William Clark Russell

“ Is there an uglier heap of rock in the wide world? The black lava of the scowling Galapagos yields nothing more horrid. And the spirit of its dark and horrible solitude visited you the more sharply because of the crawling, stealthy life you beheld low down by the wash of the beach, remote from the inland loneliness; the creeping shape of the elephant tortoise, of the black lizard, of crabs as huge as targets, and no further motion save what’s in the air, where the ocean fowl are glancing. That island was a fit tomb for the ship which it caverned. ”

“ I took my quadrant on deck; the sun did not show himself, and I got at the situation of the brig by dead reckoning. The westerly gale blew fresh and strong, and I needed to keep the vessel under the tall canvas of the topgallant sail to run her free of the huge Horn surge, which chased us as though to the hurl of an earthquake. It was impossible to make too much of such a wind; at any moment might come a greasy Horn calm with a swell like a land of hills; to be swept with horrible suddenness by a black outfly right ahead. ”

“ O God, to think of what a hell of passions this tiny speck of brig was capable of holding! To think of the large and bloody tragedy this minim of the building yards could find a theater for! Never had I so utterly felt human insignificance at sea as I did this night, when I looked over the rail and searched the smoky void of the horizon for the smudge of the island, till, for the relief of my sight, I watched a star.
“I’ll tell you what it is, William Fielding,” said I to myself, “your blood is over-heated, your spirits are over-excited. ”

“ Do you who are reading this know how deep, know by the experience of months of weevils, corned horse, and the curses of constipated sailors, how deep is the deep monotony of life on shipboard? If the depth of this monotony be known to you, then will you understand why it should be that the presence, yea, the presence merely of a handsome woman, her glances, the flash of her white teeth, the eloquent hinting by movement and posture at a hidden shape of beauty, should mingle a few threads of gold with the coarse gray, brine-drenched worsted of the sailor’s daily life—of such a daily life as mine ”

“ Never the gleam of a ship’s canvas for days and days to break the boundless continuity of the distant sea-line. The men relaxed their labors, Yan Bol took no notice, and I, who was never a “hazer,” was willing that they should lounge through their toil of the hours in a climate so enervating that one yearned to sling a hammock in some cool corner of the deck, to lie in it all day, to smoke and doze while the imagination slided away on the stream of the rippling music made by the broken waters and passed into the fairy harbors of dreams. ”

“ My watch came round at four; but, in any case, I should have watched the brig through the darkness. Some while before dawn the wind was spent, the stars glowing, the sea fast slackening its heave, with the muck that had troubled and drenched us settling away in a shadow south and west.
At last broke the day. Melancholy is daybreak at sea. There is nothing sadder in nature; nothing that so sinks the spirits of the watcher who suffers himself to be visited by the full spirit of the sight. On shore there is the chirrup and harmonies of birds, the rosy streaking of the sky over the hilltops ”

“ It is a bad sign when religion gets into a man’s head and acidly turns into windiness and nightmare imaginations, as a sweet milk hardens into curdy flatulence in the belly of the suckling.
I sought to shift the helm of his mind by talking about the dollars below; by speaking about the crew and my secret distrust of Yan Bol; by calling his attention to the look of his brig as she floated, with aslant spars, through the moonlight, flowing lengths of the sails curving in alabaster beyond the shadow in their hollows, the water, black as ink under her bowsprit, pouring aft in fire and snow. ”

“ By this time the watch below had turned out, aroused, no doubt, by one of the sailors on duty. The men in a body had gradually worked their way from the forecastle to the gangway. They were all as plainly to be viewed as by the sickly light of a foggy day. No man spoke; not for minute after minute did the grunt or growl of any one of their hurricane throats reach my ears. The wild vast scene of whiteness terrified them. The impression produced was the deeper because this was the night before the day that was to heave Greaves’ island out of the sea for our sight to feast on. ”

“ Why, thought I, it was but a day or two ago that I, mate of the Royal Brunswicker, was conning that ship, with her head pointing t’other way, in these same waters; and then I was thinking of Uncle Joe, and of some capers ashore, and of the relief of a month or two’s rest from the derned hurl of the restless billow, as the poets call it, with plenty of country to smell and fields to walk in, and a draught of new milk whenever I had a mind. Only a day or two ago—it seems no longer. Insensibility takes no count of time. ”

“ It is good to be a sailor to begin with—best sailor, best man, spite of uniforms and titles and the color of the flag he serves under. And which service produces the best sailor, I wonder? And here I told over to myself a number of names of seamen who had risen to great, and some of them to glorious, eminence in the Royal Navy, all of whom had served in the beginning of their years in the merchant service; and then I also thought to myself, who sees most of the real work—the hard, heavy, perilous work of the ocean—the man-of-warsman or the merchantman? ”

“ Sailors visit many fine countries; but there is none—not the very finest—that delights them more than the coast of their own native land when they sight it after a long voyage. The flattest piece of treeless English shore—such a melancholy, sandy, muddy waste, say, as that which the River Stour winds greasily and slimily through past Sandwich, into the salt, green, sparkling waters of the Small Downs—the English sailor will look at with a thirstier and sharper pleasure than ever could be excited in him by the most majestic and splendid scenery abroad. ”

“ She’d be in a smother forward, just a seething dazzle of yeast ’twixt the forecastle rails, everything hidden that way in a snowstorm, so that you’d think the whole length of her was thundering into the boiling whiteness about her bows; but in a breath she’d leap, black and streaming, to the height of the lifting sea, with a toss of the head that filled the wind with crystals and prisms of brine, while a long-drawn whistling and hooting came out of the fabric of her slanting masts, and the water blew forward in white smoke from the gushing scuppers. ”

“ Times are when the deep flings its own prismatic glories upon the sky. This have I marked at sunrise, when the flash of the luminary has sunk into the heart of the sea, when all is blueness and dazzle below, and, above, a sky of high-compacted cloud, delicate as flowers and figures of frost and snow upon a windowpane, charged with the colors of the great eye of ocean looking up at it.
“There’s the island,” said I to myself.
I snatched up the glass, and resolved the tiny piece of shading upon the horizon into the proportions of the ugly rock of cinders. ”

“ I finished the wine, handed down the decanter and bowl, and asked the youth to procure me a pipe of tobacco. This he did, and I lay smoking and musing upon the object of the voyage of the Black Watch. The vessel was being thrashed through the water. It was blowing fresh, and she hummed in every plank as she swept through the sea. The foam roared like a cataract past the scuttle, but her heel was moderate; the wind was evidently abaft the beam, the sea was deep and regular in its swing, and the heave and hurl of the brig as rhythmic in pulse as the melody of a waltz. ”

“ Impatience burnt like fire in them—impatience and expectation and anxiety, now complicated by the injury their captain had met with. When we made our appearance they stared and shuffled, one and all, as though they were mutineers, scarce masking a madness of bloody intention, and about to make a rush aft to its execution. Is not the insanity that drink will run into the veins and brains a sweet little cherub compared with the demon that enters the soul of man out of the coin of gold or silver?
“Captain,” cried Yan Bol, “I shpeaks for all handts. You vhas not hurt much, all handts hope?” ”

“ It came to pass that, a few days after we had got rid of Van Laar, I went on deck at midnight to take charge of the brig until four in the morning. The noble wind of the northeast trade was full in our canvas—a small, fresh, quartering gale—the sky lively with the sliding of stars amid the steam-tinctured heap of the trade-cloud swarming away southwest. Studding-sails were out and the brig hummed through it, shouldering the seas off both bows into snowstorms. The burly figure of Yan Bol stood to windward, abreast of the little skylight. ”

“ Sight was blinded at the distance of a pistol-shot, and the ocean lay as though suffocated under the burden of the hush of the night.
We kept all lights carefully screened, and the lookout was told to keep his ears open; but neither Greaves nor I felt uneasy. The schooner had been far astern when the evening fell, and our shift of helm, with a pretty considerable run into the southeast, could scarcely fail to throw her off the scent. But it is true, nevertheless, that vessels in stagnant weather have a human trick of turning up close together. ”

“ The ocean was a weak blue, and ran with a frosty sparkle into a sort of film or thickness that went all round the sea. The breeze had freshened, and it whipped the waters into little billows, with yearning and snapping heads of foam, and it was pouring its increasing volume into the lofty height and wide expanse of canvas under which the brig was thrusting along in a staggering, rushing way, the glass-smooth curve of brine at the bow breaking abreast of the gangway with a twelve-knot flash of the foam into the throbbing race of the long wake. ”

“ I rose and took a turn, full of thought, wishing to say “Yes” but wishing to consider, too.
“Even were Van Laar,” said he, “as good and trustworthy a seaman as ever stepped a deck, I would rather have a fellow-countryman for a mate than a Dutchman, though the Dutchman were the better man. In this case it is wholly the other way about. Here are you, fresh from a long voyage, with the experiences of the sea green upon you. You are young; you are English. I owe you my life; and what a debt is that! Together we can make this voyage not only a rich but a jolly jaunt. ”

“ Figure yourself, madam, on board a little ship; you are scarcely able to speak the tongue of the crew; your only associate is a rough seaman, your sitting room is a small, old-fashioned cabin, your bedroom a bit of a hole up in a corner, lighted by an eye called a scuttle, that winks at the leaping sea, your meals the pork and beef of the ocean, your diversions the fancies that come out of the running hills of water of the gale, out of the silent, swimming surface of the calm. ”

“ But now, our approach being leisurely, the expanse of water to be measured considerable, I could gaze, wonder, realize, until emotion grew overwhelming and became a sensation of sickness in me.
Were you to split a big stone open and find a live toad in it you would marvel. Hundreds would assemble to view the wonder, and a poor man might get money by exhibiting it; but how many much stranger things than a live toad imprisoned in a stone would I, as a sailor, exact the relation and sight of, ere admitting that half the sum of that marvel of a great ship at rest in a huge cave was approached? ”

“ It had been a very dark night, blowing fresh down to about the hour of eleven, during which time we had given the brig all her legs, forcing her to her best with large reefless breasts of canvas. Not a star showed all through the night. An eager lookout was kept for the Island of New Amsterdam, which, I guessed, should be visible, were there daylight to disclose it.
It is a lofty mass of land, rising amidships to an altitude of near three thousand feet; and a frequent heave of the log had assured me that already, in these hours of darkness, we were within its horizon. ”