Kipling and the Sea Read online

  ANDREW LYCETT is the author of an acclaimed biography of Rudyard Kipling and also editor of our own successful anthology, Kipling Abroad (I.B.Tauris, 2010). As a former foreign correspondent, he has travelled widely and worked in most parts of the world written about by Kipling. His other books include the highly regarded lives of Ian Fleming, Dylan Thomas, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Wilkie Collins. He is a member of the Council of the Kipling Society and a Fellow of both the Royal Geographical Society and the Royal Society of Literature.

  Praise for Kipling Abroad

  ‘[Kipling] was one of the great travel writers . . . But despite his wonderful fluency, quality inevitably suffers with volume, making a selection such as this particularly valuable. This excellent selection shows us once again, if we were in any doubt, that this man really could write.’

  Jad Adams, Guardian

  ‘This perfect bedside book collects the most descriptive and revealing of Kipling’s travel writing, never before published in a single volume. Kipling comes across as an engaging travel companion – thoughtful, curious, acute – and a writer perfectly able to evoke and crystallise the sights, sounds and spirit of a place.’

  Clover Stroud, The Telegraph

  ‘Andrew Lycett has had the good idea of making a collection of Kipling’s travel writing . . . [he] has compiled a very enjoyable anthology. There is scarcely a single piece that isn’t worth reading. Kipling’s keen observation and gift for illuminating phrase are everywhere apparent and book will be welcomed by aficionados.’

  Allan Massie, Literary Review

  ‘Kipling’s biographer Andrew Lycett presents a useful anthology of the author’s travel writings, drawing on letters and journalism as well as on Kipling’s published books and poems.’

  London Review Bookshop

  rudyard kipling

  Kipling and the Sea

  Voyages and Discoveries from North Atlantic to South Pacific

  Introduced and Edited by Andrew Lycett

  Published in 2014 by I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd

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  Distributed in the United States and Canada

  Exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan

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  Copyright © 2014 Andrew Lycett

  The right of Andrew Lycett to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  ISBN: 978 1 78076 273 9

  eISBN: 978 0 85773 486 0

  A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

  A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available

  Typeset by JCS Publishing Services Ltd., www.jcs-publishing.co.uk

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction: Poseidon’s Law

  Kipling and the Sea

  ‘A Letter or Bill of Instruction’

  ‘Poseidon’s Law’

  ‘The Gift of the Sea’

  ‘The Coastwise Lights’

  ‘Big Steamers ’

  ‘The Liner She’s a Lady’

  ‘The Junk and the Dhow’

  ‘McAndrew’s Hymn’

  ‘The Mary Gloster’

  ‘Tin Fish’

  ‘Mine Sweepers’

  Something of Myself

  From Sea to Sea

  ‘The Ballad of the Clampherdown’

  ‘The Rhyme of the Three Captains’

  ‘The Ballad of the Bolivar’

  Something of Myself

  ‘Judson and the Empire’

  Something of Myself

  ‘The Sea-Wife’

  ‘The Deep-Sea Cables’

  ‘The Merchantmen’

  ‘The White Seal’

  ‘The Ship that Found Herself’

  Captains Courageous

  ‘The Devil and the Deep Sea’

  A Fleet on Being: Notes of Two Trips with the Channel Squadron

  ‘Cruisers’

  ‘The Dykes’

  ‘Song of Diego Valdez’

  ‘The Sea and the Hills’

  ‘Their Lawful Occasions’

  ‘China-going P.&O.’s’

  ‘I’ve Never Sailed the Amazon’

  ‘Song of the Red War-Boat’

  ‘Speech Given at a Naval Club, October 1908: The Spirit of the Navy’

  ‘Egypt of the Magicians’

  The Fringes of the Fleet

  ‘Tales of “The Trade”’

  ‘The Destroyers at Jutland’

  ‘Speech to Some Junior Naval Officers of an East Coast Patrol, 1918: The First Sailor’

  Brazilian Sketches

  ‘Epitaphs of the War’

  ‘The Manner of Men’

  Letters

  ‘The King and the Sea’

  acknowledgements

  My two most valuable resources were the three-volume Cambridge Edition of the Poems of Rudyard Kipling, edited by Professor Thomas Pinney (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013) and the New Reader’s Guide to the Works of Rudyard Kipling, edited by John Radcliffe et al. under the auspices of the Kipling Society and published online at www.kipling.org.uk/rg_index.htm.

  My thanks to Tom Pinney, John Radcliffe, David Richards, John Walker and Commander Alastair Wilson for their assistance.

  INTRODUCTION

  poseidon’s law

  Kipling is rightly acclaimed for his love of the land and his admiration for soldiers, but there is a strong case to be made that his real passion was the sea and his quintessential hero the sailor. The reason, as suggested in his jovial poem ‘Poseidon’s Law’, was that the sea was the ultimate (because most fickle and most dangerous) natural force, and its subjection a true test of a man’s courage and resolve. Thus the sailor in those verses makes a pact with Poseidon, who tells him:

  Let Zeus adjudge your landward kin, whose votive meal and salt

  At easy-cheated altars win oblivion for the fault,

  But ye the unhoodwinked waves shall test – the immediate gulfs condemn –

  Unless ye owe the Fates a jest, be slow to jest with them.

  This poem appears in Traffics and Discoveries, a collection of stories published in 1904, when Kipling was at his most enthusiastic about the sea. At that point it had already been a forty-year affair. Kipling’s first experience of the wide blue deep was of ‘far-going’ Arab dhows and sudden winds blowing up from the warm Indian Ocean close to where he was born in Bombay in 1865. In his autobiography Something of Myself he recalls his evening walks ‘by the sea in the shadow of palm-groves which, I think, were called the Mahim Woods. When the wind blew the great nuts would tumble, and we fled – my ayah, and my sister in her perambulator – to the safety of the open.’

  At the age of two, and again when he was six, Kipling made the long journey back from India to Suez, and then – because the Canal had not yet been built – up overland to Alexandria, and back to Britain. In his autobiography he remembered ‘a ship with an immense semi-circle blocking all vision on each side of her’ and thought she must have been the old paddlesteamer Ripon.

  He did not return to India for many years after that, because he was left with so-called foster parents at a ‘house of desolation’ in Southsea, a suburb of the naval port of Portsmouth. There were some compensations. He enjoyed exploring the naval aspects of his new home. He was encouraged by Captain Holloway, a former coastguard who was by far the more agreeable of his foster parents. The captain used to regale young Rudyard with stories of his exploits at the Battle of Navarino, a sea battle against the Turks in the Greek War of Independence in 1827. He would accompany Rudyard on walks to the naval dockyards, where the young lad would feast his eyes on the sight of so many ships, including Admiral Nelson’s flagship at Trafalgar, HMS Victory. The young Kipling once saw a ship which had been on one of the great voyages of exploration to the Arctic. Occasional verses such as ‘The Carolina’, composed when he was ten, show promise of great things to come and give a sense that, before he really had anything to do with the army or the land, he was being inculcated into an appreciation of the sea – and of its crucial role in history and in exploration.

  These were not dominant themes during the next phase of his life – his schooling at the United Services College in Devon. Despite its all-inclusive name, it was very much a training establishment for the army and the imperial civil service. Kipling was, however, exposed to the bleak seascapes and the crashing of the waves on the Atlantic shore.

  After returning to India in 1882, he began to appreciate something of the nature of sea travel as a global enterprise, part of a burgeoning tourist trade. Although, on his voyage out to Bombay, he was moping about, having left his girlfriend Flo Garrard behind, he was also taking in details, later used in his poem ‘The E
xiles’ Line’, of how the P&O Line acted as a universal transporter, enabling the business of empire.

  The Exiles’ Line brings out the exiles’ line

  And ships them homeward when their work is done.

  There was another hiatus in Kipling’s involvement with the sea during his ‘seven years’ hard’ as a journalist in India. He experienced something of the great force of the ocean on his journey back to Britain again in 1889, when he took (and wrote about) the eastward route across the Pacific and then, after traversing the North American continent, across the Atlantic.

  He found it hard to come to terms with the niceties of living in fin-de-siècle London. He tried to capitalise on his reputation as a chronicler of the military life in his poems, the Barrack-Room Ballads, but the sea had begun to tug at him. To complement his soldierly stuff he also produced seafaring ballads such as ‘The Ballad of the Bolivar’ and ‘The Ballad of the Clampherdown’. After a visit to his old school in Devon in 1890, he wrote of the terrible power of the sea in his poem ‘The Gift of the Sea’, in which a mother mourns her dead husband, lost to the sea, as well as her dead baby. And there was also ‘The Finest Story in the World’, his remarkable account of a bank clerk who has flashes of his experiences in past lives as a seaman, both as a Viking adventurer on a voyage to America, and as a Greek galley slave.

  However, Kipling came to dislike London so much that he had a minor nervous breakdown. So, succumbing to the ‘go fever’ he had attributed to his hero Dick Heldar in his recent novel The Light That Failed, he quit London on a mad voyage to visit his literary hero Robert Louis Stevenson in Samoa.

  En route to Cape Town he met a naval officer, Commander (later Captain) Edward Bayly, who was travelling to take up command of a cruiser, HMS Mohawk, at the main South African base of Simonstown. The two men became good friends, and Bayly was to play a significant role later in the decade by introducing Kipling to the intricacies of imperial naval politics. At this stage Kipling was more interested in completing a poem called ‘The Long Trail’, which hailed not the miseries but the delights of travel on the ocean wave. Another taster:

  And it’s ‘All clear aft’ on the old trail, our own trail, the out trail,

  We’re backing down on the Long Trail – the trail that is always new.

  At Simonstown Kipling was introduced to the camaraderie of the officers’ mess, which, as he was clubbable, made a lasting impression. He particularly relished a naval yarn about a young naval officer who, on taking command of a new ship, had mistakenly and clearly ignorantly barked out an order the ‘topmast wants staying forward’. These words only had to be mentioned in the mess for the whole place to erupt into guffaws. Kipling recalled the atmosphere fondly and made the neophyte officer the model for ‘Bai-Jove-Judson’, hero of ‘Judson and the Empire’, a light tale about imperial pretensions in southern waters, published in Many Inventions in 1893.

  After the romanticism of ‘The Long Trail’, his interest in the sea now started to become more practical, as became apparent on the next stage of his journey, to Australia on board the Shaw Savill Line’s SS Doric. Kipling did not mind the stormy voyage because he had found a new hero, the dour Scots ship’s engineer, whose exploits he trumpeted in his magnificent poem ‘McAndrew’s Hymn’. Here was a man to rival the engineers and administrators whom Kipling had so much admired in India. Here was someone whose unsung exploits ensured that the empire ran smoothly. Kipling would give him his just metrical deserts. The engineer wishes for a man like Robbie Burns to sing his mechanical orchestra’s – that is, his ship’s engine’s – ‘song of steam’:

  They’re all awa! True beat, full power, the clangin’ chorus goes

  Clear to the tunnel where they sit, my purrin’ dynamoes.

  Kipling never reached Samoa. Organised shipping lines did not run beyond Auckland. So he turned back to England, taking the opportunity to visit his parents in Lahore on the way. While he was there he was summoned to hasten back to London, following the death of his American publishing friend, Walcott Balestier. He soon found himself married to Walcott’s sister Caroline and crossing the Atlantic to live in her hometown of Brattleboro’, Vermont.

  Once again he was not living by the sea, but from time to time he went to the Atlantic coast, north of Boston, and specifically to the port of Gloucester, out of which his local physician, Dr James Conlan, had once worked on the cod fishing boats that plied the Grand Banks, south-east of Newfoundland. Kipling pumped him for information, which he used in his short novel Captains Courageous. There is a nice description in Something of Myself of their nautical quests on the Massachusetts shore.

  While living in the United States, Kipling felt homesick, partly for England, but also for India and the whole idea of empire that he had come to cherish. He dealt with his nostalgia for India in stories such as The Jungle Book, but his yearning for the British Empire was more complicated. As he thought more deeply about it, he concluded that the sea was an essential element.

  So, while in Vermont, he started a new series of poems about the sea and its importance in British history. Some were generic, such as ‘The Merchantmen’ and ‘The Liner She’s a Lady’. When he wanted to rail against the greed of American publishers, he used an extended metaphor about the three-decker ship. Then there was ‘The Mary Gloster’, a wonderful ballad looking into the mind of a dying man who had built up a shipping company – a poem well worth setting beside ‘McAndrew’s Hymn’. There were also poems about subsidiary aspects of the sea, such as ‘The Anchor Song’, ‘The Coastwise Lights’ and ‘The Deep-Sea Cables’, which celebrated the laying of cables under the ocean, allowing greater communication across the empire:

  Hush! Men talk to-day o’er the waste of the ultimate slime,

  And a new Word runs between: whispering, ‘Let us be one!’

  Several of these poems were collected in his appropriately named The Seven Seas in 1896. That also was the year when Kipling decided to return with his family to live in England. He took time to settle down and it was not until 1902, after he had visited South Africa several times, that he finally found the home he wanted at Bateman’s in Sussex.

  During the intervening period Kipling lost no opportunity to expand his knowledge of the sea, particularly of the Royal Navy. While living for a short while in Torquay, he visited the training ship HMS Britannia, and the following year he accepted an invitation to attend the sea-trials of a destroyer which had been designed and built by the Thornycroft company. He also linked up again with Captain Bayly, his old friend from the voyage to South Africa, who invited him to spend some time on board HMS Pelorus, the new 20-knot cruiser of which Bayly had recently taken command. Kipling joined the ship on manoeuvres for about a fortnight and he repeated this for a shorter time the following year.

  Kipling wrote a series of newspaper articles about these experiences (collected in A Fleet in Being). He also gave fictional form to Pelorus, one of a number of breezy tales about naval life, featuring a petty officer called Pyecroft. These started in the Windsor Magazine in December 1902 and were mostly collected in 1904 in Traffics and Discoveries, where the poem ‘Poseidon’s Law’ runs alongside the story ‘The Bonds of Discipline’. These are not my favourite pieces of Kipling’s output – they seem to mimic Mulvaney without the authenticity. However, they have been compared to the work of C.S. Forester.

  In the early years of the twentieth century Kipling maintained his nautical theme, in poems such as ‘The Harp Song of the Dane Women’, in which he returned to a favourite idea – about the cruelty of the sea which robbed families of loved ones. He also began to stress the need for Britain to keep up its naval defences – as in ‘The Dykes’. He could not resist taking a historical perspective to seafaring: for example, in ‘King Henry VII and the Shipwrights’ (published in Rewards and Fairies in 1910) and in verses such as ‘The Pirates in England’ and ‘With Drake in the Tropics’ for C.R.L. Fletcher’s A School History of England in 1911.