The Sea and the Jungle
by H. M. Tomlinson · English · Gutenberg #37205 · 588,275 chars · public domain (US)
The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Sea and the Jungle
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.
Title: The Sea and the Jungle
Author: H. M. Tomlinson
Release date: August 26, 2011 [eBook #37205]
Most recently updated: September 19, 2011
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/37205
Credits: Produced by Roger Frank and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE ***
Produced by Roger Frank and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
THE SEA
AND THE JUNGLE
BY
H. M. TOMLINSON
NEW YORK
E.P. DUTTON & COMPANY
681 FIFTH AVENUE
Published, 1920,
BY E. P. BUTTON & COMPANY
_All Rights Reserved_
_First Printing, October, 1920_
_Second Printing, September, 1921_
THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE
Being the narrative of the voyage of the tramp steamer _Capella_
from Swansea to Para in the Brazils, and thence 2000 miles along the
forests of the Amazon and Madeira Rivers to the San Antonio Falls;
afterwards returning to Barbados for orders, and going by way of
Jamaica to Tampa in Florida, where she loaded for home. Done in the
years 1909 and 1910.
DEDICATED TO THOSE WHO
DID NOT GO
The author is indebted to the editors of the _English Review_, the
_Pall Mall Magazine_, the _Morning Leader_, and the _Yorkshire
Observer_, for permission to incorporate such parts of this
narrative as appeared first in their publications.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. 1
II. 98
III. 185
IV. 246
V. 271
VI. 324
THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE
I
Though it is easier, and perhaps far better, not to begin at all, yet if
a beginning is made it is there that most care is needed. Everything is
inherent in the genesis. So I have to record the simple genesis of this
affair as a winter morning after rain. There was more rain to come. The
sky was waterlogged and the grey ceiling, overstrained, had sagged and
dropped to the level of the chimneys. If one of them had pierced it! The
danger was imminent.
That day was but a thin solution of night. You know those November
mornings with a low, corpse-white east where the sunrise should be, as
though the day were still-born. Looking to the dayspring, there is what
we have waited for, there the end of our hope, prone and shrouded. This
morning of mine was such a morning. The world was very quiet, as though
it were exhausted after tears. Beneath a broken gutter-spout the rain
(all the night had I listened to its monody) had discovered a nest of
pebbles in the path of my garden in a London suburb. It occurs to you at
once that a London garden, especially in winter, should have no place in
a narrative which tells of the sea and the jungle. But it has much to do
with it. It is part of the heredity of this book. It is the essence of
this adventure of mine that it began on the kind of day which so
commonly occurs for both of us in the year's assortment of days. My
garden, on such a morning, is a necessary feature of the narrative, and
much as I should like to skip it and get to sea, yet things must be
taken in the proper order, and the garden comes first. There it was: the
blackened dahlias, the last to fall, prone in the field where death had
got all things under his feet. My pleasaunce was a dark area of soddened
relics; the battalions of June were slain, and their bodies in the mud.
That was the prospect in life I had. How was I to know the Skipper had
returned from the tropics? Standing in the central mud, which also was
black, surveying that forlorn end to devoted human effort, what was
there to tell me the Skipper had brought back his tramp steamer from the
lands under the sun? I knew of nothing to look forward to but December,
with January to follow. What should you and I expect after November, but
the next month of winter? Should the cultivators of London backs look
for adventures, even though they have read old Hakluyt? What are the
Americas to us, the Amazon and the Orinoco, Barbados and Panama, and
Port Royal, but tales that are told? We have never been nearer to them,
and now know we shall never be nearer to them, than that hill in our
neighbourhood which gives us a broad prospect of the sunset. There is as
near as we can approach. Thither we go and ascend of an evening, like
Moses, except for our pipe. It is all the escape vouchsafed us. Did we
ever know the chain to give? The chain has a certain length--we know it
to a link--to that ultimate link, the possibilities of which we never
strain. The mean range of our chain, the office and the polling booth.
What a radius! Yet it cannot prevent us ascending that hill which looks,
with uplifted and shining brow, to the far vague country whence comes
the last of the light, at dayfall.
It is necessary for you to learn that on my way to catch the 8.35 that
morning--it is always the 8.35--there came to me no premonition of
change. No portent was in the sky but the grey wrack. I saw the hale and
dominant gentleman, as usual, who arrives at the station in a brougham
drawn by two grey horses. He looked as proud and arrogant as ever, for
his face is as a bull's. He had the usual bunch of scarlet geraniums in
his coat, and the stationmaster assisted him into an apartment, and his
footman handed him a rug; a routine as stable as the hills, this. If
only the solemn footman would, one morning, as solemnly as ever, hurl
that rug at his master, with the umbrella to crash after it! One could
begin to hope then. There was the pale girl in black who never, between
our suburb and the city, lifts her shy brown eyes, benedictory as they
are at such a time, from the soiled book of the local public library,
and whose umbrella has lost half its handle, a china nob. (I think I
will write this book for her.) And there were all the others who catch
that train, except the young fellow with the cough. Now and then he does
miss it, using for the purpose, I have no doubt, that only form of
rebellion against its accursed tyranny which we have yet learned,
physical inability to catch it. Where that morning train starts from is
a mystery; but it never fails to come for us, and it never takes us
beyond the city, I well know.
I have a clear memory of the newspapers as they were that morning. I had
a sheaf of them, for it is my melancholy business to know what each is
saying. I learned there were dark and portentous matters, not actually
with us, but looming, each already rather larger than a man's hand. If
certain things happened, said one half the papers, ruin stared us in the
face. If those thing did not happen, said the other half, ruin stared us
in the face. No way appeared out of it. You paid your half-penny and
were damned either way. If you paid a penny you got more for your money.
Boding gloom, full-orbed, could be had for that. There was your extra
value for you. I looked round at my fellow passengers, all reading the
same papers, and all, it could be reasonably presumed, with
fore-knowledge of catastrophe. They were indifferent, every one of them.
I suppose we have learned, with some bitterness, that nothing ever
happens but private failure and tragedy, unregarded by our fellows
except with pity. The blare of the political megaphones, and the
sustained panic of the party tom-toms, have a message for us, we may
suppose. We may be sure the noise means something. So does the butcher's
boy when the sheep want to go up a side turning. He makes a noise. He
means something, with his warning cries. The driving uproar has a
purpose. But we have found out (not they who would break up side
turnings, but the people in the second class carriages of the morning
train) that now, though our first instinct is to start in a panic, when
we hear another sudden warning shout, there is no need to do so. And
perhaps, having attained to that more callous mind which allows us to
stare dully from the carriage window though with that urgent din in our
ears, a reasonable explanation of the increasing excitement and flushed
anxiety of the great Statesmen and their fuglemen may occur to us, in a
generation or two. Give us time! But how they wish they were out of it,
they who need no more time, but understand.
I put down the papers with their calls to social righteousness pitched
in the upper register of the tea-tray, their bright and instructive
interviews with flat earthers, and with the veteran who is topically
interesting because, having served one master fifty years, and reared
thirteen children on fifteen shillings a week, he has just begun to draw
his old age pension. (There's industry, thrift, and success, my little
dears!) One paper had a column account of the youngest child actress in
London, her toys and her philosophy, initialed by one of our younger
brilliant journalists. All had a society divorce case, with sanitary
elisions. Another contained an amusing account of a man working his way
round the world with a barrel on his head. Again, the young prince, we
were credibly informed in all the papers of that morning, did stop to
look in at a toy-shop window in Regent Street the previous afternoon. So
like a boy, you know, and yet he is a prince of course. The matter could
not be doubted. The report was carefully illustrated. The prince stood
on his feet outside the toy shop, and looked in.
To think of the future as a modestly long series of such prone mornings,
dawns unlit by heaven's light, new days to which we should be awakened
always by these clamant cockcrows bringing to our notice what the
busy-ness of our fellows had accomplished in nests of intelligent and
fruitful china eggs, was enough to make one stand up in the carriage,
horrified, and pull the communication cord. So I put down the papers and
turned to the landscape. Had I known the Skipper was back from below the
horizon--but I did not know. So I must go on to explain that that
morning train did stop, with its unfailing regularity, and not the least
hint of reprieve, at the place appointed in the Schedule. Soon I was at
work, showing, I hope, the right eager and concentrated eye, dutifully
and busily climbing the revolving wheel like the squirrel; except,
unluckier than that wild thing so far as I know, I was clearly
conscious, whatever the speed, the wheel remained forever in the same
place. Looking up to sigh through the bars after a long spin there was
the Skipper smiling at me.
I saw an open door. I got out. It was as though the world had been
suddenly lighted, and I could see a great distance.
We stood in Fleet Street later, interrupting the tide. The noise of the
traffic came to me from afar, for the sailor was telling me he was
sailing soon, and that he was taking his vessel an experimental voyage
through the tropical forests of the Amazon. He was going to Para, and
thence up the main stream as far as Manaos, and would then attempt to
reach a point on the Madeira river near Bolivia, 800 miles above its
junction with the greater river. It would be a noble journey. They would
see Obydos and Santarem, and the foliage would brush their rigging at
times, so narrow would be the way, and where they anchored at night the
jaguars would come to drink. This to me, and I have read Humboldt, and
Bates, and Spruce, and Wallace. As I listened my pipe went out.
It was when we were parting that the sailor, who is used to far horizons
and habitually deals with affairs in a large way because his standards
in his own business are the skyline and the meridian, put to me the most
searching question I have had to answer since the city first caught and
caged me. He put it casually when he was striking a match for a cigar,
so little did he himself think of it.
"Then why," said he, "don't you chuck it?"
What, escape? I had never thought of that. It is the last solution which
would have occurred to me concerning the problem of captivity. It is a
credit to you and to me that we do not think of our chains so
disrespectfully as to regard them as anything but necessary and
indispensable, though sometimes, sore and irritated, we may bite at
them. As if servitude fell to our portion like squints, parents poor in
spirit, green fly, reverence for our social superiors, and the other
consignments from the stars. How should we live if not in bonds? I have
never tried. I do not remember, in all the even and respectable history
of my family, that it has ever been tried. The habit of obedience, like
our family habit of noses, is bred in the bone. The most we have ever
done is to shake our fists at destiny; and I have done most of that.
"Give it up," said the Skipper, "and come with me."
With a sad smile I lifted my foot heavily and showed him what had me
round the ankle. "Poo," he said. "You could berth with the second mate.
There's room there. I could sign you on as purser. You come."
I stared at him. The fellow meant it. I laughed at him.
"What," I asked conclusively, "shall I do about all this?" I waved my
arm round Fleet Street, source of all the light I know, giver of my gift
of income tax, limit of my perspective. How should I live when withdrawn
from the smell of its ink, the urge of its machinery?
"_That_," he said. "Oh, damn that!"
* * * * *
It was his light tone which staggered me and not what he said. The
sailor's manner was that of one who would be annoyed if I treated him
like a practical man, arranging miles of petty considerations and
exceptions before him, arguing for hours along rows of trifles, and
hoping the harvest of difficulties of no consequence at the end of the
argument would convince him. Indeed I know he is always impatient for
the next step in any business, and not, like most of us, for more
careful consideration. "Look there," said the sailor, pointing to
Ludgate Circus, "see that Putney 'bus? If it takes up two more
passengers before it passes this spot then you've got to come."
That made the difficulty much clearer. I agreed. The 'bus struggled off,
and a man with a bag ran at it and boarded it. One! Then it had a clear
run--it almost reached us--in another two seconds!--I began to breathe
more easily; the danger of liberty was almost gone. Then the sailor
jumped for the 'bus before it was quite level, and as he mounted the
steps, turned, and held up two fingers with a grin.
Thus was a voyage of great moment and adventure settled for me.
When I got home that night I referred to the authorities for the way to
begin an enterprise on the deep. What said Hakluyt? According to him it
is as easy as this: "Master John Hawkins, with the Jesus of Lubeck, a
ship of 700 tunnes, and the Solomon, a ship of seven score, the Tiger, a
barke of 50, and the Swalow of 30 Tunnes, being all well furnished with
men to the number of one hundred threescore and ten; as also with
ordnance and vituall requisite for such a voyage, departed out of
Plinmouth the 18 day of October in the yeere of our Lord 1564, with a
prosperous wind."
But we all know such things were done far better in that century. Yet
Master John Hawkins, who seems to have handled a fleet with greater
facility than I do this pen now I am so anxious to scratch it across
preliminaries and get it to sea, did not come to a decision by the
number of passengers on a Putney 'bus. So I turned to a modern
authority. Yet Bates, I found, is worse than old John Hawkins, Bates
actually arrives at his destination in the first sentence. He steps
across in thirty-eight words from England to the Amazon. "I embarked at
Liverpool with Mr. Wallace, in a small trading vessel, on the 26th day
of April 1848; and, after a swift passage from the Irish Channel to the
equator arrived on the 26th of May off Salinas."
Well, I did not. I say it is a gross deception. Voyaging does not get
accomplished in that off-hand fashion. It is a mockery to captives like
ourselves to pretend bondage is puffed away in that airy manner. It is
not so easily persuaded to disencumber us. Indeed, with this and that, I
found the initial step in the pursuit of the sunset red a heavy weight,
and hardly suited to the constitution of men who have worked into a deep
rut; but that high resolution and a faith equal to belief in the
liquefaction of St. Januarius' blood are needed to drop the protective
routine of years, to sheer off the dear and warm entanglements of home
and friendships; to shut the front door one bleak winter evening when
the house smells comfortable and secure, and the light on the hearth,
under such circumstances, is ironic in its bright revelation of years of
ease and stability till then not fully appraised; and so depart in the
dusk for an unknown Welsh coaling port, there to board a tramp steamer
for a voyage that has some serious doubts about it, though its landfall
shall be near the line, and have palms in it. The door slammed, I
noticed, in a chill and penetrating minor, an incident of travel I have
never seen recorded.
Now do I come at last, O Liberty, my loved and secret divinity! Your
passionate pilgrim is here, late, though still young and eager eyed; yet
with his coat collar upturned for the present. Allons! the Open Road is
before him. But how the broad and empty prospects of his freedom shudder
with the dire sounds and cries of the milk churns on Paddington Station!
And next I remember black night--it was, I think, about three a.m.--and
a calamitous rain, and a Welsh railway station where I had alighted,
faint with a famine, a kit bag soon to increase in weight and drag, and
a pair of numbed feet. There was a porter who bore himself as though it
were the last day and he knew the worst, a dying station light, the wind
and rain, and me. Outside was the dark, and one of the greatest coaling
ports in the world. As I could not see the coal in great bulk I could
not admire it. The railway man turned out the light, conducted me
politely into a puddle, set my course for the docks in uncharted night
with a dexter having no convictions, and left me. I began to hate the
land of the wild bard in which I found myself for the first time, and
felt a savage satisfaction in being nearly a pure blooded London Saxon;
and as I surveyed my prospects in that country, not even the fact that I
had a grandparent named Hughes would have prevented me striking Wales
with my umbrella, for it is only a cheap one; but I had left it in the
train.
It had never occurred to me (any more than it did to you when you got
this book to learn about the tropic sea and the jungle) that the Open
Road, where the chains fall from us, would include Swansea High Street
four hours before sunrise in a steady winter downpour. But there I
discovered that trade wind seas by moonlight, flying fish, Indians, and
forests and palms, cannot be compelled. They come in their turn. They
are mixed with litter and dead stuff, like prizes in a bran tub. Going
down the drear and aqueous street it was clear that if there are exalted
moments in travel, as on the instant when we discover we really may
prepare to go, yet exaltation implies the undistinguished flats from
which, for a while, we are translated. This is a travel book for honest
men. I am still on the flat. It will be to-morrow presently.
My chief fear was that my waterproof, rattling in the wind, would alarm
silent and sleeping Swansea. I found a policeman standing at a street
corner, holding out his cape to help away the rain. He could give me no
hope. He knew where the dock was, but the way thither was difficult and
torturous. I had better follow the tram lines, and ask again, if I saw
anybody. Therefore the tram lines I followed till my portable estate, by
compound interest, had increased to untold tons; but the empty tram way
went on for ever down the rows of frozen and desolate lamps, so that I
surrendered all my chances of the seas of the tropics and the jungle of
the Brazils, and turned aside from the course which the policeman said
led to ships and the deep, entered the dark portico of a shop, where it
was only half wet, and lit my pipe, there to wait for the shy gods to
turn my luck. Hesitating footsteps fumbled to where I was hidden, and
stopped at the flash of my match. "Could yer 'blige with a light,
mister?"
He was a little elderly seaman in yellow oilskins and a so'wester. He
was rather drunk. His oilskins gathered the reflected street shine, so
that he looked phosphorescent, an old man risen wet and shining from the
ocean. He was looking for Buenos Aires, he explained, and hadn't got any
matches. Now he, for the Plate, and I, for ultimate Amazonas, set off
down the Swansea tram lines. And the wind whined through overhead wires,
and a lost dog followed us along the empty thoroughfare where the only
sound was of waterspouts, and the elderly mariner sang bold and improper
songs, so that I wondered there was not an irruption of nightcaps at
upper Swansea windows to witness this disturbance of their usual peace.
We came at length to abandoned lagoons, where spectral ships were moored
down the marges, and round the wide waters was the loom of uncertain
monsters and buildings. Railway metals waylaid us and caught us by the
feet. There were many electric moons swaying in the gale, and they
spilled showers of broken light, which melted on the black water, and
betrayed to us our loneliness in outer night. The call of a vessel's
syren across that inhospitable space was heard by us as the prolonged
moan of the lost.
The old man of the sea took me under a stack of timber to light his
pipe. He borrowed my box of matches, and malicious spurts of wind
extinguished each match, steadily, as mine ancient struck them. It was
now 4 a.m. He threw each bit of dead wood down, without irritation, as
though it were the fate of man to strike lights for the gods to douse,
but yet was he uplifted now beyond the hurt of cosmic mockery. The
matches were not wasted. At least they lighted up his sorrowful face as
he talked to me. I would not have had him any the less drunk, for it but
softened his facial integument, which I could see had been hardened and
set by bitter experience, masking the man; but now his jaded life,
warmed by emotion, though much of the emotion was artificial and of the
pewter born, was quick in his face again, and made him a human
responsive to his kind, instead of a sober and warped shellback with a
sour remembrance of his hardships, and of the futility of his endurance,
and of the distance away of his masters with their bowels of iron.
He had seven children, and the sea was a weary place. Had I any
children?--and God keep them if I had. He was a troublesome old man
("that's another light gone") but he had just left his kids ("ah, to
hell wi' the wind") and he had to talk to someone about them, and that
was my rotten luck, said he. We got to the fifth child, and I heard
something about her, when the wind reached round the wood stack at us,
and snatched the last glim. So it was in the dark that I heard about the
other two and the wife, while one of my pockets filled with rain. Only
Milly, he said, was at work, and what was four pound a month for the
rest? And he was sick of the sea and chief mates, and did I think a chap
stood for a better time when he died, if he kept off drink and did his
bit without grousing, like some of the parson fellers said? Then he
indicated my ship, and disappeared in the dark. He is still waiting an
answer to his last question, which I have saved for you to give him.
For me, I was in no mood to discuss whether balm is to be got in Gilead,
when we come to the place; but stumbling among the lumber on the
deserted deck of the S.S. "Capella," I found a cabin, fell into it, and
remember nothing more but the smell of hot bread, eggs and bacon, and
coffee, which visited me in a beautiful dream. Then I woke to the
reveille of a tin whistle, which the chief engineer was playing in my
ear; and it was daylight. The jumble of recollections of the night
before were but dark insanities. But the smell of that aromatic food, I
give grace, did not pass with the awakening, for next door I heard
lively sizzling in the galley. Already Fleet Street was hull down.
* * * * *
If you are used only to the methods of passenger steamers and regular
routes, then you know little of travel. You are but carried about.
Insistent clocks and schedules keep that way, and the upholstered but
rigid routine is a soporific. You never see the hither side of the
hedge. The granite countenance of fortune, her eyes filmed like frozen
pools, which keeps alert and bright the voyager who is unprotected from
her unscheduled and unmoral acts except by his own ready buckler, is
watched for you by others. You are never surprised into fear by the
unlucky position of the planets, nor moved to sing Laus Deo, when now
and then, the stars are propitious. I had been brought hastily to the
"Capella," for it was said she was sailing instantly. This morning I
learned at breakfast that nobody knew when she could sail. Our steamer
sat two feet higher than her capacity. There was some galvanised iron to
come from Glascow, some machinery from Sheffield; and owing to labour
difficulties we were short of several hundred tons of coal. A little mob
of us, all strangers, shuffled after the Skipper's spry heels that
morning to the Board of Trade offices, where an official mumbled over
the ship's articles, to our shut ears, and we signed where we were told.
A more glum and unromantic group of voyagers, each man twirling his
shabby hat in his hands as he waited his turn for the corroded pen, was
never seen this side of the Elizabethan era. I became the purser of the
"Capella," with my wages lawfully recorded at a shilling per month.
I was committed. There was no withdrawal now but desertion. And
desertion, at times, I seriously considered, because for a week more the
cargo dribbled down to us, while I endured as a moucher about those
winter docks with their coal tips, and the muddy streets with their
sailors' slop marts, marine stores, and pawnshops having a cankered
display of chronometers, telescopes, and other flotsam of marine failure
and wreckage. Daily the quays and the dismal waterside ways with their
cheap shops were still more depressed by additional snow mush and drives
of sleet; and it was no warmth for this idler that he saw the tradesmen,
because of the season, putting holly among their oranges and wreathing
beer bottles with chains of coloured paper. The iron decks and cabins of
my new home were as chill and unfriendly as the empty grate, the marble
tables, and the tin advertisements of chemical slops of a temperance
hotel. Am I plain? Such are the conditions which compass the wayward
traveller. This is what chills one's rapid pulse when pursuing at last
the rosy visions of boyhood. The deplorable littoral of our island
kingdom is part of a life on the ocean wave, and should help you in
coming to a decision when next you see a friendless and bestial
sailorman. It becomes necessary to declare that we shall really get down
to the tropics presently; have the courage to wait, like the crew of the
"Capella." Our ship did sail, when she was ready.
It was the afternoon before we sailed, and having listened long enough
to my messmates, who, after dinner, weighed the probabilities of
malaria, yellow fever and other alien disasters into our coming strange
voyage, that I went into the town to take my last look round a book
shop, and to get some marine soap, dungarees, and things. Here was I at
last with my heart's desire. On the very next day I should sail, I
myself, and no other hero, veritably Me at last, for a place not on the
chart, because the place we should find, at the journey's end, the map
described with those words of magic: "Forest" and "Unexplored." I made
my way round crates and barrels on that untidy deck, which had a thick
mud of coal dust and snow, to the ladder overside. Coal dust and melting
snow! But where was the uplifted heart, the radiant anticipation, as of
one to whom the future was big with treasures to be born, which are the
privilege of a young pilgrim, released from his usual obligations to
pursue far horizons in the Spanish main, while his envious fellows in
the city still cast ledgers under gas lamps? Here was another swindle of
the romanticists. You may search their warm and golden pages in vain for
coal tips, melting ice, delays, and steam heaters that will not work for
cold cabins. Down they go here, though. These gallant affairs, I
thought, as I descended the wet and gritty ladder, are much better done
before the fire at home, in your slippers; for the large scale map, as
you traverse its alluring blank areas, leaves out the conditions which
now, when I am on the actual business, precipitate as frozen spicules,
as would north winds, my warm, aerial, and cloudy enthusiasms that were
wont to be dyed such wonderful hues by sunsets, poems, and tales of old
travel. Another of these congealing draughts was now to catch me
unbuttoned. Because of our unusual destination, and the wild stories
that were told of it, we were a point of interest in Swansea docks, and
had many interviewers and curious visitors. Some of them were on the
quay then, inspecting our steamer, and as I stepped off the ladder one
turned to me.
"Mister," he whispered, "are you going in her?"
"I am," I said.
"O gord," said he.
That night I met a number of my grave fellow shipmates in the town. The
question was, Should we then go back to the ship?
"What," burst out one of us in surprise--his gold-laced cap was already
resting on his right eyebrow--"Now? Not me. Boys, don't freeze the
Carnival. Follow me!"
We followed him. The rest of the evening is more easily given in dumb
show. There was a mechanical piano in a saloon bar, and it steadily
devoured pennies, and returned to us automatic joy, fortissimo, over
which our conversation strenuously high-stepped and vaulted. Later,
there was a search for cabs, and an engineer carried with him everywhere
two geese by their necks and sometimes trod on their loose feet. When he
did this he snatched a goose from his own grasp, and then roundly abused
us for our post-dated frivolity. We learned our steamer was now moored
in mid-dock. We found a quay wall, and at the bottom of it, at a great
depth in the dark, the level of the water was seen only because shreds
of lamp-shine floated there. We understood a boat was below, and found
it was, and we loaded it till the water brimmed at the gunwale. As we
mounted the "Capella's" rope-ladder only one goose fell back into the
dock.
* * * * *
The "Capella" started in her sleep, and she woke me. She was still
trembling. Resting my hand on her I felt her heart begin to throb,
though faintly. We were off.
It was a bright morning, early and keen. Those habitual quays now were
moving past us. The decks were cleared, the carpenter and some sailors
were fixing the hatches, and the pilot, muffled in a thick white shawl,
was on the bridge with the Skipper. We stopped in the outer lock, the
exhaust humming impatiently while a pier-head jumper--for we were a
sailor short--was examined by our doctor. The Skipper had some short
words for an official who had mounted the bridge, because the third mate
had deserted, and had taken his half pay; and the official, who had
volunteered to get us a substitute, had failed. There were now but two
mates for our big tramp steamer going a long and arduous voyage which
included the navigation for some months of narrow inland waterways in
the tropics. Our first mate, passing amidships where the Purser was
leaning overside, stopped to tell me what this meant for him and the
second mate. I was mighty glad it was not the purser's fault. I have
never heard a short speech more passionate; and his eyes were feral. Yet
it became increasingly clear to me, as the voyage lengthened, that his
eyes no more than met the case.
Out we drove at last. It was December, but by luck we found a halcyon
morning which had got lost in the year's procession. It was a Sunday
morning, and it had not been ashore. It was still virgin, bearing a
vestal light. It had not been soiled yet by any suspicion of this
trampled planet, this muddy star, which its innocent and tenuous rays
had discovered in the region of night. I thought it still was regarding
us as a lucky find there. Its light was tremulous, as if with joy and
eagerness. I met this discovering morning as your ambassador while you
still slept, and betrayed not, I hope, any greyness and bleared satiety
of ours to its pure, frail, and lucid regard. That was the last good
service I did before leaving you quite. I was glad to see how well our
old earth did meet such a light, as though it had no difficulty in
looking day in the face. The world was miraculously renewed. It rose,
and received the new-born of Aurora in its arms. There was clouds of
pearl above hills of chrysoprase. The sea ran in volatile flames. The
shadows on the bright deck shot to and fro as we rolled. The breakfast
bell rang not too soon. This was a right beginning.
The pilot was dropped, and a course was shaped to pass between Lundy and
Hartland. A strong northwester and its seas caught us beyond the
Mumbles, and the quality of the sunshine thinned to a flickering stuff
which cast only grey shadows. The "Capella" became quarrelsome, and
began to strike the seas heavily. You may know the "Capella" when you
see her. She is a modern three-thousand-ton freighter, with derrick
supports fore and aft, and a funnel; and the three of them are so
fearful of seeming rakish that they overdo the effect of stern utility,
and appear to lean ahead. She is a three-island ship, the amidships
section carrying the second mate's cabin, and the cabins of the four
engineers, all of them, excepting the Chief's cabin, looking outwards
overseas across a narrow sheltered alleyway; and on a narrower
athwartship's alleyway there, and opening astern, are the Chief's place,
and the cook's galley, the entrance to the engine-room, and the
engineers' messroom. Above this structure is the boat deck. You may
reach the poop, which contains the master's and chief mate's quarters,
the doctor's and steward's berths, and the saloon, by descending a
perpendicular iron ladder to the long main deck, or else, as all did at
sea, by a flying trestle bridge, which is dismantled when in port. Her
black funnel is relieved by a cryptic design in white, and her bows are
so bluff that, as the chief mate put it, "her belly begins there." She
might not take your eye, but a shipowner would see her points. She
carries a large cargo on a comparatively low registered tonnage. The
money that built her went mostly in hull and engines, and the latter do
their work as sweetly as an eight-day clock, giving ten and a half
knots, weather permitting, on a low coal consumption. There was not much
money left, therefore, for balm in the cabins, and that is the reason we
do not find it there.
At sundown the sky cleared. The wind, increased in violence, had swept
it of the last feather. Lundy was over our starboard bow, a small dark
blot in a clear yellow light which poured, with the gale and the rising
seas, from the west. The glass was falling. Now, the Skipper has often
told me how his "Capella" had faced hurricanes off Cape Hatteras, when
laden with ore, and had kept her decks dry. There are other stories
about her surprising buoyancy, when deeply laden, and I have heard them
all at home, and they are fine stories. But what lies they are! For
there below me, with Lundy not even passed, and the Bay of Biscay to
come (Para not to be thought of yet) were tons and tons of salt wash
that could not get time to escape by the scuppers, but plunged wearily
amongst the hatches and winches.
"I've never seen her as dirty as this," grumbled the chief engineer
apologetically, peeping from his cabin at cold green water lopping over
casually on to the after deck. "It's that patent fuel--its stowed wrong.
Now she'll roll--you can feel it--the cat she is, she's never going to
stop. It's that patent fuel and her new load line."
Certainly she sat close to the sea. I had never seen so much lively
water so close. She wallowed, she plunged, she rolled, she sank heavily
to its level. I looked out from the round window of the Chief's cabin,
and when she inclined those green mounds of the swell swinging under us
and away were superior, in apparition, to my outlook.
"Listen to it," said the Chief. He stopped triturating some shavings of
hard tobacco between his huge palms, and sat quietly, hands clasped, as
though in prayer. The surge mourned over the deck. The day, too, was
growing towards the dusky hours of retrospection. That sombre monody
outside was like the tremor and boom of the drums funebre. "That chap
some of you talk about--Lloyd George!"--said the Chief, suddenly rubbing
his tobacco again with energy. (Good God, I thought, and here we are at
sea too. Now what has the misguided man done.) "If I had him here I'd
hold him down in that wash on deck till it cleared. Then he'd know. He
put it there, to break sailors' legs. This steamer, she had dry decks
till her load line was altered. She carries more now than she was built
for, two hundred tons more. If I had him here--but there you are!
Popularity! There's a fine popular noise for you, isn't it? Sailors
growled for better food. 'What about this improved food scale?' says Mr.
Lloyd George to the shipowners. 'Oh,' said they, 'we'll give 'em better
food, the drunken insubordinate dogs, if you'll make overloading legal.'
'Why,' says Lord George, 'then it wouldn't be illegal, would it?' So it
was done. What does the public know about a ship's buoyancy? Nothing.
But it understands food. So the clever man heightens the Plimsoll mark,
adds a million or so to shipowners' capital by dipping his pen in the
ink, and gives Jack more jam. What you want ashore," the Chief added
bitterly, "is not more voters, as some say, but more lunatic asylums."
Though I had left politics at home, to be settled by others, like the
trouble with the drains, the dog licence, and the dispute about the
garden fence, I glanced with interest at the Chief. I know him well. Not
only is he a kindly man, but he himself is also a philosophic rebel. But
his eye was hard, and he still ground the tobacco with forgetful energy,
us though an objectionable thing were between his strong hands. Then
impatiently he threw the tobacco loose on his log book, which was open
on his deck, paused, and said, "Ah, maybe the man thought a little
freeboard the less didn't matter. God give him grace," and picked his
flute out of a bookshelf which was fastened above his bunk; sat down
over the steam heater, and broke out like a blackbird. Yet was it a
well-remembered air he fluted so well. I listened so long as respect for
the artist demanded, then rose, filled my pipe from the fragrant grains
on the log book, and left him. Presently I would listen to such airs;
but this was too soon.
I repeat I had confidence in the "Capella" to gain. I went forward to
get it, mounting the bridge, where my cabin mate, the youthful second
officer, was in charge, in his oilskins. A cheerful sight he looked. "I
think," said he briskly, "we're going to catch it." He was puckering his
face over our course. Lundy was looming large--even Rat Island was
plain--but it looked so frail in that flood of seas, wind, and wild
yellow light streaming together from the evening west, that I looked for
the unsubstantial island to spring suddenly from its foundations, and to
come down on us a stretched wisp of thinned and ragged smoke. The sea
was adrift from its old confines. The flood was pouring past, and the
wind was the drainage of interstellar space. Lundy was the last delicate
fragment of land. It still fronted the upheaval and rush of the
ungoverned elements, but one looked for it to be swept away.
Yet that wild and scenic west, of such pallor and clarity that one
shrank from facing its inhospitable spaciousness, with each shape of a
wave there, black against the light as it reared ahead, a distinct
individual foe in the host moving to the attack, was but the prelude.
Night and the worst were to come. Just then, while the last of the light
was shining on the officer's oilskins, I was only surprised that our
bulk was such a trifle after all. Our loaded vessel looked so bluff and
massive when in dock. She began to attempt, off Lundy, the spring and
jauntiness of a trawler. The bows sank to the rails in an acre of white,
and the spume flew past the bridge like rain. The black bows lifted and
swayed, buoyant on submarine upheavals, to cut out segments of the
sunset; then sank again into dark hollows where the foam was luminous.
The cold and wind were bitter dolours.
We rolled. I grasped the rail of the weather cloth, in the drive of wind
and spume, and rode down on our charger like a valiant man; like a
valiant man who is uncertain of his seat. Something like a valiant man.
We advanced to the attack, masts and funnel describing great arcs, and
steadily our bows shouldered away the foe. I think sailors deserve large
monies. Being the less valiant--for the longer I watched, the more grew
I wet and cold--it came to my mind that where we were, but a few weeks
before, another large freighter had her hatches opened by the seas, and
presently was but a trace of oil and cinders on the waters. You will
remember I am on my first long voyage. The officer was quite cheerful
and asked me if I knew Forest Gate. There were, he said, some fine girls
at Forest Gate.
We rounded Hartland. It was dusk, the weather was now directly on our
starboard beam, and the waves were coming solidly inboard. The main deck
was white with plunging water. We rolled still more.
"I can't make out why you left London when you didn't have to," said the
grinning sailor. "I'd like to be on the Stratford tram, going down to
Forest Gate."
This was nearly as bad as the Chief's flute. I held up two fingers over
those hatches of ours, called silently on blessed Saint Anthony, who
loves sailors, and went down the ladder; for night had come, and the
prospect from the "Capella" was not the less apprehensive to the mind of
a landsman because the enemy could not be seen, except as flying ghosts.
The noises could be heard all right.
I shut my heavy teak door amidships, shut out the daunting uproar of
floods, and the sensation that the night was collapsing round our
heaving ship. There was a home light far away, on some unseen Cornish
headland, rising and falling like a soaring but tethered star. Nor did I
want the lights of home.
"I love the sea," a beautiful woman once said to me. (We, then, stood
looking out over it from a height, and the sea was but the sediment of
the still air, the blue precipitation of the sky, for it was that
restful time, early October. I also loved it then.)
I was thinking of this, when the concrete floor of the cabin nearly
became a wall, and I fell absurd-wise, striking nearly every item in the
cabin. Was this the way to greet a lover? Sitting on a sea-chest, and
swaying to and fro because the ship compelled me to a figure of woe, I
began to consider whether it was only the books about the sea which I
had loved hitherto, and not the sea itself. Perhaps it is better not to
live with it, if you would love it. The sea is at its best at London,
near midnight, when you are within the arms of a capacious chair, before
a glowing fire, selecting phases of the voyages you will never make. It
is wiser not to try to realise your dreams. There are no real dreams.
For as to the sea itself, love it you cannot. Why should you? I will
never believe again the sea was ever loved by anyone whose life was
married to it. It is the creation of Omnipotence, which is not of human
kind and understandable, and so the springs of its behaviour are hidden.
The sea does not assume its royal blue to please you. Its brute and dark
desolation is not raised to overwhelm you; you disappear then because
you happen to be there. It carries the lucky foolish to fortune, and
drags the calculating wise to the strewn bones. Yet, thought I, that
night off Cornwall, if I pray now as one of the privileged and lucky
foolish, this very occasion may prove to be set apart for the sole use
of the calculating wise. Because that is the way things happen at sea.
What else may we expect from It, the nameless thing, new-born with each
dawn, but as old as the night? Now for me had it degenerated into its
mood of old night, behaving as it did in the lightless days, before
poetry came to change it with flattery. It was again as inhuman as when
the poet was merely a wonderfully potential blob on a warm mudbank.
Here, you see, is the whole trouble in appealing to Omnipotence. Picture
me entering the wide western ocean at night, an inconspicuous but
self-important morsel sitting on a sea-chest, at a time when it was
perhaps ordained that hundreds of ships should have anxious passages.
(Afterwards I learned very many ships did have anxious passages.) How
could I expect to be spared, even though somewhere the hairs of my head
were all numbered? It is plain that to spare me would be to extend
beneficence to all. There only remained to me my liberty to hope that
our particular steamer might miss all seventh waves, by luck. I was free
to do that.
I turned up the dull and stinking oil lamp, and tried to read; but that
fuliginous glim haunted the pages. That black-edged light too much
resembled my own thoughts made manifest. There were some bunches of my
cabin mate's clothes hanging from hooks, and I watched their erratic
behaviour instead. The water in the carafe was also interesting, because
quite mad, standing diagonally in the bottle, and then reversing. A lump
of soap made a flying leap from the washstand, and then slithered about
the floor like something hunted and panic-stricken. I listened to
numerous little voices. There was no telling their origins. There was a
chorus in the cabin, rustlings, whispers, plaints, creaks, wails, and
grunts; but they were foundered in the din when the spittoon, which was
an empty meat tin, got its lashings loose, and began a rioting fandango
on the concrete. Over the clothes chest, which was also our table and a
cabin fixture, was a portrait of the mate's sweetheart, and on its frame
was one of my busy little friends the cockroaches; for the mate and I do
not sleep alone in this cabin, not by hundreds. The cockroach stood in
thought, waving his hands interrogatively, as one who talks to himself
nervously. The ship at that moment received a seventh wave, lurched, and
trembled. The cockroach fell. I rose, listening. I felt sure a new
clamour would begin at once, showing we had reached another and critical
stage of the fight. But no; the brave heart of her was beating as
before. I could feel its steady pulse throbbing in our table. We were
alive and strong, though labouring direfully.
It was when I was thinking whether bed would be, as I have so often
found it, the best answer to doubt, that I heard a boatswain's pipe.
I fought one side of the door, and the wind fought the other. My hurry
to open the door was great, but the obstinate wind jammed it firmly.
Without warning the wind released its hold, the ship fell over to
windward, the door flew open, and forth I went, clutching at the driving
dark. Then up sailed my side of the ship, and the door shut with the
sound of gunfire. I had never experienced such insensate violence. These
were the unlawful noises and movements of chaos. Hanging to a rail, I
was puzzling out which was the fore and which the rear of the ship, when
a flying lump of salt water struck me in the face just as a figure (I
thought it was the chief officer) hurried past me bawling "All hands."
The figure came back. "That you, purser? Number three hatch has gone,"
it said, and disappeared instantly.
So. Then this very thing had come to me, and at night! Our hatches were
adrift. It was impossible. Why, we had only just left Swansea. It could
not be true; it was absurdly unfair. This was my first long voyage, and
it had only just begun. I stood like the cricketer who is out for a
duck.
If I could tell you how I felt, I would. Somebody was shouting
somewhere, but his words were cut off at once by the wind and blown
away. I felt my way along a wet and dark iron alleyway which was giddily
unstable, pressing hard against my feet, and then falling from under me.
I got round by the engine-room entrance. Small gleams, shavings of
light, were escaping from seams in the unseen structure, but they showed
nothing, except a length of wet rail or a scrap of wet deck. The ship
itself was a shade, manned by voices.
I could not see that anything was being done. Were they allowing her to
fill up like an open barge? I became aware my surcharged feelings were
escaping by my knees, which kept knocking in their tremors against a
lower rail. I tried to stop this trembling by hardening my muscles, but
my fearful legs had their own way. Yet it is plain there was nothing to
fear. I told my legs so. Had we not but that day left Swansea? Besides,
I had already commenced a letter which was to be posted at Para. The
letter would have to be posted. They were waiting for it at home.
Somewhere below me a heavy mass of water plunged monstrously, and became
a faintly luminous cloud over all the main deck aft, actually framing
the rectangular form of the deck in the night. It was unreasonable. I
was not really one of the crew either, though on the articles. I was
there by chance. No advantage should be taken of that. A torrent poured
down the athwartships alleyway, and nearly swept me from my feet.
One could not watch what was happening. That was another cruel
injustice. The wind and sea could be heard, and the ship could be felt.
But how could I be expected to know what to do in the dark in such
circumstances? There ought to be a light. This should have happened in
the daytime. My garrulous knees struck the lower rail violently in their
excitement. I leaned over the rail, shading my eyes. I grew savagely
indignant with something having no name and no shape. I cannot even now
give a name to the thing that angered me, but can just discern, in the
twilight which shrouds the undiscovered, a vast calm face the rock of
which no human emotion can move, with eyes that stare but see nothing,
and a mouth that never speaks, and ears from which assailing cries and
questions fall as mournful echoes, ironic repetitions. This flung stone
falls from it, as unavailing as your prayers; but we shall never cease
to pray and fling stones, alternately, up there into the twilight.
Nevertheless, when the chief, with his hurricane lamp, found me, he says
I was smiling. The youth who was our second mate ran up and stood by us,
the better to shout to the deck below. He shouted, bending over the
rail, till he was screaming through hoarseness. He turned to us
abruptly. "They don't understand a word I say," he cried in despair.
"There isn't a sailor or an Englishman in the crowd, the ---- German
farmers." This, I found afterwards, was nearly true. These men had been
signed on at a Continental port. It was really our Dutch cook who saved
us that night. It was the cook who first saw the hatch covers going.
The ship's head had been put to the seas to keep the decks as clear as
possible, and being now more accustomed to the gloom I could make out
the men below busy at the hatch. Most conspicuous among them was the
cook, who had taken charge there, and he, with three languages,
bludgeoned into surprising activity the inexperienced youngsters who
were learning for the first time what happens to a ship when the
carpenter's chief job on leaving port has its defects discovered by
exceptional weather. They were wading through swirling waters as they
worked, and once a greater wave sprang bodily over them, and when the
hatch showed through the foam again some of the men had gone as though
dissolved. But it was found they had kept the right side of the
bulwarks, and the elderly carpenter, whose leg had got wedged in a
winch, was the only one damaged.
If you ask me when I shall be pleased to allow the necessary sun to rise
upon this narrative to give it a little warmth, then I must tell you it
cannot be done till we have fastened down the "Capella's" number two
hatch, at least. That hatch has gone now, and if hatches one and four
give way while number two is getting attention from the weary, soaked,
and frozen crowd which has just had an hour's desperate work at number
three, then I fear the sun will never rise on this narrative. (How Bates
got over to his wonderful blue butterflies in those forest paths under a
tropical sun in thirty-eight words I do not know. He must have been
thinking of nothing but his butterflies. I cannot do it, with the seas
and the ship keeping my mind so busy.)
Luckily, the other hatches kept staunch. We were watertight again. When
the Old Man, the Chief, the Doctor, and the Purser, gathered late that
night in the Chief's cabin to see what it was he had secreted in his
cupboard, and boasted of, we sat where we could, being comfortably
crowded, and I never knew tobacco could taste like that. I felt as if
never before had I found such large leisure for extracting its full
flavour. From being suddenly confined within a space which gave me a
short outlook of a few hours, I was presently released into the open
again and of what might remain to me of the usual gift of ample years. I
had all that time to smoke in. Never did a pipe taste so sweet. It is
idle for good and serious souls to think me graceless here with this
talk of tobacco immediately after such a release. Let me tell them my
sacrificial smoke rose up straight and accepted. Looking through the
smoke I saw clearly how worthy, kind, and lovable were the faces of my
comrades. I warmed to this voyage for the first time; as though, after a
test, I had been initiated. This was the place for me, with men like
these about me, and such great affairs to be met. I revelled in the
thought of our valorous bluff, insignificant as we were in that malign
desolation, sundered from our kind.
"Chief," said the Old Man, "it was my department that time. None of your
old engines did it."
"You've got a good cook," said the Chief, "I saw that." Then the Chief,
remembering something, turned in his seat to the picture hanging above
his desk of a smiling and handsome matron. "Here's luck, old girl," he
said, holding up his glass; "you can still send me some letters."
* * * * *
The Chief, in case of an emergency, slept in his clothes that night on
the settee, and I climbed into his bunk. What a comfortable outline the
man had, as he lay on his broad back, mildly snoring. There was a tangle
of tense hair over a square copper coloured forehead. A long experience
of such nights was written in many lines on that brow, and was shown in
that indifferent snoring while chaos was without. The nose sprang out of
the big face like an ejaculation, and beneath it was a moustache clipped
short to show the red of the upper lip. The jaw was powerful, but its
curves made it friendly. His body and limbs hid the settee and had a
margin over. I quite believed what I had been told of his successful way
with refractory stokers. There was confidence to be got from a mere look
at that slumbering Jovian form. The storm assailed its hairy and fleshy
ears in vain. I braced my knees against the bulkhead to keep myself
still, the rolling was so violent, and went to sleep ... waking to find
us on a level keel; and was deceived into thinking the parallel lines of
grey and gold in the upper air, seen as a picture framed by the port,
were the heights about; a harbour into which we had run for shelter; but
it was only cloudland over the western ocean. The stillness, too, was
but a short reprieve. The wind was merely making a detour, to spring at
us from another quarter.
The sun died at birth. The wind we had lost we found again as a gale
from the south-east. The waters quickly increased again, and by noon the
saloon was light and giddy with the racing of the propeller. I moved
about like an infant learning to walk. We were 201 miles from the
Mumbles, course S.W. 1/2W.; it was cold, and I was still looking for the
pleasures of travel. The Doctor came to introduce himself, like a good
man, and tried me with such things as fevers, Shaw, Brazilian
entomology, the evolution of sex, the medical profession under
socialism, the sea and the poets. But my thoughts were in retreat, with
the black dog in full cry. It was too cold and damp to talk even of sex.
When my oil lamp began to throw its rays of brown smell, the Doctor,
tired of the effort to exalt the sour dough which was my mind, left me.
It was night. O, the sea and the poets!
By next morning the gale, now from the south-west, like the seas, was
constantly reinforced with squalls of hurricane violence. The Chief put
a man at the throttle. In the early afternoon the waves had assumed
serious proportions. They soared by us in broad sombre ranges, with
hissing white ridges, an inhospitable and subduing sight. They were a
quite different tribe of waves from the volatile and malicious natives
of the Bristol Channel. Those channel waves had no serried ranks in the
attack; they were but a horde of undisciplined savages, appearing to
assault without design or plan, but getting at us as they could,
depending on their numbers. The waves in the channel were smaller folk,
but more athletic, and very noisy; they appeared to detach themselves
from the sea, and to leap at us, shouting.
These western ocean waves had a different character. They were the sea.
We did not have a multitude of waves in sight, but the sea floor itself
might have been undulating. The ocean was profoundly convulsed. Our
outlook was confined to a few heights and hollows, and the moving
heights were swift, but unhurried and stately. Your alarm, as you saw a
greater hill appear ahead, tower, and bear down, had no time to get more
than just out of the stage of surprise and wonder when the "Capella's"
bows were pointing skyward on a long up-slope of water, the broken
summit of which was too quick for the "Capella"--the bows disappeared in
a white explosion, a volley of spray, as hard as shot, raked the bridge,
the foredeck filled with raging water, and the wave swept along our run,
dark, severe, and immense; with so little noise too; with but a faint
hissing of foam, as in a deliberate silence. The "Capella" then began to
run down a valley.
The engines were reduced to half speed; it would have been dangerous to
drive her at such seas. Our wet and slippery decks were bleak,
windswept, and deserted. The mirror of water on the iron surfaces,
constantly renewed, reflected and flashed the wild lights in the sky as
she rolled and pitched, and somehow those reflections from her polish
made the steamer seem more desolate and forlorn. Not a man showed
anywhere on the vessel's length, except merely to hurry from one vantage
to another--darting out of the ship's interior, and scurrying to another
hole and vanishing abruptly, like a rabbit.
The gale was dumb till it met and was torn in our harsh opposition,
shouting and moaning then in anger and torment as we steadily pressed
our iron into its ponderable body. You could imagine the flawless flood
of air pouring silently express till it met our pillars and pinnacles,
and then flying past rift, the thousand punctures instantly spreading
into long shrieking lacerations. The wounds and mouths were so many,
loud, and poignant, that you wondered you could not see them. Our
structure was full of voices, but the weighty body which drove against
our shrouds and funnel guys, and kept them strongly vibrating, was
curiously invisible. The hard jets of air spurted hissing through the
winches. The sound in the shrouds and stays began like that of something
tearing, and rose to a high keening. The deeper notes were amidships, in
the alleyways and round the engine-room casing; but there the ship
itself contributed a note, a metallic murmur so profound that it was
felt as a tremor rather than heard. It was almost below human hearing.
It was the hollow ship resonant, the steel walls, decks, and bulkheads
quivering under the drumming of the seas, and the regular throws of the
crank-shaft far below.
It was on this day the "Capella" ceased to be a marine engine to me. She
was not the "Capella" of the Swansea docks, the sea waggon squatting low
in the water, with bows like a box, and a width of beam which made her
seem a wharf fixture. To-day in the Atlantic her bluff bows rose to meet
the approaching bulk of each wave with such steady honesty, getting up
heavily to meet its quick wiles, it is true, but often with such success
that we found ourselves perched at a height above the gloom of the
hollow seas, getting more light and seeing more world; though sometimes
the hill-top was missed; she was not quick enough, and broke the
inflowing ridge with her face. She behaved so like a brave patient thing
that now her portrait, which I treasure, is to me that of one who has
befriended me, a staunch and homely body who never tired in faithful
well-doing. She became our little sanctuary, especially near dayfall,
with those sombre mounts close round us bringing twilight before its
time.
Your glance caught a wave passing amidships as a heaped mass of polished
obsidian, having minor hollows and ridges on its slopes, conchoidal
fractures in its glass. It rose directly and acutely from your feet to a
summit that was awesome because the eye travelled to it over a long and
broken up-slope; this hill had intervened suddenly to obscure thirty
degrees of light; and the imagination shrank from contemplating water
which over-shadowed your foothold with such high dark bulk toppling in
collapse. The steamer leaning that side, your face was quite close to
the beginning of the bare mobile down, where it swirled past in a
vitreous flux, tortured lines of green foam buried far but plain in its
translucent deeps. It passed; and the light released from the sky
streamed over the "Capella" again as your side of her lifted in the
roll, the sea falling down her iron wall as far as the bilge. The
steamer spouted violently from her choked valve, as it cleared the sea,
like a swimmer who battles, and then gets his mouth free from a smother.
Her task against those head seas and the squalls was so hard and
continuous that the murmur of her heart, which I fancied grew louder
almost to a moaning when her body sank to the rails, the panic of her
cries when the screw raced, when she lost her hold, her noble and
rhythmic labourings, the sense of her concentrated and unremitting power
given by the smoke driving in violence from her swaying funnel, the
cordage quivering in tense curves, the seas that burst in her face as
clouds, falling roaring inboard then to founder half her length, she
presently to raise her heavy body slowly out of an acre of foam, the
cascades streaming from her in veils,--all this was like great music. I
learned why a ship has a name. It is for the same reason that you and I
have names. She has happenings according to her own weird. She shows
perversities and virtues her parents never dreamed into the plans they
laid for her. Her heredity cannot be explained by the general chemics of
iron and steel and the principles of the steam engine; but something
counts in her of the moods of her creators, both of the happy men and
the sullen men whose bright or dark energies poured into her rivets and
plates as they hammered, and now suffuse her body. Something of the
"Capella" was revealed to me, "our" ship. She was one for pride and
trust. She was slow, but that slowness was of her dignity and size; she
had valour in her. She was not a light yacht. She was strong and hard,
taking heavy punishment, and then lifting her broad face over the seas
to look for the next enemy. But was she slow? She seemed but slow. The
eye judged by those assailing hills, so vast and whelmingly quick. The
hills were so dark, swift, and great, moving barely inferior to the
clouds which travelled with them, the collapsing roof which fell over
the seas, flying with the same impulse as the waters. There was the
uplifted ocean, and pressing down to it, sundered from it only by the
gale--the gale forced them apart--the foundered heavens, a low ceiling
which would have been night itself but that it was thinned in patches by
some solvent day. And our "Capella," heavy as was her body, and great
and swift as were the hills, never failed to carry us up the long
slopes, and over the white summits which moved down on us like the
marked approach of catastrophe. If one of the greater hills but hit us,
I thought----
One did. Late that afternoon the second mate, who was on watch, saw such
a wave bearing down on us. It was so dominantly above us that
instinctively he put his hand in his pocket for his whistle. It was his
first voyage in an ocean steamer; he was not long out of his
apprenticeship in "sails," and so he did not telegraph to stop the
engines. The Skipper looked up through the chart-room window, saw the
high gloom of this wave over us, and jumped out for the bridge ladder to
get at the telegraph himself. He was too late.
We went under. The wave stopped us with the shock of a grounding, came
solid over our fore-length, and broke on our structure amidships. The
concussion itself scattered things about my cabin. When the "Capella"
showed herself again the ventilators had gone, the windlass was damaged,
and the iron ends of the drum on the forecastle head, on which a steel
hawser was wound, had been doubled on themselves, like tinfoil.
By day these movements of water on a grand scale, the harsh and deep
noises of gale and breaking seas, and the labouring of the steamer, no
more than awed me. At least, my sight could escape. But courage went
with the light. At dusk, the eye, which had the liberty during the hours
of light to range up the inclines of the sea to distant summits, and
note that these dangers always passed, was imprisoned by a dreadful
apparition. When there was more night than day in the dusk you saw no
waves. You saw, and close at hand, only vertical shadows, and they
swayed noiselessly without progressing on the fading sky high over you.
I could but think the ocean level had risen greatly, and was see-sawing
much superior to us all round. The "Capella" remained then in a
precarious nadir of the waters. Looking aft from the Chief's cabin I
could see of our ship only the top of our mainmast, because that
projected out of the shadow of the hollow into the last of the day
overhead; and often the sheer apparitions oscillating around us swung
above the truck of it, and the whole length vanished. The sense of
onward movement ceased because nothing could be seen passing us. At dusk
the steamer appeared to be rocking helplessly in a narrow sunken place
which never had an outlet for us; the shadows of the seas erect over us
did not move away, but their ridges pitched at changing angles.
You know the Sussex chalk hills at evening, just at that time when, from
the foot of them, they lose all detail but what is on the skyline,
become an abrupt plane before you of unequal height. That was the view
from the "Capella," except that the skyline moved. And when we passed a
barque that evening it looked as looks a solitary bush far on the summit
of the downs. The barque did not pass us; we saw it fade, and the height
it surmounted fade, as shadows do when all light has gone. But where we
saw it last a green star was adrift and was ranging up and down in the
night.
This was the dark time when, struggling from amidships to the poop, you
knew there was something organised and coherent under you, still a
standing place in chaos, only because you could feel it there. And this
was the time to seek your fellows in the saloon, where there was light,
warmth, sane and familiar things, and dinner. The "Capella's" saloon was
fairly large, and the Skipper's pride. It was panelled in maple and oak,
with a long settee at the foreward end upholstered in red velvet, the
velvet protected by a calico cover. A brass oil lamp with an opaline
shade hung over the table from a beam beneath the skylight. There was a
closed American stove, with a rigorously polished brass flue running up
through the deck. On two oak sideboards in corners of the saloon some
artificial plants blossomed; from single stems each plant blossomed into
flowers of aniline dyes and of different species. One of these plants,
an imitation palm, and a better imitation of life than the others, was
carefully watered throughout the voyage by the steward till it wilted
into corruption and an offence, and became a count against the steward
which the skipper never forgave, for he thought his floral ornaments
lovely. When a pretty Brazilian lady visitor at Itacoatiara admired the
magenta rays of one blossom, he culled it for her (five earnest minutes
with a sharp knife, for there was wire behind the green bark) more as a
sacrifice and a hard duty than a joy, and often spoke of it afterwards,
shaking his head regretfully.
Ah! that saloon. I remember it first, shiny, cold, and repellent, with a
handful of fire to its wide capacity for draughts, in the northern seas.
It had curious marine odours then, with which I was not friendly till
long after, odours that lamps, burnished brass, newly polished wood,
food, and the steward's storeroom behind it, never fully accounted for;
and I remember it as I found it in the still heat of the Amazon, when it
had the air of an oven; when, writing in it, the sweat ran off the
fingers to soil the paper, strange insects crawling everywhere on its
green baize table cover, and banging against its lamp. I remember it
assiduously now, every trivial feature of it, and the men, now scattered
over all the world, thrown together in it then for a spell to make the
most of each other. It has the indelible impress of a room of that house
where first the interest in existence awakened in us.
The Skipper, with stove behind him, took his seat before the soup tureen
at the head of the table. You would as soon think of altering the
chart-room clock, even were it wrong, as of touching the soup tureen
without the Skipper's orders. It is his duty and his right to serve the
soup, and to call the steward to inform him the density of the
vegetables in it is too heavy. We have no market garden on board, you
know.
The Doctor was on the Skipper's right hand, and the Purser next to the
Doctor, and on the opposite side, the chief mate. There was the plump
and bald-headed German steward, in white apron, the lid of one eye
heavier than the other, serving us in his shirt sleeves, sometimes
sucking his teeth with a noticeable click when he knew a dish deserved
our approval. You kept the soup in the plate by holding it off the table
and watching its tides. When her stern sailed up, and the screw raced,
the glass shade of the lamp, being a misfit, took our eyes to watch the
coming smash; the soup then poured over you, and trying to push your
chair back from the mess, you found the chair was a fixture on the
floor. This last fact was never remembered. I should try to push my
"Capella" chair back now, if I were sitting in it.
The Doctor, who had been long enough tinkering careless bodies to have
grown a little worn and grizzled, was often removed from us by a faint
but impervious hauteur, though maybe he was only a little better and
differently dressed. He was a patient listener, but his eyes could be
droll. The Doctor's chuckle, escaping from his thoughts while he was
unguarded, would sometimes make the captain look up from a narrative
with question and a trace of resentment in his glance. The captain was a
great traveller, but he was puzzled to find the memory of our surgeon
following him to the most remote and unfamiliar strands. "Now how did
that fellow come to be at a place like that?" the captain would whisper
to me afterwards. "Can't make him out. Who is he?" The surgeon had a
bottomless fund of short stories, to which he would sometimes go about
the time when we were pushing away the banana skins and nutshells. He
had an elusive and stimulating method with them. He knew his work. At
the end of one the captain would explain the fun to the seriously
interested mate (who had leaned forward to learn), placing spoons and
crumbs to demonstrate the main points. Then the mate, too, would join us
with his happy laugh. The late and giddy laughter of the mate, when he
also arrived, became a welcome feature of a yarn by the surgeon. We
expected it. The mate's own stories were usually bawdy; he always
prefaced them with some unmanageable hilarity, which impeded his start.
Mate (_pushing over his plate for soup_). That big wave washed out the
men's berths, sir.
Captain. Then it did some good. The dirty brutes.
Mate. Heard the men grumbling to-night. Said we'll never get the hawsers
to run out with them bugs in the hawse pipes. Say the bugs don't belong
to them, sir--ship's property.
Doctor. Any this end of the ship, captain? Good Lord!
Captain. Not a bug. And if there's any for'ard the men brought 'em. No
bugs in my ship. Never saw one in my cabin.
Mate (_making a confused effort to master his emotion, not to spill his
soup, and to be respectful_). Te-he! you will, sir, Te-he! (_Realises he
may not laugh, but suffers internally._)
Captain (_indicates an interrogation with frightful eyes and guttural
noises_).
Mate (_controls himself by concentrating on a fork_). Well, sir--I'm
just telling you--I heard it said the men annoyed with bugs--some of 'em
said seein's believin'--said they had enough for everybody. (_His voice
breaks into a stifled falsetto_) So they emptied a match--match--they
emptied a match box full down your ventilator this morning.
* * * * *
The captain would frequently keep his seat in the saloon after dinner
till he had finished his cigar, and in the vein, would put a leg over
the arm of his chair, which he had pushed back (his chair was cushioned,
and was not a fixture), and frowning at his cigar, as if for defects,
would voyage again his early seas. I suppose a sailor would call our
skipper a hard case. He was an elderly man, tall, spare, and meagrely
bearded. His eyes were set close into a knife-like nose, and they were
opaque and bright, like two blue stones under a forehead which narrowed
and tightened into a small shiny cranium. There were tufts of grey wool
above his temples. No light came through his eyes to make them limpid,
except when he was fondling Tinker, the dog. They shone from the
surface, giving him a look of peering and intent suspicion. The skin of
his face, neck and hands, now worked a little loose, was so steeped in
the tincture of sunshine that it had preserved an unctious child-like
quality. His dress and habits betrayed an appreciation of his own
person. He kept his own medicines.
I guessed he would have a ruthless process in an emergency; he would
identify the success and safety of the ship with his own. He laughed
from his mouth only, throwing his head back, showing surprisingly
perfect teeth, and laughter did not change the crystalline glitter of
his eyes. There was something alien and startling in his merriment. As
though his own mind were too cold for him at times he would seek out me,
or the chief, to find warmth in an argument. He would irritate us into a
disputation; and though he was a choleric man, quick at opposition, yet
his vocabulary then was flinty and sparse. It stuck, and was delivered
with pain. You could think of him labouring at his views of men and
affairs with a creaking slate pencil. He set one's teeth. But he was a
sailor, cautious and bold, with a knowledge of ships and the sea that
was a mine to me. Let me say that, during the voyage, I found him busy
making a canvas cot. He sat on the poop and worked there, bent and
patient as a seamstress, for days. With a judgment made too readily I
believed he was, naturally, making it for his own comfort, against the
heat of the river. When it was finished he was rolling up his ball of
yarn, surveying his job, and he said, mumbling and shy, that the cot was
for me.
The Skipper, on this day that our decks were swept, swore about the men
and the bugs during dinner, muttered with foreboding about the glass,
which was still falling, and the coals, which were being burnt to no
purpose. We were hardly doing more than holding our place on our course.
The saloon was delirious, and when she flung up her heels, the varied
noises rose with the racing propeller to a crescendo of furious
castenets. The mate let us. The Skipper sat glooming, eyeing his cigar
resentfully, his leg over the arm of his chair. The Doctor was swaying
with the ship, weary and forlorn. Tinker had an appeal in his eyes, and
made timorous noises. The Purser wondered why he was there at all, and
blamed his silly dreams. The night boomed without. What a night!
Skipper. If this southerly wind goes round to the west and north, look
out. I saw porpoises to-day too.
Doctor. When are we due at Para?
Skipper. Huh! What's this talk of Para? You wait. All this talk about
when we shall get there's no good.... Now in those Newfoundland
schooners where I served my time--I wouldn't have no talk in them about
getting anywhere. Seems as if somebody heard. You always run into it.
There was the "Lizzie Polwith." She was about 80 tons. Those west
country schooners in the fish trade are never more than 100 tons, else
they'd have to carry more than a master and one mate. I was her master,
and a kid of eighteen. We left Falmouth for Cadiz. Now look what
happened. My mate was old Tregenna. He was a regular misery. I never
knew such a dead homer, not so much as he was, always wanting to talk
about his wife. I say, when you've cast off, it's best not to have a
home. The ship wants all you can give her. Tregenna, he looked back a
lot. You know what I mean. Couldn't keep his mind on his job, but wished
he was through with it. There he'd be cutting bread at dinner, and it
'ud remind him, and he'd be wishing he was cutting it at home. When
things began to go stiff, he'd say, "who wouldn't sell his little farm
to go to sea?" Used to figure out on paper how long we'd be before we'd
be back. Why, you never know when you'll get back.
See what happened. We left Cadiz that year on the first of January, and
got things just right. The winds chased us over. There were big
following seas, but you know those schooners ride like ducks. Up and
over they go. Never a drop did we ship. Though they're lively enough to
bruise and sicken all but good sailors. And old Tregenna was rubbing his
hands and making out his figures better and better.
We arrived off St. Johns in a bit more than three weeks. I reckon I'd
done it all right, being such a young chap too. Well, I was turning in
that night, and just as I got into the companion a man said, "There goes
a lump of ice." I jumped out again. Why, there was ice all round us. The
sea was full of it as far as I could see into the night. "This is all
along of your figuring," I sang out to Tregenna. "But you'll have a lot
of time to reckon it up afresh," I said.
So he had. Do you know when we got in? We got in on April 15. We were
two months and a half getting in. And we came over in three weeks.
There's something in that Jonah story. Always some fool who can't keep
his mouth shut and his mind on his job.
We did have a time. Two and a half months, and our provisions ran out.
We were living on a little meal and dried peas. The ice chafed the
"Lizzie" till the rudder was worn down to the stock. It roughed up her
wooden sides till they looked as if they were covered with long coarse
hair. We were a sight when we got in. You wouldn't have known us,
hardly. We looked as if we'd come up from the bottom.... Don't ask me
when we shall get to Para. Wait till we're out of this. Listen to that
dog. Shut up, you Tinker. Making that noise, sir! Go and lie down.
The Skipper clapped on his cap aggressively and went out. The Doctor had
a long and eloquent silence. Then he turned to me. "This beats all," he
said. "Come and have a drop of gin, old dear." He led the way to his
berth, which smelt of varnish and of lamp, and we swayed in chorus as
the ship rolled, and had a heartening mourn together. But for its
accidental compensations travel would not be worth the trouble. In proof
of that there is the entry in my diary some days after:
"December 22. Awoke at four a.m. with the ship rolling as brutally as
ever. A great noise of waters and things banging. The seas huge at
sunrise, when the light came over their tops. Depressing sight. The sky
was blue at first, but was soon overcast with squalls. The horizon ahead
gets slate coloured, and low clouds underneath, like ragged bales of
dirty wool, come towards us heavy and fast. Then the squall and waves
rush down on us express, and the ship buries herself. Constantly hearing
engine-room bell sounded from bridge to slacken speed as a big sea
appears. The captain popped in his head as I was deciding whether to get
up or stay where I was. He gazed sternly at me and said he was looking
for Jonah. I half believe he means it too. Everybody is weary of this.
The men have been in oilskins since the start.
"Noon to-day, Lat. 42.6 N. Long. 11.10 W. Miles by engines since noon
yesterday 222. Knots by revolutions 9.2. But the slip is 49.2 per cent.
So actual distance 112 miles only, and knots 4.6. Bad going. Wind
southly. Engines racing and engineer still at throttle.
"Night, and a full moon tearing past cloud openings. The ship
occasionally shows like a pale ghost, the black shadows of the funnel
guys and stanchions oscillating on the white paint-work as she rolls. I
went into Chief's cabin, and from its open door--for it was sensibly
milder--looked out astern over the way we had come. Up and down, this
side and that, went the steamer, and the Great Bear, in a wind clear
patch of sky, was dancing on our wake. Polaris was making eccentric
orbits round the main masthead light. Then the Skipper came in. He sat
gazing astern. The look of his face was enough. It was quite plain he
would like to be offended to-night, and attack anybody about anything.
Presently he started intently as he looked astern, and jumped from his
seat crying the ultimate anathema on the chap at the wheel; and ran out.
The Chief glanced astern and laughed. 'The old man comes in here because
it's uncommon handy for watching the wake. Look at it. Somebody on the
bridge writing letters on the ocean. Thinking of his sweetheart, and her
name is Sue.' We gave the Skipper's voice time to reach the wheelhouse,
and then saw the wake visibly tauten out.
"I went aft, balancing like a man learning the tight rope, along the
trestle bridge. The moon was still falling precipitously through the
broken sky, and areas of the great seas, where the sweeping searchlight
of the moon showed monsters shaping and slowly vanishing, were
frightful. There were sudden expansions of vivid green lightnings in the
north and east. I found the Doctor in the chief mate's cabin. I sang
some songs in a riving minor, accompanied by the mate on an accordion,
for the doctor's amusement, and discovered why sailors always use the
accordion, previously a mystery to me. It has a sad and reflective note,
suited to men with memories when alone on the ocean. It ought to fit
Celtic bards better than the harp. It has a fine expiring moan. The mate
gave an imitation of a dying man with it.
"To bed at 11. Tried to read Henry James. My cockroach came out to wave
his derisive hands at me. No wonder. The light was very bad, and I was
pitched from side to side of the bunk. Nearly thrown out once. I might
just as well have attempted to read the Bhagavad-Gita in the original.
So I read the last letters from home instead and then fell asleep as a
little child."
* * * * *
There was something of leisure in her movements next morning. I felt
sure the glass must be rising at last. The air felt lighter and more
expansive. A peep through the port showed me the ceiling had gone up
considerably in the night. There was little wind, for the waves, though
as great as ever, had lost their white ridges. Their summits were
rounded and smooth. We were running south out of it, though the residue
of the dreary northern seas was still washing about the decks. It was
December yesterday, but April to-day. The engineers' messroom boy, with
bare fat arms, went by the cabin, singing.
At breakfast we heard that Chips, who had retired to his bunk for some
days past to mend a leg damaged when the hatches were in danger, had met
with a still more serious misfortune. We fell into a mood of silent and
respectful compassion. There was nothing to be said. Chips had lost his
Victoria Cross. He was an old hero in trouble. The few of us who were
British there--true, most of us were Germans, Dutchmen, Scandinavians,
and Portuguese--felt we represented The Country. Chips limped about the
forecastle with reproach in his face, and we felt we were petty in
noticing his face was also dirty, though it certainly was difficult to
avoid seeing that too, perhaps because, and this can be said for us, the
dirt was of longer standing than the reproach. Then again it is common
knowledge that Chips sleeps in straw, having no mattress.
Chips' story we knew. It had been whispered about the ship. He was at
the Siege of Alexandria, and a shell fell near a group of men on his
ship. Chips picked it up and dropped it overboard before the fuse was
finished. The Doctor and I felt especially responsible, for a reason I
cannot easily explain, it is so vague, and we told Chips we would help
him in his search for his lost treasure. This took us to Chips'
sea-chest, and amid a group of mask-like faces--for how could foreigners
guess what this mattered to us?--we hunted carefully for Chips his
aureole. We found--but I suppose even Victoria Cross heroes must dirty
their socks. There were other things also. Yet it was out of one of
these very other things, which were, I think, shirts, that there
dropped, when the Doctor picked up the garment, a little package wrapped
in newspaper. Chips, from his berth, gave a cry of joy. The Doctor and
I, smiling too, looked upon the old man feeling that we had acted for
you all. Chips, secretive with his sacrosanct emblem, was putting the
little packet under his coverlet, when a low foreign sailor snatched it
from him. The Cross fell to the deck. I recovered it from the feet
instantly in a white passion, and chanced to look at it. It confirmed
that one, who is named Chips here, was something in the Royal and
Ancient Order of Buffaloes.
Coming back from the fo'castle, suddenly I felt as the man of the
suburbs does when, bowed with months of black winter and work in a city
alley, he is, without any warning, transfigured on his own doorstep one
morning. There as before is his familiar shrub, dripping with rain. Yet
is it as before? It points a black finger at him. But the finger has a
polished green nail.
He is translated. His ears are opened, and there comes for the first
time that year the silver whistle of the starlings. A touch of South is
in the air. His burden falls.
The cloudy sky was not grey now, but pearly, for it was translucent to
the sun. More than day had come; life was born. There was ichor in the
day. They were not dark northern waves that baffled us, but we were
shoved and rocked by the send of a long nacreous ocean swell, firm but
kind, from the south-west. The iron ship which had been repulsive to the
touch, for its face had been glassy and cold, was now drying a warm rust
red, like earth of Devon in spring, and was responsive. You could rest
against its iron body and feel yourself grow. I saw the Chief outside
his cabin in his shirt sleeves, gazing overseas between the stanchions
of the boat deck, smoking in the evident luxury of full comfort and
release. Involuntarily, he danced the two-step as she rolled. "Got
anything to read?" he asked.
Now that reminded me. We have no library, of course, but we have a
circulation of books on board. There are no common shelves; but the book
you left thoughtlessly on the skylight five minutes ago, while you went
to find some matches, is gone when you return. And you, if you see a
book lying open and unprotected in a cabin, glance round warily, dash
in, and take it; very often only to discover to your bitter
disappointment that it is one of your own, and not an adventurous and
unread stranger. The Chief's question reminded me that the day we left
Swansea a lady (and a friend of poor Jack, the public is well aware)
sent us a bale of literature. We blessed her when we saw its bulk,
looking at it as oxen might look at a truss of hay, for that was its
size and shape. Though it proved to be shavings and a cruel blow to the
animals, as you shall hear.
Here was the very day to get at that bale, and impatiently I rolled it
into the open. It was trussed with great care, so I tore away a corner
of the wrappings, dived in a hand, and hauled out a copy of "Joy Bells
for Young Christians," the November number of 1899.
Well. Anyhow, it was a clean copy, and I put it by as the portion of our
bald-headed German steward.
This disappointment made me pause, though. Here was going to be a long
job for the Purser, sorting out this. Supposing there was anything
nutritious in the bale I did not mind the labour of the unpacking and
the distribution; but if the bulk of the consignment was hailed, so to
speak, by "Joy Bells," then it would be better to call a deck hand and
get the package overside before the ship was littered with too much of
this joy. A Brazilian stoker, as he passed, saw me standing in thought,
and I suppose imagined--for he could not ask--that I wanted to cut the
string, but had no knife. Before I could stop him, he, smiling a knowing
and friendly smile, whipped out a blade from his rear; and at once we
stood ankle-deep in literature. There was a landslide near me of Infant
Methodists (dates unknown) and I gave the Brazilian an armful for his
kindness.
Our dear unknown friend at Swansea, with her eye on our sailor-like but
yet immortal souls, had heard, no doubt, at the annual meeting of the
Society for the Succor of Seamen, at Caxton Hall, Westminster (held on
the 29th of every February), what simple and barbarous and yet, in the
main, considering our origins and circumstances, what worthy fellows we
were. But she was not told at the meeting that the wealthy shipowners,
subscribers to the society, and whose presence there made Caxton Hall
seem nautical, have a way of signing on crews at continental ports
because wages rule lower there; and that consequently not one of our men
was moved by Christian English, but only by mates English, and then not
so very quickly. The officers and engineers were English, and there the
sailors' friend was right in her surmise; but I do not see how she could
have done more to put in awful jeopardy the soul of our wise and
spectacled chief engineer, for instance, than by approaching him with a
winning and philanthropic smile, under the impulse to do him good with a
statement of her religion in words of one syllable. He would have met
her politely, I know; but after she had gone----
Let her try to imagine her own feelings if our Chief, uninvited and
blankly unmindful, invaded the exclusive inner circle of Swansea
society, and approached her in the midst of her own with the childish
notion of instructing her in the first principles of his pronounced
Pyrrhonism; or say he went to her as a colporteur of the Society for
Instructing the Intelligence and Manners of Leisured Folk. But I must
say for our chief that this cannot be even supposed. He would never
offer the lowliest being such an indignity.
We pulled and dragged at the escaped mass of periodicals, looking for
something good, but found no pearls had been cast before us. There were
parish magazines and temperance monthlies, there were religious almanacs
for the years we have lost; by some sporting chance there were even a
few back numbers of the "Monumental Mason." It is plain the latter could
be considered an added grievance, even though they were put in as a
kindly reminder of our narrow lease here. It was an aggravation of the
original offence to sailors who, when their short term here closes, have
to make shift with some firebars at their heels. What is Aberdeen
granite and indelible gold lettering to such men but a hint of the
hardships which follow them even beyond the end?
So overboard went the lot--I may as well tell the whole truth, overboard
also went the evangelical hymn books, new though they were. I will only
suppress the advice cried to the gulls astern as the literature went
floating and flying in their direction. We had to rely for our reading
on what had been brought aboard by our crowd, a collection which
gradually revealed itself in single books and magazines.
There was, for example, the "Morphology of the Cryptogamia," an
exhaustive work which gave me much pleasure in wondering how it got
aboard at all. The chief mate used it as a wedge between his open door
and the bulkhead, to prevent the miserable knocking as the ship lolled
about. He would not lend me that book, because it jammed into the
opening nicely; but I borrowed from him "Three Fingered Jack, the Terror
of the Antilles," and I made him a complete gift in return of "Robert
Elsmere" which I found marooned on a bunker hatch as I came along. There
you see the delightful chance and hazardous character of our literature.
I prided myself on the select reading I had brought aboard with me. But
what devilish black art the sea air worked on those choice volumes,
however, I cannot explain. I have no means of knowing. But there they
are, their covers bitten by cockroaches, and the words inside bleached
and sterilised of all meaning. There they will stop; Henry James, too.
For what is the use of him when big seas are running? He would be a
magician indeed who could capture our minds then. You get the right
amplitude of leisure and the flat undistracting circumstances he
demands, the emptiness and the immobility necessary, when you are
waiting for cargo long in coming at a low seaboard. I suppose we want
the representation of life only when we are not very much alive. In
heavy weather there is no doubt old newspapers make the best reading,
especially if they have good bold advertisements. For I know it requires
the same courage and concentration needed ashore for reading Another
Great Speech by the Premier; indeed, the steel blue quality of deadly
resolution used only by men of letters who write biographies and spin
literary causeries, to manage even novels when great billows are moving.
The mind is inclined to absent itself then. Then it is you put all
reading aside with a promise of a long and leisurely festival of books
when the ship is steaming uniformly down the unvarying "trades."
But when you get near the neighbourhood of the constant sun, during the
day you fall asleep over "Three Fingered Jack" and the old magazines
which you had on your knees while musing on the colours of the sea and
the mounting architecture of the clouds; and beyond sundown listen to
the mate's accordion or the engineer's flute. Perhaps, moved by the
hu-s-s-h of the waves, the silky and purple dark, and the loneliness of
your little company under the mid-ocean stars, tentatively (though your
shipmates are very forgiving) lift a ballad yourself; for something is
expected of you, and singing seems right.
Of all the books aboard the "Capella" I got most out of the Skipper's
sailing directories and his charts. Talk of romance! There was that
chart-room under the bridge, across its open doors on either side
creaming waves going by in the moonlight, and the steamer inclining each
side alternately, and the shadows of the rigging sliding back and forth
on the pale deck. You cannot know what romance is till you are in seas
you have never sailed before, where the marks will be few when landfall
comes; that ocean where the Skipper is to find his own way by his lore
of the sea, and may even ask your opinion about alternatives; and there
read sailing directories. The romance of these books cannot be
translated or quoted. It would leave them, as though a glimmer went out,
if you attempted to take them from that chart-room where pendant things
are swaying leisurely, where you can hear the bells tell the watches,
and the skipper's gold-laced cap is on the mahogany table. The South
Atlantic Sailing Directions, our own guide, is fine, especially when it
gets down to the uninhabited islands in far southern latitudes. I do not
think this noble volume is included in the best hundred books, but I
know it can release the mind from the body.
But what's this talk of landfalls? as the old man would say. There will
be no landfall yet for us; and this is Christmas Eve. I knew it was an
auspicious occasion of some kind, for the steward just went aft with two
big plum cakes cuddled in his apron. That made me look at the calendar.
We are now 800 miles out, and the steamer has reached six knots. This
was the best night we had yet found. The steamer was on an even keel,
with but occasional spasms of sharp rolling, for there was no sea, but
only old ocean breathing deeply and regularly in its sleep, and
sometimes making a slight movement. The light of the full moon was the
shining ghost of noon. The steamer was distinct but immaterial,
saliently accentuated, as a phantom. A deep shadow would have detached
the forecastle head but for a length of luminous bulwark which still
held it, and some quiet voices of men who were within the shadow,
yarning. The line of bulwark and the murmuring voices held us together.
The prow as it dipped sank into drifts of lambent snow. The snow fled by
the steamer's sides, melting and musical. Two engineers off duty leaned
on the rails amidships, smoking, looking into the vacancy in which the
moonlight laid a floor of troubled silver. As if drawn by its light a
few little clouds were poised near the moon, grouped round the bright
heart of the night. There was the moon and its small company of clouds,
and ourselves below in our own defined allotment of sea. The only thing
outside and far was Sirius, burning independently in the east, looking
unwinking through the wall of night into our world.
On such a night and with Christmas morning but sixty minutes away it
would have been wasting life to go to bed. I glanced expectantly at the
door of the Chief's cabin, and saw indeed it was open, a yellow
rectangle within which was the profile of the Chief beneath his lamp,
talking to somebody. The Doctor was there, and he made room for me on
the settee. Then the captain joined us, and I perched myself on the
washstand.
"Well, we can undress to-night when we turn in," said the Chief. (None
of us had, so far.) In a long silence which filled the cabin with
tobacco smoke I could hear the engines below uplifted in confident song.
"Now they're walking round," said the Skipper, nodding his head. "Now
she feels it."
* * * * *
When we met thus, between the hours of nine and midnight, as was our
irregular habit, the talk first was always desultory, and about our own
ship and our own circumstances, for the concerns of our little world
strangely occupied our minds, as you would think, and the large affairs
of that great world we had left, of which we heard now no sound nor
rumour, had lessened in the mind, faded and vanished, all the huge
consequence and loud clangour of it, so that now there was an empty
horizon astern, and nothing between us and that void but a few gulls,
like small and pursuing recollections. Our little microcosm, afloat and
sundered in the wastes, was occupied in its own polity. We talked of the
carpenter's bad leg; complained of the cook's bread; heard that Tinker
the dog, being young, had the habit at night, while honest folk slept,
of eating the saloon mats; grumbled that the ship's tobacco was mouldy.
The deck was getting dry, the Skipper said, and now we could get the men
chipping it, and then it could be tarred.
"That donkeyman," said the Skipper, "that man wastes the fresh water.
I'll have a lock put on the pump handle. He works it as if we were laid
out to the main. I spoke to him about it this morning." The fresh water
is a vital affair with us. We may not drink the water of the country to
which we are bound, so eighty tons of Welsh mountain spring is in our
cleansed and whitewashed tanks. Woe to the man caught overflowing his
can, if an officer sees him. "The handle can't be locked," said the
Chief, "because it's next to the galley. The cook wants it all day
long."
"Well, let me catch anyone wasting it. We'd look all right with a lot of
dysentery, drinking that river water out there."
This common meeting-place of ours, the Chief's cabin, is on a highway of
the ship, being on the direct route from the poop to the bridge, and so
it is a hostel, for the Chief is a kindly and popular man, big and
robust in body and mind; though he has a knack, at odd and unexpected
times, of being candid in a way that shocks, treading on corns without
ruth, the Skipper's particularly, when their two departments are at a
difference.
This cabin was one which I always visited first, for, especially in the
morning when other folk had not rubbed the night out of their eyes, and
so looked darkly upon their fellows, my friend the Chief had the early
eye of a child and the soaring spirit of the lark. I never met him when
he had got out of bed on the wrong side. His cabin became a refuge to
me, for, unlike the Doctor's and my own place (we both were birds of
passage, therefore our cabins were cold and stark), the Chief's was
comfortable with settled furniture, cosy and habitable, like a fixed
home. There was a wicker chair, with cushions, and a writing-desk where
the engineer's log lay handy and bearing some plug tobacco, freshly cut,
on its cover, and a pipe rack above the desk carrying a most foul
assortment waiting their turns again for favour. Portraits of the
Chief's family were on the walls, smiling boys and girls, with their
mother in a chief place, looking upon daddy by proxy. There was a
bookshelf bearing some engineering manuals, a few novels and magazines,
a tape measure, some gauge glasses, some tin whistles, a flute, and a
palm leaf fan. Above the washstand was a rack with glasses and a carafe.
A settee ran along one side, and his bunk upon the other side. There we
sat on Christmas Eve, while the wicker chair bent and complained with
the Skipper's weight as he swayed to the leisurely rocking of the ship.
The tobacco smoke floated in coils and blue smears in the room. A bottle
of Hollands rested for security on the bed, and we held our glasses on
our knees.
The pallid and puffy face of the steward, a very honest man secretly
free with his small store of apples on my account because I am green and
my palate not yet used to the flatness of tinned provisions, looked in
on us from the right. "Vhere is der dog, sir? I haf not seen der dog."
"Must be about," we cried. "We had seen him," we said, "nosing about the
poop for rats, or asleep on the saloon mat, or padding round the casing
looking for friends." "But no, I haf looked. He is not found. Vhere is
der dog?" A hole in our little community, it was apparent from our
intent looks, could not be thought of with equanimity. Tinker's
importance became quite large. The second engineer passed the door,
caught the drift of our anxious converse, and turned to say the dog was
then asleep in his room. "Ach! zat is all right." We struck matches for
our pipes again.
"That dog, I shouldn't like to lose him," said the Skipper, stroking his
beard. "There's no luck in that. I shot a dog once on a ship; and first
we ran into a blow and lost a lot of gear, and then the mate got his
hand smashed, and then everything got cross-grained till I'd have paid,
ah, fifty pounds to have had the brute back again, and an ugly customer
he was. Ah, you can smile, Doctor, but there it is. I'm not
superstitious and never was. But you can't tell me. Look at the things
that happen. When I was a youngster, my ship was off Rio, and I dreamt
my father was dead. I took my bearings and the time. I dreamt my father
died in a red brick house with a laylock tree by the door and that tree
was in blossom plain enough to smell. I didn't know the house. There was
a path of clean red bricks leading up to the porch, through a garden. I
didn't see my father. But you know what dreams are like--no sense in
them--there the house was and not a soul in sight. I knew he was dying
inside it."
"How do you account for that? Have you got it down in your books? I lay
you haven't. I forgot all about that dream. Long after I was at Cape
Town and met my brother. That reminded me. After a bit I said to him,
'Father's dead.' 'Yes,' he said, 'but how did you know?' Said I, 'Was
the house like this?' and I told him. 'Yes,' he said, 'it was like that.
A place he was staying at in Essex. But how did you know?' I didn't tell
him. What's the good? He wouldn't have believed it. People don't."
All through the anxious time when we were being soused and buffeted I
noticed how our company, every man of them, even the Pyrrhonist, saw
omens in all the chance variety of the vast menace under the frown of
which we huddled in our iron box; porpoises alongside; one of Mother
Cary's dark brood accompanying us, glancing about the vagaries of the
flowing hills with swift precision; the form of a cloud; a loom far out,
as though day were there at least. The fall of a portrait in the Chief's
room once set him wondering and melancholy. Again, when the dog whined
and moped, the Skipper eyed the animal narrowly, as though the creature
had prescience but could tell us what it knew only by drooping and
quivering its hind quarters. You might have thought that Fate, dumb and
cruel, but a little relenting for something inevitably to come to our
mishap, were trying to stretch a point, and so induced the Skipper to
put his shirt on inside out one morning, after dreaming he saw drowned
rats, in case the horse were not too blind to see both the nod and the
wink.
The Sphinx makes subtle dumb motions, as it were, when closely regarded.
I do not wonder if it does. Sometimes in those dark days I thought I got
a hint or two. I cannot tell you what they were. The weather grew
brighter afterwards and I forgot them. From our narrow and weltering
security, where the wind searched through us like the judgment eye, I
know, looking out upon the wilderness in turmoil where was no help, and
no witness of our undoing, where the gleams were fleeting as though the
very day were riven and tumbling, that I saw the filmy shapes of those
things which darken the minds of primitives. While the sky is changeful,
and there are storms at sea when our fellows are absent, and mischance
and death are veiled but here, we shall have gods and ghosts. The
sharp-sighted collectors of old brain-lumber and such curios may still
keep busy, and tie up their dry bundles of mythology and religions; but
I myself could make plenty more.
So it was my shipmates' yarns were most of the dire kind, with some dim
warning precedent. I do not recall a story that was gay, except those of
the wanton sort. They were of close calls and of women, as, I suppose,
have been those of all hard livers, from the cave men on.
Eight bells were rung on the bridge, and, like a faint echo in a higher
pitch, answered from the fo'castle. Christmas morning! By my pocket
compass we toasted the folk at home. We had heard a good many stories of
wreck this night, and the Chief was now at his contribution to the
unseasonable memories. ("I've had enough of it. Here goes," said the
Doctor; and he went.) "Don't leave us. It lets in the draught. Well, the
compliments to you. This typhoon--I had had four others--but this one
made me think it was good-bye. She was a small steamer, that 'Samuel
Plimsoll,' and old, but well-behaved. But her light nearly went out in
that blow. It was that dark you could find nothing but the noise, and we
were just the same as a chunk of wood under a waterfall, because the
Lord knows how many feet of water were in the engine-room, for she was
rolling so. Her fires were out. She had a list of 22 degrees to port.
She simply lay in it, and it went over her. Every time she rolled over
on the deep side, thinks I, this is the last of her. All this, mind you,
went on for two days, and the skipper was in the chart-room, waiting.
I've found that when the danger is not much you get excited, but when
there seems no chance you get cool and cunning and try to make one. One
time I thought she seemed easier, and I was able to get the donkey
engine going. I felt better as soon as I heard the steam, even though it
was only in the donkey. Thinks I, there's power, and it's mine--a canful
of steam to a typhoon. It was a chance to laugh at. Then I took the
other engineers with me and we went below. The water there, full of
cinders and trash, pouring through the gear as she turned from side to
side, made it look a pretty poor show. You see, the donkey wouldn't work
the pumps, for the coal and muck were sucked in. So I took a basket and
got into the tank, holding the basket under the pump. The water was up
to my neck, and every time she rolled I was ducked. But the dodge
worked, and that list of hers to port was a bit of luck in its way, for
it helped us to get the starboard boiler going. When I saw the throws
moving, and the wash angry when it splashed on the hot metal, I said,
'So much for your old typhoon.' We were not counted out then. We crawled
under the lee of an island, and lay for four days repairing her. The
funny thing was when we got to Hong Kong the papers were full of our
loss. '"Samuel Plimsoll" lost with all hands.' It was funny to see a
bill like that. I met the placard as it came running round a corner, and
it made me stand and shuffle my feet on the ground to see if the earth
was all right. I knew the editor of that paper, and I was then going up
to give him something good. And here he was making money out of us like
that. He stood at the door of his office and saw me coming. I went up
laughing, waving his paper in my hand. He looked quite surprised. His
mouth was wide open. 'You're a nice sort of chap,' I said."
* * * * *
Christmas Day. In case it has become necessary for me to show again the
symbols of verity, as this is a book of travel, here they are: "Lat.
37.2 N., long. 14.14 W. Light wind and moderate swell from S.W. Vessel
rolling heavily at intervals. 961 miles out. Miles by engines 226.
Actual distance travelled (because of the swell on our starboard bow)
197 miles." I cannot see that these particulars do more than help me out
with the book, but as they have been considered essential in narratives
of voyaging, here they are, and much good may they do anybody. Thoreau,
in one of his quaintly superior moods when speaking of travel, said, "It
is not worth while going round the world to count the cats in Zanzibar."
In nearly every book of travel this is proved to be true. They show it
was not worth the while, seeing it was either to shoot cats or to count
degrees of latitude. (As for me, I have no reason whatever for being at
sea.) Consider Arctic travel. I have read long rows of books on that,
but recall few emotional moments. The finest passage in any book of
Arctic travel is in Warburton Pikes' "Barren Grounds," where he quotes
what the Indian said to the missionary who had been speaking of heaven.
The Indian asked, "And is it like the land of the Musk-ox in summer,
when the mist is on the lakes, and the loon cries very often?"
You feel at once that the country the Indian saw around him would be
easily missed by us, even when in the midst of it. For taking the
bearings of such a land, the sextant, and the miles already travelled,
would not be factors to help much. Now the Indian knew nothing of
artificial horizons and the aids to discovering where they are which
strangers use. But in summer the mists of his lakes were but the vapour
of his musings, the penumbra of the unfathomed deeps of his mind whereon
he paddled his own canoe; and when the wild-fowl called, it was his
memory heard; it was his thought become vocal then while he dreamed on.
I myself learned that the treasures found in travel, the chance rewards
of travel which make it worth while, cannot be accounted beforehand, and
seldom are matters a listener would care to hear about afterwards; for
they have no substance. They are no matter. They are untranslatable from
their time and place; and like the man who unwittingly lies down to
sleep on the tumulus where the little people dance on midsummer night,
and dreams that in the place where man has never been his pockets were
filled with fairy gold, waking to find pebbles there instead, so the
traveller cannot prove the dreams he had, showing us only pebbles when
he tries. Such fair things cannot be taken from the magic moment. They
are but filmy, high in the ceiling of your thoughts then, rosy and
sunlit by the chance of the light, transitory, melting as you watch. You
come down to your lead again. These occasions are not on your itinerary.
They are like the Indian's lakes in summer. They have no names. They
cannot be found on the best maps. Not you nor any other will ever
discover them again. Nor do they fill the hunger which sent you
travelling; they are not provender for notebooks. They do not come to
accord with your mood, but they come unaware to compel, and it is your
own adverse and darkling atoms that are changed, at once dancing in
accord with the rare incidence of that unreasonable and transcendent
moment of your world, the rhythm of which you feel, as you would the
beat of drums.
And what are these things?--but how can we tell? A strip of coral beach,
as once I saw it, which was as all other coral beaches; but the ship
passed close in, and by favour of the hour and the sun this strand did
not glare, but was resplendent, and the colours of the sea, green, gold,
and purple, were not its common virtues, but the emotional and passing
attar of those hues. There was the long, slow labouring of our burdened
tramp in the Atlantic storm. Or one April, and a wild cherry-tree in
blossom by an English hedge, a white cloud tinctured with rose, and in
it moving a dozen tropical chaffinches; the petals were on the grass.
And now, this is Christmas morning. I am in the Chief's bunk, and he
still sleeps on the settee. We fell asleep where we lay yarning on our
backs after midnight. I wake at the right moment, opening my eyes with
the serene and secure conviction that things are very well. The slow
rocking of the ship is perfect rest. There is no sound but the faint
tap-tap of something loose on the desk and responding to the ship's
movements. The cabin is strangely illuminated to its deepest corner by
an extraordinary light, as though the intense glow of a rare dawn had
penetrated even our ironwork. On the white top of the cabin a bright
moon quivers about, the shine from live waters sent up through the round
of our port. When we lean over, the port shows first the roof of the
alleyway dappled with bright reflections; then a circle of sky, which
the horizon soon halves; and then the dazzling white and blue of the
near waves; we reverse.
This is life. This is what I have come for. I do not repose merely in a
bunk. I am prone and easy in the deepest assurance of good. This
conviction has penetrated even the unconsciousness of the Chief; he
snores in profound luxury. If in a ship you are brought sometimes too
cruelly close to the scrutiny of the terms of your narrow tenure,
expecting momentarily to see the document torn across by invisible
fingers, yet nowhere else do you feel those terms to be so suddenly
expanded in the sun. And nowhere else is got such release, secure and
absolute, from the nudging of insistent trifles. There is nothing
between your eyes and the confines of your own place. Empty day is all
round. In the entire circle there is not the farthest impertinent
interruption--through all the degrees there is not one fool standing in
the light; and you yourself are on nobody's horizon. No history stains
that place. There is not a black doubt anywhere. It is the first day
again, and no need yet for a rubbish heap.
Yet when, singing to myself, I went outside to matins, I found Sandy our
third engineer with the toothache. So much of truth is got from being a
gymnosophist and regarding your own toes with aloof abstraction on a
sunny Christmas morning. I became Sandy's courage for him instead, took
his arm firmly, and led him aft to the doctor. We would start a rubbish
heap for a pristine world with a decayed tooth. Something to be going on
with.
Seeing we were almost off Madeira we had some amount of right to the
July sun under which we had run. For the first time since the Mumbles
our decks were quite dry, and cherry red with rust. There were
glittering crusts of salt in odd places. At eight bells (midday) the
captain ordered a general holiday, except for the routine duties; and
the donkeyman appeared to startle us as the apparition of a stranger on
the ship, for he had a clean face, though his eyes still were dark and
spectral, and he wore a suit of new dungarees, stiff and creased from a
paper parcel, but just opened, out of a Swansea slop shop. His mates
were some seconds realising him. Then they made derisive signs, and the
boldest some ribald cries. I thought their resentment was really aroused
by Donkey's new shirt; it was that touch which pushed matters too far,
and made him unfriendly. He saw this himself. Soon he changed the new
shirt for one that had been rendered neutral in the stoke-hold and the
bucket.
There was something neutral, like Donkey's old shirt, about most of our
crowd. Each one of the mob which gathered with mess kits a little before
midday about the galley door seemed reduced, was faded in a noticeable
measure from the sharp and strong pattern of a man. Their conversation
about the galley was always in subdued mutterings, not direct, but out
of the mouth corners, sideways. Their only independence was in the
negligence of their attitudes. They might have been keeping in mind an
austere and invisible presence, whose swift words from nowhere might at
any time cleave their soft babble. If I made to pass through them the
babble ceased, and from limp poses they sprang upright in the narrow way
to let me pass, their eyes cast down. A man who had not seen me coming,
but still sprawled on the rail, talking quietly, would be nudged by his
neighbour. It struck me this attitude would change when they knew us
better; but it never did. These deckhands and firemen were mostly
youngsters, steadied by a few older hands. Chips and Donkey were the
veterans. In that crowd the boatswain was the admirable figure. He was a
young Britisher, tall, upright, and weighty, with a smiling, respectful
eye in which sometimes, I thought, there was a faint hint of mockery. He
had an easy balance and confidence in his movements which made him worth
watching when about his business. Clean shaven when he came aboard, he
now had a tawny beard which caught gold lights, and it was singularly
good on his weather-darkened face. He seldom wore a cap, for it could
have added little protection to the taut vigour of his hair, and would
have spoilt, as perhaps he himself guessed, that proper flourish and
climax to the poise of his head.
Donkey was an Irishman, and he was the huge frame of what, maybe thirty
years before, had been a powerful man. This morning his big cadaverous
face, white only on the bony ridges surrounding the depressions of the
temples, the cheeks, and the dark pits of the eyes, and with the shadowy
hollow of the mouth which gaped through the weight of the massive jaw,
would have resembled, from a little distance, that of a skeleton head of
one of the monsters in a geological gallery, but for the dewlap
sustained by sinews running from his chin down his throat. Donkey was a
silent man, and never caught your glance as you passed him, but lumbered
along with so much of the surprising celerity of a gaunt elephant that
you thought you might hear the rasp of his loose clothes. He was a
simple and docile fellow. I never heard him speak, but he used to come
to the Chief, fill the door with his massive front, his small eyes which
expressed nothing and were but sparks of life, looking nowhere in
particular, and make guttural sounds; and the Chief, being used to him,
understood. At sea Donkey did his small duties like a plain but
cumbersome mechanism that had somewhere in it an obscure point of
rationality. When ashore, though, he was said to go mad, and to roll
trampling and trumpeting through the squalid littoral of the world;
being brought aboard afterwards an enormity of lax bones and flesh, with
the cogitating glim in his bulk quite doused.
Of the others, there was a Teutonic bunch of lads, deckhands, which I
never succeeded in segregating, they looked so much alike. They had
pimpled, idle faces, and neutral eyes, cast down when they sidled by
one, thin down on their chins, and grimy raiment which, by the look of
it, was an integument never cast after we left port. One name would have
covered that lot, and frequently I heard the mates use it. But Olsen,
the Norwegian with a blond moustache which covered his mouth like a
fog-protector, and stern blue eyes, was a sailor. The firemen made a
better bunch. There was among them a swarthy Brazilian, whose constant
smile seemed ever on the point of breaking into song, but that he was
always chewing the end of a sweat rag he wore twisted round his neck.
The happy feature of our firemen was a Dutchman, whose hollow face was
full of silent woe and endurance. He was our chief joy. When once we
found the sun, he then appeared in a single garment, trousers and braces
cut in one piece of brown canvas, hauled up well under his arms, leaving
his slab feet remote and forlorn. His torso was bare, a dancing girl in
red and blue tattooed on his chest. He wore a bowler hat without a brim.
We will get Christmas over. It was a pagan festival. Looking back at it,
I see--with the astonishment of the sedate who is native to a
geometrical suburb where the morning train follows the night and every
numbered house shelters a moral agnostic--I see a dancing baccanal with
free gestures who fades, as I look back intently, doubting my senses, in
a roseous haze. The lawless movements of that wild, bright and laughing
figure, its exultant blasphemy, its confident mockery, are remembered by
me as though once I had been admitted to the green room of heaven.
Surely I have seen a god whose deathless knowledge derides the solemn
gods, behind the curtain. It was Christmas night, and our little
"Capella," our point of night shine, a star moving through the void to
its dark destiny, filled the vault with its song, while its fellows in
the heavens stood round. Christmas is over.
* * * * *
The day following was Sunday, a grey day of penance, the men soberly
washing their shirts in buckets under the forecastle head, smoking moody
pipes. The garments were tied to any convenient gear where they could
hang free. The sky was leaden. This grey day was distinguished by the
strange phenomenon of an horizon which was almost level; the skyline and
the clouds did not slant first this way, then that. The swell had almost
gone. Already I began to feel the large patience and tranquillity of a
mind losing its shadows, and contemplating the light and space of a long
voyage in which the same men do the same things in the same place daily
under the centre of the empty sky. Sitting on a hatch with the Doctor,
smoking, we confessed, with ease at the heart, and with minds in which
nervous vibrations had ceased, that we must have reached this place that
was nowhere, and that now time was not for us. We had escaped you all.
We were free. There was not anything to engage us. There was nothing to
do, and nobody who wanted us. Never before had I felt so still and
conscious of myself. I realised, with a little start of surprise, that
it was Me who felt the warm air, and who looked at the slow pulse of the
waters, and the fulgent breaks in the roof, and heard the droning of the
wake, and not that mere skin, eyes and ears which, as in London, break
in upon our preoccupied minds with agitating sensations; and I took in
this newly-discovered world of ocean and cloudland and my own sure
identity centred therein with the complacency of an immortal who will
see all the things which do not matter pass away. When we left England
we were tense, and sometimes white (though there were others who went
red) about a Great Crisis in our Country's History. The Doctor and I
arrived on board, detached from the opposing armies in the impending
conflict, and at first put our hands swiftly to our swords every ten
minutes or so during meals. Of that crisis only one small gull now was
left, and he was following us astern with a melancholy cry at intervals,
of which we took no more notice. (And that gull departed, I see by my
diary, the very next day.)
So ended the Great Crisis. I did not even note the ship's position at
the time, though I can see now that was a serious fault for which future
historians may blame me. I can but state vaguely that it was about sixty
miles north-west of the Fortunate Isles. The change in the quality of
the sun and air became most marked; I remember that. The horizon
expanded to a surprising distance. According to letters from home, sent
about that date, which I received long afterwards, I am unable to find
that similar phenomena were witnessed in England. Probably they were but
local. These manifestations in the heavens filled the few of us
privileged to witness them with awe, and a new faith in the power and
compassion of God. Nothing further of note occurred on this day, except
that Chips, as a further miracle, suddenly was raised whole from where
he lay in his bunk with a useless leg. His leg, you may remember, was
damaged in the gale off Cornwall. The Doctor, going his rounds, was
surprised to find Chips dancing the hoola-hoola in the forecastle, and a
stoker, with a cut eye, wailing for a lost half bottle of gin taken from
his box while he was on duty. Thereafter Chips returned to work, his leg
becoming halt again only when he knew we saw him stepping it too
blithely.
* * * * *
"_Decr. 27._ Distance run for past 24 hours to midday 219. Total
distance 1177 miles. Fine weather. Glass rising."
Have you ever heard of the monotony of a long voyage? The same sky you
know, the same waters, the same deck; and now I can see it should be
added, the same old self, dismayed by the contemplation of its features
daily, week after week, within that spacious empty hall, where is no
escape from the bright stare overhead which reveals your baldness and
blemishes without ruth. You get found out. You want to mix with the mob
again, to get lost in the sameness of your fellows. He who goes
travelling should leave his self at home, or as much of it as is not
wanted on the voyage. It is surprising to find how little you want of
yourself. The ideal traveller would venture out merely as a disembodied
thought, or, at most, as an eye.
A mere eye would see no monotony, for the sky may be the same sky, but
its moods are like those of the same woman; and the ocean, though young
as the morning, is older than Asia--you never know what to expect from
that profound enigma. As for the sunny deck, I see the Doctor sitting on
a spare spar, waiting for someone to sit beside him. The Chief is filing
a piece of small gear outside his cabin. The Skipper is overlooking,
with a hard frown, a group of men busy repairing his chart-room, which
is just forward of the engine-room casing (I could get a job from him at
once for the asking, though I shall not ask). The first mate is trying
to be in three places at once. The second mate patrols the bridge. The
German steward, who tells curious stories in a Teutonised dialect of
Shadwell, is hanging mattresses and bed clothes over a boom. The men are
chipping and tarring the deck; and the boatswain, bare-legged, wildly
bearded, a sheath knife on his hams, looks like a fine pirate brought to
menial tasks.
I have watched this day's monotonous sky onwards from the dawn. We are
in the neighbourhood of the Hesperides. For some early hours of the
morning it was grey. But the grey roof soon broke with the incumbent
weight of light, letting sunshine through narrow fractures to the sea,
far out. There were partitions of thin gold in the dim hall. The moving
floor was patterned in day and night. The low ceiling was fused where
the day poured through, became a candent vapour, volatilised. We had
over us before breakfast the ultimate blue, where a few cirrus clouds
showed its great height.
Then it was August. The sea ran in broad heavy mounds, blue-black and
vitreous, which hardly moved our bulk. In the afternoon, the ocean, a
short distance from the ship, grew filmed and opaque, a milky blue shot
with purple shadows. Its surface, though heaving, was smooth and
flawless. No light entered its deeps, but the radiant heat was mirrored
on it as on the pallor of fluid lava. The water ploughed up by the bows
did not break, but rolled over viscidly. The sun dropped behind the sea
about a point west of our course. Night was near. Yet still the high
dome with its circular floor the sea was magically illuminated, as by
the proximity of a wonderful presence. We, solitary and privileged in
the theatre, waited expectant. The doors of glory were somewhere ajar.
The western wall was clear, shining and empty, enclosed by a proscenium
of amber flames. In the north-east, astern of us, were some high
fair-weather clouds, like a faint host of little cherubs, and from their
superior galleries they watched a light invisible to us; it made their
faces bright. Beneath them the glazed sea was coral pink. Even our own
prosaic iron gear was sublimated; our ship became lustrous and strange.
We were the Argonauts, and our world was bright with the veritable
self-radiance of a world of romance where the things that would happen
were undreamed of, and we watched for them from our argosy's side, calm
and expectant; my fellows were transfigured, looked huge, were rosy and
awful, immortals in that light no mortal is given to see.
Now had been given me fellowship with the ship and her men; we were one
body. I had been absorbed by our enterprise. For a long while our
steamer was a harsh and foreign thing to me, unfriendly to the eye,
difficult to understand. But now she had become intelligible and proper.
She and her men were all my world, and I could find my way about that
world in the dark. Getting used to a ship has the process of the growth
of a lasting friendship. Chance begins it. You regard your luck askance,
as you accept a new acquaintance with no joy, to make the best of him.
But presently, to put the matter at its lowest, you arrive at an
understanding. You have learned your friend's worth. Familiarity would
breed contempt only in the mouse-hearted. You never have to account him
afresh, or he is no comrade; there can be no surprises again, no
encounters with a stranger in him. His value, at the least reckoning, is
that you know his value. Any hour of the day or night you can guess with
assurance where his mind would be found. And here my "Capella" has no
strange doors and startling declivities and traps for me any more. I
know her. She is not exactly all she should be, but I apprehend exactly
what she is. If I hurt myself against her it is my own fault. She is as
familiar to me as home now. I should resent any alteration. Having
learned to know her faults I like her as she is; the trestle bridge with
its sagging hand-ropes and wobbling stanchions (look out, you, when she
rolls) which crosses the main deck aft on the port side from the
amidships section, where I live, to the poop, where the Doctor lives.
The two little streets of three doors each, to port and starboard of her
amidships, the doors that open out under the shade of the boat deck to
sea. There, amidships also, are the Chief's room and the galley, the
engineers' messroom, and the engine-room entrance; but these last do not
open overside, but look aft, from a connecting alley which runs across
the ship to join the side alleyways. Forward of these cabins is the
engine-room casing, where the 'midship deck broadens, but is cumbered
with bunker hatches (mind your feet, at night, there); and beyond,
again, is the chart-room, and over the chart-room the bridge and the
wheelhouse, from which is a sheer long drop to the main deck foreward.
At the finish of that deck is an iron wall, with the entrance to the
mysterious forecastle in its centre; and over that is the uplifted head
of our world watching our course, a bleak windswept place of rails,
cable chains, and windlass. The poop has a timber deck, and there in
fine weather the deck chairs are. The poop is a place needing exact
navigation at night. Long boxes enclosing the rudder chains are on
either side of it. In the centre is the saloon skylight, the companion,
the steward's ice chest, and the hand-steering gear. Also there are two
boats. I gained my night knowledge of the poop deck by assault, and
retained my gains with sticking plaster. I am really proud of the
privilege which has been given me to roam now this rolling shadow at
night, this little dark cloud blowing between the stars and the deep,
the unseen abyss below as with its profound reverberations, and the
height above with its scattered lights as remote as the sounds in the
deeps. With calm faith in our swaying shadow I place my feet where
nothing shows, sure that my angel will bear me up. I put out my hands
and a support comes to them; the pitfalls have ladders for me, and by
touching at some places in the black shadow, as by magic, a lighted and
comfortable room at once materialises for my rest in the void.
* * * * *
I think I liked her better as a formless shadow after sundown. Whether
it was then a noise in my head, my tranquil thoughts murmuring in their
sleep, or whether the sound I heard was the deep humming of the world's
speed, I don't know; whatever it was, it was the only sound. Our
mainmasthead light was but a nearer star of the host. I was not
surprised to see one of the stars so close. I was within the luminous
porch of the Milky Way.
It was midnight. In that silence, where I was alone in space, adrift on
a night cloud in the constellations, the stars were really my familiars;
once, when in London, though they had been named to me and were constant
there, they were far in the place to which one lifts one's eyes from the
dust and traffic, nothing to do with London and with me. But now there
was no more dust and traffic. I was among them at last. Splendid Orion
was near and vast in his hunting. The Pleiades no longer dimmered on the
very limit of vision, but were separate points of delicate light. The
night moved with diamond fire.
I was so far absent from the body that a human voice beside me was like
a surprising concussion with something invisible in space. Turning,
there was the glow of Sandy's pipe. Sandy is an elderly man, and an
engineer. He was leaning over the rail, cooling after his watch below.
The magic of the star shine had got into his mind too. He began with
guesses about the things which are not known, parrying doubt with,
"Ah--but it's hard to say; there are things----"; and, "you bright young
fellers don't know everything"; and, "somebody told me a queer thing
now."
"There was a bright young feller, same as yourself, and he was first
mate of the 'Abertawe,' out of Cardiff. Jack Driscoll was his name. It
was a funny thing happened to him. I heard about it afterwards.
"All the girls thought Jack Driscoll was so nice. One of the girls was
his owner's daughter, and she was the best of the bunch, anyway, for she
was an only child, and her father would have given her the earth. He was
a good owner, was her father, as things go in Cardiff. Do you know
Cardiff? Well, a little goes a long way on the Welsh coast. Jack was a
smart sailor, with the first chance of the next new boat, if he watched
out. I reckon Jack was a fool. Why, he needn't have gone to sea any
more. But what did he do?
"Jack was one of them fellers who think if they put a gold-laced cap
saucy over one ear, and laugh with the eyes, they can whistle up a
duchess. And I daresay Jack could in summer, in his white suit, when
he'd just shaved. He was a bit of all right was Jack. He was a proper
tall lad, and the way he carried himself--It was a treat to see him move
about a ship. His black hair was like one of the big fiddler chap's, and
his smile would take in one of his pals.
"Well, it was happy days for Jack. He got good things to come to him. He
didn't have to look for 'em, like me and you. He knew his work, too. He
was a good sailor. He could get off the mark, at the first word, like a
bird, and he never left a job while there was a loose bit to it.
Sometimes when there was nothing doing it was pretty rotten, Jack would
say, to be stuck there in a Welsh tramp with a crowd of dagoes, and
drink coffee essence and condensed milk out of a pint mug, and never go
to a music hall only once in six months. Jack reckoned it would be fine
to be brass-bound always, in one of the liners, and have a deck like a
skating rink, and a lot of lady passengers who wanted a chap like him to
talk to them.
"He could tell stories, too, on the quiet, could Jack. They were pretty
blue, though. Sailor stories. They were all about himself in the West
Coast ports. Do you know the Chili coast? Well, it's mind your eye
there, and no half larks. They're pretty handy with knives out there.
But when Jack was out for fun you couldn't stop him. He was like all you
young chaps. He wouldn't listen to sense.
"The 'Abertawe' went light ship to Barry, one trip, from Buenos Aires,
and Jack saw her snug, and told all the men to be at the shipping office
early and sober in the morning, because they got in on a Sunday, and
Jack saw the old man safe on his way to Cardiff, and then shaved, and
sang while he was shaving. He got himself up west-end style, new yellow
boots and all, and tied his red tie Spanish fashion. And he went down
the quay, looking for anything that was about, and he felt like the best
man on the Welsh coast.
"But Barry is a dull place. Do you know Barry? Well, it's a one-eyed
God-forsaken town, made out of odds and ends stuck down anywhere, all
new houses, docks, coal tips, and railway sidings, and nowhere to go.
It's best to stay aboard, in Barry. Jack began to feel like the only
bird on a mudbank. He got out of the town, and walked along a road till
he came to an old woman sitting in the hedge, with her back up against a
telegraph post. Her face was brown and wrinkled, and she had an
orange-coloured handkerchief round her face, and tied under her chin.
She was smoking a pipe, and looking at her blucher boots. As Jack came
along, she said, 'Tell your fortune, pretty gentleman?' Jack laughed,
and told her his face was his fortune.
"'What do you see when you look in the glass?' said she.
"Now that was dead easy to Jack, because he knew as well as the girls;
and he told her. There was none of your silly modesty about Jack. Then
the old woman laughed; but I reckon Jack thought she was only pleased
with him, because he made it a point to make the mothers and the
grandmothers smile, the same as the girls.
"'What do you see in this glass?' said she to Jack. She was fumbling in
her dress, and hauls out a mirror like you see in the old-fashion shops,
a mirror made of silver, and it had a frame of ebony. She polished it on
her skirt, and gave it to him, and told him to pass a bit of silver with
the other hand. Well, Jack saw sport, and he could always pay for that,
and he did what she said. But he only saw himself in the mirror.
"'Hi,' said Jack, 'here, what's your little game now? None of your larks
now,' he said, 'or I'll ask a policeman what he can see in this tin
glass of yours.'
"'You and your policeman,' she said. 'Look now, my dandy boy, and see
more than your money's worth.' And she rubbed the glass again. Then Jack
took another look. It was a dull day, but that mirror was bright with
sunshine. There was something funny about that mirror. He saw a fine
place in it, all cool and white and gold, like you see out East. It was
a palace, I reckon. There was a fountain in the middle, and some girls
with not a lot on, like some of the Amsterdam postcard girls, were lying
around, just anyhow. And there was Jack's own self among 'em, and they
were laughing and talking to him. It was fine. Jack turned his head,
just like you would do, to see if the real place was behind him. But, of
course, there was the funnels and topmasts of Barry, and the sky looked
like rain. I bet it gave him a shock.
"'Now you've seen what'll be your luck, honey, if you're not careful,'
said the old woman. 'Mind your eye,' she said, 'mind your eye, you with
the saucy face. What's more,' she called after him, 'don't you speak to
the girl with the odd eyes in Cardiff, though I know you will, and sorry
you'll be.'
"'Go to the devil,' said Jack.
"He was just like all you young chaps. Thought she was an artful old
shark who'd got his money dead easy. That's what you always think. If
you don't understand anything, then there's nothing in it. You call in
at the next pub and chatter to the barmaid. What happened? Why, the very
next day the Skipper came back, and told him the new boat was near
ready, and the owner wanted to see him. Jack went, and forgot about
everything, except that he was going to be the handsome boy all right
with the owner's own daughter to look at him. A pretty girl she was too.
I saw her once, holding up her skirts off the deck while she looked
round. The Skipper introduced me. 'Good morning, Mr. Brown,' she said to
me.
"Coming out of the Great Western Station at Cardiff Jack saw a place
he'd never noticed before. It wasn't Cardiff style. 'It's a new place,'
Jack thinks to himself, 'and a ripping good place it looks,' for he was
thirsty, and there was plenty of time. 'It must have been run up since I
was here last,' says Jack to himself, 'though that's queer, for I reckon
it'd take years to rig up a dandy show of this sort.' But in he went.
"He was surprised, when he got in, and so would you have been. It was
like the place I saw on the stage at London once. It was in Aladdin, at
a place in the Mile End Road. You know what those things are like, when
the curtain goes up. You can see a long way, but you can't see all the
way. You expect something to happen there. It was full of pillars, all
white and gold, in a pink light. There was a lot of ladies and gentlemen
sitting on sofas full of cushions, talking, and they were too grand to
even notice Jack as he stood there looking round for a chair. But it
took a lot to get on Jack's nerves. There was one girl in a white silk
dress, with red roses in her golden belt, and she had a white hat with
red roses in that, and she looked like a summer day. Jack was glad to
see that the only vacant chair was at a table where she sat alone. Of
course, over there goes Jack. The place was as quiet as a church before
the service begins. There was only a faint whispering. He got to where
the girl sat, as if she was waiting for him. She looked up and smiled at
Jack. Jack sat down beside her and said what a fine day it was. She had
a face the colour of moonlight, and her eyes were odd. But there wasn't
a girl who could make Jack wonder if his tie was straight, in those
days, and he began to order things, and talk.
"Once he took a look round, leaning back in his chair, feeling pretty
large, and he noticed the other people were looking at him artful-like,
out of the corners of their eyes, as if he was talking too loud. But
Jack thought he'd jolly well talk as he liked, and he'd got just the
best girl in that room or anywhere else. He looked at his watch. It was
near twelve o'clock. He had to be at his owner's by one. There was
plenty of time.
"The drink had a funny taste, but it was the best liquor he'd ever had.
He marked down that place. He didn't know there was a show like that in
Cardiff. He caught hold of the girl's hand, which he noticed was white,
and very cold, and pretended he wanted to look at her ring. There was a
stone in the ring, just like a bit of soda. She asked him to try it on
his own finger, because the stone changed colour then, but Jack couldn't
get the ring off till he'd placed her finger to his lips, to moisten the
ring. He was the boy, was Jack, to see things didn't drag along. When he
got the ring on his finger the stone was full of red fire. So the time
went; but he forgot all about time, and the owner, and the owner's
daughter, and everything. The girl's hair was scented, too, and it was
close to him.
"Presently he looked up, and saw what he'd never noticed before. He
could see further into the building than ever. There seemed to be a
garden beyond, full of sunshine, and all the men and women were walking
that way, talking loud, and laughing. His own girl got up too, and said,
'Come along, Jack Driscoll,' and he never even wondered how she knew his
name, nor why her face was like snow by moonlight, nor why she smiled
like that.
"No. Not Jack. All he thought was what a ripping garden that was, with
palms, and marble courts, like you see in the East. There was music far
away, two notes and a drum, like you hear in a native dance, before the
dancers come. It made Jack feel like a millionaire or a lord, able to do
anything, but just then only wanting a good time. Then he noticed they
were alone in the garden, which was full of trees in blossom. All the
other people had gone. There was only that music. The place was very
quiet. He could hear water tinkling in a fountain, and he reckoned he
would stay there till closing time. The girl talked to him in whispers,
and he put his arm around her. I don't know how long he stayed there,
but he kept telling the girl she was the best girl he'd ever had, and
he'd never had such a good time in his life.
"It was funny the way he got out. Jack reckoned in there that the world
would never come to an end, like young fellers do, when they're enjoying
themselves proper. But once he took her ring off his finger, to have
another look at it. Then he was in the street again, looking up at a
building which had its doors shut, and Jack only thought he was looking
there for a number he wanted.
"It had started to rain. He looked at his watch. It was just twelve
o'clock. He didn't know what he wanted with an address in that street,
so he started off in a hurry for his owner's house, feeling pretty
stiff, as if he'd been sleeping rough. When he got to his owner's house,
he rang the bell.
"The owner's daughter came to the door, and looked at him like she
didn't know him, and was a bit afraid of him. 'No, thank you,' she said
kindly, 'not to-day.' And shut the door at once.
"What puzzled Jack was that he didn't feel surprised and angry. He
turned and went down those steps again, and down the street, thinking it
over. He looked back at the house. Yes, that was the house all right.
And that was Annie all right. Well, what the devil was the matter with
him? There was a public-house at the corner, and he stopped there,
thinking things over, and staring at the window. Then he saw his face in
a mirror, and shouted so that the barman came and ordered him out of
that, sharp now. But he kept looking at the glass, not believing his
eyes. He knew his own face again, but only just knew it. His eyes were
dull and red and gummy, same as those old men have who've lived too
long, and his face was puffed and pimpled, and he had a lousy white
beard."
II
December 28. Lat. 39.10 N., long. 16.3 W. Course, S.W. 1/2 west. We are
nearing the tropics. Now the ship has such a complete set of grumblers,
good fellows who know their work better than anyone less than God, that
our great distance at sea is plain. Our men, casually gathered and
speaking divers tongues, detached from earth and set afloat on a mobile
islet to mix on it if they can, have become one body to deal with the
common enemy. We are corporate to face each trouble as it meets us, and
free to explain afterwards how much better we should have done under
another captain. The skipper knows this broad spirit now possesses us,
and so is contented and blithe, wearing only on deck that weary look
which is the sober badge of high office, as though he were an
unfortunate man to have us about him, we being what we are, but that he
would do his best with the fools, seeing we are in his charge.
This morning at six, hearing the men at the hosepipes giving the decks
their daily wash, I tumbled out for a cold tub. This is a simple affair.
You leave the cabin with a towel about you, stand in a clear space, and
rotate before the hydrant, to general cheering. A hot bath on the
"Capella" is not so easy, because, although there is a bath-room aboard,
it has become a paint locker. One must descend into the engine-room,
after warning the engineer on duty, who then will have ready a barrel,
filled from the boilers. The ingenious man will fix a shower bath also.
This is a perforated meat tin, hanging from a grating above the tub, and
connected with a pump. After a hot bath in the engine-room, where the
temperature was often well over 120 deg., that shower of cold sea water
would strike loud cries from any man whose self-control was uncertain.
This morning was the right prelude to the tropics. This was the morning
when, if our planet had been till then untenanted, a world unconsummated
and waiting approval, the divine approval would have come, and a child
would have been born, an immortal, the offspring of Aurora and the Sea
God, flame-haired and lusty, with eyes as bright as joy, and a rosy body
to be kissed from toes to crown. The dancing light, and the warm shower
suddenly born alive in it from one ripe cloud, the golden air, the waves
of the north-east trades, the seas of the world in the first dawn,
moving along like a multitude released to play, their blue passionate
and profound, their crests innocent and dazzling, made me think I might
hear faint cheering, if I listened intently. In the west was a steep
range of cloudland rising from the sea, and against it was inclined the
flame of a rainbow. There was that rainbow, as constant as the pennant
hoisted over an uplighted occasion. The world's noble emblem was aloft.
I demanded of the Skipper if he would run up our ensign in reply to it;
but he only peered at me curiously.
The heat increased with the day. We had run well down from the bleak
apex of the world with its nimbus of fogs. Here was the entrance to the
place where our youthful dreams began. I recognised it. Every feature
was as we both have seen it from afar, across the roofs from our outlook
in the arid city when the path to it had appeared as hopeless to our
feet as the path to the moon. This pioneer can assure his fellows whose
bright illusions grow fainter with age that their dreams must be
followed up, to be reached.
At midday we began to cast clothes. As to the afternoon, of that I
remember the less. There was the chief's empty bunk, so much more
alluring than my own. Into that I climbed, my mind steeled against
drowsy weakness. I would digest my dinner with a book, eyes sternly
alert.
The "Capella" rocked slowly, a big cradle. My body was lax and
responsive. There was about us the silent emptiness which is far from
the centres where many men believe it is necessary to get lots of things
done. The Chief suspired on his settee. The waves were singing to
themselves. A ray of light laughed in my eyes, playing hide and seek
across the wisdom of my book.... I put the book down.
As you know, where I had come from we do not dare to sleep during
daylight without first arguing with the conscience, which usually we
fail to convince. This comes of our mental trick which takes a pleasure
we wholly desire and puts on it a prohibitive label. Self-indulgence,
you understand; softening of the character; courage, brothers, do not
stumble. The solemn forefinger wags gravely in our faces. Before I fell
asleep, my habit, born of the hard grey weather which makes an
Englishman hard and prosperous, did come with its admonitory forefinger.
Remembering that I was secure in a sunnier world I cried out with ribald
mockery across the abyss I had safely crossed, knowing my old self could
not follow, and shut my eyes happily. And also, let me say--sitting up
again with an urgent afterthought, which I must get rid of before I
sleep--if this were not a plain narrative of travel without any wise
asides I would get off the "Capella" here to argue that what all you
fellows want in the place I have luckily left is not more
self-restraint, in which wan virtue you have long shown yourselves to be
so proficient that our awards for your merit have overcrowded the
workhouses, but more rollicking self-indulgence and a ruddy and bright
eyed insistence on the means to it. Look at me now in this bunk! Not
since I was last in a cradle have I felt the world would buoy me up if I
dared to shut my eyes to affairs while the sun was shining. But I am
going to try it again now, and risk my future. I repeat, I would argue
this with you, only I want to sleep....
It is worth recording that when I awoke I found nothing had happened to
me, except benefit. The venture can be made safely. Others had kept the
course for me. The ship had not stopped. Through the door I could see a
half-naked, blackened, and sweating stoker, who had been keeping the
fires while I slept, and he was getting back his breath in loud sobs.
Something had made him sick. These stupid and dirty men will drink too
much while they are attending to the furnaces. They have been warned of
the danger, of which they take no heed, and so they have to suffer. On
the poop was the second officer, busy in the hot sun with a gang,
overhauling a boat. And I found, on enquiry, that a man was still at the
wheel. So thereafter, while in the land of the constant sun, I slept
every afternoon, and was never a penny the worse. Somehow, you know,
things went on. I think I shall become one of the intelligent leisured
class.
It was within an hour of midnight. The moon had set. I was idling
amidships about the ship's shadowy structure when I was asked to take
charge of the bridge till eight bells. The second mate was ill, and the
first mate was asleep through overwork. The skipper said he would not
keep me up there long. I had but to call if a light came into view, and
to keep an eye on the wheelhouse. Ah, but it is long since I played at
ships, and was a pirate captain. I remembered there are dull folk who
wonder what it feels like to be a king. The king does not know. Ask the
small boy who is surprised with an order to hold a horse's head. I took
my promotion, mounting the steep ladder to the open height in the night.
I felt then I was more than sundered from my kind. I had been taken and
placed remotely from the comfort of the "Capella's" isolated community
also. There was me, and there were the stars. They were my nearest
neighbours. I stood for you among them alone. When the last man hears
but does not see the deep waters of this dark sphere in that night to
which there shall be no morning sun, he shall know what was my sensation
aloft in the saddle of the "Capella"; the only inhabitant of a congealed
asteroid off the main track in space, with the sun diminished to a point
through travel, and the Milky Way not reached yet; though I could see we
were approaching its bay of light. An appreciable journey had been made.
But by the faintness of its shine there was a timeless vacancy to be
travelled still. We should make that faint glow, that congregation of
suns, that archipelago of worlds; though not yet. But had we not all the
night to travel in? The night would be long. We should not be disrupted
any more by the old day. The final morning had passed. I had no doubt
the drift of the dark lump to which I clung in space, while my hair
streamed with our speed, would at length reach the bright fraternity, no
more than a dimmer of removed promise though it seemed.
A bell rang beside me in the night. It was answered at once from
somewhere ahead. Others, then, were journeying with me. The void was
peopled, though the travellers were all invisible; and I heard a
confident voice call, "Lights are burning bright." The lights were. I
could see that. But when the profundities are about you, and you think
you are alone in outer night, that is the kind of word to hear. Joyously
I shouted into what seemed to be boundless nothing, "All Right!"
* * * * *
One dayfall we saw the Canary Islands a great distance on the port beam.
I do not know which day it was. The Hesperides were as blurred as the
place in the calendar. The days had run together into a measureless
sense of well-being. We had passed the last of the trivial allotments of
time. The islands loomed, and I wondered whether that land was the hint
of something in a past life which the memory saw but could not shape.
Whatever was there it was too long forgotten. That apparition which a
whisper told me was land faded as I gazed at it overseas, lazily trying
to remember what it once meant. It was gone again. It was no matter now.
Perhaps I was deceiving myself. Perhaps I had had no other life. This
"Capella," always under the height of a blue dome, always the centre of
a circular floor of waters, waters to be seen beating against the steep
and luminous walls encompassing us, though nowhere finding an outlet,
was all my experience. I could recall only the faintest shadows of a
past into that limpid present. I could see nothing clearly that was not
confined within the dark faultless line where the sky was inseparably
annealed to the sea. Here I had been always. All I knew was this length
of sheltered deck, and those doors behind me where I leaned on a rail
between the stanchions, doors which sheltered a few familiars with their
clothes on hooks, their pipe racks, and photographs of women, a length
of deck finishing on either hand in two iron ladders, the ladder
forward, just past the radiation and coal grit by the engine-room
casing, descending to a broad walk which led to the forecastle head,
that bare outlook always at a difference with the horizon; and the
ladder aft going down to another broad walk, sticky with new tar, where
the bulwarks were as high as the breast, and Tinker, the dog, glad of a
word from you, trotted about the rusty winches and around the hatches;
and that walk aft finished in the door of the alleyway opening upon the
asylum of the doctor's cabin, and the saloon, the skipper's sanctum, and
the domain of the friendly steward. There was the smell of the cargo
drawing from the ventilators on the deck, when you went by their trumpet
mouths. There was the warm oily gush of air from the engine-room
entrance. And in the saloon alleyway I used to think the store of
potatoes, right behind, was generating gases. (But nobody knows every
origin of the marine smells.) Well, here were all the things my senses
apprehended. I could walk round my universe in five minutes. And when I
had finished I could do it again. Here I had been always. Nothing could
be clearer than that. Looking out from my immediate circumstances I saw
no entrance to the place where we were rocking, the place where the
"Capella" was alone. The walls of the enclosure were flawless. There was
not a door through them anywhere. There was not a rift in the precision
of the dark circle about us where one could crawl out between the sky
and the sea.
There we indubitably were though, and I dwelt constantly on the miracle
of that lucky existence. I could not doubt that we were there. Yet how
had we got there? I leave that to the metaphysicians. There we were; and
no man who merely trusted his experience could explain our presence.
There was some evidence to my simple mind that such a life in such
surroundings perchance was the gift of the gods, and that we could never
get any nearer the limits of the world in which we had been placed to
see what was beyond, could never approach that enclosure of blue walls
where the distant waves, which beat against them, could not get out.
Morning after morning I watched them, the dark leaping shapes of the far
rebels, mounting their prison at its base, and collapsing, beaten.
The seas never changed. They followed us and the wind, a living host,
the blue of their slopes and hollows as deep as ecstasy, their crests
white and lambent. They were buoyant, they were leisurely, they were the
right companions of travel. They just kept pace with us. They ran after
us like happy children, as though they had been lagging. They came abeam
to turn up to us their shining faces, calling to us musically, then
dropping behind again in silence. When I looked overside into the
pellucid depths, peering below the surface in long forgetfulness,
leaving the body and gliding the mind in that palpable and hyacinthine
air beneath us where the sunken foam dimmered in pale clouds, I felt
myself not afloat but hovering in the midst of a hollow sphere filled
with light. The blue water was only a heavier and a darker air. I had no
weight there. I was only a quiet thought tinctured with the royal colour
of the space wherein I drifted.
The upper half of the sphere was blue also, but of a different blue. The
rarer and more volatile ether was above us. The sea was its essence and
precipitate. The sea colour was profound and satisfying; but the colour
of the sky was diffused, as though the heaven were an idea which was
beyond you, which you stood regarding, and azure were it symbol, and
that by concentration you might fathom its meaning. But I can report no
luck from my concentrated efforts on that symbol. The colour may have
been its own reward.
* * * * *
Every morning after breakfast the Skipper and the Doctor made a visit to
the forecastle. Then, after the Doctor had carefully searched his dress
for insects, we spent the day together. We mounted the forecastle to
begin with, watching the acre of dazzling foam which the "Capella's"
bows broke around us. Out of that the flying fish would get up, just
under us, to go skimming off, flights of silver locusts. This reminded
the surgeon that we might try for albacore and bonito, which would be a
change from tinned mutton. The Skipper found a long fir pole, to which
was attached sixty fathoms of line, with a large hook which we covered
with a white rag, lapping a cutting of tin round the shank. When this
object was dropped over the stern in its leaps from wave to wave it bore
a distant resemblance to a flying fish. The weight of the trailing line,
breaking a cord "tell-tale," frequently gave us false alarms and long
tiring hauls. But on the second day the scaffold pole vibrated to some
purpose, and we knew we were hauling in more than the bait. We got
aboard a coryphene, the dolphin of the sailors. It gave us in its death
agony the famous display, beautiful, but rather painful to watch, for
the wonderful hues, as they changed, stayed in the eye, and sent to the
mind only a message of a creature in a violent death struggle.
The contours of this predatory fish express extraordinary speed and
power, and its armed mouth has been upturned by Providence the better to
catch the flying fish as they drop back to sea after an effort to escape
from it. But Providence, or evolution, had never taught the coryphene
that there are times when the little flying fish, as it falls back
exhausted, may be a rag of white shirt and a scrap of bright tin ware
with a large hook in its deceptive little belly. So there the dolphin
was, glowing and fading with the hues of faery. Its life really
illuminating it from within. As its life ebbed, or strove convulsively,
its colours waned and pulsed. It was gold when it came on board, and
darkened to ultramarine as it thrashed the deck, and its broad dorsal
fin showed violet eyes. Its body changed to a pale metallic green; and
then its light went out.
Now as I look back upon the "Capella" and her company as they were in
that period of our adventure when our place was but somewhere in
mid-ocean between Senegambia and Trinidad, I see us but indifferently,
for we are mellowed in that haze in which retrospection just discerns
those affairs, long since accomplished, that were not altogether
wearisome. It is better to go to my log again, for there the matter was
noted by the stub of a pencil at the very time, and when, unless a
beautiful mist was seen, it had not the remotest chance of being
recorded. When I turn to the diary for further evidence of those days of
blue and gold in the north-east trades its faithfulness is seen at once.
"_30 Decr._ A grey day. The sun fitful. Wind and seas on the port
quarter, and the large following billows occasionally lopping inboard as
she rolled. The decks therefore are sloppy again. We had a sharp
reminder at six bells that we are not bound to any health resort, as
Sandy put it. We were told to go aft, where the doctor would give each
of us five grains of quinine. This is to be a daily rite. To encourage
the men to take the quinine it is to be given to them in gin. Being
foreigners, they did not understand the advice about the quinine, but
they caught the word gin quite well, and they were outside the saloon
alleyway, a smiling queue, at the stroke of eleven. I went along to see
the harsh truth dawn on them. The first man was a big German deckhand.
He took the glass from the doctor. His shy and puzzled smile at this
unexpected charity from the skipper dissolved instantly when the quinine
got behind it. His eyes opened and stared at nothing. To the surprise of
his fellows he turned violently to the ship's side, rested his hands on
it, and spat; spat carefully, continuously and with grave deliberation.
"Distance run since noon yesterday 230 miles. Actual knots 9,5. Total
distance 2072 miles. There was not a living thing in sight to-day; not
even a flying fish.
"The night is fine and starlit, the Milky Way a brilliant arch from east
to west, under which we are steaming. When Venus rose she was a tiny
moon, so refulgent that she gave a faint pallor to a large area of sky,
outlined the coast of a cloud, and made a broad shining path on the sea.
The moon rose after nine, veiled in filmy air, peeping motionless at the
edge of a black curtain.
"The moon later was quite obscured, and the steamer ceased to exist
except where in my heated cabin the smoky oil lamp showed me my dismal
cubicle. I went in and sat on the mate's sea chest. The mate was on
duty. On the washstand was his mug of cocoa, and on top of the mug two
thick sandwiches of bread and meat. That food was black with
cockroaches. The oil lamp stank but gave little light. The engines were
throbbing, and out of the open door I saw the gleam of the wash, and
heard its harassing note. I could not read. I loathed the idea of
getting into the hot bunk and lying there, stewing, a clear keen,
clangour of thoughts making sleep impossible. The mate appeared, drove
off the cockroaches cheerfully, examined the sandwiches for
inconspicuous deer, opening each to make sure, and then muffled himself
with one. My God! I could have killed him with these two hands. What
right had he to be cheerful? But he is such a ginger-headed boy, and to
break that unconsciously happy smile of his would be sacrilege. Besides,
he began to tell me about his sweetheart. Her portrait hangs in our
cabin. It is an enlargement. You pay for the frame, and the
photographer, overjoyed I suppose, gives you the enlargement. I prefer
the second engineer's sweet-hearts, who are in colours, and are Dutch
picture postcards and cuttings from French comic papers; and he calls
them his recollections of Sundays at home. I listened, patient and kind,
to the second mate's reminiscences of rapturous evening walks under the
lamps of Swansea with this girl in the picture--no doubt it eased his
heart to tell me--till I could have howled aloud, like the dog who hears
music at night. Then I broke away, and ran to the chief's cabin for
sanctuary.
"The Chief was making an abstract, and was searching through his log for
ten tons of coal which were missing. In the hunt for the lost coal I
lost myself. I grew excited wherever a thick bush of figures promised
the hidden quarry; and in an hour's search found the strayed tons in
hiding at the bottom of a column. They had been left there, and not
transported into the next. Again the dread of that bunk had to be faced
and dealt with. I stood at the chief's door, knocking out my pipe,
looking astern into the night, looking to where Ursa-Major, our
celestial familiar of home, was low down and preparing to leave us
altogether to the strange and perhaps unlucky gods of other skies. O the
nights at sea!
"_31 Decr._ Wakened with my heart jumping because of a devastating sound
without. In the early morning, Tinker was being thrashed by the Old Man
for eating the saloon mats. When at 11.30 the men congregated amidships
with their tins for dinner the sun was a near furnace and the breeze a
balm. The white of the ship is now a glare, and the sea foam cannot be
looked at. Donkey lumbered out of his place where he attends to the
minor boiler, his face the colour of putty, and held to a rail, gazing
out with dead eyes overside, gasping. He declared he couldn't stick his
job. The flying fish are getting up in flights all day long. I saw one
fish go a distance of about fifty yards in a semi-circle, making a bight
in the direction of the wind. We caught another large coryphene to-day,
and had him in steaks for tea. He was much better cooked than the last,
which had the texture of white wool; and to increase our happiness the
cook had not given us sour bread. At midday we were 17.22 N. and 33.27
W.
"I had a lonely evening with the chief. This is New Year's eve. We
talked of the East India Dock Road, and of much else in London Town. At
eight bells, when we held up our glasses in the direction of Polaris,
the moon was bright and the waters hushed. Then we took each a hurricane
lamp, and went about the decks collecting flying fish for breakfast,
finding a dozen of them.
"_1 Jan._ The uplifted splendour of these days persists; but the
splendour sags now a little at midday with the weight of the heat. The
poop deck is now sheltered with an awning; and lying there in lazy
chairs, with a wind following and barely overtaking us, idly watching
the shadows of the overhead gear move on the bright awning as the ship
rolls, is to get caught in the toils of the droning wake, and to sleep
before you know you are a prisoner. The wake itself, in these seas, when
the sun is on it, a broad road going home straight and white over the
hills, the road which is not for us, is one of the good things of the
voyage. Straight beneath the rail the wake is an upheaval of gems,
sapphires, emeralds, and diamonds, always instantly melting in the sun,
always fusing and fleeting in swift coils of malachite and chrysoprase,
but never gone. As you watch that coloured turmoil it draws your mind
from your body. You feel your careless gaze snatched in the revolving
hues speeding astern, and your consciousness is instantly unwound from
your spinning brain, and you are left standing on the ship, an empty
spool.
"Under the awning at night, to the Doctor and to me, the first mate
played his accordion. He is a little Welshman, this mate, with a
childish nose and a brutish moustache, and in his face is blended a
girlish innocence of large affairs, and the hirsute nature of the adult
male animal, a nature he relieves on the "Capella" with bawdy talk and
guffaws. He played 'Come, Birdie, Come,' and things like that, and then
told us some Monte Videan stories. As they were true stories about
himself and other young sailors they ought really to be included in a
faithful diary of a sea voyage, yet as I cannot reproduce the Doctor's
antiseptic judgment, of which I know nothing but the glow of his pipe in
the unresponding dark at the end of the stories--the last titter of the
mate had died away--it is better to leave this matter alone.
"_3 Jan._ The hottest day we have had. I descended at midday to the
engines to see Sandy at work with his shining giants. Standing on the
middle platform, while he was shouting his greetings to me over the
uproar, I felt the heat of the grating through my boot soles, and
shifted. The temperature there was 122 deg.. Sandy was but in his drawers
and a pair of old boots, and the tongues of the boots, properly, were
hanging out. His noble torso was glistening with moisture, and as I
talked, energetically vaulting my words above the roar of the crank
throws in that hot and oleaginous place, the perspiration began a sudden
drop from my own face and hands, and in a copious way which startled me.
For a time I had some difficulty in breathing, as though in a vacuum,
but gradually forgot this danger of suffocation in the love of the
artist Sandy showed while offering me the spectacle of 'his job.' I
think I understood him. At first one would see no order in that haze of
rioting steel. The massive metal waves of the shaft were walloping and
plunging in their pits with an astonishing bird-like alacrity; about
fifteen tons of polished steel were moving with swift and somewhat awful
desperation. The big room shook and hummed with the vigour of it. But
order came as Sandy talked, and presently I found the continuous
thunder, that deadening bass of the crank throws, seemed to lessen as we
conversed, sitting together on a tool chest. Our voices easily
penetrated it. And listening more attentively at length I found what
Sandy said was true, that each tossing and circling part of the
room-full could be heard contributing its strident or profound note to
the chorus, and each became constant and expected, a singing personality
which was heard through the others whenever listened for. Above all, at
regular intervals, a rod rang clear, like the bell in Parsifal; yet,
curiously enough, Sandy declared he could not catch that note, though it
tolled clear and resonant enough in my ears. The skylight was so far
above us that we got little daylight. Hanging from the gratings in a few
places, some black iron pots, shaped like kettles, had cotton rags in
their spouts, and were giving us oil flares instead. The terrific
unremitting energy of the ponderous arms, moving thunderously, and still
with a speed which made tons as aery as flashes of light; and Sandy in
the midst of it, quick in nothing but his eyes, moving about his raging
but tethered monsters cock-sure and casual, rubbing his hands on a pull
of cotton waste, putting his ear down to listen attentively at a
bearing, his face turned from a steel fist which flung violently at his
head, missed him, and withdrew to shoot at him again, gave me the first
distinct feeling that our enterprise had its purpose powerfully
energised and cunningly directed. I felt as I watched the dance of the
eccentrics and the connecting rods that our ship was getting along
famously. I think I detected in Sandy himself a faint contempt for the
chap at the upper end of the telegraph. I stayed two hours, and then my
shirt was as though I had been overboard; and ascending a greasy and
almost perpendicular series of ladders to the upper world, I discovered,
from the drag of my feet and the weight of my body, that I had had just
as much of an engineer's watch in the tropics as I could stand. There
was a burst of cool light. The tumult ceased; and again there was the
old "Capella" rocking in the singing seas, for ever under the tranquil
clouds. We had stopped again.
"_4 Jan._ A moderate north-east wind and sea, and a bright morning; but
far out a dark cloud formed, and drew, and driving towards us, covered
us presently with a blue-black canopy. The warm torrent fell with
outrageous violence, and for all we could see of our way the "Capella"
might have been in a dense fog. The mosquito curtains were served out
to-day, and we amused ourselves draping our bunks. Later, the weather
cleared. The night was stiflingly hot; and in that reeking bunk, with an
iron bulkhead separating me from the engine room, it was like lying on
the shelf of an oven. Though wide open on its catch, the door admitted
no air, but did allow a miserable tap-tapping as the ship rolled. At
eleven o'clock a pale face floated in the black vacancy of the door, and
I could see the Doctor peering in to find if I were awake. 'I say,
Purser, I can't sleep. Will you come and have a gossip, old dear?' We
went aft in our pyjamas, the Doctor cleared away bottles and things from
his settee, and we disembarked from the 'Capella,' visiting other and
distant stars, returning to our own again not before three next morning.
"_5 Jan._ We seem to have got to a dead end of the trade winds. The heat
of the forenoon was oppressively humid and dinner was nearly lost
through it. The cook, a fair and plump Dutchman, broke down in the midst
of his pans, and was carried out to find his breath again. This poor
chef is up at four o'clock every morning coffee making; is working in
the galley, which is badly ventilated, all day, getting two hours' rest
in the early afternoon. Then he goes on till the saloon tea is over;
when he begins to bake bread. He fills in his leisure in peeling
potatoes.
"All round the horizon motionless and permanent storm clouds are banked.
Their forms do not alter, but their colours change with the hours. They
seem to encompass us in a circular lake, a range of precipitous and
intricately piled Alps, high and massive. Cleaving those steeps of
calamitous rocks--for so they looked, and not in the least like
vapour--are chasms full of night, and the upper slopes and summits are
lucent in amber and pearl. In the south and east the ranges are indigo
dark and threatening, and the water between us and that closed country
is opaque and heavy as molten lead. Across the peaks of the mountains
rest horizontal strata of mist. Some petrels were about to-day. The
evening is cool, with a slight head breeze."
* * * * *
After weeks at sea, imprisoned within the walls of the sky, walls which
have not opened once to admit another vessel to give the assurance of
communion, you begin to doubt your direction and destination, and the
possibility of change. Only the clouds change. The ship is no nearer
breaking that rigid circle. She cannot escape from her place under the
centre of the dome. The most cheering assurance I had was the pulse of
the steamer, felt whenever I rested against her warm body. Purposeful
life was there, at least. Though the day may have been brazen, and
without a hint of progress, and the sea the same empty wilderness, yet
when most disheartened in the blind and melancholy night I felt under me
the beatings, energetic and insistent, of her lively heart, some of that
vitality was communicated, and I got sleep as a child would in the arms
of a strong and wakeful guardian.
Poised between two profundities--though nearer the clouds, cirrus and
lofty though they are, than the land straight beneath the keel--and with
morning and night the only variety in the round, the days flicker by
white and black like a magic lantern working without a story. Tired of
watching for the fruits of our enterprise I went to sleep. Old Captain
Morgan must have lived a dull life, monotonous with adventure. What is
the use of travel, I asked myself. The stars are as near to London as
they are to the Spanish main. In their planetary journey through the
void the passengers at Peckham see as much as their fellows who peer
through the windows in Macassar. The sun rises in the east, and the moon
is horned; but some of the passengers on the mudball, strangely enough,
take their tea without milk. Yet what of that?
In the chart room some days ago I learned we had 3000 fathoms under us.
Well; these waves of the tropics, curling over such abysmal deeps, look
much the same as the waves off Land's End. I began to see what I had
done. I had changed the murk of winter in London for the discomforts of
the dog days. I had come thousands of miles to see the thermometer rise.
Where are the Spanish Main, the Guianas, and the Brazils? At last I had
discovered them. I found their true bearings. They are in Raleigh's
"Golden City of Manoa," in Burney's "Buccaneers of America," with Drake,
Humboldt, Bates, and Wallace; and I had left them all at home. We borrow
the light of an observant and imaginative traveller, and see the foreign
land bright with his aura; and we think it is the country which shines.
* * * * *
At eight this morning we crossed the equator. I paid my footing in
whisky, and forgot all about the equator. Soon after that, idling under
the poop awning, I picked up the Doctor's book from his vacant chair. I
took the essays of Emerson carelessly and read at once--the sage plainly
had laid a trap for me--"Why covet a knowledge of new facts? Day and
night, a house and garden, a few books, a few actions, serve as well as
all trades and spectacles." So----. At this moment the first mate
crossed my light, and presently I heard the sounding machine whirring,
and then stop. There was a pause, and then the mate's unimportant voice,
"Twenty-five fathoms, sir, grey sand!"
Emerson went sprawling. I stood up. Twenty-five fathoms! Then that grey
sand stuck to the tallow of the weight was the first of the Brazils. The
circle of waters was still complete about us, but over the bows, at a
great distance, were thunder clouds and wild lights. The oceanic swell
had decreased to a languid and glassy beat, and the water had become
jade green in colour, shot with turquoise gleams. The Skipper, himself
interested and almost jolly, announced a pound of tobacco to the first
man who spied the coast. We were nearing it at last. Those far clouds
canopied the forests of the Amazon. We stood in at slow speed.
I know those forests. I mean I have often navigated their obscure
waterways, rafting through the wilds on a map, in my slippers, at night.
Now those forests soon were to loom on a veritable skyline. I should see
them where they stood, their roots in the unfrequented floods. I should
see Santa Maria de Belem, its aerial foliage over its shipping and
squalor. It was quite near now. I should see Santarem and Obydos, and
Itacoatiara; and then, turning from the King of Rivers to his tributary,
the Madeira, follow the Madeira to the San Antonio falls in the heart of
the South American continent. We drew over 23 feet, with this "Capella."
We were going to try what had never been attempted before by an ocean
steamer. This, too, was pioneering. I also was on an adventure, going
two thousand miles under those clouds of the equatorial rains, to live
for a while in the forests of the Orellana. And our vessel's rigging, so
they tell me, sometimes shall drag the foliage in showers on our decks,
and where we anchor at night the creatures of the jungle will call.
Our nearness to land stirs up some old dreads in our minds also. We
discuss those dreads again, though with more concern than we did at
Swansea. Over the bows is now the prelude. We have heard many unsettling
legends of yellow fever, malaria, blackwater fever, dysentery, and
beri-beri. The mates, looking for land, swear they were fools to come a
voyage like this. They ought to have known better. The Doctor, who does
not always smile when he is amused, advises us not to buy a white sun
umbrella at Para, but a black one; then it will do for the funerals.
"Land O!" That was the Skipper's own perfunctory cry. He had saved his
pound of tobacco.
It was two in the afternoon. There was America. I rediscovered it with
some difficulty. All I could see was a mere local thickening of the
horizon, as though the pen which drew the faint line dividing the world
ahead into an upper and a nether opalescence had run a little freely at
one point. That thickening of the horizon was the island of Monjui.
Soon, though, there was a palpable something athwart our course. The
skyline heightened into a bluish barrier, which, as we approached still
nearer, broke into sections. The chart showed that a series of low
wooded islands skirted the mainland. Yet it was hard to believe we were
approaching land again. What showed as land was of too unsubstantial a
quality, too thin and broken a rind on that vast area of water to be of
any use as a foothold. Where luminous sky was behind an island groups of
diminutive palms showed, as tiny and distinct as the forms of mildew
under a magnifying glass, delicate black pencillings along the foot of
the sky-wall. Often that hairlike tracery seemed to rest upon the sea.
The "Capella" continued to stand in, till America was more than a frail
and tinted illusion which sometimes faded the more the eye sought it.
Presently it cast reflections. The islands grew into cobalt layers, with
vistas of silver water between them, giving them body. The course was
changed to west, and we cruised along for Atalaia point, towards the
pilot station. Over the thin and futile rind of land which topped the
sea--it might have undulated on the low swell--ponderous thunder clouds
towered, continents of night in the sky, with translucent areas dividing
them which were strangely illuminated from the hither side. Curtains as
black as bitumen draped to the waters from great heights. Two of these
appalling curtains, trailing over America, were a little withdrawn. We
could look beyond them to a diminishing array of glowing cloud summits,
as if we saw there an accidental revelation of a secret and wonderful
region with a sun of its own. And all, gigantic clouds, the sea, the far
and frail coast, were serene and still. The air had ceased to breathe. I
thought this new lucent world we had found might prove but a lucky dream
after all, to be seen but not to be entered, and that some noise would
presently shatter it and wake me. But we came alongside the white pilot
schooner, and the pilot put off in a boat manned by such a crowd of
grinning, ragged, and cinnamon skinned pirates as would have broken the
fragile wonder of any spell. Ours, though, did not break, and I was able
to believe we had arrived. At sunset the great clouds were full of
explosions of electric fire, and there were momentary revelations above
us of huge impending shapes. We went slowly over a lower world obscurely
lighted by phosphorescent waves.
* * * * *
It was not easy to make out, before sunrise, what it was we had come to.
I saw a phantom and indeterminate country; but as though we guessed it
was suspicious and observant, and its stillness a device, we moved
forward slowly and noiselessly, as a thief at an entrance. Low level
cliffs were near to either beam. The cliffs might have been the dense
residuum of the night. The night had been precipitated from the sky,
which was clearing and brightening. Our steamer was between banks of
these iron shades.
Suddenly the sunrise ran a long band of glowing saffron over the shadow
to port, and the vague summit became remarkable with a parapet of black
filigree, crowns and fronds of palms and strange trees showing in rigid
patterns of ebony. A faint air then moved from off shore as though under
the impulse of the pouring light. It was heated and humid, and bore a
curious odour, at once foreign and familiar, the smell of damp earth,
but not of the earth I knew, and of vegetation, but of vegetation exotic
and wild. For a time it puzzled me that I knew the smell; and then I
remembered where we had met before. It was in the palm house at Kew
Gardens. At Kew that odour once made a deeper impression on me than the
extraordinary vegetation itself, for as a boy I thought that I inhaled
the very spirit of the tropics of which it was born. After the first
minute on the Para River that smell went, and I never noticed it again.
Full day came quickly to show me the reality of one of my early visions,
and I suppose I may not expect many more such minutes as I spent when
watching from the "Capella's" bridge the forest of the Amazon take
shape. It was soon over. The morning light brimmed at the forest top,
and spilled into the river. The channel filled with sunshine. There it
was then. In the northern cliff I could see even the boughs and trunks;
they were veins of silver in a mass of solid chrysolite. This forest had
not the rounded and dull verdure of our own woods in midsummer, with
deep bays of shadow. It was a sheer front, uniform, shadowless, and
astonishingly vivid. I thought then the appearance of the forest was but
a local feature, and so gazed at it for what it would show me next. It
had nothing else to show me. Clumps of palms threw their fronds above
the forest roof in some places, or a giant exogen raised a dome; but
that was all. Those strong characters in the growth were seen only in
passing. They did not change the outlook ahead of converging lines of
level green heights rising directly from a brownish flood.
Occasionally the river narrowed, or we passed close to one wall, and
then we could see the texture of the forest surface, the microstructure
of the cliff, though we could never look into it for more than a few
yards, except where, in some places, habitations were thrust into the
base of the woods, as in lower caverns. An exuberant wealth of forms
built up that forest which was so featureless from a little distance.
The numerous palms gave grace and life to the facade, for their plumes
flung in noble arcs from tall and slender columns, or sprayed directly
from the ground in emerald fountains. The rest was inextricable
confusion. Vines looped across the front of green, binding the forest
with cordage, and the roots of epiphytes dropped from upper boughs, like
hanks of twine.
In some places the river widened into lagoons, and we seemed to be in a
maze of islands. Canoes shot across the waterways, and river schooners,
shaped very like junks, with high poops and blue and red sails, were
diminished beneath the verdure, betraying the great height of the woods.
Because of its longitudinal extension, fining down to a point in the
distance, the elevation of the forest, when uncontrasted, looked much
less than it really was. The scene was so luminous, still, and
voiceless, it was so like a radiant mirage, or a vivid remembrance of an
emotional dream got from books read and read again, that only the
unquestionable verity of our iron steamer, present with her smoke and
prosaic gear, convinced me that what was outside us was there. Across a
hatch a large butterfly hovered and flickered like a flame. Dragon flies
were suspended invisibly over our awning, jewels in shimmering enamels.
* * * * *
We anchored just before breakfast, and a small launch flying a large
Brazilian flag was soon fussing at our gangway. The Brazilian customs
men boarded us, and the official who was left in charge to overlook the
"Capella" while we remained was a tall and majestic Latin with dark eyes
of such nobility and brooding melancholy that it never occurred to me
that our doctor, who has travelled much, was other than a fellow with a
dull Anglo-Saxon mind when he removed some loose property to his cabin
and locked his door, before he went ashore. So I left my field glasses
on the ice-chest; and that was the last I saw of them. Yet that fellow
had such lovely hair, as the ladies would say, and his smile and his
courtesy were fit for kings. He carried a scented pink handkerchief and
wore patent leather boots. Our surgeon had but a faint laugh when these
explanations were made to him, taking my hand fondly, and saying he
loved little children.
Para, a flat congestion of white buildings and red roofs in the sun, was
about a mile beyond our anchorage, over the port bow; and as its name
has been to me one that had the appeal of the world not ours, like
Tripoli of Barbary, Macassar, the Marquesas, and the Rio Madre de Dios,
the agent's launch, as it took us towards the small craft lying
immediately before the front of that spread of houses between the river
and the forest, was so momentous an occasion that the small talk of the
dainty Englishmen in linen suits, a gossiping group around the agent and
the Skipper, hardly came into the picture, to my mind. The launch rudely
hustled through a cluster of gaily painted native boats, the dingiest of
them bearing some sonorous name, and I landed in Brazil.
There was an esplanade, shadowed by an avenue of mangoes. We crossed
that, and went along hot narrow streets, by blotched and shabby walls,
to the office to which our ship was consigned. We met a fisherman
carrying a large turtle by a flipper. We came to a dim cool warehouse.
There, some negroes and half-breeds were lazily hauling packages in the
shadows. It had an office railed off where a few English clerks, in
immaculate white, overlooked a staff of natives. The warehouse had a
strange and memorable odour, evasive, sweet, and pungent, as barbaric a
note as I found in Para, and I understood at once I had come to a place
where there were things I did not know. I felt almost timorous and yet
compelled when I sniffed at those shadows; though what the eye saw in
the squalid streets of the riverside, where brown folk stood regarding
us carelessly from openings in the walls, I had thought no more than a
little interesting.
What length of time we should have in Belem was uncertain, but presently
the Skipper, looking most morose, came away from his discussion with the
agent and told us, at some length, what he thought of people who kept a
ship waiting because of a few unimportant papers. Then he mumbled, very
reluctantly, that we had plenty of time to see all Para. The Doctor and
I were out of that office before the Skipper had time to change his
mind. Our captain is a very excellent master mariner, but occasionally
he likes to test the security of his absolute autocracy, to see if it is
still sound. I never knew it when it was not; but yet he must, to assure
himself of a certainty, or to exercise some devilish choler in his
nature, sometimes beat our poor weak bodies against the adamant thing,
to see which first will break. I will say for him that he is always
polite when handing back to us our bruised fragments. Here he was giving
us a day's freedom, and one's first city of the tropics in which to
spend it; and we agreed with him that such a waste of time was almost
unbearable, and left hurriedly.
Outside the office was a small public square where grew palms which ran
flexible boles, swaying with the weight of their crowns, clear above the
surrounding buildings, shadowing them except in one place, where the
front of a ruinous church showed, topped by a crucifix. The church, a
white and dilapidated structure, was hoary with ficus and other plants
which grew from ledges and crevices. Through the crowns of the palms the
sunlight fell in dazzling lathes and partitions, chequering the stones.
An ox-cart stood beneath.
The Paraenses, passing by at a lazy gait--which I was soon compelled to
imitate--in the heat, were puzzling folk to one used to the features of
a race of pure blood, like ourselves. Portuguese, negro, and Indian were
there, but rarely a true type of one. Except where the black was the
predominant factor the men were impoverished bodies, sallow, meagre, and
listless; though there were some brown and brawny ruffians by the
foreshore. But the women often were very showy creatures, certainly
indolent in movement, but not listless, and built in notable curves.
They were usually of a richer colour than their mates, and moved as
though their blood were of a quicker temper. They had slow and insolent
eyes. The Indian has given them the black hair and brown skin, the negro
the figure, and Portugal their features and eyes. Of course, the ladies
of Para society, boasting their straight Portuguese descent, are not
included in this insulting description; and I do not think I saw them.
Unless, indeed, they were the ladies who boldly eyed us in the
fashionable Para hotel, where we lunched, at a great price, off imported
potatoes, tinned peas, and beef which in England would be sold to a glue
factory; I mean the women in those Parisian costumes erring something on
the sides of emphasis, and whose remarkable pallor was even a little
greenish in the throat shadows.
After lunch some disappointment and irresolution crept into our
holiday....There had been a time--but that was when Para was only in a
book; that was when its mere printed name was to me a token of the
tropics. You know the place I mean. You can picture it. Paths that go at
noon but a little way into the jungle which overshadows an isolated
community of strange but kindly folk, paths that end in a twilight
stillness; ardent hues, flowers of vanilla, warm rain, a luscious and
generative earth, fireflies in the scented dusk of gardens; and
mystery--every outlook disappearing in the dark of the unknown.
Well, here I was, placed by the ordinary moves of circumstance in the
very place the name of which once had been to me like a chord of t
Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/37205