Fourteen fathoms

Can you be too accurate in your fiction?

Our navigator was recently rereading one of Kipling’s lesser-known poems.  “The `Mary Gloster'” is probably underappreciated because it’s a long narrative poem, a form out of favor these days.  At just under two hundred lines it’s hardly of epic length, but it takes up six or seven pages in a printed book, and publishers are more used to getting two or three poems to a page.  You can find it, though, if you look.

Something struck our navigator this time through: the amount of detail in one particular part of it.  The narrator, a sometime ship captain, remembers burying his wife at sea “one hundred eighteen east, and south just three.”  Our navigator found a chart covering that position and yes, it’s a spot in the ocean in the Macassar Straits (as mentioned elsewhere in the poem).  But the narrator provides more details: “By the Little Paternosters, as you come to the Union Bank-/And we dropped her in fourteen fathom. . .”  Just north of the given position is a string of little islands.  They have a name in the local language now (Balabalagan), but were historically known by that Latin tag to European sailors.  And yes, there’s the Union Bank.  The chart even shows a depth of twenty-eight meters, which is fourteen fathoms as near as you please.  That’s an impressive amount of accurate detail for a work of fiction. Could it be too much?  Is it all necessary?

That may seem a strange question for us to raise.  After all, we’ve emphasized the importance of getting the details right in your stories, and we can help you with the science (and some other bits).  If you skimp on research you can expect at least a scathing review from an expert who cares about such things.  If you go too wrong readers may say, “But that can’t happen,” at which point you’ve lost them.  However, we think it’s a valid question: why specifically fourteen fathoms?  Kipling could have used any reasonable depth, or none at all; almost no one would bother to check up on him.

It’s not a matter of an author obsessed with accuracy.  Kipling is scrupulous about his research, and the reader can generally expect that his technical terms are correct, but there are certainly places where he doesn’t let a fact stand in the way of a good story.  Nor is it a sort of throw-away pile of details, left in out of absent-mindedness or something.  George Orwell gave as one characteristic of Charles Dickens’ writing a mountain of irrelevant and unnecessary detail.  But Kipling is a very deliberate author; what he writes is all there for a reason.

We think Kipling is emphasizing the determination of the narrator, who is dying and wants to be buried at sea just where his wife was.  To be sure he gives multiple ways of knowing where the position is, and how to recognize it: “By the heel of the Paternosters–there isn’t a chance to mistake. . .”  They also show that the old man is still clear-headed and of excellent memory (a theme of the poem is the possibility of other people proving he was not in his right mind, and thus voiding his will).  And, of course, good details contribute to the impression of reality in the imaginary world of the poem, important in all good fiction.

We’re not sure where Kipling picked up his information.  He could have looked at a chart; we think it’s more likely that he came across the story of a captain burying his wife at sea, and put the details away in his notes or memory against the time he might find them of use.  We conclude that this is an example of the good use of truth in fiction.