19. CHAPTER XIX.
Again must I call attention to my white jacket, which
about this time came near being the death of me.
I am of a meditative humor, and at sea used often to mount
aloft at night, and, seating myself on one of the upper yards,
tuck my jacket about me and give loose to reflection. In
some ships in which I have done this, the sailors used to
fancy that I must be studying astronomy—which, indeed, to
some extent, was the case—and that my object in mounting
aloft was to get a nearer view of the stars, supposing me, of
course, to be short-sighted. A very silly conceit of theirs,
some may say, but not so silly after all; for surely the advantage
of getting nearer an object by two hundred feet is
not to be underrated. Then, to study the stars upon the
wide, boundless sea, is divine as it was to the Chaldean Magi,
who observed their revolutions from the plains.
And it is a very fine feeling, and one that fuses us into the
universe of things, and makes us a part of the All, to think
that, wherever we ocean-wanderers rove, we have still the
same glorious old stars to keep us company; that they still
shine onward and on, forever beautiful and bright, and luring
us, by every ray, to die and be glorified with them.
Ay, ay! we sailors sail not in vain. We expatriate ourselves
to nationalize with the universe; and in all our voyages
round the world, we are still accompanied by those old
circumnavigators, the stars, who are shipmates and fellow-sailors
of ours—sailing in heaven's blue, as we on the
azure main. Let genteel generations scoff at our hardened
hands, and finger-nails tipped with tar—did they ever clasptruer
palms than ours? Let them feel of our sturdy hearts,
beating like sledge-hammers in those hot smithies, our bosoms;
with their amber-headed canes, let them feel of our
generous pulses, and swear that they go off like thirty-two-pounders.
Oh, give me again the rover's life—the joy, the thrill, the
whirl! Let me feel thee again, old sea! let me leap into
thy saddle once more. I am sick of these terra firma toils
and cares; sick of the dust and reek of towns. Let me hear
the clatter of hailstones on icebergs, and not the dull tramp
of these plodders, plodding their dull way from their cradles
to their graves. Let me snuff thee up, sea-breeze! and
whinny in thy spray. Forbid it, sea-gods! intercede for me
with Neptune, O sweet Amphitrite, that no dull clod may
fall on my coffin! Be mine the tomb that swallowed up
Pharaoh and all his hosts; let me lie down with Drake,
where he sleeps in the sea.
But when White-Jacket speaks of the rover's life, he
means not life in a man-of-war, which, with its martial formalities
and thousand vices, stabs to the heart the soul of all
free-and-easy honorable rovers.
I have said that I was wont to mount up aloft and muse;
and thus was it with me the night following the loss of the
cooper. Ere my watch in the top had expired, high up on
the main-royal-yard I reclined, the white jacket folded around
me like Sir John Moore in his frosted cloak.
Eight bells had struck, and my watchmates had hied to
their hammocks, and the other watch had gone to their stations,
and the top below me was full of strangers, and still
one hundred feet above even them I lay entranced; now
dozing, now dreaming; now thinking of things past, and
anon of the life to come. Well-timed was the latter thought,
for the life to come was much nearer overtaking me than I
then could imagine. Perhaps I was half conscious at last
of a tremulous voice hailing the main-royal-yard from the
top. But if so, the consciousness glided away from me, and
left me in Lethe. But when, like lightning, the yard dropped
under me, and instinctively I clung with both hands to the
“
tie,” then I came to myself with a rush, and felt something
like a choking hand at my throat. For an instant I thought
the Gulf Stream in my head was whirling me away to eternity;
but the next moment I found myself standing; the
yard had descended to the
cap; and shaking myself in my
jacket, I felt that I was unharmed and alive.
Who had done this? who had made this attempt on my
life? thought I, as I ran down the rigging.
“Here it comes!—Lord! Lord! here it comes! See, see!
it is white as a hammock.”
“Who's coming?” I shouted, springing down into the top;
“who's white as a hammock?”
“Bless my soul, Bill, it's only White-Jacket—that infernal
White-Jacket again!”
It seems they had spied a moving white spot there aloft,
and, sailor-like, had taken me for the ghost of the cooper;
and after hailing me, and bidding me descend, to test my
corporeality, and getting no answer, they had lowered the
halyards in affright.
In a rage I tore off the jacket, and threw it on the deck.
“Jacket,” cried I, “you must change your complexion!
you must hie to the dyers and be dyed, that I may live. I
have but one poor life, White-Jacket, and that life I can not
spare. I can not consent to die for you, but be dyed you
must for me. You can dye many times without injury; but
I can not die without irreparable loss, and running the eternal
risk.”
So in the morning, jacket in hand, I repaired to the First
Lieutenant, and related the narrow escape I had had during
the night. I enlarged upon the general perils I ran in being
taken for a ghost, and earnestly besought him to relax his
commands for once, and give me an order on Brush, the captain
of the paint-room, for some black paint, that my jacket
might be painted of that color.
“Just look at it, sir,” I added, holding it up; “did you
ever see any thing whiter? Consider how it shines of a
night, like a bit of the Milky Way. A little paint, sir, you
can not refuse.”
“The ship has no paint to spare,” he said; “you must
get along without it.”
“Sir, every rain gives me a soaking;—Cape Horn is at
hand—six brushes-full would make it water-proof; and no
longer would I be in peril of my life!”
“Can't help it, sir; depart!”
I fear it will not be well with me in the end; for if my
own sins are to be forgiven only as I forgive that hard-hearted
and unimpressible First Lieutenant, then pardon there is
none for me.
What! when but one dab of paint would make a man of
a ghost, and a Mackintosh of a herring-net—to refuse it!
I am full. I can say no more.
