IN discussing my own poems, I shall try to answer some of the questions most frequently asked by the students whose fate it is to have to wrestle with them—a situation I would have foreseen with horror in the days when I toiled at school myself, cursing the authors of the set pieces. It may be taken as a sign of increased tolerance, as well as of the lively interest in Australian writing now kindled in the schools, that I receive several hundred letters of inquiry from school students every year, all couched in the politest and even kindliest terms.
It is difficult for any writer to discuss his own verse, mainly because of the problem of deciding where the boundary lies between the personal associations and meanings which certain words produce in him and those which they produce in the reader. In any case, the very act of analysing emotional documents composed twenty or thirty years ago is often impossible for the author—he may feel that he is in the position of a palaeontologist asked to report on a specimen of fossilized fern.
The sequence of poems called “Five Visions of Captain Cook” is, I think, quite straightforward in its intention and expression. It could be described as a sort of Identikit likeness, made by superimposing a number of aspects of Cook, seen through the eyes of various men who sailed with him, thus approaching perhaps a total portrait.
The first vision of Cook is that of the ordinary seaman who manned his ships on the three great voyages. The second is that of some of the officers who served under him.
The third is the view of history (denoted by the time-measuring instruments in Cook’s cabin). The fourth is that of some of the midshipmen. The fifth is the vision of Cook which remained in the memory of one of his companions many years after his death.
The whole work owes a great debt to a remarkable man whom I was once privileged to know and visit, Captain Francis Bayldon, who lived at Darling Point in the ‘20s and who died in 1948. Captain Bayldon was a sea-captain himself, if not of the “powder days” at least of the clipper ship days of last century. From sail he transferred to steam in 1901 and commanded many Burns Philp vessels in the Pacific until 1910, charting previously unsurveyed anchor-ages for the Hydrographic Office. In 1910 he founded the Sydney Nautical School (in which hundreds of Australian merchant service officers have been trained). He was an authority on the history of Pacific navigation, especially on Torres and Cook, and his reconstruction of Cook’s Endeavour was published as a plate. But above all he had a magnificent nautical library, more than a thousand books about the sea and seamen, logs, journals, learned papers, instruction manuals, maps and charts, many of them exceedingly rare and valuable. Fortunately the Mitchell Library acquired them after his death.
Since he was my wife’s uncle, I was allowed to browse through this collection on my weekly visits. Over a glass of sherry I was encouraged to ask questions, and his enthusiasm, his scholarly gusto and his astonishing knowledge of unfamiliar details soon infected me with his own worship of Cook. Indeed, all that I have written about Captain Cook I got from Captain Bayldon. The Five Visions, rough and incomplete as they seem to me still, are merely fragments of the image he built for me.
In part 1, there are two principal themes—the contrast between the old kind of sea captain and the modern kind, and the crucial decision which brought Cook to the coast of Australia.
The ship’s captain of the days of sail and “powder” (gun-powder) was required to have some working knowledge of such things as mathematics, astronomy, navigation, chart-reading, sight-taking, foreign languages and elementary medicine, attainments which made him seem an almost supernatural being in the eyes of his crew, most of whom were unable to read or write. The simple sailors under his command did what they were bidden, sailed where they were taken, ate and drank what they were given, blindly confident that the magic of their captain (as it must have seemed to them) would preserve their lives from evil spirits, monsters and spells (some of them still believed in sea-serpents) and convey them safely across unmapped seas and unknown lands.
Captains like this were indeed “daemons in wigs”, navigating by signs in the stars which they could read as easily as books, though to ordinary men the sky seemed just a tangle of constellations. They gave their crews medicaments and drugs against disease (in Cook’s case against scurvy), which seemed nonsense to the sailors but which they swallowed with childish faith. The success of such commanders depended above all on their personal qualities, their individual resources of courage, nerve, imagination, shrewdness and self-confidence.
“No laws of schoolbook steam” expresses this idea. The speed of a passage by sail (and in consequence its profitability to the owners of the ship) were often determined by the captain’s daring and skill in such things as putting on full sail in a high wind and knowing when it could be done and at what risk. In modern days of steam and oil, the captain is limited by the purely mechanical factor of the ship’s engines and their capacities. The boiler-plates will take just so much pressure before blowing up. There is no call, therefore, for the same kind of personal nerve or judgement in deciding what sails to use or risks to run. The modern skipper is often an “executive of company rules”, bound not to take any undue chances.
Thus we have two aspects of the old sailing-ship captain. (1) In the eyes of his crew, a magically gifted being whose orders (daft as they might seem) could save their lives. (2) A man on whose personal characteristics of audacity and self-confidence the success of the enterprise often depended. This was the kind of captain Cook was, and the first section of part 1 draws a distinction between the “powder days” and the modern reign of “company rules”.
In the second section, we have Cook coming to the Coral Sea, at the north of the Australian coastline, after his voyage to New Zealand. This was the great turning-point for earlier explorers who depended on sails. If they went west, they turned against the prevailing winds, with no indication of how long their provisions would need to last, or what lay in store for them, or whether indeed they would ever come back. It was in every respect a “passage into the dark”. But if they turned north, into Torres Strait, the winds would be with them all their way home through the Indian Ocean.
It was a fateful decision to have to make, and most of those who confronted it—including Tasman and Bougainville—had chosen the path of prudence by sailing north. Bougainville recorded that he had heard “the voice of God” advising him to take the safe way home to the north, away from the “dead lee shore”. But Captain Cook, at these crossroads of navigation and history, determined to sail west instead of north, “into the devil’s mouth”, and so came to the coastline of eastern Australia—and so, 160 years later, I was able to write this poem.
The historical facts to which part 2 alludes are verified by the journals, logs, diaries and letters of Cook and many of the people who accompanied him.
“Cook sailed at night.” Usually, in strange waters, particularly in such an area of hidden reefs and unsounded depths, sailing was done in daylight only. But such was Cook’s confidence in his navigation and seamanship that he kept his vessel sailing in darkness as well. No doubt he felt that he had only a limited time for exploration and did not wish to waste a minute.
The episode in which the ship narrowly missed hitting a coral reef while officers stood on deck taking their sights for longitude has been described by Captain Cook himself. The greatest danger of sailing in such waters was the risk of a current driving a ship on to a sharp reef with no wind to take it off. The Australian sailor-writer Alan Villiers has written of this incident: “The little ship drifted until she was only the trough of the sea away from a horrible reef over which the surf boiled and the great Coral Sea rollers smashed in fury. A few yards more and not a soul aboard nor an undamaged plank of the ship would have survived.”
This is what Cook wrote: “The same sea that washed the side of the ship rose in a breaker prodigiously high the very next time it did arise, so that between us and destruction was only a dismal valley, the breadth of one wave, and even now no ground could be felt with 120 fathoms. Messrs Green, Clerke and Forwood were engaged in taking a sight for the longitude.”
Alan Villiers remarked: “For three of the most important officers in the ship calmly to proceed with the accumulation of precise data to work out laboriously some reasonable approximation of the longitude of the ship, when that same ship was five minutes from one of the nastiest pieces of reef in the Coral Sea, and when the great swell was edging them to their deaths—this is on a level with the great moments of the sea. Messrs Green, Clerke and Forwood were perfectly aware of the danger the ship was in because, before they had the data for their sights, the foam from the reef was making a fine spray on their instruments.”
In part 3, the allusion is to an aspect of the second voyage which would have made it memorable in history even if nothing else had been achieved. This time Cook took with him two recently invented chronometers, installed by the Admiralty for a trial of the new method of discovering longitude. Thus he was, in effect, a test-pilot trying out new equipment.
In the episode described in part 2, the officers used the “lunar” method, involving complicated calculations, which was only a little less unsatisfactory than the even older method of the log line. Sir Isaac Newton suggested a new way, by the comparison of two clocks, one marked Greenwich time and the other the local time by the sun at sea. The great problem was to construct a clock which would keep absolutely accurate time through the vast range of temperature and humidity of a sea-voyage.
Two famous English watchmakers supplied the chronometers for this historic experiment. One was made by John Arnold, a friend of Sir Joseph Banks, the other by Larcum Kendal from a prototype invented by John Harrison. After both had been tested for many months of Cook’s voyage, it was found that Kendal’s chronometer lost time (7 minutes, 45 seconds in three years) while Arnold’s gained time. For the purpose of the poem, it is imagined therefore that Kendal lived in the past and Arnold in the future.
In part 4, the vision of Captain Cook on a workaday occasion during his third voyage is derived from some verses written by one of the midshipmen aboard, later to become Captain Trevenen. I was able to see a copy of this manuscript among the treasures of Captain Bayldon’s library. The phrase “cats to catch mice” was one of Cook’s favourite admonitions to the lively boys who were his midshipmen. It is quoted by Trevenen with the explanation that the captain frequently told them that he didn’t mind how much they kicked up their heels provided they did their duties first—his actual words were “my cats have to catch mice before they get any milk”.
So, after their routines had been finished, these young schoolboy-officers, to whom the whole voyage with all its perils and hardships was a glorious adventure, were often able to go with Cook in one of the ship’s boats when he made small excursions, noting details for his charts and getting fresh meat for the galley from birds and animals ashore.
The account of Cook in part 5 comes in substance from the manuscript journal kept by Captain Alexander Home. I had the fortune to see a copy of it in Captain Bayldon’s library. Like Captain Trevenen, Alexander Home had been one of Cook’s company on his third voyage. Later, after many years at sea, he became almost totally blind and retired on a pension of 2s. 6d. a day to his home in Berwickshire in Scotland. Although Captain Home did not witness the affray in which Cook lost his life, he wrote a narrative of it soon after the event, from statements made by those who had been ashore at the time. The references to Cook (such as his warning to deserters that he would get them back eventually “dead or alive”) are almost word for word from Home’s journal.
The line “Greenwich Hospital for Cook” alludes to the Admiralty’s offer to give Cook an administrative post at the home for naval veterans, Greenwich Hospital. This was at a time when his proposals for further voyages were becoming a nuisance to the lethargic sea lords. For Cook, then aged 47, it was a dreadful vision of stagnation and he was reluctant to accept the offer. It would, indeed, have been like putting a seagull in a birdcage.
The details of the killing of Captain Cook follow the accepted version given in many descriptions of the scene. It is a fact that Cook was stabbed with an English knife that had been traded to the Hawaiian natives only a few days before.
Many hundreds of years ago, in an Arabian fairytale, a man dipped his head into a basin of magic water. In the few moments between submerging his face and withdrawing it, he dreamed that he had sailed on seven voyages, was cast up in a shipwreck, captured by pirates, discovered a diamond as big as a turkey’s egg, married a princess, fought in many battles, and was brought to execution.
After he had lived this whole lifetime, he opened his eyes and shook the water from his face and found himself amongst a laughing group of people, with everything around him exactly as it had been when he had dipped his head into the water five seconds before.
I think the point of this story is that, although the man’s lifetime under water had been a vision, the experiences which he suffered during it, the miseries and delights, the fears and triumphs, were as actual as those of his real life. He had, in fact, lived an entire existence on another timescale.
This is partly the idea of “Five Bells”, a poem which suggests that the whole span of a human life can be imagined, and even vicariously experienced, in a flash of thought as brief as the interval between the strokes of a bell. “Five Bells” can be described as a kind of meditation at night, while looking at Sydney Harbour and hearing the cold fact of time, five bells or half-past ten, rung from a ship at its moorings below.
But in the three seconds or so which this mechanical process involves, between the double ding-ding and the single ding of the ship’s bell, a sequence from a very different time-scale is interposed, compressing about thirty years of human life into the three seconds. For this reason the words “five bells” are repeated three times during the poem, to remind the reader that time, on the other scale, has occupied only a few moments, that the tongue of the bell is still moving and the sound is still suspended in the air.
The poem therefore is on two planes. First it attempts to epitomize the life of a specific human being, but fundamentally it is an expression of the relativeness of “time”.
Considered in this light, the personal allusions are unimportant. However, so many students continue to inquire about the identity of “Joe” and the circumstances of his death that a little explanation may be justified.
The “dead man” whose life is re-lived “between the double and the single bell” was named Joe Lynch. He was a friend of my youth, a black-and-white artist of superb humour and talent whose work appeared in the ‘20s in many Australian periodicals and who was a member of the staffs of Smith’s Weekly and Melbourne Punch when I, too, worked for them. (He was a brother of the sculptor Frank, or “Guy”, Lynch, whose “Satyr” and “Australian Venus” were famous in the ‘30s. Frank Lynch was old-fashioned enough to believe that sculpture should primarily be a work of beauty rather than of scrap iron and wire, and as a consequence his magnificent Satyr now moulders in the cellars of the Sydney Art Gallery.)
One evening in the 1930s, Joe and half a dozen other artists and journalists left Circular Quay by ferry to go to a party of the north side of the Harbour. Joe sat on the lower deck-rail of the boat, clad in an ancient tattered raincoat, heavily laden with bottled beer in the pockets. There was a good deal of jollity until someone noticed that Joe had disappeared. The ferry hove to and there was a wide search, but no trace of Joe Lynch could be found. His body was never recovered and eventually he was presumed drowned.
There are a number of lines in “Five Bells” which seem to cause constant inquiries from students, and I shall try to explain some of them.
“… the Cross hangs upside-down in water.” This, of course, means the reflection of the Southern Cross constellation and is not (as one ingenious school-student suggested) an allusion to the lights of Kings Cross.
“Your journal with the sawn-off lock …” In his bedroom at a North Melbourne boarding-house in the days when he worked for Punch, Joe found a battered, moroccobound notebook, apparently the relic of some unknown lodger, and gave it to me for scribbling. It contained some pages of manuscript notes written by the lodger (or Joe) which, of course, I had really no right to see.
One of these entries is reproduced literally in “Five Bells”. Its misspellings (“photoes”, “differant”, “curioes”) give it, I think, a peculiarly haunting and convincing flavour. I imagine that Labassa, at the beginning of the extract, is the name of another Melbourne lodging-house and that the writer is describing his bedroom “at the top of the tower”. But for the purpose of the poem I have assumed that this is Joe’s own entry.
“We argued about blowing up the world.” Joe was a devout nihilist and frequently contended (over a pint of Victoria bitter) that the only remedy for the world’s disease was to blow it up and start afresh. He meant this literally and—long before the discovery of nuclear fission—conceived the notion of an explosive force that would destroy the entire globe at one go.
“Harbour-buoys/Tossing their fireballs wearily each to each.” No pun on “boys” is intended, as some critics have suggested, though there may have been a subconscious Empsonian instinct. It is an attempt to describe the Harbour navigation-lights, winking alternately on each side of the channel, so that it might appear that one was throwing a “fireball” to be caught by the other.
“Country Towns” is a small and simple Australian bucolic which requires (I hope) no elucidation. It refers to no country town specifically but is a composite of many which have seemed the same. Its period is fading, or perhaps has already vanished, since farmers today prefer motors to mares and buggy-wheels are seldom heard. However, it is possible that the last of the Hogans still manage a few supermarkets and that the playbills of the Great Golightly Family may still be found under a layer of posters advertising pop singers.
As a matter of accuracy, it might be mentioned that “locusts” should properly be called cicadas and that the “pepper-trees” are those feathery small trees, with bunches of red pellets, more scientifically known as Peruvian mastic.
“North Country” and “South Country” are located in the coastal areas north and south of Sydney, and the contrast is between the densely timbered forests of the north and the bare, rolling cattle-grazing hills of the south. In “North Country”, the phrase “bangled by greedy death” means “ringbarked”. Seven lines further down, “battue” is intended to suggest that the dismembered trunks of felled trees resemble the bodies of animals slaughtered in a game-shooting hunt or “battue”.
“William Street” is a sort of flashlight photograph of the swarming city channel that runs up the hill to Kings Cross, taken on a rainy night when the surface of the road is coated with a slick of reds and greens and whites reflected from the neon skysigns (the “red globes” and “pulsing arrows”).
Here, too, there have been inexorable changes since the poem was written. The old fish-shops and “21 meals for £1” cafes have given way to pizza-counters and American hamburger-bars, and second-hand clothes no longer hang in pawnshop windows. But the general reason for the poem remains, since it was intended as a defence of metropolitan fascinations against those who considered the city “ugly” and found beauty only in the outback.
“Sleep” is explained by its title. It imagines the nightly human mystery of going to sleep as a surrender to complete selflessness, in the form of a return to the unconsciousness of a child in its mother’s body. Thus the nature of sleeping is pictured as the oblivion of pre-life and that of awakening as birth itself.
Sleep, the state of unconsciousness, is personified as the mother addressing the child, the sleeper. The response “Yes, utterly,” comes from the sleeper—or child—consenting to the total immersion of “body and no-body, flesh and no-flesh” (that is to say, body and mind) within the enveloping ocean of unconsciousness.
Technically this poem is an experiment in the narcotic effect of the repetition of certain consonant-structures and vowel-sounds. The significant vowel-sound is the long “U” in such words and phrases as “bear you”, “estuary”, “carry you”, “ferry you”, “take you”, “receive you”, “consume you”, “engulf you”, “huge cave” and “huger waves”. There are also many internal rhymes and assonances such as “ferry” and “burial”, “cave”, “lave”, “waves”, “slumber”, “dumb”, “remorseless”, “forceps”, and so on.
“Beach Burial” comes from the period when Australian soldiers were fighting in the Western Desert of Egypt near El Alamein, where the German advance had been halted in 1942. Many of their camps were on the Mediterranean coast, and in the morning it was not uncommon to find the bodies of drowned men washed up on the beaches. They were buried in the sandhills under improvised crosses, identification usually being impossible. Most of them were sailors, some British, some German or Italian, some of them “neutrals”.
Many of the inquiries from students about this poem have asked the meaning of its last words “other front”. The superficial meaning, of course, is a military one. The verses were written at a time when there was pressure on the Allies to open a “second front” against the Germans.
However, there is a deeper implication which is really the theme of the poem. It is the idea that all men of all races, whether they fight with each other or not, are engaged together on the common “front” of humanity’s existence. The absolute fact of death unites them. Their hatreds, quarrels and wars should be dwarfed by the huger human struggle to survive against disease and cataclysms on this dangerous planet.
KENNETH SLESSOR