Free The Last Ship by William Brinkley Page A

dictators, a ship’s captain has no bodyguards, no armies to shield him. He is gravely outnumbered, his only armament being the sea’s ancient law of command and his own resolve. Therefore, the more crucial both the resolve and the unwavering assumption that it would be accepted wherever it might lead, whatever portend. Nelson’s band of brothers, to be sure, but also his “If I give an order I expect it to be obeyed.” Hence self-doubts of any kind were the very thing I must above all suppress. A calm presence, whatever tremblings I might feel inside. Calm presence: Sometimes I felt that in that considerable list of attributes indispensable to a ship’s captain, this was the most important of all.
    Only once on our odyssey had that rule felt serious challenge; for one terrible moment we had come to the very brink. I had stood it down by the only weapon I had. There was no assurance that that governance would not be tested again and this time more formidably. And if it came, the weapon would be no different. I had had to harden myself; the departure, loss, of over a third of ship’s company on other seas affixing that indelible imprint—that absence of pause by which ruthlessness becomes but another resource where circumstances insist. In the end there is no substitute for will: Other men may have the choice of embracing that conviction, that banal option, or not. A ship’s captain, none. For him it is immutable fact. If he loses that, he loses all: Nothing must be permitted to deny it.
    I had decided on the island as a place on whose land and near waters we would seek sustenance. But reason, craftiness, said one step at a time. Beyond that manifestly my first essential cunning was to keep to myself those other intentions I had for it—and for them.
    Turning slightly, I looked with purpose across the star-caught water to the dark recumbent island, which alone shared the sea with us; feeling somehow there was something of importance about it we did not know, some unrevealed essence, perhaps favorable, perhaps otherwise; knowing, whichever, we stood committed to its strangeness, its unknownness. Nothing came forth. It stayed as slumbering as the sea itself, wrapped in mystery, harboring its secrets, reluctant to part with a single one. Then something pleasant. A sibilance of wind stirred, its brief plaintive sound through the halyards like some nightly orison, and before it as quickly vanished bore to me from somewhere forward the faintest scent of one of them, a barely discernible whisper of perfume, mingling with the sea smell, even before I saw her shadowy form crossing up the ladder to the bridge. Navy directives, you must take my word, had something to say even on that matter: “in good taste.” The Navy leaves nothing to chance. The affected hands had remained in line. Even so, to this day I had not become accustomed to that shipboard trace—the last thing from being unpleasant, only always still a surprise, that one should find it here of all places, on this man-of-war; the scents of women. Probably Seaman Thornberg, quartermaster striker, on her way to relieve the dog watch—yes, we kept a helmsman on watch even at anchor, by that unforgiving sea law that decrees that a ship must be ready to act instantly at any sign of danger, and to get underway at once. The quick intake of scent must have started it: I began consciously to think back over when it had begun, as though the history of that strange thing, turning inside out as it did the very texture of ships that had held from earliest voyages on great waters, might somehow now suggest an answer; a way through the hazardous difficulty that had begun to haunt me like a dark foreboding and whose tenacity seemed but to intensify, to resist all my mental efforts to stow it away until other, presumably more urgent, matters—food, for instance—were underway.
    As I have recounted, I had strongly opposed their original admission into ships, for the rather