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Chapter II - Voyage To EnglandChapter II - Voyage To England
Chapter II - Voyage To England
The occasion of my second visit to England was in invitation from some
Mechanics` Institutes in Lancashire and Yorkshire, which separately are
organized much in the same way as our New England Lyceums, but, in 1847, had
been linked into a "Union," which embraced twenty or thirty towns and cities,
and presently extended into the middle counties, and northward into Scotland.
I was invited, on liberal terms, to read a series of lectures in them all. The
request was urged with every kind suggestion, and every assurance of aid and
comfort, by friendliest parties in Manchester, who, in the sequel, amply
redeemed their word. The remuneration was equivalent to the fees at that time
paid in this country for the like services. At all events, it was sufficient
to cover any travelling expenses, and the proposal offered an excellent
opportunity of seeing the interior of England and Scotland, by means of a
home, and a committee of intelligent friends, awaiting me in every town. I did
not go very willingly. I am not a good traveller, nor have I found that long
journeys yield a fair share of reasonable hours. But the invitation was
repeated and pressed at a moment of more leisure, and when I was a little
spent by some unusual studies. I wanted a change and a tonic, and England was
proposed to me. Besides, there were at least, the dread attraction and
salutary influences of the sea. So I took my berth in the packet-ship
Washington Irving, and sailed from Boston on Tuesday, 5th October, 1847.
On Friday, at noon, we had only made one hundred and thirty four miles. A
nimble Indian would have swum as far; but the captain affirmed that the ship
would us in time all her paces, and we crept along through the floating drift
of boards, logs, and chips, which the rivers of Maine and New Brunswick pour
into the sea after a freshet.
At last, on Sunday night, after doing one day`s work in four, the storm
came, the winds blew, and we flew before a north-wester, which strained
every rope and sail. The good ship darts through the water all day, all night,
like a fish, quivering with speed, gliding through liquid leagues, sliding
from horizon to horizon. She has passed Cape Sable; she has reached the Banks;
the land-birds are left; gulls, haglets, ducks, petrels, swim, dive, and
hover around; no fishermen; she has passed the Banks; left five sail behind
her, far on the edge of the west at sundown, which were far east of us at
morn, - though they say at sea a stern chase is a long race, - and still we
fly for our lives. The shortest sea-line from Boston to Liverpool is 2850
miles. This a steamer keeps, and saves 150 miles. A sailing ship can never go
in a shorter line than 3000, and usually it is much longer. Our good master
keeps his kites up to the last moment studding-sails alow and aloft, and, by
incessant straight steering, never loses a rod of way. Watchfulness is the law
of the ship, - watch on watch, for advantage and for life. Since the ship was
built, it seems, the master never slept but in his day-clothes whilst on
board. "There are many advantages," says Saadi, "in sea-voyaging, but
security is not one of them." Yet in hurrying over these abysses, whatever
dangers we are running into, we are certainly running out of the risks of
hundreds of miles every day, which have their own chances of squall,
collision, sea-stroke, piracy, cold, and thunder. Hour for hour, the risk on
a steamboat is greater; but the speed is safety, or, twelve days of danger,
instead of twenty-four. Our ship was registered 750 tons, and weighed
perhaps, with all her freight, 1500 tons. The mainmast, from the deck to the
top-button, measured 115 feet; the length of the deck, from stem to stern,
155. It is impossible not to personify a ship; everybody does, in everything
they say: - she behaves well; she minds her rudder; she swims like a duck; she
runs her nose into the water; she looks into a port. Then that wonderful
esprit de corps, by which we adopt into our self-love everything we touch,
makes us all champions of her sailing qualities.
The conscious ship hears all the praise. In one week she has made 1467
miles, and now, at night, seems to hear the steamer behind her, which left
Boston to-day at two, has mended her speed, and is flying before the gray
south wind eleven and a half knots the hour. The sea-fire shines in her
wake, and far around wherever a wave breaks. I read the hour, 9h.45`, on my
watch by this light. Near the equator, you can read small print by it; and the
mate describes the phosphoric insects, when taken up in a pail, as shaped like
a Carolina potato.
In find the sea-life, an acquired taste, like that for tomatoes and
olives. The confinement, cold, motion, noise, and odor are not to be dispensed
with. The floor of your room is sloped at an angle on twenty or thirty
degrees, and I waked every morning with the belief that some one was tipping
up my berth. Nobody likes to be treated ignominiously, upset, shoved against
the side of the house, rolled over, suffocated with bilge, mephitis, and
stewing oil. We get used to these annoyances at last, but the dread of the sea
remains longer. The sea is masculine, the type of active strength. Look, what
eggshells are drifting all over it, each one, like ours, filled with men in
ecstasies of terror, alternating with cockney conceit, as the sea is rough or
smooth. Is this sad-colored circle an eternal cemetery? In our graveyards we
scoop a pit, but his aggressive water opens mile widepits and chasms, and
makes a mouthful of a fleet. To the geologist, the sea is the only firmament;
the land is in perpetual flux and change, now blown up like a tumor, now sunk
in a chasm, and the registered observations of a few hundred years find it in
a perpetual tilt, rising and falling. The sea keeps its old level; and `tis no
wonder that the history of our race is so recent, if the roar of the ocean is
silencing our traditions. A rising of the sea, such as has been observed, say
an inch in a century, from east to west on the land, will bury all the towns,
monuments, bones, and knowledge of mankind, steadily and insensibly. If it is
capable of these great and secular mischiefs, it is quite as ready at private
and local damage; and of this no landsman seems so fearful as the seaman. Such
discomfort and such danger as the narratives of the captain and mate disclose
are bad enough as the costly fee we pay for entrance to Europe; but the wonder
is always new that any sane man can be a sailor. And here, on the second day
of our voyage, stepped out a little boy in his shirt-sleeves, who had hid
himself, whilst the ship was in port, in the bread-closet, having no money,
and wishing to go to England. The sailors have dressed him in Guernsey frock,
with a knife in his belt, and he is climbing nimbly about after them, "likes
the work first-rate, and, if the captain will take him, means now to come
back again in the ship." The mate avers that this is the history of all
sailors; nine out of ten are runaway boys; and adds that all of them are sick
of the sea, but stay in it out of pride. Jack has a life of risks, incessant
abuse, and the worst pay. It is a little better with the mate, and not very
much better with the captain. A hundred dollars a month is reckoned high pay.
If sailors were contented, if they had not resolved again and again not to go
to sea any more, I should respect them.
Of course, the inconveniences and terrors of the sea are not of any
account to those whose minds are preoccupied. The water-laws, arctic frost,
the mountain, the mine, only shatter cockneyism; every noble activity makes
room for itself. A great mind is a good sailor, as a great heart is. And the
sea is not slow in disclosing inestimable secrets to a good naturalist.
`Tis a good rule in every journey to provide some piece of liberal study
to rescue the hours which bad weather, bad company, and taverns steal from the
best economist. Classics which at home are drowsily read have a strange charm
in a country inn, or in the transom of a merchant brig. I remember that some
of the happiest and most valuable hours I have owed to books, passed many
years ago, on shipboard. The worst impediment I have found at sea is the want
of light in the cabin.
We found on board the usual cabin library: Basil Hall, Dumasg Dickens,
Bulwer, Balzac, and Sand were our sea-gods. Among the passengers, there was
some variety of talent and profession; we exchanged our experiences, and all
learned something. The busiest talk with leisure and convenience at sea, and
sometimes a memorable fact turns up, which you have long had a vacant niche
for, and seize with the joy of a collector. But, under the best conditions, a
voyage is one of the severest tests to try a man. A college examination is
nothing to it. Sea-days, are long, - these lack-lustre, joyless days which
whistled over us; but they were few, - only fifteen, as the captain counted,
sixteen according to me. Reckoned from the time when we left soundings, our
speed was such that the captain drew the line of his course in red ink on his
chart, for the encouragement or envy of future navigators.
It has been said that the King of England would consult his dignity by
giving audience to foreign ambassadors in the cabin of a man-of-war. And I
think the white path of an Atlantic ship the right avenue to the palace front
of this seafaring people, who for hundreds of years claimed the strict
sovereignty of the sea, and exacted toll and the striking sail from the ships
of all other peoples. When their privilege was disputed by the Dutch and other
junior marines, on the plea that you could never anchor on the same wave, or
hold property in what was always flowing, the English did not stick to claim
the channel, or bottom of all the main. "As if," said they, "we contended for
the drops of the sea, and not for its situation, or the bed of those waters.
The sea is bounded by his majesty`s empire."
As we neared the land, its genius was felt. This was inevitably the
British side. In every man`s thought arises now a new system, English
sentiments, English loves and fears, English history and social modes.
Yesterday, every passenger had measured the speed of the ship by watching the
bubbles over the ship`s bulwarks. To-day, instead of bubbles, we measure by
Kinsale, Cork, Waterford, and Ardmore. There lay the green shore of Ireland,
like some coast of plenty. We could see towns, towers, churches, harvests; but
the curse of eight hundred years we could not discern.
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