Eighteen Inches

by Joseph Conrad, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

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There is a figure written in the official log of the barque Agnes Wardle, of Sunderland, for the morning of the ninth of November in a year I need not name, which is in my hand, and which is false; and beside it, in the margin, in the same hand but smaller, there is a correction which is true. I have been told by men who should know that a log-book is a dull document. It is the dullest thing in the world, and the most exacting, for it is the only witness a ship carries that cannot be persuaded afterwards to remember differently. Whatever is put down there has been sworn to by the man who put it down, and he must stand by it before owners, underwriters, and the gentlemen of the Board of Trade, who have never been wet in their lives but who know, with a terrible clerical exactness, what a figure means.

I was mate of her then. She was a wooden barque of something under six hundred tons register, built on the Wear, honest in her lines and old in her fastenings, and we had loaded her in the Tees with steel rails for Valparaiso, which is a cargo no seaman loves. Rails lie low. They lie in the bottom of the hold like a bad conscience, a dead weight with no bulk to it, and a ship stowed so is stiff beyond all reason; she will not lean to a sea and give with it, as a decent ship should, but snaps back upright with a violence that wrenches at every treenail in her frame. You feel it in your teeth. Captain Tolley, who had commanded her eleven years, said on the day we finished loading that she would roll the sticks out of herself if we met anything west of Ushant, and then he went below and wrote to his wife, and I do not think he thought of it again until it was time to think of it.

We met it in the Bay. I will not describe the weather. Weather at sea is very much the same thing to the men inside it as illness is to the patient, and no more interesting to an outsider; it was a gale from the west-south-west which came on in the first watch of the seventh and settled to its work, and the Agnes Wardle, under lower topsails and a reefed foresail, laboured in it as I had known she would. She did not fight the seas so much as refuse them. Each one that came at her she met like a wall, and it broke over her like a wall breaking, and she shook, and came upright with a jerk, and waited for the next. By the morning of the eighth she was making water.

That was not alarming in itself. Every wooden ship that is worked hard in a seaway will take some water through her seams, and the pumps are there for it, as a man has a handkerchief for a cold. The carpenter sounded the well at the end of every watch, dropping the iron rod on its line down the sounding-pipe beside the mainmast, drawing it up, and reading the wet mark against the notches cut in it; and the figure was chalked on a board by the cabin door and entered by the officer of the watch in the log. Twelve inches. Fourteen. We pumped her down to eight. She came back to fourteen in four hours, and we pumped her down again. It was a routine, and a routine is a mercy, because it takes the place of imagination, which in such weather is a thing a ship can very well do without.

On the afternoon of the eighth the carpenter, a Norwegian named Halvorsen, a slow, reliable man with a beard like oakum, had his left hand crushed between the pump-brake and the fife-rail when she gave one of her jerks. He did not cry out; he looked at it for some time, as though it belonged to someone else and he was wondering whom to return it to, and then he went aft to the captain, who set two fingers and bound the hand up and sent him to his bunk with a tot of rum. So the sounding of the well fell to somebody else, and the captain, who had a sense of fitness in small things, gave it to our senior apprentice.

His name was Pascoe. He was a Cornishman, from somewhere near Falmouth, sixteen years old, in the third year of his indentures, with a long serious face that the wind made raw and a habit of standing very straight when spoken to, as if straightness were a thing he had been told to keep in a dry place. He was a good boy. I say that now, and I said it then, and I must ask you to believe that it was true, because nothing that follows makes it any less true. He knew his work. He could hand, reef and steer as well as any man in the forecastle, and he had a way of repeating an order back, quietly, under his breath, as if to fix it in himself, which I liked. The captain showed him the rod and the notches, though he knew them already, and said, "End of every watch, Pascoe. Read it true and chalk it up," and Pascoe said, "End of every watch, sir. Read it true," and went forward with the rod over his shoulder like a boy carrying a fishing-pole.

He sounded at four in the afternoon and at eight, and again at midnight, and his figures were good; I checked the eight o'clock one myself without telling him, and it was exact to the half-inch. We pumped. She held. At midnight it was sixteen inches and we pumped her to ten, and the second mate, Mr. Ince, took the deck, and I went below with my sea-boots on and slept, as one sleeps in a gale, by a kind of agreement with oneself not to notice anything short of the masts going.

At two Mr. Ince had the boy sound again, and it was eighteen inches, which was more than it should have been, but not so much more as to be a fact; and he manned the pumps and brought her down to twelve. I learned this afterwards. I came on deck at four.

You must understand what the deck of that ship was at four o'clock that morning, or nothing I say will have any weight. It was black, with that particular blackness of a winter gale at sea, in which the only light is the faint grey of broken water, so that you see the seas by their crests and not by their bodies, and they seem to come at you out of nothing. The wind had gone, if anything, a point more westerly, and she was taking the seas a little on the bow and shipping them green into the waist, where they ran from rail to rail in a flood that would take a man off his feet and wash him into the lee scuppers, or over, if he was unlucky and not holding on. Lifelines were rigged fore and aft. To go from the poop to the pump-well at the mainmast you went down the poop ladder into that, and timed your run between two seas, and got your arm round the mast before the third came; and then you had to stand there with your back to the weather and the line in your hands and feel for the sounding-pipe, which had a brass cap you must unscrew with fingers that had stopped belonging to you, and drop the rod, and wait, and draw it up, and then come back with it to the binnacle lamp to read it, for no lantern would live in the waist that night. It was a thing to be done. It was not a thing anybody wanted to do.

I came up the companion and Mr. Ince gave me the course and the sail and the state of things in about twenty words, and said, "The boy's gone to sound," and went below. I stood by the weather rail of the poop with the helmsman behind me and looked at nothing. My eyes had not yet made their peace with the dark. And presently, in perhaps four minutes, perhaps less, Pascoe came up the lee poop ladder with the rod on its line, and stood straight, and said, "Eighteen inches, sir. Same as before."

"Very good," I said. "Chalk it up."

He went to the board by the cabin door, under the break of the poop, where there was a little shelter and the gleam of the binnacle lamp, and I heard the chalk squeak, and he went below to his bunk; and I stood my watch.

Now I will tell you what I knew, and when I knew it, because that is the whole of this story, and the rest is only pumping.

I knew, at the moment he spoke, that he had come up the lee ladder. The lee ladder, not the weather one. There is no reason in seamanship why a man coming aft from the mainmast should use one ladder rather than the other in a heavy sea, for both were swept; but I had stood on that poop through forty hours of that gale, and I knew, as you know the sounds of your own house at night, where the boy's boots had been. He had not come aft along the lifeline from the mainmast. He had come up out of the lee of the deckhouse, where there is a corner between the galley and the half-deck door in which a man may crouch out of the worst of the water and the whole of the wind. I knew it in my body, the way you know a step is missing in the dark before your foot has found the gap. And I said, "Very good. Chalk it up."

I have thought about that since more than about anything else I did at sea, and I have not been able to make it into anything better than it was. It was not that I trusted him; I had checked his eight o'clock figure without telling him, which is not trust. It was not that I was cold, or tired, or that the sea was too heavy for me to go forward myself; I would go forward myself within two hours, and did. It was that I had come on deck to begin my watch, and eighteen inches was a figure I could begin a watch with. It was the figure I wanted. The boy had brought it to me as a dog brings back the stick you threw, and I took it from his mouth and did not look at it, because looking at it would have been a kind of work, and the work would have been the beginning of a different watch from the one I meant to have. That is all. I should like to say it was a temptation, which would at least give it a certain dignity. It was not even that. It was a sort of comfortable deafness, which came over me for the space of three words, and passed off, and left the three words standing in the log, in my hand, at four o'clock: Well sounded, 18 in.

Of the boy I can tell you less, because I was not inside him, and he never told me. I think he had gone forward meaning to sound. I think he had got as far as the lee of the house and seen the waist full of water, white and roaring under the rail, and stood in that corner, waiting for a smooth that did not come; and that in the waiting it had seemed to him that he knew the figure already, that the ship had been eighteen inches at two and nothing had changed, that he could feel nothing different through his feet; and that the knowledge he believed he had was so nearly as good as the knowledge the rod would give him that the difference was not worth a man's life. I think it seemed to him that he was being sensible. Nobody had ever told him that the sea does not take any notice of what a man believes himself to know. That is a thing one is not told. One finds it out, and the finding out is the whole of one's education, and no indentures will give it to you.

She was heavy by half-past five. A ship that is making water does not tell you in any manner a landsman would understand; she simply begins to be a little less herself. She rose to the seas a fraction late. She hung at the end of her roll for a breath longer before she came back, and came back without quite her old spite, and the water she shipped went off her decks more slowly, as if she were reluctant to part with it. I stood at the rail and felt this through the soles of my boots, and I told myself that the wind had shifted, or that a sea had taken her awkwardly, and then I stopped telling myself anything, and took the second rod from its beckets under the poop, and the lantern from the binnacle-box, and went down the weather ladder into the waist.

I will not make anything of getting to the mainmast. I was swept once, and fetched up against the pump with my arm round it and my ribs complaining, and got the cap off the pipe, and dropped the rod. It came up wet to within two inches of the fourth foot-mark. Three feet ten inches. I sounded again, to be sure, and it was the same, and the lantern went out while I looked at it, and I stood there in the dark with the wet rod in my hand and the water roaring past my knees and understood that I had been standing my watch for an hour and a half on a figure that did not exist.

I called all hands. There is nothing to tell about the next six hours except that we pumped. We pumped in two spells, the watch below and the watch on deck, at the two pumps by the mainmast, swinging the brakes up and down with the sea coming over us, and the clank of the pumps went on under everything, under the wind, under the crash of the seas, with the stubborn regularity of a thing that has been forbidden to stop. Halvorsen came up with his hand in a bundle and worked the brake one-handed until I sent him below, and he came up again. The cook brought coffee in a bucket. Pascoe was on the lee brake of the after pump with three men, and I saw his face in the grey, when the grey came, and it was the face of a boy who has worked out a sum. He said nothing, and pumped. By noon we had her down to two feet and holding, and the captain, who had been on deck since six, without oilskins, in an old pilot-cloth coat that was black with water, looked at the sky to windward and decided we should not bear up for Ferrol, and we did not.

It was in the afternoon, when the watches were divided again and she was holding her own at about twenty inches, that he sent for me to the cabin, and put the log open on the table between us.

Captain Tolley was a man of sixty, short, thick, with a face so weathered that it had passed beyond expression into a kind of geography, and he was deaf in the left ear from a gun accident in his youth, so that he turned the right side of his head to you when you spoke, and seemed always to be listening for something just over your shoulder. He did not raise his voice, ever. I never heard him swear. He put one finger, with a broken nail, beside the entry for four o'clock.

"Mr. Brearley," he said. "This is your hand."

"Yes, sir."

"Eighteen inches at four. Three foot ten at half-past five. That is a leak of a foot and a half in the hour, Mr. Brearley. That is a sprung plank, or a butt started. That is a matter for the owners' surveyor at Valparaiso, and the underwriters, and very likely for the Board. They will open her up looking for it." He waited. "Halvorsen has been round the hold with a lantern on the rails, as far as he could get. He can find nothing new."

He did not ask me anything. He did not have to. He sat with his right ear turned towards me and his finger on the figure, and the ship groaned round us, and the clank of the pumps came faintly down through the deck, and I understood that he knew, and that he was not going to say it, because it was not his to say. It was mine. The log was in my hand. The figure was sworn to in my hand. Whatever had gone wrong between the half-deck and the poop ladder at four o'clock that morning had come to its end in me, and stopped there, as a current stops in the last link of a chain; and the boy, asleep in his bunk with his raw hands under his chin, was a thing I had already been responsible for when I said "Very good," and had not known it.

"The well was not sounded at four, sir," I said.

He took his finger away. "Who reported it?"

"I received the report," I said, "without looking at it."

He considered this. I do not think he had any doubt who had made the report; there was only one person aboard who sounded the well. But I had not given him the name, and he did not ask for it again. He took the pen from the rack and dipped it and handed it to me, and I wrote in the margin, small, as an alteration in a log must be made, that the entry of four o'clock was in error and the well not sounded at that hour, and I put my initials and the date, and he blotted it and closed the book.

"She is a tight ship," he said, after a while. "A tight old ship. She has always made a bit of water in a seaway. I told the owners so in the Tees." He was looking at the closed book. "Two foot and more in an hour and a half. I thought we had lost her, Mr. Brearley. For a quarter of an hour this morning I believed it."

That was all he said. He never spoke of it again, to me or, so far as I know, to anyone. The entry went to the owners with the rest of the log at the end of the voyage, and the marine superintendent, a gentleman with side-whiskers and a gold chain, asked me about it in his office in Sunderland the following spring, and I told him what I had written, and he made a note, and I believe the note is in a drawer somewhere still. It did me no good. I do not think it did me as much harm as it should have.

Pascoe I never spoke to about it. He sounded the well every watch for the rest of the passage, until Halvorsen's hand was healed off the Plate, and I did not check him again; there was no need. He would come up the weather ladder, always the weather ladder, whatever the sea, and he would not say the figure. He would hold up the rod to me, with the wet line on it, and wait, standing straight, until I had taken the lantern and looked at the notch with my own eyes; and only then, when I had read it, would he say it aloud, as if confirming an order he had been given.

I saw him once more, years afterwards, on the quay at Cardiff, in a bowler hat, with a mate's certificate in his pocket and a berth in a tramp steamer; a big quiet man by then, still very straight. We shook hands and talked of the Agnes Wardle, which had been sold to the Norwegians and lost with all hands in the Skagerrak, and of Captain Tolley, who was dead. Neither of us spoke of the ninth of November. When we parted he went off along the quay towards his ship, and I watched him stop at the head of the gangway, where the bosun was waiting for him with something in his hand, and take it, and turn it to the light. It was a sounding-rod, I think; or it may have been anything. But he held it up and looked along it for a long time before he went aboard, and the bosun stood and waited for him to finish.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem septimum decimum Kalendās Novembrēs (16 October 2026), ā Iōsēphō Conradō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Joseph Conrad, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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