One does not seem really to have got out-of-doors till he goes to sea.
On the land he is shut in by the hills, or the forests, or more or less
housed by the sharp lines of his horizon. But at sea he finds the roof
taken off, the walls taken down; he is no longer in the hollow of the
earth's hand, but upon its naked back, with nothing between him and the
immensities. He is in the great cosmic out-of-doors, as much so as if
voyaging to the moon or to Mars. An astronomic solitude and vacuity
surround him; his only guides and landmarks are stellar; the earth has
disappeared; the horizon has gone; he has only the sky and its orbs
left; this cold, vitreous, blue-black liquid through which the ship
plows is not water, but some denser form of the cosmic ether. He can now
see the curve of the sphere which the hills hid from him; he can study
astronomy under improved conditions. If he was being borne through the
interplanetary spaces on an immense shield, his impressions would not
perhaps be much different. He would find the same vacuity, the same
blank or negative space, the same empty, indefinite, oppressive
out-of-doors.
For it must be admitted that a voyage at sea is more impressive to the
imagination than to the actual sense. The world is left behind; all
standards of size, of magnitude, of distance, are vanished; there is no
size, no form, no perspective; the universe has dwindled to a little
circle of crumpled water, that journeys with you day after day, and to
which you seem bound by some enchantment. The sky becomes a shallow,
close-fitting dome, or else a pall of cloud that seems ready to descend
upon you. You cannot see or realize the vast and vacant surrounding;
there is nothing to define it or set it off. Three thousand miles of
ocean space are less impressive than three miles bounded by rugged
mountains walls. Indeed, the grandeur of form, of magnitude, of
distance, of proportion, are only upon shore. A voyage across the
Atlantic is an eight or ten day sail through vacancy. There is no
sensible progress; you pass no fixed points. Is it the steamer that is
moving, or is it the sea? or is it all a dance and illusion of the
troubled brain? Yesterday, to-day, and to-morrow, you are in the same
parenthesis of nowhere. The three hundred or more miles the ship daily
makes is ideal, not real. Every night the stars dance and reel there in
the same place amid the rigging; every morning the sun comes up from
behind the same wave, and staggers slowly across the sinister sky. The
eye becomes a-hunger for form, for permanent lines, for a horizon wall
to lift up and keep off the sky, and give it a sense of room. One
understands why sailors become an imaginative and superstitious race;
it is the reaction from this narrow horizon in which they are
pent,--this ring of fate surrounds and oppresses them. They escape by
invoking the aid of the supernatural. In the sea itself there is far
less to stimulate the imagination than in the varied forms and colors of
the land. How cold, how merciless, how elemental it looks!
The only things that look familiar at sea are the clouds. These are
messengers from home, and how weary and disconsolate they appear,
stretching out along the horizon, as if looking for a hill or
mountain-top to rest upon,--nothing to hold them up,--a roof without
walls, a span without piers. One gets the impression that they are grown
faint, and must presently, if they reach much farther, fall into the
sea. But when the rain came, it seemed like mockery or irony on the part
of the clouds. Did one vaguely believe, then, that the clouds would
respect the sea, and withhold their needless rain? No, they treated it
as if it were a mill-pond, or a spring-run, too insignificant to make
any exceptions to.
One bright Sunday, when the surface of the sea was like glass, a long
chain of cloud-mountains lay to the south of us all day, while the rest
of the sky was clear. How they glowed in the strong sunlight, their
summits shining like a bouquet of full moons, and making a broad, white,
or golden path upon the water! They came out of the southwest, an
endless procession of them, and tapered away in the east. They were the
piled, convoluted, indolent clouds of midsummer,--thunder-clouds that
had retired from business; the captains of the storm in easy undress.
All day they filed along there, keeping the ship company. How the eye
reveled in their definite, yet ever-changing, forms! Their under or base
line was as straight and continuous as the rim of the ocean. The
substratum of air upon which they rested was like a uniform layer of
granite rock, invisible, but all-resisting; not one particle of these
vast cloud-mountains, so broken and irregular in their summits, sank
below this aerial granite boundary. The equilibrium of the air is
frequently such that the under-surface of the clouds is like a ceiling.
It is a fair-weather sign, whether upon the sea or upon the land. One
may frequently see it in a mountainous district, when the fog-clouds
settle down, and blot out all the tops of the mountains without one
fleck of vapor going below a given line which runs above every valley,
as uniform as the sea-level. It is probable that in fair weather the
atmosphere always lies in regular strata in this way, and that it is the
displacement and mixing up of these by some unknown cause that produces
storms.
As the sun neared the horizon these cloud-masses threw great blue
shadows athwart each other, which afforded the eye a new pleasure.
Late one afternoon the clouds assumed a still more friendly and welcome
shape. A long, purple, irregular range of them rose up from the horizon
in the northwest, exactly stimulating distant mountains. The sun sank
behind them, and threw out great spokes of light as from behind my
native Catskills. Then gradually a low, wooded shore came into view
along their base. It proved to be a fog-bank lying low upon the water,
but it copied exactly, in its forms and outlines, a flat, umbrageous
coast. You could see distinctly where it ended, and where the water
began. I sat long on that side of the ship, and let my willing eyes
deceive themselves. I could not divest myself of the comfortable feeling
inspired by the prospect. It was to the outward sense what dreams and
reveries are to the inward. That blind, instinctive love of the land,--I
did not know how masterful and involuntary the impulse was, till I found
myself warming up toward that phantom coast. The empty void of the sea
was partly filled, if only with a shadow. The inhuman desolation of the
ocean was blotted out for a moment, in that direction at least. What
phantom-huggers we are upon sea or upon land! It made no difference that
I knew this to be a sham coast. I could feel its friendly influence all
the same, even when my back was turned.
In summer, fog seems to lie upon the Atlantic in great shallow fleeces,
looking, I dare say, like spots of mould or mildew from an elevation of
a few miles. These fog-banks are produced by the deep cold currents
rising to the surface, and coming in contact with the warmer air. One
may see them far in advance, looking so shallow that it seems as if the
great steamer must carry her head above them. But she does not quite do
it. When she enters this obscurity, there begins the hoarse bellowing of
her great whistle. As one dozes in his berth or sits in the cabin
reading, there comes a vague impression that we are entering some port
or harbor, the sound is so welcome, and is so suggestive of the
proximity of other vessels. But only once did our loud and repeated
hallooing awaken any response. Everybody heard the answering whistle out
of the thick obscurity ahead, and was on the alert. Our steamer
instantly slowed her engines and redoubled her tootings. The two vessels
soon got the bearing of each other, and the stranger passed us on the
starboard side, the hoarse voice of her whistle alone revealing her
course to us.
Late one afternoon, as we neared the Banks, the word spread on deck that
the knobs and pinnacles of a thunder-cloud sunk below the horizon, and
that deeply and sharply notched the western rim of the sea, were
icebergs. The captain was quoted as authority. He probably encouraged
the delusion. The jaded passengers wanted a new sensation. Everybody was
willing, even anxious, to believe them icebergs, and some persons would
have them so, and listened coldly and reluctantly to any proof to the
contrary. What we want to believe, what it suits our convenience, or
pleasure, or prejudice, to believe, one need not go to sea to learn what
slender logic will incline us to believe. To a firm, steady gaze, these
icebergs were seen to be momently changing their forms, new chasms
opening, new pinnacles rising: but these appearances were easily
accounted for by the credulous; the ice mountains were rolling over, or
splitting asunder. One of the rarest things in the average cultivated
man or woman is the capacity to receive and weigh evidence touching any
natural phenomenon, especially at sea. If the captain had deliberately
said that the shifting forms there on the horizon were only a school of
whales playing at leap-frog, all the women and half the men among the
passengers would have believed him.
In going to England in early May, we encountered the fine weather, the
warmth and the sunshine as of June, that had been "central" over the
British Islands for a week or more, five or six hundred miles from
shore. We had come up from lower latitudes, and it was as if we had
ascended a hill and found summer at the top, while a cold, backward
spring yet lingered in the valley. But on our return in early August,
the positions of spring and summer were reversed. Scotland was cold and
rainy, and for several days at sea you could in the distance hardly tell
the sea from the sky, all was so gray and misty. In mid-Atlantic we ran
into the American climate. The great continent, basking there in the
western sun, and glowing with midsummer heat, made itself felt to the
centre of this briny void. The sea detached itself sharply from the sky,
and became like a shield of burnished steel, which the sky surrounded
like a dome of glass. For four successive nights the sun sank clear in
the wave, sometimes seeming to melt and mingle with the ocean. One night
a bank of mist seemed to impede his setting. He lingered a long while
partly buried in it, then slowly disappeared as through a slit in the
vapor, which glowed red-hot, a mere line of fire, for some moments
afterward.
As we neared home the heat became severe. We were going down the hill
into a fiery valley. Vast stretches of the sea were like glass bending
above the long, slow heaving of the primal ocean. Swordfish lay basking
here and there on the surface, too lazy to get out of the way of the
ship:--
"The air was calm, and on the level brine
Sleek Panope with all her sisters played."
Occasionally a whale would blow, or show his glistening back, attracting
a crowd to the railing. One morning a whale plunged spitefully through
the track of the ship but a few hundred yards away.
But the prettiest sight in the way of animated nature was the shoals of
dolphins occasionally seen during these brilliant torrid days, leaping
and sporting, and apparently racing with the vessel. They would leap in
pairs from the glassy surface of one swell of the steamer across the
polished chasm into the next swell, frisking their tails and doing their
best not to be beaten. They were like fawns or young kine sporting in a
summer meadow. It was the only touch of mirth, or youth and jollity, I
saw in the grim sea. Savagery and desolation make up the prevailing
expression here. The sea-fowls have weird and disconsolate cries, and
appear doomed to perpetual solitude. But these dolphins know what
companionship is, and are in their own demesne. When one sees them
bursting out of the waves, the impression is that school is just out;
there come the boys, skipping and laughing, and, seeing us just passing,
cry to one another: "Now for a race! Hurrah, boys! We can beat 'em!"
One notices any change in the course of the ship by the stars at night.
For nearly a week Venus sank nightly into the sea far to the north of
us. Our course coming home is south-southwest. Then, one night, as you
promenade the deck, you see, with a keen pleasure, Venus through the
rigging dead ahead. The good ship has turned the corner; she has scented
New York harbor, and is making straight for it, with New England far
away there on her right. Now sails and smoke-funnels begin to appear.
All ocean paths converge here: full-rigged ships, piled with canvas, are
passed, rocking idly upon the polished surface; sails are seen just
dropping below the horizon, phantom ships without hulls, while here and
there the black smoke of some steamer tarnishes the sky. Now we pass
steamers that left New York but yesterday; the City of Rome--looking,
with her three smoke-stacks and her long hull, like two steamers
together--creeps along the southern horizon, just ready to vanish behind
it. Now she stands in the reflected light of a great white cloud which
makes a bright track upon the water like the full moon. Then she slides
on into the dim and even dimmer distance, and we slide on over the
tropic sea, and, by a splendid run, just catch the tide at the moment of
its full, early the next morning, and pass the bar off Sandy Hook
without a moment of time or an inch of water to spare.