Many a long hour have I spent on the shores of the Round Pond in
Kensington Gardens, watching the tiny fleets there till imagination has
been transported by the charming miniature imagery into the heart of a
horizon capacious enough to hold some scores of Londons with their
metropolitan suburbs. This diversion seems to have delighted the
fastidious and elegant taste of Nathaniel Hawthorne, who, in his
“American Note Books,” speaks of frequent visits to the “Frog Pond”
merely to see the boys sail their ships. “There is a full-rigged
man-of-war,” he says, “with, I believe, every spar, rope, and sail, that
sometimes makes its appearance; and when on a voyage across the pond it
so identically resembles a great ship, except in size, that it has the
effect of a picture. All its motions—its tossing up and down on the
small waves, and its sinking and rising in a calm swell, its heeling to
the breeze—the whole effect, in short, is that of a real ship at sea;
while, moreover, there is something that kindles the imagination more
than the reality would do.” I have a note of another beautiful model
constructed so long ago as 1767. It was a little ship of sixty-four
guns, completely rigged—four inches long! The materials of which it was
composed were gold, silver, steel, brass, copper, ivory, ebony, and
hair. The hull, masts, yards, and booms were of ivory; the guns, blocks,
anchors, and dead-eyes silver; the colours—the Royal Standard, the
Admiralty and union flags, the jack and ensign—were of ivory. The
sixty-four guns weighed fifty grains. The scale was forty feet to one
inch. His Royal Highness the Duke of York was so delighted with its
singular minuteness and the exquisite delicacy of its workmanship, that
he recommended it to the attention of his Majesty, who was graciously
pleased to place it in his cabinet of curiosities. The artist was an
officer in the navy, and I hope the royal admiration was accompanied by
recognition of the sailor’s genius.
Herman Melville, in “Redburn,” speaks of an old-fashioned glass ship,
about eighteen inches long, of French manufacture. “Every bit of it was
glass, and that was a great wonder of itself; because the masts, yards,
and ropes were made to exactly resemble the corresponding parts of a
real vessel that could go to sea. She carried two tiers of black guns
all along her two decks; and often I used to try to peep in at the
portholes to see what else was inside.... Not to speak of the tall masts
and yards and rigging of this famous ship, among whose mazes of spun
glass I used to rove in imagination till I grew dizzy at the main truck,
I will only make mention of the people on board of her. They, too, were
all of glass, as beautiful little glass sailors as anybody ever saw,
with hats and shoes on, just like living men, and curious blue jackets
with a sort of ruffle round the bottom. Four or five of these sailors
were very nimble little chaps, and were mounting up the rigging with
very long strides; but for all that, they never gained a single inch in
the year, as I can take my oath. Another sailor was sitting astride of
the spanker-boom, with his arms over his head, but I never could find
out what that was for; a second was in the foretop with a coil of glass
rigging over his shoulder; the cook with a glass axe was splitting wood
near the fore hatch; the steward in a glass apron was hurrying towards
the cabin with a plate of glass pudding; and a glass dog with a red
mouth was barking at him; whilst the captain in a glass cap was smoking
a glass cigar on the quarter-deck.”
Among strange vessels may be classed fabrics—no matter of what size—of
copper, leather, canvas, cloth, and (for the age) iron. The ancient
Briton’s coracle was the leather boat. This is Rees’ presumption, in his
“Beauties of South Wales,” from the circumstance of the fishermen in
certain Welsh rivers using a corwg, or coracle, “which,” says he, “is
probably coeval with the earliest population of the island.” The form of
the coracle was nearly oval, its length five feet, and its breadth four.
The frame was formed of split rods, plaited like basket-work and covered
with raw hide. It was a portable boat, and its owner carried it on his
back when he wished to convey it to or from his home. How far iron, as a
material for the construction of ships, can be traced back I do not
know. Grantham, a sound authority, gets no further than 1787. I can beat
that record by ten years. In the “Annual Register” for 1777, under the
month of June, I find, “A new pleasure-boat, constructed of sheet-iron,
was lately launched into the river Foss, in Yorkshire. She is twelve
feet long, sailed with fifteen persons, and is so light that two men may
carry her.” Clearly a strange ship to those who beheld her! Twelve years
later another strange craft was sent afloat: “A very curious experiment
was tried—that of proving how far an entire copper vessel would answer
the purpose of sailing. Mr. Williams, a joint proprietor of the great
copper mines, was the projector, and a very numerous party attended the
experiment. It was launched at Deptford, and promises to answer every
purpose for which it was designed. Should it do so entirely it will
prove a very singular advantage to the British navy.” The joint
proprietor’s patriotic scheme apparently bore no fruit. What would the
ship-builder of this day think of copper vessels?
A cheaper experiment in strange craft was adventured in the direction of
cloth. What particular merit this boat had is not stated. It was the
invention of a Frenchman named Desquinemara. The fabric was said to be
impermeable to air and water. All that I can learn of this boat is, the
experiments proved so successful that an account of them was sent to the
class of the Physical and Mathematical Sciences of the Institute, in
order that a decision should be come at as to the useful purposes to
which this novel invention was applicable. After which this cloth boat,
sliding past on Time’s current, slips into blackness and disappears. Of
a strange vessel made of canvas I find a tolerably full account. She was
the invention of a certain Colonel Brown, whose brother, a lieutenant in
the Royal Navy, accompanied by thirty persons, crossed the Thames in
her, and passed through one of the arches of Westminster Bridge, in the
view of many thousands of spectators. She is described as a military
batteau made of prepared canvas, so as to be impervious to water. Her
length was seventeen feet, width five feet, and depth three feet, and
when loaded with thirty people she drew only three inches. She was
capable of carrying one hundred soldiers with arms, accoutrements, and
baggage, fifty of them sitting and fifty lying. She weighed sixty
pounds, and could be taken to pieces and put together again in three
minutes. I do not learn that this strange vessel was ever employed.[63]
Footnote 63:
In “Shipwrecks and Disasters at Sea,” vol. i. (1812), there is
preserved a singular narrative of an escape of some men from captivity
by means of a canvas boat. The title is quaint: “A small monument of
great mercy, in the miraculous deliverance of five persons from
slavery at Algiers, in a canvas boat; with an account of the great
distress and extremities which they endured at sea.” By William
Okeley, 1644.
Another account of a strange craft I find in 1793. This was a vessel
intended to “sail” against wind and tide, and on trial she managed to do
it at the rate of four knots an hour. She was fitted with a pump of a
diameter of two feet, worked by a steam engine, by means of which a
stream of water was driven through the keel. The impetus of the water
forced through the square channel against the exterior water acted as an
impelling power. This idea has been again and again revived, possibly by
some who considered their scheme as surprisingly novel and
revolutionary.
One of the strangest vessels which ever floated was the paddle-wheel
boat of 1472. A sketch of one form of this boat[64] exhibits a
periagua-shaped vessel, sharp at both ends, and fitted with five sets of
paddles fitted to beams, which work in orifices like tholes. A somewhat
similar boat is heard of in 1681, in which year a vessel, fitted with
revolving oars or paddles, distanced the King’s barge, leaving her far
astern, though she was manned by sixteen rowers. An ingenious gentleman,
in the Middle Ages, invented a mode of propulsion by erecting an immense
bellows in the stern of a vessel. He thought that, when the wind
dropped, there was nothing to do but fill his sails with the bellows,
and so blow himself along his course. He hardly foresaw that the bellows
and the sails would act against each other, and leave the ship
motionless; or worse yet, in a calm, give her a small sternway. Jonathan
Hull’s ship of 1736 would also be reckoned by his contemporaries a
strange vessel. She was, indeed, the first steamer that ever blackened
the surface of water with the reflection of the smoke of coal. His
patent was for “a machine for carrying ships and vessels out of or into
any harbour or river against wind and tide, or in a calm.” Hull’s was a
stern-wheel boat, and adaptation of his invention of late years has
familiarized to us an object that would have been viewed with wonder
even a quarter of a century since.
Footnote 64:
Lindsay’s “History of Shipping.”
An illustrated history of shipbuilding would furnish the student with a
series of plates of objects quite as astonishing for variety of shapes
and freaks of taste as anything to be found in pictures in books of
zoology and the physiology of fishes. The summit of perfection in form,
beauty, in an almost spirit-like interpretation of the poetry of the
sea, moulded and embodied by the hand of the shipwright and the rigger,
was reached in some of the frigates afloat at the period of the
introduction of iron. Grace and loveliness are now perpetuated by the
yacht builder. Some of the iron sailing ships are, it must be admitted,
framed with much elegance of judgment. But the vicious obligations of
economy, supplemented by the severe conditions which now enter into
naval arming, have forced us into many hideous forms, and render this
age in the matter of marine taste the heaviest sinner of all the
centuries. The uncouthness of the junk, the clumsiness of the galliot,
the absurd freeboard, crowning poops, square bows, and tower-like rigs
of the ships of olden times are admitted features; but all staring
qualities were sobered by an atmosphere of quaintness, a complexion of
romance, by elements of colour and furniture and apparel, which did
somehow greatly help the imagination into ideal surveys and
considerations. But is there anything to idealize in the leviathan mass
of twelve-inch plates that floats past like a gasworks gone adrift? And
what of poetry may we find in a metal tube that shows nothing above
water but a short polemast and a conning-tower?
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_MYSTERIOUS DISAPPEARANCES._
“Land in your eye!” said the mate, who was looking through the
telescope.—_Two Years Before the Mast._
Something of humour goes to the fancy of a shipmaster homeward bound
with a mind oppressed by the discovery of land that is literally “all in
his eye.” The emotions excited by Samuel Weller’s lantern in the soul of
the scientific gentleman would be trifling compared with the _fine_
triumph of a man who is the first to discover land. Though it be but a
rock—nay, a reef or shoal—is it not a surer hand than that of the
greatest poet for the carrying of one’s name down to the remotest
posterity? What as a memorial so excellent and enduring as a piece of
mother-earth? Every new chart enlarges the bounds of the discoverer’s
fame. Take such a man as Bugsby. In what old black-letter book the life
of him lies pierced through and through by worms I know not. I might
search Limehouse and Poplar and find no oldest inhabitant able to tell
me a word about Bugsby, whether he was a great merchant or a haggard
water-thief, whether he fetched his last breath in Execution Dock, or
died very honestly in a four-poster. Yet so long as the silver Thames
continues to flow, so long (I am afraid) will its translucent
tide—particularly in the neighbourhood of the East India Docks and the
aromatic Isle of Dogs—go on murmuring the elegant name of Bugsby.
Bugsby’s Reach! Think of the enormous fame of Bugsby! Then should not a
master-mariner, sailing home with an entry concerning a discovery of
land in his log-book, feel extremely boastful and happy? Supposing it to
be, as it almost always is in this age of an exhausted world, an island
or a rock entirely “in his eye:” it will be the same to him; he will go
to his grave as cocksure about it as if he had landed, hoisted the Union
Jack, taken possession of it in the Queen’s name, and called it by his
own. Several nations may send forth ships to examine the spot: all whose
commanders shall return and say there is nothing to be seen. But the
first discoverer of land is a being not to be easily cheated out of his
convictions. “Land-ho?” “Whereaway?” “Dead abeam!” And there it must
stand, a piece of holy ground in our skipper’s faith, latitude
unquestionable, longitude exact, though a shift of wind or a new
complexion of light would attenuate the solid object into a texture
considerably thinner than the most difficult of the difficult airs of
the mountaintops.
Some islands have been unaffected dreams. Such was that shore which at
the dawning of the day proved to be “a land flat to our sight, and full
of boscage, which made it show the more dark,” called by its discoverer
New Atlantis. Such was that happy republic whose “figure is not unlike a
crescent; between its horns the sea comes in eleven miles broad, and
spreads itself into a great bay.” Such, too, are the queer countries of
Swift and Rabelais, and of several philosophers and poets, both of
ancient and modern times. But, on the other hand, many of the old
sea-girt demon-haunted rocks, the sunny and spice-sweetened and
flower-coloured dominions of the ocean fairies, the little surf-washed
principalities of dead seamen’s souls, were as real as immoderate
private conviction could render them. They had been seen! the ancient
mariner, with a beard as long as his whom Henrie Lane writes of in
“Hakluyt”—“At their rising, the prince called them to his table, to
receive each one a cup from his hand to drinke, and tooke into his hand
Master George Killingworth’s beard, which reached over the table, and
pleasantly delivered it to the Metropolitane, who seeming to blesse it,
sayd in Russe, this is God’s gift. As, indeede, at that time it was not
onely thicke, broad, and yellow-coloured, but in length five foot and
two inches of assize”—the ancient mariner, I say, staring under the
sharp of his hand, with eyes on fire with alarm and amazement, his
mighty beard blowing like smoke upon his breast; this ancient mariner,
standing on his tall poop near to the great lanthorn, with pennons many
ells in length streaming from the topmast heads, the bonaventure mast
sloping well aft, the sprit-top-sail glancing under the yawn of the
forecourse like a sheet of silk, beheld the magic islands with his own
fiery eyes under his own shaggy white brows, and on his return did
depose to them with awful solemnity, calling upon many saints to bear
witness to his veracity, and expressing himself as being perfectly
willing to be boiled, fried, burnt, or in any other way “dressed,” if
his statement could be proved a lie.
His voyages furnished him with queer relations to deliver. The ocean was
a huge mystery; and things which familiarity has long ago rendered mean
were instinct with the terror, the splendour, the power, the majesty of
the ocean, marvellous with the spirit of the measureless surface and the
unfathomed depths, in the midst of which the early mariner found them.
The enchanted island was real enough then. The sea-life was in its
beginning: it was credulous as a man’s childhood is; and, childlike, it
took wonders and astonishments and impossibilities for the truth, and by
sheer stress of prodigious faith made them so.
It must have been a noble time to go to sea in. A boy starts now as a
sailor for India or China, and his head is full of fancies of elephants,
ivory, gleaming towers, wild beasts, coloured men, and strange coins.
His imagination reaches no further than his reading, or what has been
told him. He pretty well knows what he is to see, and of course, what he
sees falls infinitely short of his expectations. But the ocean to the
ancient mariner was pure Wonderland. Read what he has to say of the
whale, the albatross, the iceberg. Coleridge catches the infantile awe
and astonishment of the early voyagers in that exquisite “rime” of his,
in which the commonplaces of the deep show mighty and fearful, as a sort
of prodigies indeed, in the organ-utterance of the aged seaman of lean
and Ember-week-like aspect. In these days if a man arrives home with a
yarn of an uncharted rock his tale is to the last degree prosaic. The
primitive navigator, on the other hand, would have found it a heap of
extraordinary sights, a mass of miracles. Of course he had this
advantage over us moderns: he could hint at its situation with such
happy ambiguity as would defy discovery of it, even if the astrolabe and
the cross-staff had been as precise as the sextant and the chronometer.
But then he credited his own detections. His tales rendered his charts
as queer to the eye as a star-map outlined with the zodiacal symbolism;
and the ocean was like Spenser’s poem for witcheries, marvels,
necromancies, monstrous shapes, dreadful sounds, and mysterious islands.
A romantic marine age, indeed, when Cape Fly-away was to be doubled, and
No Man’s Land made!
Of the unparalleled isles of the ancient mariner many descriptions are
extant. We hear of floating islands, verdant with tropic vegetation,
suddenly rising to the surface of the sea, then foundering; of islands,
covered with medicinal herbs of greater efficacy even than the most
largely advertised of modern pills, approaching the coast once in every
seven years; of islands inhabited by women only; of islands merely
enchanted, such as the old New England voyager’s: “very thick foggie
weather, we sailed by an inchanted island, saw a great deal of filth and
rubbish floating by the ship;” of islands formed of green meadows,
which, says Mr. Wirt Sikes, “were supposed to be the abode of the souls
of certain Druids who, not holy enough to enter the heaven of the
Christians, were still not wicked enough to be condemned to the tortures
of Annwn, and so were accorded a place in this romantic sort of
purgatorial paradise.”—“British Goblins.” Here is one of Mandeville’s
twisters:—
“In an isle clept Crues, ben schippes withouten nayles of iren, or
bonds, for the rockes of the adamandes; for they ben alle fulle there
aboute in that see, that it is marveyle to spaken of. And gif a schippe
passed by the marches, and hadde either iren bands or iren nayles, anon
he sholde ben perishet. For the adamande of this kinde draws the iren to
him; and so wolde it draw to him the schippe, because of the iren; that
he sholde never departen fro it, ne never go thens.”[65]
Footnote 65:
Quoted by Simon Wilkin in his edition of Sir Thomas Browne’s Works.
How must the apprehension of encountering such islands as this, capable
of wrecking a stout ship by magnetically extracting her iron bolts and
so dissolving her, have set the knees of the sturdiest old sailors
knocking one against another! Or figure the emotions with which they
would view the prospect of going ashore upon such an island as we have
here: “There came a southe winde, and drof the shyppe northward, whereas
they saw an ylonde full dirke and full of stench and smoke; and then
they herde grete blowinge and blasting of belowes, but they might see
noothynge, but herde grete thunderyng.”[66]
Footnote 66:
The Golden Legend.
But these wonderful isles of the sea differed widely, some being very
horrible and some being delightful. “Oh,” sings Thomas Moore—
“Oh, for some fair Formosa, such as he,
The young Jew fabled of in the Indian sea,
By nothing but its name of Beauty known,
And which Queen Fancy might make all her own,
Her fairy kingdom—take its peoples, lands,
And tenements into her own bright hands,
And make at least one earthly corner fit
For love to live in, pure and exquisite!”
Such an island as this was discovered and duly reported. First by a
monk, who after sailing three days due east beheld a dark cloud, which
when it cleared, revealed an island where “was joy and mirthe enough.”
This monk had apparently been induced to put to sea by the assurance of
a mariner that he had met Judas floating on a rock! It was reserved for
St. Brandau, however, to christen this delectable spot, and he called it
the Blessed Island. Though its existence was fully believed in, its
reputation faded as the years rolled by and nobody came home to say he
had seen it. Then, all on a sudden, a Lisbon pilot stumbled upon it in a
gale of wind, and so excited the appetite of a Spanish nobleman for its
felicities that his lordship fitted out an expedition for no other
purpose than to find it. Happier for him had it remained a secret of the
deep! he was wrecked upon it, fell into a trance that lasted some years,
woke up mad, and returned to Spain with a long story of its being
populated and ruled by a descendant of the last King of the Goths. The
Spanish nobleman’s experiences of its blessedness did not weaken the
general faith in this ocean paradise; search was made for it so late as
1721, after which it disappears. Possibly it was the account of some
such an island as this that addled the brains of King Gavran and sent
him seeking for the enchanted fairy meadows which floated upon the sea.
He took his family with him, and he and they were never heard of more.
But does not one see in all this how real those islands were, how
seductive or repellant, and how delightfully different from the plain
discoveries of the modern mariner, whether fancied or real?
“There are traditions,” says Mr. Wirt Sikes, “of sailors who in the
early part of the present century actually went ashore on the fairy
islands, not knowing that they were such until they returned to their
boats, when they were filled with awe at seeing the islands disappear
from their sight, neither sinking in the sea nor floating away upon the
waters, but simply vanishing suddenly.”
There is pleasantness and softness in the fancy of men in olden days
putting forth to sea in search of islands of bliss, of insulated
paradises as visionary as the poet’s dream-like shore dimly resounding
the wash of fairy breakers.[67] The mariner must have spun his yarn to
some purpose to awaken that thirsty desire of emigration. Many wonders,
which might have remained hidden for ever in the dark ocean solitude,
were lighted on by elderly gentlemen with long hair and in costumes like
bed-gowns, who were abroad searching for spots which the Jacks of that
age had declared to be out and away superior to Eden. Maildun, a Celtic
hero, one of these searchers, came across several islands filled with
demons and monsters. He also encountered a Circe, and eventually the
terrestrial paradise. But nothing particular seems to have come of these
discoveries, and it is to be suspected that he did not take the trouble
to verify their position. Another person, a saint, after a long search,
found a holy island inhabited by twenty-four monks. How these monks
managed to get there, in what condition the saint found them, whether
they were spontaneous growths or a kind of melancholic survival of a
state of society whose origin is hopelessly indeterminable, we are not
told. The same saint also met with an island whose inhabitants were
fallen angels, and an island populated by fiends, who fell upon him and
forced him to fly. In fact, if this saint is to be believed, he was
quite the Captain Cook of his day. Yet his search after the Australia
Incognita of bliss must, I think, be pronounced distinctly
unsatisfactory, though one cannot but respect a theory of life that
could impart the animation of adventure to a monastic bosom.
Footnote 67:
“Magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.”—KEATS.