Ballads of the Fleet and Other Poems :: :: University of Virginia Library

But ever they beat in the teeth of storms, half blind with the threshing hail,
While the spray froze fast on gear and mast and starched their fretting sail;

They came to the edge of a mountain world, where clouds hung heavy and low
On the gloom of the great fir forests, black under the crowning snow:

The sparkle died from the merry sea, and the fogs lay dank and thick
On the wan unfriendly waters, and half of his men fell sick.

But the trend of the land lay westward still, and icier struck the blast,
The work of three grew a toil for six, and they gave up hope at last.

So the Hind ran south with the wind in her wake till they chanced on a kindlier land,
And they set up forge and workshop, and they beached her on the strand.

The gentle tribes of the Indian folk came down to their camp unscared,
On a shore that the Old World's lust for gold or hunger of earth had spared:

They hailed them welcome, they brought them gifts, in wonder and love and awe,
And bowed at the feet of the great white gods who were come to give them law;

They brought the wand of their chief of chiefs to set in the general's hand,
And with mystic rights proclaimed him the lord of the Indian's land.

So the English went to their upland towns, for the fringe of the hills was near,
Looked over the boundless pasture world and the untold herds of deer;

The dust of that earth was agleam with gold, the skirt of the slopes was rare
With the tender growth of a northern clime, and spring was quick in the air.

There was many a lad was tempted then—begged hard to be left behind,
For they said, “We have wandered two full years at the chance of the fickle wind.

“So long we roam, and it's far to home, and weary of fight are we,”
But the captain frowned in silence as he led them down to the sea.

He piled a cairn on the cliffs' high crest with a graven plate thereon,
And Her Grace's name writ large to mark when her latest realm was won;

He called that land New Albion, with a tender thought for home,
As they bade farewell to the gleaming rocks that rose through the whiter foam;

The wild folk watched with wondering eyes, the women crooned low wails,
For the fair white gods went seaward and the Hind shook out her sails.

But the sea-queen's brood shall come once more to that shore where the white cliffs are,
When the sons of their children's children have followed the evening star;

Their bounds shall be either ocean, for the same divine unrest
Shall drive their teeming millions to seek new fortunes west;

And a great sea-city havened here shall leap to sudden fame,
Re-echoing in an alien speech the great sea-captain's name.

He laid his course by the Spaniard's chart, “For we'll trust to the open sea,
And it's Westward Ho till the home-wind blows, as it was from the start,” said he.

“We are half-way round the world, my lads, and it's half-way round once more,
Till we've ploughed a track on the ocean's back that never was ploughed before.”

So they dropped to the edge of the North-East Trade, and they ran west sixty days,
With never a sight of shore or sail in the infinite ocean ways;

And the mariner's boy through the long night-watch would brood on his heart's desire,
While the strange stars played with the dancing yards and the wake ran blue with fire;

For the craving came that the wanderer knows for the lilt of his own folk's speech,
For the damp moss scents in the ancient grass and the shade of elm and beech,

For the rook's loud call in the twilight fall and the thin blue smoke that weaves,
The veil of mist on the red farm roof and the gold of the autumn leaves.

But weary wide were those seas untried, and little avail to sigh
For the home stars in their places and the old familiar sky.

Light lie the snows on byre and thatch, and windless falls the rain,
Deal gently with them, summer sun, till we get back again!

And at last they came to a mid-sea isle, and a cluster of isles beyond
Swam up through the white mirage of dawn as if by a fairy's wand;

Up rose the sun, the long low swell slid landward flushed with day,
And the golden message climbed the brows of an upland far away;

The flighting sea-birds overhead went clanging through the sky,
But the ripple showed the white reef's edge, and they dared not venture nigh.

So they left the clustering isles to dream through their drowsy moons and noons,
Safe walled in the coral girdles that glass their still lagoons

And they bore away for the Line once more till a fairway broadened free,
Where the perfume-laden breezes blow through the blue Molucca sea.

The bloom of the clove was harvested as they lingered to explore
The garden ways of the ocean realms of Ternate and Tidore;

And they beached the Hind in a lonely isle where foot never yet, maybe,
Had stirred the sand of the shell strewn strand since the isles came up from the sea.

All over its hills gigantic, weird, the silent forest grew,
With tapered stems to the tented roof that never a sun looked through,

And even at midmost noon was gloom in the branchless colonnade,
Where the bats and the flying foxes were lords of the twilight shade,

Where great land-crabs in the twisting roots stared out of their towering eyes,
And night was quick with the shifting light of the myriad phosphor flies.

So there they abode for a month intrenched with the bullion stacked on shore,
Till trimmed and taut for her long run home, she slid to the deep once more.

Then west and south through the infinite isles, through treacherous reefs that hide,
Where the dead volcanoes cumber the drift of the parcelled tide;

They were bound for the Sunda Channel, for the chart gave free-way there,
They were two days out from Celebes, and the topsail wind blew fair;

There was never a sign on the false sea's face as she struck with a grinding shock,
As the keel ploughed through and the ship held fast in the crust of a sunken rock;

Oh, many a time these two years back they had fought with the ague breath
That chills the heart of the bravest man when he looks in the face of death;

But not in their mad race past the Horn, nor the jaws of the fearsome strait,
Not yet at the hand of God or man had they stood so near their fate.

And then, as ever in direst need, they bent the stubborn knee,
And said the brief and earnest prayer to the God who made the sea.

It was all deep water round the Hind, and the warps could find no stay,
And fast at the chance of a freshening breeze and a rising swell they lay;

So they rolled the great guns overboard, and the spoils of rich Peru,
The shimmering ingots one by one went diving down the blue.

No craven panic blanched their cheeks though the good ship never stirred,
The ocean drill was perfect now—one voice alone demurred:

What ailed you, Master Fletcher, there, brave heart in all beside,
To prate about the hand of God, and the death that Doughty died?

The little captain turned in wrath and flung him on the deck,
Set both his ankles in the stocks, and a posy round his neck:

“Lo, here sits Parson Fletcher, the falsest knave alive!”
“For till her timbers part,” said he, “I'll have no croaker thrive.”

And so the weary day went down, and up the full moon sailed,
The broken waters tinkled by, and nought their toil availed;

But tired and spent and sick at heart they watched the watches through:
“We are in the hand of God,” said he; “we have done what men may do.”

And lo, the hand was stetched to save; as it drew towards the day
The breeze that held her broadside up grew slacker, died away;

She heeled towards the deep once more, and so with never a strain,
By the mercy of God, as the morning broke, slid back to her own again.

Now, drawers, bring the Alicant of which we robbed the Don!
Go loose the parson from the stocks, and get his surplice on!

The leadsmen to the chains again, for Drake's triumphant star
Shall guide us through the Flores Sea and past the eastern bar!

So on by treacherous reef and shoal, by cape and channel and sound,
They groped their way through the island belt that girds the South Sea round;

Behind them sank the shadowy shores, and they came on the ocean swell
Where the great tides heave untrammelled, and they knew that all was well.