In the atmosphere of the Easterly weather, as pellucid as a piece of
crystal and refracting like a prism, we could see the appalling numbers
of our helpless company, even to those who in more normal conditions
would have remained invisible, sails down under the horizon. It is the
malicious pleasure of the East Wind to augment the power of your
eyesight, in order, perhaps, that you should see better the perfect
humiliation, the hopeless character of your captivity. Easterly weather
is generally clear, and that is all that can be said for it—almost
supernaturally clear when it likes; but whatever its mood, there is
something uncanny in its nature. Its duplicity is such that it will
deceive a scientific instrument. No barometer will give warning of an
easterly gale, were it ever so wet. It would be an unjust and ungrateful
thing to say that a barometer is a stupid contrivance. It is simply that
the wiles of the East Wind are too much for its fundamental honesty.
After years and years of experience the most trusty instrument of the
sort that ever went to sea screwed on to a ship’s cabin bulkhead will,
almost invariably, be induced to rise by the diabolic ingenuity of the
Easterly weather, just at the moment when the Easterly weather,
discarding its methods of hard, dry, impassive cruelty, contemplates
drowning what is left of your spirit in torrents of a peculiarly cold and
horrid rain. The sleet-and-hail squalls following the lightning at the
end of a westerly gale are cold and benumbing and stinging and cruel
enough. But the dry, Easterly weather, when it turns to wet, seems to
rain poisoned showers upon your head. It is a sort of steady,
persistent, overwhelming, endlessly driving downpour, which makes your
heart sick, and opens it to dismal forebodings. And the stormy mood of
the Easterly weather looms black upon the sky with a peculiar and amazing
blackness. The West Wind hangs heavy gray curtains of mist and spray
before your gaze, but the Eastern interloper of the narrow seas, when he
has mustered his courage and cruelty to the point of a gale, puts your
eyes out, puts them out completely, makes you feel blind for life upon a
lee-shore. It is the wind, also, that brings snow.
Out of his black and merciless heart he flings a white blinding sheet
upon the ships of the sea. He has more manners of villainy, and no more
conscience than an Italian prince of the seventeenth century. His weapon
is a dagger carried under a black cloak when he goes out on his unlawful
enterprises. The mere hint of his approach fills with dread every craft
that swims the sea, from fishing-smacks to four-masted ships that
recognise the sway of the West Wind. Even in his most accommodating mood
he inspires a dread of treachery. I have heard upwards of ten score of
windlasses spring like one into clanking life in the dead of night,
filling the Downs with a panic-struck sound of anchors being torn
hurriedly out of the ground at the first breath of his approach.
Fortunately, his heart often fails him: he does not always blow home upon
our exposed coast; he has not the fearless temper of his Westerly
brother.
The natures of those two winds that share the dominions of the great
oceans are fundamentally different. It is strange that the winds which
men are prone to style capricious remain true to their character in all
the various regions of the earth. To us here, for instance, the East
Wind comes across a great continent, sweeping over the greatest body of
solid land upon this earth. For the Australian east coast the East Wind
is the wind of the ocean, coming across the greatest body of water upon
the globe; and yet here and there its characteristics remain the same
with a strange consistency in everything that is vile and base. The
members of the West Wind’s dynasty are modified in a way by the regions
they rule, as a Hohenzollern, without ceasing to be himself, becomes a
Roumanian by virtue of his throne, or a Saxe-Coburg learns to put the
dress of Bulgarian phrases upon his particular thoughts, whatever they
are.
The autocratic sway of the West Wind, whether forty north or forty south
of the Equator, is characterized by an open, generous, frank, barbarous
recklessness. For he is a great autocrat, and to be a great autocrat you
must be a great barbarian. I have been too much moulded to his sway to
nurse now any idea of rebellion in my heart. Moreover, what is a
rebellion within the four walls of a room against the tempestuous rule of
the West Wind? I remain faithful to the memory of the mighty King with a
double-edged sword in one hand, and in the other holding out rewards of
great daily runs and famously quick passages to those of his courtiers
who knew how to wait watchfully for every sign of his secret mood. As we
deep-water men always reckoned, he made one year in three fairly lively
for anybody having business upon the Atlantic or down there along the
“forties” of the Southern Ocean. You had to take the bitter with the
sweet; and it cannot be denied he played carelessly with our lives and
fortunes. But, then, he was always a great king, fit to rule over the
great waters where, strictly speaking, a man would have no business
whatever but for his audacity.
The audacious should not complain. A mere trader ought not to grumble at
the tolls levied by a mighty king. His mightiness was sometimes very
overwhelming; but even when you had to defy him openly, as on the banks
of the Agulhas homeward bound from the East Indies, or on the outward
passage round the Horn, he struck at you fairly his stinging blows (full
in the face, too), and it was your business not to get too much
staggered. And, after all, if you showed anything of a countenance, the
good-natured barbarian would let you fight your way past the very steps
of his throne. It was only now and then that the sword descended and a
head fell; but if you fell you were sure of impressive obsequies and of a
roomy, generous grave.
Such is the king to whom Viking chieftains bowed their heads, and whom
the modern and palatial steamship defies with impunity seven times a
week. And yet it is but defiance, not victory. The magnificent
barbarian sits enthroned in a mantle of gold-lined clouds looking from on
high on great ships gliding like mechanical toys upon his sea and on men
who, armed with fire and iron, no longer need to watch anxiously for the
slightest sign of his royal mood. He is disregarded; but he has kept all
his strength, all his splendour, and a great part of his power. Time
itself, that shakes all the thrones, is on the side of that king. The
sword in his hand remains as sharp as ever upon both its edges; and he
may well go on playing his royal game of quoits with hurricanes, tossing
them over from the continent of republics to the continent of kingdoms,
in the assurance that both the new republics and the old kingdoms, the
heat of fire and the strength of iron, with the untold generations of
audacious men, shall crumble to dust at the steps of his throne, and pass
away, and be forgotten before his own rule comes to an end.