The West Wind reigns over the seas surrounding the coasts of these
kingdoms; and from the gateways of the channels, from promontories as if
from watch-towers, from estuaries of rivers as if from postern gates,
from passage-ways, inlets, straits, firths, the garrison of the Isle and
the crews of the ships going and returning look to the westward to judge
by the varied splendours of his sunset mantle the mood of that arbitrary
ruler. The end of the day is the time to gaze at the kingly face of the
Westerly Weather, who is the arbiter of ships’ destinies. Benignant and
splendid, or splendid and sinister, the western sky reflects the hidden
purposes of the royal mind. Clothed in a mantle of dazzling gold or
draped in rags of black clouds like a beggar, the might of the Westerly
Wind sits enthroned upon the western horizon with the whole North
Atlantic as a footstool for his feet and the first twinkling stars making
a diadem for his brow. Then the seamen, attentive courtiers of the
weather, think of regulating the conduct of their ships by the mood of
the master. The West Wind is too great a king to be a dissembler: he is
no calculator plotting deep schemes in a sombre heart; he is too strong
for small artifices; there is passion in all his moods, even in the soft
mood of his serene days, in the grace of his blue sky whose immense and
unfathomable tenderness reflected in the mirror of the sea embraces,
possesses, lulls to sleep the ships with white sails. He is all things
to all oceans; he is like a poet seated upon a throne—magnificent,
simple, barbarous, pensive, generous, impulsive, changeable,
unfathomable—but when you understand him, always the same. Some of his
sunsets are like pageants devised for the delight of the multitude, when
all the gems of the royal treasure-house are displayed above the sea.
Others are like the opening of his royal confidence, tinged with thoughts
of sadness and compassion in a melancholy splendour meditating upon the
short-lived peace of the waters. And I have seen him put the pent-up
anger of his heart into the aspect of the inaccessible sun, and cause it
to glare fiercely like the eye of an implacable autocrat out of a pale
and frightened sky.
He is the war-lord who sends his battalions of Atlantic rollers to the
assault of our seaboard. The compelling voice of the West Wind musters
up to his service all the might of the ocean. At the bidding of the West
Wind there arises a great commotion in the sky above these Islands, and a
great rush of waters falls upon our shores. The sky of the westerly
weather is full of flying clouds, of great big white clouds coming
thicker and thicker till they seem to stand welded into a solid canopy,
upon whose gray face the lower wrack of the gale, thin, black and
angry-looking, flies past with vertiginous speed. Denser and denser
grows this dome of vapours, descending lower and lower upon the sea,
narrowing the horizon around the ship. And the characteristic aspect of
westerly weather, the thick, gray, smoky and sinister tone sets in,
circumscribing the view of the men, drenching their bodies, oppressing
their souls, taking their breath away with booming gusts, deafening,
blinding, driving, rushing them onwards in a swaying ship towards our
coasts lost in mists and rain.
The caprice of the winds, like the wilfulness of men, is fraught with the
disastrous consequences of self-indulgence. Long anger, the sense of his
uncontrolled power, spoils the frank and generous nature of the West
Wind. It is as if his heart were corrupted by a malevolent and brooding
rancour. He devastates his own kingdom in the wantonness of his force.
South-west is the quarter of the heavens where he presents his darkened
brow. He breathes his rage in terrific squalls, and overwhelms his realm
with an inexhaustible welter of clouds. He strews the seeds of anxiety
upon the decks of scudding ships, makes the foam-stripped ocean look old,
and sprinkles with gray hairs the heads of ship-masters in the
homeward-bound ships running for the Channel. The Westerly Wind
asserting his sway from the south-west quarter is often like a monarch
gone mad, driving forth with wild imprecations the most faithful of his
courtiers to shipwreck, disaster, and death.
The south-westerly weather is the thick weather _par excellence_. It is
not the thickness of the fog; it is rather a contraction of the horizon,
a mysterious veiling of the shores with clouds that seem to make a
low-vaulted dungeon around the running ship. It is not blindness; it is
a shortening of the sight. The West Wind does not say to the seaman,
“You shall be blind”; it restricts merely the range of his vision and
raises the dread of land within his breast. It makes of him a man robbed
of half his force, of half his efficiency. Many times in my life,
standing in long sea-boots and streaming oilskins at the elbow of my
commander on the poop of a homeward-bound ship making for the Channel,
and gazing ahead into the gray and tormented waste, I have heard a weary
sigh shape itself into a studiously casual comment:
“Can’t see very far in this weather.”