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Churchill Fiction: “Man Overboard! An Episode of the Red Sea” (1899)
- By THE CHURCHILL PROJECT
- | October 30, 2017
- Category: Resources The Literary Churchill
Introduction
Churchill’s first piece of published fiction, Man Overboard! appeared in January 1899. Ronald Cohen’s bibliography dates its writing to March 1898. In late March or early April, Churchill sent a draft to General Ian Hamilton: “The story I send you as it may amuse you for an hour….”
Dr. Paul Alkon (in his scholarly work Winston Churchill’s Imagination) describes Man Overboard! as “justly forgotten.” But Henry Austin’s melodramatic drawings suggest an 1899 version of “Jaws.” Alkon quips that the story “quickly sank out of sight, taking down with it Austin’s pictures.” It does leave us with a glimpse of the shipboard life and song Churchill enjoyed in those days.
The possibility of falling overboard probably occupied our author during his progresses up and down the Red Sea, en route to or returning from India or South Africa. We can conceive of his vivid imagination conjuring what might happen if someone accidentally fell in. There is the fading music, the dimming light as the ship pulls away, the despair of the victim. The story manifests that streak of fatalism Churchill always carried with him.
“Death as near as I believe I have ever seen him”
The historian Andrew Roberts reminds us that young Winston himself had felt the sensation when a boat pulls away, from his boyhood adventure on Lake Geneva, with his brother Jack. After they had dived for a swim off a rowboat, a light breeze began to blow the boat away from them. “I saw Death as near as I believe I have ever seen him,” Churchill wrote his autobiography….
He was swimming in the water at our side, whispering from time to time in the rising wind which continued to carry the boat away from us at about the same speed we could swim. No help was near. Unaided we could never reach the shore…. I now swam for life…. I scrambled in, and rowed back for my companion who, though tired, had not apparently realised the dull yellow glare of mortal peril that had so suddenly played around us.
Here is Churchill’s story, by kind permission of Randolph S. Churchill and the Churchill Literary Estate.
Man Overboard! An Episode of the Red Sea
It was a little after half-past nine when the man fell overboard. The mail steamer was hurrying through the Red Sea in the hope of making up the time which the currents of the Indian Ocean had stolen.
The night was clear, though the moon was hidden behind clouds. The warm air was laden with moisture. The still surface of the waters was only broken by the movement of the great ship, from whose quarter the long, slanting undulations struck out like the feathers from an arrow shaft, and in whose wake the froth and air bubbles churned up by the propeller trailed in a narrowing line to the darkness of the horizon.
There was a concert on board. All the passengers were glad to break the monotony of the voyage and gathered around the piano in the companion-house. The decks were deserted. The man had been listening to the music and joining in the songs, but the room was hot and he came out to smoke a cigarette and enjoy a breath of the wind which the speedy passage of the liner created. It was the only wind in the Red Sea that night.
***
The accommodation-ladder had not been unshipped since leaving Aden and the man walked out on to the platform, as on to a balcony. He leaned his back against the rail and blew a puff of smoke into the air reflectively. The piano struck up a lively tune and a voice began to sing the first verse of “The Rowdy Dowdy Boys.” The measured pulsations of the screw were a subdued but additional accompaniment.
The man knew the song, it had been the rage at all the music halls when he had started for India seven years before. It reminded him of the brilliant and busy streets he had not seen for so long, but was soon to see again. He was just going to join in the chorus when the railing, which had been insecurely fastened, gave way suddenly with a snap and he fell backwards into the warm water of the sea amid a great splash.
For a moment he was physically too much astonished to think. Then he realized he must shout. He began to do this even before he rose to the surface. He achieved a hoarse, inarticulate, half-choked scream. A startled brain suggested the word, “Help!” and he bawled this out lustily and with frantic effort six or seven times without stopping. Then he listened.
***
“Hi! hi! clear the way For the Rowdy Dowdy Boys.” The chorus floated back to him across the smooth water for the ship had already completely passed by. And as he heard the music, a long stab of terror drove through his heart. The possibility that he would not be picked up dawned for the first time on his consciousness. The chorus started again:
“Then—I—say—boys, Who’s for a jolly spree? Rum—tum—tiddley—um, Who’ll have a drink with me?”
“Help, help, help!” shrieked the man, now in desperate fear.
“Fond of a glass now and then, Fond of a row or noise; Hi! hi! clear the way For the Rowdy Dowdy Boys!”
***
The last words drawled out fainter and fainter. The vessel was steaming fast. The beginning of the second verse was confused and broken by the ever-growing distance. The dark outline of the great hull was getting blurred. The stern light dwindled.
Then he set out to swim after it with furious energy, pausing every dozen strokes to shout long wild shouts. The disturbed waters of the sea began to settle again to their rest and widening undulations became ripples. The aerated confusion of the screw fizzed itself upwards and out. The noise of motion and the sounds of life and music died away.
The liner was but a single fading light on the blackness of the waters and a dark shadow against the paler sky.
At length full realization came to the man and he stopped swimming. He was alone—abandoned. With the understanding the brain reeled. He began again to swim, only now instead of shouting he prayed—mad, incoherent prayers, the words stumbling into one another.
***
Suddenly a distant light seemed to flicker and brighten.
A surge of joy and hope rushed through his mind. They were going to stop—to turn the ship and come back. And with the hope came gratitude. His prayer was answered. Broken words of thanksgiving rose to his lips. He stopped and stared after the light—his soul in his eyes. As he watched it, it grew gradually but steadily smaller. Then the man knew that his fate was certain. Despair succeeded hope; gratitude gave place to curses. Beating the water with his arms, he raved impotently. Foul oaths burst from him, as broken as his prayers—and as unheeded.
The fit of passion passed, hurried by increasing fatigue. He became silent—silent as was the sea, for even the ripples were subsiding into the glassy smoothness of the surface. He swam on mechanically along the track of the ship, sobbing quietly to himself in the misery of fear. And the stern light became a tiny speck, yellower but scarcely bigger than some of the stars, which here and there shone between the clouds.
***
Nearly twenty minutes passed and the man’s fatigue began to change to exhaustion. The overpowering sense of the inevitable pressed upon him. With the weariness came a strange comfort—he need not swim all the long way to Suez. There was another course. He would die. He would resign his existence since he was thus abandoned. He threw up his hands impulsively and sank.
Down, down he went through the warm water. The physical death took hold of him and he began to drown. The pain of that savage grip recalled his anger. He fought with it furiously. Striking out with arms and legs he sought to get back to the air. It was a hard struggle, but he escaped victorious and
gasping to the surface. Despair awaited him. Feebly splashing with his hands, he moaned in bitter misery:
“I can’t—I must. O God! Let me die.”
The moon, then in her third quarter, pushed out from behind the concealing clouds and shed a pale, soft glitter upon the sea. Upright in the water, fifty yards away, was a black triangular object. It was a fin. It approached him slowly.
His last appeal had been heard.
Interview: Churchill with Bram Stoker, 1908
The Stoker interview as it appeared in the Daily Courier (15 January 1908). It had appeared in the United States on 5 October 1907 by The World (New York City), and on 6 October 1907 by The Evansville Courier (Indiana). Thanks to Professor Antoine Capet for drawing this to our attention on the Bram Stoker website.
When I wrote to Mr. Winston Churchill asking for an appointment to interview him he replied: “I would very much rather not; but if you wish it I cannot refuse you.” When I met him in his library he explained more fully in words: “I hate being interviewed, and I have refused altogether to allow it. But I have to break the rule for you, for you were a friend of my father.” Then he added gracefully another reason personal to myself: “And because you are the author of Dracula.” This latter was a vampire novel I wrote some years ago, which had appealed to his young imagination.
He had himself been an imaginative writer. The first thing of his which I remember reading was a powerful short story called Man Overboard! An Episode of the Red Sea—a grim, striking story wherein he followed the last thoughts of a drowning man.
As he had already written, some ten years ago, Savrola, a political novel, I asked him if he intended or wished to write others, in case, of course, he should have time to do so through the revolutions of the political wheel. He answered thoughtfully:
“No, I think not; not novels. I hope to write, and to write as much as public life will give me opportunity of doing. But I do not think it will be fiction.” —London Chronicle, 12 January 1908
Bibliographic Notes
Man Overboard! is C72 in my Section C (Articles, Reviews and News Reports from War Zones in Serial Publications). First published in Harmsworth Magazine, Vol. I, no. 6, it reappeared in Argosy (UK) in June 1965. It also occurs in Great Untold Stories of Fantasy and Horror (B292), The Lucifer Society (B195), The Arbor House Treasury of Horror and the Supernatural (B203), Demonic, Dangerous and Deadly (B204) and the Collected Essays of Sir Winston Churchill, Vol. IV. Besides his novel Savrola (Cohen A3), Churchill wrote only three other fictional pieces: On the Flank of the Army (C202, 1901); If Lee Had Not Won the Battle of Gettysburg (C344, 1930); and The Dream (C705, written 1947, first published 1965). —Ronald I. Cohen, author, Bibliography of the Writings of Sir Winston Churchill.
The Joys of Harmworths, 1899
I have seen Man Overboard! in several collections. Every one includes it in a bound volume of a half year’s issues of Harmsworth Magazine. In every case, the owner has read Churchill’s story but not the remainder of the volume, missing some interesting items.
“American Wives of English Husbands” (289) pictures and discusses Lady Randolph Churchill; Duchess Lily Spencer-Churchill (wife of the 8th Duke of Marlbororough); Consuelo, Duchess of Marlborough (wife of the 9th Duke); Consuelo, Duchess of Manchester (the former named for the latter); and several other American women who figure in the Churchill story.
“The Modern Miniature Craze” (197) features miniatures of Muriel Wilson and Pamela Plowden, young Winston’s early loves. (He called Pamela, who as Lady Lytton remained a friend for life, “the most beautiful girl I have ever seen.”)
George Cornwallis-West’s mother, later to become Lady Randolph Churchill’s mother-in-law, is pictured in an article entitled “Irish Beauties” (488). So the bound volume offers more than just Man Overboard! —Dalton Newfield, Editor, Finest Hour, 1974
Skillful technique juxtaposes the extremes of the human situation with the indifference of nature to humanity on one hand and the apparent cruelty of God on the other. This story, in theme, is similar to Stephen Crane’s short story “The Open Boat” and is in no way “justly forgotten.” This tale of the sea is true work of art.
Based on a true boyhood experience, Sir Winston Churchill’s excursion into horror “Man Overboard” is similar to American author Stephen Crane’s short story “The Open Boat.” Churchill’s story, like Crane’s, is told with irony, a realistic literary approach, and the juxtaposition of two situations: the rest of the crew aboard the mail steamer from which the protagonist has fallen overboard enjoy the merriment of an onboard concert, complete with cocktails, symbolic of life and pleasure, while the main character founders about in the sea, watching the ship recede farther and farther into the distance. Alone, he is, like Crane’s shipwrecked survivors, on his own in a setting in which there is neither chance of survival nor any concern, on the part of nature, as to whether he lives or dies. Nothing avails him, neither friends, nor colleagues, nor society in general, nor culture, nor God. The last line of the story underscores both the horror of his predicament and that of what philosophers have termed “the death of God.”