Captain’s Library
From the inside the cabin door looked entirely different than from the outside. Instead of the crude, gnarled beechwood, it was all polished mahogany, inlaid with brighter materials and secured by ornamental brass rivets. Such a door befits the premises of a sailing-ship captain who wishes to uphold and assert his uniquely elevated status-even if that vessel is, in fact, a pirate ship. Why should pirate captains be denied an appreciation of beauty?
It is really only prejudice that holds them to be savage, primitive cutthroats who belch at table, wipe their mouths with their coat-sleeves, and throw gnawed bones into every corner. Nothing could be further fron the truth! Among pirate captains one can find any number of individuals whose manners are truly refined, cultivated and polite; men who, moreover, have the ability to appreciate various of the arts and, in many cases, to create art themselves.
Although you will definitely never find this information in textbooks of literary history, because it would be unedifying to mention such uncomfortable truths, many a great poem, and even several excellent novels, were written in just such cabins, during lulls between piratical or corsairly actions. Likewise, there are countless still-lifes, some of which have found their way into the galleries of great museums, created in moments of inspiration after the division of booty valiantly liberated from owners who, for obvious reasons, will have no further use for it. It is only natural that on such occasions the captains (at least, those of finer propensities), are in no hurry to seize for themselves the trifles which fascinate the common crewmen and perhaps even the less educated officers. Gold and silver specie, and other such blatantly valuable items, do not attract such captains strongly; but a rare book, or a painting by an old master, can certainly appease a delicate conscience, upset by the somewhat dishonest means by which they were obtained. In such matters, the ideal circumstance is for one pirate ship to rob another; the question of honest acquisition having been completely cancelled, the luckier and more capable captain can then enjoy his newly acquired riches with a completely untroubled conscience.
That our present captain was of that special sort was demonstrated by many unmistakeable signs in the cabin. Indeed, had it not been for a small, black, triangular gonfalon bearing the device of a white skull-and-crossbones, which stood on a substantial marble base on his ample desk (a desk which required six legs, though they were slender, elegantly curved and ornately carved), one might have fancied that this room was the atelier or salon of a connoiseur who, for some eccentric reason, chose to dwell on a sailing ship instead of, as might have been predicted, a remote castle surrounded by carefully tended lawns hidden among shady, evergreen forests.
It is also a vulgar prejudice, however, to assume that true devotees of the arts invariably wish to retreat into such sheltered environments. Quite the opposite is true: you are more likely to find them in quite different places, some of which may not appear entirely suited to the contemplation of artistic beauty. Don’t let appearances deceive you. Artistry, and its appreciation, may dwell where nobody suspects that it might be found.
Even if you overlooked the white grand piano (on your right as you step through the door)—the piano from which occasionally flowed the sounds of elegies measurelessly melancholic, which caused shivers of nameless dread among sailors unused to such things-and if you ignored the right-hand wall, almost entirely covered with winter landscapes, the best that could be obtained on the open seas, with frames curled into such arabesques as would provoke envy in even the haughtiest art collector, still there was no way that you could fail to notice the vast library stretching along the entire left-hand wall, from the ceiling timbers lying flush with their rounded wooden beams down to the slickly polished deck.
What styles of binding and spine were to be seen there! On the higher, less accessible shelves slept the captain’s favourites, ancient manuscripts from the days before printing. (That dispensation was not without certain advantages; forced to work slowly, writers had time to give proper consideration to each word before committing it to papirus or parchment—the more so because the words once set down were difficult if not impossible to alter. Later, when cheap paper and equally cheap printing came to dominate every phase of the business, the once-proud act of writing lost almost all its mystique. Anything could be written down, by anyone, without the least inhibition, the moment it crossed his mind; moreover, it could then be multiplied without limit, giving rise both to the saying that ‘paper tolerates everything’, and to the new names invented for the most unworthy sorts of writers; for who has ever heard of ‘hackwork’ on papirus, or the ‘grubstreet scribblers’ of parchment?)
The antiquities occupying the highest shelves in the captain’s library did not, in fact, possess any binding in the usual sense. Stiff leaves were constrained between thin tablets of stone or wood which only hinted at a possibility of book-covers, and with no hint at all of a spine. Only by lifting the book down could one find out what it was, and that privilege was exclusive to the captain. Should any other person, from some unthinkable degree of ignorance (or even worse, malice) reach out to remove a book from this library, that miscreant would suffer immediate capital punishment, without hope of forgiveness or mercy. Not that it had ever come to that; the inclinations of his crew lay in fundamentally different directions.
