Of seagulls and the Flying Dutchman

‘Ode to the Sea’

Being a descendant from a long line of mariners, I could say that I’ve got seawater running through my veins. The love we all have towards the vast blue planes of the world is indelible. The great oceans: the Atlantic, the Pacific, the Arctic, the Indian Ocean and the Antarctic, and many seas form part of our life. 

The time spent as a young child with my maternal grandfather, a retired sea-captain, and my great-grandfather (a retired mariner) was a magical world of stories and tales, now perhaps long forgotten. 

Stories by my great-grandfather, telling me of ships being dragged to the bottom of the sea by monsters with huge tentacles, scaring the life out of the mariners of old (I’m referring to the 1800s). We know now there are indeed giant squid with huge tentacles and compared with the smaller sailing ships of the 1800s, they must have looked monstrous.  They may well have caught hold of small ships, who can tell? Ships that went down in those days and before had no way of communicating, and it was only around the time they were expected in port that people felt something had happened. Many lost their life at sea.

There were stories of a more ghostly nature…about the Flying Dutchman. My great-grandfather told me that both he and his father had come across this doomed ship on a very foggy night when they couldn’t see what was ahead until they heard a ship’s bell and a vague shape was emerging through the fog. As she came closer, they saw the deck was empty, and she navigated as if by her own will.  Not a mariner who didn’t sink to his knees praying to God. Meeting the Flying Dutchman usually meant the ship encountering her would be doomed and none of her crew would survive. 

We may say now that there is no such thing as a ghost ship, or that it must have been a natural phenomenon, but who can tell what is between heaven and earth that remains unseen to most. Those mariners of old, the ones who lived to tell what had happened, knew that they had escaped danger. 

Catching or killing an albatross would cause a certain doom. No mariner of old in his right mind would even consider doing this.

Those of you who have been to a beach may have seen seagulls accompanying ships up to a certain point at sea, then return to shore. It is said that these are the souls of mariners who once drowned at sea. They have to return to sea for such is their love but they cannot stay there for long and must return to shore. 

That love was and is in each one of us. Nothing smelled better and caused more longing than the smell of salt water, of ropes wet from seawater, and long ago, of tar. The sound of a foghorn or the ship’s bell, indicating the time by being struck every 30 minutes up to 8 bells (6 periods of 4 hours). One bell at 12:30hrs, two bells at 13:00hrs and so on till 8 bells at 16:00hrs. Then it started again at 1 bell. 

It should come as no surprise to those who know how much I regret the loss of historic buildings, the loss of tangible history, that my heart lies with old ships. Ships with a Bridge where the wooden floor creaked, with nautical instruments like a Telegraph set in brass, a Compass, often in a beautiful wooden case. An engine room with huge pipes, valves and flanges. It was a magical place for me to play (it wasn’t allowed, but who could resist a little girl with blond curly hair saying “oh please?”). Nowadays, on modern ships the engineers and Bridge officers are more like IT staff.

Charles Baudelaire, famous French author, poet, wrote in his ‘Les Fleurs du Mal’ (The Flowers of Evil):

“Homme libre, toujours tu chériras la mer!
La mer est ton miroir; tu contemples ton âme
Dans le déroulement infini de sa lame,
Et ton esprit n'est pas un gouffre moins amer.”

Translated by Roy Campbell in his ‘Poems of Baudelaire’:

“Free man, you'll always love the sea — for this, 
That it's a mirror, where you see your soul 
In its eternal waves that chafe and roll; 
Nor is your soul less bitter an abyss.”

And so it is, we’ve always loved the sea, from the grey North Sea to the blue Mediterranean, from the cold Arctic to the warm Pacific. Wherever we are, there is always that infinite longing and belonging. The sea is our home.

Grateful to Duane Toops who captured this poem so beautifully in his collage. It’s an honour to work with him.