THE PASSAGE OUT
WE all dined together that day; and a rather formidable party we were: no
fewer than eighty-six strong. The vessel being pretty deep in the water,
with all her coals on board and so many passengers, and the weather being
calm and quiet, there was but little motion; so that before the dinner
was half over, even those passengers who were most distrustful of
themselves plucked up amazingly; and those who in the morning had
returned to the universal question, ‘Are you a good sailor?’ a very
decided negative, now either parried the inquiry with the evasive reply,
‘Oh! I suppose I’m no worse than anybody else;’ or, reckless of all moral
obligations, answered boldly ‘Yes:’ and with some irritation too, as
though they would add, ‘I should like to know what you see in _me_, sir,
particularly, to justify suspicion!’
Notwithstanding this high tone of courage and confidence, I could not but
observe that very few remained long over their wine; and that everybody
had an unusual love of the open air; and that the favourite and most
coveted seats were invariably those nearest to the door. The tea-table,
too, was by no means as well attended as the dinner-table; and there was
less whist-playing than might have been expected. Still, with the
exception of one lady, who had retired with some precipitation at
dinner-time, immediately after being assisted to the finest cut of a very
yellow boiled leg of mutton with very green capers, there were no
invalids as yet; and walking, and smoking, and drinking of
brandy-and-water (but always in the open air), went on with unabated
spirit, until eleven o’clock or thereabouts, when ‘turning in’—no sailor
of seven hours’ experience talks of going to bed—became the order of the
night. The perpetual tramp of boot-heels on the decks gave place to a
heavy silence, and the whole human freight was stowed away below,
excepting a very few stragglers, like myself, who were probably, like me,
afraid to go there.
To one unaccustomed to such scenes, this is a very striking time on
shipboard. Afterwards, and when its novelty had long worn off, it never
ceased to have a peculiar interest and charm for me. The gloom through
which the great black mass holds its direct and certain course; the
rushing water, plainly heard, but dimly seen; the broad, white,
glistening track, that follows in the vessel’s wake; the men on the
look-out forward, who would be scarcely visible against the dark sky, but
for their blotting out some score of glistening stars; the helmsman at
the wheel, with the illuminated card before him, shining, a speck of
light amidst the darkness, like something sentient and of Divine
intelligence; the melancholy sighing of the wind through block, and rope,
and chain; the gleaming forth of light from every crevice, nook, and tiny
piece of glass about the decks, as though the ship were filled with fire
in hiding, ready to burst through any outlet, wild with its resistless
power of death and ruin. At first, too, and even when the hour, and all
the objects it exalts, have come to be familiar, it is difficult, alone
and thoughtful, to hold them to their proper shapes and forms. They
change with the wandering fancy; assume the semblance of things left far
away; put on the well-remembered aspect of favourite places dearly loved;
and even people them with shadows. Streets, houses, rooms; figures so
like their usual occupants, that they have startled me by their reality,
which far exceeded, as it seemed to me, all power of mine to conjure up
the absent; have, many and many a time, at such an hour, grown suddenly
out of objects with whose real look, and use, and purpose, I was as well
acquainted as with my own two hands.
My own two hands, and feet likewise, being very cold, however, on this
particular occasion, I crept below at midnight. It was not exactly
comfortable below. It was decidedly close; and it was impossible to be
unconscious of the presence of that extraordinary compound of strange
smells, which is to be found nowhere but on board ship, and which is such
a subtle perfume that it seems to enter at every pore of the skin, and
whisper of the hold. Two passengers’ wives (one of them my own) lay
already in silent agonies on the sofa; and one lady’s maid (_my_ lady’s)
was a mere bundle on the floor, execrating her destiny, and pounding her
curl-papers among the stray boxes. Everything sloped the wrong way:
which in itself was an aggravation scarcely to be borne. I had left the
door open, a moment before, in the bosom of a gentle declivity, and, when
I turned to shut it, it was on the summit of a lofty eminence. Now every
plank and timber creaked, as if the ship were made of wicker-work; and
now crackled, like an enormous fire of the driest possible twigs. There
was nothing for it but bed; so I went to bed.
It was pretty much the same for the next two days, with a tolerably fair
wind and dry weather. I read in bed (but to this hour I don’t know what)
a good deal; and reeled on deck a little; drank cold brandy-and-water
with an unspeakable disgust, and ate hard biscuit perseveringly: not ill,
but going to be.
It is the third morning. I am awakened out of my sleep by a dismal
shriek from my wife, who demands to know whether there’s any danger. I
rouse myself, and look out of bed. The water-jug is plunging and leaping
like a lively dolphin; all the smaller articles are afloat, except my
shoes, which are stranded on a carpet-bag, high and dry, like a couple of
coal-barges. Suddenly I see them spring into the air, and behold the
looking-glass, which is nailed to the wall, sticking fast upon the
ceiling. At the same time the door entirely disappears, and a new one is
opened in the floor. Then I begin to comprehend that the state-room is
standing on its head.
Before it is possible to make any arrangement at all compatible with this
novel state of things, the ship rights. Before one can say ‘Thank
Heaven!’ she wrongs again. Before one can cry she _is_ wrong, she seems
to have started forward, and to be a creature actually running of its own
accord, with broken knees and failing legs, through every variety of hole
and pitfall, and stumbling constantly. Before one can so much as wonder,
she takes a high leap into the air. Before she has well done that, she
takes a deep dive into the water. Before she has gained the surface, she
throws a summerset. The instant she is on her legs, she rushes backward.
And so she goes on staggering, heaving, wrestling, leaping, diving,
jumping, pitching, throbbing, rolling, and rocking: and going through all
these movements, sometimes by turns, and sometimes altogether: until one
feels disposed to roar for mercy.
A steward passes. ‘Steward!’ ‘Sir?’ ‘What _is_ the matter? what _do_
you call this?’ ‘Rather a heavy sea on, sir, and a head-wind.’
A head-wind! Imagine a human face upon the vessel’s prow, with fifteen
thousand Samsons in one bent upon driving her back, and hitting her
exactly between the eyes whenever she attempts to advance an inch.
Imagine the ship herself, with every pulse and artery of her huge body
swollen and bursting under this maltreatment, sworn to go on or die.
Imagine the wind howling, the sea roaring, the rain beating: all in
furious array against her. Picture the sky both dark and wild, and the
clouds, in fearful sympathy with the waves, making another ocean in the
air. Add to all this, the clattering on deck and down below; the tread
of hurried feet; the loud hoarse shouts of seamen; the gurgling in and
out of water through the scuppers; with, every now and then, the striking
of a heavy sea upon the planks above, with the deep, dead, heavy sound of
thunder heard within a vault;—and there is the head-wind of that January
morning.
I say nothing of what may be called the domestic noises of the ship: such
as the breaking of glass and crockery, the tumbling down of stewards, the
gambols, overhead, of loose casks and truant dozens of bottled porter,
and the very remarkable and far from exhilarating sounds raised in their
various state-rooms by the seventy passengers who were too ill to get up
to breakfast. I say nothing of them: for although I lay listening to
this concert for three or four days, I don’t think I heard it for more
than a quarter of a minute, at the expiration of which term, I lay down
again, excessively sea-sick.
Not sea-sick, be it understood, in the ordinary acceptation of the term:
I wish I had been: but in a form which I have never seen or heard
described, though I have no doubt it is very common. I lay there, all
the day long, quite coolly and contentedly; with no sense of weariness,
with no desire to get up, or get better, or take the air; with no
curiosity, or care, or regret, of any sort or degree, saving that I think
I can remember, in this universal indifference, having a kind of lazy
joy—of fiendish delight, if anything so lethargic can be dignified with
the title—in the fact of my wife being too ill to talk to me. If I may
be allowed to illustrate my state of mind by such an example, I should
say that I was exactly in the condition of the elder Mr. Willet, after
the incursion of the rioters into his bar at Chigwell. Nothing would
have surprised me. If, in the momentary illumination of any ray of
intelligence that may have come upon me in the way of thoughts of Home, a
goblin postman, with a scarlet coat and bell, had come into that little
kennel before me, broad awake in broad day, and, apologising for being
damp through walking in the sea, had handed me a letter directed to
myself, in familiar characters, I am certain I should not have felt one
atom of astonishment: I should have been perfectly satisfied. If Neptune
himself had walked in, with a toasted shark on his trident, I should have
looked upon the event as one of the very commonest everyday occurrences.
Once—once—I found myself on deck. I don’t know how I got there, or what
possessed me to go there, but there I was; and completely dressed too,
with a huge pea-coat on, and a pair of boots such as no weak man in his
senses could ever have got into. I found myself standing, when a gleam
of consciousness came upon me, holding on to something. I don’t know
what. I think it was the boatswain: or it may have been the pump: or
possibly the cow. I can’t say how long I had been there; whether a day
or a minute. I recollect trying to think about something (about anything
in the whole wide world, I was not particular) without the smallest
effect. I could not even make out which was the sea, and which the sky,
for the horizon seemed drunk, and was flying wildly about in all
directions. Even in that incapable state, however, I recognised the lazy
gentleman standing before me: nautically clad in a suit of shaggy blue,
with an oilskin hat. But I was too imbecile, although I knew it to be
he, to separate him from his dress; and tried to call him, I remember,
_Pilot_. After another interval of total unconsciousness, I found he had
gone, and recognised another figure in its place. It seemed to wave and
fluctuate before me as though I saw it reflected in an unsteady
looking-glass; but I knew it for the captain; and such was the cheerful
influence of his face, that I tried to smile: yes, even then I tried to
smile. I saw by his gestures that he addressed me; but it was a long
time before I could make out that he remonstrated against my standing up
to my knees in water—as I was; of course I don’t know why. I tried to
thank him, but couldn’t. I could only point to my boots—or wherever I
supposed my boots to be—and say in a plaintive voice, ‘Cork soles:’ at
the same time endeavouring, I am told, to sit down in the pool. Finding
that I was quite insensible, and for the time a maniac, he humanely
conducted me below.
There I remained until I got better: suffering, whenever I was
recommended to eat anything, an amount of anguish only second to that
which is said to be endured by the apparently drowned, in the process of
restoration to life. One gentleman on board had a letter of introduction
to me from a mutual friend in London. He sent it below with his card, on
the morning of the head-wind; and I was long troubled with the idea that
he might be up, and well, and a hundred times a day expecting me to call
upon him in the saloon. I imagined him one of those cast-iron images—I
will not call them men—who ask, with red faces, and lusty voices, what
sea-sickness means, and whether it really is as bad as it is represented
to be. This was very torturing indeed; and I don’t think I ever felt
such perfect gratification and gratitude of heart, as I did when I heard
from the ship’s doctor that he had been obliged to put a large mustard
poultice on this very gentleman’s stomach. I date my recovery from the
receipt of that intelligence.
It was materially assisted though, I have no doubt, by a heavy gale of
wind, which came slowly up at sunset, when we were about ten days out,
and raged with gradually increasing fury until morning, saving that it
lulled for an hour a little before midnight. There was something in the
unnatural repose of that hour, and in the after gathering of the storm,
so inconceivably awful and tremendous, that its bursting into full
violence was almost a relief.
The labouring of the ship in the troubled sea on this night I shall never
forget. ‘Will it ever be worse than this?’ was a question I had often
heard asked, when everything was sliding and bumping about, and when it
certainly did seem difficult to comprehend the possibility of anything
afloat being more disturbed, without toppling over and going down. But
what the agitation of a steam-vessel is, on a bad winter’s night in the
wild Atlantic, it is impossible for the most vivid imagination to
conceive. To say that she is flung down on her side in the waves, with
her masts dipping into them, and that, springing up again, she rolls over
on the other side, until a heavy sea strikes her with the noise of a
hundred great guns, and hurls her back—that she stops, and staggers, and
shivers, as though stunned, and then, with a violent throbbing at her
heart, darts onward like a monster goaded into madness, to be beaten
down, and battered, and crushed, and leaped on by the angry sea—that
thunder, lightning, hail, and rain, and wind, are all in fierce
contention for the mastery—that every plank has its groan, every nail its
shriek, and every drop of water in the great ocean its howling voice—is
nothing. To say that all is grand, and all appalling and horrible in the
last degree, is nothing. Words cannot express it. Thoughts cannot
convey it. Only a dream can call it up again, in all its fury, rage, and
passion.
And yet, in the very midst of these terrors, I was placed in a situation
so exquisitely ridiculous, that even then I had as strong a sense of its
absurdity as I have now, and could no more help laughing than I can at
any other comical incident, happening under circumstances the most
favourable to its enjoyment. About midnight we shipped a sea, which
forced its way through the skylights, burst open the doors above, and
came raging and roaring down into the ladies’ cabin, to the unspeakable
consternation of my wife and a little Scotch lady—who, by the way, had
previously sent a message to the captain by the stewardess, requesting
him, with her compliments, to have a steel conductor immediately attached
to the top of every mast, and to the chimney, in order that the ship
might not be struck by lightning. They and the handmaid before
mentioned, being in such ecstasies of fear that I scarcely knew what to
do with them, I naturally bethought myself of some restorative or
comfortable cordial; and nothing better occurring to me, at the moment,
than hot brandy-and-water, I procured a tumbler full without delay. It
being impossible to stand or sit without holding on, they were all heaped
together in one corner of a long sofa—a fixture extending entirely across
the cabin—where they clung to each other in momentary expectation of
being drowned. When I approached this place with my specific, and was
about to administer it with many consolatory expressions to the nearest
sufferer, what was my dismay to see them all roll slowly down to the
other end! And when I staggered to that end, and held out the glass once
more, how immensely baffled were my good intentions by the ship giving
another lurch, and their all rolling back again! I suppose I dodged them
up and down this sofa for at least a quarter of an hour, without reaching
them once; and by the time I did catch them, the brandy-and-water was
diminished, by constant spilling, to a teaspoonful. To complete the
group, it is necessary to recognise in this disconcerted dodger, an
individual very pale from sea-sickness, who had shaved his beard and
brushed his hair, last, at Liverpool: and whose only article of dress
(linen not included) were a pair of dreadnought trousers; a blue jacket,
formerly admired upon the Thames at Richmond; no stockings; and one
slipper.
Of the outrageous antics performed by that ship next morning; which made
bed a practical joke, and getting up, by any process short of falling
out, an impossibility; I say nothing. But anything like the utter
dreariness and desolation that met my eyes when I literally ‘tumbled up’
on deck at noon, I never saw. Ocean and sky were all of one dull, heavy,
uniform, lead colour. There was no extent of prospect even over the
dreary waste that lay around us, for the sea ran high, and the horizon
encompassed us like a large black hoop. Viewed from the air, or some
tall bluff on shore, it would have been imposing and stupendous, no
doubt; but seen from the wet and rolling decks, it only impressed one
giddily and painfully. In the gale of last night the life-boat had been
crushed by one blow of the sea like a walnut-shell; and there it hung
dangling in the air: a mere faggot of crazy boards. The planking of the
paddle-boxes had been torn sheer away. The wheels were exposed and bare;
and they whirled and dashed their spray about the decks at random.
Chimney, white with crusted salt; topmasts struck; storm-sails set;
rigging all knotted, tangled, wet, and drooping: a gloomier picture it
would be hard to look upon.
I was now comfortably established by courtesy in the ladies’ cabin,
where, besides ourselves, there were only four other passengers. First,
the little Scotch lady before mentioned, on her way to join her husband
at New York, who had settled there three years before. Secondly and
thirdly, an honest young Yorkshireman, connected with some American
house; domiciled in that same city, and carrying thither his beautiful
young wife to whom he had been married but a fortnight, and who was the
fairest specimen of a comely English country girl I have ever seen.
Fourthly, fifthly, and lastly, another couple: newly married too, if one
might judge from the endearments they frequently interchanged: of whom I
know no more than that they were rather a mysterious, run-away kind of
couple; that the lady had great personal attractions also; and that the
gentleman carried more guns with him than Robinson Crusoe, wore a
shooting-coat, and had two great dogs on board. On further
consideration, I remember that he tried hot roast pig and bottled ale as
a cure for sea-sickness; and that he took these remedies (usually in bed)
day after day, with astonishing perseverance. I may add, for the
information of the curious, that they decidedly failed.
The weather continuing obstinately and almost unprecedentedly bad, we
usually straggled into this cabin, more or less faint and miserable,
about an hour before noon, and lay down on the sofas to recover; during
which interval, the captain would look in to communicate the state of the
wind, the moral certainty of its changing to-morrow (the weather is
always going to improve to-morrow, at sea), the vessel’s rate of sailing,
and so forth. Observations there were none to tell us of, for there was
no sun to take them by. But a description of one day will serve for all
the rest. Here it is.
The captain being gone, we compose ourselves to read, if the place be
light enough; and if not, we doze and talk alternately. At one, a bell
rings, and the stewardess comes down with a steaming dish of baked
potatoes, and another of roasted apples; and plates of pig’s face, cold
ham, salt beef; or perhaps a smoking mess of rare hot collops. We fall
to upon these dainties; eat as much as we can (we have great appetites
now); and are as long as possible about it. If the fire will burn (it
_will_ sometimes) we are pretty cheerful. If it won’t, we all remark to
each other that it’s very cold, rub our hands, cover ourselves with coats
and cloaks, and lie down again to doze, talk, and read (provided as
aforesaid), until dinner-time. At five, another bell rings, and the
stewardess reappears with another dish of potatoes—boiled this time—and
store of hot meat of various kinds: not forgetting the roast pig, to be
taken medicinally. We sit down at table again (rather more cheerfully
than before); prolong the meal with a rather mouldy dessert of apples,
grapes, and oranges; and drink our wine and brandy-and-water. The
bottles and glasses are still upon the table, and the oranges and so
forth are rolling about according to their fancy and the ship’s way, when
the doctor comes down, by special nightly invitation, to join our evening
rubber: immediately on whose arrival we make a party at whist, and as it
is a rough night and the cards will not lie on the cloth, we put the
tricks in our pockets as we take them. At whist we remain with exemplary
gravity (deducting a short time for tea and toast) until eleven o’clock,
or thereabouts; when the captain comes down again, in a sou’-wester hat
tied under his chin, and a pilot-coat: making the ground wet where he
stands. By this time the card-playing is over, and the bottles and
glasses are again upon the table; and after an hour’s pleasant
conversation about the ship, the passengers, and things in general, the
captain (who never goes to bed, and is never out of humour) turns up his
coat collar for the deck again; shakes hands all round; and goes laughing
out into the weather as merrily as to a birthday party.
As to daily news, there is no dearth of that commodity. This passenger
is reported to have lost fourteen pounds at Vingt-et-un in the saloon
yesterday; and that passenger drinks his bottle of champagne every day,
and how he does it (being only a clerk), nobody knows. The head engineer
has distinctly said that there never was such times—meaning weather—and
four good hands are ill, and have given in, dead beat. Several berths
are full of water, and all the cabins are leaky. The ship’s cook,
secretly swigging damaged whiskey, has been found drunk; and has been
played upon by the fire-engine until quite sober. All the stewards have
fallen down-stairs at various dinner-times, and go about with plasters in
various places. The baker is ill, and so is the pastry-cook. A new man,
horribly indisposed, has been required to fill the place of the latter
officer; and has been propped and jammed up with empty casks in a little
house upon deck, and commanded to roll out pie-crust, which he protests
(being highly bilious) it is death to him to look at. News! A dozen
murders on shore would lack the interest of these slight incidents at
sea.
Divided between our rubber and such topics as these, we were running (as
we thought) into Halifax Harbour, on the fifteenth night, with little
wind and a bright moon—indeed, we had made the Light at its outer
entrance, and put the pilot in charge—when suddenly the ship struck upon
a bank of mud. An immediate rush on deck took place of course; the sides
were crowded in an instant; and for a few minutes we were in as lively a
state of confusion as the greatest lover of disorder would desire to see.
The passengers, and guns, and water-casks, and other heavy matters, being
all huddled together aft, however, to lighten her in the head, she was
soon got off; and after some driving on towards an uncomfortable line of
objects (whose vicinity had been announced very early in the disaster by
a loud cry of ‘Breakers a-head!’) and much backing of paddles, and
heaving of the lead into a constantly decreasing depth of water, we
dropped anchor in a strange outlandish-looking nook which nobody on board
could recognise, although there was land all about us, and so close that
we could plainly see the waving branches of the trees.
It was strange enough, in the silence of midnight, and the dead stillness
that seemed to be created by the sudden and unexpected stoppage of the
engine which had been clanking and blasting in our ears incessantly for
so many days, to watch the look of blank astonishment expressed in every
face: beginning with the officers, tracing it through all the passengers,
and descending to the very stokers and furnacemen, who emerged from
below, one by one, and clustered together in a smoky group about the
hatchway of the engine-room, comparing notes in whispers. After throwing
up a few rockets and firing signal guns in the hope of being hailed from
the land, or at least of seeing a light—but without any other sight or
sound presenting itself—it was determined to send a boat on shore. It
was amusing to observe how very kind some of the passengers were, in
volunteering to go ashore in this same boat: for the general good, of
course: not by any means because they thought the ship in an unsafe
position, or contemplated the possibility of her heeling over in case the
tide were running out. Nor was it less amusing to remark how desperately
unpopular the poor pilot became in one short minute. He had had his
passage out from Liverpool, and during the whole voyage had been quite a
notorious character, as a teller of anecdotes and cracker of jokes. Yet
here were the very men who had laughed the loudest at his jests, now
flourishing their fists in his face, loading him with imprecations, and
defying him to his teeth as a villain!
The boat soon shoved off, with a lantern and sundry blue lights on board;
and in less than an hour returned; the officer in command bringing with
him a tolerably tall young tree, which he had plucked up by the roots, to
satisfy certain distrustful passengers whose minds misgave them that they
were to be imposed upon and shipwrecked, and who would on no other terms
believe that he had been ashore, or had done anything but fraudulently
row a little way into the mist, specially to deceive them and compass
their deaths. Our captain had foreseen from the first that we must be in
a place called the Eastern passage; and so we were. It was about the
last place in the world in which we had any business or reason to be, but
a sudden fog, and some error on the pilot’s part, were the cause. We
were surrounded by banks, and rocks, and shoals of all kinds, but had
happily drifted, it seemed, upon the only safe speck that was to be found
thereabouts. Eased by this report, and by the assurance that the tide
was past the ebb, we turned in at three o’clock in the morning.
I was dressing about half-past nine next day, when the noise above
hurried me on deck. When I had left it overnight, it was dark, foggy,
and damp, and there were bleak hills all round us. Now, we were gliding
down a smooth, broad stream, at the rate of eleven miles an hour: our
colours flying gaily; our crew rigged out in their smartest clothes; our
officers in uniform again; the sun shining as on a brilliant April day in
England; the land stretched out on either side, streaked with light
patches of snow; white wooden houses; people at their doors; telegraphs
working; flags hoisted; wharfs appearing; ships; quays crowded with
people; distant noises; shouts; men and boys running down steep places
towards the pier: all more bright and gay and fresh to our unused eyes
than words can paint them. We came to a wharf, paved with uplifted
faces; got alongside, and were made fast, after some shouting and
straining of cables; darted, a score of us along the gangway, almost as
soon as it was thrust out to meet us, and before it had reached the
ship—and leaped upon the firm glad earth again!
I suppose this Halifax would have appeared an Elysium, though it had been
a curiosity of ugly dulness. But I carried away with me a most pleasant
impression of the town and its inhabitants, and have preserved it to this
hour. Nor was it without regret that I came home, without having found
an opportunity of returning thither, and once more shaking hands with the
friends I made that day.
It happened to be the opening of the Legislative Council and General
Assembly, at which ceremonial the forms observed on the commencement of a
new Session of Parliament in England were so closely copied, and so
gravely presented on a small scale, that it was like looking at
Westminster through the wrong end of a telescope. The governor, as her
Majesty’s representative, delivered what may be called the Speech from
the Throne. He said what he had to say manfully and well. The military
band outside the building struck up “God save the Queen” with great
vigour before his Excellency had quite finished; the people shouted; the
in’s rubbed their hands; the out’s shook their heads; the Government
party said there never was such a good speech; the Opposition declared
there never was such a bad one; the Speaker and members of the House of
Assembly withdrew from the bar to say a great deal among themselves and
do a little: and, in short, everything went on, and promised to go on,
just as it does at home upon the like occasions.
The town is built on the side of a hill, the highest point being
commanded by a strong fortress, not yet quite finished. Several streets
of good breadth and appearance extend from its summit to the water-side,
and are intersected by cross streets running parallel with the river.
The houses are chiefly of wood. The market is abundantly supplied; and
provisions are exceedingly cheap. The weather being unusually mild at
that time for the season of the year, there was no sleighing: but there
were plenty of those vehicles in yards and by-places, and some of them,
from the gorgeous quality of their decorations, might have ‘gone on’
without alteration as triumphal cars in a melodrama at Astley’s. The day
was uncommonly fine; the air bracing and healthful; the whole aspect of
the town cheerful, thriving, and industrious.
We lay there seven hours, to deliver and exchange the mails. At length,
having collected all our bags and all our passengers (including two or
three choice spirits, who, having indulged too freely in oysters and
champagne, were found lying insensible on their backs in unfrequented
streets), the engines were again put in motion, and we stood off for
Boston.
Encountering squally weather again in the Bay of Fundy, we tumbled and
rolled about as usual all that night and all next day. On the next
afternoon, that is to say, on Saturday, the twenty-second of January, an
American pilot-boat came alongside, and soon afterwards the Britannia
steam-packet, from Liverpool, eighteen days out, was telegraphed at
Boston.
The indescribable interest with which I strained my eyes, as the first
patches of American soil peeped like molehills from the green sea, and
followed them, as they swelled, by slow and almost imperceptible degrees,
into a continuous line of coast, can hardly be exaggerated. A sharp keen
wind blew dead against us; a hard frost prevailed on shore; and the cold
was most severe. Yet the air was so intensely clear, and dry, and
bright, that the temperature was not only endurable, but delicious.
How I remained on deck, staring about me, until we came alongside the
dock, and how, though I had had as many eyes as Argus, I should have had
them all wide open, and all employed on new objects—are topics which I
will not prolong this chapter to discuss. Neither will I more than hint
at my foreigner-like mistake in supposing that a party of most active
persons, who scrambled on board at the peril of their lives as we
approached the wharf, were newsmen, answering to that industrious class
at home; whereas, despite the leathern wallets of news slung about the
necks of some, and the broad sheets in the hands of all, they were
Editors, who boarded ships in person (as one gentleman in a worsted
comforter informed me), ‘because they liked the excitement of it.’
Suffice it in this place to say, that one of these invaders, with a ready
courtesy for which I thank him here most gratefully, went on before to
order rooms at the hotel; and that when I followed, as I soon did, I
found myself rolling through the long passages with an involuntary
imitation of the gait of Mr. T. P. Cooke, in a new nautical melodrama.
‘Dinner, if you please,’ said I to the waiter.
‘When?’ said the waiter.
‘As quick as possible,’ said I.
‘Right away?’ said the waiter.
After a moment’s hesitation, I answered ‘No,’ at hazard.
‘_Not_ right away?’ cried the waiter, with an amount of surprise that
made me start.
I looked at him doubtfully, and returned, ‘No; I would rather have it in
this private room. I like it very much.’
At this, I really thought the waiter must have gone out of his mind: as I
believe he would have done, but for the interposition of another man, who
whispered in his ear, ‘Directly.’
‘Well! and that’s a fact!’ said the waiter, looking helplessly at me:
‘Right away.’
I saw now that ‘Right away’ and ‘Directly’ were one and the same thing.
So I reversed my previous answer, and sat down to dinner in ten minutes
afterwards; and a capital dinner it was.
The hotel (a very excellent one) is called the Tremont House. It has
more galleries, colonnades, piazzas, and passages than I can remember, or
the reader would believe.