1. LETTER I.
At Sea.—I have emerged from my berth this morning
for the first time since we left the Capes. We
have been running six or seven days before a strong
northwest gale, which, by the scuds in the sky, is not
yet blown out, and my head and hand, as you will see
by my penmanship, are anything butt at rights. If you
have ever plunged about in a cold rain-storm at sea
for seven successive days, you can imagine how I have
amused myself.
I wrote to you after my pilgrimage to the tomb of
Washington. It was almost the only object of natural
or historical interest in our own country that I had
not visited, and that seen, I made all haste back to embark,
in pursuance of my plans of travel, for Europe. At
Philadelphia I found a first-rate merchant-brig, the
Pacific, on the eve of sailing for Havre. She was
nearly new, and had a French captain, and no passengers,
three very essential circumstances to my taste,
and I took a berth in her without hesitation. The
next day she fell down the river, and on the succeeding
morning I followed her with the captain in the steamboat.
Some ten or fifteen vessels, bound on different voyages,
lay in the roads waiting for the pilot-boat, and
as she came down the river, they all weighed anchor
together and we got under way. It was a beautiful
sight—so many sail in close company under a smart
breeze, and I stood on the quarter-deck and watched
them in a mood of mingled happiness and sadness till
we reached the Capes. There was much to elevate
and much to depress me. The dream of my lifetime
was about to be realized. I was bound to France, and
those fair Italian cities, with their world of association
and interest were within the limit of a voyage, and all
that one looks to for happiness in change of scene, and
all that I had been passionately wishing and imagining
since I could dream a day-dream or read a book, was
before me with a visible certainty; but my home was
receding rapidly, perhaps for years, and the chances
of death and adversity in my absence crowded upon
my mind—and I had left friends (many—many as dear
to me, any of them, as the whole sum of my coming enjoyment),
whom a thousand possible accidents might
remove or estrange, and I scarce knew whether I was
more happy or sad.
We made Cape Henlopen about sundown, and all
shortened sail and came to. The little boat passed
from one to another, taking off the pilots, and in a
few minutes every sail was spread again, and away they
went with a dashing breeze, some on one course and
some on another, leaving us, in less than an hour, apparently
alone on the sea. By this time the clouds
had grown black, the wind had strengthened into a
gale, with fits of rain; and as the order was given to
“close-reef the topsails,” I took a last look at Cape
Henlopen, just visible in the far edge of the horizon,
and went below.
Oct. 18.—It is a day to make one in love with life.
The remains of the long storm, before which we have
been driven for a week, lie in white, turreted masses
around the horizon the sky overhead is spotlessly
blue, the sun is warm, the wind steady and fresh, but
soft as a child's breath, and the sea—I must sketch it
to you more elaborately. We are in the Gulf Stream.
The water here, as you know, even to the cold banks
of Newfoundland, is always blood-warm, and the temperature
of the air mild at all seasons, and just now,
like a south wind on land in June. Hundred of sea-birds
are sailing around us—the spongy sea-weeds
washed from the West Indian rocks, a thousand miles
away in the southern latitudes, float by in large masses—the
sailors, barefoot and bareheaded, are scattered
over the rigging, doing “fair-weather work”—and
just in the edge of the horizon, hidden by every swell,
stand two vessels with all sail spread, making, with
the first fair wind they have had in many days, for
America.
This is the first day that I have been able to be long
enough on deck to study the sea. Even were it not,
however, there has been a constant and chilly rain
which would have prevented me from enjoying its
grandeur, so that I am reconciled to my unusually severe
sickness. I came on deck this morning and
looked around, and for an hour or two I could scarce
realize that it was not a dream. Much as I had
watched the sea from our bold promontory at Nahant,
and well as I thought I knew its character in storms
and calms, the scene which was before me surprised
and bewildered me utterly. At the first glance, we
were just in the gorge of the sea, and looking over the
leeward quarter, I saw, stretching up from the keel,
what I can only describe as a hill of dazzling blue,
thirty or forty feet in real altitude, but sloped so far
away that the white crest seemed to me a cloud, and
the space between a sky of the most wonderful beauty
and brightness. A moment more, and the crest
burst over with a splendid volume of foam; the sun
struck through the thinner part of the swell in a line
of vivid emerald, and the whole mass swept under us,
the brig rising and riding on the summit with the
buoyancy and grace of a bird.
The single view of the ocean which I got at that moment,
will be impressed upon my mind for ever. Nothing
that I ever saw on land at all compares with it for
splendor. No sunset, no lake scene of hill and water,
no fall, not even Niagara, no glen or mountain gap ever
approached it. The waves had had no time to
“knock down,” as the sailors phrase it, and it was a
storm at sea without the hurricane and rain. I looked
off to the horizon, and the long majestic swells were
heaving into the sky upon its distant limit, and between
it and my eye lay a radius of twelve miles, an immense
plain flashing with green and blue and white,
and changing place and color so rapidly as to be almost
painful to the sight. I stood holding by the tafferel
an hour, gazing on it with a childish delight and
wonder. The spray had broken over me repeatedly,
and as we shipped half a sea at the scuppers at every
roll, I was standing half the time up to the knees in
water; but the warm wind on my forehead, after a
week's confinement to my berth, and the excessive
beauty lavished upon my sight, were so delicious, that
I forgot all, and it was only in compliance with the
captain's repeated suggestion that I changed my position.
I mounted the quarter-deck, and pulling off my
shoes, like a schoolboy, sat over the leeward rails, and
with my feet dipping into the warm sea at every lurch,
gazed at the glorious show for hours. I do not hesitate
to say that the formation, progress, and final burst
of a sea-wave, in a bright sun, are the most gorgeously
beautiful sight under heaven. I must describe it like
a jeweller to you, or I can never convey my impressions.
First of all, a quarter of a mile away to windward,
your eye is caught by an uncommonly high wave,
rushing right upon your track, and heaping up slowly
and constantly as it comes, as if some huge animal
were ploughing his path steadily and powerfully beneath
the surface. Its “ground,” as a painter would
say, is of a deep indigo, clear and smooth as enamel,
its front curved inward, like a shell, and turned overat
the summit with a crest of foam, flashing and changing
perpetually in the sunshine, like the sudden out-burst
of a million of “unsunned diamonds,” and right
through its bosom, as the sea falls off, or the angle of
refraction changes, there runs a shifting band of the
most vivid green, that you would take to have been
the cestus of Venus as she rose from the sea, it is so
supernaturally translucent and beautiful. As it nears
you, it looks in shape like the prow of Cleopatra's
barge, as they paint it in the old pictures; but its colors,
and the grace and majesty of its march, and its
murmur (like the low tones of an organ, deep and
full, and, to my ear, ten times as articulate and solemn),
almost startle you into the belief that it is a sentient
being, risen glorious and breathing from the ocean.
As it reaches the ship, she rises gradually, for there is
apparently an under-wave driven before it, which prepares
her for its power; and as it touches the quarter,
the whole magnificent wall breaks down beneath you
with a deafening surge, and a volume of foam issues
from its bosom, green and blue and white, as if it had
been a mighty casket in which the whole wealth of
the sea, crysoprase, and emerald, and brilliant spars,
had been heaped and lavished at a throw. This is the
“tenth wave,” and, for four or five minutes, the sea
will be smooth about you, and the sparkling and dying
foam falls into the wake, and may be seen like a
white path, stretching away over the swells behind, till
you are tired of gazing at it. Then comes another
from the same direction, and with the same shape and
motion, and so on till the sun sets, or your eyes are
blinded and your brain giddy with splendor.
I am sure this language will seem exaggerated to
you, but, upon the faith of a lonely man (the captain
has turned in, and it is near midnight and a dead
calm), it is a mere skeleton, a goldsmith's inventory, of
the reality. I long ago learned that first lesson of a
man of the world, “to be astonished at nothing,” but
the sea has overreached my philosophy—quite. I am
changed to a mere child in my wonder. Be assured no
view of the ocean from land can give you a shadow of an
idea of it. Within even the outermost Capes, the swell
is broken, and the color of the water in soundings is
essentially different—more dull and earthy. Go to
the mineral cabinets of Cambridge or New Haven,
and look at the fluor spars, and the turquoises, and
the clearer specimens of crysoprase, and quartz, and
diamond, and imagine them all polished and clear, and
flung at your feet by millions in a noonday sun, and
it may help your conceptions of the sea after a storm.
You may “swim on bladders” at Nahant and Rockaway
till you are gray, and be never the wiser.
The “middle watch” is called, and the second mate,
a fine rough old sailor, promoted from “the mast,” is
walking the quarter-deck, stopping his whistle now
and then with a gruff “how do you head?” or “keep
her up, you lubber,” to the man at the helm; the
“silver-shell” of a waning moon, is just visible through
the dead-lights over my shoulder (it has been up two
hours, to me, and, by the difference of our present
meridians, is just rising now over a certain hill, and
peeping softly in at an eastern window that I have
watched many a time when its panes have been silvered
by the same chaste alchymy), and so, after a walk
on the deck for an hour to look at the stars and watch
the phosphorus in the wake, and think of —, I'll
get to mine own uneven pillow, and sleep too!
