ancient reports of its wonders, and in the interpretation of its legible
characters by the child-like vision of the vanished shipmen. Remove
those Fortunate Islands, those Blessed Islands, those islands haunted by
“demon women wailing for their lovers:” strike out from the annals those
fables, faint with a strange light, of venturesome marine saints, of
marvelling, bright-eyed, hook-nosed “marineeres;” and I am afraid that
what else of human poetry remains must be sought in the ship’s
forecastle. The very fish they saw, sporting in the yeast over the side,
were as astonishing as the islands they passed. “Along all that coast,”
wrote Mr. Thomas Stevens, “we often times saw thing swimming upon the
water like a cock’s combe (which they call a ship at Guinea), but the
colour much fairer; which combe standeth upon a thing almost like the
swimmer of a fish in colour and bignesse, and beareth underneath in the
water, strings, which save it from turning over.”[68] “Od’s fish!” would
seem an appropriate expression in the mouths of such navigators. What
sort of thing is this cockscomb with strings? They wrapt up what they
saw in quaint dark words; and their imagination operating on what they
beheld set life a-teeming with marvels. Or mark them sailing past a
headland: “At this Cape lieth a great stone, to the which the barkes
that passed thereby, were wont to make offerings of butter, meale and
other victuals, thinking that unlesse they did so, their barkes or
vessels should there perish, as it hath been oftentimes seene; and there
it is very darke and mistie.”[69] Thus these poor old fellows, crossing
themselves and singing a litany the while, propitiate the demon of the
place with offerings of wet and dry stores, and you see them in fancy
grouped in a body upon the deck, watching with bowed heads and level,
alarmed gaze the sullen and dismal loom of the coast slowly veering away
upon the quarter, as though the rugged, fog-swollen mass might at any
moment shape itself into the titanic proportions of the fiend-king of
the cold and barren land.
Footnote 68:
Hakluyt.
Footnote 69:
“Jenkins’s Voyage.” Hakluyt.
To those early eyes such monsters revealed themselves, that the like was
never heard of before or since. A crew would come home and say that they
had met with an extraordinary animal that had a horse’s body and a pig’s
head; another, that they had seen a similar wonder, only in this case it
was a stag’s body with horns; a third, that one day, the sea being calm,
there rose close to the ship an animal that had the head and snout of a
boar, and that spurted water through a tube at the top of its head.
Those were the halcyon days of the mermaid and the merman; leviathan
then sported in twenty different terrible shapes, with mouth most
hideously garnished with quadruple rows of teeth, gaping moonwards; the
sea-serpent wrapped the spinning globe about with a million leagues of
scales; strange voices whispered in mysterious accents under the still
intertropic starlight, and shapes like the shadows of pinions moved upon
the midnight air; spectral lanthorns were hung up by spirit-hands at the
yard-arms and on the bowsprit-end, and, by their dull, graveyard
illumination, cast a dismal complexion of death upon the upwards-staring
faces of the mariners. I find those early seamen always sailing along as
if possessed with an uncontrollable awe and reverence; they are punctual
in their prayers; the whole story of their navigation is but a
single-hearted reference to the majesty and mercy of the Most High; the
atmosphere about them trembles to their devout muttering of _Aves_ and
the low chanting of psalms. The ocean was a mystery, the home and the
haunt of creatures and objects not to be conceived by the understanding
of men. The spirit and influence of the liquid solitude beyond the
familiar line, over whose edge the sun rose or sank every day, you will
find expressed with artless, most impressive power in the narrative of
the first voyage of Columbus in Harris’s Collection, briefly recited as
the great admiral’s adventures there are. For such and for earlier
mariners—as indeed for later, down even to the times of Dampier,
Shelvocke, Cowley, and the Dutch and French explorers of the early years
of the last century—the sea could not but hold islands of enchantment,
green places deep in its heart, on whose sands the water-nymphs fresh
from their coral pavilions, sat combing their yellow hair; paradisaical
abodes whose soil was brilliant with gold dust, over whose trees,
radiant with fruit, flew birds of a plumage of dazzling splendour, in
whose central valley girls of startling beauty might be seen in the
moonlight threading with languid eyes the mazes of some amorous dance.
Did not even Herman Melville, so recently as 1830 or 1840, find some
such enchanted island as this in the Marquesas group?
The sudden emergence or subsidence of land would also help to confirm
the ancient mariner in his belief in magic isles, and in their
controlment by spells of necromancy. In an old nautical magazine, dated
1802, I find the following: “On the seventh of June, 1790, the
_Seahorse_, Captain Mayo, of Boston, from the coast of Africa, saw (in
lat. 73 south) _a large point of land_ sink in one moment into the
unfathomable deep! As soon as the crew recovered from the inexpressible
horror which so tremendous a spectacle must have impressed on their
minds, they steered to some ships catching whales, and found that their
men had been spectators of the same awful scene. The seamen
involuntarily dropped down upon their knees and thanked God for their
escape, having been on the same point of land a short time before its
sudden disappearance.”
They saw the land disappear; but suppose no other vessels had been in
company, and it had chanced that none of the crew had seen the land
sink, you have then the seeds of an amazing relation. Figure a dead
calm, all hands below at dinner, and nobody on deck but the man at the
wheel nodding drowsily over the spokes. The land was plain enough in
sight, a mile distant, perhaps, when the crew left the deck; when they
return it has vanished. Had it been a ship they would, of course,
suppose that she had foundered. But land! is it possible that a tall,
substantial mass of land shall vanish on a sudden like a wreath of
tobacco smoke? Had the vessel been whirled away out of sight of it by a
fierce current? Had she been insensibly blown some leagues along by a
stout breeze of wind? No. The man at the wheel is questioned; he rubs
his eyes, stares; it is the same marvel to him as to the others. Knowing
something of the sailor’s character, I will venture to say that had not
those men of the _Seahorse_ actually seen the land go down, two-thirds
of them would have gone to their graves persuaded that there had been
witchcraft in the business. But put the date back three centuries, into
the period of the real Ancient Mariner. He shall behold the cliff
founder, if you please, and yet land at Plymouth or Erith with an
imagination charged to bursting point with this obvious Satanic
engorgement. I think I see him telling the story. Can his hearers,
gazing upon his mahogany face, doubt that there are islands which rise
and sink? and how can they rise or sink without magical possession,
without being under the government of something to direct them? The
ancient mariner may, indeed, be beforehand with a solution by importing,
let me say, one jaw of a monstrous fish that did “suck ye londe down to
ye admiration of ye beholders.” But failing some such explanation, the
reason must be sought for devil-wards. The island or cliff easily
becomes the abode of demons or of ocean-spirits, who use their dominions
as a sort of ship, and who, when they desire a change of air or scene,
alter their latitude and longitude by the easy expedient of a submarine
excursion. Such a solution could not long miss of confirmation. For
presently arrives some _Elizabeth-Jonah_, or some _Ascension_, of
London, or _Jesus_, of Hull, with an extraordinary and incredible
report: to wit, that being about fifty leagues to the westwards of the
island of Madeira, there did happen a mighty commotion in the sea; the
water boiled furiously, and out of the midst of it there arose a great
flame that was followed by a thick black coil of smoke which emitted a
most detestable stench. This, rising, did overspread the heavens with a
sable canopy, through which the sun, that had before been ardent, glowed
ruefully with a most affrighting face. When the atmosphere had somewhat
cleared, and the sea fallen flat again, they observed a great heap of
black land floating just where the flame had been; but now, to their
great joy, a small gale happening, they hastily trimmed their sails to
it and departed, with hearty thanksgiving for their merciful deliverance
from a hideous and diabolic spot. There would be to the full as much
truth in this as in the account of the subsidence. In every century
there have been submarine volcanic disturbances which have dislodged or
uphove points of land, rocks, little and even big islands. Suppose what
these cheery old mariners beheld was, instead of land, a body of
compacted weed; or, not impossibly, a dead whale. No matter! home with
the thrilling story; and let any man be pilloried who shall dare to
doubt that the rock that came up is not the very identical rock that
went down!
I find a singular example of the credulity that gives to the sea the
choicest flavour of romance in a note to the life of Sir William
Gascoigne, Lord Chief Justice of the King’s Bench in the reign of King
Henry IV., in the first edition (1750) of the “Biographia Britannica”:—
“When the said Sir Bernard Gascoigne” (the writer is referring to a
descendant of Sir William) “returned from his embassy into England, he
took shipping at Dunkirk, and one of the passengers who came over with
him was Mrs. Aphra Behn, the ingenious poetess. It is asserted by the
writer of her life that in the course of their voyage they all saw a
surprising _Phænomenon_, whether formed by any rising exhalations or
descending vapours shaped by the winds and irradiated by refracted
lights, is not explained; but it appeared through Sir Bernard’s
telescopes, in a clear day at a great distance, to be or to resemble a
fine, gay, floating fabrick, adorned with figures, festoons, etc. At
first they suspected some art in his glasses, till at last, as it
approached, they could see it plainly without them; and the relater is
so particular in the description as to assert that it appeared to be a
four-squared floor of various coloured marble, having rows of fluted and
twisted pillars ascending, with cupids on the top circled with vines and
flowers, and streamers waving in the air. ’Tis added of this strange
visionary, if not romantic or poetical, pageant—for fancy is an
architect that can build castles in the clouds as well by sea as
land—that it floated almost near enough for them to step out upon it; as
if it would invite them to a safer landing than they sought by sailing;
or pretended that the one should be as dangerous and deceitful as the
other; for soon after the calm which ensued there arose such a violent
storm that they were all shipwreckt, but happily in sight of land, to
which by timely assistance they all got safe.”
Here, to be sure, we have a very circumstantial account of a very
astonishing apparition. This would seem to have been the Blessed Island
for which the saints and a noble Spanish lord made search in earlier
times. It is a pity that the story comes to us in the life of so lively
a romancer as Mrs. Aphra Behn; one would rather have had the grave and
wary Sir Bernard’s version. Certain points suggest the legend of
Vanderdecken, as for example the circumstance of the storm rising and
shipwreck following the approach of the island-pavilion. This fabric of
fluted pillars and radiant banners must count among the mysterious
disappearances. Why, when these phenomenal glories of the deep floated
into full view of the mariner—why had not he the heart to straightway
launch his shallop, row with anchor and cable to the magic strand, and
“fix” the place, as the Yankees would say, for the satisfaction and
diversion of posterity? Why should all those wonders have been in vain?
If the modern seaman lack the poetic vision of the early navigator, he
is more generous in his detections; he desires the world to share in his
own satisfaction, and goes very painfully and exactly to his relation,
though it does but concern an iceberg or a body of vapour. The gallant
Rodney, when Commodore (1752), was sent cruising in search of an island
which one Captain W. Otton, of the snow[70] _St. Paul_, of London,
discovered in his passage from South Carolina, about three hundred
leagues west of Scilly. The record in Otton’s journal was extremely
minute. He gave the date and hour—March 4, 1748–9, two in the
afternoon—on which he made the land. He related how it bore, how he
tacked, how the wind was, and what the latitude and longitude:—
Footnote 70:
A snow is a brig.
“This island stretches N.W. and S.E., about five leagues long and about
nine miles wide. On the south side five valleys and a great number of
birds. This day a ship’s masts came alongside. On the south point of
said island is a small marshy island.”
As though all this should not be deemed confirmatory enough of his
discovery, the Captain added that he thought he saw a tent on the
island, and would have gone ashore, “but had unfortunately stove his
boat.” Rodney, in company with Captain Mackenzie, a distinguished
mathematician, cruised for many days, but to no purpose. The island was
entirely in the eye of the captain of the snow _St. Paul_. An old saint
or ancient Spanish nobleman would not have let us off so easily. The
comparatively modern skipper tells of an ordinary island, prosaically
but generously invites all mariners to participation in his discovery,
but humanely leaves land-going imagination and curiosity unvexed. The
saint or the nobleman would probably have heard the sound of viols,
perhaps an organ; the hymning of a collection of monks would have been a
distinguishable music; the more erotic vision of the nobleman might have
witnessed lovely forms and the seductive beckoning of foam-white hands.
We should have had gilded dolphins gambolling among the breakers, and
been tickled by a hundred tales more startling than Marryat’s Pasha was
regaled with.
Of what material are these fantastic fabrics, real to the beholders,
manufactured? Imagination is the loom, but whence comes the stuff? Yet
there are many spectacles at sea which the meditative, artless fancy may
easily work into creations of beauty, or fear, or brilliance,
melancholy, and horror. You must go back—put yourself in the place of
the mariner newly arrived in an ocean-waste whose surface his keel is
the first to furrow. Then think how the iceberg in the heart of the
black gale will strike you: the pallid mountain-mass flashing out to the
wild violet lightning dart, the vision or phantasm of a city of
pinnacles, spires, minarets, with the crystal smoke of the storm
whirling in clouds about its towering heights, whose ravines and scars
thunder back in echoes the cannonading of the rushing surges hurling
their madness upon the side of that mass of rocky faintness. Or consider
the magnificence and splendour of the Northern sunset—different, indeed,
from the bald glory of the sinking of the rayless tropic orb—viewed by
one who, having for days stemmed towards the Pole, penetrates for the
first time the wide white silence of the Greenland parallels. From those
dyes of the luminary, or the more amazing coruscations of the aurora
borealis, what shadows of realities might not the wondering eye of the
mariner evoke, observing rainbow islands to repose on seas of gold,
lands of delicate effulgence and of tints too exquisitely beautiful to
serve for less than the home of a race of beings whose idea and raiment
must be sought in those classic poems in which the gods of the Greeks
and the Romans are described! From the texture of the shoulders of
rising clouds, from shifting veins of moonlight in the lace-like drapery
of white mist, from the luminous shadow of the waterspout with its
wing-shaped peak and boiling base, the new imagination, far out upon the
bosom of nameless waters, would readily snatch material enough for half
those wonders of magic spaces of shore which in those times dotted the
oceans of the world from the latitude of Schouten’s iron headland to the
height of Nova Zembla. Or, to descend to homelier stuff, omitting the
mirage—perhaps the fancy’s noblest opportunity on the deep—there is the
ship bottom up; the inverted hulk that for months may have been washing
about until she has gathered to her sodden timbers a large estate of
sea-weed and marine fungi. The Telmaque rock had undoubtedly no better
foundation than this. The passengers—it was in 1786—saw green grass and
moss on the rock. This settled the matter; the new island was duly
logged and then charted; yet what could it prove but a capsized hull? So
of the famous Ariel Rocks, which, in my humble opinion, must be put down
to a dead whale or two.
“Captain T. Dickson, of the _Ariel_, when on a voyage from Liverpool to
Valparaiso, December, 1827, saw something of a reddish appearance about
a quarter of a mile from the vessel; sounded in forty-seven fathoms,
fine grey sand. Approaching the object it seemed about six feet above
water, when another appeared about three feet below the surface; the sea
broke on both; much sea-weed and many birds around; the position was
determined by good mer. alt. of sun, and by lunar and chronometric
observations.”[71]
Footnote 71:
“South Atlantic Directory,” 1870. A long list of apocryphal islands,
rocks, and shoals is given in this volume.
H.M.S. _Beagle_, with the late Dr. Darwin on board, passed several times
over the position assigned to these rocks, but found nothing—yes, her
people found this: “A heavy swell arose on the quarter which struck our
weather-quarter boat, and turned her in upon the deck.... I thought we
had indeed found the rocks, _and the huge black back of a dead whale
which just then showed itself very near the vessel, much increased the
sensation_.”
In more ways than one may the mysterious disappearance of islands be
accounted for. The sternly prosaic mariner will desire nothing in this
direction that is not real, and of this as little as possible. But
happily for the poetic student these disappearances stop short at the
precincts of ocean literature. Enter, and the magic is all before you,
perennial in its gorgeousness or terror, its sweetness or extravagance
of horror. Who would wish one of those enchanted islands away? No prow
built by human hands need fear them as a danger; they lie in a daylight
or a midnight of their own, washed by the elfin surf of faery-land,
lashed by the storms of high imagination, phantoms under phantom suns
and stars, dreams of the young-eyed mariner. They are uncharted; but
love has their bearings, and memory holds them fondly to their moorings.
Of the sea they form the daintiest romance, and they give a colouring of
poetry even to the dry and austere perpetuation of such things in these
days of scientific exactness and the occasional blunders of the
triumphant discoverer.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_RICH CAPTURES._
On October 4, 1799, despatches were received at the Admiralty from
Captain Young, of the _Ethalion_ frigate, announcing the capture of a
Spanish vessel named the _Thetis_, from the Havannah, with one million
and a half of dollars on board, besides a quantity of merchandise.
Shortly after this came news of the capture of another Spanish galleon,
the _Santa Brigida_, with treasure estimated at between two and three
millions of dollars, in addition to a valuable cargo of cochineal,
sugar, coffee, and the like. A few days later it was rumoured that Lord
Bridport’s share alone of the prize-money amounted to £125,000. But the
excitement caused by this great capture had led to much exaggerated
gossip, and it was shown that if the prizes yielded £800,000, then Lord
Bridport, who, as commander-in-chief, shared one-third of an eighth,
would get about £33,000. The other two-thirds of an eighth went to
subordinate flag officers, who reckoned on £10,000 apiece, whilst the
four captains of the frigates divided £50,000.
On the 29th of the same month a singular procession in honour of this
great capture passed through Stonehouse and Plymouth to the dungeons of
the Citadel. First went a trumpeter of the Surrey dragoons, sounding a
charge; then followed two artillery conductors, an officer of the Surrey
dragoons, an officer of artillery, Surrey dragoons, two and two, with
drawn sabres; a band of drums and fifes, playing “Rule Britannia” and
“God save the King;” then _sixty-three waggons full of dollars_, in nine
divisions of seven waggons. On the first waggon a seaman, carrying the
British over the Spanish jack, and two officers of marines, armed. On
the centre waggon a seaman carrying the British ensign over the Spanish
ensign, midshipmen armed with cutlasses. On the last waggon a seaman
with the British pendant flying over the Spanish pendant; armed mariners
and seamen, two and two: a band of drums and fifes playing “Britons,
strike home!” armed seamen with cutlasses; an artillery officer; two
officers of marines, armed; Surrey dragoons, two and two, with drawn
sabres, and two trumpeters sounding a charge closed the procession. Both
to larboard and starboard of this procession walked a number of armed
sailors and midshipmen.
It is eighty-seven years since this remarkable parade took place. Long
ago death wrested the bugle from the trumpeter in the van and sounded
_his_ charge. Those dollars lying piled in sixty-three waggons have been
spent a hundred times over. The ringing cheers of the thousands of
spectators “who testified their satisfaction by repeated huzzas at
seeing so much treasure, once the property of the enemy of old England,
soon to be in the pockets of her jolly tars and marines,” have been
silenced ages agone by that same choking dust, out of which Spaniards,
equally with Englishmen, are manufactured. The Don and the Briton are
now excellent friends, and one need not be a holder in Spanish
securities to heartily hope that the Spaniard’s shadow may never be
less. But one cannot help one’s instincts. In this pacific age it must
be wrong to feel elated over old triumphs; yet I confess, somehow or
other, I cannot listen to the cheers—how infinitely dim and distant
soever—of the spectators of that procession of soldiers and sailors,
marching with conquering banners, without an unsounding, yet distinct,
lifting up of the voice within me in a huzza of my own. “Our echoes roll
from soul to soul,” says Tennyson; and I defy a true-born Englishman to
watch those waggons of dollars, those rolling seamen, those brave
soldiers and valiant marines, those little cocked-hatted middies,
passing along over the fairy-like soil of history to the elf-like
strains of “Rule, Britannia” and “Britons, strike home!” without joining
in the procession and cheering with all his might the thin phantasm of a
once brilliantly real pageant.
’Twas a fine haul for Jack. Sixty-three waggons of dollars! How many
jorums of grog lay in those piles? How much fiddling, jigging,
caper-cutting? But those waggons only represented a part. It was not
until the last day of the month that the remaining chests of the Spanish
treasure were lodged in the dungeons of the Citadel, and then the record
runs: From _El Thetis_ four hundred and twenty-seven boxes of dollars;
from _Santa Brigida_ five hundred and eight boxes of dollars, containing
nearly three million dollars, besides very valuable cargoes of cocoa,
indigo, cochineal, and sugar, “all safely landed and warehoused in
Plymouth, under the Excise and Custom House locks.” Booty of this kind
makes one think of the old South Seaman, of the big caracks of the spice
islands and Western American seaboard, of Dampier, Shelvocke,
Clipperton, and Betagh, and of the grand old Commodore Anson. His was
possibly as big a bag as ever fell to the mariner’s lot. The galleon he
captured had in her one million three hundred and thirteen thousand
eight hundred and forty-three pieces of eight, and nearly thirty-six
thousand ounces of silver, which, with the treasure already taken by the
_Centurion_, amounted to about £400,000, “independent,” says the writer
of the voyage, “of the ships and merchandize which she either burnt or
destroyed, and which, by the most reasonable estimation, could not
amount to so little as £600,000 more; so that the whole damage done the
enemy by our squadron did doubtless exceed a million sterling.”