Glasgow is the port where Joe Williams and the surviving crew of his sunken ship are brought to safety, but not immediately released. The city becomes a place of confinement: the men arrive shaken by the sea, encounter armed guards, and spend twelve days in a fenced compound before sailing home aboard a new freighter.

Arrival and the waterfront

After the scoutcruiser takes the rescued men aboard, it brings them to Glasgow. They stand in drizzle on the dock while Captain Perry goes to find the American consul. The crew’s passage from the boats to shore has not ended their uncertainty: Joe, numb from standing still, tries to walk to the iron gates opposite the wharf house and look down the street, but an elderly uniformed guard points a bayonet at his belly. He turns back to the others.

Joe tells the group that they are being treated like prisoners. The crew’s complaints gather around earlier encounters with authority as well as their present predicament: Flannagan recalls being arrested in Marseilles after fighting with an Orangeman, while Joe recounts being taken in Liverpool. Their stories make Glasgow part of a wider, unsettled experience of being stopped and held while trying to get home.

The fenced compound

The mate, Ben Tarbell, returns with an elderly man from the consulate and leads the crew across town. The streets are darkened for fear of air raids and slick with rain. Their destination is a long tarpaper shack inside a barbed-wire enclosure. Tarbell tells the men that they must stay there for the time being; he is trying to get the consul to act, and the consulate has cabled the ship’s owners in an effort to secure their pay.

Red Cross women bring food and thin blankets. The provisions are mostly bread, marmalade, and meat paste, and the narrator emphasizes how little there is to eat that the men can really sink their teeth into. For twelve days, the crew remain in the compound, passing the time with poker, stories, and old newspapers. In the evenings, a disheveled, half-drunk woman sometimes gets past the old guard, peeks into the shack, and beckons one of the men into the fog behind the latrines; some refuse, disgusted. The episode conveys the confinement through a string of material conditions and routines rather than through a formal account of the men’s status.

Departure and significance

When the mate finally tells the men they are going home, their long stay has left them too depleted to cheer. They cross Glasgow again, through traffic and gaslight in the fog, and board the Vicksburg, a new 6,000-ton freighter that has just unloaded cotton. On the voyage home, Joe can lie around as a passenger, a sharp contrast with the restrictions and hardships ashore.

Glasgow is therefore both a rescue port and a place where rescue remains incomplete. The crew have survived the sinking, but reaching land does not restore their freedom at once: the dockside bayonet, the barbed-wire enclosure, the inadequate food, and the twelve-day wait extend their exposure to danger and dependence beyond the sea. Their departure aboard the Vicksburg brings the confinement to an end and carries Joe toward the life he hopes to resume with Del.