Summary
A voice calls out “Ahoy!” and the two jump to their feet. Chris goes to the deck. He comes back in with a limp man in dungarees, supporting him into the cabin. Johnson, Chris’s young Swedish deckhand, follows with another exhausted man. Chris calls for Anna to get whiskey and for Johnson to get another man. Four men were on a steamer that was wrecked and they had been at sea for five days.
Mat Burke comes around the corner. He is a “powerful, broad-chested six-footer, his face handsome in a hard, rough, bold, defiant way” (36). He is about thirty, heavily muscled and dark-eyed. He grumbles about this boat but then says he is happy to be saved. He sneers at the fourth weak man whom Johnson brings in.
Anna appears and offers him whiskey and he looks up as if he is dreaming. She cuts off his florid talk and asks what happened. He says it was a narrow squeak, but when she tells him he ought to rest he criticizes the other weak men with him and says he is the reason why they were saved because he is strong and they are not. She is unimpressed with his boasting. He turns sour, and suggests she is a fool living with a man on a barge when she could be with a man like him. He puts his arm around her waist and tries to kiss her.
She pushes him away and, caught off guard, he falls back. He is knocked out and she kneels down in shock. When he opens his eyes he is full of admiration and says that no man has ever been able to do that. She apologizes but says he had no right to get fresh with her.
Sitting down, she grudgingly offers that the captain is her father. He is pleased to hear this and tells her he knows he is a tough man and he is not fit for a girl like her but he begs her to be friends with him. She agrees, touched, and he squeezes her hand. It is too hard and she yelps, but is impressed nonetheless.
Mat invites her to sit down so they can say a bit about themselves. She sits but says not about her. He asks, a touch confused, what she does or did when she was not on the boat with her old man. She is uneasy and tells him she is a governess. He is impressed. She changes the topic to the wreck, which he details. It seems all but four men died, which is terrible but Mat says this is a nice clean death for a sailor.
Anna is struck by the word “clean” and Mat tells her she might have a bit of the sea in her blood too. She turns the conversation back to him and asks if he is Irish. He says yes but that he has not been home in many years; life at sea is hard and lonesome. The only women one meets are prostitutes, who are very different from Anna, and all they want to do is steal.
Anna gets up, agitated, and Mat feels he has offended her with his talk of those types of women. He apologies and she allows herself to be mollified. She asks why if he does not like the sea he continues to work on it and he explains that he does not like it. But, he wonders, there are good and bad jobs on both land and sea and he could get work in a nice liner and have a house and a nice girl back on land and it would be a good life.
Mat looks at Anna, who is uneasy, and says passionately that he will stop roving and drinking if she will marry him. She is astonished that he would propose after only a few moments of knowing her. He is convinced that God brought him through this storm to her.
Chris steps out, and seeing her talking to a strange man, orders her inside. She is resistant and he changes his tone to one of pleading. He tells Mat to get into the fo’c’s’tle with the other men. Anna says that Mat is sick.
Mat stands up threateningly but then says he knows that Chris is Anna’s old man and he would not raise a fist to him in all the world. At that, he then slumps and Anna tells him to come inside. He is delirious and happy and says “You’re the girl of the world and we’ll be marrying soon and I don’t care who knows it!” (46). She shushes him gently and brings him inside.
Chris hears his words and shakes his fist at the sea, proclaiming it is the sea who pulled off this “dirty trick” (46). He begs it to not do “it” while he is still alive.
Analysis
Mat’s rescue shatters the erstwhile peace father and daughter have made for themselves. Anna is immediately attracted to the handsome, rough, muscular sailor and Chris is immediately wary of the man because he sees his daughter’s attraction to him. He is not only concerned that their nascent family relationship is threatened but also because he can see that Mat is absolutely a man of the sea, and thus diametrically opposed to himself and to what he wants his daughter to be.
Mat does indeed share Anna’s affection for the sea, if not for the same reasons as she. He tells Anna that dying at sea might sound terrible to the “swabs [that] does live on land, maybe” but that “for the like of us does be roaming the seas, a good end, I'm telling you—quick and clane” (42).
He sees it as fitting for a real man, boasting to Anna that “It’s only on the sea you’d find rale men with guts is fit to wed with fine, high-tempered girls…the like of yourself” (43). He repeats his stance to Chris, telling him “The sea’s the only life for a man with guts in him isn’t afraid of his own shadow! ‘Tis only on the sea he’s free” (54-55). Even though he promises Anna that he will settle down with her, we know that the land will never satisfy him and the sea will continue to call him for the rest of his life.
Even though the reader/audience can see that Chris is avoiding introspection and acceptance of his own bad decisions, critic Ryder Thornton posits that "Chris’s caution seems warranted when we observe how frequently illusion and irony are connected with the sea. Almost immediately after her purifying encounter with the fog, Anna deceives Mat into thinking she has been a governess. Chris is ironically deceived when he brings Anna on the barge for exclusive company only to lose her to the first sailor she meets. Mat believes fate led him to a ‘fine, dacent girl’ in Anna until she reveals her past…Anna reunites with her father and falls in love with Mat; however, in the end her actions result in their enlistment on the Londonderry, and so she may only have been the sea’s agent in reclaiming them the whole time…[but] the final trick is on Anna who escapes her past but ‘falls victim to the family curse, and duplicates her mother’s fate of wedding a sailor who abandons her for the Sea.’”
Arthur Holmberg agrees, wondering why critics and audiences found the end of the play “happy” when what Anna has done is merely a replaying of her trauma of parental abandonment: “Mat, a roaming seaman at heart, will not give Anna the emotional solace she needs. And during his long voyages from home as he whiles away idle hours in the brothels that hug every port, will a woman with Anna's sexual awareness stay happily at home, planting cabbages?” Maybe the sea is as devious as Chris thinks it is, or maybe all the characters should consider who or what actually dictates the courses of their lives and offers referendums on the purity of their souls.
