âWell, good night to you, Mr Stevenson. Keep a sharp lookout and call me if you need to.â
The time-honoured formula uttered by every shipmaster leaving his bridge to a subordinate expressed the utmost discharge of Mackinnonâs duty before he could turn in. Stevenson responded in the time-honoured way:
âAye, aye, sir.â
It was as punctilious an exchange as the preceding remarks had been personal. Both men, the older with his hands on the ladder rails as he paused for a moment, staring astern at the orange glow in the sky above the city state of Singapore, and the younger as he began to pace the wide bridge of the
Matthew Flinders
, knew that its historical utterance would soon be a thing of the past.
âOld bugger,â Stevenson muttered affectionately to himself, smiling in the moonlight as Mackinnonâs bulk faded into the shadows of the boat-deck below.
In his cabin Mackinnon found he was unable to sleep. Perhaps he had brought something of the disturbing magic of the night with him from the bridge, magic which had prompted him to expose himself to Stevenson, for it was uncharacteristic of the Captain to be so candid. Oddly he feltno guilty regret over a momentary lapse of reticence, but an odd anxiety that the frankness did not disturb him. The paradox made him restless and he sat on the settee in the darkened cabin. It was lit only by the shaded desk lamp which illuminated the scattered remains of the bureaucracy of Singapore littering its top. He sighed. The windows which looked forward were uncurtained, the neat chintz fabric looped tidily up to hooks on either side of them. In the old, munificent days, the Master of the
Matthew Flinders
would have had his personal steward, his âTigerâ, a Chinaman whose sole task was to minister to his wants and one of whose duties would have been to draw the curtains at sunset. Now Mackinnon had to remember to attend to the matter himself, and since he had been on the bridge for the past three hours the task remained undone.
He declined to move; as long as the cabin remained lit only by the small, shaded bulb in the desk lamp it would not affect visibility from the bridge above.
How odd it was, the paperwork, the curtains, the trivial stuff of which his life had been made with its rituals and rather pompous little formalities. Some marked the point at which the machinery of a state touched him as Master of a foreign-going merchant ship, some irked him with their burden of responsibility, some reminded him of his diminishing status.
Woo still liked to call himself Mackinnonâs âTigerâ, because once he had occupied the office and could not now lose face; but he no longer attended to the Captainâs curtains at sunset and both men knew their respective positions had shifted upon the uncertain sand of social change.
Such changes, Mackinnon thought, made the leaving palatable just as they made confidences easier, though why he had felt the need to make them to Stevenson he was not sure. Was he expressing some quiet satisfaction that his own life had been full? He had known war and love, and if not abject poverty then something like it in the indigence of themerchant seaman. But the recollection of those lost warships, which he had never traversed this point on the surface of the earth without recalling, had tonight touched him with an almost potent poignancy. He well remembered news of their loss, remembered his boyhood sentiments as first they, and then Singapore, had fallen to the Japanese. His arrival at Singapore on the
James Cook
had seemed to his young and fanciful imagination to have been a renewal, a picking up of the torch of British maritime endeavour, a carrying on after the reverses of adversity.
How was it put in the words of the prayer alleged to have been written by Drake to support his near-mutinous crews in his circumnavigation?
It is not the doing of a thing that yields the true glory, but the continuing
The time-honoured formula uttered by every shipmaster leaving his bridge to a subordinate expressed the utmost discharge of Mackinnonâs duty before he could turn in. Stevenson responded in the time-honoured way:
âAye, aye, sir.â
It was as punctilious an exchange as the preceding remarks had been personal. Both men, the older with his hands on the ladder rails as he paused for a moment, staring astern at the orange glow in the sky above the city state of Singapore, and the younger as he began to pace the wide bridge of the
Matthew Flinders
, knew that its historical utterance would soon be a thing of the past.
âOld bugger,â Stevenson muttered affectionately to himself, smiling in the moonlight as Mackinnonâs bulk faded into the shadows of the boat-deck below.
In his cabin Mackinnon found he was unable to sleep. Perhaps he had brought something of the disturbing magic of the night with him from the bridge, magic which had prompted him to expose himself to Stevenson, for it was uncharacteristic of the Captain to be so candid. Oddly he feltno guilty regret over a momentary lapse of reticence, but an odd anxiety that the frankness did not disturb him. The paradox made him restless and he sat on the settee in the darkened cabin. It was lit only by the shaded desk lamp which illuminated the scattered remains of the bureaucracy of Singapore littering its top. He sighed. The windows which looked forward were uncurtained, the neat chintz fabric looped tidily up to hooks on either side of them. In the old, munificent days, the Master of the
Matthew Flinders
would have had his personal steward, his âTigerâ, a Chinaman whose sole task was to minister to his wants and one of whose duties would have been to draw the curtains at sunset. Now Mackinnon had to remember to attend to the matter himself, and since he had been on the bridge for the past three hours the task remained undone.
He declined to move; as long as the cabin remained lit only by the small, shaded bulb in the desk lamp it would not affect visibility from the bridge above.
How odd it was, the paperwork, the curtains, the trivial stuff of which his life had been made with its rituals and rather pompous little formalities. Some marked the point at which the machinery of a state touched him as Master of a foreign-going merchant ship, some irked him with their burden of responsibility, some reminded him of his diminishing status.
Woo still liked to call himself Mackinnonâs âTigerâ, because once he had occupied the office and could not now lose face; but he no longer attended to the Captainâs curtains at sunset and both men knew their respective positions had shifted upon the uncertain sand of social change.
Such changes, Mackinnon thought, made the leaving palatable just as they made confidences easier, though why he had felt the need to make them to Stevenson he was not sure. Was he expressing some quiet satisfaction that his own life had been full? He had known war and love, and if not abject poverty then something like it in the indigence of themerchant seaman. But the recollection of those lost warships, which he had never traversed this point on the surface of the earth without recalling, had tonight touched him with an almost potent poignancy. He well remembered news of their loss, remembered his boyhood sentiments as first they, and then Singapore, had fallen to the Japanese. His arrival at Singapore on the
James Cook
had seemed to his young and fanciful imagination to have been a renewal, a picking up of the torch of British maritime endeavour, a carrying on after the reverses of adversity.
How was it put in the words of the prayer alleged to have been written by Drake to support his near-mutinous crews in his circumnavigation?
It is not the doing of a thing that yields the true glory, but the continuing
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