Kipling moved to America in 1892, settling in Brattleborough, a village in rural Vermont, on the estate belonging to the family of his new American wife, Caroline (Carrie) Balestier. Here he built a cabin, had children, was happy, wrote the two Jungle Books and continued pouring forth poems and short stories.
Captains Courageous
Late in 1896 he began serialisation of a new prose work, Captains Courageous. It’s short, only ten chapters and 153 pages in the Oxford University paperback edition I read.
Like a lot of Kipling’s fictions, it’s long on journalistic details and specialised jargon, short on plot, extremely light on psychology. Spoilt teenage son of millionaires, Harvey Cheyne, is irritating the crew on a transatlantic liner before going for a walk along the deck when – whoops – he is washed overboard by a big wave. He comes to on a New England fishing boat and learns, to his horror, that the rough old fishermen who’ve saved him a) don’t believe a word about him being a rich man’s son b) stay out fishing for cod on the Grand Banks all summer long with no plans to return to shore till the autumn!
After cheeking them a few times, Harvey gets knocked down and starts to find out the hard way that if he wants to eat, he has to work.
Over the next eight chapters Harvey becomes a Man in the sense that ‘you’ll be a man, my son’ in Kipling’s most famous poem, If (1895). Eventually he is reunited, a changed person, with his grieving parents who thought he was drowned.
The striking issues are: Masculinity; the gospel of work; showing off; the language; the plot.
1. The plot
It’s more like a set-up or predicament than a plot. Or the thinnest of fairy tale transformations. In the hands of a Henry James or Joseph Conrad the pleasure would have been in seeing Harvey’s character genuinely change through a sequence of events. Instead Kipling supplies a stream of incidents but they’re curiously detached from Harvey’s transformation. And Harvey’s transformation doesn’t occur in a gradual way but very quickly in chapter 2 after he’s been knocked down for cheeking the skipper and then chased around the deck with a rope till he performs the shipboard chores correctly. In other words, the chastening and growing-up of Harvey is poorly handled. Because Kipling isn’t really interested in it. Psychology isn’t his thing.
Instead of plot there is a succession of incidents. The crew tell stories. The crew sing songs. A luxury liner nearly hits them in foggy weather and does run over and sink another schooner, killing most of the crew. In a good piece of Kipling cruelty and spookiness, the crew dredge up the corpse of one of the sailors from the wrecked schooner, which seems to have eerily followed them. A hair-standing-up-on-end moment. But these incidents merely follow each other rather than accumulating, let alone prompting Harvey’s psychological progress.
2. Showing off
If there’s next to no psychological depth on display, what there is a lot of is Kipling’s characteristic concern to impress the reader with the depth of his expertise – this time on the subject of New England cod ships and sailors. Apparently, he researched the story very thoroughly, visiting shipyards, going out in boats, gutting cod himself, and having long conversations with a friend who sailed. The result is a text absolutely stuffed with fishing expertise and technical terms. No part of the fishing boat or process is left unexplored and unexplained and this can get rather wearisome.
3. The language
The expertise is most obviously displayed in the dialect speech of the cod sailors which Kipling renders phonetically, as exhaustively as he renders the regional dialects of his famous Soldiers Three (Yorkshire, Ulster, Cockney) or the Indians who populate his Asia stories. Short though it is, I found the book difficult to read because almost every sentence required decoding from Kipling’s phonetic spelling. Add to this the plethora of technical terms he makes sure he stuffs into every sentence, and his preference for often elliptical conversations over authorial explanation, and it gets quite hard to understand what’s going on in places.
‘Mother av delight! He s forkin them wan by wan,’ howled Long Jack, as Uncle Salters got to work laboriously; the little man in the other dory counting a line of notches on the gunwale. ‘That was last week’s catch,’ he said, looking up plaintively, his forefinger where he had left off. Manuel nudged Dan, who darted to the after-tackle, and, leaning far overside, slipped the hook into the stern-rope as Manuel made her fast forward. The others pulled gallantly and swung the boat in man, fish, and all. ‘One, two, four nine,’ said Tom Platt, counting with a practised eye. ‘Forty-seven. Penn, you re it!’ Dan let the after-tackle run, and slid him out of the stern on to the deck amid a torrent of his own fish.
It’s all like this. Very hard work.
4. Surfaces
Kipling’s energy doesn’t go into the psychological depths, into where you’d expect a novelist to be working; it goes into the surfaces of facts and language. As a novelist, Kipling is a great journalist. It’s typical that in Chapter 9, when the bereaved parents learn that their son is alive after all, instead of even attempting to describe the psychological impact on them, Kipling spends pages detailing the route Cheyne senior’s private train would have taken from San Francisco to Gloucester, Mass., including the details of all the drivers and engineers required, the messages sent ahead to key junctions and so on and so on. Whereas the grieving parents’ reunion with their son takes place in a sentence, and has little or no impact on either of them.
5. The gospel of work
If the Victorians can be divided into Hebrews or Hellenes, Kipling is a prophet of Hebraicism. Following in the traditions of Carlyle et al he believes in the virtues of Work, the Dignity of Labour, that the truth is only revealed to those who work hard, do their duty, building and maintaining the world we live in.
In chapter 7 the schooner (emblematically named We’re Here) is nearly run down in the fog by a vast luxury liner; a fellow schooner is actually cut in half and the whole crew crushed or drowned. The tragedy / disaster / accident rams home Kipling’s moral that the pampered passengers on the liner fussing over their gilt-edged menus don’t even notice that, in a few seconds, their vessel has destroyed the livelihoods, and actually killed, poor, hard-working, honest sailors.
At the end of the story the Cheyne parents attend the annual church service for fishermen lost in that season and the pampered Mrs Cheyne is shown breaking down in tears as the long list of drowned seamen is read out. Kipling has a highly moral purpose in almost all his writings, which is to show pampered liberals the sheer bloody hard work of the thousands of unsung soldiers, sailors, merchants, explorers, engineers etc who provide the peace, stability, goods and services they all take for granted. It is not an unworthy task.
5. Masculinity
What is it to be a man? Kipling has a very clear idea, and Harvey’s transformation from pampered brat to blooded young man is accomplished through hard physical work, dedication to duty, masculine comradeship, and the rejection of all luxury. These are the values Kipling elsewhere esteems in his Indian administrators and soldiers, in the New England sailors, in his South African pioneers. It is a narrow, blinkered view of (hu)man nature, but one he made his own and expresses more completely than, maybe, any other English writer.
The well-known poem, If, written a year earlier than Captains Courageous, in 1895, may be regularly parodied and mocked by knowing intellectuals. But it is just as regularly voted Britain’s favourite poem. Whatever you think of Kipling’s politics and artistry, his jingoism and sexism, he is saying something which still endures and speaks to many people today.
The story is written from the point of view of Harvey, but it can also be seen as the story of Mr Cheyne, the successful millionaire, too busy running his business empire to attend to his son who, as a result, becomes a spoilt brat. The act of Fate which throws Harvey into the company of the sailors and shows him hard work, comradeship and respect – which makes a responsible adult of him – was something Cheyne senior realises that he was failing to do himself. As a father, I wouldn’t be unhappy if something similar happened to my son.
The movie
There have been two film versions, the 1937 one starring Spencer Tracy. I bet it’s great. Costs £20 on Amazon. And a 1977 remake starring Karl Malden.
Books & Boots 