FROM the main truck of the average tall ship the horizon describes a
circle of many miles, in which you can see another ship right down to her
water-line; and these very eyes which follow this writing have counted in
their time over a hundred sail becalmed, as if within a magic ring, not
very far from the Azores—ships more or less tall. There were hardly two
of them heading exactly the same way, as if each had meditated breaking
out of the enchanted circle at a different point of the compass. But the
spell of the calm is a strong magic. The following day still saw them
scattered within sight of each other and heading different ways; but
when, at last, the breeze came with the darkling ripple that ran very
blue on a pale sea, they all went in the same direction together. For
this was the homeward-bound fleet from the far-off ends of the earth, and
a Falmouth fruit-schooner, the smallest of them all, was heading the
flight. One could have imagined her very fair, if not divinely tall,
leaving a scent of lemons and oranges in her wake.
The next day there were very few ships in sight from our mast-heads—seven
at most, perhaps, with a few more distant specks, hull down, beyond the
magic ring of the horizon. The spell of the fair wind has a subtle power
to scatter a white-winged company of ships looking all the same way, each
with its white fillet of tumbling foam under the bow. It is the calm
that brings ships mysteriously together; it is your wind that is the
great separator.
The taller the ship, the further she can be seen; and her white tallness
breathed upon by the wind first proclaims her size. The tall masts
holding aloft the white canvas, spread out like a snare for catching the
invisible power of the air, emerge gradually from the water, sail after
sail, yard after yard, growing big, till, under the towering structure of
her machinery, you perceive the insignificant, tiny speck of her hull.
The tall masts are the pillars supporting the balanced planes that,
motionless and silent, catch from the air the ship’s motive-power, as it
were a gift from Heaven vouchsafed to the audacity of man; and it is the
ship’s tall spars, stripped and shorn of their white glory, that incline
themselves before the anger of the clouded heaven.
When they yield to a squall in a gaunt and naked submission, their
tallness is brought best home even to the mind of a seaman. The man who
has looked upon his ship going over too far is made aware of the
preposterous tallness of a ship’s spars. It seems impossible but that
those gilt trucks which one had to tilt one’s head back to see, now
falling into the lower plane of vision, must perforce hit the very edge
of the horizon. Such an experience gives you a better impression of the
loftiness of your spars than any amount of running aloft could do. And
yet in my time the royal yards of an average profitable ship were a good
way up above her decks.
No doubt a fair amount of climbing up iron ladders can be achieved by an
active man in a ship’s engine-room, but I remember moments when even to
my supple limbs and pride of nimbleness the sailing-ship’s machinery
seemed to reach up to the very stars.
For machinery it is, doing its work in perfect silence and with a
motionless grace, that seems to hide a capricious and not always
governable power, taking nothing away from the material stores of the
earth. Not for it the unerring precision of steel moved by white steam
and living by red fire and fed with black coal. The other seems to draw
its strength from the very soul of the world, its formidable ally, held
to obedience by the frailest bonds, like a fierce ghost captured in a
snare of something even finer than spun silk. For what is the array of
the strongest ropes, the tallest spars and the stoutest canvas against
the mighty breath of the infinite, but thistle stalks, cobwebs and
gossamer?