SYDNEY.
At nine o’clock on the morning of the third day from the time occupied
in the last chapter, a hand stationed on the look-out in the fore-top
sent a roar from the sky:
“Land right ahead!”
In half an hour’s time it was to be seen from the deck, a mere blue
vision stretching eel-shaped, upon the horizon.
Australia! the great and wealthy continent of which there were men then
living whose fathers could recall the time when this vast tract of land
had no place in the world’s knowledge of the Pacific.
Of all sensations, the first glimpse of the land towards which a
ship has been steering for weeks and weeks, with seldom even so much
as a passing sail to relieve the monotony of the ocean, is the most
thrilling. The oldest seaman will desert his bunk or hammock to make
for the forecastle and have a look at the dim cloud. The pale-faced
steward, seldom seen on deck, sneaks from his berth in the steerage
redolent of lukewarm soup and resonant with the ceaseless clattering of
crockery, to peer over the bulwarks at the far-off coast. If there be
passengers on board, you are sensible of an uneasy movement among them,
strangely suggestive of mingled excitement and reluctance, as though
they were at once eager and loath to quit their floating home, the
familiar cabin in which so many hours have been passed, the white decks
which have become to them what the pavement in front of your house is
to you. The ship is endeared to them, and the hold she has upon them is
felt now that they shall shortly leave her. How nobly she has struggled
with the waves and the wind! What grandeur she assumes when thought
of with respect to the immense universe of water she has traversed
in safety! But a few weeks ago, one might say, she was in English
waters, and now she is breasting the waves of the antipodes, raising
her graceful canvas to the heavens with almost conscious elegance, as
though exulting in the knowledge of the feat she has performed--a feat
of which no repetition can ever diminish the wonder, the courage, and
the triumph.
And now the land loomed large and bold upon the horizon, a gray and
iron coast, inhospitable enough to scare away all rash adventurers, one
might think, in search of new homes and brighter fortunes.
What was Captain Duff about! Did he mean to run his ship bow on to
those granite-coloured cliffs stretching to right and left, with their
swart base marginated with a line of crawling foam? Screw your eyes up
attentively, and you will see two breaks in the shore. The bowsprit of
the “Jessie Maxwell” heads for the break on the right. Slowly the coast
grows clearer. That break on the left is but a deceptive hollow, with a
vast block of rock lying in the blue, shark-studded water, upon which,
many years later, a noble ship called the “Dunbar” shall be wrecked,
and, of a great crowd of human beings, but one man saved.
And now behold the miracle of the seaman’s art!
For weeks and weeks, counting from the English summer, the “Jessie
Maxwell” has been surrounded by the ocean, directed through light and
darkness, through bright sunshine and howling tempests charged with
sleet and spray, by no more than a little needle, but gifted with a
steadfastness of intelligence more unerring than the loftiest that
humanity is endowed with. For weeks and weeks this little needle points
and the helmsman obeys, and onwards the ship sails through hundreds of
miles of water, until one morning those on board awake and look ahead,
and lo! there is the land, with the ship’s head pointing accurately
towards the little cleft in the coast through which the great Bay of
Sydney is to be entered.
This bay is a vision of beauty. No hint of its existence is given until
you have sailed into it. The effect produced by the contrast between
the rugged, iron, sterile coast beheld from the sea, and the loveliness
of deep blue water and summer islands richly wooded, and green hills
sloping to the water’s edge, and sandy creeks, with the heavy bush to
the right, and the tropical splendour of vegetation that meets the eye
upon the outlying land--all which form the noble bay into which you
pass through the narrowest and most repellent of headlands--is not to
be described. One might think that Nature had stooped to the human
device of a pantomimic surprise, and reared the bleak Australian coast
in this latitude for no other reason than to give effect to the grand
transformation scene she exhibits behind it.
To the eyes of Holdsworth, wearied by the eternal glancing or leaping
of the sea, how sweet and refreshing were the green shores, the houses
peeping out here and there upon the outskirts of the bush, the trees
overhanging the margin of the islands like living things never weary
of admiring their own shapes! Here and there a boat rowed from shore
to shore. Small coasters lay at anchor, their sails clewed up but not
furled, and the men lounging drowsily aboard of them. Hark to the
humming of the locusts!--comparable to nothing so much as the murmurs
of a sleepy congregation reciting the responses in church.
Anon the city of Sydney opened; at its foot a great semicircular basin
of water, with the masts of many vessels standing out against the
farther houses, and the green hills backing all. How picturesque from a
distance the combined colours of the streaming flags, the white-fronted
houses, the green of the hills, and the heavenly azure of the sky! All
the way on the left ran the houses into the country beyond, and close
at hand were shaggy abutments of wooded land, with deep shady recesses
through which the sunlight sparkled on the emerald ground, with many
boats upon the water to give variety and life to the picture. Far, far
away, almost like an echo from the old world, the strains of a band
playing a hearty English melody could be heard.
No thoughtful man can behold such a colony as this without finding
something at once pathetic and inspiring in the spectacle. A great
rugged continent, lying hidden in the distant Pacific main, is
encountered by human enterprise; and in a few years we witness towns
and cities thronging its seaboard, and all along the surf-beaten
shores is heard the hum of industry. We mark the inalienable love
of home, of the mother-country, in a thousand tokens, and find the
measureless ocean bridged by sympathy and memory, and Old England
renewed in such forms as make us scarcely conscious of our distance
from it; though sometimes thought itself, when the thousand leagues
of waters that flow between are remembered, seems almost powerless to
present our beloved home to us as something real, so vague, so dim, so
inaccessibly remote has it become since we left its shores. Signs of
remembered things are about us. We think of the home love which gave
that name to that street; which reared yonder house in the likeness of
one in the far-off land, that enshrines the emigrant’s most precious
memories of childhood; which parcelled out yonder garden in the fashion
of the little tract of land in the distant country, whose soil is
sacred to the mind as the favoured retreat of a beloved parent. The
very nomenclature by which the colonist dignifies some mean spot or
small building by the name of a noble city or a spacious edifice in
the old home, is full of pathos, since it can signify no more than a
deep-rooted affection (not to be weakened nor divorced by the harshest
recollection of the impracticable struggle for bread which drove whole
families across the sea) for England, and a tender impulse to give
permanent form to memories which survive through many generations, and
create loyalty and patriotism among a people who owe nothing to the
country and the sovereign whom they reverence, and would at any moment
serve. British faces are around us; British accents sound in our ears;
and on all sides we behold signs of that British courage, audacity,
and genius, which grow sublime under our gathering appreciation of the
difficulties which have been conquered and the triumphs which have been
achieved.