'Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates' and male taciturnity in Hemingway's "A Day's Wait." - Ernest Hemingway

Studies in Short Fiction, Fall, 1993 by Susan F. Beegel

A plantation owner's son, 16-year-old Harry Mostyn, runs away from home to seek adventure with pirate captain Henry Morgan. The boy accompanies Morgan and a handful of desperados on a cutting-out expedition. They seize a Spanish galleon and endeavor to sail the treasure-laden ship out of a defended harbor. On the way, Morgan engages in desperate combat with a Spanish galley. The Spaniards concentrate all of their musket fire on the pirates' helmsman, and when the helmsman falls, fatally wounded, Morgan roars for someone to seize the wheel and keep the pirate ship from falling off the wind. Our boy-hero obliges:

In the first moment of this effort [Harry] had reckoned of nothing but carrying out his captain's designs. He thought neither of cannon balls nor of bullets. But now ... he came suddenly back to himself to find the galleries of the galley aflame with musket shots, and to become aware with the most horrible sinking of the spirits that all the shots therefrom were intended for him. He cast his eyes about him in despair, but no one came to ease him of his task, which, having undertaken, he had too much spirit to resign from carrying through to the end, though he was very well aware that the very next instant might mean his sudden and violent death. His ears hummed and rang, and his brain swam light as a feather. (95; my emphasis)(6)

Thanks to Harry's courage, the pirate ship remains on course, ramming and sinking the enemy galley.

And now ... that all danger was past and gone, there were plenty to come running to help our hero at the wheel. As for Captain Morgan ... he fetches the young helmsman a clap on the back. |Well, Master Harry,' says he, |and did I not tell you I would make a man of you?' Whereat our poor Harry fell a-laughing, but with a sad catch in his voice, for his hands trembled as with an ague, and were as cold as ice. As for his emotions, God knows be was nearer crying than laughing, if Captain Morgan bad but known it. (96; my emphasis)

In this story Henry Morgan becomes a kind of savage surrogate father to young Harry Mostyn, introducing the boy to the world of piracy and to codes of behavior requiring a man to stand to the wheel in a hail of fire and shrug off his fear with no more comment than a forced laugh.

The father in "A Day's Wait" reads aloud to Schatz from Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates twice, both before and after the hunt. As Schatz struggles to confront death bravely, his father is, all unwittingly, catechizing him on courage, urging him to remain stoic and silent. Twice the father stops reading, thinking "I could see he was not following what I was reading ..." (437, 438), when in fact Schatz is following what his father is reading, following the pirate code of stoicism in the face of death as strictly as he can. We can sense Schatz's hurt when his father tells him to "Just take it easy" (438; my emphasis). The son believes his father is telling him to take death easy, which is exactly what he has been trying to do. From Schatz's point of view, his father obviously has not appreciated his courageous behavior.