WE MEET AND SPEAK THE LOVELY NANCY, SNOW.
For days and days after we had cleared the Channel and entered upon
those deep waters, which, off soundings sway in brilliant blue billows,
sometimes paling into faint azure or weltering in dyes as purely dark
as the violet, according as the mood of the sky is, nothing whatever
of consequence befell. We were forty of a company. Captain Skevington
was a stout but sedate sailor, who had used the sea for many years,
and had confronted so many perils there was scarce an ocean-danger you
could name about which he could not talk from personal experience. He
was, likewise, a man of education and intelligence, with a manner
about him at times not very intelligible, though his temper was always
excellent and his skill as a seaman equal to every call made upon it.
We carried six twelve-pounders and four brass swivels and a plentiful
store of small-arms and ammunition. Our ship was five years old, a good
sailer, handsomely found in all respects of sails and tackling, so
that any prospect we might contemplate of falling in with privateers
and such gentry troubled us little; since with a brave ship and nimble
heels, high hot hearts, English cannon and jolly British beef for the
working of them, the mariner need never doubt that the Lord will own
him wherever he may go and whatever he may do.
We crossed the Equator in longitude thirty degrees west, then braced
up to the Trade Wind that heeled us with a brisk gale in five degrees
south latitude, and so skirted the sea in that great African bight
'twixt Cape Palmas and the Cape of Good Hope, formerly called, and
very properly, I think, the Ethiopic Ocean; for, though to be sure it
is all Atlantic Ocean, yet, methinks, it is as fully entitled to a
distinctive appellation as is the Bay of Biscay, that is equally one
sea with that which rolls into it.
One morning in July, we being then somewhat south of the latitude of
the island of St. Helena, a seaman who was on the topsail-yard hailed
the deck, and cried out that there was a sail right ahead. It was an
inexpressibly bright morning; the sun had been risen two hours, and he
stood--a white flame of the blinding and burning brilliance he seems to
catch up from the dazzling sands of Africa as he soars over them--in
a sky of the most dainty sapphire fairness; not a cloud--no, not so
big as a fading wreath of tobacco smoke anywhere visible, so that the
ends of the sea went round with the clearness of the circle of a glass
table, only that a small wind, very sweet and pleasant to every sense,
blowing a little off our starboard bow, fluttered the ocean into a
sort of hovering look, and its trembling caused the wake of the sun
to resemble the leaping and frolicking of shoals of wet and sparkling
mackerel.
We waited with much expectation and some anxiety for the stranger to
approach near enough to enable us to gather her character, or even her
nationality; for the experienced eye will always observe a something
in the ships of the Dutch and French nations to distinguish the flags
they belong to. It was soon evident that she was standing directly for
us, shown by the speed with which her sails rose; but when her hull
was fairly exposed, Captain Skevington, after a careful examination of
her, declared her to be a vessel of about one hundred tons, probably a
snow--her mainmast being in one with her foremast--and so we stood on,
leaving it to her to be wary if she chose.
Whether she had at once made sure of us as an honest trader, I cannot
say; she never budged her helm by so much as the turn of a spoke, but
came smoothly along, a very pretty shining object, rolling on the soft,
long-drawn swell in such a way as to dart shadows across the moonlike
gleaming of her canvas with the breathings of their full bosoms--so
that the sight reminded me of the planet Venus as I once beheld her
after she had passed from the tincture of the ruby into the quick light
of the diamond, lightly troubled by the swift passage of a kind of
gossamer scud, as though the winds on high sought to clothe her naked
beauty with a delicate raiment of their own wearing, from which she was
forever escaping into the liquid indigo she loves to float in.
After a little the English ensign was seen to flutter at her
fore-topgallant-masthead. To this signal we instantly replied by
hoisting our colour; and shortly after midday, arriving abreast of
each other, we backed our topsail-yard, she doing the like, and so we
lay steady upon the calm sea, and so close, that we could see the faces
of her people over the rail, and hear the sound, though not the words,
of the voice of the master giving his orders.
It was Captain Skevington's intention to board her, as he suspected
she was from the Indies, and capable therefore of giving us some hints
concerning the Dutch, into whose waters, in a manner of speaking, we
were now entering; accordingly the jolly boat was lowered and pulled
away for the stranger, that proved to be the snow, Lovely Nancy, of
Plymouth--name of cruel omen as I shall always deem it, though I must
ever love the name of Nancy as being that of a fair-haired sister who
died in her fifteenth year.
As many of my readers may not be acquainted with sea terms, it may be
fit to say here, that a snow is nothing more than a brig, with the
trifling addition of a thin mast abaft her mainmast, upon which her
trysail or boom mainsail sets. I guess these vessels will always bear
this name until their trysail-masts go out of fashion.
But to return.
I know not why I should have stood looking very longingly at that
Plymouth ship whilst our captain was on board her; for though to be
sure we had now been at sea since April, whilst she was homeward bound,
yet I was well satisfied with the Saracen and all on board. I was glad
to be getting a living and earning in wages money enough to put away;
my dream being to save so much as would procure me an interest in a
ship, for out of such slender beginnings have sprung many renowned
merchant princes in this country. But so it was. My heart yearned for
that snow as though I had a sweetheart on board. Even Mr. Hall, the
mate, a plain, literal, practical seaman, with as much sentiment in
him as you may find in the first Dutchman you meet in the Amsterdam
fish-market, even he noticed my wistful eyes, and clapping me on the
back, cries out--
"Why, Fenton, my lad, I believe you'd be glad to go home in that little
wagon yonder if the captain would let ye."
"I believe I would, sir," I replied; "and yet if I could, I don't know
that I would, either."
He laughed and turned away, ridiculing what he reckoned a piece of
lady-like sentiment; and that it was no more, I daresay I was as sure
as he, though I wished the depression at the devil, for it caused me to
feel, whilst it was on me, as though a considerable slice of my manhood
had slipped away overboard.
It is one of the few pleasures time permits to old men to recall the
sweet, or gay, or fair pictures which charmed them when young. And
which of all our faculties is more wonderful as a piece of mechanism,
and more Divine in its life-giving properties, than Memory, which
enables the Spirit to quicken dust that has lain for many years in the
womb of time; to attire it and to return to it its passions, emotions,
and all other qualities; to put back the cycles the sun has run and
oblige him to shine on forms which were then infants, but are now
grass-hidden ridges; on houses then stately but now long since swept
away; on meadows and orchards then bright with daisies, ruddy with
fruit, but now covered with houses and busy streets whose sidewalks
echo to the tread of generations more dream-like in that past to which
the aged eye turns than ever can be the dead who then lived.
'Tis thus when I think of that Plymouth snow; for leaning back in
my chair and closing these eyes, that morning shines all around me;
the tremulous sea of blue, of a satin sheen in its tiny ripplings,
shot with milder tints where the currents run as though they were the
thin fingers of the wind toying with the bosom of the deep, bends to
the distant sky upon whose lowermost reaches it flings the same opal
lustre it gathers at its horizon; the air blows fitfully, like the warm
breathings from a woman's sweet lips, and sometimes stills our sails
and sometimes suffers them to flutter in sounds soothing as the murmurs
of a midsummer night breeze amid the high branches of a sleeping oak.
The snow had black sides but was painted white from her water-line;
and though there was no lack of draining weeds and clustered shells
upon her bilge and run, yet, with every slow roll from us, the wet
whiteness, taking the meridian effulgence, broke out in a glory as of
virgin silver, enriched by the marine adhesions, into the very likeness
of a resplendent mosaic of precious metal and green glass.
Such magic has the sea to beautify whatever it is permitted to possess
long enough for its powers of enrichment to work their way!
Her canvas flashed out of shadow into brightness with every lift of
the swell; the ripples ran a dissolving tracery along her bends, as
dainty to see as the choicest lace; the weather-clouded faces of her
men looked at us over the stout bulwark-rail that was broken by a few
open ports through which you spied the mouths of little cannon; and
it was laughable to mark her figurehead, that represented an admiral
in a cocked hat--a cheap dockyard purchase, no doubt, for the effigy
was ridiculously out of character and foolishly too big for the
vessel--bowing to the blue surface that flowed in lines of azure light
to the cutwater, as though there were some mermaid there to whom he
would be glad to "make a leg," as the old saying was.