The editorial team at The Seasloth is delighted—nay, thrilled beyond the bounds of modest restraint—to bring its readers yet another groundbreaking exclusive. In this dazzling new edition, we present poetry and prose from some of the finest voices writing today, alongside an exclusive interview with C. Langley Dunwood, who breaks her long silence to address, at last and head-on, the persistent rumour that she lives in a shed. You will not want to miss this hard-hitting and altogether extraordinary interview, conducted by Seasloth contributor Fionella Crane.
But just as we always strive to bring our readers the cutting edge of contemporary poetry, we are equally committed to reminding the world of the lost, marginalised voices of the past. Such a one is C. Elwydd Abel Prentiss—a name that may be new to you now, but will not remain so for long. Raised in a Welsh mining village, he never went down the pit himself; he had seen what the coal had done to his father, and wanted none of it. Instead, at the tender age of fifteen, he hopped a coal wagon down to the Cardiff docks, where he lied about his age, signed articles, and joined the crew of the SS Penarvon. He left her before her final voyage—she was lost with all hands in an Atlantic storm in 1935, a disaster that haunted Prentiss for the rest of his life. His voice carries to us across the decades as the authentic sound of the twentieth century: raw, sometimes unvarnished, but always, unmistakably, true.
In pride of place, then, we are honored to offer our readership the first publication anywhere of further examples of this singular and startling talent. These pieces are drawn from the Prentiss Archive at Billancoo University in New South Wales, and will appear in the forthcoming volume from Barbecue Books, now in production, provisional title: Passages Deep in the Grain — Selected Poems and Prose of C. Elwydd Abel Prentiss.
What we offer here is merely a keyhole glance into the depth and breadth of this remarkable man’s work. His origins were humble, his early life hardscrabble by any measure—and yet, what a way with words! To imagine that these poems were composed while he toiled as a deckhand aboard tramp steamers, and later as a swagman on an Australian sheep stations, is to marvel all the more. We remain deeply indebted, indeed, to Senior Lecturer Gwen Juniper and her team of graduate students at Billancoo University’s Outback Studies Department, whose tireless research has at last brought this work the recognition it so richly deserves.
Before turning to the longer prose narrative that concludes this feature, we offer four poems spanning more than twenty years of Prentiss’s writing. Read together, they suggest something of the remarkable range of a poet too often remembered, when remembered at all, simply as “the merchant seaman.”
Here, then—as a small taste of the treasures to come—are four examples of his distinct poetic voice, followed by his powerful lyrical narrative on the voyage of the SS Gallant.
Landfall
And still they rowed amidst the roar
of waters fast prevailing;
Lord Ullin reach’d that fatal shore—
his wrath was chang’d to wailing.
—Thomas Campbell, “Lord Ullin’s Daughter”
Those who survived the voyage—
storms, sickness, brutality—
knew they had come
to the far edge of the world.
They mustered courage,
took their fate as given.
Ragged they were,
rugged they became:
fierce, harsh, independent—
yet never free,
no freer than the horse
yoked to the plough.
Glamour? Glory?
We worked the guano trade—
a battered steamer, relic
of the days when coal
left Cardiff for the world.
Power? We argued the toss,
shared our Marx,
then lost the language—
the cries, the shouts,
the slogans of that day.
Some took to drink.
Some to God.
Lost now to the ship-breaker politicians
with their easy phrases,
glib tongues and urgent pleas.
Peace in our time? Oh yes.
Say no more.
The Japs are now in Singapore.
The Second Mate
The second mate kept telling us
how wrong we were,
and that what we heard about him
was wrong too.
Chapel man, you see.
Every Sunday he wore his hat
and read the gospel
aloud to any who would listen.
There was a cat on that boat—
she listened, curled on his bunk.
Until one day you wake up screaming.
We left with the tide.
Chug, chug, chug.
The Offices
Everything needs signatures,
bits of paper, in duplicate.
In their places, files and folders
and cabinets for the records.
Here’s your copy. And theirs.
Stored, sorted, filed alphabetised,
neat and typed and arranged.
Systems keep track,
name names, record time and place
and tell the who on what and where.
But none tell the story of why,
and none catch the breath of still dread
in the eye of the typhoon
off Yokohama, or the smell
of the river steaming to Shanghai.
Those stories, singular, permanent,
linger when all else is gone save
the memory of the time the mess boy
hit the cook with the shovel
and the shifter went over the side
in the China Sea. Have you never seen
the stars on a still night beneath the Southern Cross?
The fog loom off an iceberg off St. John?
Copy that, sign that, file it away.
Now, in a minute.
Some stay confined.
Others must go free. The illusion.
The scars, the fear, the ripped hands, the broken back,
the stench of the hold— those are yours.
And yours alone.
If these poems show us Prentiss the witness—watching, arguing, remembering—what follows shows us Prentiss the storyteller at his fullest. We close this exclusive with a longer prose piece from the archive: his account of the voyage of the SS Gallant, a tramp steamer’s passage through one of the worst Atlantic storms of the decade. It is, in its way, the fullest expression yet uncovered of the voice that runs through everything else here—plain, exact, and utterly unafraid of the sea that so nearly claimed him.
Editorial Note: The editors have retained Prentiss’s occasional nautical expressions and have resisted the temptation to standardise his spelling, believing these features integral to the music of the original.
| The S.S. Gallant I. Black Funnel and Red Duster She wore a black funnel with a narrow band of dirty cream, a red duster snapping at her stern, out of London, tramp of the Western Ocean, rust on her plates but stout in the bones. I signed articles in Philadelphia for anthracite to Halifax, thence for Liverpool—four thousand tons of wheat awaiting discharge. On Pier 23 we scrubbed the holds raw of coal and limed them white. She passed inspection. We nailed the shifting boards before the grain chutes hissed and filled the air with dust. Shore leave, the night before we sailed. We took our draw, the Halifax waterfront, mutton stew, hot rum and screech, Scouser Mac reeling against a brutal wind, singing “I’d give my right arm for you” while ice crusted the black, coal-slicked water. Black Gang Taff, skin still dark with coal dust, stood square in his donkey jacket, raw hands clenched, swaying, ready for any man or sea, the unhealed scar above his right eye pulsing red. Sven filled the bucket dockside and soaked us sober. We met curfew and cursed the watch and stumbled to the fo’c’sle bunks in the dark. We sailed on the tide, wheat stowed deep, hatches clamped and covered, the wind already tugging at the rigging. II. Heavy Seas Six days out, the Atlantic came on rough. Great booming seas, slate-dark, white-topped, came in and struck the decks. The lifeboat aft went first, snatched clean from her falls, then the rudder couplings parted in a nor’easter from hell. She fell into the trough. Bridge-ends under. Boats stove in. Davits sheared at the pins. Night after night, no lamps but navigation lights. Rain, hail, blinding snow. Immense seas swallowed her stem to stern; only the bridge island stood clear of the flood. Cabins drowned, bulkheads working and groaning under the weight of water they were never built to hold, hatches doubly secured, holding by little more than a margin and a prayer. Twelve days out, the coal ran low. The Black Gang turned desperate: hands hauled wheat from the hold, mixed it with oil and wood torn from the cabin walls, and fed the furnace. They raked the red-hot grates to clear the slag. Then shovelful after shovelful of golden wheat flared fierce and floury, the very cargo eating itself alive while the ship steamed in circles, head to the weather, propeller thrashing air, staying afloat. Below, we clung to bunks while sleep fled; the cabin shuddered at each blow. The gales never eased. Wires snapped, jury rudders failed, yet the Old Man never lost his nerve—”It’s the tip of the oyster, lads,” he’d grin in fair weather, and in the storm he stood just as steady. III. Master and Men The Captain loved a joke, said he could smell landfall in the song of the whelk, but when the Western Ocean went hard, no hand on the wheel stood steadier. He slept on the engine-room grating, arms folded, face iron-set while torrents poured above. When the Mate came reeling, rum-crazed and roaring, the Captain, tamped now, ordered him taken below and locked in. He returned to the bridge without another word. Black Gang Taff, Sven, Scouser Mac—men of coal dust, furnace fire, frozen lines, raw hands, and thin harbour beer—cursed, fought, swore, prayed, and held the ship together. Some got chopsy, some steady, one went mad. Overdue at Lloyd’s. Investors shrugged, underwriters totted their figures. Dragging anchors near the Queenstown rocks, she came in broadside without pilot or rudder. Searchlights stabbed the breakers to port and starboard while the engineers worked her ahead and astern like a blind man threading a needle in hell. She made it. Hull sound, engines alive, and in the holds, beneath the wreckage above, enough wheat remained to fill Britain’s ovens yet. On the quay, the Old Man stood bare-headed, counting his men off the gangway one by one, then turned to the agent to talk of repairs, as if the sea had asked of him nothing at all. |
Images:
John Perceval: Ships at Night,1959, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, and Ships Graveyard, 1956, which depicts the rusting hulks of old boats at Williamstown near Melbourne.
Russell Drysdale: The Fossicker, aka Road with Rocks 1949, Art Gallery, New South Wales, and Landscape of Rocks, 1949.
Book design: Barbeque Books: Smoke and Sauce Press.