14. Born leader.

It’s unusual for all the boats of a prawn-fishing fleet to leave port at the same time because it’s unusual for them to be in port at the same time. But this was an unusual day. At ten o’clock when Wild Bill, Neil and the five crew-members of the Osprey were ready to set metaphorical sail on the morning tide, the river was choked with trawlers.

In order to cast off the lines and make for the mouth of the river and the open sea, they would have to move six boats all tied abreast of the mother-ship. These boats weren’t moving because other trawlers were anchored in the stream fore, aft and abeam of them. There was barely ten yards of free water in the middle of the river available for maneuvering. Not only that – some skippers and crews were still ashore. Others hovered uncertainly in the traffic jam waiting for some kind of order.

The whole village had turned out to wave their goodbyes and see the fun. What they saw was chaos. The skippers had momentarily adopted a misguided sense of discipline requiring the mother-ship to lead them from port. The radio buzzed with a cacophony of exaggerated and indecipherable jargon which all added up to one thing – “We don’t know what we’re doing. We’re waiting for you.”

Wild Bill turned the radio off and called to Neil on the deck to stand by the lines of the boats tied to the port side of the Osprey. He had the deckys cast off from the wharf and, with a deft twist of the wheel, throttled the powerful diesels – first ahead, then immediately astern. The big ship with its attachment of three banks of two trawlers surged magically sideways into the middle of the stream. He signaled Neil to cast off the boat lines. They drifted aimlessly into the tangle of complaining trawlers  as the big boat surged away.

Follow that.

The truth is the cloying neediness of his new band of followers was starting to get on Wild Bill’s nerves. It occurred to him that this bunch of bearded brawling, shagging wild-men might be a bunch of sissies. His viewpoint was, of course, colored by the sudden realisation that he now had responsibility for them.

It was never his ambition. He didn’t want to be a leader. The only reason Wild Bill found himself in this position was because the young Wild Bill thought that running away and going to sea would really piss off his dad, Old Bill. 

Old Bill had been in the ground (given up smoking as they used to say) for the last seventeen years and Wild Bill still hadn’t come up with a replacement ambition. He was feeling the burden of leadership.

Some fairly hefty thinking machines have been put to work on the notion of leadership because there seemed to be some kind of natural law at work. The Scottish essayist Thomas Carlyle (1795 – 1881) came up with “the great man theory”. He reckoned that all of history was made up of the doings of born-leaders – guys like Shakespeare (1564 – 1616), Muhammad (570 – 632) and Napoleon (1769 – 1821).

Then, polymath, Francis Galton (1822 – 1911) pushed it even further claiming that leadership was a property unique to certain extraordinary individuals who were born with it. It’s safe to assume that Francis claimed membership in that club – he was an anthropologist, eugenicist, explorer, geographer, inventor, meteorologist and statistician. A real clever-clogs - he was also a knight.

This didn’t stop, sociologist, Herbert Spencer (1820 – 1903) from calling bullshit on Galton’s theory, saying that leaders were a natural product of the social environment from which they’d sprung.

None of this was any help to Wild Bill even if he’d heard of it. Whether he was a product of the disorganized rabble now endangering each other’s lives in the Halley River or a mutant gene passed down by a belt wielding wharfy, it made no difference.

Besides, Wild Bill didn’t feel like a born leader.

When he was twelve and Neil was nine, Wild Bill cut through every second spoke in the back wheel of Old Bill’s bike with a pair of tin-snips. He concealed the sabotage by carefully rejoining them with dabs of grease.

He gleefully imagined the old bastard riding out over the steep gutter at the front of the house and falling on his arse when the back wheel collapsed. 

He and Neil waited and watched from behind the mango tree but nothing happened. Old Bill bumped over the gutter and continued on around the corner. Apparently the unsnipped spokes were sufficient to maintain the wheel’s structural integrity.

Old Bill continued his ride to work undisturbed aside from a faint hissing sound coming from somewhere behind. This sound was caused by the loosened spokes brushing softly against the rear forks of the bike but Old Bill didn’t know that. He barely registered the sound except to start thinking of snakes.

Just as he was pulling through the big gates at number eight wharf and waving to the rest of his gang, one spoke came adrift and jabbed him painfully in the back of the right calf. Old Bill was convinced he’d been bitten by a snake and shrieked like a girl. He started to pedal furiously to make a getaway and another wayward spoke pierced his other calf. He shrieked again, reached down to fend off the imaginary taipan and fell in a heap on the ground.

He bum-walked backwards for five yards before noticing the twisted wire wickerwork that was now his back wheel.

Thinking about it now gave Wild Bill some satisfaction but he doubted it was the work of a born leader. This leadership deal wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. He was their boss but he was working for them. He had to do all the thinking and the worrying and, in the end, he had to answer to them.

Born loser maybe.