05Commencment SpeachDW

Keynote Address
Captain David V. V. Wood, USCG (Ret.)
Fairmont Le Château Frontenac
Ville de Québec , Canada
June 27, 2005

I've never given a graduation speech before, and I have to confess that I don't remember much about the ones I've listened to, but I think they ought to be short, and include both a note of congratulation and a challenge. So I'll start with the congratulations.

First, a salute to the parents, who had the imagination, the wisdom, the emotional courage, and the resources, to send your children off on adventure that you knew would change their lives. And I expect you are already beginning to find out how much those lives have been changed.

Second, a salute to Terry Davies, the founder of Class Afloat, for the vision and the determination to create this marvelous program, and to keep it going for 20 years—and to the staff of Class Afloat and the crew of Concordia for doing such a fine job of taking care of these young people and helping them to grow in an exciting adventure that is (unfortunately) very nearly unique in the world today.

But most importantly, congratulations to the young men and women who have just finished this incredible voyage. I have some idea what your feelings must have been as you sailed up the St. Lawrence a few days ago, knowing that you were soon to return to a life that now seems so distant from the one you left ten months ago—and that this adventure of a lifetime was about to end. And I expect those feelings have been very mixed. Excitement and joy at being home (or almost home)—bursting with stories to tell—the prospect of having your cell phones and your iPods back, sleeping in a real bed, taking long showers—sadness at the prospect of suddenly going your separate ways after being shipmates for so long—apprehension at the hustle and bustle of the city and family life after months of the simple and reassuring routine of shipboard life—and many other things as well.

So it probably far too early to be reflecting on what you have accomplished and learned, and on how your lives have been changed by your experience. That will come later, and indeed I expect you will be reflecting on it for the rest of your lives, just as you will maintain a bond among yourselves for the rest of your lives.

But I thought I would like to tell you some of the things I think you've learned.

You have learned how lucky—indeed privileged would not be too strong a word—you are to have had this experience, and how fortunate you are in comparison with most of the people you have met in your travels.
You have learned how large the world is, and how full of wonders—and at the same time, paradoxically, how small it is, in this age of instant communications and rapid air travel. And how the things that we associate with our advanced civilization—good and bad—are to be found everywhere.
You have learned that you can get along without a lot of things you thought you couldn't (including personal time and space).
You have learned to take risks, and discovered that you can do hard things that you never thought you could do, and have thereby gained an enormous amount of confidence in yourselves.
You have taken the measure of the Earth and seen the vastness of the oceans on a planet that is some 70% water, and you have experienced the forces of nature in ways that most people never do.
You have learned what matters, and what doesn't—and that teamwork and community are essential to survival.
You have learned to conserve resources, because a ship at sea is like a spaceship—it must carry everything needed for its crew to survive because, despite the fact that the oceans are vital to life on earth, human beings were not designed to live on or in them.
And on those magical long, languid tropical nights at sea when the stars glittered in almost unbelievable profusion and intensity—including many that you had never seen when you (or most of you) were growing up 49 degrees or more north of the equator—you must have sensed in a way that you never can ashore what a tiny spaceship our planet is in a universe of incomprehensible distance and immensity—the only home we'll ever have—and I hope you began to understand that the lessons for survival you were learning on board Concordia are very much the same lessons we all will need if human civilization is going to survive in the future.

Now here's the challenge part. What are you going to do with this new wisdom and understanding? Most of you are about to go off to college, or will in another year, and over the coming few years you will be making many choices about your future. Let me therefore digress for a moment with a brief history lesson, in order to put things in perspective.

Just 100 years ago—in 1905—my grandfather was a little older than you are now, a couple of years out of college, and was working as a manager on a Canadian-owned sugar plantation in northern Mexico . Only two years earlier the Wright brothers had proven that powered flight was possible, and just a year before that Guglielmo Marconi had sent the first wireless message across the Atlantic Ocean (in Morse Code). Automobiles were a brand new phenomenon, not very reliable, and you had to crank them by hand to get them started. To cross the oceans, one had to travel in passenger liners (like the Titanic) powered by coal-fired steam engines; but magnificent, engineless square-rigged ships were still being built to sail around Cape Horn carrying bulk cargo—like grain and wool and timber and nitrates—from the west coast of North and South America, and from Australia, to Europe. Almost all of the places you visited on your voyage were colonies of European imperial powers. The population of the world was about 1.6 billion.

50 years later (or 50 years ago, if you prefer), when I was about the same age that you are now, the age of sail was virtually over—to be preserved only by people around the world (like Terry Davies) who understood that large sailing ships represented a sort of pinnacle of appropriate technology and were marvelous vehicles for education. The age of trans-Atlantic travel by ocean liner was about to end because jet airliners were a lot quicker, and people were in a hurry. The microchip was three years away from being invented, but the possibility of launching satellites—and therefore ballistic missiles—had been proven, and the world lived under the cloud of the prospect of nuclear war. Cars were bigger, more gas-guzzling, and more abundant than ever, but the US interstate highway system had yet to be built. So that same grandfather of mine bought and learned to fly a small airplane, and twice a year (until he turned 80) he flew across the country from California to the east coast to visit my family. He had adapted well to technological change. He navigated by following railroad lines; but if you were going to go to sea much beyond coastal waters in 1955 (and indeed, when I first went to sea in 1962), you still had to know celestial navigation to find your way, and long-range wireless communications were still done in Morse code. All of those European empires had pretty much disappeared in the wake of two devastating world wars in which scores of millions died, and there were dozens of new independent countries emerging in Africa, Asia , and the Pacific. The term “aquaculture” had not yet been coined, but the era of large-scale fishing was already beginning to deplete the oceans in order to feed the world's population—which by now grown to about 2.6 billion.

I don't need to tell you too much about today, I suppose, but it's worth noting that celestial navigation is no longer a necessary art: the sky is crowded with satellites for navigation, communications, weather forecasting, spying, television and radio broadcasting, etc. You can pull a cell phone out of your pocket and call anyone with a telephone anywhere in the world. Air travel is commonplace, and it's hard to find a place anywhere that doesn't have a McDonald's and a Starbucks. The markets are full of Atlantic Salmon grown on “farms” in Canada, Maine, Ireland, Norway, and even Tasmania; if you can find a place to buy a wild Atlantic Salmon, please let me know. And there are now more than 6 billion people in the world—almost as many in India and China alone as there were in the entire world 50 years ago.

50 years from now—when you are about the age I am today—the world may or may not be running out of oil, depending on whose predictions you believe. Also, depending on whose predictions you believe, the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps may or may not be melting and sea levels rising around the world; but it seems a certainty that the world's climate will be warmer than at any time since humans have inhabited the earth. And, according to most predictions, there will be nearly 10 billion people in the world, more than 10 times as many as there were just 250 years earlier when the industrial revolution was beginning. The good news is that population should begin to level off around then. The bad news is that virtually all the growth in the next 50 years will be in areas of the world—South Asia, Latin America, and particularly Africa—where the majority of the population already are desperately poor.

So why am I mentioning all this? Because this is the world in which you are going to be living—it's the only one we'll ever have, don't forget—and these are the challenges—and opportunities—that lie ahead of you as you begin your adult lives. The pace of change has been breathtaking over the last century—indeed, the last two centuries—and it will continue to be in your lifetime. Human beings have a remarkable ability to adapt, but most of us have yet to overcome our strong tribal instincts, and tend to circle the wagons when the going gets tough.

The going will get tough at times, and when it does you may (indeed you probably will) occasionally find yourselves thinking (as Herman Melville's Ishmael did) that it is “high time to get to sea again.” Just remember that in any voyage there are unknown storms and shoals ahead, and when the call is for “all hands on deck”, there is always a great temptation to curl up in your bunk and hope that everybody else can take care of the emergency without you.

What you have done and learned in the past year has taught you that you cannot and must not do that—and it has given you the skills and courage and self-confidence to jump to the fore and be the first aloft to lend a hand. Those traits will be needed in the decades ahead. Use them wisely and well—and fair winds!