Essay
by Ian C. Smith
After landing an oarfish in Bass Strait…
…the turbulent stretch of water separating Tasmania from mainland Australia, without knowing what I had caught, I found information on it. I had throttled back in prismatic reflected light. An area of seaweed nearby, like an acre of brown carpet, had attracted me and an audience of mutton birds gossiping when I reeled in my most exotic catch. One and a half metres of thrashing iridescent muscle silenced the birds, its red sail undulating in fury or dread. Who knows? Kneeling below its head I pinned it to twist the hook out, a huge eye staring at me. It left a spine in me as I flipped it back over the gunwale.
Oarfish are rarely seen except when washed ashore dead, favour warm waters and deep holes, and make poor eating. Mine was a small specimen. I pictured this creature exploring Bass Strait’s numerous wrecks from the days of sail. Thinking of wrecks switches me onto how little I would know about them if not for books, and if not for my sister who died recently, teaching me how to read before I started school. Any books or articles about boats—mutinies, shipwrecks, piracy, discovery, disappearances—spark me. Conflict, trouble, conjecture over maps and charts, too. Reading about Jonathan Raban, a good friend of Robert Lowell, navigating his wooden ketch around the tricky British coastline, I travelled with him in my mind, as I do when reading books I love, but minus the danger and responsibility, the books’ chief attractions. I loved the section where Raban takes his tutor of twenty years earlier, Philip Larkin, to dinner. Larkin, dubious about Lebanese food, couldn’t pronounce falafel, but salvaged the evening with his mordant wit.
Near blind, as well as deaf, Larkin then drove Raban home, kangaroo-hopping through the city of Hull’s unemployed streets to his vessel moored in the Fish Dock, deserted since the end of the Icelandic cod wars but for loners who tackle northeast Britian’s foggy coastal currents. A two-yard ladder from the car park straight down to the deck loomed. This was a risk too far for the myopic Larkin, whose chosen words about love and beauty ever just beyond reach Raban—who also navigated a light craft down the busy Mississippi—believed braver than any mariner’s feats. Larkin’s time left was short, Raban’s seas and waterways still swelling in wait. Both gazed into the unknown’s dark ripples.
Love of hair-raising adventure, and material for his books, likely spurred Raban’s urge to test himself. This must have been shared by early mariners in their quests. The Pacific, its beauty and danger, beckoned them. A need of breadfruit to feed slaves was Bounty’s main purpose. Adding the necessary soupcon of imagination as devoted readers do, I devoured anything written about the Bounty mutiny as well as viewing the five movies. Thus, I pictured at Spithead on the U.K.’s south coast, where a few miserable scapegoat mutineers would eventually play out their final hours, a young midshipman rowing from the moored Bounty through the gathering dusk to meet his brother, Charles Christian, an East India Company’s respected ship’s surgeon. Enjoying peat smoke’s earthy scent of ancient moss airborne, his rhythmic stroking finished, he greeted Charles at the inn, Fletcher’s mocking tone familiar. Charles’ journey recently completed, his was delayed. They burned the candle quaffing ale, swapped news. That oarfish, also known as a Doomsday Fish due to its mythical reputation as a prognosticator of disaster, evolved far from Portsmouth but doom was appropriate there, then.
Charles, edgy, recounted a tale of mutiny on his recent voyage home to England. Gripping his brother’s muscular arm, he confessed his own implication in the crisis, describing vile abuse—a big no-no for officers—blows, loaded pistols, a terrible captain. Fletcher, always exuding confidence, allayed his older brother’s concern by using sentimental gossip about Cockermouth, their home patch where Wordsworth first attended school. He also mimicked his own ill-mannered martinet he had sailed with previously, who raged in a fool’s accent about incompetence. The brothers in their cups, their bond infrangible, laughed until it hurt before Charles vowed to remember Fletcher in prayer, their fond farewells lost forever to history like most words uttered. On Bounty anchored in the roadstead’s silence a sleeping soul might have cried out. Dream as premonition?
I learned of Bounty’s limp sails sighing in the Doldrums’ belt of calms before sudden squalls; ahead: zero latitude, imaginary line between polar extremes where harsh baptisms usually await in the crossing-the-line ceremony. South Seas palm trees in his mind’s eye, skylarking on deck to Michael Byrne’s sizzling fiddle, taking the piss out of that old nipcheese Bligh’s parsimony, reeling, sweat flying, Fletcher anticipated the tarring, the shaving, the acting, but not beyond that, not the fading echo of the last cannonade, and certainly not Bounty’s eventual death by arson in its moorage at Pitcairn Island. As for he and Bligh being the starring characters in all those movies? Well. The stilled ducking stool shadowed the yardarm, foreboding.
When Bligh and his crowded castaways endured their four-thousand-mile open boat voyage, soaked, often unable to lie down, with the exception of brief landfalls in Tofua and Australia—New Holland back then—death’s sour breath blowing them ever westward, they barely caught any fish. In those waters an oarfish, however unpalatable, would have provided valuable calories. Would any of them have known of its dire reputation? Or might a full-grown oarfish have lashed some hapless and shipless mariner overboard? A Mississippi River marine outfitter tried to interest Jonathan Raban in buying an electronic fish locater, but Raban was more concerned with surviving the turbid river’s wrath, its boiling current, as well as swanky towboats’ massive wash. Bligh could have used that fish locater, and a degree in psychology. Who knows what the doleful Larkin made of the need for breadfruit leading to such disaster? Batteries would have been handy, a microwave, too, to complement them and to augment what the sextant Fletcher, decency kicking in, gave in that mutiny’s irreversible last minutes. While no longer shipboard Bligh at least had a boat, the stout launch, a ketch, like Raban’s. Oceans, seas, rivers, bays and inlets. All that water, disturbed now. Threatening.
Editor’s notes—This wonderful essay made us reach for the Atlas for some of the geography. The Bass Strait, a former land bridge, lies between the Melbourne Coast of mainland Australia and Tasmania. Hull (Kingston-on-Hull) is a maritime town of Yorkshire, on England’s northeast coast; Portsmouth and Spithead lie on the country’s southern coast. The charmingly named Cockermouth is an inland English market town, just outside the Lake District in Cumbria, northeast England. And speaking of England, Philip Larkin wrote a rather sarcastic poem about British male fantasies called “Breadfruit.”
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