At the end of Proteus Stephen looks back over his
shoulder and sees the masts of a sailing ship floating into
Dublin on the flood tide: "Moving through the air high spars
of a threemaster, her sails brailed up on the crosstrees,
homing, upstream, silently moving, a silent ship."
Several aspects of this occurrence require comment. First, it
is helpful to visualize where Stephen is and to realize
exactly what he must be seeing. He is sitting on the seaward
side of the South Wall,
the long breakwater that separates the waters of the River
Liffey on the north from the tide flats on the south. With
high tide approaching, seawater is flowing in along the
extended channel of the Liffey, facilitating the ship's
approach to the Dublin docks. Its sails are furled on the
yardarms because it is taking advantage of the tide.
The seaward side of the wall is buttressed by massive granite
blocks, which tumble some distance down to the water. Stephen
must be sitting near the bottom of the wall of rocks, because,
as he watched the tide approaching the seawall a short while
earlier, he thought, "My ashplant will float away."
His location at the bottom of the wall accounts for the
language of the narration, which says that the "spars"
of a ship are "Moving through the air." The
body of the ship is apparently obscured by the wall of rock,
meaning that Stephen sees a kind of surreal apparition: three
masts with "crosstrees" hovering in the air,
moving slowly to his left. This spectral appearance evokes the
timeless, symbolic image of the three crosses at Calvary.
But the ship is quite real. Joyce tells his reader nothing
about it at this point, but later chapters will fill in some
blanks. In Wandering Rocks, the throwaway that Bloom
has thrown away into the Liffey 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 one schooner
among all the ships? The fact that it is identified as a
threemaster may encourage an observant reader to suppose that
this may be the ship that arrived in Dublin a few hours
earlier.
Eumaeus rewards this hypothetical reader with
actionable information. In the cabman's shelter 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." Since Stephen was sitting
along the wall at some time around 11:00, it must have been
this threemaster that he saw. And Gifford notes that a
schooner of that name was indeed reported in the Freeman's
Journal of 16 June 1904 as having arrived in Dublin
"from Bridgwater with bricks." Bridgwater is in SW England,
just west of Bristol. Gifford observes that "it was well known
for its manufacture of Bath bricks (scouring bricks used to
clean knives and polish metal)."
