Threemaster

At the end of Proteus Stephen looks back over his shoulder and sees the masts of a sailing ship floating through the air: "Moving through the air high spars of a threemaster, her sails brailed up on the crosstrees, homing, upstream, silently moving, a silent ship." This mysterious apparition gradually makes more sense as one considers the realistic way in which Joyce is presenting it. But the sentence also contains some accidentally unrealistic details, one of which Joyce insisted on keeping even after his error was pointed out to him. Evidently he wanted to layer symbolic suggestions on top of his realistic scene, making it a vision of Calvary.

For readers confused by the apparition, it helps to visualize all the details of the scene. Stephen is sitting on the seaward side of the South Wall, the long "mole of boulders" that forms a breakwater separating the waters of the River Liffey from the Sandymount tide flats to the south. Coming into Dublin on the flood tide, with seawater flowing "upstream" into the artificially extended channel of the Liffey, the ship is coasting to its harborage, its sails "brailed," or furled, on the yardarms because, riding the incoming tide, it needs no wind power. The massive granite blocks on the seaward side of the breakwater tumble some distance down to the strand, and Stephen must be sitting near the bottom of this rock wall, because, as he watched the rising tide approaching the wall a short while earlier, he thought, "My ashplant will float away." This is why he sees only the "high spars" of the ship "Moving through the air": the ship's hull is obscured by a huge intervening wall of rock.

Joyce does not make things easy for his readers by spelling out all these details, and the effect of his presentation is to create a kind of surreal apparition: three wooden masts moving through the air, unconnected to anything. But the ship is quite real. Although readers learn nothing about it at this point, later chapters will fill in the narrative blank. In Wandering Rocks the throwaway that Bloom has thrown away into the Liffey in Lestrygonians floats "eastward by flanks of ships and trawlers, amid an archipelago of corks, beyond new Wapping street past Benson's ferry, and by the threemasted schooner Rosevean from Bridgwater with bricks." Why name only this one ship among the many moored along the docks? The fact that it is identified as a threemaster suggests that this may be the ship that arrived in Dublin a few hours earlier, and indeed in Eumaeus a grizzled sailor who calls himself D. B. Murphy says, "We come up this morning eleven o'clock. The threemaster Rosevean from Bridgwater with bricks." Bridgwater is in southwest England not far from Bristol—an easy day's sail to Dublin. Since Stephen was sitting along the wall during the hour before noon, this must be the threemaster he saw.

Gifford notes that a schooner named Rosevean was indeed reported in the Freeman's Journal of 16 June 1904 as having arrived in Dublin "from Bridgwater with bricks." He notes that Bridgwater "was well known for its manufacture of Bath bricks (scouring bricks used to clean knives and polish metal)." In a 12 April 2023 post on his blog, Peter Chrisp adds considerably to this account. He notes that the Rosevean must actually have arrived on June 15, because the Freeman article contained a subheading that Joyce apparently overlooked: "DUBLIN SHIPPING NEWS—YESTERDAY." Also, the Rosevean had two masts, not three, and it was rigged fore-and-aft (with the sails running parallel to the ship's length) rather than square-rigged as implied by Joyce's word "crosstrees." As for the bricks, Chrisp reports that in 1900 the Rosevean was owned by Clifford James Symons. He was a partner in "Colthurst, Symons & Co., which owned at least seven brick and tile works around the Bridgwater area at the height of their production." Some of these, Chrisp supposes, may have been the kind of bricks used to construct buildings.

Even if the Rosevean had been square-rigged, it seems that sailors would not have called the high yardarms that Stephen is seeing "crosstrees." In The Making of Ulysses Joyce's friend Frank Budgen recalls pointing this out to the writer: "I sailed on schooners of that sort once and the only word we ever used for the spars to which the sails are bent was 'yards'. 'Crosstrees' were the lighter spars fixed near the lower masthead. Their function was to give purchase to the topmast standing rigging." Nautical language in the Age of Sail was a linguistic world unto itself—exacting, multifarious, arcane, nearly impenetrable to outsiders—so so if Joyce made a mistake in his terminology the error is understandable . Normally, though, such a failure in precision would have sent him scurrying back to correct his mistake. In this instance he stood firm in the face of Budgen's correction: "Thank you for pointing it out.... There's no sort of criticism I more value than that. But the word 'crosstrees' is essential. It comes in later on and I can't change it. After all, a yard is also a crosstree for the onlooking landlubber."

Despite the careful defense of versimilitude he mounted by making the error Stephen's, Joyce here was engaged in sophistry. The later passage to which Joyce referred, the parody of the Apostle's Creed in Scylla and Charybdis—"Who, put upon by his fiends, stripped and whipped, was nailed like bat to barndoor, starved on crosstree"—in no way requires retrospective retention of the word in Proteus. But the context in which it is repeated "later on" makes clear why he insisted on retaining his earlier use of the word. Clearly Joyce wanted the ship's three masts to evoke the famous three crosses on Calvary, and "yards" would not do the trick. Imagining that a nautically ignorant "landlubber" like Stephen might use such a word was the frail yardarm of rationalization on which he hung his erroneous detail. For some reason a symbolic evocation of the crucifixion was essential. If he had been told that his "threemaster" actually had only two masts, no doubt he would have rejected that realistic improvement as well—or found a different ship.

John Hunt 2025

The south side of the South Wall at high tide. A ship is visible in the distance, either coming into Dublin or leaving it via the extended mouth of the River Liffey that lies to the left of the rocks. Source: livetofivehundred.wordpress.com.

View east along the South Wall, looking out to the Poolbeg lighthouse. The extension of the River Liffey formed by the wall is to the left, and a ship is visible in Dublin Bay at the far right. Source: livetofivehundred.wordpress.com.

2009 photograph by Donaldytong of the square-rigged ship Jeanie Johnston moored in the River Liffey, with "her sails brailed up on the crosstrees." Source: Wikimedia Commons.

The Rosevean, in a painting held in the Blake Museum in Bridgwater, displayed courtesy of the Bridgwater Town Council. Source: peterchrisp.blogspot.com.

A Colthurst, Symons, & Company brick manufactured in Bridgwater. Source: peterchrisp.blogspot.com.