"What is the moon?" says Captain Boyle. And says I to myself--"What is the Sea?" Me sitting in a rowing boat off Bullock Harbour, surrounded by a mixture of oxygen and nitrogen--the air--and dropping a line into a mixture of oxygen and hydrogen--the water. And for the tenth time I ask myself: "What is the Sea?"

Boyle had it easy. The moon is up there in the sky and you can see the thing. Not only can you see it, but you can walk on it. And if you're inclined to do your homework and swot up on the math and things like that, there's a fair chance that sometime soon you could go up to it. The Americans have been there; the Russians put a toy robot on it.

But I keep on asking myself--"What is the Sea?"

There are fellows reading this who, on a good night in the Med, leaned over the fantail and asked themselves the same question. And the young nippers coming behind them will ask it. "What is the Sea?"

There was an old Greek called Homer and when he wrote about it a damn sight longer ago than I care to think about, he called it "the wine-dark sea". If you ever ploughed up of an evening through the Greek islands heading for the Bosphorus, the sea all around you is purple dark like the colour of grapes ripe for the wine. But if you're clawing along the north coast of Africa, chasing the ghost of the Ouzel Galley out of Dublin, there are times the sea is the colour of sand, as if the Sahara was reaching out to capture it. And over on the coast behind the scrub you can see it from the bow. What is the Sahara itself but another kind of sea, with drifts and currents building up the dunes that take on the shape of giant waves in the mid-Atlantic?

They have a roller-coaster over in Blackpool, and in the annual orgy of Wales Week a whole lot of landlubbers from Manchester and Bolton pay good money to have their stomachs turned upside down.

Nature has the best roller-coaster in the world in a January gale in the Bay of Biscay, when the foc'sle plunges down, down, down down, and your heart stops, and then comes the wiggle and a screw to one side and the other, and she starts climbing again, up, up, up; and you're looking at the stars, and Juno comes back to you and asks: "What is the Stars?"

And there are times when you feel you're breaking a mirror and you'll have seven years bad luck, and to get away from the sun-drenched monotony ahead, you turn to the wake and watch the arrow-head ripple vanishing into the haze-heat of the horizon, and say to your sweat-drenched self: "What is the Sea?"

There was an engineer on one of the P.O. liners that stopped at Malta before the war. He used to drop into my office every time he passed, with bundles of poetry he wrote in the dog watch going down Suez and through the Gulf of Bombay. It was all about babbling brooks, and lakes, and streams, and rivers, and trees; and there was one about his mother's hen house. It was all bad, but I listened and tried to help. Why not? He was just another lonely sailor out of the millions down through the pages of history, trying to escape from his mistress, the sea, and he couldn't.

I was sitting on a bollard on the North Wall in Dublin, about an hour after the "reads." A couple of unlucky lads were standing around having a quiet bit of a smoke watching their mates fix a cargo in the slings.

There was one elderly chap playing around with a hook and throwing a professional eye on the stowing.

"Did you ever go to sea?" I asked him.

"I did," says he, "with the cattle for the Continent."

"And did you like it?"

"I didn't like it one bit."

"And," says I, "you've had a long time on the docks. How d'you like that?"

You couldn't even print his answer in the Waterfront News.

Funny, but my mind kept going back over my own encounters with the sea: half-drowned at Ballyliffin in Inishowen at the age of five and revived; nearly drowned at Greencastle on Lough Foyle and revived; down my third time at Rogey Hole at Bundoran and revived; back and forward time and again to Heysham; a rattleship of a boat, the "Largs Bay", to Malta; the "Knight of Malta" at week-ends to Catania; the war and joined the Air Force to spend two years in submarines on the petrol run to Alexandria; home by sub to Gib, and to Liverpool by broken-down destroyer; and more of the cross-Channel stuff, and more and more encounters in the small rowing bits, sail bits and motor launch bits. And here I was sitting on a bollard looking at the crown scum being pushed back by the rising tide.

"What sort of a job would you like then?" says I.

He went into an eloquent dream about nine-to-five, a warm office, pints with his mates, and then he added a wistful after-thought: "But it would have to be somethin' to do with the sea."

You can't escape the damn sea if it once gets a hold on you.

There's a special kind of women who know this, and they'll drop the apron on the kitchen floor and travel to the other end of the country to spend twenty-four hours with their man on the North Atlantic run from Brunswick or Newport Mews to Belfast or the Clyde. And come back and pick up the apron off the floor and start another round of dishwashing until the chancey sea lets them unite again for another minute or two. They'll curse the sea, damn the sea, wish it never was invented--but the sea is in them too and they know it.

"What is the Sea?" The time for rolling and screwing down the coast of Africa is gone; the time for surfacing after ten hours under is gone; the time for watching for the porpoise school or the miracle of flying fish is gone. But the sea itself is always there. Where? Damned if I know.

Zammit was torpedoed four times in the first World War. He sat beside me on the bastion ringing the Barracca Gardens overlooking the Grand Harbour in Valetta.

"Signu Ward", he said, "the sea is in my heart."

Maybe it is. So I sit in my rowing boat off Bullock Harbour, the fishing lead bouncing on the bottom, a school of Heron class winging down towards Dalkey Sound, a white Dutch coaster out in the channel, and a deep-laden tanker waiting for the tide in Scotsman's Bay. And I rock on that chemical mixture of oxygen, hydrogen and salt, and say to myself for the eleventh time--"What is the Sea?"

And I still say, I'm damned and double-damned if I know.

The End

Note: Described as "a poem in prose, a rhapsody in blue (water), a dream of an article....because it is written from the heart", "What is the Sea" appeared in the "Waterfront News" issue of July, 1971. At that time Charlie was Chief Sub-Editor of Radio Telefís Éireann. I was unaware of his two earlier drowning experience, but elsewhere in this Home Page have mentioned his rescue from drowning at Rogey. Readers may find one of his finest articles under the title Requiem for a River. For those unfamiliar with the work, Capt. Boyle and Juno are characters in Sean O'Casey's play, "Juno and the Paycock".
John Ward