I have been talking in the past tense of heroes and of knight-errants,
but surely their day is not yet passed. When the earth has all been
explored, when the last savage has been tamed, when the final cannon
has been scrapped, and the world has settled down into unbroken virtue
and unutterable dulness, men will cast their thoughts back to our age,
and will idealize our romance and—our courage, even as we do that of
our distant forbears. “It is wonderful what these people did with their
rude implements and their limited appliances!” That is what they will
say when they read of our explorations, our voyages, and our wars.
Now, take that first book on my travel shelf. It is Knight’s “Cruise of
the _Falcon_.” Nature was guilty of the pun which put this soul into a
body so named. Read this simple record and tell me if there is anything
in Hakluyt more wonderful. Two landsmen—solicitors, if I remember
right—go down to Southampton Quay. They pick up a long-shore youth, and
they embark in a tiny boat in which they put to sea. Where do they turn
up? At Buenos Ayres. Thence they penetrate to Paraguay, return to the
West Indies, sell their little boat there, and so home. What could the
Elizabethan mariners have done more? There are no Spanish galleons now
to vary the monotony of such a voyage, but had there been I am very
certain our adventurers would have had their share of the doubloons.
But surely it was the nobler when done out of the pure lust of
adventure and in answer to the call of the sea, with no golden bait to
draw them on. The old spirit still lives, disguise it as you will with
top hats, frock coats, and all prosaic settings. Perhaps even they also
will seem romantic when centuries have blurred them.
Another book which shows the romance and the heroism which still linger
upon earth is that large copy of the “Voyage of the _Discovery_ in the
Antarctic” by Captain Scott. Written in plain sailor fashion with no
attempt at over-statement or colour, it none the less (or perhaps all
the more) leaves a deep impression upon the mind. As one reads it, and
reflects on what one reads, one seems to get a clear view of just those
qualities which make the best kind of Briton. Every nation produces
brave men. Every nation has men of energy. But there is a certain type
which mixes its bravery and its energy with a gentle modesty and a
boyish good-humour, and it is just this type which is the highest. Here
the whole expedition seem to have been imbued with the spirit of their
commander. No flinching, no grumbling, every discomfort taken as a
jest, no thought of self, each working only for the success of the
enterprise. When you have read of such privations so endured and so
chronicled, it makes one ashamed to show emotion over the small
annoyances of daily life. Read of Scott’s blinded, scurvy-struck party
staggering on to their goal, and then complain, if you can, of the heat
of a northern sun, or the dust of a country road.
That is one of the weaknesses of modern life. We complain too much. We
are not ashamed of complaining. Time was when it was otherwise—when it
was thought effeminate to complain. The Gentleman should always be the
Stoic, with his soul too great to be affected by the small troubles of
life. “You look cold, sir,” said an English sympathizer to a French
_emigré_. The fallen noble drew himself up in his threadbare coat.
“Sir,” said he, “a gentleman is never cold.” One’s consideration for
others as well as one’s own self-respect should check the grumble. This
self-suppression, and also the concealment of pain are two of the old
_noblesse oblige_ characteristics which are now little more than a
tradition. Public opinion should be firmer on the matter. The man who
must hop because his shin is hacked, or wring his hand because his
knuckles are bruised should be made to feel that he is an object not of
pity, but of contempt.
The tradition of Arctic exploration is a noble one among Americans as
well as ourselves. The next book is a case in point. It is Greely’s
“Arctic Service,” and it is a worthy shelf-companion to Scott’s
“Account of the Voyage of the _Discovery_.” There are incidents in this
book which one can never forget. The episode of those twenty-odd men
lying upon that horrible bluff, and dying one a day from cold and
hunger and scurvy, is one which dwarfs all our puny tragedies of
romance. And the gallant starving leader giving lectures on abstract
science in an attempt to take the thoughts of the dying men away from
their sufferings—what a picture! It is bad to suffer from cold and bad
to suffer from hunger, and bad to live in the dark; but that men could
do all these things for six months on end, and that some should live to
tell the tale, is, indeed, a marvel. What a world of feeling lies in
the exclamation of the poor dying lieutenant: “Well, this _is_
wretched,” he groaned, as he turned his face to the wall.
The Anglo-Celtic race has always run to individualism, and yet there is
none which is capable of conceiving and carrying out a finer ideal of
discipline. There is nothing in Roman or Grecian annals, not even the
lava-baked sentry at Pompeii, which gives a more sternly fine
object-lesson in duty than the young recruits of the British army who
went down in their ranks on the Birkenhead. And this expedition of
Greely’s gave rise to another example which seems to me hardly less
remarkable. You may remember, if you have read the book, that even when
there were only about eight unfortunates still left, hardly able to
move for weakness and hunger, the seven took the odd man out upon the
ice, and shot him dead for breach of discipline. The whole grim
proceeding was carried out with as much method and signing of papers,
as if they were all within sight of the Capitol at Washington. His
offence had consisted, so far as I can remember, of stealing and eating
the thong which bound two portions of the sledge together, something
about as appetizing as a bootlace. It is only fair to the commander to
say, however, that it was one of a series of petty thefts, and that the
thong of a sledge might mean life or death to the whole party.
Personally I must confess that anything bearing upon the Arctic Seas is
always of the deepest interest to me. He who has once been within the
borders of that mysterious region, which can be both the most lovely
and the most repellent upon earth, must always retain something of its
glamour. Standing on the confines of known geography I have shot the
southward flying ducks, and have taken from their gizzards pebbles
which they have swallowed in some land whose shores no human foot has
trod. The memory of that inexpressible air, of the great ice-girt lakes
of deep blue water, of the cloudless sky shading away into a light
green and then into a cold yellow at the horizon, of the noisy
companionable birds, of the huge, greasy-backed water animals, of the
slug-like seals, startlingly black against the dazzling whiteness of
the ice—all of it will come back to a man in his dreams, and will seem
little more than some fantastic dream itself, so removed is it from the
main stream of his life. And then to play a fish a hundred tons in
weight, and worth two thousand pounds—but what in the world has all
this to do with my bookcase?
Yet it has its place in my main line of thought, for it leads me
straight to the very next upon the shelf, Bullen’s “Cruise of the
_Cachelot_,” a book which is full of the glamour and the mystery of the
sea, marred only by the brutality of those who go down to it in ships.
This is the sperm-whale fishing, an open-sea affair, and very different
from that Greenland ice groping in which I served a seven-months’
apprenticeship. Both, I fear, are things of the past—certainly the
northern fishing is so, for why should men risk their lives to get oil
when one has but to sink a pipe in the ground. It is the more fortunate
then that it should have been handled by one of the most virile writers
who has described a sailor’s life. Bullen’s English at its best rises
to a great height. If I wished to show how high, I would take that next
book down, “Sea Idylls.”
How is this, for example, if you have an ear for the music of prose? It
is a simple paragraph out of the magnificent description of a long calm
in the tropics.
“A change, unusual as unwholesome, came over the bright blue of the
sea. No longer did it reflect, as in a limpid mirror, the splendour of
the sun, the sweet silvery glow of the moon, or the coruscating
clusters of countless stars. Like the ashen-grey hue that bedims the
countenance of the dying, a filmy greasy skin appeared to overspread
the recent loveliness of the ocean surface. The sea was sick, stagnant,
and foul, from its turbid waters arose a miasmatic vapour like a breath
of decay, which clung clammily to the palate and dulled all the senses.
Drawn by some strange force, from the unfathomable depths below, eerie
shapes sought the surface, blinking glassily at the unfamiliar glare
they had exchanged for their native gloom—uncouth creatures bedight
with tasselled fringes like weed-growths waving around them,
fathom-long, medusae with coloured spots like eyes clustering all over
their transparent substance, wriggling worm-like forms of such elusive
matter that the smallest exposure to the sun melted them, and they were
not. Lower down, vast pale shadows creep sluggishly along, happily
undistinguishable as yet, but adding a half-familiar flavour to the
strange, faint smell that hung about us.”
Take the whole of that essay which describes a calm in the Tropics, or
take the other one: “Sunrise as seen from the Crow’s-nest,” and you
must admit that there have been few finer pieces of descriptive English
in our time. If I had to choose a sea library of only a dozen volumes I
should certainly give Bullen two places. The others? Well, it is so
much a matter of individual taste. “Tom Cringle’s Log” should have one
for certain. I hope boys respond now as they once did to the sharks and
the pirates, the planters, and all the rollicking high spirits of that
splendid book. Then there is Dana’s “Two Years before the Mast.” I
should find room also for Stevenson’s “Wrecker” and “Ebb Tide.” Clark
Russell deserves a whole shelf for himself, but anyhow you could not
miss out “The Wreck of the _Grosvenor_.” Marryat, of course, must be
represented, and I should pick “Midshipman Easy” and “Peter Simple” as
his samples. Then throw in one of Melville’s Otaheite books—now far too
completely forgotten—“Typee” or “Omoo,” and as a quite modern flavour
Kipling’s “Captains Courageous” and Jack London’s “Sea Wolf,” with
Conrad’s “Nigger of the Narcissus.” Then you will have enough to turn
your study into a cabin and bring the wash and surge to your ears, if
written words can do it. Oh, how one longs for it sometimes when life
grows too artificial, and the old Viking blood begins to stir! Surely
it must linger in all of us, for no man who dwells in an island but had
an ancestor in longship or in coracle. Still more must the salt drop
tingle in the blood of an American when you reflect that in all that
broad continent there is not one whose forefather did not cross 3000
miles of ocean. And yet there are in the Central States millions and
millions of their descendants who have never seen the sea.
I have said that “Omoo” and “Typee,” the books in which the sailor
Melville describes his life among the Otaheitans, have sunk too rapidly
into obscurity. What a charming and interesting task there is for some
critic of catholic tastes and sympathetic judgment to undertake rescue
work among the lost books which would repay salvage! A small volume
setting forth their names and their claims to attention would be
interesting in itself, and more interesting in the material to which it
would serve as an introduction. I am sure there are many good books,
possibly there are some great ones, which have been swept away for a
time in the rush. What chance, for example, has any book by an unknown
author which is published at a moment of great national excitement,
when some public crisis arrests the popular mind? Hundreds have been
still-born in this fashion, and are there none which should have lived
among them? Now, there is a book, a modern one, and written by a youth
under thirty. It is Snaith’s “Broke of Covenden,” and it scarce
attained a second edition. I do not say that it is a Classic—I should
not like to be positive that it is not—but I am perfectly sure that the
man who wrote it has the possibility of a Classic within him. Here is
another novel—“Eight Days,” by Forrest. You can’t buy it. You are lucky
even if you can find it in a library. Yet nothing ever written will
bring the Indian Mutiny home to you as this book will do. Here’s
another which I will warrant you never heard of. It is Powell’s “Animal
Episodes.” No, it is not a collection of dog-and-cat anecdotes, but it
is a series of very singularly told stories which deal with the animal
side of the human, and which you will feel have an entirely new flavour
if you have a discriminating palate. The book came out ten years ago,
and is utterly unknown. If I can point to three in one small shelf, how
many lost lights must be flitting in the outer darkness!
Let me hark back for a moment to the subject with which I began, the
romance of travel and the frequent heroism of modern life. I have two
books of Scientific Exploration here which exhibit both these qualities
as strongly as any I know. I could not choose two better books to put
into a young man’s hands if you wished to train him first in a gentle
and noble firmness of mind, and secondly in a great love for and
interest in all that pertains to Nature. The one is Darwin’s “Journal
of the Voyage of the _Beagle_.” Any discerning eye must have detected
long before the “Origin of Species” appeared, simply on the strength of
this book of travel, that a brain of the first order, united with many
rare qualities of character, had arisen. Never was there a more
comprehensive mind. Nothing was too small and nothing too great for its
alert observation. One page is occupied in the analysis of some
peculiarity in the web of a minute spider, while the next deals with
the evidence for the subsidence of a continent and the extinction of a
myriad animals. And his sweep of knowledge was so great—botany,
geology, zoology, each lending its corroborative aid to the other. How
a youth of Darwin’s age—he was only twenty-three when in the year 1831
he started round the world on the surveying ship _Beagle_—could have
acquired such a mass of information fills one with the same wonder, and
is perhaps of the same nature, as the boy musician who exhibits by
instinct the touch of the master. Another quality which one would be
less disposed to look for in the savant is a fine contempt for danger,
which is veiled in such modesty that one reads between the lines in
order to detect it. When he was in the Argentine, the country outside
the Settlements was covered with roving bands of horse Indians, who
gave no quarter to any whites. Yet Darwin rode the four hundred miles
between Bahia and Buenos Ayres, when even the hardy Gauchos refused to
accompany him. Personal danger and a hideous death were small things to
him compared to a new beetle or an undescribed fly.
The second book to which I alluded is Wallace’s “Malay Archipelago.”
There is a strange similarity in the minds of the two men, the same
courage, both moral and physical, the same gentle persistence, the same
catholic knowledge and wide. sweep of mind, the same passion for the
observation of Nature. Wallace by a flash of intuition understood and
described in a letter to Darwin the cause of the Origin of Species at
the very time when the latter was publishing a book founded upon twenty
years’ labour to prove the same thesis. What must have been his
feelings when he read that letter? And yet he had nothing to fear, for
his book found no more enthusiastic admirer than the man who had in a
sense anticipated it. Here also one sees that Science has its heroes no
less than Religion. One of Wallace’s missions in Papua was to examine
the nature and species of the Birds-of-Paradise; but in the course of
the years of his wanderings through those islands he made a complete
investigation of the whole fauna. A footnote somewhere explains that
the Papuans who lived in the Bird-of-Paradise country were confirmed
cannibals. Fancy living for years with or near such neighbours! Let a
young fellow read these two books, and he cannot fail to have both his
mind and his spirit strengthened by the reading.