Nehemiah Adams

“ If we were in haste to reach our port this difference of speed would try our patience. As it is we are grateful; it seems painful to be whirled along in ten days, night and day, instead of coming at our leisure unmindful of time, willing to be where we are, indefinitely, except that we sympathize with the captain’s desire to make a short voyage, and feeling willing also to shorten this part of our way knowing that we shall have sufficient experience of the sea by the time that we have belted the globe. ”

“ It was a pleasant morning in spring when we set out in the cars from New York to Boston. Having been a hundred and sixteen days on the water since leaving Manila, we were prepared to appreciate the solid earth. The privilege of walking and not coming to the ship’s rail every few minutes, was vividly felt. I hardly enjoyed anything in detail, when first on land again; every thing was absorbed in the one consciousness of being on the solid earth. “Then are they glad because they be quiet,” says the sacred penman, describing the sailors’ feelings, on reaching shore. ”

“ I found my eye going up the new rope in admiration at the perfect regularity in the twist of the strands. An artist cannot always combine the hempen yarns with the exactness which the ropemaker’s wheel gives them. My eye went from the new rope to the old ones; all had the same perfect twist throughout the ship. The ropes, from belaying-pin to truck, the signal halyard and the hawser, seemed instinct with “the35 beauty of fitness,” to borrow a term from the above-mentioned writer,—a common window-sash, with its parallelograms of panes, serving that great genius for an illustration. ”

“ One of the passengers sat plying her needle on the chief signal flag, another writing, one enjoying the soothing influences of the day in his hammock, the captain fixing his signals with a contrivance for keeping them separate and easily handled. Soft airs were about us. The clouds showed that we were in the trade wind region. Instead of banks of clouds and thunderheads there were innumerable fleecy clouds, mostly small, giving a calm look to the heavens. We seldom see this for a long time on land. We are in all respects the larger part of the time as if we were in a pleasure boat. ”

“ Going on deck to view the tempest you are made to feel, as the ship goes down into deep places, that you would be more surprised at her coming up than if she should disappear. It is a good time and place for faith. One of the Latin fathers said, “Qui discat orare, discat navigare;” Let him who would learn to pray go to sea. It is to be doubted whether there are many places on the globe where one feels the power of solitude precisely as here. In the depth of a wilderness, or among mountains, solitude is more like death ”

“ They will use their sheath-knives about his nose, and disfigure him in all conceivable ways. Their theory is that a shark never dies till sunset. Sharks are hard to kill. You may cut off their heads and tails, and disembowel them, and even then the trunk will thrash the deck at so lively a rate that his executioners will have need to jump about for safety. In contrast with the shark, the dolphin seemed to me for beauty to verify all that poets have said of him. It is my belief that a dolphin’s mouth is as perfect a curve as nature ever produces. His tints, when dying, are no fiction. ”

“ Coming up with the vessel, or she and you drawing near in passing, reading the numbers by the spyglass, and arranging all the signals, is an agreeable occupation for the larger part of two hours, including the departure of the vessels from each other, as though friends were parting, leaving the ocean more a solitude than before.
Meeting vessels, or passing them at a distance, exchanging signals, making out their numbers, bring remote parts of the earth suddenly to mind. Thus new trains of thought succeed each other entirely disconnected. ”

“ Half of the ship’s company are asleep; those who are up are busily occupied; before you left your bed you heard the tramp of feet overhead. The dash of buckets120 of water, the noise of brooms, the holy-stone drawn backwards and forwards and athwart ship, and then the perfect quiet, made you feel that everything was ready for any one who wished to be alone on deck. Behind you, but hidden from view by the spanker, is the man at the wheel; the rudder-head jounces monotonously at every turn; a sailor here and there creeps about barefooted; the steward makes his official visits to the galley ”

“ I felt a desire to tell good men in Boston that there yet remaineth much land to be possessed here by christian philanthropists; that they can readily find villages of219 sixty thousand waiting each for its chapel, to say nothing of cities with millions in them, where it would be easy to begin a work for the ransomed spirits of good men and women to review with pleasure in heaven. Truly enviable is that rich christian who can employ wealth to do good for him when he is with Christ. The Appleton Chapel at Shanghai seemed to me a cup of cold water, the donor of which is not losing his reward. ”

“ As I told the sailors one Sabbath, God never sells anything; He never lets a man give him an equivalent; He will receive as much grateful love as we will give, but nothing in the light of payment.
Let me never feel on shore that if I were at sea I could have more vivid impressions of God’s presence. ”

“ There is a touch of pathos in seeing the stars pale in the growing light; but they cannot awaken much sentiment in us; we find it, if at all, in the victories of light over darkness; the imprint of beauty on monotony; the responses of the zenith and then of the west to the first outgoings of the morning in the east, the crimson bars,138 the purpling cloud, the snowy top of a pile whose base is yet black. ”

“ There are paradoxes in one’s feelings in times of imminent danger. It is easy at these moments, strange as it may seem, to forget your own possible loss and sorrow, and lose yourself in thinking of your ship, of which you may have felt so proud, and which, having borne you half round the globe, must, perhaps, now bury her stem or stern ignobly in the sand, all her rich panelwork being made of no account by the waves breaking ruthlessly in through the rent sides, the spars and sails left free to be the sport of the tempest, and soon her freight melting away in the surge. ”

“ The depths are around you; the distant sail tells you that yonder is a company of human beings shut out like you from the world; you understand how solitary you are, by musing on them; you fancy how lonesome you would be sailing away, as they seem to be, from human fellowship, not considering that you are also. ”

“ My dear Bishop Eastburn,—I shall not soon forget that the first letter which met my eye on reaching San Francisco, after a voyage of one hundred and eleven days, was in your handwriting. I have since then been so pleasantly reminded of you through a good man’s influence here in China that I must tell you of it. Being on a visit to Shanghai, I was invited to attend worship in a Chinese chapel five miles from the city. We went through the fields in chairs borne by coolies, till we came to the village where trade was plying all its arts, and handicraft its implements, unconscious of the Sabbath. ”

“ Think of the privilege of running through the Straits of Lemaire, of coming close by the shores of Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego, of experiencing those Cape Horn swells, of feeling that you were not far from Antarctic regions. Those were days when life had some romance in it. Now you seem to be fired out of a field piece; the next thing will be to creep into a pneumatic machine, the air will be exhausted and in a state of suspended consciousness159 you will wake from your short delirious dream and will be told that you have been shot eight thousand miles across the continent. ”

“ One who had been several years before the mast and afterwards successively third, second, first mate, lately said to me, “When a young man, standing on the top gallant103 forecastle, leaning against the forestay, in a foggy day or dark night, the ship rushing into the dark unknown beyond, I sometimes thought, What if there should be an end to the sea, a precipice over which we should plunge, an undiscovered continent against which we should run! How did Columbus feel on his first voyage in a fog or in darkness? What a picture of life, its unknown future! ”

“ The city of Canton is only eight hours by steamer from Hong Kong. Arriving in the Canton river you find yourself in a floating population in boats, close together, as though ground rents were as dear as in Broadway. When you enter a boat for a passage up the river you marvel that the boat can extricate itself from the snarl; but you are in a few moments on your way, meeting a seemingly endless throng of people, among whom you involuntarily close197 your eyes as if in anticipation of a crash. ”

“ It seems fearful to lie so far removed from the habitable parts of the globe, a little company of human beings without neighbors, and with no means of help should we need75 it. Yet there are birds flying around us; some of them are resting on these waves. This inspires us with a feeling of safety. The sight of life in these creatures seems to be a connecting link between us and the living God. “From the ends of the earth,” literally, we cry to God when our hearts are overwhelmed by a sense of solitude. ”

“ Every thing about the ship, outside as well as inside, is in beautiful order. Even the belaying pins, of which there are about forty, including all on each side of the deck and about the masts, have been scraped and varnished. No house on shore is in a more creditable state of neatness. No idleness is allowed, but we are not so much at a loss to find employment for the sailors as was one captain, who, when everything about his ship was in perfect order, still kept his men occupied by setting them to scrape the anchors. ”

“ If he comes from his ship and steps ashore on the Sabbath in China, and sees coopers and blockmakers and boatbuilders busily at work, the tailors’ shops filled with men plying their needles, the stationers ruling paper, the coolies instead of horses and mules carrying everything which ever lades a ship, from the quay to the storehouses, the thought will come over him, What progress is the knowledge of the gospel likely to make among this people? ”

“ There are no birds in our tops to herald its coming; no living things to make it appear that they welcome the return of light, the flying fish are no more of them on the wing than when the ship at night breaks in among them, nor do the porpoises gambol more at day break than at noon. ”

“ The steward was passing from the galley to the cabin table with a plate of hash. A sudden lurch made him lose his balance. His arms went into the air and the hash left the plate and went in a body against the side of the ship where a coil of rope hung; and it remained fast, the coil forming an oval frame for it. We pitied the steward but did not weep for the hash. Some of us thought we could understand the action of a company of boys at a boarding school, who were asked in Lent what luxury they would each propose to forego during the season of fasting and humiliation as a religious offering. ”