Adrift in a dangerous world

For reasons too many to say, I associate the autumn with the sea, for better or worse. I have never felt happier than I have at sea, or more terrified, or sicker if it comes to that. The passages in literature that have thrilled me most have almost all been sea battles and storms. Now I have had the great and exhilarating pleasure of surviving yet another tempest in Richard Hughes's "In Hazard," now equipped with an excellent introduction by John Crowley (New York Review Books, paperback, $14.95). The novel, first published in 1938, is based on an actual event. In November 1932 the British cargo ship Phemius, manned by British officers and a Chinese crew, was struck by an unpredicted, untracked hurricane in the Caribbean Sea, a calamity that the vessel and all aboard survived, though just barely. In his novel, Hughes sets events in 1929 and calls his ship the Archimedes, but aside from that only the men have been fictionalized.

The book begins with a portrayal of gratifying nautical order: the neatly buttoned-up engines and potent furnaces; the expedient, husbandly compartments of the double hull; the austere length of the propeller shaft, "a smooth column of steel, lying in cool and comfortable bearings . . . turning round and round with no sound." To this he adds descriptions of the inviolably separate realms and duties of engineer and deck officers. All is shipshape in the most viscerally pleasing manner, while the presence of a pet lemur called Thomas, flitting through the ship at night opening the eyelids of sleeping men, strikes a faultless note of small mayhem - and, later, of ghoulish, most welcome humor.

It took the ship's captain some time to acknowledge that, though it was no longer the hurricane season, and though there was no radio report of anything except a small "tropical disturbance" hundreds of miles away, the Archimedes was, in fact, in the midst of a very real and nasty hurricane. On the second day, the ship's funnel, designed and secured to resist unimaginable force, was plucked away, eventually crippling the oil-fired furnaces and shutting down the steam engines. The vessel was left without power, without lights or radio, unable to steer or to pump out the fast-filling hold. Food and water, too, were inaccessible, submerged under water. For all her modern electric and hydraulic equipment and, indeed, because of it, the ship was far worse off than a sailing vessel would have been: "She was dead, as a log is dead, rolling in the sea; she was not a ship any more. She was full of men, of course, but there was no work for them to do, because ships having once discarded men's strength, cannot fall back on that strength in an emergency."

Trapped helpless in the vortex for four more days, the Archimedes was clobbered, and ripped by brutal winds and a maddened sea, by waves as big as houses and others like "trees galloping about, lashing and thrashing each other to bits." Only when she passed into the macabre stillness of the hurricane's awful eye - with days of horror ahead unbeknownst to all - could the ship's appalling condition be seen: "The gaping crater left by the funnel's roots. Smashed derricks, knotted stays. The wheelhouse like a smashed conservatory." She had a frightening list, and "now you could see the horizon tilted sideways, the whole ocean tipped up a steep slope . . . so steep it seemed to tower over the lee bulwarks. It was full of sharks, too, which looked at you on your own level - or, almost, it seemed, above you. It looked as if any moment they might slide down the steep green water and land on the deck right on top of you. They were plainly waiting for something: and waiting with great impatience."

Just as shocking as the storm's deadly force was the malevolent presence of fear, a poisonous contagion that threatened to spread throughout the ship. It paralyzed a few, the most wretched case being that of Rabb, a righteous man who became bereft of willpower and simply folded, crouching "in a corner, his face immobile, his eyes shut: while Thomas, with the absorption of a handicraftsman, his own nocturnal eyes glowing like lamps in the light of the torch, was endeavoring to pick those clamped eye-lids open again in vain."

Hughes wrote "In Hazard" in the mid-1930s and tells us in an afterword, written years later, that the impulse to write the novel came from a subconscious awareness that there would be another catastrophic war, a "hurricane of preternatural power which no maneuvering could dodge." The text, he says "bristles with clues (which is typical of the workings of the subconscious)." It is this, perhaps, that gives the imagery its fraughtness - and perhaps not. Just on its own terms, the novel is superb.

Ships at sea in fiction have stood in for just about everything from the world to the womb. The vessel afloat in Stanley Crawford's "Log of the S.S. The Mrs Unguentine" (Dalkey Archive, paperback, $12.95) is in fact an old seagoing garbage barge, and it is also the world, a phantasmagorical Garden of Eden, and a simply dreadful marriage. Its captain is an even more controlling, egocentric version of the nameless lawgiver in Crawford's brilliantly funny "Some Instructions to My Wife Concerning the Upkeep of the House and Marriage and to My Son and Daughter Concerning the Conduct of Their Childhood." Yes, exactly; this is the kind of guy we're talking about, only more so. Unguentine has gone to sea in his barge with his wife and livestock and a great mulch of garbage in which are planted trees and a garden. He salvages all further necessaries of life and a whole bunch of other junk from the ocean and is always up to some improvement or so: constructing a glass dome to cover their world, sails to replace the engine, a water-purification plant. None of it is remotely feasible, though it is all spelled out in punctilious detail by Mrs. U in this, her "log." Well, why not? Her husband rarely speaks to her, just sends her sneaky little notes now and again. Reading this novel was like having a nightmare. It is lavish and bizarre and defies the laws of nature. It is thoroughly frightening and real in the unreal way that really terrible things are. In that way you could call it a triumph.

Katherine A. Powers lives in Cambridge. She can be reached by e-mail at pow3@verizon.net.