University of Virginia Library

2. II.

The motion was just sufficiently lively to inspirit
one—making the blood frolic through the
veins, and the heart beat more proudly. The old
tars, as they cruised about the decks, walked as
steadily as on land. This proves nothing, you may

say, if you have witnessed Jack's pendulating, uncertain—“right
and left oblique” advance on a
shore cruise.

Our tyros of the sea, in their venturesome projections
of their persons from one given point in their
eye to another, in the hope of accomplishing a
straight line, after vacillating most appallingly, would
finally succeed “haud passibus æquis” in reaching
the position aimed for, fortunate if a lee-lurch
did not accommodate them with a dry bed in the
“lee scuppers.”

Of all laughter-exciting locomotives which most
create sensations of the ludicrously serious, commend
me to an old land-crab teaching its young
one to “go ahead”—a drunkard, reeling homeward
through a broad street on a Saturday night—and a
“gentleman passenger” three days at sea in his
strange evolutions over the deck.

Stretched before me upon the weather hen-coop,
enveloped in his cloak, lay one of our “goodlie
companie.” If his sensations were such as I imagined
them to be, he must have felt that the simplest
chicken under him wore the stoutest heart.

On the lee hen-coop reposed another passenger
in sympathy with his fellow, to whose feelings I
felt a disposition to do equal justice. Abaft the
wheel, coiled up in the rigging, an agreeable substitute
for a bed of down, lay half obscured within
the shadow of the lofty stern, another overdone toper
—a victim of Neptune, not of the “jolly god”—but
whose sensations have been experienced by many

of the latter's pupils, who have never tasted other
salt water than their own tears.

It has been said or sung by some one, that the
“ear is the road to the heart.” That it was so to
the stomach, I already began to feel, could not be
disputed; and as certain “guttural sounds” began
to multiply from various quarters, with startling
emphasis, lest I should be induced to sympathize
with the fallen novitiates around me, by some overt
act, I hastily glided by the helmsman, who stood
alone like the sole survivor of a battle-field—his
weather-beaten visage illuminated at the moment
with a strange glare from the “binnacle-lamp” which,
concealed within a case like a single-windowed
pigeon house, and open in front of him, burned
nightly at his feet. The next moment I was in the
cabin, now lighted up by a single lamp suspended
from the centre of the ceiling, casting rather shade
than light upon a small table—studiously arranged for
supper by the steward—that non-descript locum tenens
for valet—waiter—chambermaid—shoe-black
—cook's-mate, and swearing-post for irascible captains
to vent stray oaths upon, when the wind is
ahead—with a flying commission for here, there,
and nowhere! when most wanted.

But the supper! ay, the supper. Those for
whom the inviting display was made, were, I am
sorry to say it, most unhesitatingly “floored” and
quite hors du combat. What a deal of melancholy
truth there is in that aphorism, which teaches us
that the “brave must yield to the braver!”

As I stood beside the helmsman, I could feel the
gallant vessel springing away from under me, quivering
through every oaken nerve, like a high-mettled
racer with his goal but a bound before him. As
she encountered some more formidable wave, there
would be a tremendous outlay of animal-like
energy, a momentary struggle, a half recoil, a
plunging, trembling—onward rush—then a triumphant
riding over the conquered foe, scattering the
gems from its shivered crest in glittering showers
over her bows. Then gliding with velocity over
the glassy concave beyond, swaying to its up-lifting
impulse with a graceful inclination of her lofty
masts, and almost sweeping the sea with her yards,
she would majestically recover herself in time to
gather power for a fresh victory.

Within an hour after clearing the last head-land,
whose lights, level with the plain of the sea,
gleamed afar off, twinkling and lessened like stars,
with which they were almost undistinguishably
mingled on the horizon—we had exchanged the
abrupt, irregular “seas” of the bay, for the regular,
majestically rolling billows of the ocean.

I had been for some time pacing the deck, with
the “officer of the watch” to recover my sea-legs,
when the helmsman suddenly shouted in a wild
startling cry, heard, mingling with the wind high
above the booming of the sea, the passing hour of
the night watch.—“Four bells.”—“Four bells,” repeated
the only one awake on the forecastle, and
the next moment the ship's bell rung out loud and
clear—wildly swelling upon the gale, then mournfully

dying away in the distance as the toll ceased,
like the far-off strains of unearthly music—
There is something so awful in the loud voice of
a man mingling with the deep tones of a bell,
heard at night upon the sea, that familiar as my
ear was with the sounds—the blood chilled at my
heart as this “lonely watchman's cry” broke suddenly
upon the night.

When he again told the hour I was safely stowed
away in a comfortable berth, not so large as that
of Goliah of Gath by some cubits, yet admirably
adapted to the sea, which serves most discourteously
the children of Somnus, unless they fit their
berths like a modern M. D. his sulkey, lulled to
sleep by the rattling of cordage, the measured
tread of the watch directly over me, the moanings,
et cetera, of sleepless neighbours, the roaring of
the sea, the howling of the wind, and the gurgling
and surging of the water, as the ship rushed through
it, shaking the waves from her sides, as the lion
scatters the dew from his mane, and the musical
rippling of the eddies—like a glassichord, rapidly run
over by light fingers—curling and singing under the
keel.