The enduring sorrow: Why a life lost to the sea remains an agonizing, unresolvable mystery

“ From "Two years before the Mast."
=228.= LOSS OF A MAN AT SEA. Death is at all tunes solemn, but never so much so as at sea. A man dies on shore; his body remains with his friends, and "the mourners go about the streets;" but when a man falls overboard at sea and is lost, there is a suddenness in the event, and a difficulty in realizing it, which give to it an air of awful mystery. A man dies on shore—you follow his body to the grave, and a stone marks the spot. ”

“ On the land, in the city or town, a death is hardly noticed, and is not felt; but on board a ship, with but a small circle, as in our case, of about thirty, living together as one family, and shut out from the world, as it were, one snatched from our small company is seriously missed, and death serves to bind the remaining still closer together, as the loss just experienced shows us all the uncertainty of human life, and no one knows who will next be called upon to pay the last sad debt of nature. ”

“ Death is at all times solemn, but never so much so as at sea. A man dies on shore; his body remains with his friends, and “the mourners go about the streets;” but when a man falls overboard at sea and is lost, there is a suddenness in the event, and a difficulty in realizing it, which give to it an air of awful mystery. A man dies on shore—you follow his body to the grave, and a stone marks the spot. ”

“ Such has been the [Pg 22] fate of many gallant ships; no single survivor to tell the story; no boat or piece of wreckage, no bottle, not a sign or syllable from the vasty deep to reveal the nature of the awful catastrophe by which vessel, cargo, crew, and passengers were blotted out of existence! There is a weirdness, an awful terror, in such mysterious disappearances. They fill the imagination with horror, and cause mental tension in the minds of relatives of the lost far harder to bear than when the fate of a wrecked vessel is told by survivors. ”

“ From every center of great calamity waves of sympathetic sorrow spread to far-distant strangers, but the perishing of great numbers in a shipwreck seems to impress our human nature more profoundly than do accidents or visitations of other kinds in which the toll of death is as great. ”

“ It is part of the ghostly sense of mystery that always haunts the sea and its tragedies. On the land, when disaster occurs, all the wreckage is left to tell its own tale; but on the ocean Fate instantly obliterates all her tracks. ”

“ As a matter of fact, never a year passes without the loss of some ship somewhere in the wild expanse of the world’s waters. Boats go down, leaving usually at least some indirect evidence of their fate. Now and again, as in the case of the Archduke Johann Salvator’s Santa Margarita and Roger Tichborne’s schooner Bella, not a survivor lives to tell the tale nor is any bit of wreckage found to give indication. Here we have the genuine marine mystery. ”

“ With her went Johann Salvator, his variety-girl wife and a crew of twenty-six. Though search has been made in every thinkable port, through the distant archipelagoes of the Pacific, in ten thousand outcast towns, and though emissaries have visited all the fabled refuges of missing men, from time to time, over a period of nearly forty years, no sight of any one connected with the lost ship has ever been got, and no man knows with certainty what fate befell her and her princely master. ”

“ There is no mystery in all the world greater than a deserted wreck. An old house, an abandoned mill, a cabin in the forest, all these have their charm of mystery, but the wreck of a ship, laden with who knows what treasure, and abandoned by her master, a wreck so remote from inhabited lands that it has not been visited since the night of its disaster, here was mystery indeed.
So eager were they to board the craft that they could scarcely wait until the plane had been made fast and the canvas boat lowered. ”

“ With ten thousand families on both sides of the Atlantic mourning the untimely death of relatives and friends who went down into the depths from the decks of a brand new ship, widely proclaimed the greatest and the safest that ever ploughed the sea, these are, after all, the most pertinent questions that may be asked by a sorrowing world as it looks to the future rather than the past. ”

“ Arrangements were made for interring him in the grave-yard of a neighboring farmer, and the next morning, the colors of the ship were half-masted, and all the boats—each with its colors also at half-mast—formed in line, and as many of the officers and crew as could be spared from duty, followed the deceased to his last resting-place. There were six boats in the procession, and as they pulled in for the shore, with the well-known funeral stroke and drooping flags, the spectacle was one to sadden the heart. A young life had been suddenly cut short in a far distant land. ”

“ No stone or wreath from human hands Will ever mark the spot Where fifteen hundred men went down, But Manhood perished not. Old Ocean takes but little heed Of human tears or woe. No shafts adorn the ocean graves, Nor weeping willows grow. Nor is there need of marble slab To keep in mind the spot Where noble men went down to death, But manhood perished not! Those men who looked on death and smiled, And trod the crumbling deck, Have saved much more than precious lives From out that awful wreck. ”

“ Even their lifeless bodies were never recovered. They were sepulchred in the great ocean, which has wrapped its garment of green round many of the fairest and noblest of the sons of men, and which rolls its continued requiem of sublimity and sadness over the millions whom it hath entombed. ”

“ There is not a single tear in the thousand leagues of ocean, nor a sigh in the winds that sweep over it, for all the hearts it breaks or the lives it destroys. The sea, therefore, is not a symbol of divine mercy. It is the very emblem of tremendous and remorseless power. Indeed, if Nature had no other face but this, we could hardly believe in God, or at least, with gentle attributes; we could only stand on the shore of existence, and shake with terror at the presence of a being of infinite power, but cold and pitiless as the waves that roll from the Arctic pole. ”

“ The people feared that [Pg 31] the gods underground were angry if the dead were left uncovered with their kindred dust. No greater imprecation could have been cast at an enemy than that he might not be covered with the earth. Hence it was that the ancients stood in great fear of death on the ocean, for there their bodies could not be interred. When one went to sea, it was not uncommon for him to tie a reward to his body, that in case he should be drowned and his body found, the finder would see it buried, and so become entitled to the treasure. ”

“ It is a fearful thing to be brought down to the dregs of life, by the failure of food and water, on the surface of the wide ocean, dying by inches, often without the consolations of the church, and ever without Christian sepulture. ”

“ It is remarkable that in no part of the world, in any age, has the sea been selected as a burial place for the dead. Indeed, the idea of being drowned at sea, or dying on shipboard to be intombed in the fathomless ocean, is so abhorrent to many individuals that it is with fear and trembling they trust themselves on the water. ”

“ A gray sail’s ghost where the autumn lies on
Wraiths of the mist and the squall-blown rain;
Her dark girl eyes that search the horizon,
Grave with a haunting pain.
Stars may burn and the wild winds whistle
Over the rocks where the sea-gulls rave—
My heart is bleak as the wind-worn thistle
on her seaside grave.
{222}
IV
Sad as sad eyes that ache with tears
The stars of night shine through the leaves;
And shadowy as the Fates’ dim shears
The weft that twilight weaves.
The summer sunset marched long hosts
Of gold adown one golden peak,
That flamed and fell ”

“ Lacking a purpose—either innate or acquired—people are apt to drift aimlessly through life, like an abandoned boat upon the ocean, subject to every wind that blows and every current that flows. With conditions favorable, they may float on indefinitely, even as derelicts at sea have been known to do for years without meeting with any serious obstruction. ”

“ Let an accident occur, however—let a ship go down or a bather be carried out in the wash of the tide—and something in our bones remembers the old fears of the monster in the waters. We realise suddenly that we who trust the sea are like the people in other lands who live under the fiery mountains that have poured death on their ancestors time and again. We are amazed at the faith of men who rebuild their homes under a volcano, but the sea over which we pass with so smiling a certainty is more restless than a volcano and more clamorous for victims. ”

“ They are, it is true, “ship-swallowers,” but are sometimes nice in their appetite, or over-gorged,237 and cannot fully dispose of every wreck; and so the clinching evidence of disaster is rarely lacking, in the protruding timbers of a lost ship, or the fluke of an almost entirely buried anchor; although it becomes the duty of the Trinity House to remove—generally by blowing up with dynamite—any wreckage here that is considered to be dangerous to navigation.
To stand contemplative upon the Goodwins is a strange and deeply impressive experience. ”

“ Sorrow that is too deep and strong for words clutches the heart-strings of humanity and the Nation mourns for the heroic dead, who were carried down into the sea with the crushed “Titanic.” They faced death with high hearts, making the Supreme Sacrifice so that the women and the helpless little ones might live.
It is a heart-rending story, redeemed and ennobled by the heroism of the victims. Its details are appalling. The world is full of mournings for the dead. Nature has conquered again, destroying with ruthless hand the most marvelous ship that ever floated on the bosom of the deep. ”

“ Death in our unconscious is a wondrous masquerader and it very often appears as sleep. The grave is a bed; the churchyard, a dormitory; catacombs, berths. Water symbolism, too, is very common, for example, the crossing of a dark river to the other shore, a boat, a narrow strait, a stormy or a deep dark sea across which we pass to an island or a new continent, the abode of the dead; and we speak of going out with the ebb of the tide, shipwreck, stranding, etc. Death may also appear as a fire that consumes or purifies. Processions and even crowds may suggest burial or funerals ”

“ Verily, one's life flows on towards the dark ocean of death, irresistibly, unrestingly, willy-nilly—whether swift or slow, whether long or short—whether it flows through pleasant champaigns or dreary marshes, past romantic castled crags, or by bleak quarries. ”

“ Alas! if every soul be its own father and creator, why shall it not be its own destroying angel too? Is this a man still near me? Wretched being! That petty life of thine is but the sigh of nature, or the echo of that sigh. Your wavering cloudy forms are but reflections of rays cast by a concave mirror upon the clouds of dust which shroud your world—dust which is dead men’s ashes. Look ye down into the chasm athwart the face of which the ash-clouds float and fly. A mist of worlds rises up from the Ocean of Death; the future is a gathering cloud, the present a falling vapour. ”

“ Besides the seeming certainty of death, it was unutterably terrible to be swept through this dark, mysterious channel under the sea. Perhaps the terror lay most in the darkness of the passage. It was a darkness simply inconceivable, beyond any that the imagination could conjure up—such absolute absence of light as shadow the unfathomable caverns on the ocean floor or fill the great, empty spaces between one constellation and another. In the darkest night there is always some fine, almost imperceptible degree of light. ”

“ Every one of us stands on the brink of the endless sea that is Time and is Death; and all the blind, beautiful, mute, majestic forces of creation move around us and yet tell us nothing.
It is wonderful that, with this awful mystery always about us, we can go on on our little lives as cheerfully as we do; that on the edge of that mystical shore we yet can think so much about the crab in the lobster-pot, the eel in the sand, the sail in the distance, the child's face at home. ”

“ There seemed a sort of sacrilege in the destruction of so much beauty. Again and again I would pause to admire a shape of exquisite grace, a form of glorious hue, before striking; and then it seemed to me as I toiled, many fancies crowding into my head now that I looked close into this glorious incrustation, that it was impossible this galleon could have been sunk to the depth I had first imagined. Surely no such rainbow-like life as I now witnessed existed in the black and tideless depths, countless fathoms out of reach of the longest and fiercest lance of light the sun could dart. ”

“ And if the mere waters of the ocean, satiate and wearied with tragedy as they must be, still keep for our fancy such records, how much more might we attribute a human consciousness to these shattered fragments, each seared by its own special grief. ”

“ Thou call'st along the sand, and haunt'st the surge,
Restless, and sad; as if, in strange accord
With the motion and the roar
Of waves that drive to shore,
One spirit did ye urge —
The Mystery - the Word.
Of thousands, thou, both sepulchre and pall,
Old Ocean! A requiem o'er the dead,
From out thy gloomy cells,
A tale of mourning tells, —
Tells of man's woe and fall,
His sinless glory fled.
Then turn thee, little bird, and take thy flight
Where the complaining sea shall sadness bring
Thy spirit nevermore. ”