Roger Vercel’s Heroic Captain

Grove Koger

Today’s entry in the series I’m calling “Sea Fever” deals with a novel by Roger Vercel, who died February 26, 1957.

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Remorques (Paris: A. Michel, 1935). Tug-Boat, trans. by Warre Bradley Wells (London: Chatto & Windus, 1936); as Salvage (New York: Harper, 1936)

Born in Le Mans in 1894, Roger Vercel was studying at the University of Caen when World War I broke out. He saw service in Eastern and Southeastern Europe, returning to France at war’s end to teach in the little Breton town of Dinan. His first, psychologically acute novel, based on his experiences in the Balkans and translated as Captain Conan, appeared in 1930 and won the Prix Goncourt. Although he often wrote about the sea, Vercel seems to have had little actual sailing experience. As he said of one of his works, “I made the trip under the lamp at home, leaning over maps and compasses.”

The protagonist of Salvage, Captain Renaud, has sailed wooden ships around Cape Horn. But the days of sail are long past, and Renaud now commands a salvage tug, the Cyclone, out of the northwestern French port of Brest. The bulk of Salvage is taken up with a meticulous description of the rescue of a Greek freighter that has foundered in a terrible storm—an operation that repeatedly goes wrong as the freighter’s panic-stricken crew undermine their rescue and as the several hawsers that the Cyclone has attached to the freighter break in the storm’s fury.

Vercel advances his story as stolidly as Renaud and his crew carry out their mission: “It was a tacit rule of honour … never to be taken aback by anything that happened at sea.” Yet Renaud ultimately finds himself undone by the very relationship that has buoyed him up for so long and that he has always taken for granted—his marriage. Perhaps inevitably, Vercel has been called the French Conrad, and like his British counterpart, he finds relationships between the sexes problematic and even debilitating.

Besides his sea novels, Vercel wrote about the port of Saint-Malo, which lies a few miles downriver from his adopted home of Dinan, in Saint-Malo et l’âme malouine. To read my posts about the two locations, which Maggie and I visited in 2001, see “On Our Way to the Emerald Coast” and “France’s Enchanted Emerald Coast.”

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The cover of the 1950 Pantheon edition at the top of today’s post features a painting by Jean Gradassi. The photograph of Vercel at a book signing in 1935 is by Luc Walterspiler and is reproduced courtesy of Wikimedia Commons under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. The bottom image is the cover of the 1982 Albin Michel edition of Vercel’s book about St.-Malo.

Counting the Sirens

Grove Koger

I’ve recently completed two essays involving sirens, and, as I compiled what little information I could find about the creatures, I noticed a surprising point. Their earliest appearance in the literature that has come down to us is in Book 12 of the Odyssey, where they attempt to lure Odysseus and his men onto their island. The means of their appeal is said to be their song, which is so beguiling that none who hear it can resist it. As you probably remember, Odysseus takes Circe’s advice and gets around this problem by filling his sailors’ ears with wax and ordering them to tie him to the mast before they row past the sirens’ dangerous lair.

Aside from the sirens’ physical appearance—they evolved over time from women with avian aspects to women with piscine aspects—there was the question of number. How many were there? If you’re like me, you picture a dozen or so, but the translation I was working from, the 1996 version from Robert Fagles, doesn’t specify. My real problem arose, however, when I consulted other sources, only to be assured, again and again, that Homer refers to two. No, I thought, checking Fagles again; in his version, Homer doesn’t say. Fagles provides notes on the text, but none addresses the question of sirens.

Next, I turned to another noted translation, this one by Robert Fitzgerald from 1961, and was more than a little surprised to read, “Soon, / as we came smartly within hailing distance, / the two Seirênês, noting our fast ship / off their point, made ready,” and so on. Hmmm. The issue was scarcely a major one, but I didn’t want to make an error, so I sidestepped the issue and finished my essays.

The question continued to bother me, however, and I did my best to consult an online version of the Odyssey in ancient Greek in the Perseus Digital Library, which is maintained by Tufts University. But although I thought I knew the word for sirens in Greek, I couldn’t spot it. So I turned to someone who might have knowledge of the ancient version of the language, my good friend Dr. Pamela Francis, who’s a fellow-member of the International Lawrence Durrell Society and an Associate Lecturer of English at the Louisiana School for Math, Science, and the Arts. She couldn’t help me, but she knew someone who could: her colleague Dr. Morris Tichenor, who graciously checked the Perseus text and came up with an answer almost immediately. As he explained, “In ancient Greek, a noun can be one of three ‘numbers’: singular, plural, and the supercool and ultrarare dual, used mostly in epic and only when there are specifically two of something.” Putting the site’s online glossing function to work, he identified the key word—σειρήνοιιν—as feminine, genitive, and dual!

We’ve all heard that Homer nods, but apparently Fagles nods too, which I find reassuring.

In any case, the number of sirens grew over time to eight, and ancient mythographers even created genealogies for them. Nearer our own day, poet and classicist Robert Graves identified eleven in his Greek Myths (1955). However, we’ve long since lost track of whatever dangerous reef or psychologically charged folktale gave rise to the stories of the strange creatures in the first place.

I’ve had good luck writing about sirens. My short story involving them, “The Happiest Man Alive,“ was published in the September 2018 issue of the Bosphorus Review of Books. And my essay “In Search of the Sirens,” in which I discuss the possible location of the creatures’ island(s), is scheduled to appear in the first issue of Seaborne in March.

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The image at the top of today’s post is a detail from an Attic red-figure stamnos depicting Odysseus and the sirens; it dates from ca. 480-470 BCE and is reproduced courtesy of Wikipedia Commons. The second image is John William Waterhouse’s 1891 painting Ulysses and the Sirens and is reproduced courtesy of the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia. The third is a 1909 painting with the same title by Herbert James Draper, reproduced courtesy of the Ferens Art Gallery, Hull, England.  

The Mystery of Balta Island

Grove Koger

My good friend Bill Cope recently asked me to take up my old role of reference librarian, and I’m glad to say that, after a bit of flailing around, I was able to help him.

Bill’s question involved the island of Balta in the subarctic Shetland archipelago north of mainland Scotland. He’d noticed a reference to it, he said, because he’d once read a book about a famous sled dog named Balto, which is another story for another day. In any case, Bill had used the satellite feature of Google Maps to look as closely as he could at the island simply to see what could be seen, which, given Balta’s small size (some 200 acres), and northerly latitude (60°45′3.6″ N), wasn’t much. But as he zeroed in, he noticed circular patterns in the waters just off the island’s shores. Were they, he wondered, evidence of some defect in Google Maps? Or were they really there? And if so, what were they?

We both speculated for a moment, and I suspected that Bill was seeing storage tanks for petroleum, which of course is being extracted all over the North Sea. However, when I looked up Balta in Wikipedia, which I use frequently but cautiously, there was no mention of oil. I learned that the island does have the northernmost fish farm and fish hatchery in the United Kingdom, but since I don’t eat fish, I didn’t give the matter much thought.

Next, I turned directly to Google Maps, and sure enough, there were the circles Bill was seeing, two sets of ten apiece just off the island’s western shore. But they looked so regular—so perfectly circular—that, like Bill, I wondered whether they were some sort of defect in Google’s imaging process. You can see what we were seeing here.

The more I looked, however, the more I read about fish farming, so I did an image search under “Balta” and “fish farming,” and sure enough, we were seeing fish cages, which I admit was an entirely new concept to me. They’re essentially large, circular nets that are open at the top and closed at the bottom. Some are designed to float at the water’s surface, but others are apparently suspended below the surface. Those being used at Balta are the former variety, and are being used to raise salmon.

I also ran across announcements that Cooke Aquaculture Scotland bought a company named Balta Island Seafare in 2016, and, given that information, found a YouTube video promoting the Cooke operation, although I’m not sure we’re seeing Balta itself.

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Bill, by the way, was the liveliest writer working for Boise Weekly back in the day. I appeared there very occasionally, but he maintained a weekly schedule, year after year. I was able to help him with research from time to time, and it’s been a pleasure to do so again. You can see a selection of Bill’s columns here.

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The photograph at the top of today’s post shows the beach at South Links, Balta, and the second shows some of Balta’s residents with fish cages and the nature reserve known as the Keen of Hamar beyond. Both were taken by Mike Pennington and are reproduced courtesy of Geograph.

Jules Verne Sets Out

Grove Koger

Today’s post is about the early life of an enormously influential French novelist who was born February 2, 1828—Jules Verne. It’s drawn from my article “Extraordinary Voyages: Jules Verne’s Geographical Imagination,” which originally appeared in the September/October 2002 issue of Mercator’s World.

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When Jules Verne (1828-1905) was a child, he decided to run away to sea. Accompanied by two friends, he rowed out to a ship anchored near his family’s summer home on the Loire River and signed on as a cabin boy. Had the Coralie not put in subsequently at the nearby port of Paimboeuf, allowing Verne’s father to catch up with him, he might well have reached the Indies. It was 1839, and Jules was eleven.

It’s a fine story, and it offers a handy key to the mind of a writer who set so many of his stories at sea, or beneath it. Yet Verne published no account of the escapade during his lifetime, and it almost certainly never took place, even though it became enshrined in family legend and has been repeated in many biographies. Verne grew up in the western French port of Nantes, and like many youths he dreamed of ships and the sea, but in the story of the Coralie we meet the daring boy that Verne and his readers wanted him to be, not the timid boy he really was.

What is beyond doubt is that the writer subsequently underwent a young man’s typical struggle between his father’s expectations and his own ambitions. Verne studied law, but he lived and breathed literature. That his legal studies had taken him to Paris in 1846 was surely fortuitous. Verne’s first literary efforts were boulevard dramas, but what little success he enjoyed in the theatre seems to have been due to his friendship with Alexandre Dumas pere and fils. Several short stories Verne published in 1851–“The First Ships of the Mexican Navy” and “A Balloon Trip”–suggested a different direction, but it was to be more than a decade before he found a winning formula.

By 1863 European explorers such as Richard Burton and Heinrich Barth had penetrated deep into Africa. The public anxiously awaited word from James Grant and John Speke about the source of the Nile River. In January of that year, Parisians woke up to read the exciting account of one Dr. Samuel Ferguson, who, thanks to the backing of the Daily Telegraph in London, had set out to cross the continent with two companions—by hydrogen balloon! According to the report, Ferguson had solved some of the most vexing problems involved in long balloon flights—the apparent necessity of releasing precious gas or dropping ballast from time to time in order to control the craft’s  altitude.

Five Weeks in a Balloon was the first of an array of novels, novellas, and short stories that Verne and his publisher, Pierre-Jules Hetzel, would call “Les Voyages extraordinaires.” Hereafter, most of Verne’s works made their first appearance in Hetzel’s Magasin d’éducation et de recreation. The astute publisher contracted with Verne to handle the author’s works in periodical form, followed by book publication. Over the years this arrangement, revised several times, would make Verne rich, allowing him to move his family to the quiet northern French town of Amiens and to buy a series of yachts.