MORE SEA EXPERIENCES.
In the month of July we were ready for sea again. In the meantime
Captain Ward had got together a new list of passengers, and we more than
doubled our numbers by the addition of several Roman Catholic gentlemen
of birth and education with their followers, and a party of Orangemen
and their families, of a rather rough farming sort, escaping from
religious feuds and hostile neighbours. A blooming widow Culleeney, of
the former class, was added to the scanty female society on board; and
for the first few hours after leaving port, we had fun and dancing on
deck galore. But alas, sea-sickness put an end to our merriment all too
soon. Our new recruits fled below, and scarcely showed their faces on
deck for several days. Yet, in this apparently quiet interval, discord
had found her way between decks.
We were listening one fine evening to the comical jokes and rich brogue
of the most gentlemanly of the Irish Catholics above-mentioned, when
suddenly a dozen men, women and children, armed with sticks and foaming
at the mouth, rushed up the steerage hatchway, and without note of
warning or apparent provocation, attacked the defenceless group standing
near us with the blindness of insanity and the most frantic cries of
rage. Fortunately there were several of the ship's officers and sailors
on deck, who laid about them lustily with their fists, and speedily
drove the attacking party below, where they were confined for some days,
under a threat of severe punishment from the captain, who meant what he
said. So this breeze passed over. What it was about, who was offended,
and how, we never could discover; we set it down to the general
principle, that the poor creatures were merely 'blue-mowlded for want of
a bating.'
Moderately fair breezes, occasional dead calms, rude, baffling
head-winds, attended us until we reached the Gulf of St. Lawrence. After
sailing all day northward, and all night southerly, we found ourselves
next morning actually retrograded some thirty or forty knots. But we
were rewarded sometimes by strange sights and wondrous spectacles. Once
a shoal of porpoises and grampuses crossed our course, frolicking and
turning summersets in the air, and continuing to stream onwards for full
two hours. Another time, when far north, we had the most magnificent
display of aurora borealis. Night after night the sea became radiant
with phosphorescent light. Icebergs attended us in thousands, compelling
our captain to shorten sail frequently; once we passed near two of these
ice-cliffs which exceeded five hundred feet in height, and again we were
nearly overwhelmed by the sudden break-down of a huge mass as big as a
cathedral. Near the Island of Anticosti we saw at least three hundred
spouting whales at one view. I have crossed the Atlantic four times
since, and have scarcely seen a single whale or shark. It seems that
modern steamship travel has driven away the inhabitants of the deep to
quieter seas, and robbed "life on the ocean wave" of much of its
romance.