While recently reading a first-person account of a circumnavigation, I was struck by the types of memories that the writer passed along. No waving palms and perfect trade winds here; just challenges, difficulties, and surprises—a few brought about by what he admits were episodes of bad judgment when he allowed himself to become exhausted.
Nick Nicholson’s honest report of personal responsibility, successful and otherwise, was refreshing in a time when the news is dominated by claims of victimhood. The common wisdom seems to be that our world is filled with hostile forces from which we cannot escape under our own power. The current trend of published conversations among sailors includes tales of ship captains dumping containers overboard into our paths, of whales assaulting keels, of commercial sponsors spoiling our races, and of forecasters fouling up weather data. To believe all this, you’d think sailors were powerless, innocent victims.
As any responsible grown-up knows, while luck is always a factor, and the world can be a dangerous place, we retain free will and the ability to affect our own fortunes. That is the assumption behind the following verse from “The Officer’s Creed,” an old poem by a Scots mariner that collects some rules of thumb:
See your course is always clear,
Nothing then you’ll have to fear.
Strive to keep a level head,
Mind your lights, lookout, and lead.
Line 3, about striving to keep a level head
—that’s the tricky part. Yes, it helps to have the orderly ship’s routines proposed in the other lines, but it also helps to be sane
—and that means being healthy and well-rested. Wet, cold, sleepy people panic and make bad decisions.
Unlevel heads play a part in many disasters at sea. In my book After the Storm is the story of the wreck of the ship Elizabeth within miles of her destination while carrying the American writer Margaret Fuller and her family back home to America from Italy in 1850. Running before a strong wind—a hurricane in fact— into the shallow funnel leading to New York Harbor, she grounded and broke up after her captain, Henry Bangs, made a number of careless errors. Among them, he set his course relative to only one aid to navigation, an especially bright light on the New Jersey shore. Neglecting to “mind his lead,” he double-checked his position only once with a single depth sounding. And, amazingly, just as his landfall was approaching, he went to his cabin and fell asleep.
 |
| "Bangs lacked the good judgment that would have forced him to check for errors" |
|
Bangs was awakened by the roar of breakers as the
Elizabeth sluiced through the surf onto a bar off Fire Island, 50 miles from his presumed position and near a lighthouse with the same characteristics as the Jersey light. The ship came to a wrenching stop and soon fell apart, taking with her Margaret Fuller and her family, while Bangs survived.
What happened? The first issue is not so much that Bangs made those errors. More important, he lacked the good judgment that would have forced him to check for them. Navigation offers many opportunities for mistakes, and also many opportunities for identifying them. Alert minds in any activity observe the carpenter’s rule, “measure twice, cut once.” (Redundancy is an excellent reason for navigating simultaneously using two methods, for example, dead reckoning and GPS.) But Henry Bangs, with his eye on what he thought was that Jersey lighthouse, took only one sounding, even as he was racing into one of the most dangerous corners on the Atlantic Coast.
Bangs was overconfident, no question. He bet his whole future on that single lighthouse. There are occasions when even the most cautious navigator is like a teenager prowling a shopping mall for a date, eager to fall in love with the first boy or girl—or aid to navigation—that appears on the horizon. At his age and experience, Bangs should long before have flushed the romance from his system, but somehow his judgment failed him.
That “somehow” was exhaustion. Henry Bangs lost his “level head” by allowing himself to become worn out. At just the moment when he should have been on the bridge, he was fast asleep in his cabin. True, he had been under considerable pressure in a long voyage wracked by illness, crew changes, and bad weather. Everybody was eager to get to shore. Add to those strains the pressures of the landfall itself
—the most dangerous part of any voyage. Anybody would feel strain under such circumstances. The challenge is how to keep that strain from scrambling judgment. The first step is to be rested.
Having worn himself out, Henry Bangs lacked the power to think clearly. He suspended the fate of his ship and his crew and passengers on the fragile thread of hopeful thinking, which is the last thing that anybody should rely on in such circumstances. Bangs, in short, was no victim. His and his ship’s lives were in his own power to save, and the same can be said of all of us.
Connect with Facebook
