The term “tall ship” refers to almost any vessel with large sails and “traditional” rigging. Examples include arcane nautical vocabulary such as the schooner, the brigantine, the barque, and the brig. Getting too detailed wouldn’t be helpful to anyone without substantial background in maritime history. Basically, a tall ship is probably what you see in your mind’s eye when you think about Herman Melville.
There are no more than five or six hundred tall ships left in operation today, because the steamship essentially ran them out of business. The first ocean-faring steamship set sail in the early 1800s and took about 70 years to become economically viable. At that point, ships and nautical culture underwent a volatile transitional phase. Engineers fought with captains, and there was some rioting; by the turn of the century, sailpower was all but extinct. The tall ships still in operation today are mostly run under the aegis of cultural preservation, predicated on romanticism, and fueled by the pride of being hardcore.
When I found out about Sea Education Association (cutely acronymed SEA), I was at first incredulous—“These ships still exist? And people use them?”—and then immediately determined to enroll. Within weeks I was signed up.
SEA puts students through nautical science and oceanography classes for six weeks in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and then on a ship for six weeks in the middle of the ocean. The sailing component takes place on an 18th-century-style brigantine schooner. SEA owns two schooners: the double-masted 134-foot SSV Corwith Cramer and the slightly larger SSV Robert C. Seamans. The Seamans cruises the vast emptiness of the Pacific, occasionally laying anchor in Tahiti, Mexico, and Alaska. The Cramer spends the year cycling from Nova Scotia to the Caribbean and the Gulf, heading North in the summer and South in the winter. I met the Cramer in the U.S. Virgin Islands around Thanksgiving 2007 and sailed West from St. Croix through the North Caribbean and up through the Gulf to Key West, Florida.
Still, when people ask me where I went, I find it very hard to explain. Location is a very different sort of idea at sea. You never quite know exactly where you are because sextants and GPS systems are imperfect. Mathematical exactitude doesn’t matter so much because the physical world that surrounds you is more important than what any chart shows. You tend to think of location as a general concept, in relation to certain water masses, weather patterns, or under-water geological features. So when I tell people that I went to Saba Bank, and they ask, “Do you mean Saba the island?” it’s hard to explain how you can go to a place that you can’t stand on. This is only one of the many epistemological shifts that occurs when you live at sea, and one of the things that ties tall ship sailors together.
During my voyage with the Cramer, there were thirty people living on the ship. Seventeen of us were my classmates who did research and worked as deckhands. The rest were the captain, the three mates, three scientists and a fourth head scientist, the engineer, the steward, and three deckhands. We each had our own bunk below decks, long enough for most of us to fit into along with all of our belongings, and tall enough for some to sit up in. I made the arrogant mistake of ignoring the steward’s admonition not to bring any food into my bunk, and kept a box of Kashi that I had taken backpacking in the Virgin Islands the week prior to setting sail. The smell of that box of food magnified in the heat, mixed with my terrible body odor, and came to embody everything about living in squalor with severe seasickness. To this day, I cannot even approach anything with buckwheat in it.
Deciding to do an abroad program that involved living at sea was, in retrospect, ill advised. I knew that I got motion sickness, but I’d also heard from a lot of people that your body adjusts to the motion after a few days and the sickness goes away. Still, it was ill advised because I went into it with an unfortunate coupling of blood disorders, both anemia and hypoglycemia. That means it is dangerous for me to go without food for too long. Sometimes it was days between digested meals, and not because I wasn’t trying to eat them.
Sometimes I couldn’t keep down more than one meal per week, and I became a zombie. For days at a time, my body did not have the blood sugar to fund things like short-term memory, facial expressions, or even standing. Especially, I did not have the capacity for higher-order thinking like planning or being able to recognize when I was about to do something stupid, both of which are of the utmost importance when living on a ship. Even the simple sequencing of using the head (going to the bathroom) and getting a drink of water was beyond me.
I was never relieved of this condition. There were a few days with extremely calm seas when my stomach could settle enough to retain full meals. But the majority of my time on the ship was spent somewhere between ferocious and convulsive sickness and the resulting total enervation of my body and mind. Unfortunately, seasickness is not considered an excuse for inactivity among sailors. It is considered merely an obstacle to be overcome through willpower. You must “boot and rally” even, as my first mate reminded me so often had been his experience, if you are vomiting blood.
When we first set sail, there was a strong wind coming from a tropical storm a few hundred miles away. We were tacking into the wind, which meant that we were going up and over the crest of every wave that pushed against our bow. The ship bucked wildly. I remember feeling proud of myself for being the first to get sick and then to push through it, helping to strike a sail and then furl it. Deckhands patted me on the back saying, “Way to rally, kid! You’re doing great!” But my body had not yet even begun its stomachic rampage. I continued heaving through sunset and into the night, until I was half-awake.
I came to because I felt my arm tingling. I opened my eyes, and found myself draped like a rag doll over the rail, my arm dragging in the ocean as the ship listed sharply to port in the fierce headwind. At some point I had put on a harness and clipped myself to the safety cable for fear of falling overboard, though I didn’t remember doing so. The sea rose up to wash the bile out of my nose, stinging. I spluttered, but couldn’t move. I remember thinking, “if I don’t pass out again soon, I’m going to unclip this harness and let myself go over.”
There’s a sailor’s adage that seasickness has two stages. The first stage is when you are so sick that you fear you might die. The second stage is when you fear you might not.
I am within the 1% of the human population whose body is incapable of adjusting to motion. Or, so my captain told me. He said that in more than twenty years at sea, he had never seen anyone with such persistent and ferocious sickness.
Unfortunately, the ship’s crew was unaware that my sickness was rooted in medical disorders. They saw my inactivity as a motivation problem, and after about three days of lying prone on the quarterdeck, it appeared as though I were merely shirking my responsibilities. And I began to internalize that judgment. I would wonder, Am I really that sick? If I’m not puking right now, I must be ok…I need to stop being lazy and start doing my job.
After a few days, I was the only person still unable to keep food down. But I was embarrassed, and didn’t want to appear weak, so I kept it to myself. Even on a boat less than half a football field long, there are ways to be stealthy about sickness. I managed to isolate myself when I had to heave so that nobody was around to see. I would have rather taken skepticism and criticism than six weeks of pity.
The third day was the first time any of the students had to set a sail. We were in groups of about four people, and my group was setting the jib, a pretty small sail all the way forward. I hadn’t eaten in days and my blood sugar must have been only a few milligrams away from a diabetic coma. One moment I remember hauling on the line, and the next thing I remember is leaning against the bulwark, seeing that the job had been finished. My first mate saw me leaning and told me that it was all in my head, that everyone felt sick, and that I needed to pull my weight. At that point I crumpled to the deck. Afterwards my friends told me that I had been muttering about not being able to feel my limbs, and about flying away into the ocean.
Even that incident did little to validate my sickness, both in my own mind and in others’. I heard rumors that the head scientist was talking to my shipmates about how I needed to be contributing more, that I needed to suck up my discomfort and do my job on watch.
Interestingly, with all of the capacities that I lost with my lack of blood sugar, self-criticism was not one of them. I became extremely self-conscious in a way that was entirely unfamiliar to me. I simultaneously felt that I was being a lazy selfish brat, and that I was doomed to being a lazy selfish brat because I could not do my work. I began to question everything about myself. Is this ‘cannot’ attitude really just an attitude? Is it all in my head or am I really medically debilitated? I distrusted my competence in completing even the simplest tasks, like washing a knife, or answering a question. What began as an anthill of self-criticism soon grew into a stalwart monument of self-doubt.
I was drawn to the program for its sense of adventure, and the prospect of toughing it and getting my hands dirty. Until I got there, I thought of myself as a pretty capable person. Now all of a sudden I felt useless and in the way. That self-doubt at the beginning, in combination with low blood sugar, kept me from ever fully catching on to the routines and duties of the ship. I felt increasingly useless every day.
It’s hard to explain all of the things that need doing on a boat. Things constantly have to be checked, tied, scanned, re-checked, calculated. There are three watch groups, and five time slots in the watch schedule. When on deckwatch, you might have to do sailhandling maneuvers, chart a course, measure your speed over ground, take the helm, look at the radar, wash the deck, or thirty other things. In the lab, you might have to deploy sampling equipment, check the water depth, temperature, or salinity, label sample jars, or manipulate data. In the galley, you have to prepare six meals a day and wash dishes.
Maritime tradition was heavily enforced on the Cramer. Every task on a boat, no matter how simple, has a right way to be done. There is a particular hose, a particular notation, a particular rhythm, and a particular knot for each particular task. Those methods have been arrived at through the trial and error of centuries of other sailors. Out of respect for their efforts, it is nearly blasphemous to try and do things your own way. In fact, it earns reprimand. Really everything must be learned, including the most seemingly mundane details. I was behind the learning curve for the entire 6 weeks. I couldn’t sweep the sole (floor) right, I couldn’t rinse a bucket right, I couldn’t even use the head right. Later on, when I gained more responsibilities, I couldn’t tie a knot right (and I love tying knots), I couldn’t read the radar right, and I couldn’t count microorganisms under a microscope right. The whole time I was on the ship, I never lost the feeling that I was doing something wrong, and that my idiocy was about to endanger my shipmates. I felt like a menace and an obstacle. Out of embarrassment and the need to cling to dignity, I never asked for help.
The intensity of my depression was almost directly related to how much food I could digest. My success at digestion was directly related to the weather. With high winds came high seas, which meant for me high amounts of dysfunction and despondence. Even now, sometimes I find myself anxious and can’t figure out why. If I think about it for a minute, I usually realize it’s because the wind has started to blow.
For about two days when we were sailing through Haitian waters, there was no wind. I woke up one morning and ate breakfast before going up above. After about 20 minutes, I realized that something was different. I didn’t feel sick. I went up on deck and blinked in the glare. The world looked like a sheet of glass.
As my breakfast sank in, I started to take deep breaths. I could smell. I stretched and felt salt crystals sting in the creases of my dirty skin. I looked over and saw the reflection of the Cramer in the water, with every detail of the rigging. I realized I could name every facet of the ship, every line, every axle and knot and carving. In the reflection, I could see myself bending over the rail. I realized that I hadn’t looked in a mirror for weeks.
I bent over further to see the details of my face. I had lost weight. In my mind, I heard my own name and it sounded strange.
My reverie was broken when my captain put his hand on my back.
“Leah?” he said with concern. I stood up and looked into his face.
He smiled. After a few seconds, I found I was able to smile back.
* * * * *
In retrospect, I was not the only person experiencing self-doubt. Especially, the final phase of the program flung students into leadership positions that most of us felt unprepared for. In that final phase, students became Junior Watch Officers (JWO), where they basically took over most of the mate’s responsibilities while still remaining a subordinate. The JWO delegated tasks to deckhands, directed sailhandling and celestial navigation, made sure that the ship was achieving its course, negotiated course adjustments with passing vessels, and generally managed all of the business that happens on watch. While all students served as JWO at some point, certainly not all of them were competent. That led to some pretty scary situations.
One night I was on midwatch (11pm to 3am), and the steward had asked us to get rid of all the ice in the freezer. Usually, deckwatch at night has 3 or so rotations through different stations: the helm, bow watch, and general lookout or helping with galley clean-up. My shipmate Tom was the JWO, and he asked me to take care of the freezer.
As an important aside, mid-watch galley cleanup is the most hellish occupation that can be found on the Cramer. I once had to clean the galley in a storm and I forever afterwards referred to it as Lucifer’s Midwatch Galley Cleanup; that night we were about 400 miles away from a tropical storm and so were hit with massive swells, with waves so big they looked like mountains. The ship was rolling, and pots, pans, and knives would fly through the air past my face every time we tipped over the crest of a wave. I had to grip the countertops to keep from being thrown across the room, which was caked with the mess and smell of 6 meals that had been prepared that day. I was hardly there long enough to get anything done between trips up on deck to vomit. But compared to that, Defrost Freezer Night was a whole different level of stomach turning.
The freezer was below the galley, even deeper into the belly of the ship. The space was about five by five feet, and about three and a half feet tall, and played host to the combined smells of rotten lettuce and the engine room. My job was to move all the food out and crawl around in there with a hot water hose and a screwdriver (as an ice pick) and remove the ice that blanketed every surface. After that, I was supposed to wipe everything down with bleach.
It happened to be a night with moderate waves, so the job was a slippery one. With the hot water hose and the bleach, it was a lot like being in a steamy pool-smelling igloo, inside of a dice tumbler. I imagined myself as a rock inside the accelerated version of some bizarre geological process that might take place on another planet. I remember feeling that I would find myself buried in sediments at the bottom of the ocean once the process was over.
When I was almost done, one of my shipmates poked his head inside. He blinked and coughed at the chlorine steam.
“Tom needs you up on deck.”
As an aside, the ocean is huge. Living on land, you are surrounded by objects (buildings, trees, people, whatever), and those objects vary the texture of your environment. You understand your location based on your position relative to those objects. On land, there is a pretty small risk that you will collide with those objects and drown; at sea, you want as much space as possible between yourself and everything else.
In fact, the whole concept of space is different at sea. There is space on the ship—very finite, very precious—and there is space outside the ship: infinite. Especially if you climb to the top of the mast on a calm day, the ocean appears to go on forever. It is humbling, terrifying, bewildering to try and conceive of all that space. It also makes you feel a peculiar sense of statistics, if you can feel statistics. It feels like your presence in this vastness is incredibly unlikely. And it seems almost impossible that anyone else could be there too.
So the last thing I expected to see when I climbed up on deck was the lights of a ship. And these lights looked particularly bad. Through my binoculars, the red port, the green starboard, and the white masthead lights were arranged in a neat little triangle. That’s called “The Triangle of Death.” The only way to see a vessel’s lights in that shape is if it’s coming right at you.
I looked over at Tom. Usually buoyant and fidgety, he was now standing still with his arms crossed and lips pursed.
“We didn’t see them coming on the radar, and I can’t reach them on the radio,” Tom said quietly. “Margeaux just saw the light moving on the port horizon, and now they’re already only three miles away.” Tom looked at Carl, the second mate.
“Go wake up Grant. Tell him Carl said he needs to come up on deck right now,” Carl urged.
That was the beginning of my real concern. Of course I had seen the Triangle of Death. But I was inexperienced and naïve, and major problems in the past were taken care of way before I ever knew about them. I trusted my captain and mates completely, and I had gotten a sense that nothing could actually go seriously wrong. In fact I could rarely even recognize when something was dangerous. But I knew that for a mate to show fear in front of his deckhands was rare, and that one only wakes up the captain for a good reason. And I had never even heard of a reason to get him out of bed. I puked, covertly.
Less than ten seconds after Tom went down below, Grant was up on deck in his underwear and blinking furiously.
“Turn on the deck lights,” he said to Carl quietly. Then he pushed the engine ignition button.
At that, I panicked. I had never, ever seen the deck lights on at night, even when scientists were wrangling with complicated equipment. And the engine had never been turned on without asking the engineer.
My shipmates and I looked at each other. Without saying anything, we all turned to eyeball the emergency alarm button.
I jumped as the captain blasted the foghorn. Again, something that I’d never heard except while entering or leaving port. It sounded like the Cramer itself was screaming. The stranger’s bow was now looming a few hundred yards away. For a second I stopped being scared and was overcome with awe at the sheer size of the vessel. Her decks were at least sixty feet above the water.
Tom looked like he wanted to do something. “Should we strike the sails before we motor—“
“Full speed ahead Carl,” enunciated Grant, paying no attention to Tom.
The propellers jolted us forward and Grant pulled the horn again. It took nearly ten seconds for us to be out of the way, and the Cramer pitched violently as we hit the steep wake of the stranger.
We got about a mile away before the engine was turned off, still inside the usual comfort zone of two nautical miles. The ocean liner slid by, her wake soughing in the distance. Even from a mile away, the vessel stretched across the full Western horizon. I felt like I could reach out and touch it, like an astronaut must feel when they get within 1000 miles of the moon.
I looked at my friend John. “Did we just almost…”
He shrugged and smirked. “Time to go finish with the freezer,” he sighed. “I think it’s my turn now.”
* * * * *
Physicists will tell you that time and space are really the same thing. It’s a hard concept to digest, but living at sea made it easier for me to believe. Since the world around you looks pretty much always the same except for different kinds of waves and weather, the qualities of time also become strangely uniform; a single moment feels like a day, and by dinner time, the breakfast you tried to eat 13 hours before might as well have been months ago. There are probably a million psychological and philosophical reasons it feels like that, but the easiest ones I can think of are the breakneck speed that things are moving, and the total shift of sleeping habits. The combination of sleep deprivation and malnourishment allowed me to be constantly discovering new levels of bewilderment.
There is hardly a waking moment at sea to be spent reflecting, or even remembering. Every mental effort is focused towards planning your next move, the next time you can get a drink or go to sleep or (try to) eat a snack or sit down, or when you have to use a sextant or gybe or check the engine. If you aren’t actively planning those things, you are waiting for them to happen. If everyone has a hypothetical mental timeline, the present and the future are the only things that exist at sea; it’s less of a line and more of a ray in one direction. The past doesn’t matter because the present moment is full of danger, and if you aren’t paying attention you are putting everyone else at risk. Individual moments feel like they are racing by, and so even if you are waiting for something, you are waiting at a furious pace.
Living at sea also made me realize how much of human psychology is shaped by sleeping habits. Because of the watch rotation, it’s not possible to get more than 6 consecutive hours of sleep, and that’s if you’re lucky. You alternate between sleep and wakefulness pretty regularly, and that gives months at sea the impression of being one long day with a series of short naps. And especially when your surroundings don’t appear to be changing, it feels like one lingering and unblinking moment in the same place. Or if you do feel motion, it’s like a fast-forward moment in a weird dimension where you stand still and the world moves around you.
In addition to sleep, I started to notice that simple daily habits are a major way that people define their lives and feel psychologically stable. There are tons of habits that most people have surrounding sleep that just don’t translate into life at sea. For instance, most people brush their teeth before they go to bed at night and when they wake up in the morning. But if you go to sleep right after dinner and wake up at 3 am, and then go back to sleep after breakfast, when do you brush your teeth? And when do you change your clothes? When do you shower? And since you have a different watch schedule everyday, there is no opportunity to form new habits with which to make sense of time. The only thing that helped me understand the passage of time was when I did Dawn Clean-up every third day after breakfast. I would get down on my hands and knees and wipe every conceivable surface with bleach and think Here I am again.
Even the tiniest details of living on land cannot transfer to living at sea. In fact, you might as well be on the moon. Even the topics that make up your mental matrix are wildly different. For example, when I live on land I never really think about constant mortal danger, or the different materials that make up rope, or what happens inside of clouds. Given those new habits of thought, even the way that you recall and assign meaning to different events is altered; a certain rare cloud is a big deal, far more so than an interesting conversation.
The four times that we saw land, it felt strange. I had made such an effort trying (and failing) to adjust to living at sea, that going ashore felt like backtracking. The first time I saw land in three weeks I had been dragged out of bed and up on deck, and to my shock and dismay, there was an island there. My captain told me it would be good for me to go ashore, so I did, and immediately felt dizzy and puked. That’s called Dock Rock, when you first get back to land and your body can’t handle the stillness. I sat there on the ground and for the first time realized how deeply exhausted I was from constant motion. In my memory, I sat there without shifting or even twitching for the entire afternoon.
It was called Swan Island in English, and was no more than 2 miles long and a hundred yards wide. I really had no idea where it was besides somewhere North of the coast of Honduras. It was occupied by the Honduran Navy, which amounted to 6 shirtless guys loosely holding guns, their eyes glazed with ennui. The island had been ravaged by a hurricane decades ago, and was still littered with the skeletons of cement buildings and broken military equipment. The number of mutilated buildings suggested that the island used to host at least a few hundred more people, maybe even a thousand. The only things that seemed to be getting regular use now were a soccer field with chairs set up as goal posts, and a makeshift bench press made out of car parts. There were decomposing cars and trucks everywhere, and two mangy dogs followed my shipmates like spies. To this day, I have not been able to find the island on any map.
We were scheduled to dock in Key West on December 31st, the last day of 2007. I was on midwatch galley clean-up the last night we were at sea. There were four foot waves that night, and I was just as sick as the first day. I played out my usual routine of 5 to 6 minutes of work interspersed with trips up on deck to hurl.
At one point I had to haul the garbage up a ladder to get on deck. I had to be as quiet as possible so that I didn’t wake anybody up. Several times I puked into the garbage and then, unable to move up, I hugged the can to keep it from clattering back down the ladder. At each rung, quivering, I thought of a new person from home—Spencer would never do this. Next rung, Alie would never do this. It took me 20 minutes to go up 8 feet.
As I dumped the foul-smelling garbage over the rail, I heaved some more. This time I laughed as I coughed up food. I could see the Milky Way and a billion other stars. Every time the ship pitched, I could see a faint red one nestled on the horizon. It was the lighthouse at Key West. I chuckled more and more until I was laughing maniacally between burps. Out loud, I croaked to myself: Only 15 hours left.
