XXIII.
And so much depends upon the craft which, made by man, is one with
man, that the sea shall wear for him another aspect. I remember
once seeing the commander--officially the master, by courtesy the
captain--of a fine iron ship of the old wool fleet shaking his head
at a very pretty brigantine. She was bound the other way. She was
a taut, trim, neat little craft, extremely well kept; and on that
serene evening when we passed her close she looked the embodiment
of coquettish comfort on the sea. It was somewhere near the Cape--
THE Cape being, of course, the Cape of Good Hope, the Cape of
Storms of its Portuguese discoverer. And whether it is that the
word "storm" should not be pronounced upon the sea where the storms
dwell thickly, or because men are shy of confessing their good
hopes, it has become the nameless cape--the Cape tout court. The
other great cape of the world, strangely enough, is seldom if ever
called a cape. We say, "a voyage round the Horn"; "we rounded the
Horn"; "we got a frightful battering off the Horn"; but rarely
"Cape Horn," and, indeed, with some reason, for Cape Horn is as
much an island as a cape. The third stormy cape of the world,
which is the Leeuwin, receives generally its full name, as if to
console its second-rate dignity. These are the capes that look
upon the gales.
The little brigantine, then, had doubled the Cape. Perhaps she was
coming from Port Elizabeth, from East London--who knows? It was
many years ago, but I remember well the captain of the wool-clipper
nodding at her with the words, "Fancy having to go about the sea in
a thing like that!"
He was a man brought up in big deep-water ships, and the size of
the craft under his feet was a part of his conception of the sea.
His own ship was certainly big as ships went then. He may have
thought of the size of his cabin, or--unconsciously, perhaps--have
conjured up a vision of a vessel so small tossing amongst the great
seas. I didn't inquire, and to a young second mate the captain of
the little pretty brigantine, sitting astride a camp stool with his
chin resting on his hands that were crossed upon the rail, might
have appeared a minor king amongst men. We passed her within
earshot, without a hail, reading each other's names with the naked
eye.
Some years later, the second mate, the recipient of that almost
involuntary mutter, could have told his captain that a man brought
up in big ships may yet take a peculiar delight in what we should
both then have called a small craft. Probably the captain of the
big ship would not have understood very well. His answer would
have been a gruff, "Give me size," as I heard another man reply to
a remark praising the handiness of a small vessel. It was not a
love of the grandiose or the prestige attached to the command of
great tonnage, for he continued, with an air of disgust and
contempt, "Why, you get flung out of your bunk as likely as not in
any sort of heavy weather."
I don't know. I remember a few nights in my lifetime, and in a big
ship, too (as big as they made them then), when one did not get
flung out of one's bed simply because one never even attempted to
get in; one had been made too weary, too hopeless, to try. The
expedient of turning your bedding out on to a damp floor and lying
on it there was no earthly good, since you could not keep your
place or get a second's rest in that or any other position. But of
the delight of seeing a small craft run bravely amongst the great
seas there can be no question to him whose soul does not dwell
ashore. Thus I well remember a three days' run got out of a little
barque of 400 tons somewhere between the islands of St. Paul and
Amsterdam and Cape Otway on the Australian coast. It was a hard,
long gale, gray clouds and green sea, heavy weather undoubtedly,
but still what a sailor would call manageable. Under two lower
topsails and a reefed foresail the barque seemed to race with a
long, steady sea that did not becalm her in the troughs. The
solemn thundering combers caught her up from astern, passed her
with a fierce boiling up of foam level with the bulwarks, swept on
ahead with a swish and a roar: and the little vessel, dipping her
jib-boom into the tumbling froth, would go on running in a smooth,
glassy hollow, a deep valley between two ridges of the sea, hiding
the horizon ahead and astern. There was such fascination in her
pluck, nimbleness, the continual exhibition of unfailing
seaworthiness, in the semblance of courage and endurance, that I
could not give up the delight of watching her run through the three
unforgettable days of that gale which my mate also delighted to
extol as "a famous shove."
And this is one of those gales whose memory in after-years returns,
welcome in dignified austerity, as you would remember with pleasure
the noble features of a stranger with whom you crossed swords once
in knightly encounter and are never to see again. In this way
gales have their physiognomy. You remember them by your own
feelings, and no two gales stamp themselves in the same way upon
your emotions. Some cling to you in woebegone misery; others come
back fiercely and weirdly, like ghouls bent upon sucking your
strength away; others, again, have a catastrophic splendour; some
are unvenerated recollections, as of spiteful wild-cats clawing at
your agonized vitals; others are severe, like a visitation; and one
or two rise up draped and mysterious, with an aspect of ominous
menace. In each of them there is a characteristic point at which
the whole feeling seems contained in one single moment. Thus there
is a certain four o'clock in the morning in the confused roar of a
black and white world when coming on deck to take charge of my
watch I received the instantaneous impression that the ship could
not live for another hour in such a raging sea.
I wonder what became of the men who silently (you couldn't hear
yourself speak) must have shared that conviction with me. To be
left to write about it is not, perhaps, the most enviable fate; but
the point is that this impression resumes in its intensity the
whole recollection of days and days of desperately dangerous
weather. We were then, for reasons which it is not worth while to
specify, in the close neighbourhood of Kerguelen Land; and now,
when I open an atlas and look at the tiny dots on the map of the
Southern Ocean, I see as if engraved upon the paper the enraged
physiognomy of that gale.
Another, strangely, recalls a silent man. And yet it was not din
that was wanting; in fact, it was terrific. That one was a gale
that came upon the ship swiftly, like a parnpero, which last is a
very sudden wind indeed. Before we knew very well what was coming
all the sails we had set had burst; the furled ones were blowing
loose, ropes flying, sea hissing--it hissed tremendously--wind
howling, and the ship lying on her side, so that half of the crew
were swimming and the other half clawing desperately at whatever
came to hand, according to the side of the deck each man had been
caught on by the catastrophe, either to leeward or to windward.
The shouting I need not mention--it was the merest drop in an ocean
of noise--and yet the character of the gale seems contained in the
recollection of one small, not particularly impressive, sallow man
without a cap and with a very still face. Captain Jones--let us
call him Jones--had been caught unawares. Two orders he had given
at the first sign of an utterly unforeseen onset; after that the
magnitude of his mistake seemed to have overwhelmed him. We were
doing what was needed and feasible. The ship behaved well. Of
course, it was some time before we could pause in our fierce and
laborious exertions; but all through the work, the excitement, the
uproar, and some dismay, we were aware of this silent little man at
the break of the poop, perfectly motionless, soundless, and often
hidden from us by the drift of sprays.
When we officers clambered at last upon the poop, he seemed to come
out of that numbed composure, and shouted to us down wind: "Try
the pumps." Afterwards he disappeared. As to the ship, I need not
say that, although she was presently swallowed up in one of the
blackest nights I can remember, she did not disappear. In truth, I
don't fancy that there had ever been much danger of that, but
certainly the experience was noisy and particularly distracting--
and yet it is the memory of a very quiet silence that survives.
