Rowing, the Great Equalizer

Just for kicks, my uncle and I decided to sign up for classes at a rowing club on Lake Union.  We’ve been doing it now for almost three weeks.  At this point in life, I consider myself a fairly old hand at rowing, since we did it every single day on the Camp Parsons waterfront in the 14-foot aluminum Smokercrafts.  As you can imagine, though, rowing an eight-man racing shell is really a very different sort of game.  No longer am I slogging around in a heavy, metal bathtub.  Suddenly I’m in a seat that slides, I’m inches above the water, I’m sweeping on one side only, I have to keep tempo with seven other people, and I’m going a whole hell of a lot faster.

I never before realized how much of a science there was to rowing.  There is a whole technique designed to maximize the use of your strongest muscle groups (the legs) and minimize the use of your weaker muscle groups (the arms and back), while at the same time minimizing air resistance on the blades, minimizing the braking effect that comes from sliding your body forward, and maximizing the efficiency of the blade’s contact with the water.  For each iteration of a stroke, I’d say that there are about two dozen individual things that you have to remind your body to do, and you have to do them all in the right sequence every time.

I love that sort of thing.  There’s something remarkably therapeutic and anesthetic about it all.  It forces you to stop thinking about all the crap that goes on in the world and focus instead on the timing of your breaths, the depth of your blade, the squareness of your shoulders, the rotations of your wrist, the straightness of your back, the balance of the boat, and all the while you're trying to swing your body in perfect rhythm with the body in front of you, as if all eight of you were tied together with a string.  After a while, it becomes almost a form of self-hypnotism, and you reach a very different level of consciousness.

But it wasn't that way at first.  On the way to the first day of class, I was hoping that the other guys in the class would turn out to be rickety, pot-bellied, middle-aged men, and that way I didn’t have to feel insecure about my own deplorable lack of physique.  To my dismay, however, my classmates turned out to be your regular statuesque, gym-going types.  Yes, there they were in their tight workout clothes, and then here was scrawny, gangling, pathetic me.  Damn.

Yesterday, though, we were out on Lake Union, and there was a guy who hadn’t been to class in a while, so the instructor had him sit out and ride in the escort boat with him in order to watch us.  Now by the end of that class, I was getting a little vexed with the instructor, because he was giving a lot of feedback to every other guy, but he didn’t say a single damned thing to me, neither positive nor negative.  Sometimes that means that the instructor has given up on you as a lost cause.  After class, I talked with the guy who had to sit out and ride with the instructor.  It turns out that the reason the instructor never said anything to me was that whenever it was my turn to row, he turned around to talk to the guy and was using me as an example to explain how to row correctly. 

I have never been good at a sport before.  During Aquatics Instructor training last summer, Gary told me that I have a kind of gift for picturing what my body is supposed to do, and then doing it.  I didn’t really believe that then.  At the risk of sounding vain, I’m starting to think it might be true.  I’ve kind of already committed this lifetime to sailing, and I’m a little too over-the-hill to switch passions now, but I think in my next life, I’m going to be a rower.

GREAT NAUTICAL READS: Billy Budd, Sailor, by Herman Melville

“Struck dead by an angel of God. Yet the angel must hang!”  Here we confront the central moral dilemma of this classic sea tale by Herman Melville.

Billy Budd, a newly conscripted sailor aboard H.M.S. Bellipotent, finds himself on the wrong side of Mr. Claggart, one of the ship’s petty officer, who secretly loathes Billy for his popularity among the crew, which he garners through his easy temperament and Grecian good looks.  When Claggart trumps up charges that Billy is inciting a mutiny among the crew, Billy accidentally strikes and kills him—a capital offense under the rigid Articles of War that govern the warship—and now the ship’s officers must decide what fate is to befall this angelic yet luckless seaman.

Like much of Melville’s later work, Billy Budd can be read on several different levels, and the discerning reader will be surprised at the amount of depth Melville has given to such a short narrative.

On the most basic level, it can be read as a simple historical sea story that explores the sociology of the crew aboard a Napoleonic-era man-of-war and the various classes of men that had to coexist within its cramped quarters.  After all, the interplay among the sailors, petty officers, and commissioned officers lies at the heart of the plot, and Melville aptly conjures up a sense of the tensions that must have existed among them during a period that was already intensely hierarchical.

The story can also be read as a juristic thought-experiment, and indeed it is much discussed in law schools as a case study that encapsulates a moral-legal dilemma in which a law seems to condemn a good and arguably innocent man.  The haphazard approach of the drumhead court that tries Billy offers food for thought regarding how courts come to understand the facts of a case and render their verdicts.

Few stories in Western literature can be said to be devoid of Biblical undercurrents, and here this story abounds with them.  Might this be a reworked version of the fall of Adam, with Claggart as the serpent and Captain Vere as God?  Or, more compellingly, might it be a story of the trial and death of Christ, with Claggart standing in for Judas and Captain Vere as Pontius Pilate? After all, doesn't Pontius Pilate ask that famous question, "What is truth?"  And here we have another case in which a hapless judge fails to see the truth and renders faulty justice.

Another angle that cannot be ignored is the latent homoerotic undertones in the work, which suggests that Melville was wrestling with his own conflicted sexuality.  Melville makes Billy’s “comeliness” a central element of the story and often paints him in an overtly feminine light, comparing him, to name just some examples, to a lily and a rose and the dames of the court.  It is even hinted in the book that Claggart may have loved the “Handsome Sailor” and despised himself for it, and resolved to destroy this affection by destroying the object of it.  This may likewise have been Melville’s way of vanquishing his own feelings for this Ganymede by restoring a repressive sense of law and order aboard his own ship.

Billy Budd remained incomplete at the time of Melville’s death and was only published when the manuscript fell into the hands of a literary scholar in the 1920s.  Its publication reignited interest in Melville, who went mostly unappreciated during his lifetime, and finally prompted his induction into the canon of American literature.

And how lucky we are that it was discovered.  Billy Budd, Sailor is a wonderfully complex nautical tale that is both a tribute to Melville's genius and an invaluable window into his psyche and ours.

GREAT NAUTICAL READS: The Riddle of the Sands, by Erskine Childers

This classic of maritime fiction is also considered to be among the first modern spy novels in English literature. Many of the tropes that we now associate with the spy genre—e.g., the clever hero, the suave villain, the gradual unfolding of clues, and the suspenseful reconnaissance missions under the nose of the enemy—all find their forebear in The Riddle of the Sands.

In 1902, when this book is set, Britain’s imperial power was at its height, but a growing German navy threatened to upend Britain's command of the seas. The story begins when the narrator, a young civil servant named Carruthers, receives an invitation from an old college acquaintance, Davies, to join him for some “yachting” and duck hunting on the German coast. Having no other vacation plans, Carruthers takes up the offer and sets off for the Baltic.

Expecting to spend the next few weeks in oceanic luxury, Carruthers is mortified to step off the train and find a “scrubby” little yawl. The Dulcibella, as it is called, is so small that he can’t even fit his trunk down the hatch to his cramped quarters. Needless to say, there are no servants, deckhands, or fellow passengers; Carruthers would be Davies's lone companion, even though he knows next to nothing about sailing.

In spite of everything, Carruthers resolves to enjoy himself, and he sets out with Davies through the fjords of Schleswig-Holstein. Davies, it turns out, is a good enough sailor, and Carruthers gradually learns to make himself useful aboard the yacht. He can’t help noticing, however, that Davies doesn't seem very interested in the ducks, which are few at this time of year anyway. He is also reticent to share much information about a recent excursion through the North Sea sandbanks, the description of which was torn out of his logbook and rewritten.

A chance encounter with another sailor reveals that Davies had run aground during a gale and would certainly have been killed if the other sailor hadn't towed him to safety. This finally forces Davies to tell Carruthers the real reason for asking him to come to Germany. A mysterious yachtsman named Dollmann had tried to murder Davies by deliberately guiding him into a wall of rocks during a storm. Davies suspects that Dollmann may also be an English traitor who is conspiring with the Germans on some secret naval project that has something to do with the sandbanks of the North Sea coast. Might Germany be preparing secret coastal defenses in case of war with England? Carruthers, who knows German, might be able to help Davies solve this mystery.

For the rest of the story, you will have to read the book for yourself. I assure you that it will be worth your while. The story compelling, and the writing itself is witty and robust. The novel is also “riddled” with nautical jargon and marvelously detailed descriptions of the rugged life aboard the Dulcibella. It invites the reader to participate in the harrowing trials of navigating the North Sea in tumultuous October weather.

For me, the novel’s real pièce de résistance is the character Davies, who is so much like many of the true old salts I’ve met.  By now you’ve guessed that he is no white-capped sailor in blue serge. Instead, he is short, disheveled, and strongly disdainful of the shore. His little boat is an extension of his being. It may look “scrubby” to the untrained eye, and so might he, but they are both perfectly well cut out for the task of coastal sailing. Davies's shrewd knowledge of the sea guides the pair through many a rough passage to allow Carruthers to investigate the mystery more closely.

In its day, The Riddle of the Sands was more than an adventurous and innovative sea story. It was also a highly topical and much discussed political work, for it threw light on England’s woeful lack of preparedness for an eventual war with Germany. Davies and Carruthers both admire Germany, which had only recently unified and was now industrializing and militarizing rapidly. Hidden in their admiration was a thinly veiled warning to British readers about their own country’s worrisome state of affairs.  This makes it a rather timely political novel, for in it we find a tense mood not unlike our own, as we contrast China’s inexorable economic and military progress to our own languid and dismal situation in the United States.

The Riddle of the Sands is a book that has it all: excellent writing, a pioneering plot line, vivid sailing descriptions, and a political significance that is relevant even today. All of these serve to make it a masterful and classic novel and a great nautical read.

N.B.: The life of author, Erskine Childers, is a story unto itself. He was a civil servant and Boer War veteran who had taken up sailing after a sciatic injury precluded other sporting options.  He cruised extensively throughout the German coastal islands that served as his novel’s backdrop and was a Royal Navy intelligence officer during the First World War. Afterward, he became an Irish nationalist and revolutionary leader and was arrested and executed by firing squad. He was the father of a future president of Ireland, Erskine Hamilton Childers.