University of Virginia Library

1. I.

To be a “Cabin passenger” fifteen or twenty
days out, in a Yankee merchantman, is to be in a
state as nearly resembling that of a half-assoilzied
soul in purgatory, as flesh and blood can well be
placed in. A meridian sun—a cloudless sky—a
sea of glass, like a vast burning reflector, giving
back a twin-heaven inverted—a dry, hot air, as
though exhaled from a Babylonian furnace, and a
deck, with each plank heated to the foot like a
plate of hot steel—with the “Horse latitudes,” for
the scene, might, perhaps, heighten the resemblance.

Zimmerman, in his excellent excellent upon solitude,
has described man, in a “state of solitary indolence
and inactivity, as sinking by degrees, like
stagnant water, into impurity and corruption.”
Had he intended to describe from experience, the

state of man as “Cabin passenger” after the
novelty of his new situation upon the heaving
bosom of the “dark blue sea,” had given place to
the tiresome monotony of never-varying, daily
repeated scenes, he could not have illustrated it
by a more striking figure. This is a state of which
you are happily ignorant. Herein, ignorance is
the height of bliss, although, should a Yankee
propensity for peregrinating stimulate you to
become wiser by experience, I will not say that
your folly will be more apparent than your wisdom.
But if you continue to vegetate in the
lovely valley of your nativity, one of “New-England's
yeomanry,” as you are wont, not a little
proudly, to term yourself—burying for that distinctive
honour your collegiate laurels beneath the broad-brim
of the farmer—exchanging your “gown” for
his frock—“Esq.” for plain “squire,” and the
Mantuan's Georgics for those of the Maine Farmer's
Almanac—I will cheerfully travel for you; though,
as I shall have the benefit of the wear and tear,
rubs and bruises—it will be like honey-hunting in
our school-boy days, when one fought the bees
while the other secured the sweet plunder.

This sea life, to one who is not a sailor, is a sad
enough existence—if it may be termed such. The
tombstone inscription “Hic jacet,” becomes prematurely
his own, with the consolatory adjunct et
non resurgam. A condition intermediate between
life and death, but more assimilated to the latter
than the former, it is passed, almost invariably, in
that proverbial inactivity, mental and corporeal,

which is the well-known and unavoidable consequence
of a long passage. It is a state in which
existence is burthensome and almost insupportable,
destroying that healthy tone of mind and body, so
necessary to the preservation of the economy of
the frame of man.—Nothing will so injure a good
disposition, as a long voyage. Seeds of impatience
and of indolence are there sown, which will be for
a long period painfully manifest. The sweetest
tempered woman I ever knew, after a passage of
sixty days, was converted into a querulous Xantippe;
and a gentleman of the most active habits,
after a voyage of much longer duration, acquired
such indolent ones, that his usefulness as a man of
business was for a long time destroyed; and it was
only by the strongest application of high, moral
energy, emanating from a mind of no common order,
that he was at length enabled wholly to be himself
again. There is but one antidote for this disease,
which should be nosologically classed as Melancholia
Oceana, and that is employment. But on
shipboard, this remedy, like many other good ones
on shore, cannot always be found. A meddling,
bustling passenger, whose sphere on land has been
one of action, and who pants to move in his little
circumscribed orbit at sea, is always a “lubberly
green horn,” or “clumsy marine,” in every tar's way
—in whose eye the “passenger” is only fit to thin
hen-coops, bask in the sun, talk to the helmsman, or,
now and then, desperately venture up through the
“lubber's hole” to look for land a hundred leagues in
mid ocean, or, cry “sail ho!” as the snowy mane
of a distant wave, or the silvery crest of a miniature
cloud upon the horizon, flashes for an instant
upon his unpractised vision.

A well-selected library, which is a great luxury
at sea, and like most luxuries very rare, does
wonders toward lessening this evil; but it is still
far from constituting a panacea. I know not how
it is, unless the patient begins in reality to suspect
that he is taking reading as a prescription against
the foe, and converting his volumes into pill boxes
—which by and by gets to be too painfully the
truth—but the appetite soon becomes sated, the
mind wearied, and the most fascinating and
favourite authors “pall upon the sense” with a
tiresome familiarity. Reading becomes hateful,
for the very reason that it has become necessary.
Amusements are exhausted, invented, changed,
varied, and again exhausted. Every thing upon
which the attention fixes itself, vainly wooing
something novel, soon becomes insipid. Chess,
back-gammon, letter-writing, journalizing, smoking,
eating, drinking, and sleeping, may at first contribute
not a little to the discomfiture of old Time, who
walks the sea shod with leaden sandals. The
last three enumerated items, however, generally
hold out to the last undisabled. But three Wellingtons
could not have won Waterloo unsupported;
nor, able and doughty as are these bold three—
much as they prolong the combat—manfully as
they fight, can they hold good their ground for
ever; the obstinate, scythe-armed warrior, with his
twenty-four body guards following him like his

shadow, will still maintain the broadest portion
of his diurnal territory, over which, manœuvre as
they may, these discomfited worthies cannot extend
their front.

Few situations are less enviable, than that of
the worn voyager, as day after day “drags its slow
length along,” presenting to his restless, listless
eyes, as he stretches them wearily over the leaden
waste around him—the same unbroken horizon,
forming the periphery of a circle, of which his
vessel seems to be the immovable and everlasting
centre—the same blue, unmeaning skies above—
the same blue sea beneath and around—the same
gigantic tracery of ropes and spars, whose fortuitous
combinations of strange geometrical figures he has
demonstrated, till they are as familiar as the
diagrams on a turtle's back to an alderman; and the
same dull white sails, with whose patches he has
become as familiar as with the excrescences and
other innocent defects upon the visages of his
fellow-sufferers.

On leaving port, I commenced a journal, or
rather, as I am in a nautical atmosphere, a “log,”
the choicest chips of which shall be hewn off,
basketed in fools-cap, and duly transmitted to you.
Like other chips they may be useful to kindle the
fire withal. “What may not warm the feelings
may—the toes,” is a truism of which you need not
be reminded: and if you test it practically, it will
not be the first time good has been elicited from
evil. But the sameness of a sea-life will by no
means afford me many combustible incidents.

Somebody has said “the will is equal to the deed,
if the deed cannot be.” Now I have the will to
pile a hecatomb, but if I can pile only a couple of
straws, it will be, of course, the same thing in the
abstract. Mine, perchance, may be the fate of that
poor journalist who, in a voyage across the Atlantic,
could obtain but one wretched item wherewith
to fill his journal—which he should have published,
by the way. What a rare sort of a book it would
have been! So soon read too! In this age when
type-blotted books are generative, it would immortalize
the author. Tenderly handed down from one
generation to another, it would survive the “fall of
empires, and the crash of worlds.” “At three
and a quarter P. M., ship going two and a half knots
per hour, the cook lost his bucket over-board—
jolly boat lowered, and Jack and Peter rowed
after it.”

“Half-past three, P. M.—Cook has got his bucket
again—and a broken head into the bargain.”

To one who has never “played with Ocean's
mane,” nor, borne by his white-winged coursers,
scoured his pathless fields, there may be, even in
the common-place descriptions of sea-scenes, something,
which wears the charm of novelty. If my
hasty sketches can contribute to your entertainment
“o' winter nights,” or, to the gratification of your
curiosity, they will possess an influence which I
do not promise or predict for them.

Unfavourable winds had detained our ship several
days, and all who had taken passage were on the
“tiptoe of expectation” for the signal for sailing.

Trunks, boxes, chests, cases, carpet-bags, and all
the paraphernalia of travelling equipage, had long
been packed, locked, and shipped—and our eyes
had hourly watched the fickle gyrations of a horizontal
gilt figure, which surmounted the spire of a
neighbouring church, till they ached again. Had
the image been Eolus himself, it could not have
commanded more devoted worshippers.

A week elapsed—and patience, which hitherto
had been admirably sustained, began to flag; murmurings
proceeded from the lips of more than one
of the impatient passengers, as by twos and threes,
they would meet by a kind of sympathetic affinity
at the corners of the streets, where an unobstructed
view could be obtained of some church-vane, all
of which, throughout our city of churches, had
taken a most unaccommodating fancy to kick their
golden-shod heels at the Northern Bear.

At precisely twenty minutes before three of the
clock, on the afternoon of the first of November instant,
the phlegmatic personage in the gilt robe,
very obligingly, after he had worn our patience to
shreds by his obstinacy, let his head and heels exchange
places. At the same moment, ere he had
ceased vibrating and settled himself steadily in his
new position, the welcome signal was made, and
in less than half an hour afterward, we were all,
with bag and baggage, on board the ship, which
rode at her anchor two hundred fathoms from the
shore.

The top-sails, already loosed, were bellying and
wildly collapsing with a loud noise, in the wind;

but bounding to their posts at the command of their
superior officer, the active seamen soon extended
them upon the spars—immense fields of swelling
canvass; and our vessel gracefully moved from her
moorings, and glided through the water with the
lightness of a swan.

As we moved rapidly down the noble harbour,
which, half a century since, bore upon its bosom
the hostile fleet of the proud island of the north,
the swelling ocean was sending in its evening tribute
to the continent, in vast scrolls, which rolled
silently, but irresistibly onward, and majestically
unfolded upon the beach—or, with a hoarse roar,
resounded along the cliffs, and surged among the
rocky throats of the promontory, impressing the
mind with emotions of sublimity and awe.