M E R I D I A N     M A G A Z I N E

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.

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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