AN INCIDENT.
By the time we had been a month at sea, having applied myself
assiduously to work, I picked up a little knowledge of seamanship. I
took my turn of watch with the rest; I learned to go aloft and to lay
out upon a yard in a stiff topgallant breeze. I acquired all the
mysteries of knotting and splicing, of serving a rope with spun-yarn,
and to know the technical difference between the _rope_ itself and a
line. I could heave the log, box the compass, and take my "trick" at
the helm with the best man on board, and thus gained the golden
opinions of those among whom a rough turn of the wheel of fortune had
so strangely and so suddenly cast me.
Some days after leaving the Canaries, we found ourselves passing
through what seemed to be immense meadows of green stuff adrift. By
moonlight the branches, leaves, and fibres of this uprooted marine
forest,--for such it was, being wrack and seaweeds of wondrous length
springing from the lowest depths of the ocean--sparkled, flashed, and
whirled in the foaming eddies astern of the brig as she cleft or
brushed down the yielding masses with her rushing keel.
I was never weary of surveying this scene, which was so marvellous in
its beauty, when the moon was shining on the sea.
These vast broad leaves and long snaky tendrils that danced upon the
surface of the sea were the Florida gulf-weed.
"The tropical grape of the sailors," said Hislop, as we leaned over
the lee-quarter one evening. "These plants grow upon the two great
banks of the Atlantic, and were known to the Phoenicians, who named
them the Weedy Sea."
"I remember," said I; "and that the seamen of Columbus thought they
were sent by heaven to stay their course."
"You are right," replied the mate, with an approving smile. "It is
pleasant to meet one like you, Rodney, who has read that which is
worth reading and remembers it."
"The Gulf Stream," said Weston, joining in the conversation, "is a
great current about sixty miles broad, caused by the trade winds,
which always blow from east to west. It issues from the Gulf between
Cape Florida and Cuba, and runs at the rate of three knots an hour
along the shores of South and North America, till the Newfoundland
bank turns it to the south-east; so everywhere its track is known by
that gulf-weed which you now see floating past."
It is by this mysterious current--this mighty river that traverses
the ocean--that the timber logs of the St. Lawrence, the wrecks of
the old plate argosies, and the carved idols of older Mexico and the
Caribbean Isles, all covered with the weeds and barnacles of long
immersion, have been cast upon the western shores of Scotland and the
Hebrides.
Every morning the weather became warmer--the sea and sky more
clear--the atmosphere more rarefied. The wind was so steady that
scarcely a sheet or tack were altered. Thus for several days we bore
on with both sheets aft, as the phrase is, when running right before
the wind.
Shoals of porpoises plunged across the bows of the brig in the
sapphire-colored sea, and when it was smooth a whole fleet of the
little nautilus passed us with purple sails up; nor were the dark and
gliding shark and the silvery flying-fish wanting at times to keep my
attention excited; and the tiny petrels, as they came tripping along,
half in water and half in air; kept pace with the _Eugenie_, as she
cracked on under a press of sail, dashing the waves around her,
ploughing so freely and so fearlessly the deep waters that hide a
finny world, and wash the dark and unknown basements of the earth.
One glorious morning, when we were within a few days' sail of
Hispaniola, there occurred a circumstance which was afterwards a
source of the deepest regret to us all; how and why, will be shown
during the progress of my story.
The day was fine, even for that region of fine days. The _Eugenie_
was running smoothly before the wind, and Hislop, with considerable
animation, was detailing to the captain and me the appearance of that
rare phenomenon, a lunar rainbow, which by singular good fortune he
had once seen in these latitudes, and which Aristotle declares is
never seen but at the time of the full moon,--a declaration which our
learned Scotch mate treated with contempt; for he was a strange
fellow, this Marc Hislop, and could with equal facility dilate on the
Apology of Plato, and the method of club-hauling a square-rigged
vessel, or sheering her to her anchor in a gale of wind; on the
Prometheus of Æschylus, or the proper mode of lying too in a
hurricane, with every thing struck aloft, and topsail yards on the
cap; and now, on the subject of the lunar rainbow, he was proceeding
to quote from the Portuguese Pilot of Ramusio, when Weston
interrupted him by hailing aloft.
"Fore-top--there!"
"Aye, aye, sir," was the usual response from Ned Carlton, a seaman
who was perched in the top.
"What are you about?" asked Weston, angrily.
"Greasing the sling of the fore-yard, sir."
"Oh--I thought you were making hay, you are so slow about it. You
have been staring ahead for the last twenty minutes at least."
"Because I think I see something," said the seaman, annoyed by the
nautical taunt.
"Something," reiterated Weston, "what is it? a church, or a windmill
going before the wind?"
"Neither, sir,--but a boat adrift."
"How does it bear, Ned?" asked Hislop, starting into the rigging.
"On the starboard bow, about two miles off."
On hearing this the telescope was resorted to, and we could plainly
enough see a white object, which the intervening waves, as they rose
and fell, hid from us at times; and there was a great diversity of
opinion, for one of the crew maintained it was a harbor buoy adrift.
"It must have drifted a long way to have come here," retorted
Carlton; "and if you have your grandmother's spectacles about you,
wipe them clean, put them on, and look again,--for I can see plainly
enough that it is a boat."
"Then we shall overhaul it," said Weston; "Hislop, prepare to lower
ours, and to lay the fore-yard aback."
The _Eugenie's_ course was shaped toward it, and when within a
quarter of a mile, the foresail was laid to the mast, the brig hove
in the wind, and the stern boat lowered; Hislop, Tom Lambourne, two
other hands, and I, manned her, and put off to inspect and report
upon what we could discover. And so, with many surmises as to
wrecks, boats getting adrift or being washed away from their davits,
and so forth, we pulled swiftly toward her, all stripped to our
shirtsleeves, for a hot West Indian sun was blazing in a cloudless
sky, and the air seemed still and breathless.