The Last Samurai

He had found a centre for oceanography and they had refused to let him go down. And he had gone to the yard and talked to the boatman, and the boatman liked Picasso’s Blue Period. The boatman would have taken him out at night, but then there would have been no blue. One weekend the oceanographers went to a conference and the boatman took him out and sent him down. And when he came up he said to the boatman Have you seen the blue, and the boatman said No. And he said You must see this. I can’t paint this so you must see it. You must show me how to send this capsule up and down and you must go down. The boatman was nervous but excited. He showed him how to send the capsule up and down and he stood by while the painter practised and sent the capsule up and down. Then the boatman got into the capsule and the painter winched it over the side.

The painter never painted what he saw, for he said it could not be done.

The boatman said:

I had often sent down Dr. Cooper and the research students over the years. Sometimes a student would say This is amazing. They might say it the first time or two. But there was a lot of work to be done recording observations. Sometimes they worked with the light out, dictating observations into a machine, and other times they had a light on. I had seen a lot of photographs, and once or twice I had watched TV programmes about oceanography—I took an interest because of my connection with the field, but to tell the truth it had never had an overwhelming appeal. I went scuba diving once on a holiday in the Bahamas.

When I was growing up we had a picture from Picasso’s Blue Period, and that has always been my favourite period in which he worked. Later I bought lots of books about Picasso, and the Blue Period was always my favourite. I never wanted to paint; I wanted to follow the sea. As a lad I went out on a yacht working for Dickie Lomax, as he then was, and later I was offered the job by the Oceanography Department. Sometimes it seemed to me that Dr. Cooper and his students were just making an excuse to go out to sea and go down in the capsule; they had to make up research projects to get money to do it. Sometimes I felt like saying Look, why make everything so complicated, why not just learn to sail a boat?

So when Mr. Watkins came to me I responded to him, because I thought he wasn’t making excuses—he just wanted to go down there. I don’t know if Picasso would have gone down, but I respected Mr. Watkins for wanting to do it.

I was very surprised when he suggested I go down, and quite nervous at the prospect. I didn’t like the idea of leaving the helm to someone with so little experience. I told him I’d seen the photographs, but he kept saying No, No, that’s not good enough, you must see for yourself.

At last I thought Well, it’s now or never, isn’t it? Because there was no way the professor was going to send me down just to have a look. It was a calm day, and I thought Well, if it’s got to be, so be it. So I got into the capsule, and Mr. Watkins winched me down.

As I said before, I’d been scuba diving in the Bahamas on a holiday. This was different. You might think you would get the full effect better actually being in the water, and that might be true up to a point. But in the capsule you were inside a pocket of air. What it felt like was being in a pocket of blue light—light that was blue the way water is wet.

When I came up I got out of the capsule and he made a questioning gesture at it. I nodded and he got in and I winched him down for the last time. It was only now that I realised how low the fuel supply was. The winch runs off a generator, and we’d sent the capsule down more often than the researchers usually did—they usually went down and stayed down making observations. I sat watching the needle on the dial get closer to empty, and when I started bringing the capsule up he said not yet. So I waited and started to bring it up and he said Not yet, but I had to. Just as I brought it up to the surface the motor conked out. So he climbed back on board, and I pointed to the gauge, and he nodded and sat down. I had to take us back to land under sail. The whole time we were going neither of us said a word.

The boatman said later that though later you wanted to find words for it, at the time it was so beautiful that, or rather beautiful would be a word that you would use later but at the time it was so much bigger than that that it would have hurt to talk. He said that one thing he respected in Mr. Watkins was that he had seen just in the look in his eyes that he had seen how big it was and that it would hurt to talk. A lot of people would have had to make a joke or something, but we both knew it was too big for that and we both knew we knew it.

There were other stories about this painter, because after this he decided he could not paint blue. He decided that he must see white, and this time he persuaded the pilot of a plane to fly him to a station in the far North of Canada.