen trips,

A few work-outs around the track to let

Them find their breathing, take the boiler cough

Out of them. She’s not racing for a cup.”

Claret!

            “Steamships like sprinters have to get

Their second wind before they open up.”

“That group of men around the captain’s table,

Look at them, count the aggregate—the House

Of Astor, Guggenheim, and Harris, Strauss,

That’s Frohman, isn’t it? Between them able

To halve the national debt with a cool billion!

Sir Hugh is over there, and Hays and Stead.

That woman third from captain’s right, it’s said,

Those diamonds round her neck—a quarter million!”

Mignon of Beef!

                      Quail!

                                    “I heard Phillips say

He had the finest outfit on the sea;

The new Marconi valve; the range by day,

Five hundred miles, by night a thousand. Three

Sources of power. If some crash below

Should hit the engines, flood the dynamo,

He had the batteries: in emergency,

He could switch through to the auxiliary

On the boat deck.”

                    Woodcock and Burgundy!

“Say waiter, I said rare, you understand.”

Escallope of Veal!

                    Roast Duckling!

                                  Snipe! More Rhine!

“Marconi made the sea as safe as land:

Remember the Republic—White Star Line—

Rammed off Nantucket by the Florida,

One thousand saved—the Baltic heard the call.

Two steamers answered the Slavonia,

Disabled off the Azores. They got them all,

And when the Minnehaha ran aground

Near Bishop’s Rock, they never would have found

Her—not a chance without the wireless. Same

Thing happened to that boat—what was her name?

The one that foundered off the Alaska Coast—

Her signals brought a steamer in the nick

Of time. Yes, sir—Marconi turned the trick.”

The Barcelona salad; no, Beaucaire;

That Russian dressing;

                                  Avocado pear;

“They wound her up at the Southampton dock,

And then the tugs gave her a push to start

Her off—as automatic as a clock.”

Moselle!

        “For all the hand work there’s to do

Aboard this liner up on deck, the crew

Might just as well have stopped ashore. Apart

From stokers and the engineers, she’s run

By gadgets from the bridge—a thousand and one

Of them with a hundred miles of copper wire.

A filament glows at the first sign of fire,

A buzzer sounds, a number gives the spot,

A deck-hand makes a coupling of the hose.

That’s all there’s to it; not a whistle; not

A passenger upon the ship that knows

What’s happened. The whole thing is done without

So much as calling up the fire brigade.

They don’t need even the pumps—a gas is sprayed,

Carbon dioxide—and the blaze is out.”

A Cherry Flan!

                    Champagne!

                                  Chocolate parfait!

“How about a poker crowd to-night?

Get Jones, an awful grouch—no good to play,

But has the coin. Get hold of Larry.”

                                          “Right.”

“You fetch Van Raalte; I’ll bring in MacRae.

In Cabin D, one hundred seventy-nine.

In half-an-hour we start playing.”

                                      “Fine.”

The sky was moonless but the sea flung backOn deck

With greater brilliance half the zodiac.

As clear below as clear above, the Lion

Far on the eastern quarter stalked the Bear:

Polaris off the starboard beam—and there

Upon the port the Dog-star trailed Orion.

Capella was so close, a hand might seize

The sapphire with the silver Pleiades.

And further to the south—a finger span,

Swam Betelgeuse and red Aldebaran.

Right through from east to west the ocean glassed

The billions of that snowy caravan

Ranging the highway which the Milkmaid passed.

I say, old man, we’re stuck fast in this place,9.05 p.m. “Californian” flashing

More than an hour. Field ice for miles about.

Say, Californian, shut up, keep out,“Titanic”

You’re jamming all my signals with Cape Race.

A group of boys had gathered round a spot10 p.m.

Upon the rail where a dial registered

The speed, and waiting each three minutes heard

The taffrail log bell tallying off a knot.

First act to fifth act in a tragic plan,11.20 p.m. Behind a deck house

Stage time, real time—a woman and a man,

Entering a play within a play, dismiss

The pageant on the ocean with a kiss.

Eleven-twenty curtain! Whether true

Or false the pantomimic vows they make

Will not be known till at the fifth they take

Their mutual exit twenty after two.

Position half-a-mile from edge of floe,11.25 p.m.

Hove-to for many hours, bored with delay,

The Californian fifteen miles away,

And fearful of the pack, has now begun

To turn her engines over under slow

Bell, and the operator, his task done,

Unclamps the ’phones and ends his dullest day.

The ocean sinuous, half-past eleven;

A silence broken only by the seven

Bells and the look-out calls, the log-book showing

Knots forty-five within two hours—not quite

The expected best as yet—but she was going

With all her bulkheads open through the night,

For not a bridge induction light was glowing.

Over the stern zenith and nadir met

In the wash of the reciprocating set.

The foam in bevelled mirrors multiplied

And shattered constellations. In between,

The pitch from the main drive of the turbine

Emerged like tuna breaches to divide

Against the rudder, only to unite

With the converging wake from either side.

Under the counter, blending with the spill

Of stars—the white and blue—the yellow light

Of Jupiter hung like a daffodil.

“Ace full! A long time since I had a pot.”D-179

“Good boy, Van Raalte. That’s the juiciest haul

To-night. Calls for a round of roodles, what?

Let’s whoop her up. Double the limit. All

In.” (Jones, heard muttering as usual,

Demurs, but over-ruled.) “Jones sore again.”

“Ten dollars and all in!Van Raalte (dealer)

                           The sea’s like glass

To-night. That fin-keel keeps her steady.”

                                              “Pass.”Jones

(Not looking at his hand.)

                          “Pass.”Larry

                                  “Open for ten.”Cripps

(Holding a pair of aces.) “Say, who won

The sweep to-day?”

                        “A Minnesota guy

With olive-coloured spats and a mauve tie.

Five hundred and eighty miles—Beat last day’s run.”

“My ten.”Mac

          (Taking a gamble on his fourHarry

Spades for a flush) “I’ll raise the bet ten more.”

(Two queens) “And ten.”Van R.

                            (Discovering three kings)Jones

“Raise you to forty” (face expressing doubt.)

(Looking hard at a pair of nines) “I’m out.”Larry

(Flirts for a moment with his aces, flingsCripps

His thirty dollars to the pot.)

                                          (The same.)Mac

“My twenty. Might as well stay with the game.”Harry

“I’m in. Draw! Jones, how bloody long you wait.”Van R.

(Withholds an eight) “One.” (And then draws an eight.)Jones

“Three.” (Gets another pair.)Cripps

                                  “How many, Mac?”

“Guess I’ll take two, no, three.” (Gets a third Jack.)Mac

“One.” (Draws the ace of spades.)Harry

                                    “Dealer takes three.”Van R.

(Throws in a dollar chip.)Cripps (the opener)

                          (The same.)Mac

                                              “I’ll raiseHarry

You ten.”

                    “I’ll see you.”Van R.

                                    (Hesitates, surveysJones

The chips.) “Another ten.”

                                    “I’ll call you.”Cripps

                                                 “See.”Mac

“White livers! Here she goes to thirty.”Harry

                                              “JustVan R.

The devil’s luck.” (Throws cards down in disgust.)

“Might as well raise.” (Counts twenty sluggishly,Jones

Tosses them to the centre.)

                             “Staying, Cripps?”

“No, and be damned to it.”Cripps

                          “My ten.” (With groans.)Mac

(Looks at the pyramid and swears at Jones,Harry

Then calls, pitching ten dollars on the chips.)

(Cards down.) “A full house tops the flush.” (He spreadsJones

His arms around the whites and blues and reds.)

    “As the Scotchman once said to the Sphinx,Mac

    I’d like just to know what he thinks,

    I’ll ask him, he cried,

    And the Sphinx—he replied,

    It’s the hell of a time between drinks.”

Cripps (watch in hand)

“Time? Eleven forty-four, to be precise.”

“Jones—that will fatten up your pocket-book.Harry

My throat’s like charcoal. Ring for soda and ice.”

“Ice: God! Look—take it through the port-hole—look!”Van R.

A signal from the crow’s nest. Three bells pealed:11.45 p.m.

The look-out telephoned—Something ahead,

Hard to make out, sir; looks like . . . . iceberg deadMurdoch holding the bridge-watch

On starboard bow!

                Starboard your helm: ship heeled

To port. From bridge to engine-room the clang

Of the telegraph. Danger. Stop. A hand sprang

To the throttle; the valves closed, and with the churn

Of the reverse the sea boiled at the stern.

Smith hurried to the bridge and Murdoch closed

The bulkheads of the ship as he supposed,

But could not know that with those riven floors

The electro-magnets failed upon the doors.

No shock! No more than if something alive

Had brushed her as she passed. The bow had missed.

Under the vast momentum of her drive

She went a mile. But why that ominous five

Degrees (within five minutes) of a list?

“What was that, steward?”In a cabin

                  “Seems like she hit a sea, sir.”

“But there’s no sea; calm as a landlocked bay

It is; lost a propeller blade?”

                              “Maybe, sir.”

“She’s stopped.”

                    “Just cautious like, feeling her way,

There’s ice about. It’s dark, no moon to-night,

Nothing to fear, I’m sure, sir.”

                                  For so slight

The answer of the helm, it did not break

The sleep of hundreds: some who were awake

Went up on deck, but soon were satisfied

That nothing in the shape of wind or tide

Or rock or ice could harm that huge bulk spread

On the Atlantic, and went back to bed.

“We’ve struck an iceberg—glancing blow: as yetCaptain in wireless room

Don’t know extent; looks serious; so get

Ready to send out general call for aid;

I’ll tell you when—having inspection made.”

A starboard cut three hundred feet or moreReport of ship’s carpenter and fourth officer

From foremast to amidships. Iceberg tore

Right at the bilge turn through the double skin:

Some boiler rooms and bunkers driven in;

The forward five compartments flooded—mail

Bags floating. Would the engine power avail

To stem the rush?

                        Titanic, C.Q.D.Wireless room, First officer Phillips at key

Collision: iceberg: damaged starboard side:

Distinct list forward. (Had Smith magnified

The danger? Over-anxious certainly.)

The second (joking)—“Try new call, maybe

Last chance you’ll have to send it.”

                                       S.O.S.

Then back to older signal of distress.

On the same instant the Carpathia called,

The distance sixty miles—Putting about,

And heading for you; Double watch installed

In engine-room, in stokehold and look-out.

Four hours the run, should not the ice retard

The speed; but taking chances: Coming hard!

As leaning on her side to ease a pain,The Bridge

The tilted ship had stopped the captain’s breath:

The inconceivable had stabbed his brain,

This thing unfelt—her visceral wound of death?

Another message—this time to report her

Filling, taxing the pumps beyond their strain.

Had that blow rent her from the bow to quarter?

Or would the aft compartments still intact

Give buoyancy enough to counteract

The open forward holds?

                              The carpenter’s

Second report had offered little chance,

And panic—heart of God—the passengers,

The fourteen hundred—seven hundred packed

In steerage—seven hundred immigrants!

Smith thought of panic clutching at their throats,

And feared that Balkan scramble for the boats.

No call from bridge, no whistle, no alarm

Was sounded. Have the stewards quietly

Inform the passengers: no vital harm,

Precautions merely for emergency;

Collision? Yes, but nature of the blow

Must not be told: not even the crew must know:

Yet all on deck with life-belts, and boats ready,

The sailors at the falls, and all hands steady.

The lilac spark was crackling at the gap,Wireless room

Eight ships within the radius of the call

From fifteen to five hundred miles, and all

But one answering the operator’s tap.

Olympic twenty hours away had heard;

The Baltic next and the Virginian third;

Frankfurt and Burma distant one-half day;

Mount Temple nearer, but the ice-field lay

Between the two ships like a wall of stone;

The Californian deaf to signals though

Supreme deliverer an hour ago:

The hope was on Carpathia alone.

So suave the fool-proof sense of life that fearOn the decks

Had like the unforeseen become a mere

Illusion—vanquished by the towering height

Of funnels pouring smoke through thirty feet

Of bore; the solid deck planks and the light

From a thousand lamps as on a city street;

The feel of numbers; the security

Of wealth; the placid surface of the sea,

Reflecting on the ship the outwardness

Of calm and leisure of the passengers;

Deck-hands obedient to their officers;

Pearl-throated women in their evening dress

And wrapped in sables and minks; the silhouettes

Of men in dinner jackets staging an act

In which delusion passed, deriding fact

Behind the cupped flare of the cigarettes.

Women and children first! Slowly the men

Stepped backward from the rails where number ten,

Its cover off, and lifted from the chocks,

Moved outward as the Welin davits swung.

The new ropes creaking through the unused blocks,

The boat was lowered to B deck and hung

There while her load of sixty stepped inside,

Convinced the order was not justified.

Rockets, one, two, God! Smith—what does he mean?

The sounding of the bilges could not show

This reason for alarm—the sky serene

And not a ripple on the water—no

Collision. What report came from below?

No leak accounts for this—looks like a drill,

A bit of exhibition play—but still

Stopped in mid-ocean! and those rockets—three!

More urgent even than a tapping key

And more immediate as a protocol

To a disaster. There! An arrow of fire,

A fourth sped towards the sky, its bursting spire

Topping the foremast like a parasol

With fringe of fuschia,—more a parody

Upon the tragic summons of the sea

Than the real script of unacknowledged fears

Known to the bridge and to the engineers.

Midnight! The Master of the ship presents

To the Master of the Band his compliments,

Desiring that the Band should play right through;

No intermission.

                    “Bad?”Conductor

                              “Yes, bad enough,Officer

The half not known yet even to the crew;

For God’s sake, cut the sentimental stuff,

The Blue Bells and Kentucky lullabies.

Murdoch will have a barrel of work to do,

Holding the steerage back, once they get wise;

They’re jumpy now under the rockets’ glare;

So put the ginger in the fiddles—Zip

Her up.”

                “Sure, number forty-seven:” E-YipConductor

I Addy-I-A, I Ay . . . I don’t care . . .

Full noon and midnight by a weird designNumber ten goes over the side

Both met and parted at the median line.

Beyond the starboard gunwale was outspread

The jet expanse of water islanded

By fragments of the berg which struck the blow.

And further off towards the horizon lay

The loom of the uncharted parent floe,

Merging the black with an amorphous gray.

On the port gunwale the meridian

Shone from the terraced rows of decks that ran

From gudgeon to the stem nine hundred feet;

And as the boat now tilted by the stern,

Or now resumed her levels with the turn

Of the controlling ropes at block and cleat,

How easy seemed the step and how secure

Back to the comfort and the warmth—the lure

Of sheltered promenade and sun decks starred

By hanging bulbs, amber and rose and blue,

The trellis and palms lining an avenue

With all the vista of a boulevard:

The mirror of the ceilings with festoon

Of pennants, flags and streamers—and now through

The leaded windows of the grand saloon,

Through parted curtains and the open doors

Of vestibules, glint of deserted floors

And tables, and under the sorcery

Of light excelling their facsimile,

The periods returning to relume

The panels of the lounge and smoking room,

Holding the mind in its abandonment

During those sixty seconds of descent.

Lower away! The boat with its four tons

Of freight went down with jerks and stops and runs

Beyond the glare of the cabins and below

The slanting parallels of port-holes, clear

Of the exhaust from the condenser flow:

But with the uneven falls she canted near

The water line; the stern rose; the bow dipped;

The crew groped for the link-releasing gear;

The lever jammed; a stoker’s jack-knife ripped

The aft ropes through, which on the instant brought her

With rocking keel though safe upon the water.

Fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen—threeThe “Carpathia”

Full knots beyond her running limit, she

Was feeling out her port and starboard points,

And testing rivets on her boiler joints.

The needle on the gauge beyond the red,

The blow-offs feathered at the funnel head.

The draught-fans roaring at their loudest, now

The quarter-master jams the helm hard-over,

As the revolving searchlight beams uncover

The columns of an iceberg on the bow,

Then compensates this loss by daring gains

Made by her passage through the open lanes.

      East side, West side, all around the town,The Band

      The tots sang “Ring-a-Rosie”

      “London Bridge is falling down”,

      Boys and girls together . . . .

The cranks turn and the sixth and seventh swing

Over and down, the “tiller” answering

“Aye, Aye, sir” to the shouts of officers—

“Row to the cargo ports for passengers.”

The water line is reached, but the ports fail

To open, and the crews of the boats hail

The decks; receiving no response they pull

Away from the ship’s side, less than half full.

The eighth caught in the tackle foul is stuck

Half-way. With sixty-five capacity,

Yet holding twenty-four goes number three.

The sharp unnatural deflection, struck

By the sea-level with the under row

Of dipping port-holes at the forward, show

How much she’s going by the head. Behind

The bulkheads, sapping out their steel control,

Is the warp of the bunker press inclined

By many thousand tons of shifting coal.

The smoothest, safest passage to the sea

Is made by number one—the next to go—

Her space is forty—twelve her company:

“Pull like the devil from her—harder—row!

The minute that she founders, not a boat

Within a mile around that will not follow.

What nearly happened at Southampton? So

Pull, pull, I tell you—not a chip afloat,

God knows how far, her suction will not swallow.”

      Alexander’s rag-time band. . . .

      It’s the best band in the land. . . .

“There goes the Special with the toffs. You’ll makeVoices from the deck

New York to-night rowing like that. You’ll take

Your death o’ cold out there with all the fish

And ice around.”

                “Make sure your butlers dish

You up your toddies now, and bring hot rolls

For breakfast.”

                “Don’t forget the finger bowls.”

The engineering staff of thirty-five

Are at their stations: those off-duty go

Of their free will to join their mates below

In the grim fight for steam, more steam, to drive

The pressure through the pumps and dynamo.

Knee-deep, waist-deep in water they remain,

Not one of them seen on the decks again.

The under braces of the rudder showing,

The wing propeller blades began to rise,

And with them, through the hawse-holes, water flowing—

The angle could not but assault the eyes.

A fifteen minutes, and the fo’c’sle head

Was under. And five more, the sea had shut

The lower entrance to the stairs that led

From C deck to the boat deck—the short cut

For the crew. Another five, the upward flow

Had covered the wall brackets where the glow

Diffusing from the frosted bulbs turned green

Uncannily through their translucent screen.

White Star—Cunarder, forty miles apart,On the “Carpathia”

Still eighteen knots! From coal to flame to steam—

Decision of a captain to redeem

Errors of brain by hazards of the heart!

Showers of sparks danced through the funnel smoke,

The firemen’s shovels, rakes and slice-bars broke

The clinkers, fed the fires, and ceaselessly

The hoppers dumped the ashes on the sea.

As yet no panic, but none might foretell

The moment when the sight of that oblique

Breath-taking lift of the taffrail and the sleek

And foamless undulation of the swell

Might break in meaning on those diverse races,

And give them common language. As the throng

Came to the upper decks and moved along

The incline, the contagion struck the faces

With every lowering of a boat and backed

Them towards the stern. And twice between the hush

Of fear and utterance the gamut cracked,

When with the call for women and the flare

Of an exploding rocket, a short rush

Was made for the boats—fifteen and two.

’Twas nearly done—the sudden clutch and tear

Of canvas, a flurry of fists and curses met

By swift decisive action from the crew,

Supported by a quartermaster’s threat

Of three revolver shots fired on the air.

But still the fifteenth went with five inside,

Who, seeking out the shadows, climbed aboard

And, lying prone and still, managed to hide

Under the thwarts long after she was lowered.

          Jingle bells, jingle bells,

          Jingle all the way,

          O what fun. . . .

“Some men in number two, sir!”

                                    The boat swung

Back.

        “Chuck the fellows out.”

                                  Grabbed by the feet,

The lot were pulled over the gunwale and flung

Upon the deck.

                “Hard at that forward cleat!

A hand there for that after fall. Lower

Away—port side, the second hatch, and wait.”

With six hands of his watch, the bosun’s mate,

Sent down to open up the gangway door,

Was trapped and lost in a flooded alley way,

And like the seventh, impatient of delay,

The second left with room for twenty more.

The fidley leading from a boiler room

Lay like a tortuous exit from a tomb.

A stoker climbed it, feeling by the twist

From vertical how steep must be the list.

He reached the main deck where the cold night airs

Enswathed his flesh with steam. Taking the stairs,

He heard the babel by the davits, faced

The forward, noticed how the waters raced

To the break of the fo’c’sle and lapped

The foremast root. He climbed again and saw

The resolute manner in which Murdoch’s rapped

Command put a herd instinct under law;

No life-preserver on, he stealthily

Watched Phillips in his room, bent at the key,

And thinking him alone, he sprang to tear

The jacket off. He leaped too soon. “Take that!”

The second stove him with a wrench. “Lie there,

Till hell begins to singe your lids—you rat!”

But set against those scenes where order failed,

Was the fine muster at the fourteenth where,

Like a zone of calm along a thoroughfare,

The discipline of sea-worn laws prevailed.

No women answering the repeated calls,

The men filled up the vacant seats: the falls

Were slipping through the sailors’ hands.

When a steerage group of women, having fought

Their way over five flights of stairs, were brought

Bewildered to the rails. Without commands

Barked from the lips of officers; without

A protest registered in voice or face,

The boat was drawn up and the men stepped out

Back to the crowded stations with that free

Barter of life for life done with the grace

And air of a Castilian courtesy.

      I’ve just got here through Paris,

      From the sunny Southern shore,

      I to Monte Carlo went. . . .

At the sixteenth—a woman wrapped her coatIsador and Ida Strauss

Around her maid and placed her in the boat;

Was ordered in but seen to hesitate

At the gunwale, and more conscious of her pride

Than of her danger swiftly took her fate

With open hands, and without show of tears

Returned unmurmuring to her husband’s side;

“We’ve been together now for forty years,

Whither you go, I go.”

                        A boy of ten,

Ranking himself within the class of men,

Though given a seat, made up his mind to waive

The privilege of his youth and size, and piled

The inches on his stature as he gave

Place to a Magyar woman and her child.

And men who had in the world’s run of trade,

Or in pursuit of the professions, made

Their reputation, looked upon the scene

Merely as drama in a life’s routine:

Millet was studying eyes as he would draw them

Upon a canvas; Butt, as though he saw them

In the ranks; Astor, social, debonair,

Waved “Good-bye” to his bride—“See you to-morrow”,

And tapped a cigarette on a silver case;

Men came to Guggenheim as he stood there

In evening suit, coming this time to borrow

Nothing but courage from his calm, cool face.

And others unobserved, of unknown name

And race, just stood behind, pressing no claim

Upon priority but rendering proof

Of their oblation, quiet and aloof

Within the maelstrom towards the rails. And some

Wavered a moment with the panic urge,

But rallied to attention on the verge

Of flight as if the rattle of a drum

From quarters faint but unmistakable

Had put the stiffening in the blood to check

The impulse of the feet, leaving the will

No choice between the life-boats and the deck.

The four collapsibles, their lashings ripped,

Half-dragged, half-lifted by the hooks, were slipped

Over the side. The first two luckily

Had but the forward distance to the sea.

Its canvas edges crumpled up, the third

Began to fill with water and transferred

Its cargo to the twelfth, while number four,

Abaft and higher, nose-dived and swamped its score.

The wireless cabin—Phillips in his place,

Guessing the knots of the Cunarder’s race.

Water was swirling up the slanted floor

Around the chair and sucking at his feet.

Carpathia’s call—the last one heard complete—

Expect to reach position half-past four.

The operators turned—Smith at the door

With drawn incredulous face. “Men, you have done

Your duty. I release you. Everyone

Now for himself.” They stayed ten minutes yet,

The power growing fainter with each blue

Crackle of flame. Another stammering jet—

Virginian heard “a tattering C.Q.”

Again a try for contact but the code’s

Last jest had died between the electrodes.

Even yet the spell was on the ship: although

The last life-boat had vanished, there was no

Besieging of the heavens with a crescendo

Of fears passing through terror into riot—

But on all lips the strange narcotic quiet

Of an unruffled ocean’s innuendo.

In spite of her deformity of line,

Emergent like a crag out of the sea,

She had the semblance of stability,

Moment by moment furnishing no sign,

So far as visible, of that decline

Made up of inches crawling into feet.

Then, with the electric circuit still complete,

The miracle of day displacing night

Had worked its fascination to beguile

Direction of the hours and cheat the sight.

Inside the recreation rooms the gold

From Arab lamps shone on the burnished tile.

What hindered the return to shelter while

The ship clothed in that irony of light

Offered her berths and cabins as a fold?

And, was there not the Californian?

Many had seen her smoke just over there,

But two hours past—it seemed a harbour span—

So big, so close, she could be hailed, they said;

She must have heard the signals, seen the flare

Of those white stars and changed at once her course.

There under the Titanic’s foremast head,

A lamp from the look-out cage was flashing Morse.

No ship afloat unless deaf, blind and dumb

To those three sets of signals but would come.

And when the whizz of a rocket bade men turn

Their faces to each other in concern

At shattering facts upon the deck, they found

Their hearts take reassurance with the sound

Of the violins from the gymnasium, where

The bandsmen in their blithe insouciance

Discharged the sudden tension of the air

With the fox-trot’s sublime irrelevance.

The fo’c’sle had gone under the creep

Of the water. Though without a wind, a lop

Was forming on the wells now fathoms deep.

The seventy feet—the boat deck’s normal drop,

Was down to ten. Rising, falling, and waiting,

Rising again, the swell that edged and curled

Around the second bridge, over the top

Of the air-shafts, backed, resurged and whirled

Into the stokehold through the fidley grating.

Under the final strain the two wire guys

Of the forward funnel tugged and broke at the eyes:

With buckled plates the stack leaned, fell and smashed

The starboard wing of the flying bridge, went through

The lower, then tilting at the davits crashed

Over, driving a wave aboard that drew

Back to the sea some fifty sailors and

The captain with the last of the bridge command.

Out on the water was the same display

Of fear and self-control as on the deck—

Challenge and hesitation and delay,

The quick return, the will to save, the race

Of snapping oars to put the realm of space

Between the half-filled life-boats and the wreck.

The swimmers whom the waters did not take

With their instant death-chill struck out for the wake

Of the nearer boats, gained on them, hailed

The steersmen and were saved: the weaker failed

And fagged and sank. A man clutched at the rim

Of a gunwale, and a woman’s jewelled fist

Struck at his face: two others seized his wrist,

As he released his hold, and gathering him

Over the side, they staunched the cut from the ring.

And there were many deeds envisaging

Volitions where self-preservation fought

Its red primordial struggle with the “ought”,

In those high moments when the gambler tossed

Upon the chance and uncomplaining lost.

Aboard the ship, whatever hope of dawn

Gleamed from the Carpathia’s riding lights was gone,

For every knot was matched by each degree

Of list. The stern was lifted bodily

When the bow had sunk three hundred feet, and set

Against the horizon stars in silhouette

Were the blade curves of the screws, hump of the rudder.

The downward pull and after buoyancy

Held her a minute poised but for a shudder

That caught her frame as with the upward stroke

Of the sea a boiler or a bulkhead broke.

And out there in the starlight, with no trace

Upon it of its deed but the last wave

From the Titanic fretting at its base,

Silent, composed, ringed by its icy broods,

The gray shape with the palaeolithic face

Was still the master of the longitudes.

For creatures of this modern breed,

Reared from the element of flame,

Designed to match a storm for speed,

Ionia would have found a name,

Like Mercury or Bucephalus—

Some picturesque immortal label

That lifts a story into fable,

Out of the myths of Uranus;

Then changed its root to demonize

The nature of its strength and size

With fictions out of Tartarus.

Those giants of Vulcan, leather-skinned,

Whose frightful stare monocular

Made mad the coursers of the wind,

And chased the light of the morning star

Away from the Sicilian shore,

Would have been terror-blind before

This forehead which, had it been known

In Greek or Scandinavian lore,

Had turned the hierarchs to stone,

Had battered down the Martian walls,

Reduced to dust Jove’s arsenals,

Or rammed the battlements of Thor.

His body black as Erebus

Accorded with the hue of night;

His central eye self-luminous

Threw out a cone of noon-day light,

Which split the gloom and then flashed back

The diamond levels of the track.

No ancient poet ever saw

Just such a monster as could draw

The Olympian tonnage of a load

Like this along an iron road;

Or ever thought that such a birth—

The issue of an inventor’s dream—

With breath of fire and blood of steam,

Could find delivery on this earth.

In his vast belly was a pit,

Which even Homer would admit,

Or Dante, searching earth and hell,

Possessed no perfect parallel.

Evolved from no Plutonian forge,

The tender, like a slave, that followed,

Conveyed bitumen to his gorge,

Which on the instant it was swallowed

Ran black through crimson on to white.

Above the mass floated a swirl

Of crystal shapes, agate and pearl

And rose, like imps a-chase, and light

As thistledown, while the blast roared

With angry temperatures that soared

To seven hundred Fahrenheit.

Outside, the engine’s dorsal plate,

Above the furnace door ajar,

Revealed the boiler’s throbbing rate,

By dial fingers animate,

Like pulses at the jugular.

For every vital inch of steel,

A vibrant indicator read

Two hundred pounds plus twenty-five,

Waiting for the hour to drive

Their energy upon the wheel

In punches from the piston head.

And there another one supplied

The measure of the irrigation,

Whereby the lubricating tide,

Through linear runs and axle curves,

Made perfect his articulation.

And ramifying copper wire

Made up the system of his nerves,

In keeping with his lungs of fire.

Now with his armoured carapace

On head and belly, back and breast,

The Taurian prepared to face

The blurring stretches of the west.

To him it was of no concern

The evening gale was soon to turn

To the full stature of a storm

That would within an hour transform

The ranges for a thousand miles,

Close up all human thoroughfares,

Sweep down through canyons and defiles,

And drive the cougars to their lairs.

A lantern flashed out a command,

A bell was ringing as a hand

Clutched at a throttle, and the bull,

At once obedient to the pull,

Began with bellowing throat to lead

By slow accelerating speed

Six thousand tons of caravan

Out to the spaces—there to toss

The blizzard from his path across

The prairies of Saskatchewan.

The doctors claimed they never had

A case to handle quite so bad—

A record weight, abnormal girth,

And such disturbance at a birth.

The infant murdered his twin brother

And shortly after that his mother,

To celebrate his debut on the earth.

Defying pedagogic rules,

He made a Bedlam of his schools,

And wrecked them from the floor to rafter,

As one by one, with insane laughter,

Harrowed in soul and gaunt in feature,

His nurse, his father, and his teacher

Wasted, and passed into the great Hereafter.

Then came the War! and soon his name

Was but a synonym for fame;

The allied armies and their foes

Alike were stricken by his blows.

And, peace declared, he took the thanks

Of both; returned high in the ranks—

Lieutenant-Colonel with two D.S.O.s.

He married and his three young wives

In quick succession lost their lives—

A Gaul, a Teuton, and a Briton.

Just how those marital blooms were smitten,

The colonel never would confess:

They say the tale, now with the Press,

Remains by order of the Court unwritten.

Thence to a fortress—whereupon

He rounded up the garrison,

Heading that great historic riot

Concerning roaches in the diet.

A witness swore a brigadier

Gave him the bayonet from the rear

Which laid the brawler flat and strangely quiet.

For one whole day an undertaker

Worked hard upon this mischief-maker

To soften down the muscle twists,

Then called in two evangelists

Who managed somehow to erase

The indentations of his face

But failed to straighten out his knotted fists.

They buried him. That very night

With his left hook and lethal right

He put a dozen shades to rout.

The devil refereed the bout

And spread the rumour—so I’m told,

That Death failing to get him cold,

Had fouled him with a technical knock-out.

A light had gone out from his vanquished eyes;

His head was cupped within the hunch of his shoulders;

His feathers were dull and bedraggled; the tips

Of his wings sprawled down to the edge of his tail.

He was old, yet it was not his age

Which made him roost on the crags

Like a rain-drenched raven

On the branch of an oak in November.

Nor was it the night, for there was an hour

To go before sunset. An iron had entered

His soul which bereft him of pride and of realm,

Had struck him to-day; for up to noon

That crag had been his throne.

Space was his empire, bounded only

By forest and sky and the flowing horizons.

He had outfought, outlived all his rivals,

And the eagles that now were poised over glaciers

Or charting the coastal outlines of clouds

Were his by descent: they had been tumbled

Out of their rocky nests by his mate,

In the first trial of their fledgeling spins.

Only this morning the eyes of the monarch

Were held in arrest by a silver flash

Shining between two peaks of the ranges—

A sight which galvanized his back,

Bristled the feathers on his neck,

And shot little runnels of dust where his talons

Dug recesses in the granite.

Partridge? Heron? Falcon? Eagle?

Game or foe? He would reconnoitre.

Catapulting from the ledge.

He flew at first with rapid beat,

Level, direct: then with his grasp

Of spiral strategy in fight,

He climbed the orbit

With swift and easy undulations,

And reached position where he might

Survey the bird—for bird it was;

But such a bird as never flew

Between the heavens and the earth

Since pterodactyls, long before

The birth of condors, learned to kill

And drag their carrion up the Andes.

The eagle stared at the invader,

Marked the strange bat-like shadow moving

In leagues over the roofs of the world,

Across the passes and moraines,

Darkening the vitriol blue of the mountain lakes.

Was it a flying dragon? Head,

Body and wings, a tail fan-spread

And taut like his own before the strike;

And there in front two whirling eyes

That took unshuttered

The full blaze of the meridian.

The eagle never yet had known

A rival that he would not grapple,

But something in this fellow’s length

Of back, his plated glistening shoulders,

Had given him pause. And did that thunder

Somewhere in his throat not argue

Lightning in his claws? And then

The speed—was it not double his own?

But what disturbed him most, angered

And disgraced him was the unconcern

With which this supercilious bird

Cut through the aquiline dominion,

Snubbing the ancient suzerain

With extra-territorial insolence,

And disappeared.

So evening found him on the crags again,

This time with sloven shoulders

And nerveless claws.

Dusk had outridden the sunset by an hour

To haunt his unhorizoned eyes.

And soon his flock flushed with the chase

Would be returning, threading their glorious curves

Up through the crimson archipelagoes

Only to find him there—

Deaf to the mighty symphony of wings,

And brooding

Over the lost empire of the peaks.

Her high freeboard towering above the pier,

She lay beneath the lift of spars and blocks:

Her port life month by month and year by year

Knew nothing but the humdrum of the docks;—

The rumble of trucks along the warehouse floors,

The blare of sirens, shout of stevedores,

The play of tackle under the gruff mood

Of winches, clatter of hooks and booms, subdued

To the credit balance that must never fail

The ledgers of Hoboken Lines—so she,

Built for the tides of commerce on the sea,

Was under schedule in an hour to sail.

In the Commissioner’s room it was agreed

Between the Master and the mariners,

That as the men received per month or run

Their wage in dollars and were guaranteed

By statutes of the State that they might draw

Their scale of rations—bread and meat and water,

Lemon and lime and such prescribed by law,

With means of warmth in weather; they, the crew,

Should pledge themselves to conduct, faithful, true,

And orderly, in honest, sober manner;

At all times in their duties diligent;

To the Master’s lawful word obedient,

In everything relating to the vessel—

Safety of passengers, cargo and store,

Whether on board, in boats, or on the shore.

And with the reading thus concluded, both

The parties to the contract gave their oath

Of signature. Items of birthplace, age,

Height and description then were written in,

Each sailor’s time of service with his wage-

Allotment, and address of Next-of-Kin.

So, with their sea-bags on their backs, the crew

Went up the gangway to the foc’s’le; threw

Their dunnage on the bunks; soon to be lined,

Two hundred of them, on the deck; assigned

Stations and duties, as the bos’n drew

The likeliest man, his mate the next; and then,

Alternately the Watches claimed the men,

In that renowned and tacit lottery

Full of the hoary savour of the sea.

The mooring cables splashing from the bollards,

Three stern and bow tugs moved her to the stream,

And slowly swung her head round with the ebb-tide;

Were cast off; when the liner on her steam

Proceeded down the channels of the Hudson,

Into the outer harbour, to the sea,

And on past Sandy Hook where finally

She set her course which led her to the Great

Circle Track for Queenstown, Plymouth, Cherbourg

(Service of passenger and mail), thence straight

To Bremen with the body of her freight.

Thursday morning rose without a sun,

Sleet in the air: the wind was westerly:

The river breeze of Wednesday had begun

To stiffen to a whole gale on the sea.

By noon the stations at the coast were flashing

Warnings, making smaller ships delay

Their date of sailing. Vessels under canvas,

Attempting shorter trips in gulf or bay,

Crawled back to harbour double-reefed, while others,

Still further to the east, that could not make

Return,—sails blown to ribbons from the gaskets—

Were forced to scud under bare poles to take

The luck ahead. Long threat lay in the signals.

The charts traced not a cyclone’s come-and-go,—

The fury soon begun and as soon ended—

But those broad areas on which storms grow,

Northern and Oceanic, where each hour,

Feeding on the one before, transmits

In turn its own inheritance of power

Unto the next until the hammer hits

A hemisphere.

              Along the eastern sea-board,

And inland to one-half the continent,

Thousands of dials in studio and station

Were “off the air” by an ungrudged consent—

That the six-hundred-metre-wave might keep

Upon the sea that night its high command

For the great business that was nigh at hand,

With deep already calling unto deep.

Friday evening, with Cape Race reporting

Big seas with thickening fog followed by snow,

Barometer still falling, very low.

Morning of Saturday! the gale now rising

To the dimensions of a hurricane,

With gusts that boxed the compass of a vane,

Sweeping around the headlands to contest

The arrogated highway from the West.

Evening again, and in its power to smite

The snowy cordon with its warning light,

The Cape’s revolving beacon was as sick

As the guttering limit of a candle-wick.

And never—it was claimed—had tides so climbed

A slope of shoal from such a depth to feed

The tumult of the upper waves; so timed

Direction with their volume and their speed,

To meet both wave and wind that all might lock

In foam above so high a line of rock.

South of this Cape within these hours, the Roosevelt

Was driving East by North, with her decks stripped;

Her lower ventilator cowls unshipped,

The shafts plugged; battened and wedged the hatches;

Bell-mouths full-bore discharging from the bilge-pumps

Under the straining hull; thirty degrees

Measuring her roll within the heavier seas.

The facing of the ’midship house was spattered

At seventy feet. Captain and quarter-master

Saw nothing legible upon the face

Of day or night: the sextant in its case,

The navigators guessed the ship’s position.

Abaft—the smoke came out, to be driven back

In eddies low and fierce against the white

Salt crust upon the surface of the stack,

Then, split in billows to the left and right,

Dispersed before it found a line of flight.

The double lines of life-boats lay like rows

Of mastodons asleep in polar snows.

Ahead—appeared under the steamer’s light

Truncated day between two walls of night.

Sometimes the for’ard derrick-posts were blotted

Out; the hooded shapes of winches squatted

Upon the deck; and with each long roll, patches

Of white laggin’ from the steampipes swirled

And blended with the foam around the hatches.

The sea itself was gone save when it hurled

The body of a wave across the bow;

Soon even this was lost to the bridge, and now

Behind the weather-cloth it seemed the world

Was carried with the last gust to the void.

Fried stepped inside the Pilot House to get

Another reading from the aneroid.

An hour ago the adjusting hand was set

At twenty-nine—the low foul weather mark,

And the indicator for that hour had stood

Directly underneath as though it were glued

To the card. He came nearer, full of dark

Conjecture, tapped the glass, and the hand fell,

The barest fraction but perceptible.

Entering by slow, inexorable rate,

The tragic ranges of the twenty-eight.

Later he returned; the oracle

Yielded this time a record to appal

The heart. Muttering “twenty-eight (point) three,”

He shot a glance to the right where on the wall

He found, in confirmation, the line drawn

To the same level on the mercury.

’Twas four o’clock on a North Atlantic sea,

Three hours before a January dawn.

The wind having slipped the gale’s leash was soon

To match the wing-shod speed of a typhoon:

The storm of nineteen twenty-six was on.

Somewhere far-off in that unwavering gloom,

Cramped in the quarters of a wireless room,

A boy was seated, tapping at a key.

Water ran along the floor: his knee

Was braced against a table to resist

The dangerous angle of a starboard list.

Upon his right a wireless log-chart lay

With many entries for so young a day.

He reached and pushed a button and the drone

Of a generator started. A switch thrown,

He rapped the key, then instantly transferred

To the receiving set; listened with keen

Thrust of his face; and with no answer heard,

Changed over, going through the same routine.

But once when on the panel a blue flame,

Crackling like tearing linen at the gap,

Responded to a more than hectic tap

Of the finger, dumb and drowsy symbols came

To life. Through aerials screaming like curlews,

Magnetic messengers carried the name

Of a disabled vessel with the news

Of water in the stokehold and a crew’s

Vigil upon a flooded deck. Legions

Unnumbered moving at the rate of light,

Pushed out beyond all navigated regions,

Exploring every cranny of the night,

Reaching out through dusky corridors

Above the sea to uninhabited shores,

Or taking undecoded human cries

Below the keel to the Atlantic crypts.

And millions undulated to the skies,

Through snow and vapour and the cloud eclipse,

Past day and night and the terrestrial air,

To add their wasted sum to a plethora

Of speed and power in those void spaces where

Light-years go drifting by Andromeda.

And yet in all that sterile plenitude

A few were harnessed to a human mood.

The cabin of the Roosevelt radio!

Three dots, three dashes, and the dots again—

(The call sign) British freighter, Antinoe.

Don’t know position. Sixteen hours ago,

Rough latitude—North forty-six and ten,

Rough longitude—thirty-nine, five-eight.

Been hove-to ever since; the present rate

Of drift to East, two knots (approximate).

Fried took the message, reading nothing more

Than that a ship was sending out a call

For help, and that since noon the day before

She had not known her bearings. This was all

The cryptogram surrendered for a clue.

A fresh despatch was brought two minutes later,

The Aquitania calling—“Which of two

Should undertake location of the freighter?”

Their own positions given, ’twas agreed—

Cunarder farther off by hours, pressed

To the muzzle of the storm and moving West,—

The job might therefore be assigned to Fried.

Orders were given to the wireless chief

To bring the direction-finder into play,

Capture the signals and report at brief

Periods—and the ship was on her way.

Taking his station at the binnacle,

The head-phones on, he listened while he swung

The handwheel slowly to the right until

The loop above the Pilot House that hung

The wires came broadside to the signal cry.

The sounds grew fainter, faded out, came back

With further revolution but to die

Again with the reversal of the track.

Underneath, the hair-line on the face

Of the dummy compass card had kept its pace

With every move, faithful to every trial,

And like a dogma that might take denial

From neither sense nor reason, pointed There,

At a figure stamped in black upon the dial:

For when it moved to either side with the wheel,

It came back ever with the aerial square

To the source of the signal like a steadying keel

Demanding its position. How far? Where,

Along this line, now tossing like a chip

Upon those crests and hollows, lay the ship,

It could not tell—one hundred miles or two

It might have been for all the seamen knew.

Back in the wireless room the call came in

With the staccato of a bulletin;

Triads of notes spare and reiterant,

A whistle shot with burr and sibilant—

The international prelude which the sea

Beats out in storm from human veins to express

The fever pulses of its own distress.

Whether it was the sharp economy

Of pauses in the breaks, or some known trick

Of the ear to catch the timbre of a click,

A pressure or a crotchet in the tapping,

The operator felt someone was rapping

A message out with white intensity,

In life-death finger action on a key,

Within the cabin of the Antinoe.

Tarpaulins ripped. Another hatch let go.

Bad list. Grain swelling fast. Seams loosening now.

All life-boats gone from starboard davits. How

Many knots are you making? How far away

Do you reckon you are?

                        Ten knots: now eight:

Now ten—top speed allowed by sea.

                                      You say

That we sound nearer to you? Cannot wait

Much longer.

                    Twelve.

                            Find it hard to steer,

Ice-chest has crashed into the steering gear.

Coming.

        Six o’clock. Now seven. The dots

Of the freighter answered by the liner’s knots,

Followed by danger when the sea would turn

And test the rivets from the stem to stern

With longitudinal blows, hurling cascades

Upon the bow, till with a burial wave

The engines instantly would stop to save

The tail-shaft from the racing of the blades.

A longer silence; and a deep suspicion.

Destruction of the ship? or loss of power?

Blindness was coming with the light of morning,

Ten minutes, twenty, now a half-an-hour.

Where are you, Antinoe?—The keys kept rapping,

But the receiving phones were dumb to space,

And in the Pilot House there came no signal,

The hand lay palsied on the compass face.

The operator meantime on the wreck

Had left his room and crossed a slushing deck,

Reporting to his captain. When he tried

Return, a wave upon the weather side

Reached and caught the last port life-boat; smashed

It from the davits down the incline; crashed

The forward wall of the wireless cabin; sheared

It clean. Matching death with strategy,

The sailors took their chance with each spent sea;

The fragments were removed; the way was cleared;

The set put in emergency repairs

And human speech again was on the air.

Eleven o’clock. Fried knowing that he neared

The ship’s position by the growing power

Of the signals slowed the Roosevelt down to scour

The closer plotted area, fighting squall

On top of storm, boring through a pall

Of snow, till at the heart of the wave-zone,

With Jack reversed, the freighter like a lone

Sea-mallard with a broken wing was seen

Ahead, lee-rail awash, taking it green

At the bow.

               Do you wish to abandon?

                                  Not just yet;

Endeavouring to fix steering gear, and get

Hatches secured. Water in stokehold. Grain

Cargo shifted. Trying to maintain

Sufficient steam to heave-to and survive

Till weather moderate. Crew twenty-five.

Can you spread oil to windward? Please stand-by.

But hard as the three engineers might try,

The leaks outraced the pumps. The daylight grew

To dusk, the hatches opened and the crew

Signalled for rescue. Fried, a quarter mile

To windward, poured his fuel oil on the sea.

Giving, that distance, what the Roosevelt lee

Afforded, edging in and backing while

He waited for a sign of the wind’s subsiding,

Watching the scud of the waves, the darkening sky,

The drifting snow and the freighter heavily riding.

Then suddenly at nine as the squall increased,

With a smother of black hail the Roosevelt’s light

Could not pierce through, the bridge look-out lost sight

Of the Antinoe and the wireless contact ceased.

Dead Slow! The Roosevelt took a risk as great

As if the air shook with the roar of reefs.

The wireless and the navigating chiefs

Fried summoned to the flying bridge to debate

The course. What with the hammer of the sea

To windward, and that anvil on the lee,

Judgment and will were warped by doubt. Suspend

Pursuit? Keep steerage-way and just hold on?

For at this hour with sight and hearing gone,

All felt within their blood they could depend

On nothing but an elemental trust

In bulkheads; in the physics of a dark

Equation, where with each remorseless thrust

Down to the starboard limits of the arc,

The ship should take under unheard commands

The port recoil, a pivoted keel, and then,

At the crux of the port roll find again

The firm up-heave of Atlantean hands.

On such a faith, borne in by night and snow,

Rested the riddle of the Antinoe.

Was she beyond that scurrying barricade,

To come back on a wave-lift, as a score

Of doubtful moments she had done before

When gusts had passed? Or had the Roosevelt strayed

Beyond the vernier of her calculation,

Caught suddenly by a winter vertigo,

After reaching the Antinoe’s location

By a straight miracle of navigation?

But why no message? Flooded dynamo?

Followed by exhausted batteries?

The wireless room demolished by the seas?

Or aerials blown off like a wind-swept kite

From a wallowing ship beam-to and rudderless?

Or had she foundered? This the likelier guess.

The ship with unremitting search despite

The chances stacked against her, steamed on far

Into the night, past midnight and the slow

Hours, blindly heading into snow;

Not a sextant reading off a star;

No radio now with subtle fingering

Untied the snarl of the freighter’s wayward course.

Nothing but log and the dead reckoning,

And the Roosevelt’s instruments stating the force

Of wind, direction and the tidal stress,

Nothing but these and the wheel’s luck to trail her,—

Unless there might be added to the sum

Of them an unexplored residuum—

The bone-and-marrow judgment of a sailor.

But all this time signals were streaming through

The ship’s antennae; Solvang in collision,

Bulkheads crushed, and sinking; the Curlew

A-leak, and under jury-rig, Carlstad

Searching; Carlotta helping Orebro;

The Bremen hastening to the Laristan,

Engine trouble, serious, twenty-two

Aboard. No record of the Antinoe.

Each hour the searchlight moving on its swivel,

Traced but a wide circumference of yeast,

Bounding the clash of forces on the ocean,

With endless lorries heading for the east.

At times the sea would snow the Roosevelt under,

As shearing a wave, her bow came to the luff,

Or as she turned with sharp careening angle

To avoid a shadow, putting beam to trough.

The scent was cold by now. Few words were spoken

Between the officer-on-watch and captain;

The Antinoe was sunk by every token

And every law known to the wind and weather.

“With such a list, no shift or pumps could right her.”

“A dollar flashlight! All she’s got to signal.”

“If she’s afloat, ’twould take a hawk to sight her.”

“A flash upon the weather quarter?”

                                        “No.

Her power gone, that handlight wouldn’t show

A hundred yards.”

                        “A dog’s chance for a boat

To get across . . . assuming she’s afloat.”

“What do you reckon her drift?”

                              “Port easy! Hold her!

Let her take that one on her starboard shoulder.”

Feeling her shifted courses over-run,

And yet uncertain whether she should tack

Upon a chosen port or starboard track,

The baffled liner like a water-dog

Would dip her nose to the sea and then up-rear

Her head with black hawse nostrils keen to flair

A flying quarry covered by a fog.

Dawn and noon and now the afternoon.

“We picked her up”—so ran the captain’s log—

“One point upon the starboard bow at four

O’clock, with nineteen hours of delay,

And sixty miles from her last known position.”

Her navigating bridge was swept away;

Flooded, steam off, lights out, a closing day,—

The time again awaited Fried’s decision.

To pour fuel upon the sea to assuage

Its fury; make a high-decked vessel ride

Steady; maintain sufficient weather gage,

Four hundred tons of pressure at the side,

To avoid the crisis when a wave should toss

Her like a dinghy on the smaller ship,

Beam against beam, or stem to rail, to rip

The plates like cardboard to a double loss;

And yet mindful of this first charge, to crawl

Within a narrow margin to the hulk,

To take advantage of the liner’s bulk,

As windbreak for a life-boat, and forestall

The second disappearance in a squall

Of the Antinoe;—in fine, to run a race

For a crew’s life with the storm laps in advance;

To outstare Death to his salt countenance,

Made up the grim agenda on his face.

Fried took a turn upon the weather deck,

Saw little of assurance in the sky,

Came back to the lee-wing, gauging with his eye

The span his boat must cover to the wreck;

Made up his mind alone on the degree

Of risk; issued a call; in such a sea

And cause the order needed no command,

Only the heart’s assent unto the hand.

The men answering the summons with a will,

Came aft; were picked for hardihood and skill.

Their names as on the shipping register:—

Robert Miller, the first officer,

Commanding; Ernest Heitman, bos’n’s mate,

No relative; Uno Wertanen,

Master-at-arms, aged twenty-eight, a Finn,

His mother (Helsingfors), the next of kin;

Sam Fisher; Franelich, an Austrian;

Bauer, a naturalized American;

Maurice Jacobowitz of New York State;

And a Dane named Alexander Fugelsang—

Made up the life-boat complement of eight.

A dozen orders from the bos’n rang—

“Stand by and clear the falls for running; man

The cranks; let go the gripes.” Winch ropes began

To move, winding through the leading blocks;

Slowly the boat was lifted from the chocks.

The crew holding suspended lines that ran

Along the spring-stay, freeboards from the stern

To bow were jacked to gunwales; at a turn

Of the quadrant screw both boat and davit swung

Outboard. The oars and boat-hooks kept her free.

With painters taut at fore and aft, she hung

For her sixty feet of journey to the sea.

Below, like creatures of a fabled past,

From their deep hidings in unlighted caves,

The long processions of great-bellied waves

Cast forth their monstrous births which with grey fang

Appeared upon the leeward side, ran fast

Along the broken crests, then coiled and sprang

For the boat impatient of its slow descent

Into their own inviolate element.

A shout or instant gesture of the hand

Was answered by the double roar of winches.

The ropes ran through the iron cleats by inches,

Straining, checking, running on demand

Of the fore-and-after levels. “Lower away!”

A steady longer roar, then a moment clear.

Of the side. “Avast! Let go releasing gear!”

The blocks shot from the slip-links evenly,

And number one had settled on the sea.

Here was a trial far beyond her training;

Her tests had been accorded her in weather,

And in blue water where there was no danger,—

Where, governed by the stroke, all pull together,

And every rhythmic blade falls to the feather

Against the breeze. Now like a colt untried,

She bucked control and though she carried well

The lop of the shorter waves, she plunged and shied

The moment that she reached the top of a swell,

And went down sidling to the trough and flung

The crew in the water. Under discipline

Of many a drill, they struggled back and clung

To the running loops and cork-grips, clambered in,

And started for the wreck; but with recall

From the bridge, they brought her to the wind and tried

Over a wave-barrel to reach the side

Of the ship when, twenty feet away, a squall

Combined with tide-rip caught the boat and threw

The men back to the waves. Six of the crew

Clutching ladders and lines which might afford

A toe or finger hold were drawn aboard.

Heitman, crushed between the ship and boat,

Slipped from a life-buoy and was seen to float

Senseless away, down by the liner’s stern,

Where he was lost under the wave and churn

Of the propeller. Wertanen, who twice

And willingly released his own firm grip

To take within his teeth a rope eye-splice,

Swam fifteen yards to leeward of the ship

To help an exhausted mate, and paid his price

In drifting past the adventure of return.

By help of current and by desperate swim,

A wave pitched him against the life-boat stern.

He clutched the running-line and then the rim

Of the gunwale; tried to get his weight athwart,

But oil had greased his hands and he fell short.

The crew could see him grab and plunge and cling,

Using his legs as rudders so to swing

Her head around to the wreck and with the sheer

Abandon of his youth to try to steer

His open, wilful, single-handed craft

So close to the side that wind might bear it aft,

And round the freighter’s stern to where he knew

Life-belts and lines were waiting, with the crew

Gathered at the lee taffrail. Jockeying the boat

Within three fathoms length he tried to grip

A belt, but oil had made his fingers slip,

And oil was in his eyes and in his throat,

And the last thing sighted from the liner’s deck,

Near to the close of an hour’s futile searching,

Were tossing oars and a frenzied life-boat lurching

From wave to wave, a gunshot from the wreck,

And here and there as far as might be scanned

Within the spindrift, a tide-revolving speck—

A belt perhaps or human head or hand.

From every quarter came the night confounding

The unhorizoned sea with sky and air,

And to the crew of the Antinoe—despair.

At ten o’clock the Roosevelt bugle sounding

From the saloon stairway a call to prayer!

With separated phrase and smothered word

An immemorial psalm became a blurred

Bulwark under erosion by the sea.

Beneath the maddening crashes of the wind

Crumbled the grammar of the liturgy.

God of all comfort . . . .

                            humbly beseeching thee . . .

We do acknowledge . . . . . . . . sinned . . .

Most merciful . . . confess . . . grievously . . .

Who spreadest out the heavens, crownest the years.

. . . . . Grant us we pray thee . . . . .

Who commandest the seas and they do obey thee.

Nigh unto all . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . our distresses and fears.

. . . . . . . A father to the fatherless.

Followed the fragments of great passages:

I am the Resurrection . . . . . . . . We

. . . . commit . . . . bodies to the deep . . .

Corruptible . . . . . . . Of those who sleep . . .

. . . . . . . shall put on immortality.

And then brief tributes to the seamen drowned,

While Miller and his men were ranged around,

Bandaged in head and wrist, with arms in sling,

And others who had come, despite the warning,

To take their places were envisaging

The job that lay before them in the morning.

Meanwhile outside, echoing the ritual—

Now unto Him who is able to do . . . .

Exceeding abundantly . . . a wild antiphonal

Of shriek and whistle from the shrouds broke through,

Blending with thuds as though some throat had laughed

In thunder down the ventilating shaft;

And the benediction ended with the crack

Of a stanchion on the starboard beam, the beat

Of a loose block, with the fast run of feet,

Where a flying guy careered about the stack;

Then following the omen of a lull,

The advent of a wave which like a wall

Crashed down in volleys flush against the hull,

Lifting its white and shafted spume to fall

Across the higher decks; and through it all,

As on the dial of the telegraph,

Governed by derelict and hurricane,

Rang Stop, Full Speed Astern or Slow or Half,

The irregular pulse and cough of the engine strain,

The quick smite of the blades against a wave,

And always threat, escape, threat, then the brave

Lift of the keel, and still that breathless sink,

Dividing up the seconds, nearing the brink

Of a grey, unplumbed precipice and grave.

Within this hour a priest clothed with the whole

Habiliment and dignity of office—

Black cassock, surplice white and purple stole—

Feeling that from an older faith would come

The virtue of a rubric yet unspoken

For the transition of a soul, a crumb

Of favour from a cupboard not bereft

Of all by the night’s intercessions, left

His room; climbed up the stairs; pushed through a door

Storm-wedged, and balancing along the floor

Of the deck to where a davit stood, he placed

His grip securely on a guy rope there.

Lifting up a crucifix, he faced

The starboard quarter, looking down the waste

Of the waters casting back the flickering light

Of the steamer, where two bodies without wrap

Of shroud, deprived of their deck funeral rite,

Swung to the rune of the sea’s stern foster-lap.

Ego vos absolvo . . . . . . ab omnibus

Peccatis et censuris . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . in nomine

Patris et Filii et Spiritus . . . . .

Sancti . . . . . . . . . . . . Attende Domine

. . . . . . . . . . et miserere

Hear . . . O stella maris . . . Mary.

But no Gennesaret of Galilee

Conjured to its level by the sway

Of a hand or a word’s magic was this sea,

Contesting with its iron-alien mood,

Its pagan face, its own primordial way,

The pale heroic suasion of a rood.

And the absolving Father, when the ship

Righted her keel between two giant rolls,

Recrossed himself, and letting go his hold,

Returned to berth, murmuring God rest their souls.

And now throughout the middle of the night,

The Roosevelt took the hurricane, hove-to.

Into her own defence the captain knew

Must enter all the sinews of her fight—

Her searchlight ripping fissures as through dark

Parchment where at times the freighter, set

In a frame of tossing silver, showed the stark

And streaming edges of her silhouette,

Battered but yet miraculously afloat,

Heaving, subsiding with her lathered flank,

Like a bison smitten from the loin to shank,

Surrendering to the wolves about her throat.

And every hour in the wireless room,

The shards of cries as by an incantation,

Were joined to an Atlantic orchestration;

Epic and drama rising to illume

Disaster—now the call and now reply;

The Bremen radio—“still standing by

The Laristan. Six rescued. Will resume

At daylight.”

                  “Solvang lost. All saved but two.”

“Sparta reported foundering. Left no clue.”

Daylight and wreckage. Bremen calling still—

“The Laristan gone down with rest of crew.”

With every tap of key, the Roosevelt knew

How little would the game depend on skill

Of hand or resolution of the will,

How much would all the morrow’s gain and loss

Turn on the unknown chances of a toss.

At four o’clock the Roosevelt moved to windward,

And drew again upon her fuel tanks;

Only the whitened edges left the combers,

Like a growth of harvest stubble from the banks

Of rolling prairies that a fire had gleaned.

Still black and dangerous stretches intervened.

At six o’clock the flag at the mast-head

Was lowered half-high in token of her dead,

And the Red Ensign on the freighter went

To the same place in mute acknowledgement.

Then back to their full height the flags were run,

To snap out like the folds of a toreador:

With so much on the boards still to be done,

’Twas fitting that they should, in that same breath

With which the storm took the salute, restore

The colours to their stations, baiting death.

At noon the starboard list began to assume

The final margin for the Antinoe,

The signal flags reporting that below

The sea was filling up the engine room.

The next attempt was with the Lyle gun.

Fried edged his vessel nearer to the wreck,

Trying for the safest, shortest run

To get a line across the after-deck.

But once again an adverse hand conspired

Against the chance, checkmated the design,

For at the muzzle as the gun was fired,

The steel projectile snapped the messenger line.

The second did the same, the third, and so

The fourth; the six succeeding carriers trailed

Their lines midway; the last, the eleventh failed;

Only the iron passed the Antinoe.

The store of rockets next—but what availed

Their slender shafts and powder charges scaled

Against the weight of vapour, wind and snow?

An empty cask was lowered with the hope

The wind might carry it to the ship’s side.

It sank beneath its sagging weight of rope.

Another stroke of rescue was devised.

A life-boat was trailed off without a crew;

It climbed, zigzagged and floundered, plunging through,

But pitched against the freighter and capsized.

Fried tried again, placing his ship to looard

Less than a hundred yards. The next boat moored

By a line rove through the high block of the kingpost

On the quarter-deck, was towed close to the stern

Of the Antinoe, but with the luff of the Roosevelt

To the weather side, the rope sagged at the turn;

Went underneath and fouled, and number three

Started to drift beyond recovery.

Another night, the third, confronted Fried,

When the last remnant of the sky was blown

Out, with the ocean like a pampas stirred

To the confusion of a great stampede—

Riot of lariat and hoof, of spurred

Horses, and the Antinoe a thrown

Spent rider overtaken by the herd.

Wednesday morning! and the twenty-five

Huddled on the aft deck—still alive.

One hundred hours had passed since the men had known

The wool-warmth of a bunk, or stood the cold

With nourished veins; and sleep had taken hold

Of tired bodies salt-drugged to the bone.

And in that hundred hours eternity

Had ticked its lazy seconds on the sea,

Timing the wind and surge and the defeat

Of day by night; of night by day; the slow

Unreasoned alternation of the sleet

With hurrying phantoms of the hail and snow,

The same rotation on the deck—the grey

Sterility of hope with each life-boat gone,

Dusk followed by the night, and every dawn

A slattern offering dust instead of day.

During the night the fact was plain the gun

Would by such lavish firing soon outrun

The standard stock of carriers and consume

The packing cord; so in the engine room

A humming lathe was making up arrears,

In cutting blocks of steel; in fashioning

Projectiles and their rods; and engineers,

Following a passenger’s design,

Were busy in construction of a spring,

A spiral coil to graduate the strain

Of the steel rod upon the carrying line

At the initial instant of the shots.

And knowing how the day ahead would drain

Resources, men began to overhaul

The cordage, making loops for arms and knots

For hand-grips, culling big stuff from the small

For nets and heaving-lines and ladders,—all

Which might be spared out of the essential store,

From cargo-slings to the stout rope from the fall

Of a wrecked life-boat davit. Others toiled

For hours, whaler-fashion, over the four

Containing tubs, undid the twists, and coiled

The messenger line many thousand feet,

From vertical core to the end-loop with neat

Precision. So when morning came it seemed

Defaulted effort now might be redeemed,

For though the seventh shot burst free and sped

Away beyond the wreck, it carried true,

Trailing sufficient line to lay it dead

On the poop deck in centre of the crew.

A heavier rope made fast was pulled aboard,

And when the Roosevelt’s boat was safely lowered,

Another paying off through fair-leads gave

What help it could to the wavering bow control.

The boat without a load mounted each wave,

Righting herself from every plunge and roll,

Covered the stretch of water like a gull,

Until within five fathoms of the hull,

She turned broadside in an attempt to scale

A sea, the bow line chafed against the rail

And snapped, the stern line gave, and number four

Followed her sisters of the day before.

And so the latter half of the fourth day

Came with the ocean well astride its prey:

The storm in front like a shifty pugilist,

Watching for some slight turn of luck to slay

The rescuer with an iron-knuckled fist.

’Twas useless for the Roosevelt to await

The issue of the struggle by debate.

For nothing in those skies favoured a sign

That by manoeuvre could the fight be won—

By floating cask or breeches-buoy or line,

Mere parleying with rockets and a gun.

The hour had called for argument more rife

With the gambler’s sacrificial bids for life,

The final manner native to the breed

Of men forging decision into deed—

Of getting down again into the sea,

And testing rowlocks in an open boat,

Of grappling with the storm-king bodily,

And placing Northern fingers on his throat.

The call again, and number five was ready.

The men were chosen and the davits swung;

The boat moved outward easily and hung

Level and snug to leeward but unsteady

In the capricious pockets of the squall.

Another order and the falls began

To move—eight men inside her; Alfred Wall,

Araneda, Diaz, Albertz, Hahn,

Upton, Roberts, Miller in command.

The gunwale fended off with oar and hand

At every lurch, she managed luckily

To clear the steamer’s side, covering the steep

Descent, and then undamaged took the sea.

Three oars aside and with a steering sweep,

The boat pulled out from the immediate lee

Into the eddies where the waters met

From stern and bow,—where the last ounces put

On the oars, even with the wind abaft, could yet

Advance them only by the inch and foot.

They followed down the beam-path of the searchlight,

The Roosevelt all the while manoeuvring,

Now drawing in, now clawing off, and now

Dead close, beam to the wind, just shadowing

The brute drive of the freighter, to allow

The boat with heavy lateral drift to steer

With wider berth into the wind and clear

The danger of the surge around the bow.

A swamping moment caught her, but each blade

Flexed to the curve of snapping, Miller made

The turn and came down sharp broadside to gain

A point amidships that he might obtain

Such shelter as this windbreak could afford.

But the wells were under water and the lee

Was like the surf of breakers, for the sea,

Contemptuous of this man-made sunken mole,

Threatened each time to hurl the boat aboard,

And reach the funnel with resurgent roll.

Escaping this disaster, Miller drew

His boat back in the sea, and tried to creep

Forward to higher freeboard where the crew

Near the First Hatch might have the shortest leap.

Backwatering and staving off the hull,

And crawling in again with a slight lull

Of the wind, or with recession of the surge,

He took three men who on the perishing verge

Of sleep fell from the rail to the thwarts and slumped

To the floor-boards. Out and back once more

With slow manoeuvring, and another four

Secure. Others of tougher sinew jumped

To the stern sheets from the rail. The task was done

With sudden moves and checks like a strange play

Which starts, is forced to stop, and then begun

Afresh on unknown ground but under sway

Of old Olympian rules. So one by one

The lives were scored, and those who missed their aim,

And fell into the sea, were grabbed and pulled

Over the gunwale; counted with the same

Slow chalking up as of advances bulled

Out of the fiery scrimmage of a game.

Miller tried to close again but failed.

With water shipped as fast as it was bailed,

Seams leaking, twelve half-dead men barely stowed,

And with his crew of eight he did not dare

To give his boat a more unstable load;

So pushed away and with the wind and tide

In favour, forced her water-logged to where

The Roosevelt, now round to leeward, showed

A maze of lines and ladders on her side.

The first instalment of the crew too numb

To lay their hands on heaving-lines were placed

Within the cargo-nets and drawn up plumb;

The others taking ropes, with their feet braced

Against the hull went up with the sheer lift

Of their mates, till all were safe aboard, and now

The life-boat number five with damaged bow

And broken hoisting hooks was cast adrift.

The pitch of the storm, late night and still the snow,

Two hundred yards between of yawning space,

And thirteen sailors on the Antinoe.

Three nights upon the bridge behind the shield

Of the canvas dodger, his accustomed place,

Fried doubtful, peering with his blizzard face.

Now one o’clock, and a slight rift revealed

A spatter of light above the running seas—

The freighter’s lantern jabbing out in Morse

That the ship’s list had reached fifty degrees.

The last hour was on with no recourse

Except another summons to the crew.

Miller commanding for the third time drew

From the line-up of forty volunteers

Of every rank—deck-hand to passenger,

His four uninjured veterans and five new

Hands: Thomas Sloan, the third officer;

Reidel; Wilke; Deck Yeoman Wilson Beers;

And Caldwell, messman to the engineers.

The sixth life-boat was ready on the lee.

The others stood a moment in review;

Three hundred passengers, two hundred crew;

The cut was getting near the artery.

The men, lowered without mishap, once more

Brought round the boat to the lee bow of the freighter,

And ranged her off the First Hatch as before.

The risk this time for boat and ship was greater;

The growing list could take no steeper verge,

And all the boatmanship could not avail

At first against the backwash of the surge;

For there was peril in the sunken rail,

When at uncertain moments the ship tried

For balance, lifting up a wounded side

To ease a wave that struck amidships, cleaving

Her port; and peril in those hours of doubt

For strengthless men that watched their comrades leaving,

And long the galley fires had been out.

Fried shortened up his weather gage to try

To give a double shelter to the life-boat:

The message later read—“Had to rely

Upon the final power of my engines,

For had a revolution failed,—’twas either

Roosevelt or Antinoe with odds on neither.”

The revolution did not fail, and Miller

Secured his men, and though with cracked air-tank,

And all the spare oars rent in hull-collision,

The boat came down the wind to the lee flank

Of the liner where the remnant with their clothes

Sodden and shrunk were, like drowsed children, gathered

To the cargo hammocks, twelve of them, then Tose,

The captain, who had worn his buttons well.

His bread had now returned upon the waters,

For ten years back, as later stories tell,

He had while master of another vessel,

Rescued a Philadelphian bark in seas

And winds only less full of death than these.

Now open throttles! Now my lads, YOHO!

The twenty-five, by Neptune, every one!

Captain to deck-hand, every mother’s son

Aboard! GOOD-BYE, GOOD-BYE, The ANTINOE!

The sea had closed on forward deck and bow;

Let flag and mast and funnel settle now.

Frost-bitten, thinned in blood, gnarled to the bone,

But everyone surviving. All were brought

Below where ocean miracles are wrought,

Where the hearts’ furnaces are stoked and blown,

Where men are shepherded in the old way

Of the sea, where drowned men come to life, they say.

Under such calls to breathe as never come

To those that roam the uplands of this earth:—

The hearty comradeship of a foc’s’le berth,

With treble-folded blankets on their numb

Bodies, with balsam thawing out the brain,

Hot milk and coffee piping down their dumb

Constricted throats and mustard scattering pain,—

When cold half-foundered bellies steam again

Under the red authority of rum.

The siren! Never did a whistle blow

Upon a ship at sea like this before.

The notes came from a silver throat aglow

With life and triumph. Steady blast to roar

Rising to pitch and volume that would crow

The daybreak in. A shorter blast,

A mimic of halloo, followed by fast

Merry little runs in tremolo,

And then again with open throat the long

Insistent call with pauses, trills and strong

Leaping crescendos.

                    Vital, sound and steady,

For the first hour in days was heard to start

The normal rhythm of the liner’s heart;

Her bearings bathed, her boilers breathed and ready

For the ports of England. The fifth morning found her

With high gales still and white seas all around her,

But clean in every valve and with the main

Play of her steam free on each turbine-vane.

Another day and the back of the storm was broken.

The snow and hail had ceased; the clouds rode high;

And though the wind remained, the glass gave token

Of fairer weather. Through a rift of sky

A level shaft, the first one for the week,

Quivered on an edge of cloud, then struck

A line of foam making for the grey peak

Of a kingpost, then to water-line from truck,

Till from the starboard taffrail up the span

Of the hull, it reached the lettering where it ran

In crimson coronation of her name,

As if a god might thus salute the deed,

And ratify the venture with the screed

Of an aurora milled in solar flame.

The Lizard Point, and now the Eddystone!

Meanwhile a nation which was never spared

The discipline of waters, had prepared

Her subjects’ hearts from foc’s’le to throne

With this Atlantic record to attest

The valour of the eagle from the west,

In bringing home her brood of castaways.

For there had come through radiogram and wire

As high romance as any since the days,

When Grecian sails and the triremes of Tyre

Hailed Carthaginian ships upon the bays

Of the Aegean. So she entered Plymouth,

With crusted funnel, twisted rails, scoured clean

By salt on every deck, and overdue;

Yet with the bearing of a Viking Queen,—

Prerogative of life within her hand.

She anchored in the roadstead, while the crew

Of the wrecked ship were taken to the land.

The nation gave its thanks on board; and she,

Soon ready for completion of her run,

Swung out the Sound, with her day’s work well done,

And in an hour was on the Channel sea.

Here the tides flow,

And here they ebb;

Not with that dull, unsinewed tread of waters

Held under bonds to move

Around unpeopled shores—

Moon-driven through a timeless circuit

Of invasion and retreat;

But with a lusty stroke of life

Pounding at stubborn gates,

That they might run

Within the sluices of men’s hearts,

Leap under throb of pulse and nerve,

And teach the sea’s strong voice

To learn the harmonies of new floods,

The peal of cataract,

And the soft wash of currents

Against resilient banks,

Or the broken rhythms from old chords

Along dark passages

That once were pathways of authentic fires.

Red is the sea-kelp on the beach,

Red as the heart’s blood,

Nor is there power in tide or sun

To bleach its stain.

It lies there piled thick

Above the gulch-line.

It is rooted in the joints of rocks,

It is tangled around a spar,

It covers a broken rudder,

It is red as the heart’s blood,

And salt as tears.

Here the winds blow,

And here they die,

Not with that wild, exotic rage

That vainly sweeps untrodden shores,

But with familiar breath

Holding a partnership with life,

Resonant with the hopes of spring,

Pungent with the airs of harvest.

They call with the silver fifes of the sea,

They breathe with the lungs of men,

They are one with the tides of the sea,

They are one with the tides of the heart,

They blow with the rising octaves of dawn,

They die with the largo of dusk,

Their hands are full to the overflow,

In their right is the bread of life,

In their left are the waters of death.

Scattered on boom

And rudder and weed

Are tangles of shells;

Some with backs of crusted bronze,

And faces of porcelain blue,

Some crushed by the beach stones

To chips of jade;

And some are spiral-cleft

Spreading their tracery on the sand

In the rich veining of an agate’s heart;

And others remain unscarred,

To babble of the passing of the winds.

Here the crags

Meet with winds and tides—

Not with that blind interchange

Of blow for blow

That spills the thunder of insentient seas;

But with the mind that reads assault

In crouch and leap and the quick stealth,

Stiffening the muscles of the waves.

Here they flank the harbours,

Keeping watch

On thresholds, altars and the fires of home,

Or, like mastiffs,

Over-zealous,

Guard too well.

Tide and wind and crag,

Sea-weed and sea-shell

And broken rudder—

And the story is told

Of human veins and pulses,

Of eternal pathways of fire,

Of dreams that survive the night,

Of doors held ajar in storms.

A thousand years now had his breed

Established the mammalian lead;

The founder (in cetacean lore)

Had followed Leif to Labrador;

The eldest-born tracked all the way

Marco Polo to Cathay;

A third had hounded one whole week

The great Columbus to Bahama;

A fourth outstripped to Mozambique

The flying squadron of de Gama;

A fifth had often crossed the wake

Of Cortez, Cavendish and Drake;

The great grandsire—a veteran rover—

Had entered once the strait of Dover,

In a naval fight, and with his hump

Had stove a bottom of Van Tromp;

The grandsire at Trafalgar swam

At the Redoubtable and caught her,

With all the tonnage of his ram,

Deadly between the wind and water;

And his granddam herself was known

As fighter and as navigator,

The mightiest mammal in the zone

From Baffin Bay to the Equator.

From such a line of conjugate sires

Issued his blood, his lumbar fires,

And from such dams imperial-loined

His Taurian timbers had been joined,

And when his time had come to hasten

Forth from his deep sub-mammary basin,

Out on the ocean tracts, his mama

Had, in a North Saghalien gale,

Launched him, a five-ton healthy male,

Between Hong Kong and Yokohama.

Now after ninety moons of days,

Sheltered by the mammoth fin,

He took on adolescent ways

And learned the habits of his kin;

Ransacked the seas and found his mate,

Established his dynastic name,

Reared up his youngsters, and became

The most dynamic vertebrate

(According to his Royal Dame)

From Tonga to the Hudson Strait.

And from the start, by fast degrees,

He won in all hostilities;

Sighted a hammerhead and followed him,

Ripped him from jaw to ventral, swallowed him;

Pursued a shovelnose and mangled him;

Twisted a broadbill’s neck and strangled him;

Conquered a rorqual in full sight

Of a score of youthful bulls who spurred

Him to the contest, and the fight

Won him the mastery of the herd.

Another ninety moons and Time

Had cast a marvel from his hand,

Unmatched on either sea or land—

A sperm whale in the pitch of prime.

A hundred feet or thereabout

He measured from the tail to snout,

And every foot of that would run

From fifteen hundred to a ton.

But huge as was his tail or fin,

His bulk of forehead, or his hoists

And slow subsidences of jaw,

He was more wonderful within.

His iron ribs and spinal joists

Enclosed the sepulchre of a maw.

The bellows of his lungs might sail

A herring skiff—such was the gale

Along the wind-pipe; and so large

The lymph-flow of his active liver,

One might believe a fair-sized barge

Could navigate along the river;

And the islands of his pancreas

Were so tremendous that between ’em

A punt would sink; while a cart might pass

His bile-duct to the duodenum

Without a peristaltic quiver.

And cataracts of red blood stormed

His heart, while lower down was formed

That fearful labyrinthine coil

Filled with the musk of ambergris;

And there were reservoirs of oil

And spermaceti; and renal juices

That poured in torrents without cease

Throughout his grand canals and sluices.

And hid in his arterial flow

Were flames and currents set aglow

By the wild pulses of the chase

With fighters of the Saxon race.

A tincture of an iron grain

Had dyed his blood a darker stain;

Upon his coat of toughest rubber

A dozen cicatrices showed

The place as many barbs were stowed,

Twisted and buried in his blubber,

The mute reminders of the hours

Of combat when the irate whale

Unlimbered all his massive powers

Of head-ram and of caudal flail,

Littering the waters with the chips

Of whaleboats and vainglorious ships.

Where Cape Delgado strikes the sea,

A cliff ran outward slantingly

A mile along a tossing edge

Of water towards a coral ledge,

Making a sheer and downward climb

Of twenty fathoms where it ended,

Forming a jutty scaur suspended

Over a cave of murk and slime.

A dull reptilian silence hung

About the walls, and fungus clung

To knots of rock, and over boles

Of lime and basalt poisonous weed

Grew rampant, covering the holes

Where crayfish and sea-urchins breed.

The upper movement of the seas

Across the reefs could not be heard;

The nether tides but faintly stirred

Sea-nettles and anemones.

A thick festoon of lichens crawled

From crag to crag, and under it

Half-ridden in a noisome pit

Of bones and shells a kraken sprawled.

Moveless, he seemed, as a boulder set

In pitch, and dead within his lair,

Except for a transfixing stare

From lidless eyes of burnished jet,

And a hard spasm now and then

Within his viscous centre, when

His scabrous feelers intertwined

Would stir, vibrate, and then unwind

Their ligatures with easy strength

To tap the gloom, a cable length;

And finding no life that might touch

The mortal radius of their clutch,

Slowly relax, and shorten up

Each tensile tip, each suction cup,

And coil again around the head

Of the mollusc on its miry bed,

Like a litter of pythons settling there

To shutter the Gorgonian stare.

But soon the squid’s antennæ caught

A murmur that the waters brought—

No febrile stirring as might spring

From a puny barracuda lunging

At a tuna’s leap, some minor thing,

A tarpon or a dolphin plunging—

But a deep consonant that rides

Below the measured beat of tides

With that vast, undulating rhythm

A sounding sperm whale carries with him.

The kraken felt that as the flow

Beat on his lair with plangent power,

It was the challenge of his foe,

The prelude to a fatal hour;

Nor was there given him more than time,

From that first instinct of alarm,

To ground himself in deeper slime,

And raise up each enormous arm

Above him, when, unmeasured, full

On the revolving ramparts, broke

The hideous rupture of a stroke

From the forehead of the bull.

And when they interlocked, that night—

Cetacean and cephalopod—

No Titan with Olympian god

Had ever waged a fiercer fight;

Tail and skull and teeth and maw

Met sinew, cartilage, and claw,

Within those self-engendered tides,

Where the Acherontic flood

Of sepia, mingling with the blood

Of whale, befouled Delgado’s sides.

And when the cachalot out-wore

The squid’s tenacious clasp, he tore

From frame and socket, shred by shred,

Each gristled, writhing tentacle,

And with serrated mandible

Sawed cleanly through the bulbous head;

Then gorged upon the fibrous jelly

Until, finding that six tons lay

Like Vulcan’s anvil in his belly,

He left a thousand sharks his prey,

And with his flukes, slow-labouring, rose

To a calm surface, where he shot

A roaring geyser, steaming hot,

From the blast-pipe of his nose.

One hour he rested, in the gloom

Of the after-midnight; his great back

Prone with the tide, and, in the loom

Of the Afric coast, merged with the black

Of the water; till a rose shaft, sent

From Madagascar far away,

Etched a ripple, eloquent

Of a freshening wind and a fair day.

Flushed with the triumph of the fight,

He felt his now unchallenged right

To take by demonstrated merit

What he by birth-line did inherit—

The lordship of each bull and dam

That in mammalian waters swam,

As Maharajah of the seas

From Rio to the Celebes.

And nobly did the splendid brute

Leap to his laurels, execute

His lineal functions as he sped

Towards the Equator northwards, dead

Against the current and the breeze;

Over his back the running seas

Cascaded, while the morning sun

Rising in gold and beryl, spun

Over the cachalot’s streaming gloss,

And from the foam, a fiery floss

Of multitudinous fashionings,

And dipping downward from the blue,

The sea-gulls from Comoro flew,

And brushed him with their silver wings;

Then at the tropic hour of noon

He slackened down; a drowsy spell

Was creeping over him, and soon

He fell asleep upon the swell.

The cruising ships had never claimed

So bold a captain, so far-famed

Throughout the fleets a master-whaler—

New England’s pride was Martin Taylor.

’Twas in this fall of eighty-eight,

As skipper of the Albatross,

He bore South from the Behring Strait,

Down by the China Coast, to cross

The Line, and with the fishing done

To head her for the homeward run

Around the Cape of Storms, and bring

Her to Nantucket by the Spring.

She had three thousand barrels stowed

Under the hatches, though she could,

Below and on her deck, have stood

Four thousand as her bumper load.

And so to try his final luck,

He entered Sunda Strait and struck

Into the Indian Ocean where,

According to reports that year,

A fleet had had grand fishing spells

Between the Cocos and Seychelles.

Thither he sailed; but many a day

Passed by in its unending way,

The weather fair, the weather rough,

With watch and sleep, with tack and reef,

With swab and holystone, salt beef

And its eternal partner, duff;

Now driving on with press of sail,

Now sweaty calms that drugged the men,

Everything but sight of whale,

Until one startling midday, when

A gesture in the rigging drew

The flagging tension of the crew.

In the cross-trees at the royal mast,