The Sea Cow

For those of us that rail against the vagaries of outboard motors here's an extract from more than 50 years ago that shows that our plight is common the world over.

"We come now to a piece of equipment which still brings anger to our hearts and, we hope, some venom to our pen. Perhaps in self defence against suit, we should say, "The outboard motor mentioned in this book is purely fictitious and any resemblance to outboard motors living or dead is coincidental". We shall call this contraption, for the sake of secrecy, a Hansen Sea-Cow -- a dazzling little piece of machinery, all aluminium paint and touched here and there with spots of red. The Sea-Cow was built to sell, to dazzle the eyes, to splutter its way into the unwary heart. We took it along for the skiff. It was intended that it should push us ashore and back, should drive our boat into estuaries and along the borders of little coves.

But we had not reckoned with one thing. Recently, industrial civilisation has reached its peak of reality and has lunged forward into something that approaches mysticism. In the Sea-Cow factory where steel fingers tighten screws, bend and mold, measure and divide, some curious mathematick has occurred. And that secret so long sought has accidentally been found. Life has been created. The machine is at last stirred. A soul and a malignant mind have been born. Our Hansen Sea-Cow was not only a living thing but a mean, irritable, contemptible, vengeful, mischievous, hateful living thing. In the six weeks of our association we observed it, at first mechanically and then, as its living reactions became more and more apparent, psychologically. And we determined one thing to our satisfaction. When and if these ghoulish little motors learn to reproduce themselves the human species is doomed. For their hatred of us is so great that they will wait and plan and organise and one night, in a roar of little exhausts, they will wipe us out.

We do not think that Mr Hansen, inventor of the Sea-Cow, father of the outboard motor, knew what he was doing. We think the monster he created was as accidental and arbitrary as the beginning of any other life. Only one thing differentiates the Sea-Cow from the life that we know. Whereas the forms that are familiar to us are the results of billions of years of mutation and complication, life and intelligence emerged simultaneously in the Sea-Cow. It is more than a species. It is a whole new re-definition of life. We observed the following traits in it and we were able to check them again and again.

• Incredibly lazy, the Sea-Cow loved to ride on the back of a boat, trailing its propeller daintily in the water while we rowed.

• It required the same amount of gasoline whether it ran or not, apparently being able to absorb this fluid through its body walls without recourse to explosion. It had always to be filled at the beginning of every trip.

• It had apparently some clairvoyant powers, and was able to read our minds, particularly when they were inflamed with emotion. Thus, on every occasion when we were driven to the point of destroying it, it started and ran with a great deal of noise and excitement. This served the double purpose of saving its life and of resurrecting in our minds a false confidence in it.

• It had many cleavage points, and when attacked with a screwdriver, fell apart in simulated death, a trait it had in common with opossums, armadillos, and several members of the sloth family, which also fall apart in simulated death when attacked with a screwdriver.

• It hated the engineer, sensing perhaps his knowledge of mechanics was capable of diagnosing its shortcomings.

• It completely refused to run:

  1. when the waves were high

  2. when the wind blew

  3. at night, early morning, and evening

  4. in rain, dew, or fog

  5. when the distance to be covered was more than two hundred yards

But on warm sunny days when the weather was calm and the white beach nearby - in a word, on days when it would have been a pleasure to row - the Sea-Cow started at a touch and would not stop.

It loved no one, trusted no one. It had no friends.

Perhaps towards the end, our observations were a little warped by emotion. Time and again as it sat on the stern with its pretty little propeller lying idly in the water, it was very close to death. And in the end, even we were infected with its malignancy and its dishonesty. We should have destroyed it, but we did not. Arriving home, we gave it a new coat of aluminium paint, spotted it at points with new red enamel, and sold it. And we might have rid the world of this mechanical cancer."

John Steinbeck - The Log from the Sea of Cortez 1941