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Down to the Sea in Ships
By Davis Bitton
I am among those
missionaries to Europe who traveled there
and returned on a ship. I went over on the America
and returned on the United
States, both luxury liners. If you saw
the movie Titanic, you have some impression of the food,
service, and general elegance of a luxury ocean liner. Fortunately,
we didn’t encounter an iceberg.
Those coming
to America as immigrants during
the first half of the nineteenth century and beyond came by sail.
Then steamships showed their superiority. In his definitive studies
of Mormon maritime migration, Conway B. Sonne
shows that during the decade of the 1860s there were 46 sailing
vessel passages and 10 steamboat passages; during the 1870s, 59
steamboat passages and only one by sail. After that, everything
was by steamship.
Most people
now go through their lives without ever experiencing directly
what it was like to sail the seas. The historian Daniel Boorstin
once remarked that modern Americans leave their air-conditioned
homes, take an air-conditioned automobile to the air-conditioned
airport, board an air-conditioned airplane, fly in a few hours
to Egypt, and stay in the air-conditioned Cairo Hilton.
I wonder if Boorstin ever chose to make
such a trip in the old way, but we can, I think, grant the truth
of his observation — we are usually shielded from the harshness
of the environment.
For Latter-day
Saints, important early voyages brought the Jaredites,
Lehites, and Mulekites across the
vast ocean to the Western Hemisphere. Not
for them air-conditioned cabins and catered buffets on the deck.
Without knowing as much as we would like, we are given enough
information to recognize that the Jaredite craft, which could be sealed from the waves, was
unconventional. Hugh Nibley lists twelve
specific parallels to the magur-boat,
the ark of Utnapishtim, the Babylonian Noah.
To our knowledge,
unlike Columbus’s Santa Maria,
Lehi’s ship carried no name. I amuse
myself by calling it Deliverer — just as I chuckle in imagining
Nephi starting each morning at sea by doing push-ups and singing
"I will go, I will do the thing the Lord commands."
Don’t worry. I don’t stay in such a playful mood more than a few
seconds.
Obviously, some
individual voyages had great consequences. Think of the Apostle
Paul’s missionary voyages. Contrary to a popular impression, the
Mediterranean could be stormy indeed. On
his final voyage, as he traveled as a prisoner to Rome, his ship capsized off the coast of Malta.
One thinks of
storied names from the age of discovery — Christopher Columbus,
Vasco da Gama, Magellan. Readers of
Richard Hakluyt’s volumes can follow one maritime experience after
another. For the late eighteenth century, one thinks of Captain
James Cook and his ship Resolution.
How many of
the ocean-crossers — Nephi, Columbus, Thomas Jefferson going to
France to serve as U.S. ambassador, John Evington Bitton
and those of his company who would form the Martin Handcart Company
— suffered from seasickness? Anyone who has been there knows that
in its grip, one little appreciated beautiful sunsets or romantic
music played by a ship’s orchestra. Packed like sardines into
steerage, many poor Saints must have wondered more than once whether
they had made the right decision in crossing the mighty deep.
With all his
intellectual and spiritual strengths, George Q. Cannon had a weak
stomach. He suffered from terrible nausea even in crossing back
and forth between Maui and Oahu. Later, more than once, he crossed the Atlantic. When these assignments were given him, he did not say, "You
will have to excuse me. I am unable to travel by sea for health
reasons." He did in fact respond in words equivalent to 1
Nephi 3:7: "I will go and do the things which the Lord hath
commanded."
Some accounts
of sea travel and shipwrecks are fictional. In 1494 Sebastian
Brandt published Narrenshiff, using a ship as a metaphor for life. The
trope was picked up by Katherine Ann Porter in her 1962 Ship
of Fools. Erasmus of Rotterdam wrote a colloquy entitled "The
Shipwreck." With characteristic humor, he shows the frantic
passengers running back and forth on the deck, wondering whether
they can make it to shore. A monk thinks he can swim the distance,
but he would have to take off his habit and worries that God could
not recognize him without his uniform.
Defoe’s Robinson
Crusoe of course starts with a shipwreck. Melville’s Moby
Dick, a novel, gives a good sense of life on a whaling ship.
I have been
interested in the use of similar imagery by church leaders. A
recurring image to describe the onward course of the Church as
contrasted to the downward spiral of apostates has been that of
a ship. I don’t know who first utilized it. Heber C. Kimball,
Orson Hyde, Daniel H. Wells — these and others saw fidelity to
covenants as equivalent to staying with the ship. They called
it the ship Zion.
No one recurred
to this powerful metaphor more often than Brigham Young. Here
are seven examples from his printed sermons.
- "This
is the mighty ship Zion.
You stick to the ship, and honour
it, and see that you are in favour
with the ship Zion, and you need not worry about anything else." (August 30,
1857).
- "When
some want away last spring, I told them to go in peace, and
they did so. What are they doing now? Many of them are struggling
to get back, and the rest are wishing that they had never left
here. It is a kind of dear business to apostatize every year.
I would rather stick to the old ship Zion." (September 13, 1857).
- "The
Lord will rule; and if we continue steadfast to the kingdom
of God, it will save us; but if we
do not, we shall be left off, and the old ship Zion will sail right a-head and safely carry her passengers into port."
(October 7, 1857).
- "It
is in calm weather, when the old ship of Zion is sailing with
a gentle breeze, and when all is quiet on deck, that some of
the brethren want to go out in the whaling-boats to have a scrape
and a swim; and some get drowned, others drifted away, and others
again get back to the ship. Let us stick to the old ship, and
she will carry us safely into the harbour."
(January 17, 1858).
- "I will
stick to the old ship Zion until every passenger, the crew,
and every officer on board are holy and live to God; and, God
and good men being my helpers, we will conquer, and we will
run the ship into harbour — the haven
of rest. Be encouraged, all good men and women, and all you
grumblers and complainers, who think that you are curtailed
and oppressed, and do not enjoy liberty here, go elsewhere and
get all the liberty you can." (August 5, 1860).
- "We
are in the midst of the ocean. A storm comes on, and, as sailors
say, she labors very hard. "I am not going to stay here,"
says one; "I don't believe this is the Ship Zion."
"But we are in the midst of the ocean." "I don't
care, I am not going to stay here." Off goes the coat,
and he jumps overboard. Will he not be drowned? Yes. So with
those who leave this Church. It is the old Ship Zion, let us
stay in it." (May 15, 1865).
- "I know
enough to let the kingdom alone, and do my duty. It carries
me, I do not carry the kingdom. I sail in the old ship Zion,
and it bears me safely above the raging elements. I have my
sphere of action and duties to perform on board of that ship;
to faithfully perform them should be my constant and unceasing
endeavor." (June 17, 1866).
Remembering
his own experience in crossing the Atlantic
in a sailing ship, talking to people many of whom had done the
same, Brigham was communicating in terms people could understand
by evoking widely shared emotions. They had witnessed the tempest
raging, the billows tossing high.
In a different
way, those who in our own lifetime were carried in troop ships
have experienced the heaving, tossing seas. Elder John Groberg’s
book The Other Side of Heaven (as it has been retitled)
and the movie give some glimpses of the terror of storms at sea
in the islands of Tonga.
The fearful might of the elements is also conveyed in movies like
The Perfect Storm.
Whether we are
among the few who know first-hand the excitement and danger of
being at the mercy of the sea, or among the majority who know
of such things only through books and movies, the important thing
is that the good ship Zion, still on course, moves steadily forward. There are many
"unhallowed hands" out there, but, as Joseph Smith wrote
in the Wentworth Letter, they will not stop the work from progressing
"until the great Jehovah shall say the work is done."
Dedicated to my friend and colleague Dean L. May. Before his unexpected
death in 2003, he replicated the experience of his ancestors by
participating in the Sea Trek reenactment of 2001. Dean was not
one to give up the ship.
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