The Sea Always Wins
or, The Ageing Wreck Diver Speaks of the Ocean
(after Roland Morris of Penzance, Cornwall)
The sea is an indifferent lover. She may be your delight, your mistress, your beloved, but she’s not the great prize you imagine. You, in your passion, your tender obsession, are smitten, held fast in her thrall. You see nothing but her beauty, her unplumbed depths, her colours endlessly shifting. But she is nothing if not sly, and her heart is full of perfidy and guile. Treacherous as the mermaid’s song, she is only seeming fond. You come here to my land of shifting sands and you tell me: I love the sea. I smile then because you are like the gingerbread man who trusted the fox. You turn your back a moment in sleep and she, she, the one you adore above all others, for whom you would sacrifice body and soul, in that single moment of surrender she will sneak away, robbing you of all you possess. For the sea is like this: it goes grabbing, grabbing. It will seize what it fancies: great ships, fine, rich cargo, whole crews of good men – you too, if it chances upon you napping. She knows no kindness, no fellow feeling, no compassion or regret. On it or under it, make no mistake about it, the sea always wins. I know it. I’ve lost a fair son to the sea so she’s one up on me. I meet her head-on because I know her true nature and she is my proper adversary. My work is all for the balance of things, to restore what the tides steal away.
Nothing that is taken stays the same. Everything is broken, bent and battered. The wrecks where we dive are not preserved undisturbed; rather, time and the sea make them mutable. Over and over, all of our artefacts are pounded, beaten, bullied out of shape. See, here’s a silver teapot once graced a captain’s table, grotesque in its distortion; and here’s a flintlock pistol, once as pretty as you like, last discharged two hundred years ago. Today, scraped clean of the sea’s corrosion, only one thing is beyond question: twisted as it is, and colonised by coral, it will never again find its mark.Likewise, when we dive, we bring up to the surface sea-encrusted pebbles like dull, hard eggs. When we break them open, our chickens shine silver and we count the coins that sing in our hands. Through forests of seaweed, painstakingly slowly, I have scoured the floor of the ocean. How ponderous my progress was then; I’ll not seek to deny it. Now those who come after me, freed of my encumbrances, slip through the water like grey seals. That very speed breeds a lack of vigilance and so it becomes their enemy.
What price the life of a wreck-diving man? How many coins rest here in my chest? You can guess but I won’t share the answer. Here are pieces of eight, no less bright than when they reflected the glare of Spanish sun. And here’s a gold piece from Sir Cloudsley Shovell’s flagship, which floundered and went down off the Scillies, where it lay on a cannon in full, plain view, shining like a promise or a sign. I sought treasure – the word then was treasure. It was deemed an adventure to go seeking pirate gold. We live now in less innocent times. And, God love us, here – look – is something else: some humble seaman’s wages; one who sorted his coins to count them out, with the end of the voyage in sight and his sea-thoughts turning towards home. He’d have put them lightly in his pocket and they’d weigh him to his grave as he danced through the green with his commander. What high days and holidays, what women and drink these few sad old coins might have made. Sometimes, in the dark, I wake all alone to the music of their clinking. It’s then I put my hand in the hand of that seaman. I like that. It makes me feel… all right.
Abigail Ottley ran away to sea from her home port of Tilbury in Essex and sailed the high seas under One-Eyed Scurvy Seadog in pursuit of her literary fortune until she eventually came ashore at Marazion and joined with the Pirates of Penzance. In her time, she has seen service on many fine rigs, notably, the Plaza and the sloop Patricia Eschen, both the scourge of International Waters; not forgetting the National Wildfire, which she captained twice, each time carrying off a prize. Recently, she was pressed into service under the notorious Captain Connors and his pirate bride, Goldie, on that splendid brig, the Singing Yaffle. She can be reached via the Isle of Insta at @abigail_elizabeth_ottley.
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