Cabin Boy to Poet Laureate

I’m not the only one that likes John Masefield’s 1900 poem “Ship Fever.”  In 2005 it was voted  Britain’s “Favourite Sea Poem” (beating out Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”)   Masefield’s words gave this column its title and they echo for me the wild and clear call I too hear from the sea.  “I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied.”  How did John Masefield, this week’s “Ocean Person,” come to hear this call?

For most of John Masefield’s (1878-1967) adult life he was a well-known international writer and lecturer, and for over 35 years he was Britain’s Poet Laureate (he was the surprising choice in 1930 over Rudyard Kipling.) 

But his youth and young adult years read like something out of a Dickens novel.  Orphaned at age 10 after his mother died in childbirth and his father had a mental breakdown, he was shuttled from relative to relative, sent to sea at age 13 against his will by an impatient aunt, suffered years of seasickness, sunstroke, and loneliness, until he finally jumped ship in New York at age 19.  More years of hard work and poverty until he published his first collection of poetry, Salt-Water Ballads, including “Ship Fever” at age 22.  He quickly rose in the art and literary world, wrote poems and novels, lectured widely in the UK and US, promoted public readings and received honorary doctorates from Harvard, Yale and Oxford.

Being sent to sea was not that uncommon a fate for boys of the 18^th and 19^th century British Empire.  Growing trade/imperialism and naval war/imperialism demanded more sailors, so a comprehensive system of apprenticing, indenturing and training boys from as young as ten into sailors was established across Britain.  Some boys ran away to sea, others like Masefield were sent/sold by families (in one year, of the 4500 new boy sailors, half were fatherless.)  A whole new field of scholarship about these “boy sailors” describes the promised adventure, travel, and fortune, and the reality of danger, forced indenture and sense of “otherness,” without a home or family or nation.  Treasure Island’s Jim Hawkins and Gilbert and Sullivan popularized a happier version of the life of the cabin boy.

Two stories of Masefield’s youth fit this pattern, and seem particularly Dickensian, how a poor boy’s love of words and stories and learning helped him overcome considerable challenges -  poverty, class, isolation.  In a sense, the sea was Masefield’s savior.  Despite how hard his six years at sea were, with sickness, military hierarchy, loneliness, he also experienced there new worlds, possibility, beauty, surprise, sailors and their stories, enough for a lifetime of poetry and novels.

The thirteen year old orphaned John was living with his reluctant aunt, who probably expected him to do his share of work around the place.  But, as Masefield told it, he was “addicted to reading,” which his aunt “thought little of.” Her idea was that a life at sea would break him of this dubious habit and she left him off at the naval training ship, the HMS Conway.  After three years there he was sent around the world on a merchant ship.  Surprisingly he found that ship life only fueled his “addiction,” that there was ample time for reading and writing, and many long nights hearing sailor stories and yarns.  What his aunt had thought would force him to stop doing he did even more and better.

But after six years he despaired of this life and jumped ship in New York.  This bustling city was probably more of a shock than the move from rural Britain to an international merchant ship.  He struggled to find work and slept on the street.  He worked as a laborer and bar keep.  Finally he got a steady job in a carpet factory in Yonkers.  Long hours and tough conditions, but a steady income meant he could buy as many as 20 books a week, and he devoured works by Dumas, Thomas Browne, Hazlitt, Dickens, Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson, Chaucer, Keats, and Shelley.  (One wonders if he saw his own life in Dickens and Stevenson.)  He recalled later that this reading “set my heart on fire” and he vowed to devote his life to writing.  He finally returned to England, published his first poetry collection, and embarked on his literary career.

Here’s another of his poems, no doubt from a tale he heard at sea. Masefield’s ashes were placed at his request in the Poets’ Corner at Westminster Abbey.

Sea Change

"Goneys an' gullies an' all o' the birds o' the sea They ain't no birds, not really", said Billy the Dane.

"Not mollies, nor gullies, nor goneys at all", said he, "But simply the sperrits of mariners livin' again.

"Them birds goin' fishin' is nothin' but the souls o' the drowned, Souls o' the drowned, an' the kicked as are never no more An' that there haughty old albatross cruisin' around, Belike he's Admiral Nelson or Admiral Noah.

"An' merry's the life they are living. They settle and dip, They fishes, they never stands watches, they waggle their wings; When a ship comes by, they fly to look at the ship To see how the nowaday mariners manages things.

"When freezing aloft in a snorter I tell you I wish -- (Though maybe it ain't like a Christian) -- I wish I could be A haughty old copper-bound albatross dipping for fish And coming the proud over all o' the birds o' the sea."

Copyright © 2017 Deborah Streeter