THE MARINE EXCURSION OF THE KNIGHTS OF PYTHIAS
by Stephen Leacock, 1912

"The Marine Excursion of the Knights of Pythias" is the third story in Stephen Leacock's Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town. The story cycle portrays the economic, religious, and political sides of life in the town of Mariposa. In this piece Leacock shows us something of the Mariposans' social life during the course of a holiday excursion on the Mariposa Belle, which ultimately becomes more than a steamboat; it comes to represent the town itself. The story contributes to our understanding of the town's main entrepreneur, Josh Smith (arguably the entire book's main character), and the way the townspeople think. Indeed, in no other story does the narrator of Sunshine Sketches identify so often and so closely with the mentality of the town.

The narrator's voice throughout Sunshine Sketches is quite variable, speaking occasionally as an outsider but mostly in the voice of a townsperson. The opening of "The Marine Excursion" reveals the narrator's ironic acceptance of Mariposan values:

Half-past six on a July morning! The Mariposa Belle is at the wharf, decked in flags, with steam up ready to start. Excursion day!

The narrator's expressed excitement is that of the whole town, and throughout the story he speaks of the excursion in the overblown terms with which the townspeople would describe the event. The town's pretensions to greatness are portrayed in the narrator's dismissal of European natural splendors: "Lake Wissanotti in the morning sunlight! Don't talk to me of the Italian lakes, or the Tyrol or the Swiss Alps." Nothing in foreign lands could compare to Mariposa's gala. As the extremely strict time of departure keeps being moved back, as the number of members of the "Knights of Pythias" grows, as the grandeur of the scene is undercut by the sound of bottles clinking in passengers' pockets, we learn the reality behind the mock-heroic account of the ship's departure.

Like the town itself, the Belle "seems to vary so" in size, depending on how long one has been in the town and influenced by its scale of values. After "a month or two" the ship appears to be as large as the Lusitania, and the accident it suffers seems worthy of the great buildup given to it by the narrator and the resulting tension it creates in the reader. Leacock parodies other ship disasters by focusing on the absurdly strange circumstances that allowed many of the townspeople to escape being aboard the ship when it sinks. The parody at once prepares us for a real disaster then dashes that expectation as we see the nature of the supposed coincidences. In addition, the parody makes the narrator as much a figure of fun as the townspeople.

The townspeople's excitement at this outing proves to be very short-lived. Complaints arise about seating conditions, and the women retire to the lower deck, where, "by getting round the table with needlework, and with all the windows shut, they soon had it, as they said themselves, just like being at home." In other words, the ship might as well be the town for all the difference in the townspeople's behavior.

While on the way home the ship begins to sink. Our anticipation of a real emergency is undercut by the calm way in which the passengers receive the news; they appear unconcerned, and we remain puzzled until the narrator explains:

What? Hadn't I explained about the depth of Lake Wissanotti? I had taken it for granted that you knew; and in any case parts of it are deep enough, though I don't suppose in this stretch of it from the big reed beds up to within a mile of the town wharf, you could find six feet of water in it if you tried.

He then berates us for having the intimations of catastrophe that he himself has provoked. The joke is on us, then, if we insist on taking the narrator at his word; we are now in Mariposa and must relinquish our city-based, sophisticated values in favor of the town's. The sinking is an inconvenience, not a threat, in keeping with the collection's overall tone of gentle, or Horatian, satire. The townspeople are fools, not villains, and thus the objects of sympathetic rather than damning ridicule.

Once we are told that the "sinking" is a minor affair, the rhetoric shifts again and the narrator implies that in its way this sinking is as frightening as one on the open seas, if not more so. Mariposan pretensions, then, never falter or escape attack. In the rescue that follows women and children leave first but only in order to test the lakeworthiness of the boat; the brave rescuers are the ones in most need of rescue—by those they tried to save. At last, the Mariposa Belle itself floats into view, thanks to the efforts of Josh Smith, who once more demonstrates his shrewdness and basic practical intelligence. As an outsider to the town he is not quite subject to their ideals and illusions. He is capable, therefore, of acts too fundamentally sensible for most of the townspeople to conceive of.

This story is a delightful parody of sea calamities. It holds the Mariposans up to ridicule, but ridicule of a gentle sort. As elsewhere in the book of Sunshine Sketches the Mariposans here are satirized—but in a way that makes them seem more charming than despicable. These are foolish human beings—possessed of a grand self-image, but no more so than any of us. As such, Leacock suggests, they deserve smiles of recognition, not sneers of disdain.

—Allan Weiss