Caine, the great outcast of mankind

“Caine, the great outcast of mankind” is Tom Keefer’s sardonic description of the USS Caine, a phrase that makes the ship’s name and battered appearance signify a condition of exclusion. Its force lies in the way the novel joins wordplay to physical detail: what begins as a joke about the ship’s symbolic name is later confirmed, in Willie Keith’s eyes, by the contrast between the Caine and the immaculate USS Moulton.

Naming an Outcast

At dinner, Steve Maryk asks Keefer why he does not submit another request for transfer; the captain says he will approve it again. Keefer answers, “I’ve given up. This ship is an outcast, mantled by outcasts, and named for the great outcast of mankind. My destiny is the Caine. It’s the purgatory for my sins.” His remark turns a practical question about leaving the ship into a compact account of being stuck with it. The Caine is not merely an unpleasant assignment in this speech: Keefer presents it as a place from which both ship and shipmates seem marked off, while calling his own continued presence a kind of punishment.

The image works on more than one scale. Keefer calls the ship an outcast, extends the condition to those who serve aboard it, and makes its name part of the same pattern. His reference to a “great outcast” gives the name a literary or religious resonance without spelling out a doctrine. The final phrase, “the purgatory for my sins,” keeps the joke personal: Keefer makes the ship’s isolation sound like a sentence he has been assigned to serve. The line’s comic extravagance does not erase its sense of confinement; it gives that feeling a memorable form.

The Name as a Literary Joke

The captain responds admiringly to Keefer’s interpretation: “That’s the literary mind for you. I never thought of Caine being a symbolic name—” Keefer answers, “The extra e threw you off, Captain. God always likes to veil his symbols a bit, being, among His other attributes, the perfect literary artist.” The exchange presents the name’s symbolism as a joke shared at the table, with Keefer playing the literary wit and the captain accepting the premise. The extra letter is the hinge of the pun: it both distinguishes the ship’s written name and, in Keefer’s teasing account, disguises its symbolic allusion.

The moment also shows the group’s capacity for a brief, convivial exchange. Burt Gorton invites Keefer to explain his supposed sins, and Keefer’s answer provokes laughter; Maryk remarks that Keefer has not opened up in a while. The captain praises Keefer’s literary mind, and the meal proceeds to ice cream. This social ease does not remove the underlying idea of the ship as a place of exile. Instead, humor lets its officers articulate the Caine’s low standing without turning the dinner conversation into a formal complaint. The metaphor is at once a joke about a name, an account of the ship’s reputation, and Keefer’s expression of resignation.

An Outcast Made Visible

A later scene supplies a material counterpart to Keefer’s verbal image. After the final minesweeping operation, the USS Moulton loses a paravane during recovery. The crew spends an hour retrieving it, and the ships miss their chance to return to Pearl Harbor before the submarine nets close. The four old sweepers spend the night circling outside the channel entrance. When the USS Caine and USS Moulton enter the next morning, they share one buoy berth; Willie Keith crosses to visit Keggs.

The two ships are structurally identical, but Willie is startled by how unlike each other they look. The Moulton has no rust or green primer splashes; its bulwarks and decks are uniformly gray, its ladder cording is new and white, and its life lines have tightly sewn brown leather wrappings. On the Caine, those wrappings are frayed, loose, and coated in cracked gray paint. The Moulton’s sailors wear clean dungarees and tucked-in shirts, while Willie imagines a flapping shirttail as a fitting heraldic device for the Caine. These particular contrasts make the outcast image concrete: the Caine’s distinction is not built into its design, but is legible in the condition it has acquired.

The Metaphor’s Reach

Willie’s comparison sharpens the difference between a ship’s type and its visible identity. The vessels are structurally the same, yet the Moulton’s cleanliness proves to him that a DMS need not look like the Caine. It is the Caine, he realizes, that looks like what it is. That recognition gives Keefer’s earlier phrase a second life: the metaphor no longer depends only on clever interpretation of the name, because the ship’s worn surfaces and the crew’s appearance seem to corroborate it.

The expression therefore links language, material neglect, and belonging without claiming that every sailor aboard shares Keefer’s judgment. Indeed, the dinner scene includes laughter and affection, while the later comparison is Willie’s startled observation, not a formal verdict on the whole crew. Nor does the evidence establish the Caine’s condition as an innate trait of all minesweepers: the Moulton stands beside it as a direct counterexample. The phrase’s significance is narrower and more pointed. It names the Caine’s particular reputation as an outcast, then finds an image for that reputation in the visible gulf between two otherwise identical ships.