Brazilian coast. At noon we were immediately east of Pernambuco, about
thirty-five miles off shore; and, continuing on our southwesterly
course, we brought the land aboard twenty-five miles south of that
city at five o’clock. All that we could make out of the shore at that
time was that it consisted of a succession of lofty hills; and it was
not until we came up from supper at six o’clock that we saw the land
distinctly enough to appreciate aught of its beauty, lying as it did
at that hour broad on the starboard beam and ahead. On the quarter
appeared dimly the snow-white angular walls of a little town lying
snugly on an arm of the sea, glowing warm and mellow in the rich light;
while by the aid of glasses we perceived, shrouded in the mists of a
thundering surf, broad stretches of coral sand fringed at high-water
mark with clusters of palmettos and cabbage-palms; back of these,
dancing and shimmering in heat-waves, rolled the sand-dunes; and then
came the series of lovely hills rising tier on tier into the interior,
rich in that wonderfully luxuriant vegetation that clothes the surface
of equatorial Brazil, with the veils of night mist just beginning to
form in the valleys and deep ravines. The whole of this fascinating
scene lay steeped in the after-glow of a superb sunset, which touched
everything with a reddish-golden tinge to be observed only in the
tropics.
Lying almost entirely within the torrid zone, the climate of Brazil is
naturally a very hot one, and is also extremely humid, the rainfall for
the year at Maranhão amounting to the enormous total of two hundred and
eighty inches, or seven times greater than that of New York. Such an
excess of moisture has a corresponding effect upon its plant life, and
has given Brazil a wealth of vegetation not excelled by any country of
the world. Travellers assert that it is utterly beyond description,
and that in the ravines and passes near the coast, where the humidity
is intense, it defies man’s utmost efforts at restraint. Even as far
south as Rio, trees split for palings send forth shoots and branches
immediately; and on the banks of the Amazon, the level of which mighty
stream is yearly raised forty feet by the immense rainfall, the
loftiest trees destroy each other by their proximity, and are literally
bound together by rich vines and lianes. In the province of Maranhão,
the grasses, roots, and other plants extending from the brinks of
pools in time weave themselves into vegetable bridges, along which the
traveller wends his way, unaware that he has left terra firma until he
perceives the scaly jaws of an alligator protruding through the herbage
before him. On all sides the vegetation is bewildering, and every
representative of plant life is of a gigantic size.
But to return to ourselves. Happening to glance ahead a little later
we caught a glimpse of the great light-house on the extremity of Cape
St. Agostinho just as its beacon flashed over the sea, sending its
brilliant needles of light far out over the moon-lit ocean. Just at
dusk a large coasting steamer came unexpectedly out from under the
hills, in whose stern waved the green-and-gold flag of Brazil; and,
heading south across the wide wake of the moon, suddenly vanished in
the gloom beyond the sombre headland. The light on Cape St. Agostinho,
by the way, can compare favorably with our most powerful ones, for its
rays are visible twenty-five miles at sea; the tower being in the form
of a white iron tripod one hundred and sixty feet high, whose apex is
three hundred and sixty feet above the ocean. Indeed, on the whole of
the South American seaboard, from the Guianas to Cape Horn, there is
only one other light which equals it, and that is on Cape Frio, just to
the eastward of Rio Janeiro.
Speaking of Cape Horn, I wonder when we’re going to see that famous
rock? At this present rate we would be several months in beating down
the coast; if we were only as far south now as the Abrolhos Islands, we
could begin to keep off a little, that being about the first point at
which ships bound to the westward begin to think of bearing away. The
old mate told us the other day that coming to the eastward towards New
York this last time, they unbent the foresail and made some repairs to
it on the main-deck with Cape Horn in sight! This means that there was
not enough sea there at the time to wet the decks, for a sail is never
stretched there if there is any probability of water coming aboard.
The sea has now returned to its usual Prussian blue, for, being on
soundings yesterday afternoon, it changed to a most beautiful, pale,
transparent green, owing to the white, sandy bottom over which we
sailed, only twenty fathoms away; our least distance from the land
having been about eight miles. Latitude, 7° 57′ south; longitude, 32°
47′ west.
+June 14+
Though the Trades are still from the south-southeast, we have done
very well, as an offing of one hundred and thirty miles has enabled
us to hold on to the port tack all day; and as the coast-line south
of Maceió trends slightly to the westward, we may be able to go free
of the land until we reach the Abrolhoses, for which it will no doubt
be necessary for us to make a slight hitch. We were more than seven
days in making nine degrees of latitude; for, a week ago last night,
we passed the St. Paul’s Rocks fifty-five miles north of the line, and
yesterday we had not quite reached the eighth parallel. Can the reader
duplicate this tortoise-like progression in the southeast trade-wind?
It is more like the Doldrums in spite of a spanking breeze. Sometimes
when there is a lull in the wind the deep voice of Captain Scruggs
will be heard, “Loose the main-royal”; but five minutes later will
come the order, “Let go the main-royal-halliards; and you can put
the gaskets on, Mr. Rarx, we won’t want it any more.” This word
“loose” is almost invariably used at sea, and you never hear “Set the
mizzen-t’-gallant-s’l” or “Hoist the fore-sky-s’l”; they are always
“loosed.”
At dinner to-day the skipper said, “I’ll bet they’ve been having
trouble off the river Plate lately.” “Why?” said I. “Don’t you see
this swell a-heavin’ up?” he replied; “they’ve been having a southerly
buster down there.” Now, that portion of the South Atlantic in the
vicinity of that vast estuary, the Rio de la Plata, is subject to
terrific gales of wind known as pamperos, because they blow off the
pampas or plains of the Argentine; but the skipper, having lived long
on the coast of Australia, where the hardest gales are called southerly
busters, usually gives that name to the pampero.
The Rio de la Plata should never be called the Plat River, pronouncing
it as we do the Platte River in Nebraska; if the English form is used
at all, it should be called Plate, which is so universal that one of
the largest, if not the largest, shipping-houses doing business in
South America is known as the Brazil and River Plate Steamship Company.
A rather singular fact in connection with the skipper is that he has
never been to any one of the three largest and most important ports
between Cancer and Capricorn,--Calcutta, Bombay, or Rio Janeiro. This
is really astonishing, as it would be hard indeed to find another
American sailor brought up in the last generation who had never been
to either Calcutta or Rio; Bombay is more modern. Captain Scruggs
is quite interested in the Nicaraguan Canal project, and he insists
that with its completion will pass away the sailing ship from the
face of the waters, though I do not entirely agree in this theory.
People also thought that when the Suez Canal was cut through it would
kill the long-voyage trade to the East; yet what are the facts? It
is probable that nearly double the number of sailing vessels pass
Agulhas per year as pass Cape Horn, fully eight hundred rounding
Africa in both directions in a twelvemonth. The amount of case oil
alone from New York and Philadelphia which goes East in sail bottoms
is enormous. Few people, though, realize how much cheaper it is to
ship goods from New York to either San Francisco or China in sailing
vessels than by rail or steamer. For instance, the railway freights
from the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans averages about fifteen dollars
per ton; sailing ship rates, from seven to eight dollars per ton, and
often less. Eighty thousand cases of oil, which would be the cargo of
a modern two-thousand net ton iron sailing vessel, are transported to
Shanghai around Good Hope for seventeen thousand dollars; but if they
were sent overland to San Francisco from New York, and then by steamer
to destination, the freight charges would be trebled, for they would
amount to fifty thousand dollars.
We have just finished reading aloud the book which contains perhaps
the finest descriptions of tropical scenery in English,--Kingsley’s
“Westward Ho.” Nothing could be more charming than the picture of
the delight of the scurvy-ridden fellow-voyagers of Amyas Leigh upon
first landing in the West Indies; while the description of a Barbadian
sunrise is positively entrancing. Latitude, 10° 15′ south; longitude,
34° 35′ west.
+June 15+
Another very excellent run was the result of yesterday’s work, even
though we could not steer a better course than southwest, for we
made not far from three degrees of latitude, finding at noon that
Bahia bore west, distant one hundred and twenty miles, so that we are
at the moment some distance off the land. Last night was one of the
grandest that we ever remember at sea. A strong breeze whistled from
the southeast at an angle of about forty-five degrees to the long
southerly swell, making a rather confused sea in which we sheared
about considerably, our high, powerful bows crushing the steep head
seas which came rushing ceaselessly at us, piling up on either hand
a hissing wall of foam and then flinging it far away on both bows,
which, meeting the next on-rushing wave, and impinging one against the
other, would shoot up to an astonishing height, to be driven back again
in a perfect hurricane of spray, which drenched the forecastle-head,
completely obliterating for the moment the lookout, who emerged from
these showers like the shade of Neptune, with the water dripping from
his oil-skins in the moonlight in glistening rivulets. The moon herself
was full almost at the moment of rising, shining with so great an
effulgence as to necessitate the partial closing of the eyelids if one
looked at the disk, and casting a weird light upon the abysses of a
heavy rain-squall crossing our stern. I don’t know when we have enjoyed
an evening as much as this one, lying at full length in deck-chairs,
watching the mizzen-truck roll through the stars in tremendous arcs,
and listening to the bursting of the seas against the bows and the
hissing of the water as it rushed under the counter. There is but one
word which describes it,--ideal.
Has any one ever seen a keg of root-beer tapped in hot weather after
it has been well shaken up? Or has any one ever heard of a keg of
root-beer at all. I have always thought of it in bottles. However,
we have one on board, and if the expansive force of a superheated,
well-agitated barrel of root-beer can be appreciated, it will be
understood that we had a very animated and sprightly thirty minutes
this forenoon. Ever since the commencement of the voyage a beer-keg
of this fluid has been churning and rattling away under one of the
alley-ways which extend aft on either side of the cabin-house. For
some time past the skipper has been cautioning us to save all the
Apollinaris bottles, as he wanted to fill them, in cool weather, with
the root-beer. But he grew impatient, and concluded to broach the keg
this morning, after the contents had been well shaken up for a week in
equatorial heat. Therefore he gathered round about him a phalanx of
empty bottles, and, assisted by the second mate and the boy Sammie,
advanced hardily against the passive “kag.” After much ado, and the
use of sundry expletives and the dripping of perspiration, they got it
mounted on its side upon a low wooden box, wedged it, held a bottle
under the spigot, turned the faucet, and stood by. But something was
wrong; no liquor flowed, so that the spigot must have been plugged
with something. “Mr. Rarx,” said the skipper, “go and get a bit of
stiff wire.” Back came the second mate at the end of a minute, during
which Captain Scruggs was engaged in impotently kicking and pounding
the keg; and when Mr. Rarx had brought the wire, he spent ten minutes
jabbing away with it, eliciting with great force now and then a little
jet of brown foam, which generally hit him somewhere in the face, which
he persisted in holding in front of the spigot. Tiring of this, which
gave promise of lasting all day without bearing fruit, he despatched
the carpenter for an auger, having finally reached the conclusion that
it was for lack of a vent that nothing would flow. The second mate
was intrusted with its manipulation, and very confidently proceeded
to bore a hole in the bung in the upper side. The wildest dream could
not have pictured huger success. No sooner had the instrument pierced
the wood than, with a hissing shriek, a column of dark liquid as big
as a pencil shot high into the air like the spouting of a whale,
breaking full against Mr. Rarx’s head, after blowing the auger out
of the hole. Then there were frantic shoutings for a plug, while the
little cascade played merrily away, falling in a gentle shower of
amber froth upon those who tried in vain to stay its impetuous flow.
Finally it was plugged, and the skipper called for a tumbler, that
he might draw a glassful of the godly nectar, and, sipping it, gain
courage for the bottling operation. But, oh, misery! No sooner was
the faucet turned than out shot a horizontal stream of root-beer as
large as a garden-hose, and with such incredible force that the liquid
was blown into a sticky foam a few inches from the spigot. Then there
was a rush for utensils on every one’s part but the skipper’s, who
stuck fearlessly to his post in spite of the thick jet of mucilaginous
steam, trying to turn the faucet with a monkey-wrench. During this
exhibition my wife and I stood at the break of the poop, looking down
upon the actors, and simply howling at the old man, who, crouched low
upon the deck, wrestled like a gladiator with the unruly “kag”; and
when he finally emerged from his vapor-bath, with dripping beard and
garments soaked to the skin, I feared that the second mate would die of
apoplexy. However, most of the beer was saved, and we filled and corked
away fully seventy-five bottles of the bubbling mixture. Latitude, 12°
51′ south; longitude, 36° 2′ west.
+June 16+
Most doleful to disclose, the Trades began to let go this morning, and
at ten o’clock the sky-sails were set for the first time in several
days, while at the present moment, the middle of the afternoon, we
are doing wretchedly, even though we have come up to south-southwest.
As for the day, it was really magnificent; temperature of the air,
80°; of the sea, 78°, while the breeze was of that singular mixture of
vigor and balm so often observed in the southeast trade-wind. Not a
cloud specked the deep cobalt of the heavens all day save some feathery
mare’s-tails near the zenith and a few clusters of pearly clouds on the
southeastern horizon.
As usual, though, there was something to mar the serenity of the
day; how many days are there without some untoward incident to cast
its fell shadow? In this case it was the temper of Captain Scruggs,
who no sooner did he perceive that the wind was letting go than he
at once began to blackguard the men and the weather in wild, lurid
language. Perhaps he wanted to catch up with himself, for it must be
chronicled that three days, actually three long days, seventy-two
hours, have passed without his having consigned any one’s immortal
parts to the fathomless pit! Last evening my wife asked him if about
20° south wasn’t the average spot to lose the Trades; this, in truth,
is about the usual place at which the southeast winds vanish, but the
disagreeable man glared at us for a few seconds and then snapped, “How
do I know? You’re liable to lose ’m anywhere,” with an explosion on the
final word.
It is strange how he always tries to show that he knows just a little
bit better than any one else; if, for instance, I asked him if
Montevideo wasn’t in 34° 50′ south, he would be certain to reply, “No;
34° 55′,” on which occasions the mate usually gazes in wonder at him,
and then smiles gently at us, as though to say, “You see, you can’t
teach him.”
Ahead of us, distant from fifty to two hundred miles, lie a number
of shoal spots, called the Royal Charlotte, David Scott, Hotspur,
Busbridge, Victoria, and Fly Banks. There are more than twenty fathoms
on all of them, though, except on a certain unnamed shoal, thirty miles
south-southeast of the Fly Bank, on which the ship “Professor Airy”
struck in 1875. I wonder whether the water is discolored on these
spots? It would be rather strange to come suddenly upon a stretch of
green sea surrounded on all sides by water of the darkest blue.
In a copy of _Harper’s Round Table_ on board I found an amusing
article called “A Yankee Skipper’s Trick,” which seemed good enough to
transcribe, so here it is: “A good anecdote is told illustrating the
superior enterprise of the Yankee skippers years ago. The New Bedford
whalers left port for many a long voyage, sometimes to the far north,
at other times to the far south. These intrepid followers of the sea
sought and pursued the whale into the ice-clad latitudes about the
poles with a natural fearlessness. A squadron sent out by Russia to
explore the south seas, and reach the pole if possible, had attained
a degree of latitude which the commodore proudly told himself had
never been reached before by white man or other human beings. While
he reflected upon the fame which would surely embellish his name,
his sailors cried, ‘Land ho!’ Off to the south he descried a long,
low-lying bit of land, and hastened to shape his course to reach it,
there to plant the Russian standard on its highest point, claiming it
in the name of His Majesty.
“What was his disgust and astonishment when, as his vessel approached
the shore, he observed, over a bit of headland, a flag fluttering from
a mast-head. In a few minutes a little schooner poked her nose around
the point and came sailing smartly over the waves towards his vessel.
The lean, Yankee captain, who was standing in the rigging as the
schooner came up in the wind, yelled,--
“‘Ahoy there! What ship is that?’
“‘His Majesty’s ship the ----.’
“‘Well, this is the ‘Nantucket’ from Massachusetts. We’re doing a
little piloting in these latitudes, and if you want to run in the cove
yonder, why, we’ll pilot you in for a small charge.’
“The commodore’s disgust caused him to square his yards and shape his
course to Russia.” Latitude, 16° 11′ south; longitude, 37° 15′ west.
+June 17+
I don’t expect that we will weather the Abrolhoses after all; we might
be able to scrape along, but that would be taking chances, which
Captain Scruggs never does. The chief danger in holding on to this
course would be that of drifting foul of the reefs which stud the ocean
in the vicinity of these islands. Therefore at eight o’clock this
evening we will go around on the other tack, and it is to be hoped
that we’ll do better than we did yesterday, with only ninety miles of
latitude to our credit. This day was even finer than its predecessor,
and we had some very grand cloud scenery, the eastern horizon being
covered at five in the afternoon with great cirro-cumulus clouds in
which we could perceive a number of bright luminous spots on the
sea-line, called by sailors “sun-dogs”; being the bases of brilliant
rainbows whose arches were concealed by the heavy clouds, producing a
strange appearance.
The carpenter is now engaged in hewing out a new maintop-gallant-yard,
a slow but interesting piece of work. The old one is weak and may not
withstand the heavy weather of Cape Horn, and the maintop-gallant-sail
is a very important one. It is as well to observe here, that
whenever anything carries away aboard of this ship it is never
spliced and forced to do further duty, as is the case on many
vessels; the sheet, clew-line, or whatever has parted, is at once
unrove, and a brand-new rope takes its place. The first illustration
which we had of this was one morning in the Doldrums, when the
maintop-gallant-stay-sail-halliards parted with a crack, and the
half-dozen men on the end of it, among whom was myself, went down in
a heap. Without a word a new piece of manila was rove in its place;
and the same thing happened to the spanker-sheet a few nights ago.
Indeed, this is one of the distinguishing marks of a Yankee ship. You
will rarely find a piece of old running-gear aboard of a square-rigger
flying the stars and stripes.
Late yesterday afternoon we caught another dolphin, a small one,
weighing about fifteen pounds. He showed none of the splendid blues of
our first fish, though the yellows and greens were very fine. Indeed,
this dolphin, as he was towed through the water under the counter,
resembled nothing so much as a strip of gorgeous, glittering satin,
particularly whenever, as the fish rose slightly above the surface,
a glossy sheen irradiated his lithe, elegant body. And immediately
afterward we captured a bonito, about as large as a bluefish.
And now we have come to the first piece of inhumanity or gross cruelty
of which either of us has been a witness on board. What we saw before
was not much out of the way, except in regard to the bad language and
the general atmosphere of “toughness” that pervaded the encounters; but
even they were nothing to speak of when the character of the mates on
American sailing ships is taken into consideration. That which I saw
this afternoon, though, went far beyond hazing, for it assumed the form
of full-fledged brutality. I want to begin at the commencement, so as
to bring the whole affair to light and allow the reader to judge for
himself.
The actors in the little drama which just escaped being a tragedy
were Mr. Rarx and the Finn, Karl Karlsen. This fellow is slow and
thick-headed, with a very hazy idea of English, but is always one
of the first to jump if he understands the order. He was told this
afternoon at about three o’clock to overhaul a certain tackle, one
block of which was belayed to a pin in the rail, while the second mate
stood by, having in his hand another massive block of a threefold
purchase. The captain was below asleep, and I was standing at the
forward end of the poop, not twenty feet from Karl. Suddenly Mr. Rarx,
who was in a very bad humor, as I could see, walked close up to Karl
and picked up a small coil of rope from the deck, and yelling, “You
ain’t doin’ that right, d---- you,” made as though he were going to hit
him. The man at once set about the job in another way; but the second
mate’s temper was so ungovernable that he stepped up to Karl with an
expression in his eyes which I never saw before in any man’s, gave him
a terrific kick with his “letter-carrier” boots, and as the luckless
fellow swung round under the shock and impetus, Rarx drew back the
ponderous block which he still held, and which must have weighed nearly
fifteen pounds, and flung it full against the sailor’s face. I could
hear the thud distinctly, while with a sharp cry the big, powerful man
reeled across the deck and would have fallen prone had it not been for
the main fife-rail, against which he sunk gradually down, the blood
pouring from a wide gash in his nose and forehead, and rapidly forming
a little pond on the deck, while a crimson track stretched from where
he crouched to the second mate, who stood over by the rail with the
block raised above his head, as though challenging any other of the men
hard by to take up the row. Half the watch saw the affair, and if looks
could have annihilated him, Rarx would have dropped dead on the spot;
and I saw Broadhead and the Frenchman, who were putting an eye-splice
into the end of a wire rope, flush crimson and bend hard over their
work at this miserable act of cruelty.