You wish, first of all, to hear of the voyage. Let me assure you, my
dears, in the very commencement of the matter, that going to sea is not
at all the thing that we have taken it to be.
You know how often we have longed for a sea voyage, as the fulfilment of
all our dreams of poetry and romance, the realization of our highest
conceptions of free, joyous existence.
You remember our ship-launching parties in Maine, when we used to ride
to the seaside through dark pine forests, lighted up with the gold,
scarlet, and orange tints of autumn. What exhilaration there was, as
those beautiful inland bays, one by one, unrolled like silver ribbons
before us! and how all our sympathies went forth with the grand new ship
about to be launched! How graceful and noble a thing she looked, as she
sprang from the shore to the blue waters, like a human soul springing
from life into immortality! How all our feelings went with her! how we
longed to be with her, and a part of her--to go with her to India,
China, or any where, so that we might rise and fall on the bosom of that
magnificent ocean, and share a part of that glorified existence! That
ocean! that blue, sparkling, heaving, mysterious ocean, with all the
signs and wonders of heaven emblazoned on its bosom, and another world
of mystery hidden beneath its waters! Who would not long to enjoy a
freer communion, and rejoice in a prospect of days spent in unreserved
fellowship with its grand and noble nature?
Alas! what a contrast between all this poetry and the real prose fact of
going to sea! No man, the proverb says, is a hero to his valet de
chambre. Certainly, no poet, no hero, no inspired prophet, ever lost so
much on near acquaintance as this same mystic, grandiloquent old Ocean.
The one step from the sublime to the ridiculous is never taken with such
alacrity as in a sea voyage.
In the first place, it is a melancholy fact, but not the less true, that
ship life is not at all fragrant; in short, particularly on a steamer,
there is a most mournful combination of grease, steam, onions, and
dinners in general, either past, present, or to come, which, floating
invisibly in the atmosphere, strongly predisposes to that disgust of
existence, which, in half an hour after sailing, begins to come upon
you; that disgust, that strange, mysterious, ineffable sensation which
steals slowly and inexplicably upon you; which makes every heaving
billow, every white-capped wave, the ship, the people, the sight, taste,
sound, and smell of every thing a matter of inexpressible loathing! Man
cannot utter it.
It is really amusing to watch the gradual progress of this epidemic; to
see people stepping on board in the highest possible feather, alert,
airy, nimble, parading the deck, chatty and conversable, on the best
possible terms with themselves and mankind generally; the treacherous
ship, meanwhile, undulating and heaving in the most graceful rises and
pauses imaginable, like some voluptuous waltzer; and then to see one
after another yielding to the mysterious spell!
Your poet launches forth, "full of sentiment sublime as billows,"
discoursing magnificently on the color of the waves and the glory of the
clouds; but gradually he grows white about the mouth, gives sidelong
looks towards the stairway; at last, with one desperate plunge, he sets,
to rise no more!
Here sits a stout gentleman, who looks as resolute as an oak log. "These
things are much the effect of imagination," he tells you; "a little
self-control and resolution," &c. Ah me! it is delightful, when these
people, who are always talking about resolution, get caught on
shipboard. As the backwoodsman said to the Mississippi River, about the
steamboat, they "get their match." Our stout gentleman sits a quarter of
an hour, upright as a palm tree, his back squared against the rails,
pretending to be reading a paper; but a dismal look of disgust is
settling down about his lips; the old sea and his will are evidently
having a pitched battle. Ah, ha! there he goes for the stairway; says he
has left a book in the cabin, but shoots by with a most suspicious
velocity. You may fancy his finale.
Then, of course, there are young ladies,--charming creatures,--who, in
about ten minutes, are going to die, and are sure they shall die, and
don't care if they do; whom anxious papas, or brothers, or lovers
consign with all speed to those dismal lower regions, where the brisk
chambermaid, who has been expecting them, seems to think their agonies
and groans a regular part of the play.
I had come on board thinking, in my simplicity, of a fortnight to be
spent something like the fortnight on a trip to New Orleans, on one of
our floating river palaces; that we should sit in our state rooms, read,
sew, sketch, and chat; and accordingly I laid in a magnificent provision
in the way of literature and divers matters of fancy work, with which to
while away the time. Some last, airy touches, in the way of making up
bows, disposing ribbons, and binding collarets, had been left to these
long, leisure hours, as matters of amusement.
Let me warn you, if you ever go to sea, you may as well omit all such
preparations. Don't leave so much as the unlocking of a trunk to be done
after sailing. In the few precious minutes when the ship stands still,
before she weighs her anchor, set your house, that is to say, your state
room, as much in order as if you were going to be hanged; place every
thing in the most convenient position to be seized without trouble at a
moment's notice; for be sure that in half an hour after sailing an
infinite desperation will seize you, in which the grasshopper will be a
burden. If any thing is in your trunk, it might almost as well be in the
sea, for any practical probability of your getting to it.
Moreover, let your toilet be eminently simple, for you will find the
time coming when to button a cuff or arrange a ruff will be a matter of
absolute despair. You lie disconsolate in your berth, only desiring to
be let alone to die; and then, if you are told, as you always are, that
"you mustn't give way," that "you must rouse yourself" and come on deck,
you will appreciate the value of simple attire. With every thing in your
berth dizzily swinging backwards and forwards, your bonnet, your cloak,
your tippet, your gloves, all present so many discouraging
impossibilities; knotted strings cannot be untied, and modes of
fastening which seemed curious and convenient, when you had nothing else
to do but fasten them, now look disgustingly impracticable.
Nevertheless, your fate for the whole voyage depends upon your rousing
yourself to get upon deck at first; to give up, then, is to be condemned
to the Avernus, the Hades of the lower regions, for the rest of the
voyage.
Ah, _those_ lower regions!--the saloons--every couch and corner filled
with prostrate, despairing forms, with pale cheeks, long, willowy hair
and sunken eyes, groaning, sighing, and apostrophizing the Fates, and
solemnly vowing between every lurch of the ship, that "you'll never
catch them going to sea again, that's what you won't;" and then the
bulletins from all the state rooms--"Mrs. A. is sick, and Miss B.
sicker, and Miss C. almost dead, and Mrs. E., F., and G. declare that
they shall give up." This threat of "giving up" is a standing resort of
ladies in distressed circumstances; it is always very impressively
pronounced, as if the result of earnest purpose; but how it is to be
carried out practically, how ladies _do_ give up, and what general
impression is made on creation when they do, has never yet appeared.
Certainly the sea seems to care very little about the threat, for he
goes on lurching all hands about just as freely afterwards as before.
There are always some three or four in a hundred who escape all these
evils. They are not sick, and they seem to be having a good time
generally, and always meet you with "What a charming run we are having!
Isn't it delightful?" and so on. If you have a turn for being
disinterested, you can console your miseries by a view of their
joyousness. Three or four of our ladies were of this happy order, and it
was really refreshing to see them.
For my part, I was less fortunate. I could not and would not give up and
become one of the ghosts below, and so I managed, by keeping on deck and
trying to act as if nothing was the matter, to lead a very uncertain and
precarious existence, though with a most awful undertone of emotion,
which seemed to make quite another thing of creation.
I wonder that people who wanted to break the souls of heroes and martyrs
never thought of sending them to sea and keeping them a little seasick.
The dungeons of Olmutz, the leads of Venice, in short, all the naughty,
wicked places that tyrants ever invented for bringing down the spirits
of heroes, are nothing to the berth of a ship. Get Lafayette, Kossuth,
or the noblest of woman, born, prostrate in a swinging, dizzy berth of
one of these sea coops, called state rooms, and I'll warrant almost any
compromise might be got out of them.
Where in the world the soul goes to under such influences nobody knows;
one would really think the sea tipped it all out of a man, just as it
does the water out of his wash basin. The soul seems to be like one of
the genii enclosed in a vase, in the Arabian Nights; now, it rises like
a pillar of cloud, and floats over land and sea, buoyant, many-hued, and
glorious; again, it goes down, down, subsiding into its copper vase, and
the cover is clapped on, and there you are. A sea voyage is the best
device for getting the soul back into its vase that I know of.
But at night!--the beauties of a night on shipboard!--down in your
berth, with the sea hissing and fizzing, gurgling and booming, within an
inch of your ear; and then the steward conies along at twelve o'clock
and puts out your light, and there you are! Jonah in the whale was not
darker or more dismal. There, in profound ignorance and blindness, you
lie, and feel yourself rolled upwards, and downwards, and sidewise, and
all ways, like a cork in a tub of water; much such a sensation as one
might suppose it to be, were one headed up in a barrel and thrown into
the sea.
Occasionally a wave comes with a thump against your ear, as if a great
hammer were knocking on your barrel, to see that all within was safe and
sound. Then you begin to think of krakens, and sharks, and porpoises,
and sea serpents, and all the monstrous, slimy, cold, hobgoblin brood,
who, perhaps, are your next door neighbors; and the old blue-haired
Ocean whispers through the planks, "Here you are; I've got you. Your
grand ship is my plaything. I can do what I like with it."
Then you hear every kind of odd noise in the ship--creaking, straining,
crunching, scraping, pounding, whistling, blowing off steam, each of
which to your unpractised ear is significant of some impending
catastrophe; you lie wide awake, listening with all your might, as if
your watching did any good, till at last sleep overcomes you, and the
morning light convinces you that nothing very particular has been the
matter, and that all these frightful noises are only the necessary
attendants of what is called a good run.
Our voyage out was called "a good run." It was voted, unanimously, to be
"an extraordinarily good passage," "a pleasant voyage;" yet the ship
rocked the whole time from side to side with a steady, dizzy, continuous
motion, like a great cradle. I had a new sympathy for babies, poor
little things, who are rocked hours at a time without so much as a "by
your leave" in the case. No wonder there are so many stupid people in
the world.
There is no place where killing time is so much of a systematic and
avowed object as in one of these short runs. In a six months' voyage
people give up to their situation, and make arrangements to live a
regular life; but the ten days that now divide England and America are
not long enough for any thing. The great question is how to get them
off; they are set up, like tenpins, to be bowled at; and happy he whose
ball prospers. People with strong heads, who can stand the incessant
swing of the boat, may read or write. Then there is one's berth, a
never-failing resort, where one may analyze at one's leisure the life
and emotions of an oyster in the mud. Walking the deck is a means of
getting off some half hours more. If a ship heaves in sight, or a
porpoise tumbles up, or, better still, a whale spouts, it makes an
immense sensation.
Our favorite resort is by the old red smoke pipe of the steamer, which
rises warm and luminous as a sort of tower of defence. The wind must
blow an uncommon variety of ways at once when you cannot find a
sheltered side, as well as a place to warm your feet. In fact, the old
smoke pipe is the domestic hearth of the ship; there, with the double
convenience of warmth and fresh air, you can sit by the railing, and,
looking down, command the prospect of the cook's offices, the cow house,
pantries, &c.
Our cook has specially interested me--a tall, slender, melancholy man,
with a watery-blue eye, a patient, dejected visage, like an individual
weary of the storms and commotions of life, and thoroughly impressed
with the vanity of human wishes. I sit there hour after hour watching
him, and it is evident that he performs all his duties in this frame of
sad composure. Now I see him resignedly stuffing a turkey, anon
compounding a sauce, or mournfully making little ripples in the crust of
a tart; but all is done under an evident sense that it is of no use
trying.
Many complaints have been made of our coffee since we have been on
board, which, to say the truth, has been as unsettled as most of the
social questions of our day, and, perhaps, for that reason quite as
generally unpalatable; but since I have seen our cook, I am quite
persuaded that the coffee, like other works of great artists, has
borrowed the hues of its maker's mind. I think I hear him soliloquize
over it--"To what purpose is coffee?--of what avail tea?--thick or
clear?--all is passing away--a little egg, or fish skin, more or less,
what are they?" and so we get melancholy coffee and tea, owing to our
philosophic cook.
After dinner I watch him as he washes dishes: he hangs up a whole row of
tin; the ship gives a lurch, and knocks them all down. He looks as if it
was just what he expected. "Such is life!" he says, as he pursues a
frisky tin pan in one direction, and arrests the gambols of the ladle in
another; while the wicked sea, meanwhile, with another lurch, is
upsetting all his dishwater. I can see how these daily trials, this
performing of most delicate and complicated gastronomic operations in
the midst of such unsteady, unsettled circumstances, have gradually
given this poor soul a despair of living, and brought him into this
state of philosophic melancholy. Just as Xantippe made a sage of
Socrates, this whisky, frisky, stormy ship life has made a sage of our
cook. Meanwhile, not to do him injustice, let it be recorded, that in
all dishes which require grave conviction and steady perseverance,
rather than hope and inspiration, he is eminently successful. Our table
excels in viands of a reflective and solemn character; mighty rounds of
beef, vast saddles of mutton, and the whole tribe of meats in general,
come on in a superior style. English plum pudding, a weighty and serious
performance, is exhibited in first-rate order. The jellies want
lightness,--but that is to be expected.
I admire the thorough order and system with which every thing is done on
these ships. One day, when the servants came round, as they do at a
certain time after dinner, and screwed up the shelf of decanters and
bottles out of our reach, a German gentleman remarked, "Ah, that's
always the way on English ships; every thing done at such a time,
without saying 'by your leave,' If it had been on an American ship now,
he would have said, 'Gentlemen, are you ready to have this shelf
raised?'"
No doubt this remark is true and extends to a good many other things;
but in a ship in the middle of the ocean, when the least confusion or
irregularity in certain cases might be destruction to all on board, it
does inspire confidence to see that there is even in the minutest things
a strong and steady system, that goes on without saying "by your leave."
Even the rigidness with which lights are all extinguished at twelve
o'clock, though it is very hard in some cases, still gives you
confidence in the watchfulness and care with which all on board is
conducted.
On Sunday there was a service. We went into the cabin, and saw prayer
books arranged at regular intervals, and soon a procession of the
sailors neatly dressed filed in and took their places, together with
such passengers as felt disposed, and the order of morning prayer was
read. The sailors all looked serious and attentive. I could not but
think that this feature of the management of her majesty's ships was a
good one, and worthy of imitation. To be sure, one can say it is only a
form. Granted; but is not a serious, respectful _form_ of religion
better than nothing? Besides, I am not willing to think that these
intelligent-looking sailors could listen to all those devout sentiments
expressed in the prayers, and the holy truths embodied in the passages
of Scripture, and not gain something from it. It is bad to have only
_the form_ of religion, but not so bad as to have neither the form nor
the fact.
When the ship has been out about eight days, an evident bettering of
spirits and condition obtains among the passengers. Many of the sick
ones take heart, and appear again among the walks and ways of men; the
ladies assemble in little knots, and talk of getting on shore. The more
knowing ones, who have travelled before, embrace this opportunity to
show their knowledge of life by telling the new hands all sorts of
hobgoblin stories about the custom house officers and the difficulties
of getting landed in England. It is a curious fact, that old travellers
generally seem to take this particular delight in striking consternation
into younger ones.
"You'll have all your daguerreotypes taken away," says one lady, who, in
right of having crossed the ocean nine times, is entitled to speak _ex
cathedra_ on the subject.
"All our daguerreotypes!" shriek four or five at once. "Pray tell, what
for?"
"They _will_ do it," says the knowing lady, with an awful nod; "unless
you hide them, and all your books, they'll burn up--"
"Burn our books!" exclaim the circle. "O, dreadful! What do they do that
for?"
"They're very particular always to burn up all your books. I knew a lady
who had a dozen burned," says the wise one.
"Dear me! will they take our _dresses_?" says a young lady, with
increasing alarm.
"No, but they'll pull every thing out, and tumble them well over, I can
tell you."
"How horrid!"
An old lady, who has been very sick all the way, is revived by this
appalling intelligence.
"I hope they won't tumble over my _caps!_" she exclaims.
"Yes, they will have every thing out on deck," says the lady, delighted
with the increasing sensation. "I tell you you don't know these custom
house officers."
"It's too bad!" "It's dreadful!" "How horrid!" exclaim all.
"I shall put my best things in my pocket," exclaims one. "They don't
search our pockets, do they?"
"Well, no, not here; but I tell you they'll search your _pockets_ at
Antwerp and Brussels," says the lady.
Somebody catches the sound, and flies off into the state rooms with the
intelligence that "the custom house officers are so dreadful--they rip
open your trunks, pull out all your things, burn your books, take away
your daguerreotypes, and even search your pockets;" and a row of groans
is heard ascending from the row of state rooms, as all begin to revolve
what they have in their trunks, and what they are to do in this
emergency.
"Pray tell me," said I to a gentlemanly man, who had crossed four or
five times, "is there really so much annoyance at the custom house?"
"Annoyance, ma'am? No, not the slightest."
"But do they really turn out the contents of the trunks, and take away
people's daguerreotypes, and burn their books?"
"Nothing of the kind, ma'am. I apprehend no difficulty. I never had any.
There are a few articles on which duty is charged. I have a case of
cigars, for instance; I shall show them to the custom house officer, and
pay the duty. If a person seems disposed to be fair, there is no
difficulty. The examination of ladies' trunks is merely nominal; nothing
is deranged."
So it proved. We arrived on Sunday morning; the custom house officers,
very gentlemanly men, came on board; our luggage was all set out, and
passed through a rapid examination, which in many cases amounted only to
opening the trunk and shutting it, and all was over. The whole ceremony
did not occupy two hours.
So ends this letter. You shall hear further how we landed at some future
time.