Captain’s Library
The next highest shelves of the library mirrored the history of printing skills. A row of precious incunabulas, both tabulary and typographic, illustrated the early printers, the problems they faced and the processes of trial and error by which they resolved them. What materials had not been used for binding in those pioneering times? Almost anything which seemed to offer sufficient firmness and durability, but leather most of all.
Skin, that is; torn from every imaginable species of domestic and wild mammal, and even from several birds, then specially processed and cured for the purpose. After almost a century of experimentation, it had been unequivocally proved that learned texts, whether religious or secular, are best encased in leather from boars which, having been gelded when very young, are then allowed to roam for a time through a fenced-off area of oak forest, not too damp; while lighter volumes, whose contents are directed more to the emotions (a category which includes devotional poetry) are best clad in the leather of youngish pregnant cows, because of its lighter nuance of colour, which will be found to lose none of its virtue even when the mood of the contents is predominantly pensive or even melancholy.
Among the uncouth and superstitious crewmen there sometimes (and especially on nights when the moon was full) circulated whispers that among the captain’s books were some whose leather originated from no animal whatsoever. Cruel but brave, hardened sailors who had each stared death in the eye many times, yet still they shivered with horror at the thought that some of the books in the captain’s library might actually be bound in human hide. Such rumours considerably enhanced his authority, and induced the sailors to look on the library (which otherwise might have become the occasion for ironic and disrespectful remarks) with a certain awe, whose aura came to reflect upon every person known to cherish the books. Nothing improves loyalty and obedience so effectively as the thought that the punishment for rebelion or treachery might be so horribly and literally visited on one’s own skin.
Below the incunabulas and other early printed books were those rare folio editions in which the captain most frequently sought solace in those hours of sombre lassitude which, as the years slipped by, came to bedevil him more and more often. It is a falsehood that pirates, especially the more educated among them, recoil from the ultimate questions of morality, metaphysics and epistemology, particularly those which bear directly on the meaning of life. Thinking of such matters, in the long and lonely hours when the ship lay becalmed, without a breath of wind to tighten their sails and propel them into adventures new, caused the captain to evaluate very critically-indeed harshly-the course of his own life to date. At such times it seemed to him that he could discern very few, if any, moments when it had been touched by the sublime; which reflection offered so bleak a prospect for the times to come, that he was assailed by the darkest forebodings—even to the point of considering suicide as a means of slashing swiftly through the mire of futility which constrained him. Many pirate captains, shrinking from such an irreversible step, seek oblivion in drunkenness, although it is well known to all that the false relief of such transient amnesia leads deeper into the abyss. Many captains… but not this one.
When such dismal thoughts assailed him, the captain took up from its place on his six-legged desk, hard by the small, piratical flag, a staff of old wood, polished slick with long use, and culminating in a sharply pointed hook. It was the only golden object in his cabin, and he would use it to search for salvation among those large books with very thin pages in which were preserved the complete works of the great literary masters. Although at such times it would soothe him the most to read about a kindred soul tormented by similar sorrows, he had long ago resigned himself to the fact that his honourable trade seemed rarely to offer inspiration to such writers. Indeed, few authors ever wrote about pirate captains, even about those who were enlightened by education; and those who did write about them tended to do so without affection or understanding. But nothing could be done about that: in a world so full of injustice, this latest instance was matter only for regret, not wonder.
He derived some consolation for the lack of texts about his quite unjustifiably neglected and undervalued profession in one verse form, which he found only superficially inappropriate to its harshness and cruelty. In the harmonious rhymes of sonnets, in the enchanting elegance of that poetic form, in the endless scope for ingenuity which it offers within such tight contraints, and most of all in the supremely delicate feelings described by exquisitely chosen words, he found such balm that he frequently read them aloud, quite enraptured and gesticulating vividly, as if reciting for a large and avid audience.
