"Captains Courageous" – Rudyard Kipling, 1897 ★½

Fish Story Gets Away

The first thing that threw me about this novel when I encountered it as a boy was the title.

Glancing at it, I expected something like the Three Musketeers at sea. It was billed as an adventure tale. Author Rudyard Kipling was known for his war stories, often set in India. How could I have known it was a story about a youngster learning how to become a man by…catching fish?

Oh, and just to throw me for more of a loop, uber-Brit Kipling makes this an entirely American story. So here’s one for us Yanks!

Our story concerns young Harvey Cheyne, pampered son of a money-centered tycoon and a neurasthenic mother. While crossing the Atlantic on a steamship, Harvey is washed overboard and finds himself rescued by a fisherman from the We’re Here, a schooner plying the Grand Banks of the North Atlantic. Not believing Harvey’s story of a rich father, the schooner’s captain puts Harvey to work on his vessel.

Once a princeling of industry, Harvey finds himself in a more demanding environment. He must pull his own weight and risks a bloody nose for any backtalk:

This was a new world, where he could not lay down the law to his elders, but had to ask questions humbly. And the sea was horribly big and unexcited.

The captain in Captains Courageous is Disko Troop, a central figure of the story and the only character in it who manages to keep things interesting. While not a figure of derring-do, his quiet determination and stoicism dominate the action of our story – what there is of it.

Captains Courageous as a title is a kind of curiosity. I see it sometimes with quotation marks around it, as Kipling took the title from the opening line of a 17^th-century ballad, “Mary Ambree,” better-known in Kipling’s day: When captaines couragious, whom death cold not daunte,/Did march to the siege of the citty of Gaunt…

There is also a less familiar subtitle, “A Story Of The Grand Banks,” far more relevant to the story at hand.

The schooner of Captains Courageous, as illustrated for a 1907 Charles Scribner's Sons edition. Image from https://www.grandbanks.nyc/blog/2014/11/23/captains-courageous.

The novel is all about the Grand Banks off Newfoundland, and hardships and dangers of those who worked them to bring their salted cargoes home to Gloucester. They bicker, sing songs, tell tales, and work until they drop from exhaustion. It’s no easy life.

Kipling offers some memorably descriptive passages of what it entailed:

After they had buoyed the cable – all around the Virgin is rocky bottom, and carelessness means chafed ground-tackle and danger from drifting – after they had buoyed the cable, their dories went forth to join the mob of boats anchored about a mile away. The schooners rocked and dipped at a safe distance, like mother ducks watching their brood, while the dories behaved like mannerless ducklings.

A little later on, the fishermen must contend with an onslaught of cod, pursued by whales and chasing after yet smaller prey:

Then everybody shouted and tried to haul up his anchor to get among the school, and fouled his neighbor’s line and said what was in his heart, and dipped furiously with his dip-net, and shrieked cautions and advice to his companions, while the deep fizzled like freshly-opened soda-water, and cod, men, and whales together flung in upon the luckless bait.

But the often fine prose is burdened by the fact Kipling doesn’t have a story to tell here, just a situation he came across second-hand talking to fishermen about their life. Being as he was a detail maven with an eager ear for dialects, the material can’t help but stir something evocative in Kipling’s hands. Yet the core concept of a rich boy forced to grow up amid rough company is something Kipling sidesteps. The novel plays out instead as a collection of isolated moments with little in the way of story to distract us.

Rudyard Kipling. Image from https://www.audiobookcontractors.com/products/captains-courageous.

Kipling in America. It seems such a strange concept to me. But it was a reality during much of Kipling’s most fruitful period as a writer. Settling in Vermont in 1892, he went on to write both his Jungle Books, several short stories, that most Victorian of poems “If – ,” and this, one of his rare novels. As with other British celebrities like John Cleese and Prince Harry, he also took an American wife before eventually moving back home.

America isn’t just the backdrop of Captains Courageous as I see it, but the whole theme of the novel. Harvey Cheyne is not a person so much as a representational figure, of young America finding its oats. Given the novel appeared just a year before the United States took its first steps as a world power in the Spanish-American War, there is a kind of historic synchronicity to the novel coming out when it did.

No wonder Theodore Roosevelt, that most muscular of Americans, was moved to extol Captains Courageous as defining “exactly what a boy should be and do.”

I don’t think this works in the book’s favor, story-wise. Instead of marking out Harvey’s gradual growth into a more self-reliant character, we see him morph all at once into a fully-commited fisherman learning the ropes of his new craft. In a wonderful analysis of the novel (no less wonderful for the way it tracks my own), Simon of the culture blog Books & Boots points out this deficiency:

“In the hands of a Henry James or Joseph Conrad the pleasure would have been in seeing Harvey’s character genuinely change through a sequence of events. Instead Kipling supplies a stream of incidents but they’re curiously detached from Harvey’s transformation.”

Harvey learns about fishing, and sailing too, under the calm, watchful eye of Disko Troop. Image from serialreader.org.

For me, the Americanness of Harvey is at the center of everything else storywise. The novel opens in the smoking room of Harvey’s steamship, where men talk about this rich young brat in their midst. “Ameriga is full of dot kind,” grouses an old German.

A little later, Harvey himself enters the smoking room, and his nationality is again pointed out by a sardonic Philadelphian:

“You’ll blossom into a credit to your country if you don’t take care.”

“I know it. I’m an American – first, last, and all the time. I’ll show ‘em that when I strike Europe.”

We never quite get a fix on Harvey’s age. We are told he is “perhaps fifteen years old,” too young to be smoking, which is the cause of his near-demise when the German hands him a noxious “Wheeling stogie” to puff on. The West Virginia tobacco is what sends him on deck to throw up, and be thrown up instead by an errant wave that tosses him into the North Atlantic and, in a piece of amazing luck, into the net of Manuel, one of the fishermen of the We’re Here crew.

Much later on, after he has been seasoned by his work on the We’re Here, Harvey has a moment to reflect on his growth to manhood:

Other people – summer boarders and such-like – played about in catboats or looked at the sea from pier-heads; but he understood things from the inside – more things than he could begin to think about.

Harvey (Jonathan Kahn) gets the hang of mess-hall life in a 1977 made-for-television movie, with Fred Gwynne as the fisherman Long Jack at left and Ricardo Montalban as Manuel at right. Shot in Maine, the film captures the fine atmospherics of Kipling's novel...and also its tedium. You can judge for yourself at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8hYT1xvOwc.

But that growth is never particularized in any clear way. Harvey witnesses some amazing spectacles, and in one harrowing episode finds his net entangled with the faceless corpse of a drowned sailor. But the episode passes and Harvey maintains his place as eager student of hard knocks. He wonders once how his mother is taking his disappearance, but beyond that his thought processes seem a blank.

Having seen the 1937 movie adaptation, with Freddie Bartholomew as Harvey and Spencer Tracy in his Oscar-winning turn as Manuel, I was much surprised at how smoothly it all went for Harvey in the book. In the movie, poor Freddie must contend with his outsized sense of entitlement a little longer, and even be dubbed a “Jonah,” a bringer of bad luck, by the superstitious crew, with Manuel his only friend.

In the novel, the term “Jonah” is raised, and explained, but it never fastens itself to Harvey. Nor is the crew particularly hostile towards him. Manuel saves Harvey, but doesn’t register much otherwise in the book.

In the 1937 movie, Manuel is the one showing Harvey the ropes. Here Harvey (Freddie Bartholomew) gets the hang of a telescope with the help of Manuel (Spencer Tracy). Image from https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/16515-captains-courageous.

Seeing that movie first probably ruined the book for me, eventless as it is. So too did Kipling’s repeated use of the N-word, in connection with a black cook who is the only person who rightly suspects Harvey is the son of rich folk. Mark Twain in Huckleberry Finn gets away with that kind of thing better because he deploys racist sentiment ironically. Here Kipling may well be reflecting the nature of the world he is depicting, but does so in a unpleasantly accepting way.

Another point of comparison to Huckleberry Finn is an odd, sharp-left-turn ending. Instead of wrapping matters up with Harvey himself, Kipling pulls away from the We’re Here the moment it reaches Gloucester, to depict in a much drawn-out sequence how Harvey’s bereaved parents greet the news of his rescue. All manner of technology are put to use as we watch Harvey’s father effect a reunion:

He signed to her to move to the Morse as a general brings brigades into action. Then he swept his hand musician-wise through his hair, regarded the ceiling, and set to work, while Miss Kinzey’s white fingers called up the Continent of America.

Again, it boils down to America. The result merits interest, but exposes a fatal lack of purpose. Captains Courageous is a piece of history, popular in its day as a representation of a boisterous young nation that flattered its intended audience, but it falls short both as a story and as a portrait of a boy coming of age. Great premise, weak execution.