Making things happen

... with integrity

Monday January 26, 2004 Volume VI Number 4

r. Stephen Maturin and Captain Jack Aubrey teach us something about partnership.  Any of us who have attempted a working relationship with a peer have learned something about give and take.  Business partnerships are not marriages, but there are similarities between the two.  There are phases, cycles, in the working relationship and more often than not, such attempts at a shared destiny end badly.  Sometimes, they last – like the captain and the surgeon.  Often, the difference between success and failure amounts to a shade of meaning, a nuance; not a bomb blast.

It helps if you have no other choice.  There is a crystal sort of clarity in the absence of options.

Such is the case for the captain and the good doctor.  They are bound together by the confines of a wooden ship called the Surprise.

It’s the turn of the century – the nineteenth century.  In 1805, Britain resolved to hold on to it’s colonies around the globe.  The skirmish nearly thirty years earlier (we call it the Revolutionary War) with one of those colonies (the one that declared independence in 1776) was a distraction, but there were many other territories to protect – in South America, Africa, India, Southeast Asia, the Philippines, Australia to name a few.  Napoleon’s expansion plans for French conquest included an invasion of the British Isles.  Britain, in self-defense, aimed its powerful naval forces at the French.  In a rich series of novels that tell the stories of this heroic period by Patrick O’Brien, Captain Jack Aubrey is assigned a mission off the coast of Brazil.  The state of the art French warship, the Acheron, wreaked havoc on British whaling boats, attacking and destroying the unarmed fishing vessels without mercy.  It threatened to weaken the British economy and their international presence.  The Captain received his orders – pursue and destroy the larger, more heavily armed and manned French warship Acheron with his lesser vessel, the HMS Surprise.

Captain Aubrey, schooled in the classics and driven by duty and unswerving loyalty to country and crown, accepts the mission with all its risks.

The ship’s physician is also the captain’s confidant and second in command.  Dr. Maturin is a naturalist.  He is on board to care for the health needs of the crew.  He patches up the injuries that occur in the ordinary course of sailing a tall ship, maintaining her masts and sails and riggings, through wind and rain and hail and high seas.  He is particularly busy in the aftermath of battle, which also occurs out there on the Atlantic in confrontations with the French.  He would remove bullets and shrapnel and tend to open wounds from swords and daggers and flying wood chips from the blast of cannon balls on the hull.  If necessary, an amputation.  All in a day’s work.  But his real avocation is the new worlds they explore.  He observes new species of birds and creatures never before recorded in the books, and sketches their images and records patterns of behavior and is generally curious.  Steven is bookish, where Jack is an achiever.  Steven contemplative.  Jack in command. 

Life aboard ship is confining.  The captain and his crew will go weeks, months at a time without settling into port.  Sailing the tall ships across the oceans has a history of over three hundred years. There have been legendary explorations.  Protocol is set.  Nations built and operated naval fleets.  Conquered territories.  Ruled the oceans.  Pirates, too.  Lying in wait.  Menacing the high seas.  Attacking and pilfering treasures held under watchful guard in the bowels of innocent floating hulls.  In time, the stories became legends.  Great battles waged and won.  Strategies recorded in books.  The universities gathered the information and taught courses in navigation and weather and celestial patterns and astronomy and currents and geography and cartography and how to survive for months at a go in a large wooden crate bobbing up and down on a watery journey toward the open horizon on a wide expanse of salty seas.

Families, wives and children, would line the shore as a tall ship disappeared over that horizon.  Some never returned.  Others came home, but schedules were wide open.  It might be years before a reunion.

So crews left, knowing the risks, pursuing adventure and danger.  And leaving with a longing for family and affections, carrying a scrap of a letter, or a sketch of a familiar smile, but mainly a memory, and a yearning and a hope. 

So the ship carried with it something of home.  The captain’s quarters housed a library.  Books would become companions in the journey and provide some measure of escape from the monotony of repetitive routines and long nights.  The books also informed.  In the King’s Navy, officers were gentlemen.  They were civil, educated men who knew the classics.  They understood the great battles of history, the legendary captains who went before and brought back victories.  They studied their tactics, the decisions made in the heat of battle.  They prepared for the day when all of the training would come to the test, and they too would be called upon to implement daring strategies of their own, to outwit the enemy, protect the ship and the crew, and emerge victorious.

All of this required character.  Strength.  A flawed captain might well face the mutiny of his crew.  Holding the crew together, maintaining some semblance of morale and camaraderie, keeping spirits high, all this fell under the captain’s domain.  The best of them combined strength and wit and charm so that a salute from the men was an authentic sign of respect and loyalty – and not a mechanical snap of the elbow required by the rules: a cover-up for contempt.

Such a man was Captain Jack Aubrey.   He embodied the best of the King’s men.

Jack and Stephen, after dinner around the captain’s table, and lively conversation and good food and drink and laughter and story-telling, would cap off a long day with music.  Jack on the violin, Stephen the cello.  Here, too, the classics brought entertainment and diversion, with harmonies and syncopation and melodies, and the instruments brought form and life to their emotion.  A fiddle can laugh and weep, and feel.  And into the night, as the crew settled in, music drifted out from the captain’s quarters, plaintive and mournful longing for home in the melancholy strains for awhile and then a shift to dancing melodies celebrating joy and lightheartedness and underscoring the privilege of adventure and exploration and an open sky and a starry night at sea.  When the doctor and the captain made music, the whole crew settled in with a sense of contentment.

If those two are getting along, so will we.

But the battle, the test, was waiting out there just over the horizon.

* * * * * * * *

One morning this week, Carolyn presented me with a gift.  I’d forgotten it was my birthday. 

I also forgot that I’d dropped a rather obvious hint just a couple weeks before.

When she handed me the brightly colored gift bag and a heavy brick-like object, wrapped in plenty of tissue, I had no idea what it was.  I looked at her curiously.  She thought I would immediately know.  (After all these years, she still is surprised at my forgetfulness.)

Down the road, a Norwegian couple about our age, ventured west from northern Minnesota and settled in to our southern California country town.  They purchased the oldest home in the region, an historic house located near a running creek under the shade of several ancient gnarled oak trees and a big old white barn with aging slats that let the light shine through.  They converted the barn into a charming antique shop, decorated like an old restored world that might otherwise be forgotten.  They call the road side place Matilda’s Mouse.

We like to drop in over there from time to time.  We always seem to see old friends there as we wander around and check out some of the more recent acquisitions.

It was there I found it on an antique end-table beside a vintage lamp, and said to Carolyn, holding it up and inspecting the detail, “I’d really like to have this.”

Well now, as of my birthday, I do.

My grandfather owned one.  Because of it, we have a permanent record of his travels, and his home and his children and their children (me and my siblings) and the celebrations on Christmas and Thanksgiving and the summer vacations to the north woods and my first ride on an airplane – a United Airlines DC3 that took us from Midway in Chicago to Milwaukee where we met Grandma (who drove a car) for dinner. 

I’ve been a photography buff since the seventh grade when I took my first course and learned the darkroom and snapped black and white pictures.  Today, our closet is filled with boxes of photos, and now my hard-drive stores more digital images than you can imagine.  Come to think of it, my hard-drive looks a whole lot like my closet.

Turns out, Grandpa Charlie got us all started.  We’ve got several fine photographers in the family.  He got us going.  I wish I could ask him how he got his start.

Now I realize how determined he was.  He learned to co-ordinate light readings on a carefully calibrated meter, and translate the numbers to just the right combination of shutter speed and aperture and he experimented with the new Kodachrome film, testing the varying speeds.  His collection of color slides are now a family treasure and keepsake.

He did it with an Argus C3.  It was the popular camera of choice for amateur photographers from its introduction in 1939 until it was discontinued in 1966.  In its heyday, they gave the heavy rectangular black camera a nickname.  They called it “the Brick.”

I’ve got one now in the curio cabinet, right next to his pocket watch.  And I stop now on my way down the hall, to cherish a memory or two of the grandfather who taught me so much.  A grandfather I miss.

* * * * * * *

It’s Monday morning.  You are a leader.

You liked Peter Weir’s epic seafaring film Master and Commander, too.  You liked it because it explored so many aspects of leadership.  Captain Jack and Dr. Stephen are archetypes of leadership styles.  They were opposites in many respects.  Jack the doer.  Stephen the thinker.  Jack, the commanding presence.  Stephen, the thoughtful wit.  Jack welcomed Stephen’s sharp intellect and keen questions.  Stephen admired Jack’s command of the men and the ship.  Stephen was comfortable with ambiguities and complexity.  Jack needed resolution.  Stephen openly curious.  Jack stayed the course.  Stephen, inclusive, celebrating diversity.  Jack, the stern disciplinarian.  Jack obsessed with the mission.  Stephen embraced the joy of the journey.  

It would be wrong to conclude that one was stronger than the other; that one more courageous.  One more masculine.  Both displayed a profound depth of strength and courage.  But their perspectives varied.  Their values clashed.  They were caught between the knowing and the doing.  Exploring and finishing.  And in the tension of their diversity, they strengthened each other.  But never easily.

These dynamic differences eventually emerge in every working relationship.  Often, they create anxiety, conflict, even rage and resentment.  Some of us quit.  We give up.  We walk.  Too soon.

Caught in the confines of a floating community, the two men worked it out. 

The most effective means of resolution happened when they made music.  The dueling strings – cello and violin.  It was a harmony that brought together the entire crew. 

You and your partner: learn to make music.  Let your team hear you play.  The rest will fall into place.  Victory will be yours. 

Grandpa Charlie would have been there with his Argus C3 to snap a photo of the jam session.  There would be a pop of the light bulb flash, the moment recorded.  Then he’d show you the slides and tell you the story of Captain Jack Aubrey and Dr. Stephen Maturin and the glorious exploits of the HMS Surprise.

Me, I paint my pictures with words.

Welcome aboard.

Posted in Valley Center, California

© Copyright Kenneth E. Kemp 2004

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