And so much depends upon the craft which, made by man, is one with man,
that the sea shall wear for him another aspect. I remember once seeing
the commander—officially the master, by courtesy the captain—of a fine
iron ship of the old wool fleet shaking his head at a very pretty
brigantine. She was bound the other way. She was a taut, trim, neat
little craft, extremely well kept; and on that serene evening when we
passed her close she looked the embodiment of coquettish comfort on the
sea. It was somewhere near the Cape—_The_ Cape being, of course, the
Cape of Good Hope, the Cape of Storms of its Portuguese discoverer. And
whether it is that the word “storm” should not be pronounced upon the sea
where the storms dwell thickly, or because men are shy of confessing
their good hopes, it has become the nameless cape—the Cape _tout court_.
The other great cape of the world, strangely enough, is seldom if ever
called a cape. We say, “a voyage round the Horn”; “we rounded the Horn”;
“we got a frightful battering off the Horn”; but rarely “Cape Horn,” and,
indeed, with some reason, for Cape Horn is as much an island as a cape.
The third stormy cape of the world, which is the Leeuwin, receives
generally its full name, as if to console its second-rate dignity. These
are the capes that look upon the gales.
The little brigantine, then, had doubled the Cape. Perhaps she was
coming from Port Elizabeth, from East London—who knows? It was many
years ago, but I remember well the captain of the wool-clipper nodding at
her with the words, “Fancy having to go about the sea in a thing like
that!”
He was a man brought up in big deep-water ships, and the size of the
craft under his feet was a part of his conception of the sea. His own
ship was certainly big as ships went then. He may have thought of the
size of his cabin, or—unconsciously, perhaps—have conjured up a vision of
a vessel so small tossing amongst the great seas. I didn’t inquire, and
to a young second mate the captain of the little pretty brigantine,
sitting astride a camp stool with his chin resting on his hands that were
crossed upon the rail, might have appeared a minor king amongst men. We
passed her within earshot, without a hail, reading each other’s names
with the naked eye.
Some years later, the second mate, the recipient of that almost
involuntary mutter, could have told his captain that a man brought up in
big ships may yet take a peculiar delight in what we should both then
have called a small craft. Probably the captain of the big ship would
not have understood very well. His answer would have been a gruff, “Give
me size,” as I heard another man reply to a remark praising the handiness
of a small vessel. It was not a love of the grandiose or the prestige
attached to the command of great tonnage, for he continued, with an air
of disgust and contempt, “Why, you get flung out of your bunk as likely
as not in any sort of heavy weather.”
I don’t know. I remember a few nights in my lifetime, and in a big ship,
too (as big as they made them then), when one did not get flung out of
one’s bed simply because one never even attempted to get in; one had been
made too weary, too hopeless, to try. The expedient of turning your
bedding out on to a damp floor and lying on it there was no earthly good,
since you could not keep your place or get a second’s rest in that or any
other position. But of the delight of seeing a small craft run bravely
amongst the great seas there can be no question to him whose soul does
not dwell ashore. Thus I well remember a three days’ run got out of a
little barque of 400 tons somewhere between the islands of St. Paul and
Amsterdam and Cape Otway on the Australian coast. It was a hard, long
gale, gray clouds and green sea, heavy weather undoubtedly, but still
what a sailor would call manageable. Under two lower topsails and a
reefed foresail the barque seemed to race with a long, steady sea that
did not becalm her in the troughs. The solemn thundering combers caught
her up from astern, passed her with a fierce boiling up of foam level
with the bulwarks, swept on ahead with a swish and a roar: and the little
vessel, dipping her jib-boom into the tumbling froth, would go on running
in a smooth, glassy hollow, a deep valley between two ridges of the sea,
hiding the horizon ahead and astern. There was such fascination in her
pluck, nimbleness, the continual exhibition of unfailing seaworthiness,
in the semblance of courage and endurance, that I could not give up the
delight of watching her run through the three unforgettable days of that
gale which my mate also delighted to extol as “a famous shove.”
And this is one of those gales whose memory in after-years returns,
welcome in dignified austerity, as you would remember with pleasure the
noble features of a stranger with whom you crossed swords once in
knightly encounter and are never to see again. In this way gales have
their physiognomy. You remember them by your own feelings, and no two
gales stamp themselves in the same way upon your emotions. Some cling to
you in woebegone misery; others come back fiercely and weirdly, like
ghouls bent upon sucking your strength away; others, again, have a
catastrophic splendour; some are unvenerated recollections, as of
spiteful wild-cats clawing at your agonized vitals; others are severe,
like a visitation; and one or two rise up draped and mysterious, with an
aspect of ominous menace. In each of them there is a characteristic
point at which the whole feeling seems contained in one single moment.
Thus there is a certain four o’clock in the morning in the confused roar
of a black and white world when coming on deck to take charge of my watch
I received the instantaneous impression that the ship could not live for
another hour in such a raging sea.
I wonder what became of the men who silently (you couldn’t hear yourself
speak) must have shared that conviction with me. To be left to write
about it is not, perhaps, the most enviable fate; but the point is that
this impression resumes in its intensity the whole recollection of days
and days of desperately dangerous weather. We were then, for reasons
which it is not worth while to specify, in the close neighbourhood of
Kerguelen Land; and now, when I open an atlas and look at the tiny dots
on the map of the Southern Ocean, I see as if engraved upon the paper the
enraged physiognomy of that gale.
Another, strangely, recalls a silent man. And yet it was not din that
was wanting; in fact, it was terrific. That one was a gale that came
upon the ship swiftly, like a parnpero, which last is a very sudden wind
indeed. Before we knew very well what was coming all the sails we had
set had burst; the furled ones were blowing loose, ropes flying, sea
hissing—it hissed tremendously—wind howling, and the ship lying on her
side, so that half of the crew were swimming and the other half clawing
desperately at whatever came to hand, according to the side of the deck
each man had been caught on by the catastrophe, either to leeward or to
windward. The shouting I need not mention—it was the merest drop in an
ocean of noise—and yet the character of the gale seems contained in the
recollection of one small, not particularly impressive, sallow man
without a cap and with a very still face. Captain Jones—let us call him
Jones—had been caught unawares. Two orders he had given at the first
sign of an utterly unforeseen onset; after that the magnitude of his
mistake seemed to have overwhelmed him. We were doing what was needed
and feasible. The ship behaved well. Of course, it was some time before
we could pause in our fierce and laborious exertions; but all through the
work, the excitement, the uproar, and some dismay, we were aware of this
silent little man at the break of the poop, perfectly motionless,
soundless, and often hidden from us by the drift of sprays.
When we officers clambered at last upon the poop, he seemed to come out
of that numbed composure, and shouted to us down wind: “Try the pumps.”
Afterwards he disappeared. As to the ship, I need not say that, although
she was presently swallowed up in one of the blackest nights I can
remember, she did not disappear. In truth, I don’t fancy that there had
ever been much danger of that, but certainly the experience was noisy and
particularly distracting—and yet it is the memory of a very quiet silence
that survives.