Summary

Chapter I begins with narration which, in near-poetic language, first describes the breadth and depth of the sea. It then describes a group of ships traveling across that sea, rolling with its waves and managing to stay in formation despite the variability of those waves, the different requirements of each ship, and the different qualities of the men managing them. The narration also describes how the ships are traveling east, where they are awaited by large numbers of people who might suffer difficult fates if the ships did not arrive. They could, the narration comments, “be subjected to a tyrant of alien thought, their liberties torn from them” (5), something that some of the sailors and many of the people awaiting their arrival all knew. The ships, the narration comments “were things to be protected by one side or destroyed by the...