Size makes hiding feel OK
Until you go deep inside the ship
Ever feel like size has a way of hiding things that matter?
Hi, everyone-
I feel like the older I get, the more I’d agree with this observation.
Or is it just me?
You can probably say this about a lot of things. Why else do we feel compelled—myself included—to bury ourselves in good things that swell the self-worth? Including education, titles, accolades, number of life experiences, accomplishments, bragging rights, follower counts, volumes of books, and so on?
Few know this as well as someone aboard a big ship, like this one:
This ship … had everything.
People with pedigree. People who had earned that pedigree. People who earned it by fighting for the pedigree of a nation. And with that belief, any battle scars felt bearable. Which they bore some more by going onboard a ship whose magnitude seems to match the size of these scars.
What else would you do when a new nation is full of young men who had seen every other friend bleed to death? All the while their own bleeding made them see stars and siblings long gone.
For one young man known as Matthew, this big ship he was about to board was exactly that. A bunch of important people. Who had lost a bunch of important causes. And are now hiding what’s lost with a bunch of important features on a ship. To mark the few important things that they did win.
Can you imagine being Matthew?
Looking up to the three-hulled ship. Then stepping onto the wooden planks. Officially taking himself from soil to sea. You can smell wet wood. You can also smell dry wood that had been wet before.
Matthew was assigned the post of a midshipman.
If you’ve ever had to deal with corporate nonsense of any kind in the modern workforce, this title might be equivalent to what we now know as associate. Not so much entry level workers who had to grunt the coffee run. But one just above it. Meaning: he’s past the trial period where the higher-ups say, “Anyone is welcomed.” He’s now in: “Anyone is welcomed who does welcome anything.”
In plain terms:
You could be told to do one thing, be expected to have done another, and when you do that one thing and another right, the reward will still go to others.
Midshipmen nowadays are sometimes posted in the gun deck—a level that, despite its name, doesn’t always carry guns.
Maybe it was named such to fool enemy ships with the perception that there’s always more—a deck-full—than what’s shown. I suppose this is where the hiding starts. You can still feel the need to hide. Regardless of firepower.
Maybe gun decks were named such to also give those with in-between positions—like midshipmen—the feeling that their title is worth gunning for. An attempt to hide insecurities with a fancy title, that is then made fancier by up-naming a place of work that comes with that title.
And maybe that’s why midshipmen can be posted in the gun deck and yet sleep higher up in the ship, where the ‘important’ people sleep. Because despite the thankless job, who you sleep around seems to hide and put to sleep any thanklessness of the job.
The ship that Matthew, the midshipman, boarded was a 3-masted frigate, bearing 44 guns.
It was … intimidating.
But firepower wasn’t the only thing it carried.
Matthew had a lifelong dream to match the seaworthiness of his brother, who died of yellow fever at sea. Matthew had also hoped for a different life after he climbed a tree when he was younger, fell forty five feet to the ground, injured his back, and was no longer able to help his father’s farm work.
It’s easy to say that people onboard were in it for the glory. But sometimes, it’s just about making meaning out of the life you’re given.
The ship didn’t need Matthew. But he needed the ship.
This same ship also happened to have carried a revolutionary invention: an elliptical stern, as opposed to the bulky and easily-vulnerable square ones.
This ship, as it turned out, also carried Lafayette.
Yes, the Lafayette. The Frenchman who fought for American freedom at the battle of Brandywine. No wonder John Adams commissioned this Susquehanna ship and renamed it Brandywine—for the battle of Brandywine Lafayette nearly died in.
Two nights before Matthew went onboard USS Brandywine, Lafayette had a lovely dinner. His 68th birthday. Maybe there was brandy. Maybe there was wine. Maybe there was both. Or neither. But after the night where birthday wishes turned into full bellies—he went onboard the Brandywine.
I wonder how I’d feel if I was onboard a ship that sailed down the Chesapeake Bay, toward the open ocean, until finally I can see nothing left of the land behind. The land that made a point to differentiate the titled and untitled. And big names and no names. Heroes and helpers.
Would the vastness of the sea make you glad of leaving?
Or would it make you sense that, despite having left everything, the ship and the size still bore some semblance of what’s unfair? … The same big ship that made it easy to hide away the insecurities of the forgotten middle: the mediocre, the midshipmen, and meaning-seekers.
That’s the thing with size. It’s good at hiding the size-less.
But only until you go to the belly.
Underneath. Or to the engine room.
Or to the chambers: A place where vessel size can no longer make us feel like the unfair isn’t really our fault.
Or, if you’re a captain of such a vessel, to the captain’s desk: A place where, on a flat wooden surface the size of a bathtub, one must always face the music.
Or rather: the unmusical discordance of logbooks, accounts, bearings, nautical powers, and any lack thereof.
Matthew Maury didn’t have a captain’s desk.
But on his berth, where he laid flat—or tried to—like one would in a full bathtub, he must also confront the nakedness of his thoughts. Of how small his quarter was compared to the captain’s. Of how lucky he was to have been at sea with Lafayette. Of how gunpowder kills, not with the music of a clean death, but with the bite of thousands of shrapnels meant to make any who survived them, wish they hadn’t.
Matthew likely also thought of how leaks onboard have a way of reopening. And if at last they break open for good:
It doesn’t matter how big the ship is.
There would just be no more place to hide.
He had a favorite passage. Not from the book of Matthew, but from Psalm 8. Maybe he recited it: “You have put all things under his feet, even … the fish of the sea.”
Who knows who he might’ve been praying for. Maybe it is for his faith. Maybe it’s for faith in himself. Either way, weeks at sea can make any hiding place the very thing we’re trying to hide from: fear of our own insecurities.
So, Matthew buried—maybe “hide” is a better word—himself in his work for many years after.
He matched the impact of his grandfather, a teacher of Thomas Jefferson.
And he became known as the Pathfinder of the Seas.
As the father of world meteorology.
And as founder of the science of oceanography.
And if that wasn’t enough, he authored The Physical Geography of the Sea.
Matthew, like many onboard, may have sought refuge in Brandywine for whatever reason. But when Matthew stepped off the USS Brandywine, he contributed widely. To the deep world of navigation.
Which might as well mean one thing:
The ultimate place to hide … is in places that make you say: I will not hide any longer.
-Thalia
PS:
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-Thalia
Hi Thalia - Thanks for the interesting trip with Matthew. I feel like I was by his side, and I learned some cool things on the way. That was a great way to end my day!
Maybe it's something in a name that rings true, that forms a tether. Maybe its how history always holds relevance, particularly in how you thread a metaphor. I really enjoyed this piece, thanks so much for sharing it.