DOWN CHANNEL.
At six o’clock next morning the sleeping passengers were awakened
by cries and trampings which, to some of them at least, were novel
disturbers of their slumbers. They might have told the reason of all
this noise without going on deck; for those who slept in cots found
the deck making an angle with their beds, and the lee port-holes
veiled with rushing green water, and all the movables crowded together
at any distance from where they had been deposited the night before.
And hoarse cries sounded, and the flanking of massive chains, and the
strange groaning a ship makes when she heels over to a weight of canvas.
Yes! the “Meteor” was under weigh, with a spanking breeze on the
starboard quarter, which she would haul round abeam--her best point of
sailing--when she had cleared the South Foreland. If this breeze held,
the pilot said, he would be out of the ship and toasting her in rum and
water at Plymouth before the sun went down next day.
Some of the passengers came on deck when the ship was off Folkestone,
and then they saw as fair a sight as the world has to offer--the
great white English cliffs topped with swelling tracts of green, with
here and there small bays with spaces of yellow sand between; houses
thickly grouped--so it seemed in beholding them from the sea--upon the
very margin of the cliff; slate-coloured hills paling far, far away
with visionary clouds upon them; and between the ship and the shore
many pleasure-boats and other craft, with white or ochre-coloured sails
and bright flags, lending spots of red and blue to the perspective of
the chalky cliff.
The pilot hugged the wind, rightly apprehensive that it might draw
ahead and cripple him for sea room; and the “Meteor” hereabouts was so
close to the land that those on board her could see the people walking
on shore--man’s majesty illustrated by dots of black upon the beach or
the heights. Overhead was a brilliantly blue sky, with small wool-white
clouds driving over it; the sea laughed in dimples and shivered the
white sunlight far and wide, so that every crest gleamed with a diamond
spark of its own; and away on the left, a pale faint cloud floating
upon the horizon, was the French coast.
The gay panorama swept by and new scenes opened--stretches of barren
coast with ungainly Coastguards’ huts for their sole decoration; spaces
of vivid green ruled off with lines of soft brown sand, and low black
rocks mirrored in the lake-like surface of the water under the lee;
whitewashed villages with wreaths of blue smoke curling from their
midst, and broad expanses of trees darkening the lightlier-coloured
landscape with delicate shadows. Sturdy vessels, the dray-horses of
the Channel, slow, deep laden, and wafting, many of them, the scent
of pine and other woods across the water, were overtaken and passed,
often amid the laughter of the crew on the “Meteor’s” forecastle, and
“chaff,” which even the grave Captain Steel, the “Meteor’s” skipper,
condescended to smile at. How picturesque these vessels! Here a Dutch
barque painted white, with square-faced men staring over the bulwarks;
a red-capped commander in sea boots and vast inexpressibles, and a
steersman who sometimes looked at the “Meteor” and sometimes at the
sails of his own ship, mixing duty and curiosity in a manner delightful
to behold; there a North-country brig with dirty patched sails and
black rigging, and a crew with smoked faces and a grinning head at the
galley door; sometimes a French smack with as many hands on board as
would man a Black Ball Liner, women among them in red petticoats and
handkerchiefs around their faces, some gutting fish, some mending nets,
some peeling potatoes, and all talking and gesticulating at once, but
suspending both their work and their talk to crowd to the smack’s side
and stare at the noble English vessel; and sometimes a little open boat
at anchor, with a man in her fishing with deep gravity, and paying no
more heed to the ship in whose wake his cockle-shell would bob like
a cork float, than were he the only tenant of the great glittering
surface of water.
But soon the coast sank low in the horizon. The “Meteor” was standing
for the deeper water of the Middle Channel, and close hauled, but with
all sails set, she had paled old England into a thin blue cloud, and
was heading straight for the great Atlantic Ocean.
The night passed; the morning broke; but the “Meteor” was not out of
the Channel yet. The pilot grumbled as he cast his groggy eyes aloft
and saw the weather-leaches lifting. He would have to go about to fetch
Plymouth, unless he had a mind to cross the Atlantic, and this was
certainly not his intention.
All the passengers came on deck after breakfast; the ladies brought
out their work, the gentlemen lighted cigars, and those who had made a
voyage before looked knowing as they cast their eyes about and asked
nautical questions of the captain.
As to the pilot, he was ungetatable. Moreover, his language was so
clouded with marine expletives that his lightest answer was generally
a shock to the sensibilities.
Every boatman from Margate to Penzance calls himself a pilot nowadays;
but the genuine pilot--such a man as this who was taking the “Meteor”
down Channel--stands out upon the marine canvas with an individuality
that makes him unique among seafaring human kind. Figure a square,
bow-legged man, in a suit of heavy pilot cloth, a red shawl round
his neck, a tall hat on his head, a throat the colour of an uncooked
beefsteak, and a face of a complexion like new mahogany, small moist
rolling eyes, a voice resembling the tones of a man with the bronchitis
calling through a tin trumpet, and an undying affection for Jamaica
rum. Such was Mr. Dumling, the “Meteor’s” pilot, a man to whom the
gaunt sea-battered posts, the tall skeleton buoys, the fat wallowing
beacons, and the endless variety of lights ashore and at sea, from the
North Foreland to the Land’s End, were as familiar and intelligible
as the alphabet is to you; who was so profoundly acquainted with the
Channel that he boasted his power to tell you within a quarter of a
mile of where he was, by the mere faculty of smell! A man who could
look over a ship’s side and say, “Here are four fathoms of water, and
yonder are nine,” “And where the shadow of the cloud rests the water
is twelve fathoms deep;” and so on, every inch of the road, for miles
and miles--a miracle of memory! To appreciate the value of such a man
you should be with him in the Channel in a pitch-dark night, blowing
great guns from the north-east, with the roar of the Goodwin on the lee
bow, and a sea so heavy that every blow the ship receives communicates
the impression that she has struck the ground, while the black air is
hoarse with the gale and fogged with stinging spray.
The wind is nowhere more capricious than in the English Channel. At one
o’clock the spanking breeze swept round to the south-east; the watch
went to work at the braces; up went the foretopmast-stun’sail, and the
“Meteor” rushed ahead at twelve knots an hour.
“We shall be off Plymouth at eight o’clock,” says the pilot, and went
below to lunch with a serene face.
He was right. At eight o’clock the “Meteor” was lying with her main
yards backed, dipping her nose in a lively sea, with a signal for a
boat streaming at her mast-head.
The passengers might take their last look at old England then, whilst
the glorious sunset bathed the land in gold, and made the wooded shores
beautiful with colour and shadow. And now, dancing over the waters,
came a white sail, which dimmed slowly into an ashen hue as the crimson
in the skies faded and the waters darkened.
“Any letters for shore?” says Captain Steel, moving among the
passengers, and soon his hand grows full. Many of the men come forward
and deliver missives for the wife, for Sue, for Poll, to the skipper,
who gives them to the pilot. The boat, glistening with the sea-water
she has shipped, sweeps alongside, ducks her sail, and is brought up by
a line flung from the main chains.
“Good-bye, cap’n,” says the gruff pilot; “wish you a pleasant voyage,
I’m sure, gen’l’men and ladies;” drops into the main chains, and from
the main chains drops into the boat; the sail is hoisted, a hat waved,
a cheer given from the ship’s forecastle, and away bounds the lugger in
a cloud of spray.
Now bawls Captain Steel from the break of the poop; round swing the
main yards; the noble ship heels over, trembles, and starts forward,
and, with the expiring gleam of the sunset upon her highest sails, the
“Meteor” heads for the broad Atlantic, and glides into the gloom and
space of the infinite, windy night.