He waved his hand as much as to say: It's all in the day's work.
But then, abruptly, as if making up his mind:

"I'll tell you. Towards the last I used to shut myself up in my
berth and cry."

"Cry?"
"Shed tears," he explained briefly, and rolled up the chart.

I can answer for it, he was a good man - as good as ever stepped
upon a ship's deck - but he could not bear the feeling of a dead

ship under his feet: the sickly, disheartening feeling which the
men of some "overdue" ships that come into harbour at last under a

jury-rig must have felt, combated, and overcome in the faithful
discharge of their duty.

XX.
It is difficult for a seaman to believe that his stranded ship does

not feel as unhappy at the unnatural predicament of having no water
under her keel as he is himself at feeling her stranded.

Stranding is, indeed, the reverse of sinking. The sea does not
close upon the water-logged hull with a sunny ripple, or maybe with

the angry rush of a curling wave, erasing her name from the roll of
living ships. No. It is as if an invisible hand had been

stealthily uplifted from the bottom to catch hold of her keel as it
glides through the water.

More than any other event does stranding bring to the sailor a
sense of utter and dismalfailure. There are strandings and

strandings, but I am safe to say that 90 per cent. of them are
occasions in which a sailor, without dishonour, may well wish

himself dead; and I have no doubt that of those who had the
experience of their ship taking the ground, 90 per cent. did

actually for five seconds or so wish themselves dead.
"Taking the ground" is the professional expression for a ship that

is stranded in gentle circumstances. But the feeling is more as if
the ground had taken hold of her. It is for those on her deck a

surprising sensation. It is as if your feet had been caught in an
imponderable snare; you feel the balance of your body threatened,

and the steady poise of your mind is destroyed at once. This
sensation lasts only a second, for even while you stagger something

seems to turn over in your head, bringing uppermost the mental
exclamation, full of astonishment and dismay, "By Jove! she's on

the ground!"
And that is very terrible. After all, the only mission of a

seaman's calling is to keep ships' keels off the ground. Thus the
moment of her stranding takes away from him every excuse for his

continued existence. To keep ships afloat is his business; it is
his trust; it is the effectiveformula of the bottom of all these

vague impulses, dreams, and illusions that go to the making up of a
boy's vocation. The grip of the land upon the keel of your ship,

even if nothing worse comes of it than the wear and tear of tackle
and the loss of time, remains in a seaman's memory an indelibly

fixed taste of disaster.
"Stranded" within the meaning of this paper stands for a more or

less excusable mistake. A ship may be "driven ashore" by stress of
weather. It is a catastrophe, a defeat. To be "run ashore" has

the littleness, poignancy, and bitterness of human error.
XXI.

That is why your "strandings" are for the most part so unexpected.
In fact, they are all unexpected, except those heralded by some

short glimpse of the danger, full of agitation and excitement, like
an awakening from a dream of incredible folly.

The land suddenly at night looms up right over your bows, or
perhaps the cry of "Broken water ahead!" is raised, and some long

mistake, some complicatededifice of self-delusion, over-
confidence, and wrong reasoning is brought down in a fatal shock,

and the heart-searing experience of your ship's keel scraping and
scrunching over, say, a coral reef. It is a sound, for its size,

far more terrific to your soul than that of a world coming
violently to an end. But out of that chaos your belief in your own

prudence and sagacity reasserts itself. You ask yourself, Where on
earth did I get to? How on earth did I get there? with a

conviction that it could not be your own act, that there has been
at work some mysteriousconspiracy of accident; that the charts are

all wrong, and if the charts are not wrong, that land and sea have
changed their places; that your misfortune shall for ever remain

inexplicable, since you have lived always with the sense of your
trust, the last thing on closing your eyes, the first on opening

them, as if your mind had kept firm hold of your responsibility
during the hours of sleep.

You contemplate mentally your mischance, till little by little your
mood changes, cold doubt steals into the very marrow of your bones,

you see the inexplicable fact in another light. That is the time
when you ask yourself, How on earth could I have been fool enough

to get there? And you are ready to renounce all belief in your
good sense, in your knowledge, in your fidelity, in what you

thought till then was the best in you, giving you the daily bread
of life and the moral support of other men's confidence.

The ship is lost or not lost. Once stranded, you have to do your
best by her. She may be saved by your efforts, by your resource

and fortitudebearing up against the heavy weight of guilt and
failure. And there are justifiable strandings in fogs, on

uncharted seas, on dangerous shores, through treacherous tides.
But, saved or not saved, there remains with her commander a

distinct sense of loss, a flavour in the mouth of the real, abiding
danger that lurks in all the forms of human existence. It is an

acquisition, too, that feeling. A man may be the better for it,
but he will not be the same. Damocles has seen the sword suspended

by a hair over his head, and though a good man need not be made
less valuable by such a knowledge, the feast shall not henceforth

have the same flavour.
Years ago I was concerned as chief mate in a case of stranding

which was not fatal to the ship. We went to work for ten hours on
end, laying out anchors in readiness to heave off at high water.

While I was still busy about the decks forward I heard the steward
at my elbow saying: "The captain asks whether you mean to come in,

sir, and have something to eat to-day."
I went into the cuddy. My captain sat at the head of the table

like a statue. There was a strange motionlessness of everything in
that pretty little cabin. The swing-table which for seventy odd

days had been always on the move, if ever so little, hung quite
still above the soup-tureen. Nothing could have altered the rich

colour of my commander's complexion, laid on generously by wind and
sea; but between the two tufts of fair hair above his ears, his

skull, generally suffused with the hue of blood, shone dead white,
like a dome of ivory. And he looked strangely untidy. I perceived

he had not shaved himself that day; and yet the wildest motion of
the ship in the most stormy latitudes we had passed through, never

made him miss one single morning ever since we left the Channel.
The fact must be that a commander cannot possibly shave himself

when his ship is aground. I have commanded ships myself, but I
don't know; I have never tried to shave in my life.

He did not offer to help me or himself till I had coughed markedly
several times. I talked to him professionally in a cheery tone,

and ended with the confident assertion:
"We shall get her off before midnight, sir."

He smiled faintly without looking up, and muttered as if to
himself:

"Yes, yes; the captain put the ship ashore and we got her off."
Then, raising his head, he attacked grumpily the steward, a lanky,

anxious youth with a long, pale face and two big front teeth.
"What makes this soup so bitter? I am surprised the mate can

swallow the beastly stuff. I'm sure the cook's ladled some salt
water into it by mistake."

The charge was so outrageous that the steward for all answer only
dropped his eyelids bashfully.

There was nothing the matter with the soup. I had a second
helping. My heart was warm with hours of hard work at the head of

a willing crew. I was elated with having handled heavy anchors,
cables, boats without the slightest hitch; pleased with having laid