Alfred Peter Ducely

Alfred Peter Ducely is an ensign aboard the Caine whose brief appearances connect the ship’s technical duties with its search for a missing key. He has copied a minesweeping assignment from the manual without understanding its terminology, and later reveals that he witnessed the mess boys scraping out a container but withheld what he knew at their expense. His departure for reassignment gives him a final opportunity to tell Willie what he had seen.

Shipboard Role and Technical Knowledge

Ducely’s written assignment appears to explain minesweeping in detail, but he admits to Willie that he copied it straight from the Minesweeping Manual and does not understand what a paravane is. The gap between the polished report and his practical knowledge becomes an immediate matter of shipboard instruction: Maryk tells Willie to take his assistant and show him a paravane after lunch. Ducely is thus presented not as an informed specialist but as a junior officer who has reproduced technical language without mastering the equipment it describes.

Detachment and the Key Search

A BuPers dispatch orders Ensign Alfred Peter Ducely detached and directs him to travel by the best available air transportation to BuPers in Washington for reassignment, with class four priority. Queeg receives the message with Willie and asks whether that is all it says; the brief order marks the end of Ducely’s service aboard the Caine. At Guam, while the ship is tied alongside the Harte, Queeg intensifies the search for a key: armed guards are posted along the Caine’s port side to prevent anyone from passing it to a friend, and Jorgensen is sent to ask the Harte’s chief censor to report any key arriving in the mail. Meanwhile, Ducely packs his belongings, preparing to leave on the Harte’s boat for the beach.

What Ducely Knows

As he prepares to go, Ducely tells Willie that the mess boys had scraped out the container at one o’clock in the morning. He had come down from the midwatch to use the head and passed the pantry while they were doing it. He says there is no key to find, directly contradicting the premise of the search. His disclosure comes only after Willie asks him to stay and watch the search, and Ducely insists that Willie say nothing until twenty minutes after he has left.

Ducely explains that he did not speak up at the earlier meeting because he had seen Whittaker’s face and could not bring himself to expose the mess boys. His silence was therefore not a lack of knowledge: he had witnessed their actions but chose not to report them. As he leaves, he describes himself as glad to be getting off the ship and says he hated his time aboard. His final revelation supplies Willie with information relevant to the search, while showing that Ducely’s departure and his decision to remain silent had been linked by his reluctance to implicate the men.