Leviathan or The Whale

clippers that ferried tea to England from Ceylon, and on one of which my own ancestor was a captain until he was lost at sea.
    The
Morgan
is laden with equipment, almost top-heavy with it. As I duck through shrouds and step over holds, I am aware of how much danger such a ship represented for the unwitting, even before it set sail. Swaying ropes and blocks meant every movement had to be made with care. Here life was lived in public; even the captain shared his stateroom, a semblance of a landlubber’s salon, dining room and study all shrunk into one. The space seems homely, with a faded red sofa built into the side like a bunk in a caravan. In the captain’s cabin itself, an ornate bed is gimballed so as to swing in high seas and rock its occupant to sleep; and in the corner, a cupboard conceals the only private ‘head’ onboard.

    In this miniature world–so small compared to the ocean all around–every inch is used efficiently. Shelves fit into corners, drawers are set above the sofa, chests stowed under bunks. Lamps hang from hooks, pots and pans stand in compartments to stop them rolling around the galley–itself little more than a larder. There is a neatness worthy of a Shaker interior; a cosy arrangement, like a grown-up Wendy house. Sometimes an entire family travelled in these quarters. Through their eyes I see life lived on board, children at their schoolwork on the table built around the mast, their mother sewing as the ship lurched to and fro. One four-year-old, Eugene, playing in a whaleboat, nearly fell overboard, screaming for his Pa as he clung to the side. At bedtime their father told them stories about what the whale said and did.
    The reality of ship life was less comforting. There are cupboardlike cabins for officers and mates, the accommodation growing ever smaller as rank reduces until, beyond the blubber room, double tiers of bunks are built into the narrow forecastle, shelves for human stowage. Here the lowly slept, clustered like cockroaches at the prow, subject to class distinction even in the light they were allowed. Set flush into the deck are solid glass prisms, shaped like upturned hexagonal pyramids–so-called deadlights that could concentrate the sun’s rays, producing a luminescence equivalent to seventy watts. But theirs was an undemocratic illumination: while the staterooms boasted a cluster of these nineteenth-century bulbs, the forecastle had just two, shedding a watery light barely enough for a sailor to read in his bunk; and that was frustrated when obscured by a stray rope on the deck above.
    The forecastle was seldom a good place to be. One sailor claimed to have seen ‘Kentucky pig-sties not half so filthy, and in every respect preferable to this miserable hole’. Not only was it dark and odorous, but damp, too; in bad weather, crewmen might spend days on end wearing wet clothes. ‘Those who had been to sea before found this nothing new,’ wrote Nelson Cole Haley, aged just twelve years old when he ran away from his home in Maine. Now sixteen, Haley signed on for the
Morgan’s
voyage of 1849-53 as a boat-steerer.
    Still, it was hard, even for them. After standing their watch, often wet through as soon as they came out of the forecastle, they had no chance to change clothing, if they had dry to put on, until they were relieved and went below. There twenty-five men lived in quarters so small that it was impossible for all of them to find standing room at one time…And this was not for one day or month, but was their only home for four years…

    In the tropics, the unrelenting sun which sparked deadlights into life made duties even more difficult to bear. As the ship languished in dead calm, with no whales seen for weeks, lassitude overtook the company. The top deck was kept cool by watering, and its walking larder of pigs squealed with delight when buckets of sea water were thrown over them, too. Some men could shelter in the shade of the sails, but those aloft ‘had to take it straight up and down’, their eyes dazed by the cataractic sun reflecting off the sea. In the forecastle, the heat was worse. ‘The watch below lay in their berths trying to sleep, the perspiration streaming from their bodies, with nothing but the curtains drawn in front of their bunks for covering.’
    Yet even on such a ship it was possible to keep secrets. One welcome relief for sailors was a gam, a meeting with another vessel when letters and news were exchanged and men could