STEAMER NEVADA, NORTH PACIFIC, January 19.
A white, unwinking, scintillating sun blazed down upon Auckland, New
Zealand. Along the white glaring road from Onehunga, dusty trees
and calla lilies drooped with the heat. Dusty thickets sheltered
the cicada, whose triumphant din grated and rasped through the
palpitating atmosphere. In dusty enclosures, supposed to be
gardens, shrivelled geraniums scattered sparsely alone defied the
heat. Flags drooped in the stifling air. Men on the verge of
sunstroke plied their tasks mechanically, like automatons. Dogs,
with flabby and protruding tongues, hid themselves away under
archway shadows. The stones of the sidewalks and the brick of the
houses radiated a furnace heat. All nature was limp, dusty,
groaning, gasping. The day was the climax of a burning fortnight,
of heat, draught, and dust, of baked, cracked, dewless land, and
oily breezeless seas, of glaring days, passing through fierce fiery
sunsets into stifling nights.
I only remained long enough in the capital to observe that it had a
look of having seen better days, and that its business streets had
an American impress, and, taking a boat at a wharf, in whose seams
the pitch was melting, I went off to the steamer Nevada, which was
anchored out in the bay, preferring to spend the night in her than
in the unbearable heat on shore. She belongs to the Webb line, an
independent mail adventure, now dying a natural death, undertaken by
the New Zealand Government, as much probably out of jealousy of
Victoria as anything else. She nearly foundered on her last voyage;
her passengers unanimously signed a protest against her unseaworthy
condition. She was condemned by the Government surveyor, and her
mails were sent to Melbourne. She has, however, been patched up for
this trip, and eight passengers, including myself, have trusted
ourselves to her. She is a huge paddle-steamer, of the old-
fashioned American type, deck above deck, balconies, a pilot-house
abaft the foremast, two monstrous walking beams, and two masts
which, possibly in case of need, might serve as jury masts.
Huge, airy, perfectly comfortable as she is, not a passenger stepped
on board without breathing a more earnest prayer than usual that the
voyage might end propitiously. The very first evening statements
were whispered about to the effect that her state of disrepair is
such that she has not been to her own port for nine months, and has
been sailing for that time without a certificate; that her starboard
shaft is partially fractured, and that to reduce the strain upon it
the floats of her starboard wheel have been shortened five inches,
the strain being further reduced by giving her a decided list to
port; that her crank is "bandaged," that she is leaky; that her
mainmast is sprung, and that with only four hours' steaming many of
her boiler tubes, even some of those put in at Auckland, had already
given way. I cannot testify concerning the mainmast, though it
certainly does comport itself like no other mainmast I ever saw; but
the other statements and many more which might be added, are, I
believe, substantially correct. That the caulking of the deck was
in evil case we very soon had proof, for during heavy rain above, it
was a smart shower in the saloon and state rooms, keeping four
stewards employed with buckets and swabs, and compelling us to dine
in waterproofs and rubber shoes.
In this dilapidated condition, when two days out from Auckland, we
encountered a revolving South Sea hurricane, succinctly entered in
the log of the day as "Encountered a very severe hurricane with a
very heavy sea." It began at eight in the morning, and never spent
its fury till nine at night, and the wind changed its direction
eleven times. The Nevada left Auckland two feet deeper in the water
than she ought to have been, and laboured heavily. Seas struck her
under the guards with a heavy, explosive thud, and she groaned and
strained as if she would part asunder. It was a long weird day. We
held no communication with each other, or with those who could form
any rational estimate of the probabilities of our destiny; no
officials appeared; the ordinary invariable routine of the steward
department was suspended without notice; the sounds were tremendous,
and a hot lurid obscurity filled the atmosphere. Soon after four
the clamour increased, and the shock of a sea blowing up a part of
the fore-guards made the groaning fabric reel and shiver throughout
her whole huge bulk. At that time, by common consent, we assembled
in the deck-house, which had windows looking in all directions, and
sat there for five hours. Very few words were spoken, and very
little fear was felt. We understood by intuition that if our crazy
engines failed at any moment to keep the ship's head to the sea, her
destruction would not occupy half-an-hour. It was all palpable.
There was nothing which the most experienced seaman could explain to
the merest novice. We hoped for the best, and there was no use in
speaking about the worst. Nor, indeed, was speech possible, unless
a human voice could have outshrieked the hurricane.
In this deck-house the strainings, sunderings, and groanings were
hardly audible, or rather were overpowered by a sound which, in
thirteen months' experience of the sea in all weathers, I have never
heard, and hope never to hear again, unless in a staunch ship, one
loud, awful, undying shriek, mingled with a prolonged relentless
hiss. No gathering strength, no languid fainting into momentary
lulls, but one protracted gigantic scream. And this was not the
whistle of wind through cordage, but the actual sound of air
travelling with tremendous velocity, carrying with it minute
particles of water. Nor was the sea running mountains high, for the
hurricane kept it down. Indeed during those fierce hours no sea was
visible, for the whole surface was caught up and carried furiously
into the air, like snow-drift on the prairies, sibilant, relentless.
There was profound quiet on deck, the little life which existed
being concentrated near the bow, where the captain was either lashed
to the foremast, or in shelter in the pilot-house. Never a soul
appeared on deck, the force of the hurricane being such that for
four hours any man would have been carried off his feet. Through
the swift strange evening our hopes rested on the engine, and amidst
the uproar and din, and drifting spray, and shocks of pitiless seas,
there was a sublime repose in the spectacle of the huge walking
beams, alternately rising and falling, slowly, calmly, regularly, as
if the Nevada were on a holiday trip within the Golden Gate. At
eight in the evening we could hear each other speak, and a little
later, through the great masses of hissing drift we discerned black
water. At nine Captain Blethen appeared, smoking a cigar with
nonchalance, and told us that the hurricane had nearly boxed the
compass, and had been the most severe he had known for seventeen
years. This grand old man, nearly the oldest captain in the
Pacific, won our respect and confidence from the first, and his
quiet and masterly handling of this dilapidated old ship is beyond
all praise.
When the strain of apprehension was mitigated, we became aware that
we had not had anything to eat since breakfast, a clean sweep having
been made, not only of the lunch, but of all the glass in the racks
above it; but all requests to the stewards were insufficient to
procure even biscuits, and at eleven we retired supperless to bed,
amidst a confusion of awful sounds, and were deprived of lights as
well as food. When we asked for food or light, and made weak
appeals on the ground of faintness, the one steward who seemed to
dawdle about for the sole purpose of making himself disagreeable,
always replied, "You can't get anything, the stewards are on duty."
We were not accustomed to recognize that stewards had any other duty
than that of feeding the passengers, but under the circumstances we
meekly acquiesced. We were allowed to know that a part of the
foreguards had been carried way, and that iron stanchions four
inches thick had been gnarled and twisted like candy sticks, and the
constant falling of the saloon casing of the mainmast, showed
something wrong there. A heavy clang, heard at intervals by day and
night, aroused some suspicions as to more serious damage, and these
were afterwards confirmed. As the wind fell the sea rose, and for
some hours realized every description I have read of the majesty and
magnitude of the rollers of the South Pacific.
The day after the hurricane something went wrong with the engines,
and we were stationary for an hour. We all felt thankful that this
derangement which would have jeopardised or sacrificed sixty lives,
was then only a slight detention on a summer sea.
Five days out from Auckland we entered the tropics with a
temperature of 80 degrees in the water, and 85 degrees in the air,
but as the light head airs blew the intense heat of our two smoke
stacks aft, we often endured a temperature of 110 degrees. There
were quiet, heavy tropical showers, and a general misty dampness,
and the Navigator Islands, with their rainbow-tinted coral forests,
their fringe of coco palms, and groves of banyan and breadfruit
trees, these sunniest isles of the bright South Seas, resolved
themselves into dark lumps looming through a drizzling mist. But
the showers and the dampness were confined to that region, and for
the last fortnight an unclouded tropical sun has blazed upon our
crawling ship. The boiler tubes are giving way at the rate of from
ten to twenty daily, the fracture in the shaft is extending, and so,
partially maimed, the old ship drags her 320 feet of length slowly
along. The captain is continually in the engine-room, and we know
when things are looking more unpropitious than usual by his coming
up puffing his cigar with unusual strength of determination. It has
been so far a very pleasant voyage. The moral, mental, and social
qualities of my fellow-passengers are of a high order, and since the
hurricane we have been rather like a family circle than a
miscellaneous accidental group. For some time our days went by in
reading aloud, working, chess, draughts and conversation, with two
hours at quoits in the afternoon for exercise; but four days ago the
only son of Mrs. Dexter, who is the only lady on board besides
myself, ruptured a blood vessel on the lungs, and lies in a most
critical state in the deck-house from which he has not been moved,
requiring most careful nursing, incessant fanning, and the attention
of two persons by day and night. Mrs. D. had previously won the
regard of everyone, and I had learned to look on her as a friend
from whom I should be grieved to part. The only hope for the young
man's life is that he should be landed at Honolulu, and she has
urged me so strongly to land with her there, where she will be a
complete stranger, that I have consented to do so, and consequently
shall see the Sandwich Islands. This severe illness has cast a
great gloom over our circle of six, and Mr. D. continues in a state
of so much exhaustion and peril that all our arrangements as to
occupation, recreation, and sleep, are made with reference to a
sick, and as we sometimes fear, a dying man, whose state is much
aggravated by the maltreatment and stupidity of a dilapidated Scotch
doctor, who must be at least eighty, and whose intellects are
obfuscated by years of whiskey drinking. Two of the gentlemen not
only show the utmost tenderness as nurses, but possess a skill and
experience which are invaluable. They never leave him by night, and
scarcely take needed rest even in the day, one or other of them
being always at hand to support him when faint, or raise him on his
pillows.
It is not only that the Nevada is barely seaworthy, and has kept us
broiling in the tropics when we ought to have been at San Francisco,
but her fittings are so old. The mattresses bulge and burst, and
cockroaches creep in and out, the deck is so leaky that the water
squishes up under the saloon matting as we walk over it, the bread
swarms with minute ants, and we have to pick every piece over
because of weevils. Existence at night is an unequal fight with
rats and cockroaches, and at meals with the stewards for time to
eat. The stewards outnumber the passengers, and are the veriest
riff-raff I have seen on board ship. At meals, when the captain is
not below, their sole object is to hurry us from the table in order
that they may sit down to a protracted meal; they are insulting and
disobliging, and since illness has been on board, have shown a want
of common humanity which places them below the rest of their
species. The unconcealed hostility with which they regard us is a
marvellous contrast to the natural or purchasable civility or
servility which prevails on British steamers. It has its comic side
too, and we are content to laugh at it, and at all the other
oddities of this vaunted "Mail Line."
Our most serious grievance was the length of time that we were kept
in the damp inter-island region of the Tropic of Capricorn. Early
breakfasts, cold plunge baths, and the perfect ventilation of our
cabins, only just kept us alive. We read, wrote, and talked like
automatons, and our voices sounded thin and far away. We decided
that heat was less felt in exercise, made up an afternoon quoit
party, and played unsheltered from the nearly vertical sun, on decks
so hot that we required thick boots for the protection of our feet,
but for three days were limp and faint, and hardly able to crawl
about or eat. The nights were insupportable. We used to lounge on
the bow, and retire late at night to our cabins, to fight the heat,
and scare rats and kill cockroaches with slippers, until driven by
the solar heat to rise again unrefreshed to wrestle through another
relentless day. We read the "Idylls of the King" and talked of
misty meres and reedy fens, of the cool north, with its purple
hills, leaping streams, and life-giving breezes, of long northern
winters, and ice and snow, but the realities of sultriness and damp
scared away our coolest imaginations. In this dismal region, when
about forty miles east of Tutuila, a beast popularly known as the
"Flying fox" {14} alighted on our rigging, and was eventually
captured as a prize for the zoological collection at San Francisco.
He is a most interesting animal, something like an exaggerated bat.
His wings are formed of a jet black membrane, and have a highly
polished claw at the extremity of each, and his feet consist of five
beautifully polished long black claws, with which he hangs on head
downwards. His body is about twice the size of that of a very large
rat, black and furry underneath, and with red foxy fur on his head
and back. His face is pointed, with a very black nose and prominent
black eyes, with a savage, remorseless expression. His wings, when
extended, measure forty-eight inches across, and his flying powers
are prodigious. He snapped like a dog at first, but is now quite
tame, and devours quantities of dried figs, the only diet he will
eat.
We crossed the Equator in Long. 159 degrees 44', but in consequence
of the misty weather it was not till we reached Lat. 10 degrees 6'
N. that the Pole star, cold and pure, glistened far above the
horizon, and two hours later we saw the coruscating Pleiades, and
the starry belt of Orion, the blessed familiar constellations of
"auld lang syne," and a "breath of the cool north," the first I have
felt for five months, fanned the tropic night and the calm silvery
Pacific. From that time we have been indifferent to our crawling
pace, except for the sick man's sake. The days dawn in rose colour
and die in gold, and through their long hours a sea of delicious
blue shimmers beneath the sun, so soft, so blue, so dreamlike, an
ocean worthy of its name, the enchanted region of perpetual calm,
and an endless summer. Far off, for many an azure league, rims of
rock, fringed with the graceful coco palm, girdle still lagoons, and
are themselves encircled by coral reefs on which the ocean breaks
all the year in broad drifts of foam. Myriads of flying fish and a
few dolphins and Portuguese men-of-war flash or float through the
scarcely undulating water. But we look in vain for the "sails of
silk and ropes of sendal," which are alone appropriate to this
dream-world. The Pacific in this region is an indolent blue
expanse, pure and lonely, an almost untraversed sea. We revel in
these tropic days of transcendent glory, in the balmy breath which
just stirs the dreamy blue, in the brief, fierce crimson sunsets, in
the soft splendour of the nights, when the moon and stars hang like
lamps out of a lofty and distant vault, and in the pearly
crystalline dawns, when the sun rising through a veil of rose and
gold "rejoices as a giant to run his course," and brightens by no
"pale gradations" into the "perfect day."
P.S.--To-morrow morning we expect to sight land. In spite of minor
evils, our voyage has been a singularly pleasant one. The condition
of the ship and her machinery warrants the strongest condemnation,
but her discipline is admirable, and so are many of her regulations,
and we might have had a much more disagreeable voyage in a better
ship. Captain Blethen is beyond all praise, and so is the chief
engineer, whose duties are incessant and most harassing, owing to
the critical state of the engines. The Nevada now presents a
grotesque appearance, for within the last few hours she has received
such an added list to port that her starboard wheel looks nearly out
of the water.
I.L.B.