The Ship that Found Herself
"The Ship that Found Herself" | |
---|---|
Short story by Rudyard Kipling | |
Country | United Kingdom |
Language | English |
Genre(s) | Short story |
Publication | |
Published in | The Idler |
Publication type | Magazine |
Publication date | December 1895 |
"The Ship that Found Herself" is a short story by Rudyard Kipling, first published in The Idler in 1895. It was collected with other Kipling stories in The Day's Work (1898).[1]
The Dimbula, a cargo ship, makes her first voyage from Liverpool to New York. During the storm which the ship encounters, the various parts of the ship, each of which has a distinct personality, talk and argue with each other until, at the end of the voyage, they have learnt to co-operate effectively.
Story summary
Before the Dimbula leaves Liverpool, the owner's daughter, Miss Frazier, who named the ship when she was launched in Scotland, enthuses about the ship to the captain. He is more cautious, and says: "She has to find herself yet. It's the way wi' ships, Miss Frazier. She's all here, but the parrts of her have not learned to work together yet. They've had no chance.... We can no more than drive and steer her, and so forth; but if we have rough weather this trip - it's likely - she'll learn the rest by heart!"
The ship encounters heavy seas during the voyage to New York, and the parts of the ship, being strained, complain about the conditions, and about the behaviour of neighbouring parts. The deck-beams, the stringers,[2] the garboard-strake,[3] the triple-expansion engine and other parts, have particular functions, and their characters are correspondingly distinct. Stringers "always consider themselves most important, because they are so long"; the garboard-strake says "I'm twice as thick as most of the others, so I ought to know something". The Steam, who "had been to sea many times before... he used to spend his leisure ashore in a cloud, or a gutter..." makes many comments on the conditions and the various complaints.
As the Dimbula enter the Port of New York, the ship's parts stop talking and after a long silence there is a "new, big voice.... The Steam knew what had happened at once; for when a ship finds herself all the talking of the separate parts ceases and melts into one voice, which is the soul of the ship."
Commentary
A commentator writes "From the standpoint of world history, two of Britain's most important activities in the nineteenth century were those of industrialism and imperialism, both of which had been neglected by literature prior to Kipling's advent." In "stories like 'The Ship that Found Herself' and 'Bread upon the Waters' (The Day's Work)... he shows imaginative sympathy with the machines themselves as well as sympathy with the men who serve them."[4]
References
- ^ "The Ship that Found Herself The New Readers' Guide to the works of Rudyard Kipling, accessed 1 June 2014.
- ^ It is explained in the story that "the stringers... are long iron girders that run lengthways from stern to bow".
- ^ It is explained in the story that "the garboard-strake is the lowest plate in the bottom of a ship".
- ^ General Preface Just So Stories for Little Children, by Rudyard Kipling, edited by Lisa Lewis. Oxford World's Classics, accessed 1 June 2014.
External links
- The Day's Work at Project Gutenberg includes "The Ship that Found Herself"
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- The Naulahka: A Story of West and East (co-author, Wolcott Balestier, 1892)
- Captains Courageous (1896)
- Kim (1901)
- Plain Tales from the Hills (1888)
- Soldiers Three (1888)
- The Story of the Gadsbys (1888)
- In Black and White (1888)
- The Phantom 'Rickshaw and Other Tales (1888)
- Under the Deodars (1888)
- Wee Willie Winkie and Other Child Stories (1888)
- From Sea to Sea and Other Sketches, Letters of Travel (1889)
- Barrack-Room Ballads (1892, poetry)
- Many Inventions (1893)
- The Jungle Book (1894)
- "Mowgli's Brothers"
- "Kaa's Hunting"
- "Tiger! Tiger!"
- "Rikki-Tikki-Tavi"
- The Second Jungle Book (1895)
- "Letting in the Jungle"
- "Red Dog"
- All the Mowgli Stories (c. 1895)
- The Seven Seas (1896, poetry)
- The Day's Work (1898)
- Stalky & Co. (1899)
- Just So Stories (1902)
- The Five Nations (1903, poetry)
- Puck of Pook's Hill (1906)
- Rewards and Fairies (1910)
- The Fringes of the Fleet (1915, non-fiction)
- Debits and Credits (1926)
- Limits and Renewals (1932)
- Rudyard Kipling's Verse: Definitive Edition (1940)
- A Choice of Kipling's Verse (by T. S. Eliot, 1941)
- "The Absent-Minded Beggar"
- "The Ballad of the 'Clampherdown'"
- "The Ballad of East and West"
- "The Beginnings"
- "The Bell Buoy"
- "The Betrothed"
- "Big Steamers"
- "Boots"
- "Cold Iron"
- "Dane-geld"
- "Danny Deever"
- "A Death-Bed"
- "The Female of the Species"
- "Fuzzy-Wuzzy"
- "Gentleman ranker"
- "The Gods of the Copybook Headings"
- "Gunga Din"
- "Hymn Before Action"
- "If—"
- "In the Neolithic Age"
- "The King's Pilgrimage"
- "The Last of the Light Brigade"
- "The Lowestoft Boat"
- "Mandalay"
- "The Mary Gloster"
- "McAndrew's Hymn"
- "My Boy Jack"
- "Recessional"
- "A Song in Storm"
- "The Sons of Martha"
- "Submarines"
- "The Sweepers"
- "Tommy"
- "Ubique"
- "The White Man's Burden"
- ".007"
- "The Arrest of Lieutenant Golightly"
- "Baa Baa, Black Sheep"
- "Bread upon the Waters"
- "The Broken-Link Handicap"
- "The Butterfly that Stamped"
- "Consequences"
- "The Conversion of Aurelian McGoggin"
- "Cupid's Arrows"
- "The Devil and the Deep Sea"
- "The Drums of the Fore and Aft"
- "Fairy-Kist"
- "False Dawn"
- "A Germ-Destroyer"
- "His Chance in Life"
- "His Wedded Wife"
- "In the House of Suddhoo"
- "Kidnapped"
- "Learoyd, Mulvaney and Ortheris"
- "Lispeth"
- "The Man Who Would Be King"
- "A Matter of Fact"
- "Miss Youghal's Sais"
- "The Mother Hive"
- "The Other Man"
- "The Rescue of Pluffles"
- "The Ship that Found Herself"
- "The Sing-Song of Old Man Kangaroo"
- "The Taking of Lungtungpen"
- "Three and – an Extra"
- "The Three Musketeers"
- "Thrown Away"
- "Toomai of the Elephants"
- "Watches of the Night"
- "Wireless"
- "Yoked with an Unbeliever"
- Bibliography
- Bateman's (house)
- Indian Railway Library
- Ritual of the Calling of an Engineer
- Law of the jungle
- Aerial Board of Control
- My Boy Jack (1997 play)
- Rudyard Kipling: A Remembrance Tale (2006 documentary)
- My Boy Jack (2007 film)
- Caroline Starr Balestier Kipling (wife)
- Elsie Bambridge (daughter)
- John Kipling (son)
- John Lockwood Kipling (father)
- MacDonald sisters (mother's family)
- Stanley Baldwin (cousin)
- Georgiana Burne-Jones (aunt)
- Edward Burne-Jones (uncle)
- Philip Burne-Jones (cousin)
- Edward Poynter (uncle)
- Alfred Baldwin (uncle)