I will say at the outset, as I believe some one else has said on a like
occasion, that in this narrative I shall probably describe myself more
than the objects I look upon. The facts and particulars of the case
have already been set down in the guidebooks and in innumerable books
of travel. I shall only attempt to give an account of the pleasure and
satisfaction I had in coming face to face with things in the mother
country, seeing them as I did with kindred and sympathizing eyes.
The ocean was a dread fascination to me,--a world whose dominion I had
never entered; but I proved to be such a wretched sailor that I am
obliged to confess, Hibernian fashion, that the happiest moment I spent
upon the sea was when I set my foot upon the land.
It is a wide and fearful gulf that separates the two worlds. The
landsman can know little of the wildness, savageness, and mercilessness
of nature till he has been upon the sea. It is as if he had taken a
leap off into the interstellar spaces. In voyaging to Mars or Jupiter,
he might cross such a desert,--might confront such awful purity and
coldness. An astronomic solitariness and remoteness encompass the sea.
The earth and all remembrance of it is blotted out; there is no hint of
it anywhere. This is not water, this cold, blue-black, vitreous liquid.
It suggests, not life, but death. Indeed, the regions of everlasting
ice and snow are not more cold and inhuman than is the sea.
Almost the only thing about my first sea voyage that I remember with
pleasure is the circumstance of the little birds that, during the first
few days out, took refuge on the steamer. The first afternoon, just as
we were losing sight of land, a delicate little wood-bird, the black
and white creeping warbler,--having lost its reckoning in making
perhaps its first southern voyage,--came aboard. It was much fatigued,
and had a disheartened, demoralized look. After an hour or two it
disappeared, having, I fear, a hard pull to reach the land in the face
of the wind that was blowing, if indeed it reached it at all.
The next day, just at night, I observed a small hawk sailing about
conveniently near the vessel, but with a very lofty, independent mien,
as if he had just happened that way on his travels, and was only
lingering to take a good view of us. It was amusing to observe his
coolness and haughty unconcern in that sad plight he was in; by nothing
in his manner betraying that he was several hundred miles at sea, and
did not know how he was going to get back to land. But presently I
noticed he found it not inconsistent with his dignity to alight on the
rigging under friendly cover of the tops'l, where I saw his feathers
rudely ruffled by the wind, till darkness set in. If the sailors did
not disturb him during the night, he certainly needed all his fortitude
in the morning to put a cheerful face on his situation.
The third day, when we were perhaps off Nova Scotia or Newfoundland,
the American pipit or titlark, from the far north, a brown bird about
the size of a sparrow, dropped upon the deck of the ship, so nearly
exhausted that one of the sailors was on the point of covering it with
his hat. It stayed about the vessel nearly all day, flitting from point
to point, or hopping along a few feet in front of the promenaders, and
prying into every crack and crevice for food. Time after time I saw it
start off with a reassuring chirp, as if determined to seek the land;
but before it had got many rods from the ship its heart would seem to
fail it, and, after circling about for a few moments, back it would
come, more discouraged than ever.
These little waifs from the shore! I gazed upon them with a strange,
sad interest. They were friends in distress; but the sea-birds,
skimming along indifferent to us, or darting in and out among those
watery hills, I seemed to look upon as my natural enemies. They were
the nurslings and favorites of the sea, and I had no sympathy with
them.
No doubt the number of our land-birds that actually perish in the sea
during their autumn migration, being carried far out of their course by
the prevailing westerly winds of this season, is very great.
Occasionally one makes the passage to Great Britain by following the
ships, and finding them at convenient distances along the route; and I
have been told that over fifty different species of our more common
birds, such as robins, starlings, grosbeaks, thrushes, etc., have been
found in Ireland, having, of course, crossed in this way. What numbers
of these little navigators of the air are misled and wrecked, during
those dark and stormy nights, on the lighthouses alone that line the
Atlantic coast! Is it Celia Thaxter who tells of having picked up her
apron full of sparrows, warblers, flycatchers, etc., at the foot of the
lighthouse on the Isles of Shoals, one morning after a storm, the
ground being still strewn with birds of all kinds that had dashed
themselves against the beacon, bewildered and fascinated by its
tremendous light?
If a land-bird perishes at sea, a sea-bird is equally cast away upon
the land; and I have known the sooty tern, with its almost omnipotent
wing, to fall down, utterly famished and exhausted, two hundred miles
from salt water.
But my interest in these things did not last beyond the third day.
About this time we entered what the sailors call the "devil's hole,"
and a very respectably sized hole it is, extending from the banks of
Newfoundland to Ireland, and in all seasons and weathers it seems to be
well stirred up.
Amidst the tossing and rolling, the groaning of penitent travelers, and
the laboring of the vessel as she climbed those dark unstable
mountains, my mind reverted feebly to Huxley's statement, that the
bottom of this sea, for over a thousand miles, presents to the eye of
science a vast chalk plain, over which one might drive as over a floor,
and I tried to solace myself by dwelling upon the spectacle of a
solitary traveler whipping up his steed across it. The imaginary rattle
of his wagon was like the sound of lutes and harps, and I would rather
have clung to his axletree than have been rocked in the best berth in
the ship.