“No, sir.”
It would be merely the instinctive voicing of an ever-present thought
associated closely with the consciousness of the land somewhere ahead and
of the great speed of the ship. Fair wind, fair wind! Who would dare to
grumble at a fair wind? It was a favour of the Western King, who rules
masterfully the North Atlantic from the latitude of the Azores to the
latitude of Cape Farewell. A famous shove this to end a good passage
with; and yet, somehow, one could not muster upon one’s lips the smile of
a courtier’s gratitude. This favour was dispensed to you from under an
overbearing scowl, which is the true expression of the great autocrat
when he has made up his mind to give a battering to some ships and to
hunt certain others home in one breath of cruelty and benevolence,
equally distracting.
“No, sir. Can’t see very far.”
Thus would the mate’s voice repeat the thought of the master, both gazing
ahead, while under their feet the ship rushes at some twelve knots in the
direction of the lee shore; and only a couple of miles in front of her
swinging and dripping jib-boom, carried naked with an upward slant like a
spear, a gray horizon closes the view with a multitude of waves surging
upwards violently as if to strike at the stooping clouds.
Awful and threatening scowls darken the face of the West Wind in his
clouded, south-west mood; and from the King’s throne-hall in the western
board stronger gusts reach you, like the fierce shouts of raving fury to
which only the gloomy grandeur of the scene imparts a saving dignity. A
shower pelts the deck and the sails of the ship as if flung with a scream
by an angry hand; and when the night closes in, the night of a
south-westerly gale, it seems more hopeless than the shade of Hades. The
south-westerly mood of the great West Wind is a lightless mood, without
sun, moon, or stars, with no gleam of light but the phosphorescent
flashes of the great sheets of foam that, boiling up on each side of the
ship, fling bluish gleams upon her dark and narrow hull, rolling as she
runs, chased by enormous seas, distracted in the tumult.
There are some bad nights in the kingdom of the West Wind for
homeward-bound ships making for the Channel; and the days of wrath dawn
upon them colourless and vague like the timid turning up of invisible
lights upon the scene of a tyrannical and passionate outbreak, awful in
the monotony of its method and the increasing strength of its violence.
It is the same wind, the same clouds, the same wildly racing seas, the
same thick horizon around the ship. Only the wind is stronger, the
clouds seem denser and more overwhelming, the waves appear to have grown
bigger and more threatening during the night. The hours, whose minutes
are marked by the crash of the breaking seas, slip by with the screaming,
pelting squalls overtaking the ship as she runs on and on with darkened
canvas, with streaming spars and dripping ropes. The down-pours thicken.
Preceding each shower a mysterious gloom, like the passage of a shadow
above the firmament of gray clouds, filters down upon the ship. Now and
then the rain pours upon your head in streams as if from spouts. It
seems as if your ship were going to be drowned before she sank, as if all
atmosphere had turned to water. You gasp, you splutter, you are blinded
and deafened, you are submerged, obliterated, dissolved, annihilated,
streaming all over as if your limbs, too, had turned to water. And every
nerve on the alert you watch for the clearing-up mood of the Western
King, that shall come with a shift of wind as likely as not to whip all
the three masts out of your ship in the twinkling of an eye.