A tar's headway on land--A gentleman's at sea--An agreeable
trio--Musical sounds--Helmsman--Supper--Steward--A truism--
Helmsman's cry--Effect--Cases for bipeds--Lullaby--Sleep.
The motion was just sufficiently lively to inspirit one--making the
blood frolic through the veins, and the heart beat more proudly. The old
tars, as they cruised about the decks, walked as steadily as on land.
This proves nothing, you may say, if you have witnessed Jack's
pendulating, uncertain--"right and left oblique" advance on a shore
cruise.
Our tyros of the sea, in their venturesome projections of their persons
from one given point in their eye to another, in the hope of
accomplishing a straight line, after vacillating most appallingly, would
finally succeed "haud passibus aequis" in reaching the position aimed
for, fortunate if a lee-lurch did not accommodate them with a dry bed in
the "lee scuppers."
Of all laughter-exciting locomotives which most create sensations of the
ludicrously serious, commend me to an old land-crab teaching its young
one to "go _ahead_"--a drunkard, reeling homeward through a broad street
on a Saturday night--and a "gentleman passenger" three days at sea in
his strange evolutions over the deck.
Stretched before me upon the weather hen-coop, enveloped in his cloak,
lay one of our "goodlie companie." If his sensations were such as I
imagined them to be, he must have felt that the simplest chicken under
him wore the stoutest heart.
On the lee hen-coop reposed another passenger in sympathy with his
fellow, to whose feelings I felt a disposition to do equal justice.
Abaft the wheel, coiled up in the rigging, an agreeable substitute for a
bed of down, lay half obscured within the shadow of the lofty stern,
another overdone toper--a victim of Neptune, not of the "jolly god"--but
whose sensations have been experienced by many of the latter's pupils,
who have never tasted other salt water than their own tears.
It has been said or sung by some one, that the "ear is the road to the
heart." That it was so to the stomach, I already began to feel, could
not be disputed; and as certain "guttural sounds" began to multiply from
various quarters, with startling emphasis, lest I should be induced to
sympathize with the fallen novitiates around me, by some _overt_ act, I
hastily glided by the helmsman, who stood alone like the sole survivor
of a battle-field--his weather-beaten visage illuminated at the moment
with a strange glare from the "binnacle-lamp" which, concealed within a
case like a single-windowed pigeon house, and open in front of him,
burned nightly at his feet. The next moment I was in the cabin, now
lighted up by a single lamp suspended from the centre of the ceiling,
casting rather shade than light upon a small table--studiously arranged
for supper by the steward--that non-descript _locum tenens_ for
valet--waiter--chambermaid--shoe-black--cook's-mate, and swearing-post
for irascible captains to vent stray oaths upon, when the wind is
ahead--with a flying commission for here, there, and nowhere! when most
wanted.
But the supper! ay, the supper. Those for whom the inviting display was
made, were, I am sorry to say it, most unhesitatingly "floored" and
quite _hors du combat_. What a deal of melancholy truth there is in that
aphorism, which teaches us that the "brave must yield to the braver!"
As I stood beside the helmsman, I could feel the gallant vessel
springing away from under me, quivering through every oaken nerve, like
a high-mettled racer with his goal but a bound before him. As she
encountered some more formidable wave, there would be a tremendous
outlay of animal-like energy, a momentary struggle, a half recoil, a
plunging, trembling--_onward_ rush--then a triumphant riding over the
conquered foe, scattering the gems from its shivered crest in glittering
showers over her bows. Then gliding with velocity over the glassy
concave beyond, swaying to its up-lifting impulse with a graceful
inclination of her lofty masts, and almost sweeping the sea with her
yards, she would majestically recover herself in time to gather power
for a fresh victory.
Within an hour after clearing the last head-land, whose lights, level
with the plain of the sea, gleamed afar off, twinkling and lessened like
stars, with which they were almost undistinguishably mingled on the
horizon--we had exchanged the abrupt, irregular "seas" of the bay, for
the regular, majestically rolling billows of the ocean.
I had been for some time pacing the deck, with the "officer of the
watch" to recover my sea-legs, when the helmsman suddenly shouted in a
wild startling cry, heard, mingling with the wind high above the booming
of the sea, the passing hour of the night watch.--"Four bells."--"Four
bells," repeated the only one awake on the forecastle, and the next
moment the ship's bell rung out loud and clear--wildly swelling upon the
gale, then mournfully dying away in the distance as the toll ceased,
like the far-off strains of unearthly music--
"----Died the solemn knell
As a trumpet music dies,
By the night wind borne away
Through the wild and stormy skies."
There is something so awful in the loud voice of a man mingling with the
deep tones of a bell, heard at night upon the sea, that familiar as my
ear was with the sounds--the blood chilled at my heart as this "lonely
watchman's cry" broke suddenly upon the night.
When he again told the hour I was safely stowed away in a comfortable
berth, not so large as that of Goliah of Gath by some cubits, yet
admirably adapted to the sea, which serves most discourteously the
children of Somnus, unless they fit their berths like a modern M. D. his
sulkey, lulled to sleep by the rattling of cordage, the measured tread
of the watch directly over me, the moanings, _et caetera_, of sleepless
neighbours, the roaring of the sea, the howling of the wind, and the
gurgling and surging of the water, as the ship rushed through it,
shaking the waves from her sides, as the lion scatters the dew from his
mane, and the musical rippling of the eddies--like a glassichord,
rapidly run over by light fingers--curling and singing under the keel.