[A composition book, marbled boards, kept by Thomas McCausland. The first forty pages are Pitman drill in a young hand — the exercises of a copy-boy learning his trade. The transcription begins at p. 41 and continues irregularly over four years. Ewan McCausland's watch book itself is not reproduced here; this is only his son's working transcription of it, with the son's bracketed notes. Found in the Clarion morgue, envelope M-114, unfiled, with no accession mark.]
p. 41
Begun 3 February 1919.
My father kept a watch book from 1897 until the morning he died. My mother had it from May of 1913 and could not read it. I could not read it either. I have been six years learning a system in order to learn that his was not that system.
What he used is Pitman at the root, off a mate's manual, and then bent for twenty years by a man who never had to be read by anybody but himself. He shortens constantly and lengthens nothing. Weather he does in a mark of his own, which I have reasoned out against the deck log — the two books came home in the same chest and I have had the luck of being able to set the private hand beside the official one. Men he does not name after the first time. He gives a man a figure and keeps the figure for years.
I will set down what I can carry and mark what I cannot. Where I am guessing I will say I am guessing.
From the 1908 book
11 June. Office posted nothing but the men are saying there is a table now. So much for a mate, so much for a hand, so much for a boy. 22 says he has seen it. I said if it is not posted it is not a table, it is a rumour with figures in it.
[22 appears from 1906 to 1912. I do not know who 22 is. My father liked him — the entries about 22 are the only ones with jokes in them.]
From the 1912 book
2 Oct. Coal aft trimmed poorly again. Told 14. He says the gang was short two men, and short two men is what the office sends now.
13 Oct. Boy sixteen today. His mother wants him at his letters and I want him at his letters and he wants the water. We have out-voted him but he does not know it yet.
[This is me. I did not know it then, and I did not know it in December when I went to the paper — which my mother arranged, and which I believed at the time was my own idea.]
2 Nov. Office letter to the Captain came aboard sealed with the coal invoices. He read it at the table, put it in his coat, did not say what was in it. I did not ask. I set it down because he read it twice.
[I have wanted this to be about the course, and it is not about the course. My father does not say what was in it, and where he does not say a thing he generally did not know it. What I can defend is that a letter came, that the Captain read it twice, and that a first mate thought that worth a line of a book he kept for himself.]
5 Nov. Weighed at six. Two hundred and seven souls and forty-one of us. Clear going out.
6 Nov, night. Asked him at half six to lay her north — run ahead of it to the Canadian lee and come at Port Hume in the morning. Refused. Asked again at eight, with the davits gone off the starboard side and the seas coming abeam. Refused again.
He is not fit. Every man on this bridge knows he is not fit, and not one of us will put a hand on his sleeve, because his name is over the door and ours are only on the articles.
[The deck log gives this same hour four words: "Capt. refused." The watch book is where he put the rest of it. I have read the two entries side by side more times than has been good for me.]
7 Nov. — [The last entry. Four marks. Three of them are his sign for the ship's head. I cannot read the fourth and I have stopped pretending that I will. By the log's clock it stands about two hours before she struck.]
[The log has one more line of his after that, at twenty minutes to two, and there is a sentence in it I will not copy into this book. My mother has never read it. I have not told her it is there.]
The other pages
The last four pages of the 1912 book are not in the system I have described above.
He used this second set of marks perhaps twenty times in fifteen years. Always in port. Never at sea. And always — as near as I can judge from what stands around them — when he was writing about the Company rather than about the ship.
I can pick out figures in them. I can pick out what I am fairly sure is a date in 1908 and what I am fairly sure is the same date written again further down. I cannot pick out one whole sentence.
I have made a fair copy of those four pages and I mean to put them in front of somebody who reads better than I do. I have not decided who. There is nobody at this paper I can ask without also asking the paper, and I am not ready to ask the paper.
Note at the foot of p. 63, in the same hand, undated but later:
My mother kept it in a tin in the pantry with the flour for six years and told nobody, and I have had it three years and told nobody, and I am beginning to understand that this is how it is done. Not by burning a thing. By everybody who has it deciding, separately and for good reasons, that this is not the week.