I.

All day long there had been a pleasant breeze blowing from abeam; but as

the sun sank into the west the wind fined into light, delicate curls of

shadow upon the sea that, at the hour of sundown, when the great

luminary hung poised like a vast target of flaming gold upon the

ocean-line, turned into a surface of quicksilver through which there ran

a light, wide, long-drawn heave of swell, regular as a respiration,

rhythmic as the sway of a cradle to the song of a mother.

The ship was an Indiaman named the _Ruby_; the time long ago, as human

life runs, in this century nevertheless, when the old traditional

conditions of the sea-life were yet current--the roundabout Indian

voyage by way of the Cape--the slaver sneaking across the brassy

parallels of the Middle Passage--the picaroon in the waters of the

Antilles dodging the fiery sloop whose adamantine grin of cannons was

rendered horribly significant to the eye of the greasy pirate by the

cross of crimson under whose meteoric folds the broadside thundered.

I was a passenger aboard the _Ruby_, making the voyage to India for my

pleasure. The fact was, being a man of independent means, I was without

any sort of business to detain me at home. Your continental excursion

was but a twopenny business to me. Here was this huge ball of earth to

be circumnavigated whilst one was young, with spirits rendered

waterproof by health. Time enough, I thought, to amble about Europe

when Australia began to look a long way off. So this was my third

voyage. One I had made to Sydney and Melbourne, and a second to China;

and now I was bound to Bombay with some kind of notion beyond of

striking across into Persia, thence to Arabia, and so home by way of the

classic shores of the Mediterranean.

Well, it happened this 18th of June to be the captain’s birthday. His

name was Bow; he would be fifty-three years old that day he told us, and

as he had used the sea since the age of thirteen he was to be taken as a

man who knew his business. And a better sailor there never was, and

never also was there a person who looked less like a sailor. If ever you

have seen a print of Charles Lamb you have had an excellent likeness of

Captain Bow before you--a pale, spare creature of a somewhat Hebraic

cast of countenance, with a brow undarkened by any stains of weather.

His memory went far back; he had served as mate in John Company’s

ships, had known Commodore Dance who beat Linois and spoke of him as a

perfect gentleman; deplored the gradual decay of the British sailor, and

would talk with a wistful gleam in his eye of the grand and generous

policy of the Leadenhall Street Directors in allowing to their captains

as much cubic capacity in the ships they commanded for their own private

use and emolument as would furnish out the dimensions of a considerable

smack.

It was his birthday, and long ago all of us passengers had made up our

minds to celebrate the occasion by a supper, a dance on deck, and by

obtaining permission for Jack forward to have a ball, on condition that

we should be allowed to ply him with drink enough to keep his heels

nimble, and no more. We were in the Indian Ocean climbing north,

somewhere upon the longitude of Am-sterdam Island, so formidable was

the easting made in the fine old times. The latitude, I think, was about

12° south, and desperately hot it was, though the sun hung well in the

north. Spite of awnings and wet swabs the planks of the deck seemed to

tingle like tin through the thin soles of your boots. If you put your

nose into an open skylight the air that rose drove you back with a sense

of suffocation, so heavily was the fiery stagnation of it loaded with

smells of food and of the cabin interior, though there never was a

sweeter and breezier cuddy with its big windows and windsail-heels when

the thermometer gave the place the least chance. But when the sun was

nearly setting, some sailors quietly came aft and fell to work to make a

ball-room of the poop. They took the bunting out of the signal locker

and stretched it along the ridge-ropes betwixt the awning and the rail

until it was like standing inside a huge Chinese lantern for color.

They hung the ship’s lamps along in rows, roused up the piano from its

moorings in the cuddy, embellished the tops of the hencoops with red

baize, and in fifty directions not worth the trouble of indicating, so

decorated and glorified the after-end of the ship that when the lamps

came to be lighted with streaks of pearl-colored moonshine glittering

upon the deck betwixt the interstices of the signal flags, and movement

enough in the tranquil lift of the great fabric to the swell to fill the

eye with alternations of swaying shadow and gleam, this ball-room of

almond-white plank and canvas ceiling of milky softness and walls of

radiant banners was more like some fairy sea-vision than a reality,

especially with the glimpse you caught of the vast silent ocean solitude

outside with its sky of hovering stars and a stillness as of a dead

world in the atmosphere--such a contrast, by heaven! to the revelry

within the shipboard pavilion, when once the music had struck up and

the forms of women in white gowns fluffing up about them like soapsuds

were swimming round the decks in the embrace of their partners, that a

kind of shudder would come into you with the mere thinking of the

difference between the two things.

The music was good; there was a steerage passenger, a lady, who played

the piano incomparably well; then there was a cuddy passenger who blew

upon the flute very finely indeed. A military officer returning to India

after a long invaliding spell at home had as light, delicate and

accomplished a hand on the fiddle as any of the best of the first

violins which I have heard in the crackest of orchestras. When the

committee of passengers had been talking about and arranging for this

band the chief officer told them that if they thought there would not be

instruments enough there was a man forward, a fellow named Ratt, who

played the fiddle exquisitely and, if we wished it, he would make one of

the instrumentalists. We consented, and for several days previous to

this night you might have heard Ratt rehearsing in the ’tween decks,

scraping in a way that made the military gentleman who had been

invalided look somewhat grave. He spoke of Ratt with a foreboding eye,

and what he feared happened. The man could indeed play, but he had no

sense of _time_. All went wrong with the first dance-air that was struck

up. The tune he made was right enough; but it was always darting ahead

and bewildering the others, and finally the band came to a stop, though

Ratt continued to play several bars, whilst the military gentleman in

great temper was shouting to him to go away. I should have felt sorry

for the poor fellow had he not been saucy, for he had dressed himself

with extraordinary care, greased every separate hair upon his head as

though it had been a rope-yarn, and had arrived aft with a sailor’s

expectation of seeing plenty of fun and getting plenty of drink. It

ended in the chief mate grasping him by the collar and tumbling him down

the poop ladder. I afterwards heard that he went forward and in a

towering passion threw his fiddle overboard, swearing that he would

never play upon anything again but the Jew’s harp and then only for hogs

to dance to; there was no longer any taste left amongst human beings, he

said, for downright real good music.

The merriment aft was scarcely affected by this instant’s failure. The

moment Jack had been tumbled off the poop the instrumentalists began

afresh and the decks were once more filled with sliding and revolving

couples. I had slightly sprained my ankle that morning by kicking

against a coil of rope and was unable to dance; but this was no

deprivation to me on a burning hot night like that, with no place for

the draughts out of the fanning canvas to come through, and the smell

of blistered paint rising in a lukewarm breathing off the sides of the

ship as though the sun still stood over the main-truck. So squatting

myself on a hencoop I sat gazing at the merry, moving, radiant picture

and listening to the music and to the laughter of the girls which came

back from the canvas roof of the poop in echoes soft and clear as the

notes of the flute.