I should not like to ask an indulgent and idle public to saunter about
with me under a misapprehension. It would be more agreeable to invite it
to go nowhere than somewhere; for almost every one has been somewhere,
and has written about it. The only compromise I can suggest is, that we
shall go somewhere, and not learn anything about it. The instinct of the
public against any thing like information in a volume of this kind is
perfectly justifiable; and the reader will perhaps discover that this is
illy adapted for a text-book in schools, or for the use of competitive
candidates in the civil-service examinations.
Years ago, people used to saunter over the Atlantic, and spend weeks
in filling journals with their monotonous emotions. That is all
changed now, and there is a misapprehension that the Atlantic has been
practically subdued; but no one ever gets beyond the “rolling forties”
without having this impression corrected.
I confess to have been deceived about this Atlantic, the roughest and
windiest of oceans. If you look at it on the map, it does n't appear to
be much, and, indeed, it is spoken of as a ferry. What with the eight
and nine days' passages over it, and the laying of the cable, which
annihilates distance, I had the impression that its tedious three
thousand and odd miles had been, somehow, partly done away with; but
they are all there. When one has sailed a thousand miles due east and
finds that he is then nowhere in particular, but is still out, pitching
about on an uneasy sea, under an inconstant sky, and that a thousand
miles more will not make any perceptible change, he begins to have some
conception of the unconquerable ocean. Columbus rises in my estimation.
I was feeling uncomfortable that nothing had been done for the memory
of Christopher Columbus, when I heard some months ago that thirty-seven
guns had been fired off for him in Boston. It is to be hoped that they
were some satisfaction to him. They were discharged by countrymen of
his, who are justly proud that he should have been able, after a search
of only a few weeks, to find a land where the hand-organ had never
been heard. The Italians, as a people, have not profited much by this
discovery; not so much, indeed, as the Spaniards, who got a reputation
by it which even now gilds their decay. That Columbus was born in Genoa
entitles the Italians to celebrate the great achievement of his life;
though why they should discharge exactly thirty-seven guns I do not
know. Columbus did not discover the United States: that we partly found
ourselves, and partly bought, and gouged the Mexicans out of. He did not
even appear to know that there was a continent here. He discovered
the West Indies, which he thought were the East; and ten guns would
be enough for them. It is probable that he did open the way to the
discovery of the New World. If he had waited, however, somebody else
would have discovered it,--perhaps some Englishman; and then we might
have been spared all the old French and Spanish wars. Columbus let the
Spaniards into the New World; and their civilization has uniformly been
a curse to it. If he had brought Italians, who neither at that time
showed, nor since have shown, much inclination to come, we should have
had the opera, and made it a paying institution by this time. Columbus
was evidently a person who liked to sail about, and did n't care much
for consequences.
Perhaps it is not an open question whether Columbus did a good thing in
first coming over here, one that we ought to celebrate with salutes and
dinners. The Indians never thanked him, for one party. The Africans had
small ground to be gratified for the market he opened for them. Here
are two continents that had no use for him. He led Spain into a dance
of great expectations, which ended in her gorgeous ruin. He introduced
tobacco into Europe, and laid the foundation for more tracts and nervous
diseases than the Romans had in a thousand years. He introduced the
potato into Ireland indirectly; and that caused such a rapid increase
of population, that the great famine was the result, and an enormous
emigration to New York--hence Tweed and the constituency of the Ring.
Columbus is really responsible for New York. He is responsible for our
whole tremendous experiment of democracy, open to all comers, the best
three in five to win. We cannot yet tell how it is coming out, what with
the foreigners and the communists and the women. On our great stage we
are playing a piece of mingled tragedy and comedy, with what denouement
we cannot yet say. If it comes out well, we ought to erect a monument
to Christopher as high as the one at Washington expects to be; and we
presume it is well to fire a salute occasionally to keep the ancient
mariner in mind while we are trying our great experiment. And this
reminds me that he ought to have had a naval salute.
There is something almost heroic in the idea of firing off guns for a
man who has been stone-dead for about four centuries. It must have had
a lively and festive sound in Boston, when the meaning of the salute was
explained. No one could hear those great guns without a quicker beating
of the heart in gratitude to the great discoverer who had made Boston
possible. We are trying to “realize” to ourselves the importance of the
12th of October as an anniversary of our potential existence. If any one
wants to see how vivid is the gratitude to Columbus, let him start out
among our business-houses with a subscription-paper to raise money for
powder to be exploded in his honor. And yet Columbus was a well-meaning
man; and if he did not discover a perfect continent, he found the only
one that was left.
Columbus made voyaging on the Atlantic popular, and is responsible for
much of the delusion concerning it. Its great practical use in this fast
age is to give one an idea of distance and of monotony.
I have listened in my time with more or less pleasure to very rollicking
songs about the sea, the flashing brine, the spray and the tempest's
roar, the wet sheet and the flowing sea, a life on the ocean wave, and
all the rest of it. To paraphrase a land proverb, let me write the songs
of the sea, and I care not who goes to sea and sings 'em. A square yard
of solid ground is worth miles of the pitching, turbulent stuff. Its
inability to stand still for one second is the plague of it. To lie on
deck when the sun shines, and swing up and down, while the waves run
hither and thither and toss their white caps, is all well enough to lie
in your narrow berth and roll from side to side all night long; to walk
uphill to your state-room door, and, when you get there, find you have
got to the bottom of the hill, and opening the door is like lifting up
a trap-door in the floor; to deliberately start for some object, and,
before you know it, to be flung against it like a bag of sand; to
attempt to sit down on your sofa, and find you are sitting up; to slip
and slide and grasp at everything within reach, and to meet everybody
leaning and walking on a slant, as if a heavy wind were blowing, and the
laws of gravitation were reversed; to lie in your berth, and hear all
the dishes on the cabin-table go sousing off against the wall in a
general smash; to sit at table holding your soup-plate with one hand,
and watching for a chance to put your spoon in when it comes high tide
on your side of the dish; to vigilantly watch, the lurch of the heavy
dishes while holding your glass and your plate and your knife and fork,
and not to notice it when Brown, who sits next you, gets the whole swash
of the gravy from the roast-beef dish on his light-colored pantaloons,
and see the look of dismay that only Brown can assume on such an
occasion; to see Mrs. Brown advance to the table, suddenly stop and
hesitate, two waiters rush at her, with whom she struggles wildly,
only to go down in a heap with them in the opposite corner; to see her
partially recover, but only to shoot back again through her state-room
door, and be seen no more;--all this is quite pleasant and refreshing
if you are tired of land, but you get quite enough of it in a couple
of weeks. You become, in time, even a little tired of the Jew who goes
about wishing “he vas a veek older;” and the eccentric man, who looks
at no one, and streaks about the cabin and on deck, without any purpose,
and plays shuffle-board alone, always beating himself, and goes on the
deck occasionally through the sky-light instead of by the cabin
door, washes himself at the salt-water pump, and won't sleep in his
state-room, saying he is n't used to sleeping in a bed,--as if the hard
narrow, uneasy shelf of a berth was anything like a bed!--and you have
heard at last pretty nearly all about the officers, and their twenty
and thirty years of sea-life, and every ocean and port on the habitable
globe where they have been. There comes a day when you are quite ready
for land, and the scream of the “gull” is a welcome sound.
Even the sailors lose the vivacity of the first of the voyage. The first
two or three days we had their quaint and half-doleful singing in chorus
as they pulled at the ropes: now they are satisfied with short
ha-ho's, and uncadenced grunts. It used to be that the leader sang,
in ever-varying lines of nonsense, and the chorus struck in with fine
effect, like this:
“I wish I was in Liverpool town. Handy-pan, handy O!
O captain! where 'd you ship your crew Handy-pan, handy O!
Oh! pull away, my bully crew, Handy-pan, handy O!”
There are verses enough of this sort to reach across the Atlantic; and
they are not the worst thing about it either, or the most tedious. One
learns to respect this ocean, but not to love it; and he leaves it with
mingled feelings about Columbus.
And now, having crossed it,--a fact that cannot be concealed,--let us
not be under the misapprehension that we are set to any task other than
that of sauntering where it pleases us.