Ship of Fools

“ Not only in fact and feeling are Barclay's Ship of Fools and Eclogues thoroughly expressive of the unhappy, discontented, poverty-stricken, priest-ridden, and court-ridden condition and life, the bitter sorrows and the humble wishes of the people, their very texture, as Barclay himself tells us, consists of the commonest language of the day, and in it are interwoven many of the current popular proverbs and expressions. ”

“ Then they will return and try for it again!"
"You think so, sir?"
"I shall remember even more important data, steward," the Ancient Mariner smiled. "Without doubt they will return. Oh, I know them well. They are meagre, narrow, grasping fools."
"Fools! all fools! a ship of fools!" Dag Daughtry exulted; repeating what he had expressed in the hold, as he bored the last barrel, listened to the good water gurgling away into the bilge, and chuckled over his discovery of the Ancient Mariner on the same lay as his own. ”

“ For jest and earnest, use and sport, Here fools abound of every sort. The sage may here find Wisdom's rules, And Folly learn the ways of fools. Dolts rich and poor my verse doth strike, The bad find badness, like finds like. A cap on many a one I fit, Who fain to wear it would omit, Were I to mention him by name, "I know you not," he would exclaim. The "Narrenschiff" is full of indications of the manners of the day, and the woodcuts are a curious study of its costumes. ”

“ Contemporary allusions to the Ship of Fools there could not fail to be, but the only one we have met with occurs in Bulleyn's Dialogue quoted above, p. xxvii. It runs as follows:—Uxor.—What ship is that with so many owers, and straunge tacle; it is a greate vessell. Ciuis.—This is the ship of fooles, wherin saileth bothe spirituall and temporall, of euery callyng some: there are kynges, queenes, popes, archbishoppes, prelates, lordes, ladies, knightes, gentlemen, phisicions, lawiers, marchauntes, housbandemen, beggers, theeues, hores, knaues, &c. ”

“ The fools are struggling in the waves, or seeking refuge in a crazy boat, while another, freighted with a pious crew in various attitudes of devotion, and labelled as the bark of Peter, is drawn to the shore by the saint himself, his key serving very opportunely as a boat-hook. ”

“ April Fools' Day—A Ship in Sight—The 'Pyrmont'—The Rescued 'Blue Jacket' Passengers—Story of the Burnt Ship—Suffering of the Lady Passengers in an Open Boat—Their Rescue—Distressing Scene on Board the 'Pyrmont.'
1st. April.—I was roused early this morning by the cry outside of "Get up! get up! There is a ship on fire ahead!" I got up instantly, dressed, and hastened on deck, like many more. But there was no ship on fire ”

“ Then he said that such trash as us wasn’t going to be heard afore him; and then we got a bit short like (though not in liquor, that I promise you) and told the man he was no better than a something or other mongrel—like everybody else in foreign parts. After that glasses got flying about, and we slung our hook back to the ship. But it shows what fools men are, I reckon. ”

“ It ain’t cowardly to be keerful, lad; but only fools an’ ignorant people is reckless enough to get careless.”
75
I am glad to say I took this lecture with good humor, admitting frankly that Uncle Naboth was right. At least once in the future a recollection of this caution saved me from hopeless disaster.
On the sixth day the breeze died away and the ship lay still. There was not a breath of air, and the heat was so intense that the interior of the ship was like a furnace. At night we slept upon the deck, and by day we lay gasping beneath the shade of the tarpaulins. ”

“ Till I haue space you to order by degree,
I haue eyght neyghbours, that first shall haue a place
Within this my ship, for they most worthy be,
They may their learning receyue costles and free,
Their walles abutting and ioyning to the scholes;
Nothing they can, yet nought will they learne nor see,
Therfore shall they guide this our ship of fooles."
In the comfort, quiet, and seclusion of the pleasant Devonshire retreat, the "Ship" was translated in the year 1508, when he would be about thirty-two, "by Alexander Barclay Preste ”

“ With diuers other workes.... very profitable and fruitfull for all men.... Cawood. 1570. Folio.
A large cut of vessels filled with fools (the same as on p. 313, Vol. II.) is inserted between the Latin and English titles. This edition omits the ballad to the Virgin at the end. ”

“ Silence throughout the boat—silence aboard the barque—silence everywhere: the only sound heard being the “drip-drop” of the water as it falls from the feathered oar-blades.
For a time the cutter’s crew remains mute, not one essaying to speak a word. They are silent, less from surprise than sheer stark terror. Fear is depicted on their faces and observable in their attitudes, as no wonder it should. What they have just seen is sufficient to terrify the stoutest hearts—even those of tried tars, as all of them are. A ship manned by hairy men—a crew of veritable Orsons! ”

“ The solitude of the sea intensifies the thoughts and the facts of one's experience which seems to lie at the very centre of the world, as the ship which carries one always remains the centre figure of the round horizon. He viewed the apoplectic, goggle-eyed mate and the saturnine, heavy-eyed steward as the victims of a peculiar and secret form of lunacy which poisoned their lives. ”

“ Streaming with perspiration, we swarmed up the rope, and, coming into the blast of cold wind, gasped like men plunged into icy water. With burning faces we shivered to the very marrow of our bones. Never before had the gale seemed to us more furious, the sea more mad, the sunshine more merciless and mocking, and the position of the ship more hopeless and appalling. ”

“ All who ran might read, and a good many did run to read. Clearly the April Fool had become the object of the most unanimous taboo ever set in motion on a ship. Her name was mud. Even the men did not rally to her aid, though she had been popular enough with them before. There are few men who will not crumple up before a phalanx of women with daggers in their hands and feathers in their hair; even as the big-game hunter thinks it no shame to flee before a horde of singing ants! The only two who behaved with natural decency were Bellew and Sarle. ”

“ Perhaps it was that the enthusiasm of ignorance had momentarily deserted us, and we were awed by a rational glimpse of the task that lay ahead. Such moods vanish the instant one gets down to work, the great panacea, but until then they crouch on the shoulders, a dour company.
In silence we rowed out to the dream ship, and hoisted sail. I was going to say that in silence we lowered the dinghy on to its chocks, but, as a fact, the keel descended on the Skipper's toe, extracting a shout of anguish from that usually restrained mariner. ”

“ Men who had been violently thrown from their berths to the floor were everywhere picking themselves up and trying to collect their scattered senses. Crowds were hurrying from the cabins and saloons to the deck. The voices of the officers were heard in quick, anxious, peremptory orders; and those of the crew in prompt, eager, terrified responses.
And through all came shrieks of terror, anguish, and despair.
"The ship has struck!" "We are lost!" "God have mercy!" were the cries.
Ishmael hurried on his clothes and rushed to the deck. ”

“ There is always a fool aboard ship; and I remember one day when we were within sight of Corfu that the fool who was our local property for the moment touched me on the shoulder as I hung over the bows, and pointed to the island. ”

“ Those men were the ghosts of themselves, and their weight on a rope could be no more than the weight of a bunch of ghosts. Indeed, if ever a sail was hauled up by sheer spiritual strength it must have been that sail, for, properly speaking, there was not muscle enough for the task in the whole ship let alone the miserable lot of us on deck. ”

“ If the path to the goal of our chosen desire were only as straight as it is narrow, instead of being dark, mysterious and tortuous, how easily could we attain high ends! I was launched on the life for which I had longed, but strange, shadowy forms like the storm-fiends of sailors' lore, drunkenness, deceit and crime—on whose presence I had not counted—flitted about my ship's masthead. ”

“ The first period of a gale is terrifying. Later there comes an indifference born of supreme trust in the ship. The steady onward thrust of the engines—the unwavering path across the raging vortex of tumbling gray waters—the orderly way in which the members of the crew follow their duties—these are quietly persistent factors in the gradual soothing of the nerves. Many a timid passenger, after lying awake through a night of terror, has gone to sleep when the watch began to swab the deck overhead. Not even a Spartan sailor would begin to wash woodwork if the ship were sinking. ”

“ It must have been a pretty sight, the fierce industry of these beggars toiling on a motionless ship that floated quietly in the silence of a world asleep, fighting against time for the freeing of that boat, grovelling on all-fours, standing up in despair, tugging, pushing, snarling at each other venomously, ready to kill, ready to weep, and only kept from flying at each other’s throats by the fear of death that stood silent behind them like an inflexible and cold-eyed taskmaster. ”

“ By this time it blew a terrible storm indeed; and now I began to see terror and amazement in the faces even of the seamen themselves. The master, though vigilant in the business of preserving the ship, yet as he went in and out of his cabin by me, I could hear him softly say to himself several times, "Lord, be merciful to us! we shall be all lost; we shall be all undone!" ”

“ Now, before I go on with my story, I’ll just ask one or two of you young men, have any of you ever seen the biggest fool in the world? Well, I thought not; you can’t say that you have, and, what’s more, you never will. If you think that you have got hold of him, you may be sure that you’ll fall in with a bigger before long somewhere else. That is my philosophy, and I am not far wrong, depend on it.
“Well, where was I? Oh, I know. My mate’s name—t’other fool, I mean—was Abraham Coxe. The ship had put into Saint John’s, Newfoundland. He and I belonged to the same boat’s crew. ”

“ That red flag branded us as an outlaw, a crippled ship with a diseased, dying crew aboard. All around us lay the monotonous circle of horizon without a sign of life, except for an occasional whale or school of flying fish. ”

“ Against the tempest struggling, still the phantom ship is seen
Across the billows dashing; and 'tis said that every word
Of her captain's awful blasphemy upon the gale is heard.
But heaven help the hapless crew that impious sentence hears;
The doom of those is sealed to whom that fatal ship appears:
They'll never reach their destined port—they'll see their homes no more
They who see the flying Dutchman, never, never, reach the shore
J.B. O'Reilly.
"A Merry Christmas!" ”

“ Shrieks, yells of defiance, shouts of triumph, howls of rage or of pain, all softened by the distance, and all in their unison sounding appallingly as they were borne through the gloom of the fog.
Instantly every man in the ship bounded to his feet. They had not heard the first sounds, but these they heard, and in that superstition which is natural to the sailor, each man’s first thought was that the noises came from the sky, and so each looked with a stupefied countenance at his neighbor. ”

“ The mere putting into words the suspicion that had been troubling all our minds made one man in action of the whole crew, like the firing of forty pieces of ordnance in the same instant. Whatever the sailors held they flung down, and, in a bound, came to the waist on the starboard side, where they stood, looking at the ship and making, amid that silence, the strangest noise that ever was heard with their deep and fearful breathing. ”

“ Most seamen remember in their life one or two such nights of a culminating gale. Nothing seems left of the whole universe but darkness, clamour, fury—and the ship. And like the last vestige of a shattered creation she drifts, bearing an anguished remnant of sinful mankind, through the distress, tumult, and pain of an avenging terror. No one slept in the forecastle. The tin oil-lamp suspended on a long string, smoking, described wide circles ”

“ She’s a pretty boat, but she must go. There’s a blooming lot of us. Are we all to be trusted? Are we all going to stick to the same yarn if it comes to close questioning? Any durned fool can be a shipwrecked sailor. There’s a-many durned fools piking it now as castaways on the British roads, a-yarning spunkily, and saving money.”
I thought to myself, “And you’d trust me, would you? You’d allow me to be one of your shipwrecked party, eh? And if I am not to be one of your shipwrecked party—and most surely you don’t intend that I shall be—what’s to happen betwixt this and New Holland? ”

“ Gone, all are gone, they neither hear or care,
The sun shines on and life is ever fair.
They shun the struggle, laughter lurks elsewhere.
The ship is sinking, passing echoes cry,
“Stand by!”
The little ships that pass her in the night,
Speed from the darkness in their eager fright.
From troubled dreams they take refuge in flight.
Why should they then, who know they too must die,
“Standby”?
Then get you gone, desert the sinking ship,
O faithless friends, who on her pleasure-trip
Clung close with gentle words and smiling lip,
And still as ever on your own joys cry,
“Stand by!” ”