Under Sail — Story, Setting & Ideas

Dialect and Diction as Character Markers

Colcord renders Chinese characters' speech in a phonetic dialect that risks stereotype but also serves a narrative function. In the rescue scene, the steward Wang says "Walkee-walkee, can do" and "You no savvy way," while the captain speaks standard English. The dialect marks Wang's subordinate role and foreignness, yet Colcord gives him the decisive actions and the moral authority: Wang orchestrates the escape, conceals the captain, and insists on being left behind. The contrast between Wang's broken English and his competence creates a tension that the story exploits. Nichols's earlier monologue, by contrast, uses elaborate, almost literary syntax—"the same old conscience pursues them"—to argue for a shared humanity. Colcord thus uses two registers of English to stage his central question: whether surface differences conceal deeper likeness.

The Physical Texture of Shipboard Space

The excerpts are dense with the material details of a sailing vessel: the "spacious after awning," the "ringbolt in the floor," the "shallow lazaret," the "open hold," and the "junk's forecastle." Colcord uses these spaces to structure the action and to create a geography of concealment and escape. The captain follows Wang through a passage that leads "forward into the open hold" and then "beneath a hatch," each location named with the precision of a man who knows ships. The junk becomes a labyrinth, and the reader's orientation depends on these terms. This is not decorative detail; it is the scaffolding of the suspense. When Wang says "S'pose breakee in door, no findee," the reader understands the spatial logic because Colcord has mapped it.

Silence and Sound in the Narrative Voice

Colcord's prose is attentive to the auditory environment of the sea. The opening scene is quiet—talk "wandered lazily" under a half moon—but the rescue sequence is built around sudden noise: "a fearful yelling suddenly broke out toward the stern," "naked feet pattered on the deck overhead," "an angry chatter broke out." The contrast between the philosophical stillness of the frame and the violent cacophony of the action is deliberate. Within the action, Colcord also uses silence as a character trait: Wang bears his pain "in a silence that seemed almost supernatural," and the captain hears "not a sound" from overhead as they steal forward. These shifts in sonic texture give the prose a rhythmic quality that mirrors the tension between reflection and crisis.

The Moral Weight of a Single Choice

The climax of the excerpted story turns on a decision that Colcord does not sentimentalize. Captain Sheldon, having escaped the junk with Wang's help, realizes that Wang's sacrifice was not ordered but volunteered: "Those weren't my orders—they were his." The mate, puzzled, asks "Wasn't it the right thing to do?" The captain's answer is impatient and unresolved. Colcord does not provide a neat moral; instead, he lets the action speak. The story's title, "An Instrument of the Gods," hints at a larger design, but the text itself offers only the captain's dawning awareness that he has been the instrument of another man's choice. This restraint—refusing to explain or justify—is characteristic of the authorial voice in these excerpts.

Readers approaching Under Sail should attend to the way Colcord embeds argument in action. The stories are not merely adventures; they are investigations of character conducted through the precise language of seamanship and the rhythms of spoken English. The excerpts suggest a writer who trusts his readers to navigate the moral ambiguities without a guiding hand. Let the details of rigging and dialect carry you; the questions they raise are the point.

Reading Colcord’s sailors wrestling with foreign shores, I remembered evenings at my grandfather’s dock, how the water held secrets we never voiced. Then I thought of Salvage — Background and Themes, where salvage isn’t just cargo, but memory itself—what we choose to haul back up, and what we let sink. That same quiet weight lingered.