The Mirror of the Sea.........................................................................................................................................1

Landfall and Departure mark the rhythmical swing of a seaman's life and of a ship's career. From land to land

A "Departure" is not what a vain people of landsmen may think. The term "Landfall" is more easily

understood; you fall in with the land, and it is a matter of a quick eye and of a clear atmosphere. The

Departure is not the ship's going away from her port any more than the Landfall can be looked upon as the

synonym of arrival. But there is this difference in the Departure: that the term does not imply so much a sea

event as a definite act entailing a process the precise observation of certain landmarks by means of the

Your Landfall, be it a peculiarlyshaped mountain, a rocky headland, or a stretch of sanddunes, you meet at

first with a single glance. Further recognition will follow in due course; but essentially a Landfall, good or

bad, is made and done with at the first cry of "Land ho!" The Departure is distinctly a ceremony of

navigation. A ship may have left her port some time before; she may have been at sea, in the fullest sense of

the phrase, for days; but, for all that, as long as the coast she was about to leave remained in sight, a

southerngoing ship of yesterday had not in the sailor's sense begun the enterprise of a passage.

The taking of Departure, if not the last sight of the land, is, perhaps, the last professional recognition of the

land on the part of a sailor. It is the technical, as distinguished from the sentimental, "goodbye." Henceforth

he has done with the coast astern of his ship. It is a matter personal to the man. It is not the ship that takes her

departure; the seaman takes his Departure by means of crossbearings which fix the place of the first tiny

pencilcross on the white expanse of the trackchart, where the ship's position at noon shall be marked by

just such another tiny pencil cross for every day of her passage. And there may be sixty, eighty, any number

of these crosses on the ship's track from land to land. The greatest number in my experience was a hundred

and thirty of such crosses from the pilot station at the Sand Heads in the Bay of Bengal to the Scilly's light. A

A Departure, the last professional sight of land, is always good, or at least good enough. For, even if the

weather be thick, it does not matter much to a ship having all the open sea before her bows. A Landfall may

be good or bad. You encompass the earth with one particular spot of it in your eye. In all the devious tracings

the course of a sailingship leaves upon the white paper of a chart she is always aiming for that one little spot

maybe a small island in the ocean, a single headland upon the long coast of a continent, a lighthouse on a

bluff, or simply the peaked form of a mountain like an antheap afloat upon the waters. But if you have

sighted it on the expected bearing, then that Landfall is good. Fogs, snowstorms, gales thick with clouds and

Some commanders of ships take their Departure from the home coast sadly, in a spirit of grief and discontent.

They have a wife, children perhaps, some affection at any rate, or perhaps only some pet vice, that must be

left behind for a year or more. I remember only one man who walked his deck with a springy step, and gave

the first course of the passage in an elated voice. But he, as I learned afterwards, was leaving nothing behind

On the other hand, I have known many captains who, directly their ship had left the narrow waters of the

Channel, would disappear from the sight of their ship's company altogether for some three days or more.

They would take a long dive, as it were, into their stateroom, only to emerge a few days afterwards with a

more or less serene brow. Those were the men easy to get on with. Besides, such a complete retirement

seemed to imply a satisfactory amount of trust in their officers, and to be trusted displeases no seaman worthy

On my first voyage as chief mate with good Captain MacW I remember that I felt quite flattered, and went

blithely about my duties, myself a commander for all practical purposes. Still, whatever the greatness of my

illusion, the fact remained that the real commander was there, backing up my selfconfidence, though

invisible to my eyes behind a maplewood veneered cabindoor with a white china handle.

That is the time, after your Departure is taken, when the spirit of your commander communes with you in a

muffled voice, as if from the sanctum sanctorum of a temple; because, call her a temple or a "hell afloat" as

some ships have been called the captain's stateroom is surely the august place in every vessel.

The good MacW would not even come out to his meals, and fed solitarily in his holy of holies from a tray

covered with a white napkin. Our steward used to bend an ironic glance at the perfectly empty plates he was

bringing out from there. This grief for his home, which overcomes so many married seamen, did not deprive

Captain MacW of his legitimate appetite. In fact, the steward would almost invariably come up to me,

sitting in the captain's chair at the head of the table, to say in a grave murmur, "The captain asks for one more

slice of meat and two potatoes." We, his officers, could hear him moving about in his berth, or lightly

snoring, or fetching deep sighs, or splashing and blowing in his bathroom; and we made our reports to him

through the keyhole, as it were. It was the crowning achievement of his amiable character that the answers we

got were given in a quite mild and friendly tone. Some commanders in their periods of seclusion are

constantly grumpy, and seem to resent the mere sound of your voice as an injury and an insult.

But a grumpy recluse cannot worry his subordinates: whereas the man in whom the sense of duty is strong

(or, perhaps, only the sense of selfimportance), and who persists in airing on deck his moroseness all day

and perhaps half the night becomes a grievous infliction. He walks the poop darting gloomy glances, as

though he wished to poison the sea, and snaps your head off savagely whenever you happen to blunder within

earshot. And these vagaries are the harder to bear patiently, as becomes a man and an officer, because no

sailor is really goodtempered during the first few days of a voyage. There are regrets, memories, the

instinctive longing for the departed idleness, the instinctive hate of all work. Besides, things have a knack of

going wrong at the start, especially in the matter of irritating trifles. And there is the abiding thought of a

whole year of more or less hard life before one, because there was hardly a southerngoing voyage in the

yesterday of the sea which meant anything less than a twelvemonth. Yes; it needed a few days after the taking

of your departure for a ship's company to shake down into their places, and for the soothing deepwater ship

It is a great doctor for sore hearts and sore heads, too, your ship's routine, which I have seen soothe at least

for a time the most turbulent of spirits. There is health in it, and peace, and satisfaction of the accomplished

round; for each day of the ship's life seems to close a circle within the wide ring of the sea horizon. It borrows

a certain dignity of sameness from the majestic monotony of the sea. He who loves the sea loves also the

Nowhere else than upon the sea do the days, weeks and months fall away quicker into the past. They seem to

be left astern as easily as the light airbubbles in the swirls of the ship's wake, and vanish into a great silence

in which your ship moves on with a sort of magical effect. They pass away, the days, the weeks, the months.

Nothing but a gale can disturb the orderly life of the ship; and the spell of unshaken monotony that seems to

have fallen upon the very voices of her men is broken only by the near prospect of a Landfall.

Then is the spirit of the ship's commander stirred strongly again. But it is not moved to seek seclusion, and to

remain, hidden and inert, shut up in a small cabin with the solace of a good bodily appetite. When about to

make the land, the spirit of the ship's commander is tormented by an unconquerable restlessness. It seems

unable to abide for many seconds together in the holy of holies of the captain's stateroom; it will out on deck

and gaze ahead, through straining eyes, as the appointed moment comes nearer. It is kept vigorously upon the

stretch of excessive vigilance. Meantime the body of the ship's commander is being enfeebled by want of

appetite; at least, such is my experience, though "enfeebled" is perhaps not exactly the word. I might say,

rather, that it is spiritualized by a disregard for food, sleep, and all the ordinary comforts, such as they are, of

sea life. In one or two cases I have known that detachment from the grosser needs of existence remain

But these two cases were, properly speaking, pathological cases, and the only two in all my sea experience. In

one of these two instances of a craving for stimulants, developed from sheer anxiety, I cannot assert that the

man's seamanlike qualities were impaired in the least. It was a very anxious case, too, the land being made

suddenly, closeto, on a wrong bearing, in thick weather, and during a fresh onshore gale. Going below to

speak to him soon after, I was unlucky enough to catch my captain in the very act of hasty corkdrawing. The

sight, I may say, gave me an awful scare. I was well aware of the morbidly sensitive nature of the man.

Fortunately, I managed to draw back unseen, and, taking care to stamp heavily with my seaboots at the foot

of the cabin stairs, I made my second entry. But for this unexpected glimpse, no act of his during the next

twentyfour hours could have given me the slightest suspicion that all was not well with his nerve.

Quite another case, and having nothing to do with drink, was that of poor Captain B. He used to suffer from

sick headaches, in his young days, every time he was approaching a coast. Well over fifty years of age when I

knew him, short, stout, dignified, perhaps a little pompous, he was a man of a singularly wellinformed

mind, the least sailorlike in outward aspect, but certainly one of the best seamen whom it has been my good

luck to serve under. He was a Plymouth man, I think, the son of a country doctor, and both his elder boys

were studying medicine. He commanded a big London ship, fairly well known in her day. I thought no end of

him, and that is why I remember with a peculiar satisfaction the last words he spoke to me on board his ship

after an eighteen months' voyage. It was in the dock in Dundee, where we had brought a full cargo of jute

from Calcutta. We had been paid off that morning, and I had come on board to take my seachest away and

to say goodbye. In his slightly lofty but courteous way he inquired what were my plans. I replied that I

intended leaving for London by the afternoon train, and thought of going up for examination to get my

master's certificate. I had just enough service for that. He commended me for not wasting my time, with such

an evident interest in my case that I was quite surprised; then, rising from his chair, he said:

"If you happen to be in want of employment, remember that as long as I have a ship you have a ship, too."

In the way of compliment there is nothing to beat this from a ship's captain to his second mate at the end of a

voyage, when the work is over and the subordinate is done with. And there is a pathos in that memory, for the

poor fellow never went to sea again after all. He was already ailing when we passed St. Helena; was laid up

for a time when we were off the Western Islands, but got out of bed to make his Landfall. He managed to

keep up on deck as far as the Downs, where, giving his orders in an exhausted voice, he anchored for a few

hours to send a wire to his wife and take aboard a North Sea pilot to help him sail the ship up the east coast.

He had not felt equal to the task by himself, for it is the sort of thing that keeps a deepwater man on his feet

When we arrived in Dundee, Mrs. B was already there, waiting to take him home. We travelled up to

London by the same train; but by the time I had managed to get through with my examination the ship had

sailed on her next voyage without him, and, instead of joining her again, I went by request to see my old

commander in his home. This is the only one of my captains I have ever visited in that way. He was out of

bed by then, "quite convalescent," as he declared, making a few tottering steps to meet me at the sitting

room door. Evidently he was reluctant to take his final cross bearings of this earth for a Departure on the

only voyage to an unknown destination a sailor ever undertakes. And it was all very nice the large, sunny

room; his deep, easychair in a bow window, with pillows and a footstool; the quiet, watchful care of the

elderly, gentle woman who had borne him five children, and had not, perhaps, lived with him more than five

full years out of the thirty or so of their married life. There was also another woman there in a plain black

dress, quite grayhaired, sitting very erect on her chair with some sewing, from which she snatched

sideglances in his direction, and uttering not a single word during all the time of my call. Even when, in due

course, I carried over to her a cup of tea, she only nodded at me silently, with the faintest ghost of a smile on

her tightset lips. I imagine she must have been a maiden sister of Mrs. B come to help nurse her

brotherinlaw. His youngest boy, a latecomer, a great cricketer it seemed, twelve years old or thereabouts,

chattered enthusiastically of the exploits of W. G. Grace. And I remember his eldest son, too, a

newlyfledged doctor, who took me out to smoke in the garden, and, shaking his head with professional

gravity, but with genuine concern, muttered: "Yes, but he doesn't get back his appetite. I don't like that I

don't like that at all." The last sight of Captain B I had was as he nodded his head to me out of the bow

It was a distinct and complete impression, something that I don't know whether to call a Landfall or a

Departure. Certainly he had gazed at times very fixedly before him with the Landfall's vigilant look, this

seacaptain seated incongruously in a deepbacked chair. He had not then talked to me of employment, of

ships, of being ready to take another command; but he had discoursed of his early days, in the abundant but

thin flow of a wilful invalid's talk. The women looked worried, but sat still, and I learned more of him in that

interview than in the whole eighteen months we had sailed together. It appeared he had "served his time" in

the copperore trade, the famous copperore trade of old days between Swansea and the Chilian coast, coal

out and ore in, deeploaded both ways, as if in wanton defiance of the great Cape Horn seas a work, this,

for staunch ships, and a great school of staunchness for West Country seamen. A whole fleet of

copperbottomed barques, as strong in rib and planking, as wellfound in gear, as ever was sent upon the

seas, manned by hardy crews and commanded by young masters, was engaged in that now long defunct trade.

"That was the school I was trained in," he said to me almost boastfully, lying back amongst his pillows with a

rug over his legs. And it was in that trade that he obtained his first command at a very early age. It was then

that he mentioned to me how, as a young commander, he was always ill for a few days before making land

after a long passage. But this sort of sickness used to pass off with the first sight of a familiar landmark.

Afterwards, he added, as he grew older, all that nervousness wore off completely; and I observed his weary

eyes gaze steadily ahead, as if there had been nothing between him and the straight line of sea and sky, where

whatever a seaman is looking for is first bound to appear. But I have also seen his eyes rest fondly upon the

faces in the room, upon the pictures on the wall, upon all the familiar objects of that home, whose abiding and

clear image must have flashed often on his memory in times of stress and anxiety at sea. Was he looking out

for a strange Landfall, or taking with an untroubled mind the bearings for his last Departure?

It is hard to say; for in that voyage from which no man returns Landfall and Departure are instantaneous,

merging together into one moment of supreme and final attention. Certainly I do not remember observing any

sign of faltering in the set expression of his wasted face, no hint of the nervous anxiety of a young

commander about to make land on an uncharted shore. He had had too much experience of Departures and

Landfalls! And had he not "served his time" in the famous copperore trade out of the Bristol Channel, the

Before an anchor can ever be raised, it must be let go; and this perfectly obvious truism brings me at once to

the subject of the degradation of the sea language in the daily press of this country.

Your journalist, whether he takes charge of a ship or a fleet, almost invariably "casts" his anchor. Now, an

anchor is never cast, and to take a liberty with technical language is a crime against the clearness, precision,

An anchor is a forged piece of iron, admirably adapted to its end, and technical language is an instrument

wrought into perfection by ages of experience, a flawless thing for its purpose. An anchor of yesterday

(because nowadays there are contrivances like mushrooms and things like claws, of no particular expression

or shape just hooks) an anchor of yesterday is in its way a most efficient instrument. To its perfection its

size bears witness, for there is no other appliance so small for the great work it has to do. Look at the anchors

hanging from the catheads of a big ship! How tiny they are in proportion to the great size of the hull! Were

they made of gold they would look like trinkets, like ornamental toys, no bigger in proportion than a jewelled

drop in a woman's ear. And yet upon them will depend, more than once, the very life of the ship.

An anchor is forged and fashioned for faithfulness; give it ground that it can bite, and it will hold till the cable

parts, and then, whatever may afterwards befall its ship, that anchor is "lost." The honest, rough piece of iron,

so simple in appearance, has more parts than the human body has limbs: the ring, the stock, the crown, the

flukes, the palms, the shank. All this, according to the journalist, is "cast" when a ship arriving at an

This insistence in using the odious word arises from the fact that a particularly benighted landsman must

imagine the act of anchoring as a process of throwing something overboard, whereas the anchor ready for its

work is already overboard, and is not thrown over, but simply allowed to fall. It hangs from the ship's side at

the end of a heavy, projecting timber called the cathead, in the bight of a short, thick chain whose end link is

suddenly released by a blow from a topmaul or the pull of a lever when the order is given. And the order is

As a matter of fact, nothing is ever cast in that sense on board ship but the lead, of which a cast is taken to

search the depth of water on which she floats. A lashed boat, a spare spar, a cask or what not secured about

the decks, is "cast adrift" when it is untied. Also the ship herself is "cast to port or starboard" when getting

To speak with severe technicality, a ship or a fleet is "brought up" the complementary words unpronounced

and unwritten being, of course, "to an anchor." Less technically, but not less correctly, the word "anchored,"

with its characteristic appearance and resolute sound, ought to be good enough for the newspapers of the

greatest maritime country in the world. "The fleet anchored at Spithead": can anyone want a better sentence

for brevity and seamanlike ring? But the "castanchor" trick, with its affectation of being a seaphrase for

why not write just as well "threw anchor," "flung anchor," or 'shied anchor"? is intolerably odious to a

sailor's ear. I remember a coasting pilot of my early acquaintance (he used to read the papers assiduously)

who, to define the utmost degree of lubberliness in a landsman, used to say, "He's one of them poor,

From first to last the seaman's thoughts are very much concerned with his anchors. It is not so much that the

anchor is a symbol of hope as that it is the heaviest object that he has to handle on board his ship at sea in the

usual routine of his duties. The beginning and the end of every passage are marked distinctly by work about

the ship's anchors. A vessel in the Channel has her anchors always ready, her cables shackled on, and the land

almost always in sight. The anchor and the land are indissolubly connected in a sailor's thoughts. But directly

she is clear of the narrow seas, heading out into the world with nothing solid to speak of between her and the

South Pole, the anchors are got in and the cables disappear from the deck. But the anchors do not disappear.

Technically speaking, they are "secured inboard"; and, on the forecastle head, lashed down to ringbolts

with ropes and chains, under the straining sheets of the headsails, they look very idle and as if asleep. Thus

bound, but carefully looked after, inert and powerful, those emblems of hope make company for the lookout

man in the night watches; and so the days glide by, with a long rest for those characteristically shaped pieces

of iron, reposing forward, visible from almost every part of the ship's deck, waiting for their work on the

other side of the world somewhere, while the ship carries them on with a great rush and splutter of foam

The first approach to the land, as yet invisible to the crew's eyes, is announced by the brisk order of the chief

mate to the boatswain: "We will get the anchors over this afternoon" or "first thing tomorrow morning," as

the case may be. For the chief mate is the keeper of the ship's anchors and the guardian of her cable. There

are good ships and bad ships, comfortable ships and ships where, from first day to last of the voyage, there is

no rest for a chief mate's body and soul. And ships are what men make them: this is a pronouncement of

However, there are ships where, as an old grizzled mate once told me, "nothing ever seems to go right!" And,

looking from the poop where we both stood (I had paid him a neighbourly call in dock), he added: "She's one

of them." He glanced up at my face, which expressed a proper professional sympathy, and set me right in my

natural surmise: "Oh no; the old man's right enough. He never interferes. Anything that's done in a

seamanlike way is good enough for him. And yet, somehow, nothing ever seems to go right in this ship. I tell

The "old man," of course, was his captain, who just then came on deck in a silk hat and brown overcoat, and,

with a civil nod to us, went ashore. He was certainly not more than thirty, and the elderly mate, with a

murmur to me of "That's my old man," proceeded to give instances of the natural unhandiness of the ship in a

sort of deprecatory tone, as if to say, "You mustn't think I bear a grudge against her for that."

The instances do not matter. The point is that there are ships where things DO go wrong; but whatever the

ship good or bad, lucky or unlucky it is in the forepart of her that her chief mate feels most at home. It is

emphatically HIS end of the ship, though, of course, he is the executive supervisor of the whole. There are

HIS anchors, HIS headgear, his foremast, his station for manoeuvring when the captain is in charge. And

there, too, live the men, the ship's hands, whom it is his duty to keep employed, fair weather or foul, for the

ship's welfare. It is the chief mate, the only figure of the ship's afterguard, who comes bustling forward at the

cry of "All hands on deck!" He is the satrap of that province in the autocratic realm of the ship, and more

There, too, on the approach to the land, assisted by the boatswain and the carpenter, he "gets the anchors

over" with the men of his own watch, whom he knows better than the others. There he sees the cable ranged,

the windlass disconnected, the compressors opened; and there, after giving his own last order, "Stand clear of

the cable!" he waits attentive, in a silent ship that forges slowly ahead towards her pickedout berth, for the

sharp shout from aft, "Let go!" Instantly bending over, he sees the trusty iron fall with a heavy plunge under

For the anchor "to go clear" means to go clear of its own chain. Your anchor must drop from the bow of your

ship with no turn of cable on any of its limbs, else you would be riding to a foul anchor. Unless the pull of the

cable is fair on the ring, no anchor can be trusted even on the best of holding ground. In time of stress it is

bound to drag, for implements and men must be treated fairly to give you the "virtue" which is in them. The

anchor is an emblem of hope, but a foul anchor is worse than the most fallacious of false hopes that ever

lured men or nations into a sense of security. And the sense of security, even the most warranted, is a bad

councillor. It is the sense which, like that exaggerated feeling of wellbeing ominous of the coming on of

madness, precedes the swift fall of disaster. A seaman labouring under an undue sense of security becomes at

once worth hardly half his salt. Therefore, of all my chief officers, the one I trusted most was a man called

B. He had a red moustache, a lean face, also red, and an uneasy eye. He was worth all his salt.

On examining now, after many years, the residue of the feeling which was the outcome of the contact of our

personalities, I discover, without much surprise, a certain flavour of dislike. Upon the whole, I think he was

one of the most uncomfortable shipmates possible for a young commander. If it is permissible to criticise the

absent, I should say he had a little too much of the sense of insecurity which is so invaluable in a seaman. He

had an extremely disturbing air of being everlastingly ready (even when seated at table at my right hand

before a plate of salt beef) to grapple with some impending calamity. I must hasten to add that he had also the

other qualification necessary to make a trustworthy seaman that of an absolute confidence in himself. What

was really wrong with him was that he had these qualities in an unrestful degree. His eternally watchful

demeanour, his jerky, nervous talk, even his, as it were, determined silences, seemed to imply and, I

believe, they did imply that to his mind the ship was never safe in my hands. Such was the man who looked

after the anchors of a less than fivehundredton barque, my first command, now gone from the face of the

earth, but sure of a tenderly remembered existence as long as I live. No anchor could have gone down foul

under Mr. B's piercing eye. It was good for one to be sure of that when, in an open roadstead, one heard in

the cabin the wind pipe up; but still, there were moments when I detested Mr. B exceedingly. From the way

he used to glare sometimes, I fancy that more than once he paid me back with interest. It so happened that we

both loved the little barque very much. And it was just the defect of Mr. B's inestimable qualities that he

would never persuade himself to believe that the ship was safe in my hands. To begin with, he was more than

five years older than myself at a time of life when five years really do count, I being twentynine and he

thirtyfour; then, on our first leaving port (I don't see why I should make a secret of the fact that it was

Bangkok), a bit of manoeuvring of mine amongst the islands of the Gulf of Siam had given him an

unforgettable scare. Ever since then he had nursed in secret a bitter idea of my utter recklessness. But upon

the whole, and unless the grip of a man's hand at parting means nothing whatever, I conclude that we did like

The bond between us was the ship; and therein a ship, though she has female attributes and is loved very

unreasonably, is different from a woman. That I should have been tremendously smitten with my first

command is nothing to wonder at, but I suppose I must admit that Mr. B's sentiment was of a higher order.

Each of us, of course, was extremely anxious about the good appearance of the beloved object; and, though I

was the one to glean compliments ashore, B had the more intimate pride of feeling, resembling that of a

devoted handmaiden. And that sort of faithful and proud devotion went so far as to make him go about

flicking the dust off the varnished teakwood rail of the little craft with a silk pockethandkerchief a

That was the effect of his love for the barque. The effect of his admirable lack of the sense of security once

It was said in a tone full of significance, but not exactly offensive, and it was, I suppose, my innate tact that

Later on his meaning was illustrated more fully on a dark night in a tight corner during a dead onshore gale.

I had called him up on deck to help me consider our extremely unpleasant situation. There was not much time

for deep thinking, and his summingup was: "It looks pretty bad, whichever we try; but, then, sir, you always

It is difficult to disconnect the idea of ships' anchors from the idea of the ship's chief mate the man who

sees them go down clear and come up sometimes foul; because not even the most unremitting care can

always prevent a ship, swinging to winds and tide, from taking an awkward turn of the cable round stock or

fluke. Then the business of "getting the anchor" and securing it afterwards is unduly prolonged, and made a

weariness to the chief mate. He is the man who watches the growth of the cable a sailor's phrase which has

all the force, precision, and imagery of technical language that, created by simple men with keen eyes for the

real aspect of the things they see in their trade, achieves the just expression seizing upon the essential, which

is the ambition of the artist in words. Therefore the sailor will never say, "cast anchor," and the shipmaster

aft will hail his chief mate on the forecastle in impressionistic phrase: "How does the cable grow?" Because

"grow" is the right word for the long drift of a cable emerging aslant under the strain, taut as a bowstring

above the water. And it is the voice of the keeper of the ship's anchors that will answer: "Grows right ahead,

sir," or "Broad on the bow," or whatever concise and deferential shout will fit the case.

There is no order more noisily given or taken up with lustier shouts on board a homewardbound merchant

ship than the command, "Man the windlass!" The rush of expectant men out of the forecastle, the snatching

of handspikes, the tramp of feet, the clink of the pawls, make a stirring accompaniment to a plaintive

upanchor song with a roaring chorus; and this burst of noisy activity from a whole ship's crew seems like a

voiceful awakening of the ship herself, till then, in the picturesque phrase of Dutch seamen, "lying asleep

For a ship with her sails furled on her squared yards, and reflected from truck to waterline in the smooth

gleaming sheet of a landlocked harbour, seems, indeed, to a seaman's eye the most perfect picture of

slumbering repose. The getting of your anchor was a noisy operation on board a merchant ship of yesterday

an inspiring, joyous noise, as if, with the emblem of hope, the ship's company expected to drag up out of the

depths, each man all his personal hopes into the reach of a securing hand the hope of home, the hope of

rest, of liberty, of dissipation, of hard pleasure, following the hard endurance of many days between sky and

water. And this noisiness, this exultation at the moment of the ship's departure, make a tremendous contrast to

the silent moments of her arrival in a foreign roadstead the silent moments when, stripped of her sails, she

forges ahead to her chosen berth, the loose canvas fluttering softly in the gear above the heads of the men

standing still upon her decks, the master gazing intently forward from the break of the poop. Gradually she

loses her way, hardly moving, with the three figures on her forecastle waiting attentively about the cathead

This is the final word of a ship's ended journey, the closing word of her toil and of her achievement. In a life

whose worth is told out in passages from port to port, the splash of the anchor's fall and the thunderous

rumbling of the chain are like the closing of a distinct period, of which she seems conscious with a slight

deep shudder of all her frame. By so much is she nearer to her appointed death, for neither years nor voyages

can go on for ever. It is to her like the striking of a clock, and in the pause which follows she seems to take

This is the last important order; the others are mere routine directions. Once more the master is heard: "Give

her fortyfive fathom to the water's edge," and then he, too, is done for a time. For days he leaves all the

harbour work to his chief mate, the keeper of the ship's anchor and of the ship's routine. For days his voice

will not be heard raised about the decks, with that curt, austere accent of the man in charge, till, again, when

the hatches are on, and in a silent and expectant ship, he shall speak up from aft in commanding tones: "Man

The other year, looking through a newspaper of sound principles, but whose staff WILL persist in "casting"

anchors and going to sea "on" a ship (ough!), I came across an article upon the season's yachting. And,

behold! it was a good article. To a man who had but little to do with pleasure sailing (though all sailing is a

pleasure), and certainly nothing whatever with racing in open waters, the writer's strictures upon the

handicapping of yachts were just intelligible and no more. And I do not pretend to any interest in the

enumeration of the great races of that year. As to the 52foot linear raters, praised so much by the writer, I

am warmed up by his approval of their performances; but, as far as any clear conception goes, the descriptive

phrase, so precise to the comprehension of a yachtsman, evokes no definite image in my mind.

The writer praises that class of pleasure vessels, and I am willing to endorse his words, as any man who loves

every craft afloat would be ready to do. I am disposed to admire and respect the 52foot linear raters on the

word of a man who regrets in such a sympathetic and understanding spirit the threatened decay of yachting

Of course, yacht racing is an organized pastime, a function of social idleness ministering to the vanity of

certain wealthy inhabitants of these isles nearly as much as to their inborn love of the sea. But the writer of

the article in question goes on to point out, with insight and justice, that for a great number of people (20,000,

I think he says) it is a means of livelihood that it is, in his own words, an industry. Now, the moral side of

an industry, productive or unproductive, the redeeming and ideal aspect of this breadwinning, is the

attainment and preservation of the highest possible skill on the part of the craftsmen. Such skill, the skill of

technique, is more than honesty; it is something wider, embracing honesty and grace and rule in an elevated

and clear sentiment, not altogether utilitarian, which may be called the honour of labour. It is made up of

accumulated tradition, kept alive by individual pride, rendered exact by professional opinion, and, like the

This is why the attainment of proficiency, the pushing of your skill with attention to the most delicate shades

of excellence, is a matter of vital concern. Efficiency of a practically flawless kind may be reached naturally

in the struggle for bread. But there is something beyond a higher point, a subtle and unmistakable touch of

love and pride beyond mere skill; almost an inspiration which gives to all work that finish which is almost art

As men of scrupulous honour set up a high standard of public conscience above the deadlevel of an honest

community, so men of that skill which passes into art by ceaseless striving raise the deadlevel of correct

practice in the crafts of land and sea. The conditions fostering the growth of that supreme, alive excellence, as

well in work as in play, ought to be preserved with a most careful regard lest the industry or the game should

perish of an insidious and inward decay. Therefore I have read with profound regret, in that article upon the

yachting season of a certain year, that the seamanship on board racing yachts is not now what it used to be

For that was the gist of that article, written evidently by a man who not only knows but UNDERSTANDS a

thing (let me remark in passing) much rarer than one would expect, because the sort of understanding I mean

is inspired by love; and love, though in a sense it may be admitted to be stronger than death, is by no means

so universal and so sure. In fact, love is rare the love of men, of things, of ideas, the love of perfected skill.

For love is the enemy of haste; it takes count of passing days, of men who pass away, of a fine art matured

slowly in the course of years and doomed in a short time to pass away too, and be no more. Love and regret

go hand in hand in this world of changes swifter than the shifting of the clouds reflected in the mirror of the

To penalize a yacht in proportion to the fineness of her performance is unfair to the craft and to her men. It is

unfair to the perfection of her form and to the skill of her servants. For we men are, in fact, the servants of our

creations. We remain in everlasting bondage to the productions of our brain and to the work of our hands. A

man is born to serve his time on this earth, and there is something fine in the service being given on other

grounds than that of utility. The bondage of art is very exacting. And, as the writer of the article which started

this train of thought says with lovable warmth, the sailing of yachts is a fine art.

His contention is that racing, without time allowances for anything else but tonnage that is, for size has

fostered the fine art of sailing to the pitch of perfection. Every sort of demand is made upon the master of a

sailingyacht, and to be penalized in proportion to your success may be of advantage to the sport itself, but it

has an obviously deteriorating effect upon the seamanship. The fine art is being lost.

The sailing and racing of yachts has developed a class of foreand aft sailors, men born and bred to the sea,

fishing in winter and yachting in summer; men to whom the handling of that particular rig presents no

mystery. It is their striving for victory that has elevated the sailing of pleasure craft to the dignity of a fine art

in that special sense. As I have said, I know nothing of racing and but little of foreandaft rig; but the

advantages of such a rig are obvious, especially for purposes of pleasure, whether in cruising or racing. It

requires less effort in handling; the trimming of the sailplanes to the wind can be done with speed and

accuracy; the unbroken spread of the sailarea is of infinite advantage; and the greatest possible amount of

canvas can be displayed upon the least possible quantity of spars. Lightness and concentrated power are the

A fleet of foreandafters at anchor has its own slender graciousness. The setting of their sails resembles

more than anything else the unfolding of a bird's wings; the facility of their evolutions is a pleasure to the

eye. They are birds of the sea, whose swimming is like flying, and resembles more a natural function than the

handling of maninvented appliances. The fore andaft rig in its simplicity and the beauty of its aspect

under every angle of vision is, I believe, unapproachable. A schooner, yawl, or cutter in charge of a capable

man seems to handle herself as if endowed with the power of reasoning and the gift of swift execution. One

laughs with sheer pleasure at a smart piece of manoeuvring, as at a manifestation of a living creature's quick

Of those three varieties of foreandaft rig, the cutter the racing rig PAR EXCELLENCE is of an

appearance the most imposing, from the fact that practically all her canvas is in one piece. The enormous

mainsail of a cutter, as she draws slowly past a point of land or the end of a jetty under your admiring gaze,

invests her with an air of lofty and silent majesty. At anchor a schooner looks better; she has an aspect of

greater efficiency and a better balance to the eye, with her two masts distributed over the hull with a

swaggering rake aft. The yawl rig one comes in time to love. It is, I should think, the easiest of all to manage.

For racing, a cutter; for a long pleasure voyage, a schooner; for cruising in home waters, the yawl; and the

handling of them all is indeed a fine art. It requires not only the knowledge of the general principles of

sailing, but a particular acquaintance with the character of the craft. All vessels are handled in the same way

as far as theory goes, just as you may deal with all men on broad and rigid principles. But if you want that

success in life which comes from the affection and confidence of your fellows, then with no two men,

however similar they may appear in their nature, will you deal in the same way. There may be a rule of

conduct; there is no rule of human fellowship. To deal with men is as fine an art as it is to deal with ships.

Both men and ships live in an unstable element, are subject to subtle and powerful influences, and want to

It is not what your ship will NOT do that you want to know to get on terms of successful partnership with

her; it is, rather, that you ought to have a precise knowledge of what she will do for you when called upon to

put forth what is in her by a sympathetic touch. At first sight the difference does not seem great in either line

of dealing with the difficult problem of limitations. But the difference is great. The difference lies in the spirit

in which the problem is approached. After all, the art of handling ships is finer, perhaps, than the art of

And, like all fine arts, it must be based upon a broad, solid sincerity, which, like a law of Nature, rules an

infinity of different phenomena. Your endeavour must be singleminded. You would talk differently to a

coalheaver and to a professor. But is this duplicity? I deny it. The truth consists in the genuineness of the

feeling, in the genuine recognition of the two men, so similar and so different, as your two partners in the

hazard of life. Obviously, a humbug, thinking only of winning his little race, would stand a chance of

profiting by his artifices. Men, professors or coalheavers, are easily deceived; they even have an

extraordinary knack of lending themselves to deception, a sort of curious and inexplicable propensity to allow

themselves to be led by the nose with their eyes open. But a ship is a creature which we have brought into the

world, as it were on purpose to keep us up to the mark. In her handling a ship will not put up with a mere

pretender, as, for instance, the public will do with Mr. X, the popular statesman, Mr. Y, the popular scientist,

or Mr. Z, the popular what shall we say? anything from a teacher of high morality to a bagman who

have won their little race. But I would like (though not accustomed to betting) to wager a large sum that not

one of the few firstrate skippers of racing yachts has ever been a humbug. It would have been too difficult.

The difficulty arises from the fact that one does not deal with ships in a mob, but with a ship as an individual.

So we may have to do with men. But in each of us there lurks some particle of the mob spirit, of the mob

temperament. No matter how earnestly we strive against each other, we remain brothers on the lowest side of

our intellect and in the instability of our feelings. With ships it is not so. Much as they are to us, they are

nothing to each other. Those sensitive creatures have no ears for our blandishments. It takes something more

than words to cajole them to do our will, to cover us with glory. Luckily, too, or else there would have been

more shoddy reputations for firstrate seamanship. Ships have no ears, I repeat, though, indeed, I think I have

known ships who really seemed to have had eyes, or else I cannot understand on what ground a certain

1,000ton barque of my acquaintance on one particular occasion refused to answer her helm, thereby saving

a frightful smash to two ships and to a very good man's reputation. I knew her intimately for two years, and in

no other instance either before or since have I known her to do that thing. The man she had served so well

(guessing, perhaps, at the depths of his affection for her) I have known much longer, and in bare justice to

him I must say that this confidenceshattering experience (though so fortunate) only augmented his trust in

her. Yes, our ships have no ears, and thus they cannot be deceived. I would illustrate my idea of fidelity as

between man and ship, between the master and his art, by a statement which, though it might appear

shockingly sophisticated, is really very simple. I would say that a racingyacht skipper who thought of

nothing else but the glory of winning the race would never attain to any eminence of reputation. The genuine

masters of their craft I say this confidently from my experience of ships have thought of nothing but of

doing their very best by the vessel under their charge. To forget one's self, to surrender all personal feeling in

the service of that fine art, is the only way for a seaman to the faithful discharge of his trust.

Such is the service of a fine art and of ships that sail the sea. And therein I think I can lay my finger upon the

difference between the seamen of yesterday, who are still with us, and the seamen of tomorrow, already

entered upon the possession of their inheritance. History repeats itself, but the special call of an art which has

passed away is never reproduced. It is as utterly gone out of the world as the song of a destroyed wild bird.

Nothing will awaken the same response of pleasurable emotion or conscientious endeavour. And the sailing

of any vessel afloat is an art whose fine form seems already receding from us on its way to the overshadowed

Valley of Oblivion. The taking of a modern steamship about the world (though one would not minimize its

responsibilities) has not the same quality of intimacy with nature, which, after all, is an indispensable

condition to the building up of an art. It is less personal and a more exact calling; less arduous, but also less

gratifying in the lack of close communion between the artist and the medium of his art. It is, in short, less a

matter of love. Its effects are measured exactly in time and space as no effect of an art can be. It is an

occupation which a man not desperately subject to seasickness can be imagined to follow with content,

without enthusiasm, with industry, without affection. Punctuality is its watchword. The incertitude which

attends closely every artistic endeavour is absent from its regulated enterprise. It has no great moments of

selfconfidence, or moments not less great of doubt and heartsearching. It is an industry which, like other

industries, has its romance, its honour and its rewards, its bitter anxieties and its hours of ease. But such

seagoing has not the artistic quality of a singlehanded struggle with something much greater than yourself;

it is not the laborious absorbing practice of an art whose ultimate result remains on the knees of the gods. It is

not an individual, temperamental achievement, but simply the skilled use of a captured force, merely another

Every passage of a ship of yesterday, whose yards were braced round eagerly the very moment the pilot, with

his pockets full of letters, had got over the side, was like a race a race against time, against an ideal

standard of achievement outstripping the expectations of common men. Like all true art, the general conduct

of a ship and her handling in particular cases had a technique which could be discussed with delight and

pleasure by men who found in their work, not bread alone, but an outlet for the peculiarities of their

temperament. To get the best and truest effect from the infinitely varying moods of sky and sea, not

pictorially, but in the spirit of their calling, was their vocation, one and all; and they recognised this with as

much sincerity, and drew as much inspiration from this reality, as any man who ever put brush to canvas. The

Some of them were like Royal Academicians of a certain kind. They never startled you by a touch of

originality, by a fresh audacity of inspiration. They were safe, very safe. They went about solemnly in the

assurance of their consecrated and empty reputation. Names are odious, but I remember one of them who

might have been their very president, the P.R.A. of the seacraft. His weatherbeaten and handsome face, his

portly presence, his shirt fronts and broad cuffs and gold links, his air of bluff distinction, impressed the

humble beholders (stevedores, tally clerks, tidewaiters) as he walked ashore over the gangway of his ship

lying at the Circular Quay in Sydney. His voice was deep, hearty, and authoritative the voice of a very

prince amongst sailors. He did everything with an air which put your attention on the alert and raised your

expectations, but the result somehow was always on stereotyped lines, unsuggestive, empty of any lesson that

one could lay to heart. He kept his ship in applepie order, which would have been seamanlike enough but

for a finicking touch in its details. His officers affected a superiority over the rest of us, but the boredom of

their souls appeared in their manner of dreary submission to the fads of their commander. It was only his

apprenticed boys whose irrepressible spirits were not affected by the solemn and respectable mediocrity of

that artist. There were four of these youngsters: one the son of a doctor, another of a colonel, the third of a

jeweller; the name of the fourth was Twentyman, and this is all I remember of his parentage. But not one of

them seemed to possess the smallest spark of gratitude in his composition. Though their commander was a

kind man in his way, and had made a point of introducing them to the best people in the town in order that

they should not fall into the bad company of boys belonging to other ships, I regret to say that they made

faces at him behind his back, and imitated the dignified carriage of his head without any concealment

This master of the fine art was a personage and nothing more; but, as I have said, there was an infinite

diversity of temperament amongst the masters of the fine art I have known. Some were great impressionists.

They impressed upon you the fear of God and Immensity or, in other words, the fear of being drowned with

every circumstance of terrific grandeur. One may think that the locality of your passing away by means of

suffocation in water does not really matter very much. I am not so sure of that. I am, perhaps, unduly

sensitive, but I confess that the idea of being suddenly spilt into an infuriated ocean in the midst of darkness

and uproar affected me always with a sensation of shrinking distaste. To be drowned in a pond, though it

might be called an ignominious fate by the ignorant, is yet a bright and peaceful ending in comparison with

some other endings to one's earthly career which I have mentally quaked at in the intervals or even in the

But let that pass. Some of the masters whose influence left a trace upon my character to this very day,

combined a fierceness of conception with a certitude of execution upon the basis of just appreciation of

means and ends which is the highest quality of the man of action. And an artist is a man of action, whether he

creates a personality, invents an expedient, or finds the issue of a complicated situation.

There were masters, too, I have known, whose very art consisted in avoiding every conceivable situation. It is

needless to say that they never did great things in their craft; but they were not to be despised for that. They

were modest; they understood their limitations. Their own masters had not handed the sacred fire into the

keeping of their cold and skilful hands. One of those last I remember specially, now gone to his rest from that

sea which his temperament must have made a scene of little more than a peaceful pursuit. Once only did he

attempt a stroke of audacity, one early morning, with a steady breeze, entering a crowded roadstead. But he

was not genuine in this display which might have been art. He was thinking of his own self; he hankered after

As, rounding a dark, wooded point, bathed in fresh air and sunshine, we opened to view a crowd of shipping

at anchor lying half a mile ahead of us perhaps, he called me aft from my station on the forecastle head, and,

turning over and over his binoculars in his brown hands, said: "Do you see that big, heavy ship with white

lower masts? I am going to take up a berth between her and the shore. Now do you see to it that the men jump

I answered, "Ay, ay, sir," and verily believed that this would be a fine performance. We dashed on through

the fleet in magnificent style. There must have been many open mouths and following eyes on board those

ships Dutch, English, with a sprinkling of Americans and a German or two who had all hoisted their flags

at eight o'clock as if in honour of our arrival. It would have been a fine performance if it had come off, but it

did not. Through a touch of selfseeking that modest artist of solid merit became untrue to his temperament.

It was not with him art for art's sake: it was art for his own sake; and a dismal failure was the penalty he paid

for that greatest of sins. It might have been even heavier, but, as it happened, we did not run our ship ashore,

nor did we knock a large hole in the big ship whose lower masts were painted white. But it is a wonder that

we did not carry away the cables of both our anchors, for, as may be imagined, I did not stand upon the order

to "Let go!" that came to me in a quavering, quite unknown voice from his trembling lips. I let them both go

with a celerity which to this day astonishes my memory. No average merchantman's anchors have ever been

let go with such miraculous smartness. And they both held. I could have kissed their rough, cold iron palms

in gratitude if they had not been buried in slimy mud under ten fathoms of water. Ultimately they brought us

up with the jibboom of a Dutch brig poking through our spanker nothing worse. And a miss is as good as a

But not in art. Afterwards the master said to me in a shy mumble, "She wouldn't luff up in time, somehow.

Yet the answer was clear. The ship had found out the momentary weakness of her man. Of all the living

creatures upon land and sea, it is ships alone that cannot be taken in by barren pretences, that will not put up

From the main truck of the average tall ship the horizon describes a circle of many miles, in which you can

see another ship right down to her waterline; and these very eyes which follow this writing have counted in

their time over a hundred sail becalmed, as if within a magic ring, not very far from the Azores ships more

or less tall. There were hardly two of them heading exactly the same way, as if each had meditated breaking

out of the enchanted circle at a different point of the compass. But the spell of the calm is a strong magic. The

following day still saw them scattered within sight of each other and heading different ways; but when, at

last, the breeze came with the darkling ripple that ran very blue on a pale sea, they all went in the same

direction together. For this was the homewardbound fleet from the faroff ends of the earth, and a Falmouth

fruitschooner, the smallest of them all, was heading the flight. One could have imagined her very fair, if not

The next day there were very few ships in sight from our mastheads seven at most, perhaps, with a few

more distant specks, hull down, beyond the magic ring of the horizon. The spell of the fair wind has a subtle

power to scatter a whitewinged company of ships looking all the same way, each with its white fillet of

tumbling foam under the bow. It is the calm that brings ships mysteriously together; it is your wind that is the

The taller the ship, the further she can be seen; and her white tallness breathed upon by the wind first

proclaims her size. The tall masts holding aloft the white canvas, spread out like a snare for catching the

invisible power of the air, emerge gradually from the water, sail after sail, yard after yard, growing big, till,

under the towering structure of her machinery, you perceive the insignificant, tiny speck of her hull.

The tall masts are the pillars supporting the balanced planes that, motionless and silent, catch from the air the

ship's motivepower, as it were a gift from Heaven vouchsafed to the audacity of man; and it is the ship's tall

spars, stripped and shorn of their white glory, that incline themselves before the anger of the clouded heaven.

When they yield to a squall in a gaunt and naked submission, their tallness is brought best home even to the

mind of a seaman. The man who has looked upon his ship going over too far is made aware of the

preposterous tallness of a ship's spars. It seems impossible but that those gilt trucks which one had to tilt one's

head back to see, now falling into the lower plane of vision, must perforce hit the very edge of the horizon.

Such an experience gives you a better impression of the loftiness of your spars than any amount of running

aloft could do. And yet in my time the royal yards of an average profitable ship were a good way up above

No doubt a fair amount of climbing up iron ladders can be achieved by an active man in a ship's

engineroom, but I remember moments when even to my supple limbs and pride of nimbleness the sailing

For machinery it is, doing its work in perfect silence and with a motionless grace, that seems to hide a

capricious and not always governable power, taking nothing away from the material stores of the earth. Not

for it the unerring precision of steel moved by white steam and living by red fire and fed with black coal. The

other seems to draw its strength from the very soul of the world, its formidable ally, held to obedience by the

frailest bonds, like a fierce ghost captured in a snare of something even finer than spun silk. For what is the

array of the strongest ropes, the tallest spars and the stoutest canvas against the mighty breath of the infinite,

Indeed, it is less than nothing, and I have seen, when the great soul of the world turned over with a heavy

sigh, a perfectly new, extrastout foresail vanish like a bit of some airy stuff much lighter than gossamer.

Then was the time for the tall spars to stand fast in the great uproar. The machinery must do its work even if

The modern steamship advances upon a still and overshadowed sea with a pulsating tremor of her frame, an

occasional clang in her depths, as if she had an iron heart in her iron body; with a thudding rhythm in her

progress and the regular beat of her propeller, heard afar in the night with an august and plodding sound as of

the march of an inevitable future. But in a gale, the silent machinery of a sailingship would catch not only

the power, but the wild and exulting voice of the world's soul. Whether she ran with her tall spars swinging,

or breasted it with her tall spars lying over, there was always that wild song, deep like a chant, for a bass to

the shrill pipe of the wind played on the sea tops, with a punctuating crash, now and then, of a breaking

wave. At times the weird effects of that invisible orchestra would get upon a man's nerves till he wished

And this recollection of a personal wish, experienced upon several oceans, where the soul of the world has

plenty of room to turn over with a mighty sigh, brings me to the remark that in order to take a proper care of a

ship's spars it is just as well for a seaman to have nothing the matter with his ears. Such is the intimacy with

which a seaman had to live with his ship of yesterday that his senses were like her senses, that the stress upon

I had been some time at sea before I became aware of the fact that hearing plays a perceptible part in gauging

the force of the wind. It was at night. The ship was one of those iron woolclippers that the Clyde had floated

out in swarms upon the world during the seventh decade of the last century. It was a fine period in ship

building, and also, I might say, a period of overmasting. The spars rigged up on the narrow hulls were

indeed tall then, and the ship of which I think, with her colouredglass skylight ends bearing the motto, "Let

Glasgow Flourish," was certainly one of the most heavilysparred specimens. She was built for hard driving,

and unquestionably she got all the driving she could stand. Our captain was a man famous for the quick

passages he had been used to make in the old Tweed, a ship famous the world over for her speed. The Tweed

had been a wooden vessel, and he brought the tradition of quick passages with him into the iron clipper. I was

the junior in her, a third mate, keeping watch with the chief officer; and it was just during one of the night

watches in a strong, freshening breeze that I overheard two men in a sheltered nook of the main deck

And the other, an older man, uttered grumpily: "No fear! not while the chief mate's on deck. He's that deaf he

And, indeed, poor P, quite young, and a smart seaman, was very hard of hearing. At the same time, he had

the name of being the very devil of a fellow for carrying on sail on a ship. He was wonderfully clever at

concealing his deafness, and, as to carrying on heavily, though he was a fearless man, I don't think that he

ever meant to take undue risks. I can never forget his naive sort of astonishment when remonstrated with for

what appeared a most daredevil performance. The only person, of course, that could remonstrate with telling

effect was our captain, himself a man of daredevil tradition; and really, for me, who knew under whom I

was serving, those were impressive scenes. Captain S had a great name for sailorlike qualities the sort of

name that compelled my youthful admiration. To this day I preserve his memory, for, indeed, it was he in a

sense who completed my training. It was often a stormy process, but let that pass. I am sure he meant well,

and I am certain that never, not even at the time, could I bear him malice for his extraordinary gift of incisive

criticism. And to hear HIM make a fuss about too much sail on the ship seemed one of those incredible

It generally happened in this way: Night, clouds racing overhead, wind howling, royals set, and the ship

rushing on in the dark, an immense white sheet of foam level with the lee rail. Mr. P, in charge of the deck,

hooked on to the windward mizzen rigging in a state of perfect serenity; myself, the third mate, also hooked

on somewhere to windward of the slanting poop, in a state of the utmost preparedness to jump at the very first

hint of some sort of order, but otherwise in a perfectly acquiescent state of mind. Suddenly, out of the

companion would appear a tall, dark figure, bareheaded, with a short white beard of a perpendicular cut, very

visible in the dark Captain S, disturbed in his reading down below by the frightful bounding and lurching

of the ship. Leaning very much against the precipitous incline of the deck, he would take a turn or two,

perfectly silent, hang on by the compass for a while, take another couple of turns, and suddenly burst out:

And Mr. P, who was not good at catching what was shouted in the wind, would say interrogatively:

Then in the increasing gale of the sea there would be a little private ship's storm going on in which you could

detect strong language, pronounced in a tone of passion and exculpatory protestations uttered with every

And so on and so on, the ship meanwhile rushing on her way with a heavier list, a noisier splutter, a more

threatening hiss of the white, almost blinding, sheet of foam to leeward. For the best of it was that Captain S

seemed constitutionally incapable of giving his officers a definite order to shorten sail; and so that

extraordinarily vague row would go on till at last it dawned upon them both, in some particularly alarming

gust, that it was time to do something. There is nothing like the fearful inclination of your tall spars

So sail did get shortened more or less in time even in that ship, and her tall spars never went overboard while

I served in her. However, all the time I was with them, Captain S and Mr. P did not get on very well

together. If P carried on "like the very devil" because he was too deaf to know how much wind there was,

Captain S (who, as I have said, seemed constitutionally incapable of ordering one of his officers to shorten

sail) resented the necessity forced upon him by Mr. P's desperate goings on. It was in Captain S's tradition

rather to reprove his officers for not carrying on quite enough in his phrase "for not taking every ounce of

advantage of a fair wind." But there was also a psychological motive that made him extremely difficult to

deal with on board that iron clipper. He had just come out of the marvellous Tweed, a ship, I have heard,

heavy to look at but of phenomenal speed. In the middle sixties she had beaten by a day and a half the steam

mailboat from Hong Kong to Singapore. There was something peculiarly lucky, perhaps, in the placing of

her masts who knows? Officers of menofwar used to come on board to take the exact dimensions of her

sailplan. Perhaps there had been a touch of genius or the finger of good fortune in the fashioning of her lines

at bow and stern. It is impossible to say. She was built in the East Indies somewhere, of teakwood

throughout, except the deck. She had a great sheer, high bows, and a clumsy stern. The men who had seen her

described her to me as "nothing much to look at." But in the great Indian famine of the seventies that ship,

already old then, made some wonderful dashes across the Gulf of Bengal with cargoes of rice from Rangoon

She took the secret of her speed with her, and, unsightly as she was, her image surely has its glorious place in

The point, however, is that Captain S, who used to say frequently, "She never made a decent passage after I

left her," seemed to think that the secret of her speed lay in her famous commander. No doubt the secret of

many a ship's excellence does lie with the man on board, but it was hopeless for Captain S to try to make his

new iron clipper equal the feats which made the old Tweed a name of praise upon the lips of

Englishspeaking seamen. There was something pathetic in it, as in the endeavour of an artist in his old age

to equal the masterpieces of his youth for the Tweed's famous passages were Captain S's masterpieces. It

was pathetic, and perhaps just the least bit dangerous. At any rate, I am glad that, what between Captain S's

yearning for old triumphs and Mr. P's deafness, I have seen some memorable carrying on to make a passage.

And I have carried on myself upon the tall spars of that Clyde shipbuilder's masterpiece as I have never

The second mate falling ill during the passage, I was promoted to officer of the watch, alone in charge of the

deck. Thus the immense leverage of the ship's tall masts became a matter very near my own heart. I suppose

it was something of a compliment for a young fellow to be trusted, apparently without any supervision, by

such a commander as Captain S; though, as far as I can remember, neither the tone, nor the manner, nor yet

the drift of Captain S's remarks addressed to myself did ever, by the most strained interpretation, imply a

favourable opinion of my abilities. And he was, I must say, a most uncomfortable commander to get your

orders from at night. If I had the watch from eight till midnight, he would leave the deck about nine with the

words, "Don't take any sail off her." Then, on the point of disappearing down the companionway, he would

add curtly: "Don't carry anything away." I am glad to say that I never did; one night, however, I was caught,

There was, of course, a good deal of noise running about, the, shouts of the sailors, the thrashing of the sails

enough, in fact, to wake the dead. But S never came on deck. When I was relieved by the chief mate an

hour afterwards, he sent for me. I went into his stateroom; he was lying on his couch wrapped up in a rug,

"Why didn't you have your courses hauled up at once, then?" he asked in a tone that ought to have made my

"Well, sir," I said in an apologetic tone, "she was going eleven knots very nicely, and I thought she would do

He gazed at me darkly out of his head, lying very still on the white pillow, for a time.

And that was all I got in the way of a wigging. I waited a little while and then went out, shutting carefully the

Well, I have loved, lived with, and left the sea without ever seeing a ship's tall fabric of sticks, cobwebs and

gossamer go by the board. Sheer good luck, no doubt. But as to poor P, I am sure that he would not have got

off scotfree like this but for the god of gales, who called him away early from this earth, which is three parts

ocean, and therefore a fit abode for sailors. A few years afterwards I met in an Indian port a man who had

served in the ships of the same company. Names came up in our talk, names of our colleagues in the same

employ, and, naturally enough, I asked after P. Had he got a command yet? And the other man answered

"No; but he's provided for, anyhow. A heavy sea took him off the poop in the run between New Zealand and

Thus P passed away from amongst the tall spars of ships that he had tried to their utmost in many a spell of

boisterous weather. He had shown me what carrying on meant, but he was not a man to learn discretion from.

He could not help his deafness. One can only remember his cheery temper, his admiration for the jokes in

PUNCH, his little oddities like his strange passion for borrowing lookingglasses, for instance. Each of our

cabins had its own lookingglass screwed to the bulkhead, and what he wanted with more of them we never

could fathom. He asked for the loan in confidential tones. Why? Mystery. We made various surmises. No one

will ever know now. At any rate, it was a harmless eccentricity, and may the god of gales, who took him

away so abruptly between New Zealand and the Horn, let his soul rest in some Paradise of true seamen,

There has been a time when a ship's chief mate, pocketbook in hand and pencil behind his ear, kept one eye

aloft upon his riggers and the other down the hatchway on the stevedores, and watched the disposition of his

ship's cargo, knowing that even before she started he was already doing his best to secure for her an easy and

The hurry of the times, the loading and discharging organization of the docks, the use of hoisting machinery

which works quickly and will not wait, the cry for prompt despatch, the very size of his ship, stand nowadays

There are profitable ships and unprofitable ships. The profitable ship will carry a large load through all the

hazards of the weather, and, when at rest, will stand up in dock and shift from berth to berth without ballast.

There is a point of perfection in a ship as a worker when she is spoken of as being able to SAIL without

ballast. I have never met that sort of paragon myself, but I have seen these paragons advertised amongst ships

for sale. Such excess of virtue and goodnature on the part of a ship always provoked my mistrust. It is open

to any man to say that his ship will sail without ballast; and he will say it, too, with every mark of profound

conviction, especially if he is not going to sail in her himself. The risk of advertising her as able to sail

without ballast is not great, since the statement does not imply a warranty of her arriving anywhere.

Moreover, it is strictly true that most ships will sail without ballast for some little time before they turn turtle

A shipowner loves a profitable ship; the seaman is proud of her; a doubt of her good looks seldom exists in

his mind; but if he can boast of her more useful qualities it is an added satisfaction for his selflove.

The loading of ships was once a matter of skill, judgment, and knowledge. Thick books have been written

about it. "Stevens on Stowage" is a portly volume with the renown and weight (in its own world) of Coke on

Littleton. Stevens is an agreeable writer, and, as is the case with men of talent, his gifts adorn his sterling

soundness. He gives you the official teaching on the whole subject, is precise as to rules, mentions illustrative

events, quotes law cases where verdicts turned upon a point of stowage. He is never pedantic, and, for all his

close adherence to broad principles, he is ready to admit that no two ships can be treated exactly alike.

Stevedoring, which had been a skilled labour, is fast becoming a labour without the skill. The modern

steamship with her many holds is not loaded within the sailorlike meaning of the word. She is filled up. Her

cargo is not stowed in any sense; it is simply dumped into her through six hatchways, more or less, by twelve

winches or so, with clatter and hurry and racket and heat, in a cloud of steam and a mess of coaldust. As

long as you keep her propeller under water and take care, say, not to fling down barrels of oil on top of bales

of silk, or deposit an iron bridgegirder of five ton or so upon a bed of coffeebags, you have done about all

The sailingship, when I knew her in her days of perfection, was a sensible creature. When I say her days of

perfection, I mean perfection of build, gear, seaworthy qualities and case of handling, not the perfection of

speed. That quality has departed with the change of building material. No iron ship of yesterday ever attained

the marvels of speed which the seamanship of men famous in their time had obtained from their wooden,

coppersheeted predecessors. Everything had been done to make the iron ship perfect, but no wit of man had

managed to devise an efficient coating composition to keep her bottom clean with the smooth cleanness of

yellow metal sheeting. After a spell of a few weeks at sea, an iron ship begins to lag as if she had grown tired

too soon. It is only her bottom that is getting foul. A very little affects the speed of an iron ship which is not

driven on by a merciless propeller. Often it is impossible to tell what inconsiderate trifle puts her off her

stride. A certain mysteriousness hangs around the quality of speed as it was displayed by the old

sailingships commanded by a competent seaman. In those days the speed depended upon the seaman;

therefore, apart from the laws, rules, and regulations for the good preservation of his cargo, he was careful of

his loading, or what is technically called the trim of his ship. Some ships sailed fast on an even keel, others

had to be trimmed quite one foot by the stern, and I have heard of a ship that gave her best speed on a wind

I call to mind a winter landscape in Amsterdam a flat foreground of waste land, with here and there stacks

of timber, like the huts of a camp of some very miserable tribe; the long stretch of the Handelskade; cold,

stonefaced quays, with the snowsprinkled ground and the hard, frozen water of the canal, in which were

set ships one behind another with their frosty mooringropes hanging slack and their decks idle and deserted,

because, as the master stevedore (a gentle, pale person, with a few golden hairs on his chin and a reddened

nose) informed me, their cargoes were frozenin upcountry on barges and schuyts. In the distance, beyond

the waste ground, and running parallel with the line of ships, a line of brown, warmtoned houses seemed

bowed under snowladen roofs. From afar at the end of Tsar Peter Straat, issued in the frosty air the tinkle of

bells of the horse tramcars, appearing and disappearing in the opening between the buildings, like little toy

carriages harnessed with toy horses and played with by people that appeared no bigger than children.

I was, as the French say, biting my fists with impatience for that cargo frozen upcountry; with rage at that

canal set fast, at the wintry and deserted aspect of all those ships that seemed to decay in grim depression for

want of the open water. I was chief mate, and very much alone. Directly I had joined I received from my

owners instructions to send all the ship's apprentices away on leave together, because in such weather there

was nothing for anybody to do, unless to keep up a fire in the cabin stove. That was attended to by a snuffy

and mopheaded, inconceivably dirty, and weirdly toothless Dutch shipkeeper, who could hardly speak

three words of English, but who must have had some considerable knowledge of the language, since he

managed invariably to interpret in the contrary sense everything that was said to him.

Notwithstanding the little iron stove, the ink froze on the swing table in the cabin, and I found it more

convenient to go ashore stumbling over the arctic wasteland and shivering in glazed tramcars in order to

write my evening letter to my owners in a gorgeous cafe in the centre of the town. It was an immense place,

lofty and gilt, upholstered in red plush, full of electric lights and so thoroughly warmed that even the marble

tables felt tepid to the touch. The waiter who brought me my cup of coffee bore, by comparison with my utter

isolation, the dear aspect of an intimate friend. There, alone in a noisy crowd, I would write slowly a letter

addressed to Glasgow, of which the gist would be: There is no cargo, and no prospect of any coming till late

spring apparently. And all the time I sat there the necessity of getting back to the ship bore heavily on my

already halfcongealed spirits the shivering in glazed tramcars, the stumbling over the snow sprinkled

waste ground, the vision of ships frozen in a row, appearing vaguely like corpses of black vessels in a white

With precaution I would go up the side of my own particular corpse, and would feel her as cold as ice itself

and as slippery under my feet. My cold berth would swallow up like a chilly burial niche my bodily shivers

and my mental excitement. It was a cruel winter. The very air seemed as hard and trenchant as steel; but it

would have taken much more than this to extinguish my sacred fire for the exercise of my craft. No young

man of twentyfour appointed chief mate for the first time in his life would have let that Dutch tenacious

winter penetrate into his heart. I think that in those days I never forgot the fact of my elevation for five

consecutive minutes. I fancy it kept me warm, even in my slumbers, better than the high pile of blankets,

which positively crackled with frost as I threw them off in the morning. And I would get up early for no

reason whatever except that I was in sole charge. The new captain had not been appointed yet.

Almost each morning a letter from my owners would arrive, directing me to go to the charterers and clamour

for the ship's cargo; to threaten them with the heaviest penalties of demurrage; to demand that this assortment

of varied merchandise, set fast in a landscape of ice and windmills somewhere upcountry, should be put on

rail instantly, and fed up to the ship in regular quantities every day. After drinking some hot coffee, like an

Arctic explorer setting off on a sledge journey towards the North Pole, I would go ashore and roll shivering in

a tramcar into the very heart of the town, past cleanfaced houses, past thousands of brass knockers upon a

thousand painted doors glimmering behind rows of trees of the pavement species, leafless, gaunt, seemingly

That part of the expedition was easy enough, though the horses were painfully glistening with icicles, and the

aspect of the tram conductors' faces presented a repulsive blending of crimson and purple. But as to

frightening or bullying, or even wheedling some sort of answer out of Mr. Hudig, that was another matter

altogether. He was a big, swarthy Netherlander, with black moustaches and a bold glance. He always began

by shoving me into a chair before I had time to open my mouth, gave me cordially a large cigar, and in

excellent English would start to talk everlastingly about the phenomenal severity of the weather. It was

impossible to threaten a man who, though he possessed the language perfectly, seemed incapable of

understanding any phrase pronounced in a tone of remonstrance or discontent. As to quarrelling with him, it

would have been stupid. The weather was too bitter for that. His office was so warm, his fire so bright, his

sides shook so heartily with laughter, that I experienced always a great difficulty in making up my mind to

At last the cargo did come. At first it came dribbling in by rail in trucks, till the thaw set in; and then fast, in a

multitude of barges, with a great rush of unbound waters. The gentle master stevedore had his hands very full

at last; and the chief mate became worried in his mind as to the proper distribution of the weight of his first

Ships do want humouring. They want humouring in handling; and if you mean to handle them well, they

must have been humoured in the distribution of the weight which you ask them to carry through the good and

evil fortune of a passage. Your ship is a tender creature, whose idiosyncrasies must be attended to if you

mean her to come with credit to herself and you through the roughandtumble of her life.

So seemed to think the new captain, who arrived the day after we had finished loading, on the very eve of the

day of sailing. I first beheld him on the quay, a complete stranger to me, obviously not a Hollander, in a black

bowler and a short drab overcoat, ridiculously out of tone with the winter aspect of the wastelands, bordered

This stranger was walking up and down absorbed in the marked contemplation of the ship's fore and aft trim;

but when I saw him squat on his heels in the slush at the very edge of the quay to peer at the draught of water

under her counter, I said to myself, "This is the captain." And presently I descried his luggage coming along

a real sailor's chest, carried by means of ropebeckets between two men, with a couple of leather

portmanteaus and a roll of charts sheeted in canvas piled upon the lid. The sudden, spontaneous agility with

which he bounded aboard right off the rail afforded me the first glimpse of his real character. Without further

preliminaries than a friendly nod, he addressed me: "You have got her pretty well in her fore and aft trim.

I told him I had managed to keep the weight sufficiently well up, as I thought, onethird of the whole being

in the upper part "above the beams," as the technical expression has it. He whistled "Phew!" scrutinizing me

He knew. It turned out he had been chief mate of her for the two preceding voyages; and I was already

familiar with his handwriting in the old logbooks I had been perusing in my cabin with a natural curiosity,

looking up the records of my new ship's luck, of her behaviour, of the good times she had had, and of the

He was right in his prophecy. On our passage from Amsterdam to Samarang with a general cargo, of which,

alas! only onethird in weight was stowed "above the beams," we had a lively time of it. It was lively, but not

joyful. There was not even a single moment of comfort in it, because no seaman can feel comfortable in body

To travel along with a cranky ship for ninety days or so is no doubt a nervetrying experience; but in this

case what was wrong with our craft was this: that by my system of loading she had been made much too

Neither before nor since have I felt a ship roll so abruptly, so violently, so heavily. Once she began, you felt

that she would never stop, and this hopeless sensation, characterizing the motion of ships whose centre of

gravity is brought down too low in loading, made everyone on board weary of keeping on his feet. I

remember once overhearing one of the hands say: "By Heavens, Jack! I feel as if I didn't mind how soon I

let myself go, and let the blamed hooker knock my brains out if she likes." The captain used to remark

frequently: "Ah, yes; I dare say onethird weight above beams would have been quite enough for most ships.

But then, you see, there's no two of them alike on the seas, and she's an uncommonly ticklish jade to load."

Down south, running before the gales of high latitudes, she made our life a burden to us. There were days

when nothing would keep even on the swingtables, when there was no position where you could fix yourself

so as not to feel a constant strain upon all the muscles of your body. She rolled and rolled with an awful

dislodging jerk and that dizzily fast sweep of her masts on every swing. It was a wonder that the men sent

aloft were not flung off the yards, the yards not flung off the masts, the masts not flung overboard. The

captain in his armchair, holding on grimly at the head of the table, with the souptureen rolling on one side of

the cabin and the steward sprawling on the other, would observe, looking at me: "That's your onethird above

the beams. The only thing that surprises me is that the sticks have stuck to her all this time."

Ultimately some of the minor spars did go nothing important: spankerbooms and suchlike because at

times the frightful impetus of her rolling would part a fourfold tackle of new three inch Manilla line as if it

It was only poetic justice that the chief mate who had made a mistake perhaps a halfexcusable one about

the distribution of his ship's cargo should pay the penalty. A piece of one of the minor spars that did carry

away flew against the chief mate's back, and sent him sliding on his face for quite a considerable distance

along the main deck. Thereupon followed various and unpleasant consequences of a physical order "queer

symptoms," as the captain, who treated them, used to say; inexplicable periods of powerlessness, sudden

accesses of mysterious pain; and the patient agreed fully with the regretful mutters of his very attentive

captain wishing that it had been a straightforward broken leg. Even the Dutch doctor who took the case up in

Samarang offered no scientific explanation. All he said was: "Ah, friend, you are young yet; it may be very

serious for your whole life. You must leave your ship; you must quite silent be for three months quite

Of course, he meant the chief mate to keep quiet to lay up, as a matter of fact. His manner was impressive

enough, if his English was childishly imperfect when compared with the fluency of Mr. Hudig, the figure at

the other end of that passage, and memorable enough in its way. In a great airy ward of a Far Eastern

hospital, lying on my back, I had plenty of leisure to remember the dreadful cold and snow of Amsterdam,

while looking at the fronds of the palmtrees tossing and rustling at the height of the window. I could

remember the elated feeling and the soulgripping cold of those tramway journeys taken into town to put

what in diplomatic language is called pressure upon the good Hudig, with his warm fire, his armchair, his big

cigar, and the neverfailing suggestion in his goodnatured voice: "I suppose in the end it is you they will

appoint captain before the ship sails?" It may have been his extreme goodnature, the serious, unsmiling

goodnature of a fat, swarthy man with coalblack moustache and steady eyes; but he might have been a bit

of a diplomatist, too. His enticing suggestions I used to repel modestly by the assurance that it was extremely

unlikely, as I had not enough experience. "You know very well how to go about business matters," he used to

say, with a sort of affected moodiness clouding his serene round face. I wonder whether he ever laughed to

himself after I had left the office. I dare say he never did, because I understand that diplomatists, in and out of

But he had nearly persuaded me that I was fit in every way to be trusted with a command. There came three

months of mental worry, hard rolling, remorse, and physical pain to drive home the lesson of insufficient

Yes, your ship wants to be humoured with knowledge. You must treat with an understanding consideration

the mysteries of her feminine nature, and then she will stand by you faithfully in the unceasing struggle with

forces wherein defeat is no shame. It is a serious relation, that in which a man stands to his ship. She has her

rights as though she could breathe and speak; and, indeed, there are ships that, for the right man, will do

A ship is not a slave. You must make her easy in a seaway, you must never forget that you owe her the fullest

share of your thought, of your skill, of your selflove. If you remember that obligation, naturally and without

effort, as if it were an instinctive feeling of your inner life, she will sail, stay, run for you as long as she is

able, or, like a seabird going to rest upon the angry waves, she will lay out the heaviest gale that ever made

Often I turn with melancholy eagerness to the space reserved in the newspapers under the general heading of

"Shipping Intelligence." I meet there the names of ships I have known. Every year some of these names

The different divisions of that kind of news are set down in their order, which varies but slightly in its

arrangement of concise headlines. And first comes "Speakings" reports of ships met and signalled at sea,

name, port, where from, where bound for, so many days out, ending frequently with the words "All well."

Then come "Wrecks and Casualties" a longish array of paragraphs, unless the weather has been fair and

On some days there appears the heading "Overdue" an ominous threat of loss and sorrow trembling yet in

the balance of fate. There is something sinister to a seaman in the very grouping of the letters which form this

Only a very few days more appallingly few to the hearts which had set themselves bravely to hope against

hope three weeks, a month later, perhaps, the name of ships under the blight of the "Overdue" heading shall

appear again in the column of "Shipping Intelligence," but under the final declaration of "Missing."

"The ship, or barque, or brig Soandso, bound from such a port, with such and such cargo, for such another

port, having left at such and such a date, last spoken at sea on such a day, and never having been heard of

since, was posted today as missing." Such in its strictly official eloquence is the form of funeral orations on

ships that, perhaps wearied with a long struggle, or in some unguarded moment that may come to the readiest

Who can say? Perhaps the men she carried had asked her to do too much, had stretched beyond

breakingpoint the enduring faithfulness which seems wrought and hammered into that assemblage of iron

ribs and plating, of wood and steel and canvas and wire, which goes to the making of a ship a complete

creation endowed with character, individuality, qualities and defects, by men whose hands launch her upon

the water, and that other men shall learn to know with an intimacy surpassing the intimacy of man with man,

to love with a love nearly as great as that of man for woman, and often as blind in its infatuated disregard of

There are ships which bear a bad name, but I have yet to meet one whose crew for the time being failed to

stand up angrily for her against every criticism. One ship which I call to mind now had the reputation of

killing somebody every voyage she made. This was no calumny, and yet I remember well, somewhere far

back in the late seventies, that the crew of that ship were, if anything, rather proud of her evil fame, as if they

had been an utterly corrupt lot of desperadoes glorying in their association with an atrocious creature. We,

belonging to other vessels moored all about the Circular Quay in Sydney, used to shake our heads at her with

I shall not pronounce her name. She is "missing" now, after a sinister but, from the point of view of her

owners, a useful career extending over many years, and, I should say, across every ocean of our globe.

Having killed a man for every voyage, and perhaps rendered more misanthropic by the infirmities that come

with years upon a ship, she had made up her mind to kill all hands at once before leaving the scene of her

exploits. A fitting end, this, to a life of usefulness and crime in a last outburst of an evil passion supremely

satisfied on some wild night, perhaps, to the applauding clamour of wind and wave.

How did she do it? In the word "missing" there is a horrible depth of doubt and speculation. Did she go

quickly from under the men's feet, or did she resist to the end, letting the sea batter her to pieces, start her

butts, wrench her frame, load her with an increasing weight of salt water, and, dismasted, unmanageable,

rolling heavily, her boats gone, her decks swept, had she wearied her men half to death with the unceasing

However, such a case must be rare. I imagine a raft of some sort could always be contrived; and, even if it

saved no one, it would float on and be picked up, perhaps conveying some hint of the vanished name. Then

that ship would not be, properly speaking, missing. She would be "lost with all hands," and in that distinction

The unholy fascination of dread dwells in the thought of the last moments of a ship reported as "missing" in

the columns of the SHIPPING GAZETTE. Nothing of her ever comes to light no grating, no lifebuoy, no

piece of boat or branded oar to give a hint of the place and date of her sudden end. The SHIPPING

GAZETTE does not even call her "lost with all hands." She remains simply "missing"; she has disappeared

enigmatically into a mystery of fate as big as the world, where your imagination of a brothersailor, of a

And yet sometimes one gets a hint of what the last scene may be like in the life of a ship and her crew, which

resembles a drama in its struggle against a great force bearing it up, formless, ungraspable, chaotic and

It was on a gray afternoon in the lull of a three days' gale that had left the Southern Ocean tumbling heavily

upon our ship, under a sky hung with rags of clouds that seemed to have been cut and hacked by the keen

Our craft, a Clydebuilt barque of 1,000 tons, rolled so heavily that something aloft had carried away. No

matter what the damage was, but it was serious enough to induce me to go aloft myself with a couple of

Sometimes we had to drop everything and cling with both hands to the swaying spars, holding our breath in

fear of a terribly heavy roll. And, wallowing as if she meant to turn over with us, the barque, her decks full of

water, her gear flying in bights, ran at some ten knots an hour. We had been driven far south much farther

that way than we had meant to go; and suddenly, up there in the slings of the foreyard, in the midst of our

work, I felt my shoulder gripped with such force in the carpenter's powerful paw that I positively yelled with

unexpected pain. The man's eyes stared close in my face, and he shouted, "Look, sir! look! What's this?"

At first I saw nothing. The sea was one empty wilderness of black and white hills. Suddenly, halfconcealed

in the tumult of the foaming rollers I made out awash, something enormous, rising and falling something

It was a piece of an icefloe melted down to a fragment, but still big enough to sink a ship, and floating lower

than any raft, right in our way, as if ambushed among the waves with murderous intent. There was no time to

get down on deck. I shouted from aloft till my head was ready to split. I was heard aft, and we managed to

clear the sunken floe which had come all the way from the Southern icecap to have a try at our unsuspecting

lives. Had it been an hour later, nothing could have saved the ship, for no eye could have made out in the

And as we stood near the taffrail side by side, my captain and I, looking at it, hardly discernible already, but

"But for the turn of that wheel just in time, there would have been another case of a 'missing' ship."

Nobody ever comes back from a "missing" ship to tell how hard was the death of the craft, and how sudden

and overwhelming the last anguish of her men. Nobody can say with what thoughts, with what regrets, with

what words on their lips they died. But there is something fine in the sudden passing away of these hearts

from the extremity of struggle and stress and tremendous uproar from the vast, unrestful rage of the surface

to the profound peace of the depths, sleeping untroubled since the beginning of ages.

But if the word "missing" brings all hope to an end and settles the loss of the underwriters, the word

"overdue" confirms the fears already born in many homes ashore, and opens the door of speculation in the

Maritime risks, be it understood. There is a class of optimists ready to reinsure an "overdue" ship at a heavy

premium. But nothing can insure the hearts on shore against the bitterness of waiting for the worst.

For if a "missing" ship has never turned up within the memory of seamen of my generation, the name of an

"overdue" ship, trembling as it were on the edge of the fatal heading, has been known to appear as "arrived."

It must blaze up, indeed, with a great brilliance the dull printer's ink expended on the assemblage of the few

letters that form the ship's name to the anxious eyes scanning the page in fear and trembling. It is like the

message of reprieve from the sentence of sorrow suspended over many a home, even if some of the men in

her have been the most homeless mortals that you may find among the wanderers of the sea.

The reinsurer, the optimist of illluck and disaster, slaps his pocket with satisfaction. The underwriter, who

had been trying to minimize the amount of impending loss, regrets his premature pessimism. The ship has

been stauncher, the skies more merciful, the seas less angry, or perhaps the men on board of a finer temper

"The ship Soandso, bound to such a port, and posted as 'overdue,' has been reported yesterday as having

Thus run the official words of the reprieve addressed to the hearts ashore lying under a heavy sentence. And

they come swiftly from the other side of the earth, over wires and cables, for your electric telegraph is a great

alleviator of anxiety. Details, of course, shall follow. And they may unfold a tale of narrow escape, of steady

illluck, of high winds and heavy weather, of ice, of interminable calms or endless headgales; a tale of

difficulties overcome, of adversity defied by a small knot of men upon the great loneliness of the sea; a tale of

Of all ships disabled at sea, a steamer who has lost her propeller is the most helpless. And if she drifts into an

unpopulated part of the ocean she may soon become overdue. The menace of the "overdue" and the finality of

"missing" come very quickly to steamers whose life, fed on coals and breathing the black breath of smoke

into the air, goes on in disregard of wind and wave. Such a one, a big steamship, too, whose working life had

been a record of faithful keeping time from land to land, in disregard of wind and sea, once lost her propeller

It was the wintry, murky time of cold gales and heavy seas. With the snapping of her tailshaft her life

seemed suddenly to depart from her big body, and from a stubborn, arrogant existence she passed all at once

into the passive state of a drifting log. A ship sick with her own weakness has not the pathos of a ship

vanquished in a battle with the elements, wherein consists the inner drama of her life. No seaman can look

without compassion upon a disabled ship, but to look at a sailingvessel with her lofty spars gone is to look

upon a defeated but indomitable warrior. There is defiance in the remaining stumps of her masts, raised up

like maimed limbs against the menacing scowl of a stormy sky; there is high courage in the upward sweep of

her lines towards the bow; and as soon as, on a hastilyrigged spar, a strip of canvas is shown to the wind to

The efficiency of a steamship consists not so much in her courage as in the power she carries within herself.

It beats and throbs like a pulsating heart within her iron ribs, and when it stops, the steamer, whose life is not

so much a contest as the disdainful ignoring of the sea, sickens and dies upon the waves. The sailing ship,

with her unthrobbing body, seemed to lead mysteriously a sort of unearthly existence, bordering upon the

magic of the invisible forces, sustained by the inspiration of lifegiving and death dealing winds.

So that big steamer, dying by a sudden stroke, drifted, an unwieldy corpse, away from the track of other

ships. And she would have been posted really as "overdue," or maybe as "missing," had she not been sighted

in a snowstorm, vaguely, like a strange rolling island, by a whaler going north from her Polar cruising

ground. There was plenty of food on board, and I don't know whether the nerves of her passengers were at all

affected by anything else than the sense of interminable boredom or the vague fear of that unusual situation.

Does a passenger ever feel the life of the ship in which he is being carried like a sort of honoured bale of

highly sensitive goods? For a man who has never been a passenger it is impossible to say. But I know that

There is no mistaking that sensation, so dismal, so tormenting and so subtle, so full of unhappiness and

unrest. I could imagine no worse eternal punishment for evil seamen who die unrepentant upon the earthly

sea than that their souls should be condemned to man the ghosts of disabled ships, drifting for ever across a

She must have looked ghostly enough, that brokendown steamer, rolling in that snowstorm a dark

apparition in a world of white snowflakes to the staring eyes of that whaler's crew. Evidently they didn't

believe in ghosts, for on arrival into port her captain unromantically reported having sighted a disabled

steamer in latitude somewhere about 50 degrees S. and a longitude still more uncertain. Other steamers came

out to look for her, and ultimately towed her away from the cold edge of the world into a harbour with docks

and workshops, where, with many blows of hammers, her pulsating heart of steel was set going again to go

forth presently in the renewed pride of its strength, fed on fire and water, breathing black smoke into the air,

pulsating, throbbing, shouldering its arrogant way against the great rollers in blind disdain of winds and sea.

The track she had made when drifting while her heart stood still within her iron ribs looked like a tangled

thread on the white paper of the chart. It was shown to me by a friend, her second officer. In that surprising

tangle there were words in minute letters "gales," "thick fog," "ice" written by him here and there as

memoranda of the weather. She had interminably turned upon her tracks, she had crossed and recrossed her

haphazard path till it resembled nothing so much as a puzzling maze of pencilled lines without a meaning.

But in that maze there lurked all the romance of the "overdue" and a menacing hint of "missing."

He waved his hand as much as to say: It's all in the day's work. But then, abruptly, as if making up his mind:

I can answer for it, he was a good man as good as ever stepped upon a ship's deck but he could not bear

the feeling of a dead ship under his feet: the sickly, disheartening feeling which the men of some "overdue"

ships that come into harbour at last under a juryrig must have felt, combated, and overcome in the faithful

It is difficult for a seaman to believe that his stranded ship does not feel as unhappy at the unnatural

predicament of having no water under her keel as he is himself at feeling her stranded.

Stranding is, indeed, the reverse of sinking. The sea does not close upon the waterlogged hull with a sunny

ripple, or maybe with the angry rush of a curling wave, erasing her name from the roll of living ships. No. It

is as if an invisible hand had been stealthily uplifted from the bottom to catch hold of her keel as it glides

More than any other event does stranding bring to the sailor a sense of utter and dismal failure. There are

strandings and strandings, but I am safe to say that 90 per cent. of them are occasions in which a sailor,

without dishonour, may well wish himself dead; and I have no doubt that of those who had the experience of

their ship taking the ground, 90 per cent. did actually for five seconds or so wish themselves dead.

"Taking the ground" is the professional expression for a ship that is stranded in gentle circumstances. But the

feeling is more as if the ground had taken hold of her. It is for those on her deck a surprising sensation. It is as

if your feet had been caught in an imponderable snare; you feel the balance of your body threatened, and the

steady poise of your mind is destroyed at once. This sensation lasts only a second, for even while you stagger

something seems to turn over in your head, bringing uppermost the mental exclamation, full of astonishment

And that is very terrible. After all, the only mission of a seaman's calling is to keep ships' keels off the

ground. Thus the moment of her stranding takes away from him every excuse for his continued existence. To

keep ships afloat is his business; it is his trust; it is the effective formula of the bottom of all these vague

impulses, dreams, and illusions that go to the making up of a boy's vocation. The grip of the land upon the

keel of your ship, even if nothing worse comes of it than the wear and tear of tackle and the loss of time,

"Stranded" within the meaning of this paper stands for a more or less excusable mistake. A ship may be

"driven ashore" by stress of weather. It is a catastrophe, a defeat. To be "run ashore" has the littleness,

That is why your "strandings" are for the most part so unexpected. In fact, they are all unexpected, except

those heralded by some short glimpse of the danger, full of agitation and excitement, like an awakening from

The land suddenly at night looms up right over your bows, or perhaps the cry of "Broken water ahead!" is

raised, and some long mistake, some complicated edifice of selfdelusion, over confidence, and wrong

reasoning is brought down in a fatal shock, and the heartsearing experience of your ship's keel scraping and

scrunching over, say, a coral reef. It is a sound, for its size, far more terrific to your soul than that of a world

coming violently to an end. But out of that chaos your belief in your own prudence and sagacity reasserts

itself. You ask yourself, Where on earth did I get to? How on earth did I get there? with a conviction that it

could not be your own act, that there has been at work some mysterious conspiracy of accident; that the

charts are all wrong, and if the charts are not wrong, that land and sea have changed their places; that your

misfortune shall for ever remain inexplicable, since you have lived always with the sense of your trust, the

last thing on closing your eyes, the first on opening them, as if your mind had kept firm hold of your

You contemplate mentally your mischance, till little by little your mood changes, cold doubt steals into the

very marrow of your bones, you see the inexplicable fact in another light. That is the time when you ask

yourself, How on earth could I have been fool enough to get there? And you are ready to renounce all belief

in your good sense, in your knowledge, in your fidelity, in what you thought till then was the best in you,

giving you the daily bread of life and the moral support of other men's confidence.

The ship is lost or not lost. Once stranded, you have to do your best by her. She may be saved by your efforts,

by your resource and fortitude bearing up against the heavy weight of guilt and failure. And there are

justifiable strandings in fogs, on uncharted seas, on dangerous shores, through treacherous tides. But, saved

or not saved, there remains with her commander a distinct sense of loss, a flavour in the mouth of the real,

abiding danger that lurks in all the forms of human existence. It is an acquisition, too, that feeling. A man

may be the better for it, but he will not be the same. Damocles has seen the sword suspended by a hair over

his head, and though a good man need not be made less valuable by such a knowledge, the feast shall not

Years ago I was concerned as chief mate in a case of stranding which was not fatal to the ship. We went to

work for ten hours on end, laying out anchors in readiness to heave off at high water. While I was still busy

about the decks forward I heard the steward at my elbow saying: "The captain asks whether you mean to

I went into the cuddy. My captain sat at the head of the table like a statue. There was a strange motionlessness

of everything in that pretty little cabin. The swingtable which for seventy odd days had been always on the

move, if ever so little, hung quite still above the souptureen. Nothing could have altered the rich colour of

my commander's complexion, laid on generously by wind and sea; but between the two tufts of fair hair

above his ears, his skull, generally suffused with the hue of blood, shone dead white, like a dome of ivory.

And he looked strangely untidy. I perceived he had not shaved himself that day; and yet the wildest motion of

the ship in the most stormy latitudes we had passed through, never made him miss one single morning ever

since we left the Channel. The fact must be that a commander cannot possibly shave himself when his ship is

aground. I have commanded ships myself, but I don't know; I have never tried to shave in my life.

He did not offer to help me or himself till I had coughed markedly several times. I talked to him

Then, raising his head, he attacked grumpily the steward, a lanky, anxious youth with a long, pale face and

"What makes this soup so bitter? I am surprised the mate can swallow the beastly stuff. I'm sure the cook's

The charge was so outrageous that the steward for all answer only dropped his eyelids bashfully.

There was nothing the matter with the soup. I had a second helping. My heart was warm with hours of hard

work at the head of a willing crew. I was elated with having handled heavy anchors, cables, boats without the

slightest hitch; pleased with having laid out scientifically bower, stream, and kedge exactly where I believed

they would do most good. On that occasion the bitter taste of a stranding was not for my mouth. That

experience came later, and it was only then that I understood the loneliness of the man in charge.

It seems to me that no man born and truthful to himself could declare that he ever saw the sea looking young

as the earth looks young in spring. But some of us, regarding the ocean with understanding and affection,

have seen it looking old, as if the immemorial ages had been stirred up from the undisturbed bottom of ooze.

From a distance of years, looking at the remembered aspects of the storms lived through, it is that impression

which disengages itself clearly from the great body of impressions left by many years of intimate contact.

If you would know the age of the earth, look upon the sea in a storm. The grayness of the whole immense

surface, the wind furrows upon the faces of the waves, the great masses of foam, tossed about and waving,

like matted white locks, give to the sea in a gale an appearance of hoary age, lustreless, dull, without gleams,

Looking back after much love and much trouble, the instinct of primitive man, who seeks to personify the

forces of Nature for his affection and for his fear, is awakened again in the breast of one civilized beyond that

stage even in his infancy. One seems to have known gales as enemies, and even as enemies one embraces

Gales have their personalities, and, after all, perhaps it is not strange; for, when all is said and done, they are

adversaries whose wiles you must defeat, whose violence you must resist, and yet with whom you must live

Here speaks the man of masts and sails, to whom the sea is not a navigable element, but an intimate

companion. The length of passages, the growing sense of solitude, the close dependence upon the very forces

that, friendly today, without changing their nature, by the mere putting forth of their might, become

dangerous tomorrow, make for that sense of fellowship which modern seamen, good men as they are,

cannot hope to know. And, besides, your modern ship which is a steamship makes her passages on other

principles than yielding to the weather and humouring the sea. She receives smashing blows, but she

advances; it is a slogging fight, and not a scientific campaign. The machinery, the steel, the fire, the steam,

have stepped in between the man and the sea. A modern fleet of ships does not so much make use of the sea

as exploit a highway. The modern ship is not the sport of the waves. Let us say that each of her voyages is a

triumphant progress; and yet it is a question whether it is not a more subtle and more human triumph to be the

In his own time a man is always very modern. Whether the seamen of three hundred years hence will have

the faculty of sympathy it is impossible to say. An incorrigible mankind hardens its heart in the progress of its

own perfectability. How will they feel on seeing the illustrations to the sea novels of our day, or of our

yesterday? It is impossible to guess. But the seaman of the last generation, brought into sympathy with the

caravels of ancient time by his sailingship, their lineal descendant, cannot look upon those lumbering forms

navigating the naive seas of ancient woodcuts without a feeling of surprise, of affectionate derision, envy, and

admiration. For those things, whose unmanageableness, even when represented on paper, makes one gasp

with a sort of amused horror, were manned by men who are his direct professional ancestors.

No; the seamen of three hundred years hence will probably be neither touched nor moved to derision,

affection, or admiration. They will glance at the photogravures of our nearly defunct sailingships with a

cold, inquisitive and indifferent eye. Our ships of yesterday will stand to their ships as no lineal ancestors, but

as mere predecessors whose course will have been run and the race extinct. Whatever craft he handles with

skill, the seaman of the future shall be, not our descendant, but only our successor.

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 secondrate dignity. These are the

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 woolclipper nodding

He was a man brought up in big deepwater 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

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

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 jibboom 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

And this is one of those gales whose memory in afteryears 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

wildcats 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

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.

For, after all, a gale of wind, the thing of mighty sound, is inarticulate. It is man who, in a chance phrase,

interprets the elemental passion of his enemy. Thus there is another gale in my memory, a thing of endless,

It was off that other cape which is always deprived of its title as the Cape of Good Hope is robbed of its

name. It was off the Horn. For a true expression of dishevelled wildness there is nothing like a gale in the

The ship, broughtto and bowing to enormous flashing seas, glistened wet from deck to trucks; her one set

sail stood out a coalblack shape upon the gloomy blueness of the air. I was a youngster then, and suffering

from weariness, cold, and imperfect oilskins which let water in at every seam. I craved human

companionship, and, coming off the poop, took my place by the side of the boatswain (a man whom I did not

like) in a comparatively dry spot where at worst we had water only up to our knees. Above our heads the

explosive booming gusts of wind passed continuously, justifying the sailor's saying "It blows great guns."

And just from that need of human companionship, being very close to the man, I said, or rather shouted:

"Ay, and if it blows only a little harder things will begin to go. I don't mind as long as everything holds, but

The note of dread in the shouting voice, the practical truth of these words, heard years ago from a man I did

A look in the eyes of a shipmate, a low murmur in the most sheltered spot where the watch on duty are

huddled together, a meaning moan from one to the other with a glance at the windward sky, a sigh of

weariness, a gesture of disgust passing into the keeping of the great wind, become part and parcel of the gale.

The olive hue of hurricane clouds presents an aspect peculiarly appalling. The inky ragged wrack, flying

before a nor'west wind, makes you dizzy with its headlong speed that depicts the rush of the invisible air. A

hard sou'wester startles you with its close horizon and its low gray sky, as if the world were a dungeon

wherein there is no rest for body or soul. And there are black squalls, white squalls, thunder squalls, and

unexpected gusts that come without a single sign in the sky; and of each kind no one of them resembles

There is infinite variety in the gales of wind at sea, and except for the peculiar, terrible, and mysterious

moaning that may be heard sometimes passing through the roar of a hurricane except for that unforgettable

sound, as if the soul of the universe had been goaded into a mournful groan it is, after all, the human voice

There is no part of the world of coasts, continents, oceans, seas, straits, capes, and islands which is not under

the sway of a reigning wind, the sovereign of its typical weather. The wind rules the aspects of the sky and

the action of the sea. But no wind rules unchallenged his realm of land and water. As with the kingdoms of

the earth, there are regions more turbulent than others. In the middle belt of the earth the Trade Winds reign

supreme, undisputed, like monarchs of longsettled kingdoms, whose traditional power, checking all undue

ambitions, is not so much an exercise of personal might as the working of longestablished institutions. The

intertropical kingdoms of the Trade Winds are favourable to the ordinary life of a merchantman. The

trumpetcall of strife is seldom borne on their wings to the watchful ears of men on the decks of ships. The

regions ruled by the northeast and southeast Trade Winds are serene. In a southerngoing ship, bound out

for a long voyage, the passage through their dominions is characterized by a relaxation of strain and vigilance

on the part of the seamen. Those citizens of the ocean feel sheltered under the aegis of an uncontested law, of

an undisputed dynasty. There, indeed, if anywhere on earth, the weather may be trusted.

Yet not too implicitly. Even in the constitutional realm of Trade Winds, north and south of the equator, ships

are overtaken by strange disturbances. Still, the easterly winds, and, generally speaking, the easterly weather

As a ruler, the East Wind has a remarkable stability; as an invader of the high latitudes lying under the

tumultuous sway of his great brother, the Wind of the West, he is extremely difficult to dislodge, by the

The narrow seas around these isles, where British admirals keep watch and ward upon the marches of the

Atlantic Ocean, are subject to the turbulent sway of the West Wind. Call it northwest or southwest, it is all

one a different phase of the same character, a changed expression on the same face. In the orientation of the

winds that rule the seas, the north and south directions are of no importance. There are no North and South

Winds of any account upon this earth. The North and South Winds are but small princes in the dynasties that

make peace and war upon the sea. They never assert themselves upon a vast stage. They depend upon local

causes the configuration of coasts, the shapes of straits, the accidents of bold promontories round which

they play their little part. In the polity of winds, as amongst the tribes of the earth, the real struggle lies

The West Wind reigns over the seas surrounding the coasts of these kingdoms; and from the gateways of the

channels, from promontories as if from watchtowers, from estuaries of rivers as if from postern gates, from

passageways, inlets, straits, firths, the garrison of the Isle and the crews of the ships going and returning

look to the westward to judge by the varied splendours of his sunset mantle the mood of that arbitrary ruler.

The end of the day is the time to gaze at the kingly face of the Westerly Weather, who is the arbiter of ships'

destinies. Benignant and splendid, or splendid and sinister, the western sky reflects the hidden purposes of the

royal mind. Clothed in a mantle of dazzling gold or draped in rags of black clouds like a beggar, the might of

the Westerly Wind sits enthroned upon the western horizon with the whole North Atlantic as a footstool for

his feet and the first twinkling stars making a diadem for his brow. Then the seamen, attentive courtiers of the

weather, think of regulating the conduct of their ships by the mood of the master. The West Wind is too great

a king to be a dissembler: he is no calculator plotting deep schemes in a sombre heart; he is too strong for

small artifices; there is passion in all his moods, even in the soft mood of his serene days, in the grace of his

blue sky whose immense and unfathomable tenderness reflected in the mirror of the sea embraces, possesses,

lulls to sleep the ships with white sails. He is all things to all oceans; he is like a poet seated upon a throne

magnificent, simple, barbarous, pensive, generous, impulsive, changeable, unfathomable but when you

understand him, always the same. Some of his sunsets are like pageants devised for the delight of the

multitude, when all the gems of the royal treasurehouse are displayed above the sea. Others are like the

opening of his royal confidence, tinged with thoughts of sadness and compassion in a melancholy splendour

meditating upon the shortlived peace of the waters. And I have seen him put the pentup anger of his heart

into the aspect of the inaccessible sun, and cause it to glare fiercely like the eye of an implacable autocrat out

He is the warlord who sends his battalions of Atlantic rollers to the assault of our seaboard. The compelling

voice of the West Wind musters up to his service all the might of the ocean. At the bidding of the West Wind

there arises a great commotion in the sky above these Islands, and a great rush of waters falls upon our

shores. The sky of the westerly weather is full of flying clouds, of great big white clouds coming thicker and

thicker till they seem to stand welded into a solid canopy, upon whose gray face the lower wrack of the gale,

thin, black and angrylooking, flies past with vertiginous speed. Denser and denser grows this dome of

vapours, descending lower and lower upon the sea, narrowing the horizon around the ship. And the

characteristic aspect of westerly weather, the thick, gray, smoky and sinister tone sets in, circumscribing the

view of the men, drenching their bodies, oppressing their souls, taking their breath away with booming gusts,

deafening, blinding, driving, rushing them onwards in a swaying ship towards our coasts lost in mists and

The caprice of the winds, like the wilfulness of men, is fraught with the disastrous consequences of

selfindulgence. Long anger, the sense of his uncontrolled power, spoils the frank and generous nature of the

West Wind. It is as if his heart were corrupted by a malevolent and brooding rancour. He devastates his own

kingdom in the wantonness of his force. Southwest is the quarter of the heavens where he presents his

darkened brow. He breathes his rage in terrific squalls, and overwhelms his realm with an inexhaustible

welter of clouds. He strews the seeds of anxiety upon the decks of scudding ships, makes the foamstripped

ocean look old, and sprinkles with gray hairs the heads of shipmasters in the homewardbound ships

running for the Channel. The Westerly Wind asserting his sway from the southwest quarter is often like a

monarch gone mad, driving forth with wild imprecations the most faithful of his courtiers to shipwreck,

The southwesterly weather is the thick weather PAR EXCELLENCE. It is not the thickness of the fog; it is

rather a contraction of the horizon, a mysterious veiling of the shores with clouds that seem to make a

lowvaulted dungeon around the running ship. It is not blindness; it is a shortening of the sight. The West

Wind does not say to the seaman, "You shall be blind"; it restricts merely the range of his vision and raises

the dread of land within his breast. It makes of him a man robbed of half his force, of half his efficiency.

Many times in my life, standing in long seaboots and streaming oilskins at the elbow of my commander on

the poop of a homewardbound ship making for the Channel, and gazing ahead into the gray and tormented

It would be merely the instinctive voicing of an everpresent thought associated closely with the

consciousness of the land somewhere ahead and of the great speed of the ship. Fair wind, fair wind! Who

would dare to grumble at a fair wind? It was a favour of the Western King, who rules masterfully the North

Atlantic from the latitude of the Azores to the latitude of Cape Farewell. A famous shove this to end a good

passage with; and yet, somehow, one could not muster upon one's lips the smile of a courtier's gratitude. This

favour was dispensed to you from under an overbearing scowl, which is the true expression of the great

autocrat when he has made up his mind to give a battering to some ships and to hunt certain others home in

Thus would the mate's voice repeat the thought of the master, both gazing ahead, while under their feet the

ship rushes at some twelve knots in the direction of the lee shore; and only a couple of miles in front of her

swinging and dripping jibboom, carried naked with an upward slant like a spear, a gray horizon closes the

view with a multitude of waves surging upwards violently as if to strike at the stooping clouds.

Awful and threatening scowls darken the face of the West Wind in his clouded, southwest mood; and from

the King's thronehall in the western board stronger gusts reach you, like the fierce shouts of raving fury to

which only the gloomy grandeur of the scene imparts a saving dignity. A shower pelts the deck and the sails

of the ship as if flung with a scream by an angry hand; and when the night closes in, the night of a

southwesterly gale, it seems more hopeless than the shade of Hades. The southwesterly mood of the great

West Wind is a lightless mood, without sun, moon, or stars, with no gleam of light but the phosphorescent

flashes of the great sheets of foam that, boiling up on each side of the ship, fling bluish gleams upon her dark

and narrow hull, rolling as she runs, chased by enormous seas, distracted in the tumult.

There are some bad nights in the kingdom of the West Wind for homewardbound ships making for the

Channel; and the days of wrath dawn upon them colourless and vague like the timid turning up of invisible

lights upon the scene of a tyrannical and passionate outbreak, awful in the monotony of its method and the

increasing strength of its violence. It is the same wind, the same clouds, the same wildly racing seas, the same

thick horizon around the ship. Only the wind is stronger, the clouds seem denser and more overwhelming, the

waves appear to have grown bigger and more threatening during the night. The hours, whose minutes are

marked by the crash of the breaking seas, slip by with the screaming, pelting squalls overtaking the ship as

she runs on and on with darkened canvas, with streaming spars and dripping ropes. The downpours thicken.

Preceding each shower a mysterious gloom, like the passage of a shadow above the firmament of gray clouds,

filters down upon the ship. Now and then the rain pours upon your head in streams as if from spouts. It seems

as if your ship were going to be drowned before she sank, as if all atmosphere had turned to water. You gasp,

you splutter, you are blinded and deafened, you are submerged, obliterated, dissolved, annihilated, streaming

all over as if your limbs, too, had turned to water. And every nerve on the alert you watch for the clearingup

mood of the Western King, that shall come with a shift of wind as likely as not to whip all the three masts out

Heralded by the increasing fierceness of the squalls, sometimes by a faint flash of lightning like the signal of

a lighted torch waved far away behind the clouds, the shift of wind comes at last, the crucial moment of the

change from the brooding and veiled violence of the southwest gale to the sparkling, flashing, cutting,

clear eyed anger of the King's northwesterly mood. You behold another phase of his passion, a fury

bejewelled with stars, mayhap bearing the crescent of the moon on its brow, shaking the last vestiges of its

torn cloudmantle in inkyblack squalls, with hail and sleet descending like showers of crystals and pearls,

bounding off the spars, drumming on the sails, pattering on the oilskin coats, whitening the decks of

homewardbound ships. Faint, ruddy flashes of lightning flicker in the starlight upon her mastheads. A chilly

blast hums in the taut rigging, causing the ship to tremble to her very keel, and the soaked men on her decks

to shiver in their wet clothes to the very marrow of their bones. Before one squall has flown over to sink in

the eastern board, the edge of another peeps up already above the western horizon, racing up swift, shapeless,

like a black bag full of frozen water ready to burst over your devoted head. The temper of the ruler of the

ocean has changed. Each gust of the clouded mood that seemed warmed by the heat of a heart flaming with

anger has its counterpart in the chilly blasts that seem blown from a breast turned to ice with a sudden

revulsion of feeling. Instead of blinding your eyes and crushing your soul with a terrible apparatus of cloud

and mists and seas and rain, the King of the West turns his power to contemptuous pelting of your back with

icicles, to making your weary eyes water as if in grief, and your wornout carcass quake pitifully. But each

mood of the great autocrat has its own greatness, and each is hard to bear. Only the northwest phase of that

mighty display is not demoralizing to the same extent, because between the hail and sleet squalls of a

To see! to see! this is the craving of the sailor, as of the rest of blind humanity. To have his path made clear

for him is the aspiration of every human being in our beclouded and tempestuous existence. I have heard a

reserved, silent man, with no nerves to speak of, after three days of hard running in thick southwesterly

weather, burst out passionately: "I wish to God we could get sight of something!"

We had just gone down below for a moment to commune in a battened down cabin, with a large white chart

lying limp and damp upon a cold and clammy table under the light of a smoky lamp. Sprawling over that

seaman's silent and trusted adviser, with one elbow upon the coast of Africa and the other planted in the

neighbourhood of Cape Hatteras (it was a general trackchart of the North Atlantic), my skipper lifted his

rugged, hairy face, and glared at me in a halfexasperated, halfappealing way. We have seen no sun, moon,

or stars for something like seven days. By the effect of the West Wind's wrath the celestial bodies had gone

into hiding for a week or more, and the last three days had seen the force of a southwest gale grow from

fresh, through strong, to heavy, as the entries in my logbook could testify. Then we separated, he to go on

deck again, in obedience to that mysterious call that seems to sound for ever in a shipmaster's ears, I to

stagger into my cabin with some vague notion of putting down the words "Very heavy weather" in a

logbook not quite written uptodate. But I gave it up, and crawled into my bunk instead, boots and hat on,

all standing (it did not matter; everything was soaking wet, a heavy sea having burst the poop skylights the

night before), to remain in a nightmarish state between waking and sleeping for a couple of hours of

The southwesterly mood of the West Wind is an enemy of sleep, and even of a recumbent position, in the

responsible officers of a ship. After two hours of futile, lightheaded, inconsequent thinking upon all things

under heaven in that dark, dank, wet and devastated cabin, I arose suddenly and staggered up on deck. The

autocrat of the North Atlantic was still oppressing his kingdom and its outlying dependencies, even as far as

the Bay of Biscay, in the dismal secrecy of thick, very thick, weather. The force of the wind, though we were

running before it at the rate of some ten knots an hour, was so great that it drove me with a steady push to the

What I really thought was that we both had had just about enough of it. The manner in which the great West

Wind chooses at times to administer his possessions does not commend itself to a person of peaceful and

lawabiding disposition, inclined to draw distinctions between right and wrong in the face of natural forces,

whose standard, naturally, is that of might alone. But, of course, I said nothing. For a man caught, as it were,

between his skipper and the great West Wind silence is the safest sort of diplomacy. Moreover, I knew my

skipper. He did not want to know what I thought. Shipmasters hanging on a breath before the thrones of the

winds ruling the seas have their psychology, whose workings are as important to the ship and those on board

of her as the changing moods of the weather. The man, as a matter of fact, under no circumstances, ever cared

a brass farthing for what I or anybody else in his ship thought. He had had just about enough of it, I guessed,

and what he was at really was a process of fishing for a suggestion. It was the pride of his life that he had

never wasted a chance, no matter how boisterous, threatening, and dangerous, of a fair wind. Like men racing

blindfold for a gap in a hedge, we were finishing a splendidly quick passage from the Antipodes, with a

tremendous rush for the Channel in as thick a weather as any I can remember, but his psychology did not

permit him to bring the ship to with a fair wind blowing at least not on his own initiative. And yet he felt

that very soon indeed something would have to be done. He wanted the suggestion to come from me, so that

later on, when the trouble was over, he could argue this point with his own uncompromising spirit, laying the

blame upon my shoulders. I must render him the justice that this sort of pride was his only weakness.

But he got no suggestion from me. I understood his psychology. Besides, I had my own stock of weaknesses

at the time (it is a different one now), and amongst them was the conceit of being remarkably well up in the

psychology of the Westerly weather. I believed not to mince matters that I had a genius for reading the

mind of the great ruler of high latitudes. I fancied I could discern already the coming of a change in his royal

This was all the opening he ever got from me. The eagerness with which he seized upon it gave me the

"Very well," he shouted, with an affectation of impatience, as if giving way to long entreaties. "All right. If

we don't get a shift by then we'll take that foresail off her and put her head under her wing for the night."

I was struck by the picturesque character of the phrase as applied to a ship broughtto in order to ride out a

gale with wave after wave passing under her breast. I could see her resting in the tumult of the elements like a

seabird sleeping in wild weather upon the raging waters with its head tucked under its wing. In imaginative

precision, in true feeling, this is one of the most expressive sentences I have ever heard on human lips. But as

to taking the foresail off that ship before we put her head under her wing, I had my grave doubts. They were

justified. That long enduring piece of canvas was confiscated by the arbitrary decree of the West Wind, to

whom belong the lives of men and the contrivances of their hands within the limits of his kingdom. With the

sound of a faint explosion it vanished into the thick weather bodily, leaving behind of its stout substance not

so much as one solitary strip big enough to be picked into a handful of lint for, say, a wounded elephant. Torn

out of its boltropes, it faded like a whiff of smoke in the smoky drift of clouds shattered and torn by the shift

of wind. For the shift of wind had come. The unveiled, low sun glared angrily from a chaotic sky upon a

confused and tremendous sea dashing itself upon a coast. We recognised the headland, and looked at each

other in the silence of dumb wonder. Without knowing it in the least, we had run up alongside the Isle of

Wight, and that tower, tinged a faint evening red in the salt windhaze, was the lighthouse on St. Catherine's

My skipper recovered first from his astonishment. His bulging eyes sank back gradually into their orbits. His

psychology, taking it all round, was really very creditable for an average sailor. He had been spared the

humiliation of laying his ship to with a fair wind; and at once that man, of an open and truthful nature, spoke

up in perfect good faith, rubbing together his brown, hairy hands the hands of a mastercraftsman upon the

The transparency and ingenuousness, in a way, of that delusion, the airy tone, the hint of already growing

pride, were perfectly delicious. But, in truth, this was one of the greatest surprises ever sprung by the clearing

The winds of North and South are, as I have said, but small princes amongst the powers of the sea. They have

no territory of their own; they are not reigning winds anywhere. Yet it is from their houses that the reigning

dynasties which have shared between them the waters of the earth are sprung. All the weather of the world is

based upon the contest of the Polar and Equatorial strains of that tyrannous race. The West Wind is the

greatest king. The East rules between the Tropics. They have shared each ocean between them. Each has his

genius of supreme rule. The King of the West never intrudes upon the recognised dominion of his kingly

brother. He is a barbarian, of a northern type. Violent without craftiness, and furious without malice, one may

imagine him seated masterfully with a doubleedged sword on his knees upon the painted and gilt clouds of

the sunset, bowing his shock head of golden locks, a flaming beard over his breast, imposing, colossal,

mightylimbed, with a thundering voice, distended cheeks and fierce blue eyes, urging the speed of his gales.

The other, the East king, the king of bloodred sunrises, I represent to myself as a spare Southerner with

clearcut features, blackbrowed and darkeyed, grayrobed, upright in sunshine, resting a smoothshaven

cheek in the palm of his hand, impenetrable, secret, full of wiles, finedrawn, keen meditating aggressions.

The West Wind keeps faith with his brother, the King of the Easterly weather. "What we have divided we

have divided," he seems to say in his gruff voice, this ruler without guile, who hurls as if in sport enormous

masses of cloud across the sky, and flings the great waves of the Atlantic clear across from the shores of the

New World upon the hoary headlands of Old Europe, which harbours more kings and rulers upon its seamed

and furrowed body than all the oceans of the world together. "What we have divided we have divided; and if

no rest and peace in this world have fallen to my share, leave me alone. Let me play at quoits with cyclonic

gales, flinging the discs of spinning cloud and whirling air from one end of my dismal kingdom to the other:

over the Great Banks or along the edges of packice this one with true aim right into the bight of the Bay of

Biscay, that other upon the fiords of Norway, across the North Sea where the fishermen of many nations look

And the royal master of high latitudes sighs mightily, with the sinking sun upon his breast and the

doubleedged sword upon his knees, as if wearied by the innumerable centuries of a strenuous rule and

saddened by the unchangeable aspect of the ocean under his feet by the endless vista of future ages where

the work of sowing the wind and reaping the whirlwind shall go on and on till his realm of living waters

becomes a frozen and motionless ocean. But the other, crafty and unmoved, nursing his shaven chin between

the thumb and forefinger of his slim and treacherous hand, thinks deep within his heart full of guile: "Aha!

our brother of the West has fallen into the mood of kingly melancholy. He is tired of playing with circular

gales, and blowing great guns, and unrolling thick streamers of fog in wanton sport at the cost of his own

poor, miserable subjects. Their fate is most pitiful. Let us make a foray upon the dominions of that noisy

barbarian, a great raid from Finisterre to Hatteras, catching his fishermen unawares, baffling the fleets that

trust to his power, and shooting sly arrows into the livers of men who court his good graces. He is, indeed, a

worthless fellow." And forthwith, while the West Wind meditates upon the vanity of his irresistible might,

The prevailing weather of the North Atlantic is typical of the way in which the West Wind rules his realm on

which the sun never sets. North Atlantic is the heart of a great empire. It is the part of the West Wind's

dominions most thickly populated with generations of fine ships and hardy men. Heroic deeds and

adventurous exploits have been performed there, within the very stronghold of his sway. The best sailors in

the world have been born and bred under the shadow of his sceptre, learning to manage their ships with skill

and audacity before the steps of his stormy throne. Reckless adventurers, toiling fishermen, admirals as wise

and brave as the world has ever known, have waited upon the signs of his westerly sky. Fleets of victorious

ships have hung upon his breath. He has tossed in his hand squadrons of warscarred threedeckers, and

shredded out in mere sport the bunting of flags hallowed in the traditions of honour and glory. He is a good

friend and a dangerous enemy, without mercy to unseaworthy ships and faint hearted seamen. In his kingly

way he has taken but little account of lives sacrificed to his impulsive policy; he is a king with a

doubleedged sword bared in his right hand. The East Wind, an interloper in the dominions of Westerly

weather, is an impassive faced tyrant with a sharp poniard held behind his back for a treacherous stab.

In his forays into the North Atlantic the East Wind behaves like a subtle and cruel adventurer without a

notion of honour or fair play. Veiling his clearcut, lean face in a thin layer of a hard, high cloud, I have seen

him, like a wizened robber sheik of the sea, hold up large caravans of ships to the number of three hundred or

more at the very gates of the English Channel. And the worst of it was that there was no ransom that we could

pay to satisfy his avidity; for whatever evil is wrought by the raiding East Wind, it is done only to spite his

kingly brother of the West. We gazed helplessly at the systematic, cold, grayeyed obstinacy of the Easterly

weather, while short rations became the order of the day, and the pinch of hunger under the breastbone grew

familiar to every sailor in that heldup fleet. Every day added to our numbers. In knots and groups and

straggling parties we flung to and fro before the closed gate. And meantime the outwardbound ships passed,

running through our humiliated ranks under all the canvas they could show. It is my idea that the Easterly

Wind helps the ships away from home in the wicked hope that they shall all come to an untimely end and be

heard of no more. For six weeks did the robber sheik hold the trade route of the earth, while our liege lord,

the West Wind, slept profoundly like a tired Titan, or else remained lost in a mood of idle sadness known

only to frank natures. All was still to the westward; we looked in vain towards his stronghold: the King

slumbered on so deeply that he let his foraging brother steal the very mantle of goldlined purple clouds from

his bowed shoulders. What had become of the dazzling hoard of royal jewels exhibited at every close of day?

Gone, disappeared, extinguished, carried off without leaving a single gold band or the flash of a single

sunbeam in the evening sky! Day after day through a cold streak of heavens as bare and poor as the inside of

a rifled safe a rayless and despoiled sun would slink shamefacedly, without pomp or show, to hide in haste

under the waters. And still the King slept on, or mourned the vanity of his might and his power, while the

thinlipped intruder put the impress of his cold and implacable spirit upon the sky and sea. With every

daybreak the rising sun had to wade through a crimson stream, luminous and sinister, like the spilt blood of

In this particular instance the mean interloper held the road for some six weeks on end, establishing his

particular administrative methods over the best part of the North Atlantic. It looked as if the easterly weather

had come to stay for ever, or, at least, till we had all starved to death in the heldup fleet starved within

sight, as it were, of plenty, within touch, almost, of the bountiful heart of the Empire. There we were, dotting

with our white dry sails the hard blueness of the deep sea. There we were, a growing company of ships, each

with her burden of grain, of timber, of wool, of hides, and even of oranges, for we had one or two belated

fruit schooners in company. There we were, in that memorable spring of a certain year in the late seventies,

dodging to and fro, baffled on every tack, and with our stores running down to sweepings of breadlockers

and scrapings of sugarcasks. It was just like the East Wind's nature to inflict starvation upon the bodies of

unoffending sailors, while he corrupted their simple souls by an exasperation leading to outbursts of profanity

as lurid as his bloodred sunrises. They were followed by gray days under the cover of high, motionless

clouds that looked as if carved in a slab of ashcoloured marble. And each mean starved sunset left us calling

with imprecations upon the West Wind even in its most veiled misty mood to wake up and give us our

liberty, if only to rush on and dash the heads of our ships against the very walls of our unapproachable home.

In the atmosphere of the Easterly weather, as pellucid as a piece of crystal and refracting like a prism, we

could see the appalling numbers of our helpless company, even to those who in more normal conditions

would have remained invisible, sails down under the horizon. It is the malicious pleasure of the East Wind to

augment the power of your eyesight, in order, perhaps, that you should see better the perfect humiliation, the

hopeless character of your captivity. Easterly weather is generally clear, and that is all that can be said for it

almost supernaturally clear when it likes; but whatever its mood, there is something uncanny in its nature. Its

duplicity is such that it will deceive a scientific instrument. No barometer will give warning of an easterly

gale, were it ever so wet. It would be an unjust and ungrateful thing to say that a barometer is a stupid

contrivance. It is simply that the wiles of the East Wind are too much for its fundamental honesty. After years

and years of experience the most trusty instrument of the sort that ever went to sea screwed on to a ship's

cabin bulkhead will, almost invariably, be induced to rise by the diabolic ingenuity of the Easterly weather,

just at the moment when the Easterly weather, discarding its methods of hard, dry, impassive cruelty,

contemplates drowning what is left of your spirit in torrents of a peculiarly cold and horrid rain. The

sleetandhail squalls following the lightning at the end of a westerly gale are cold and benumbing and

stinging and cruel enough. But the dry, Easterly weather, when it turns to wet, seems to rain poisoned

showers upon your head. It is a sort of steady, persistent, overwhelming, endlessly driving downpour, which

makes your heart sick, and opens it to dismal forebodings. And the stormy mood of the Easterly weather

looms black upon the sky with a peculiar and amazing blackness. The West Wind hangs heavy gray curtains

of mist and spray before your gaze, but the Eastern interloper of the narrow seas, when he has mustered his

courage and cruelty to the point of a gale, puts your eyes out, puts them out completely, makes you feel blind

Out of his black and merciless heart he flings a white blinding sheet upon the ships of the sea. He has more

manners of villainy, and no more conscience than an Italian prince of the seventeenth century. His weapon is

a dagger carried under a black cloak when he goes out on his unlawful enterprises. The mere hint of his

approach fills with dread every craft that swims the sea, from fishingsmacks to fourmasted ships that

recognise the sway of the West Wind. Even in his most accommodating mood he inspires a dread of

treachery. I have heard upwards of ten score of windlasses spring like one into clanking life in the dead of

night, filling the Downs with a panicstruck sound of anchors being torn hurriedly out of the ground at the

first breath of his approach. Fortunately, his heart often fails him: he does not always blow home upon our

The natures of those two winds that share the dominions of the great oceans are fundamentally different. It is

strange that the winds which men are prone to style capricious remain true to their character in all the various

regions of the earth. To us here, for instance, the East Wind comes across a great continent, sweeping over

the greatest body of solid land upon this earth. For the Australian east coast the East Wind is the wind of the

ocean, coming across the greatest body of water upon the globe; and yet here and there its characteristics

remain the same with a strange consistency in everything that is vile and base. The members of the West

Wind's dynasty are modified in a way by the regions they rule, as a Hohenzollern, without ceasing to be

himself, becomes a Roumanian by virtue of his throne, or a SaxeCoburg learns to put the dress of Bulgarian

The autocratic sway of the West Wind, whether forty north or forty south of the Equator, is characterized by

an open, generous, frank, barbarous recklessness. For he is a great autocrat, and to be a great autocrat you

must be a great barbarian. I have been too much moulded to his sway to nurse now any idea of rebellion in

my heart. Moreover, what is a rebellion within the four walls of a room against the tempestuous rule of the

West Wind? I remain faithful to the memory of the mighty King with a doubleedged sword in one hand, and

in the other holding out rewards of great daily runs and famously quick passages to those of his courtiers who

knew how to wait watchfully for every sign of his secret mood. As we deep water men always reckoned, he

made one year in three fairly lively for anybody having business upon the Atlantic or down there along the

"forties" of the Southern Ocean. You had to take the bitter with the sweet; and it cannot be denied he played

carelessly with our lives and fortunes. But, then, he was always a great king, fit to rule over the great waters

where, strictly speaking, a man would have no business whatever but for his audacity.

The audacious should not complain. A mere trader ought not to grumble at the tolls levied by a mighty king.

His mightiness was sometimes very overwhelming; but even when you had to defy him openly, as on the

banks of the Agulhas homeward bound from the East Indies, or on the outward passage round the Horn, he

struck at you fairly his stinging blows (full in the face, too), and it was your business not to get too much

staggered. And, after all, if you showed anything of a countenance, the goodnatured barbarian would let you

fight your way past the very steps of his throne. It was only now and then that the sword descended and a

head fell; but if you fell you were sure of impressive obsequies and of a roomy, generous grave.

Such is the king to whom Viking chieftains bowed their heads, and whom the modern and palatial steamship

defies with impunity seven times a week. And yet it is but defiance, not victory. The magnificent barbarian

sits enthroned in a mantle of goldlined clouds looking from on high on great ships gliding like mechanical

toys upon his sea and on men who, armed with fire and iron, no longer need to watch anxiously for the

slightest sign of his royal mood. He is disregarded; but he has kept all his strength, all his splendour, and a

great part of his power. Time itself, that shakes all the thrones, is on the side of that king. The sword in his

hand remains as sharp as ever upon both its edges; and he may well go on playing his royal game of quoits

with hurricanes, tossing them over from the continent of republics to the continent of kingdoms, in the

assurance that both the new republics and the old kingdoms, the heat of fire and the strength of iron, with the

untold generations of audacious men, shall crumble to dust at the steps of his throne, and pass away, and be

The estuaries of rivers appeal strongly to an adventurous imagination. This appeal is not always a charm, for

there are estuaries of a particularly dispiriting ugliness: lowlands, mud flats, or perhaps barren sandhills

without beauty of form or amenity of aspect, covered with a shabby and scanty vegetation conveying the

impression of poverty and uselessness. Sometimes such an ugliness is merely a repulsive mask. A river

whose estuary resembles a breach in a sand rampart may flow through a most fertile country. But all the

estuaries of great rivers have their fascination, the attractiveness of an open portal. Water is friendly to man.

The ocean, a part of Nature furthest removed in the unchangeableness and majesty of its might from the spirit

of mankind, has ever been a friend to the enterprising nations of the earth. And of all the elements this is the

one to which men have always been prone to trust themselves, as if its immensity held a reward as vast as

From the offing the open estuary promises every possible fruition to adventurous hopes. That road open to

enterprise and courage invites the explorer of coasts to new efforts towards the fulfilment of great

expectations. The commander of the first Roman galley must have looked with an intense absorption upon

the estuary of the Thames as he turned the beaked prow of his ship to the westward under the brow of the

North Foreland. The estuary of the Thames is not beautiful; it has no noble features, no romantic grandeur of

aspect, no smiling geniality; but it is wide open, spacious, inviting, hospitable at the first glance, with a

strange air of mysteriousness which lingers about it to this very day. The navigation of his craft must have

engrossed all the Roman's attention in the calm of a summer's day (he would choose his weather), when the

single row of long sweeps (the galley would be a light one, not a trireme) could fall in easy cadence upon a

sheet of water like plateglass, reflecting faithfully the classic form of his vessel and the contour of the lonely

shores close on his left hand. I assume he followed the land and passed through what is at present known as

Margate Roads, groping his careful way along the hidden sandbanks, whose every tail and spit has its beacon

or buoy nowadays. He must have been anxious, though no doubt he had collected beforehand on the shores of

the Gauls a store of information from the talk of traders, adventurers, fishermen, slavedealers, pirates all

sorts of unofficial men connected with the sea in a more or less reputable way. He would have heard of

channels and sandbanks, of natural features of the land useful for seamarks, of villages and tribes and modes

of barter and precautions to take: with the instructive tales about native chiefs dyed more or less blue, whose

character for greediness, ferocity, or amiability must have been expounded to him with that capacity for vivid

language which seems joined naturally to the shadiness of moral character and recklessness of disposition.

With that sort of spiced food provided for his anxious thought, watchful for strange men, strange beasts,

strange turns of the tide, he would make the best of his way up, a military seaman with a short sword on thigh

and a bronze helmet on his head, the pioneer post captain of an imperial fleet. Was the tribe inhabiting the

Isle of Thanet of a ferocious disposition, I wonder, and ready to fall with stonestudded clubs and wooden

Amongst the great commercial streams of these islands, the Thames is the only one, I think, open to romantic

feeling, from the fact that the sight of human labour and the sounds of human industry do not come down its

shores to the very sea, destroying the suggestion of mysterious vastness caused by the configuration of the

shore. The broad inlet of the shallow North Sea passes gradually into the contracted shape of the river; but for

a long time the feeling of the open water remains with the ship steering to the westward through one of the

lighted and buoyed passageways of the Thames, such as Queen's Channel, Prince's Channel, FourFathom

Channel; or else coming down the Swin from the north. The rush of the yellow floodtide hurries her up as if

into the unknown between the two fading lines of the coast. There are no features to this land, no

conspicuous, farfamed landmarks for the eye; there is nothing so far down to tell you of the greatest

agglomeration of mankind on earth dwelling no more than five and twenty miles away, where the sun sets in

a blaze of colour flaming on a gold background, and the dark, low shores trend towards each other. And in

the great silence the deep, faint booming of the big guns being tested at Shoeburyness hangs about the Nore

The Nore sand remains covered at lowwater, and never seen by human eye; but the Nore is a name to

conjure with visions of historical events, of battles, of fleets, of mutinies, of watch and ward kept upon the

great throbbing heart of the State. This ideal point of the estuary, this centre of memories, is marked upon the

steely gray expanse of the waters by a lightship painted red that, from a couple of miles off, looks like a

cheap and bizarre little toy. I remember how, on coming up the river for the first time, I was surprised at the

smallness of that vivid object a tiny warm speck of crimson lost in an immensity of gray tones. I was

startled, as if of necessity the principal beacon in the waterway of the greatest town on earth should have

presented imposing proportions. And, behold! the brown spritsail of a barge hid it entirely from my view.

Coming in from the eastward, the bright colouring of the lightship marking the part of the river committed to

the charge of an Admiral (the CommanderinChief at the Nore) accentuates the dreariness and the great

breadth of the Thames Estuary. But soon the course of the ship opens the entrance of the Medway, with its

menofwar moored in line, and the long wooden jetty of Port Victoria, with its few low buildings like the

beginning of a hasty settlement upon a wild and unexplored shore. The famous Thames barges sit in brown

clusters upon the water with an effect of birds floating upon a pond. On the imposing expanse of the great

estuary the traffic of the port where so much of the world's work and the world's thinking is being done

becomes insignificant, scattered, streaming away in thin lines of ships stringing themselves out into the

eastern quarter through the various navigable channels of which the Nore lightship marks the divergence. The

coasting traffic inclines to the north; the deepwater ships steer east with a southern inclination, on through

the Downs, to the most remote ends of the world. In the widening of the shores sinking low in the gray,

smoky distances the greatness of the sea receives the mercantile fleet of good ships that London sends out

upon the turn of every tide. They follow each other, going very close by the Essex shore. Such as the beads of

a rosary told by businesslike shipowners for the greater profit of the world they slip one by one into the

open: while in the offing the inwardbound ships come up singly and in bunches from under the sea horizon

closing the mouth of the river between Orfordness and North Foreland. They all converge upon the Nore, the

warm speck of red upon the tones of drab and gray, with the distant shores running together towards the west,

low and flat, like the sides of an enormous canal. The seareach of the Thames is straight, and, once

Sheerness is left behind, its banks seem very uninhabited, except for the cluster of houses which is Southend,

or here and there a lonely wooden jetty where petroleum ships discharge their dangerous cargoes, and the

oilstorage tanks, low and round with slightlydomed roofs, peep over the edge of the foreshore, as it were

a village of Central African huts imitated in iron. Bordered by the black and shining mudflats, the level

marsh extends for miles. Away in the far background the land rises, closing the view with a continuous

wooded slope, forming in the distance an interminable rampart overgrown with bushes.

Then, on the slight turn of the Lower Hope Reach, clusters of factory chimneys come distinctly into view, tall

and slender above the squat ranges of cement works in Grays and Greenhithe. Smoking quietly at the top

against the great blaze of a magnificent sunset, they give an industrial character to the scene, speak of work,

manufactures, and trade, as palmgroves on the coral strands of distant islands speak of the luxuriant grace,

beauty and vigour of tropical nature. The houses of Gravesend crowd upon the shore with an effect of

confusion as if they had tumbled down haphazard from the top of the hill at the back. The flatness of the

Kentish shore ends there. A fleet of steamtugs lies at anchor in front of the various piers. A conspicuous

church spire, the first seen distinctly coming from the sea, has a thoughtful grace, the serenity of a fine form

above the chaotic disorder of men's houses. But on the other side, on the flat Essex side, a shapeless and

desolate red edifice, a vast pile of bricks with many windows and a slate roof more inaccessible than an

Alpine slope, towers over the bend in monstrous ugliness, the tallest, heaviest building for miles around, a

thing like an hotel, like a mansion of flats (all to let), exiled into these fields out of a street in West

Kensington. Just round the corner, as it were, on a pier defined with stone blocks and wooden piles, a white

mast, slender like a stalk of straw and crossed by a yard like a knittingneedle, flying the signals of flag and

balloon, watches over a set of heavy dock gates. Mastheads and funneltops of ships peep above the

ranges of corrugated iron roofs. This is the entrance to Tilbury Dock, the most recent of all London docks, the

Between the crowded houses of Gravesend and the monstrous redbrick pile on the Essex shore the ship is

surrendered fairly to the grasp of the river. That hint of loneliness, that soul of the sea which had

accompanied her as far as the Lower Hope Reach, abandons her at the turn of the first bend above. The salt,

acrid flavour is gone out of the air, together with a sense of unlimited space opening free beyond the

threshold of sandbanks below the Nore. The waters of the sea rush on past Gravesend, tumbling the big

mooring buoys laid along the face of the town; but the seafreedom stops short there, surrendering the salt

tide to the needs, the artifices, the contrivances of toiling men. Wharves, landingplaces, dockgates,

waterside stairs, follow each other continuously right up to London Bridge, and the hum of men's work fills

the river with a menacing, muttering note as of a breathless, everdriving gale. The water way, so fair above

and wide below, flows oppressed by bricks and mortar and stone, by blackened timber and grimed glass and

rusty iron, covered with black barges, whipped up by paddles and screws, overburdened with craft, overhung

with chains, overshadowed by walls making a steep gorge for its bed, filled with a haze of smoke and dust.

This stretch of the Thames from London Bridge to the Albert Docks is to other watersides of river ports what

a virgin forest would be to a garden. It is a thing grown up, not made. It recalls a jungle by the confused,

varied, and impenetrable aspect of the buildings that line the shore, not according to a planned purpose, but as

if sprung up by accident from scattered seeds. Like the matted growth of bushes and creepers veiling the

silent depths of an unexplored wilderness, they hide the depths of London's infinitely varied, vigorous,

seething life. In other river ports it is not so. They lie open to their stream, with quays like broad clearings,

with streets like avenues cut through thick timber for the convenience of trade. I am thinking now of river

ports I have seen of Antwerp, for instance; of Nantes or Bordeaux, or even old Rouen, where the

nightwatchmen of ships, elbows on rail, gaze at shopwindows and brilliant cafes, and see the audience go

in and come out of the operahouse. But London, the oldest and greatest of river ports, does not possess as

much as a hundred yards of open quays upon its river front. Dark and impenetrable at night, like the face of a

forest, is the London waterside. It is the waterside of watersides, where only one aspect of the world's life can

be seen, and only one kind of men toils on the edge of the stream. The lightless walls seem to spring from the

very mud upon which the stranded barges lie; and the narrow lanes coming down to the foreshore resemble

the paths of smashed bushes and crumbled earth where big game comes to drink on the banks of tropical

Behind the growth of the London waterside the docks of London spread out unsuspected, smooth, and placid,

lost amongst the buildings like dark lagoons hidden in a thick forest. They lie concealed in the intricate

growth of houses with a few stalks of mastheads here and there overtopping the roof of some fourstory

It is a strange conjunction this of roofs and mastheads, of walls and yardarms. I remember once having the

incongruity of the relation brought home to me in a practical way. I was the chief officer of a fine ship, just

docked with a cargo of wool from Sydney, after a ninety days' passage. In fact, we had not been in more than

half an hour and I was still busy making her fast to the stone posts of a very narrow quay in front of a lofty

warehouse. An old man with a gray whisker under the chin and brass buttons on his pilotcloth jacket,

hurried up along the quay hailing my ship by name. He was one of those officials called berthingmasters

not the one who had berthed us, but another, who, apparently, had been busy securing a steamer at the other

end of the dock. I could see from afar his hard blue eyes staring at us, as if fascinated, with a queer sort of

absorption. I wondered what that worthy sea dog had found to criticise in my ship's rigging. And I, too,

glanced aloft anxiously. I could see nothing wrong there. But perhaps that superannuated fellowcraftsman

was simply admiring the ship's perfect order aloft, I thought, with some secret pride; for the chief officer is

responsible for his ship's appearance, and as to her outward condition, he is the man open to praise or blame.

Meantime the old salt ("excoasting skipper" was writ large all over his person) had hobbled up alongside in

his bumpy, shiny boots, and, waving an arm, short and thick like the flipper of a seal, terminated by a paw red

as an uncooked beefsteak, addressed the poop in a muffled, faint, roaring voice, as if a sample of every

NorthSea fog of his life had been permanently lodged in his throat: "Haul 'em round, Mr. Mate!" were his

words. "If you don't look sharp, you'll have your topgallant yards through the windows of that 'ere warehouse

presently!" This was the only cause of his interest in the ship's beautiful spars. I own that for a time I was

struck dumb by the bizarre associations of yardarms and windowpanes. To break windows is the last thing

one would think of in connection with a ship's topgallant yard, unless, indeed, one were an experienced

berthingmaster in one of the London docks. This old chap was doing his little share of the world's work with

proper efficiency. His little blue eyes had made out the danger many hundred yards off. His rheumaticky feet,

tired with balancing that squat body for many years upon the decks of small coasters, and made sore by miles

of tramping upon the flagstones of the dock side, had hurried up in time to avert a ridiculous catastrophe. I

He remained near by, muttering to himself till the yards had been hauled round at my order, and then raised

"None too soon," he observed, with a critical glance up at the towering side of the warehouse. "That's a

halfsovereign in your pocket, Mr. Mate. You should always look first how you are for them windows before

It was good advice. But one cannot think of everything or foresee contacts of things apparently as remote as

The view of ships lying moored in some of the older docks of London has always suggested to my mind the

image of a flock of swans kept in the flooded backyard of grim tenement houses. The flatness of the walls

surrounding the dark pool on which they float brings out wonderfully the flowing grace of the lines on which

a ship's hull is built. The lightness of these forms, devised to meet the winds and the seas, makes, by contrast

with the great piles of bricks, the chains and cables of their moorings appear very necessary, as if nothing less

could prevent them from soaring upwards and over the roofs. The least puff of wind stealing round the

corners of the dock buildings stirs these captives fettered to rigid shores. It is as if the soul of a ship were

impatient of confinement. Those masted hulls, relieved of their cargo, become restless at the slightest hint of

the wind's freedom. However tightly moored, they range a little at their berths, swaying imperceptibly the

spire like assemblages of cordage and spars. You can detect their impatience by watching the sway of the

mastheads against the motionless, the soulless gravity of mortar and stones. As you pass alongside each

hopeless prisoner chained to the quay, the slight grinding noise of the wooden fenders makes a sound of

angry muttering. But, after all, it may be good for ships to go through a period of restraint and repose, as the

restraint and self communion of inactivity may be good for an unruly soul not, indeed, that I mean to say

that ships are unruly; on the contrary, they are faithful creatures, as so many men can testify. And faithfulness

is a great restraint, the strongest bond laid upon the selfwill of men and ships on this globe of land and sea.

This interval of bondage in the docks rounds each period of a ship's life with the sense of accomplished duty,

of an effectively played part in the work of the world. The dock is the scene of what the world would think

the most serious part in the light, bounding, swaying life of a ship. But there are docks and docks. The

ugliness of some docks is appalling. Wild horses would not drag from me the name of a certain river in the

north whose narrow estuary is inhospitable and dangerous, and whose docks are like a nightmare of

dreariness and misery. Their dismal shores are studded thickly with scaffoldlike, enormous timber

structures, whose lofty heads are veiled periodically by the infernal gritty night of a cloud of coaldust. The

most important ingredient for getting the world's work along is distributed there under the circumstances of

the greatest cruelty meted out to helpless ships. Shut up in the desolate circuit of these basins, you would

think a free ship would droop and die like a wild bird put into a dirty cage. But a ship, perhaps because of her

faithfulness to men, will endure an extraordinary lot of illusage. Still, I have seen ships issue from certain

docks like halfdead prisoners from a dungeon, bedraggled, overcome, wholly disguised in dirt, and with

their men rolling white eyeballs in black and worried faces raised to a heaven which, in its smoky and soiled

aspect, seemed to reflect the sordidness of the earth below. One thing, however, may be said for the docks of

the Port of London on both sides of the river: for all the complaints of their insufficient equipment, of their

obsolete rules, of failure (they say) in the matter of quick despatch, no ship need ever issue from their gates in

a half fainting condition. London is a general cargo port, as is only proper for the greatest capital of the

world to be. General cargo ports belong to the aristocracy of the earth's trading places, and in that aristocracy

The absence of picturesqueness cannot be laid to the charge of the docks opening into the Thames. For all my

unkind comparisons to swans and backyards, it cannot be denied that each dock or group of docks along the

north side of the river has its own individual attractiveness. Beginning with the cosy little St. Katherine's

Dock, lying overshadowed and black like a quiet pool amongst rocky crags, through the venerable and

sympathetic London Docks, with not a single line of rails in the whole of their area and the aroma of spices

lingering between its warehouses, with their farfamed wine cellars down through the interesting group of

West India Docks, the fine docks at Blackwall, on past the Galleons Reach entrance of the Victoria and

Albert Docks, right down to the vast gloom of the great basins in Tilbury, each of those places of restraint for

ships has its own peculiar physiognomy, its own expression. And what makes them unique and attractive is

In their way they are as romantic as the river they serve is unlike all the other commercial streams of the

world. The cosiness of the St. Katherine's Dock, the oldworld air of the London Docks, remain impressed

upon the memory. The docks down the river, abreast of Woolwich, are imposing by their proportions and the

vast scale of the ugliness that forms their surroundings ugliness so picturesque as to become a delight to the

eye. When one talks of the Thames docks, "beauty" is a vain word, but romance has lived too long upon this

The antiquity of the port appeals to the imagination by the long chain of adventurous enterprises that had

their inception in the town and floated out into the world on the waters of the river. Even the newest of the

docks, the Tilbury Dock, shares in the glamour conferred by historical associations. Queen Elizabeth has

made one of her progresses down there, not one of her journeys of pomp and ceremony, but an anxious

business progress at a crisis of national history. The menace of that time has passed away, and now Tilbury is

known by its docks. These are very modern, but their remoteness and isolation upon the Essex marsh, the

days of failure attending their creation, invested them with a romantic air. Nothing in those days could have

been more striking than the vast, empty basins, surrounded by miles of bare quays and the ranges of

cargosheds, where two or three ships seemed lost like bewitched children in a forest of gaunt, hydraulic

cranes. One received a wonderful impression of utter abandonment, of wasted efficiency. From the first the

Tilbury Docks were very efficient and ready for their task, but they had come, perhaps, too soon into the

field. A great future lies before Tilbury Docks. They shall never fill a longfelt want (in the sacramental

phrase that is applied to railways, tunnels, newspapers, and new editions of books). They were too early in

the field. The want shall never be felt because, free of the trammels of the tide, easy of access, magnificent

and desolate, they are already there, prepared to take and keep the biggest ships that float upon the sea. They

And, truth to say, for all the criticisms flung upon the heads of the dock companies, the other docks of the

Thames are no disgrace to the town with a population greater than that of some commonwealths. The growth

of London as a wellequipped port has been slow, while not unworthy of a great capital, of a great centre of

distribution. It must not be forgotten that London has not the backing of great industrial districts or great

fields of natural exploitation. In this it differs from Liverpool, from Cardiff, from Newcastle, from Glasgow;

and therein the Thames differs from the Mersey, from the Tyne, from the Clyde. It is an historical river; it is a

romantic stream flowing through the centre of great affairs, and for all the criticism of the river's

administration, my contention is that its development has been worthy of its dignity. For a long time the

stream itself could accommodate quite easily the oversea and coasting traffic. That was in the days when, in

the part called the Pool, just below London Bridge, the vessels moored stem and stern in the very strength of

the tide formed one solid mass like an island covered with a forest of gaunt, leafless trees; and when the trade

had grown too big for the river there came the St. Katherine's Docks and the London Docks, magnificent

undertakings answering to the need of their time. The same may be said of the other artificial lakes full of

ships that go in and out upon this high road to all parts of the world. The labour of the imperial waterway

goes on from generation to generation, goes on day and night. Nothing ever arrests its sleepless industry but

the coming of a heavy fog, which clothes the teeming stream in a mantle of impenetrable stillness.

After the gradual cessation of all sound and movement on the faithful river, only the ringing of ships' bells is

heard, mysterious and muffled in the white vapour from London Bridge right down to the Nore, for miles and

miles in a decrescendo tinkling, to where the estuary broadens out into the North Sea, and the anchored ships

lie scattered thinly in the shrouded channels between the sandbanks of the Thames' mouth. Through the long

and glorious tale of years of the river's strenuous service to its people these are its only breathing times.

A ship in dock, surrounded by quays and the walls of warehouses, has the appearance of a prisoner

meditating upon freedom in the sadness of a free spirit put under restraint. Chain cables and stout ropes keep

her bound to stone posts at the edge of a paved shore, and a berthingmaster, with brass buttons on his coat,

walks about like a weatherbeaten and ruddy gaoler, casting jealous, watchful glances upon the moorings

that fetter a ship lying passive and still and safe, as if lost in deep regrets of her days of liberty and danger on

The swarm of renegades dockmasters, berthingmasters, gatemen, and such like appear to nurse an

immense distrust of the captive ship's resignation. There never seem chains and ropes enough to satisfy their

minds concerned with the safe binding of free ships to the strong, muddy, enslaved earth. "You had better put

another bight of a hawser astern, Mr. Mate," is the usual phrase in their mouth. I brand them for renegades,

because most of them have been sailors in their time. As if the infirmities of old age the gray hair, the

wrinkles at the corners of the eyes, and the knotted veins of the hands were the symptoms of moral poison,

they prowl about the quays with an underhand air of gloating over the broken spirit of noble captives. They

want more fenders, more breasting ropes; they want more springs, more shackles, more fetters; they want to

make ships with volatile souls as motionless as square blocks of stone. They stand on the mud of pavements,

these degraded seadogs, with long lines of railwaytrucks clanking their couplings behind their backs, and

run malevolent glances over your ship from headgear to taffrail, only wishing to tyrannize over the poor

creature under the hypocritical cloak of benevolence and care. Here and there cargo cranes looking like

instruments of torture for ships swing cruel hooks at the end of long chains. Gangs of dock labourers swarm

with muddy feet over the gangways. It is a moving sight this, of so many men of the earth, earthy, who never

cared anything for a ship, trampling unconcerned, brutal and hobnailed upon her helpless body.

Fortunately, nothing can deface the beauty of a ship. That sense of a dungeon, that sense of a horrible and

degrading misfortune overtaking a creature fair to see and safe to trust, attaches only to ships moored in the

docks of great European ports. You feel that they are dishonestly locked up, to be hunted about from wharf to

wharf on a dark, greasy, square pool of black water as a brutal reward at the end of a faithful voyage.

A ship anchored in an open roadstead, with cargolighters alongside and her own tackle swinging the burden

over the rail, is accomplishing in freedom a function of her life. There is no restraint; there is space: clear

water around her, and a clear sky above her mastheads, with a landscape of green hills and charming bays

opening around her anchorage. She is not abandoned by her own men to the tender mercies of shore people.

She still shelters, and is looked after by, her own little devoted band, and you feel that presently she will glide

between the headlands and disappear. It is only at home, in dock, that she lies abandoned, shut off from

freedom by all the artifices of men that think of quick despatch and profitable freights. It is only then that the

odious, rectangular shadows of walls and roofs fall upon her decks, with showers of soot.

To a man who has never seen the extraordinary nobility, strength, and grace that the devoted generations of

shipbuilders have evolved from some pure nooks of their simple souls, the sight that could be seen

fiveandtwenty years ago of a large fleet of clippers moored along the north side of the New South Dock

was an inspiring spectacle. Then there was a quarter of a mile of them, from the iron dockyardgates guarded

by policemen, in a long, forestlike perspective of masts, moored two and two to many stout wooden jetties.

Their spars dwarfed with their loftiness the corrugatediron sheds, their jibbooms extended far over the

shore, their whiteandgold figureheads, almost dazzling in their purity, overhung the straight, long quay

above the mud and dirt of the wharfside, with the busy figures of groups and single men moving to and fro,

At tidetime you would see one of the loaded ships with battened down hatches drop out of the ranks and

float in the clear space of the dock, held by lines dark and slender, like the first threads of a spider's web,

extending from her bows and her quarters to the mooringposts on shore. There, graceful and still, like a bird

ready to spread its wings, she waited till, at the opening of the gates, a tug or two would hurry in noisily,

hovering round her with an air of fuss and solicitude, and take her out into the river, tending, shepherding her

through open bridges, through damlike gates between the flat pierheads, with a bit of green lawn

surrounded by gravel and a white signalmast with yard and gaff, flying a couple of dingy blue, red, or white

This New South Dock (it was its official name), round which my earlier professional memories are centred,

belongs to the group of West India Docks, together with two smaller and much older basins called Import and

Export respectively, both with the greatness of their trade departed from them already. Picturesque and clean

as docks go, these twin basins spread side by side the dark lustre of their glassy water, sparely peopled by a

few ships laid up on buoys or tucked far away from each other at the end of sheds in the corners of empty

quays, where they seemed to slumber quietly remote, untouched by the bustle of men's affairs in retreat

rather than in captivity. They were quaint and sympathetic, those two homely basins, unfurnished and silent,

with no aggressive display of cranes, no apparatus of hurry and work on their narrow shores. No

railwaylines cumbered them. The knots of labourers trooping in clumsily round the corners of cargosheds

to eat their food in peace out of red cotton handkerchiefs had the air of picnicking by the side of a lonely

mountain pool. They were restful (and I should say very unprofitable), those basins, where the chief officer of

one of the ships involved in the harassing, strenuous, noisy activity of the New South Dock only a few yards

away could escape in the dinnerhour to stroll, unhampered by men and affairs, meditating (if he chose) on

the vanity of all things human. At one time they must have been full of good old slow West Indiamen of the

squarestern type, that took their captivity, one imagines, as stolidly as they had faced the buffeting of the

waves with their blunt, honest bows, and disgorged sugar, rum, molasses, coffee, or logwood sedately with

their own winch and tackle. But when I knew them, of exports there was never a sign that one could detect;

and all the imports I have ever seen were some rare cargoes of tropical timber, enormous baulks roughed out

of iron trunks grown in the woods about the Gulf of Mexico. They lay piled up in stacks of mighty boles, and

it was hard to believe that all this mass of dead and stripped trees had come out of the flanks of a slender,

innocentlooking little barque with, as likely as not, a homely woman's name Ellen this or Annie that

upon her fine bows. But this is generally the case with a discharged cargo. Once spread at large over the

quay, it looks the most impossible bulk to have all come there out of that ship alongside.

They were quiet, serene nooks in the busy world of docks, these basins where it has never been my good luck

to get a berth after some more or less arduous passage. But one could see at a glance that men and ships were

never hustled there. They were so quiet that, remembering them well, one comes to doubt that they ever

existed places of repose for tired ships to dream in, places of meditation rather than work, where wicked

ships the cranky, the lazy, the wet, the bad sea boats, the wild steerers, the capricious, the pigheaded, the

generally ungovernable would have full leisure to take count and repent of their sins, sorrowful and naked,

with their rent garments of sailcloth stripped off them, and with the dust and ashes of the London atmosphere

upon their mastheads. For that the worst of ships would repent if she were ever given time I make no doubt. I

have known too many of them. No ship is wholly bad; and now that their bodies that had braved so many

tempests have been blown off the face of the sea by a puff of steam, the evil and the good together into the

limbo of things that have served their time, there can be no harm in affirming that in these vanished

generations of willing servants there never has been one utterly unredeemable soul.

In the New South Dock there was certainly no time for remorse, introspection, repentance, or any phenomena

of inner life either for the captive ships or for their officers. From six in the morning till six at night the hard

labour of the prisonhouse, which rewards the valiance of ships that win the harbour went on steadily, great

slings of general cargo swinging over the rail, to drop plumb into the hatchways at the sign of the

gangwaytender's hand. The New South Dock was especially a loading dock for the Colonies in those great

(and last) days of smart woolclippers, good to look at and well exciting to handle. Some of them were

more fair to see than the others; many were (to put it mildly) somewhat overmasted; all were expected to

make good passages; and of all that line of ships, whose rigging made a thick, enormous network against the

sky, whose brasses flashed almost as far as the eye of the policeman at the gates could reach, there was hardly

one that knew of any other port amongst all the ports on the wide earth but London and Sydney, or London

and Melbourne, or London and Adelaide, perhaps with Hobart Town added for those of smaller tonnage. One

could almost have believed, as her graywhiskered second mate used to say of the old Duke of S, that they

knew the road to the Antipodes better than their own skippers, who, year in, year out, took them from London

the place of captivity to some Australian port where, twentyfive years ago, though moored well and

tight enough to the wooden wharves, they felt themselves no captives, but honoured guests.

These towns of the Antipodes, not so great then as they are now, took an interest in the shipping, the running

links with "home," whose numbers confirmed the sense of their growing importance. They made it part and

parcel of their daily interests. This was especially the case in Sydney, where, from the heart of the fair city,

down the vista of important streets, could be seen the wool clippers lying at the Circular Quay no walled

prisonhouse of a dock that, but the integral part of one of the finest, most beautiful, vast, and safe bays the

sun ever shone upon. Now great steamliners lie at these berths, always reserved for the sea aristocracy

grand and imposing enough ships, but here today and gone next week; whereas the general cargo, emigrant,

and passenger clippers of my time, rigged with heavy spars, and built on fine lines, used to remain for months

together waiting for their load of wool. Their names attained the dignity of household words. On Sundays and

holidays the citizens trooped down, on visiting bent, and the lonely officer on duty solaced himself by

playing the cicerone especially to the citizenesses with engaging manners and a welldeveloped sense of

the fun that may be got out of the inspection of a ship's cabins and staterooms. The tinkle of more or less

untuned cottage pianos floated out of open sternports till the gaslamps began to twinkle in the streets, and

the ship's nightwatchman, coming sleepily on duty after his unsatisfactory day slumbers, hauled down the

flags and fastened a lighted lantern at the break of the gangway. The night closed rapidly upon the silent ships

with their crews on shore. Up a short, steep ascent by the King's Head pub., patronized by the cooks and

stewards of the fleet, the voice of a man crying "Hot saveloys!" at the end of George Street, where the cheap

eatinghouses (sixpence a meal) were kept by Chinamen (Sunkumon's was not bad), is heard at regular

intervals. I have listened for hours to this most pertinacious pedlar (I wonder whether he is dead or has made

a fortune), while sitting on the rail of the old Duke of S (she's dead, poor thing! a violent death on the coast

of New Zealand), fascinated by the monotony, the regularity, the abruptness of the recurring cry, and so

exasperated at the absurd spell, that I wished the fellow would choke himself to death with a mouthful of his

A stupid job, and fit only for an old man, my comrades used to tell me, to be the nightwatchman of a captive

(though honoured) ship. And generally the oldest of the able seamen in a ship's crew does get it. But

sometimes neither the oldest nor any other fairly steady seaman is forthcoming. Ships' crews had the trick of

melting away swiftly in those days. So, probably on account of my youth, innocence, and pensive habits

(which made me sometimes dilatory in my work about the rigging), I was suddenly nominated, in our chief

mate Mr. B's most sardonic tones, to that enviable situation. I do not regret the experience. The night

humours of the town descended from the street to the waterside in the still watches of the night: larrikins

rushing down in bands to settle some quarrel by a standup fight, away from the police, in an indistinct ring

half hidden by piles of cargo, with the sounds of blows, a groan now and then, the stamping of feet, and the

cry of "Time!" rising suddenly above the sinister and excited murmurs; nightprowlers, pursued or pursuing,

with a stifled shriek followed by a profound silence, or slinking stealthily alongside like ghosts, and

addressing me from the quay below in mysterious tones with incomprehensible propositions. The cabmen,

too, who twice a week, on the night when the A.S.N. Company's passengerboat was due to arrive, used to

range a battalion of blazing lamps opposite the ship, were very amusing in their way. They got down from

their perches and told each other impolite stories in racy language, every word of which reached me distinctly

over the bulwarks as I sat smoking on the mainhatch. On one occasion I had an hour or so of a most

intellectual conversation with a person whom I could not see distinctly, a gentleman from England, he said,

with a cultivated voice, I on deck and he on the quay sitting on the case of a piano (landed out of our hold that

very afternoon), and smoking a cigar which smelt very good. We touched, in our discourse, upon science,

politics, natural history, and operatic singers. Then, after remarking abruptly, "You seem to be rather

intelligent, my man," he informed me pointedly that his name was Mr. Senior, and walked off to his hotel, I

suppose. Shadows! Shadows! I think I saw a white whisker as he turned under the lamppost. It is a shock to

think that in the natural course of nature he must be dead by now. There was nothing to object to in his

The position had its drawbacks, however. One wintry, blustering, dark night in July, as I stood sleepily out of

the rain under the break of the poop something resembling an ostrich dashed up the gangway. I say ostrich

because the creature, though it ran on two legs, appeared to help its progress by working a pair of short

wings; it was a man, however, only his coat, ripped up the back and flapping in two halves above his

shoulders, gave him that weird and fowllike appearance. At least, I suppose it was his coat, for it was

impossible to make him out distinctly. How he managed to come so straight upon me, at speed and without a

stumble over a strange deck, I cannot imagine. He must have been able to see in the dark better than any cat.

He overwhelmed me with panting entreaties to let him take shelter till morning in our forecastle. Following

my strict orders, I refused his request, mildly at first, in a sterner tone as he insisted with growing impudence.

"For God's sake let me, matey! Some of 'em are after me and I've got hold of a ticker here."

Silence. He appeared to cringe, mute, as if words had failed him through grief; then bang! came a

concussion and a great flash of light in which he vanished, leaving me prone on my back with the most

abominable black eye that anybody ever got in the faithful discharge of duty. Shadows! Shadows! I hope he

escaped the enemies he was fleeing from to live and flourish to this day. But his fist was uncommonly hard

There were other experiences, less painful and more funny for the most part, with one amongst them of a

dramatic complexion; but the greatest experience of them all was Mr. B, our chief mate himself.

He used to go ashore every night to foregather in some hotel's parlour with his crony, the mate of the barque

Cicero, lying on the other side of the Circular Quay. Late at night I would hear from afar their stumbling

footsteps and their voices raised in endless argument. The mate of the Cicero was seeing his friend on board.

They would continue their senseless and muddled discourse in tones of profound friendship for half an hour

or so at the shore end of our gangway, and then I would hear Mr. B insisting that he must see the other on

board his ship. And away they would go, their voices, still conversing with excessive amity, being heard

moving all round the harbour. It happened more than once that they would thus perambulate three or four

times the distance, each seeing the other on board his ship out of pure and disinterested affection. Then,

through sheer weariness, or perhaps in a moment of forgetfulness, they would manage to part from each other

somehow, and byandby the planks of our long gangway would bend and creak under the weight of Mr. B

He waited for a moment of steadiness before negotiating the three steps of the inside ladder from rail to deck;

and the watchman, taught by experience, would forbear offering help which would be received as an insult at

that particular stage of the mate's return. But many times I trembled for his neck. He was a heavy man.

Then with a rush and a thump it would be done. He never had to pick himself up; but it took him a minute or

Our dog was a gaunt and unpleasant beast, more like a wolf in poor health than a dog, and I never noticed Mr.

B at any other time show the slightest interest in the doings of the animal. But that question never failed.

I was always prepared for that request. He leaned on me heavily till near enough the cabindoor to catch hold

And he could manage. He could manage to find his way into his berth, light his lamp, get into his bed ay,

and get out of it when I called him at halfpast five, the first man on deck, lifting the cup of morning coffee

to his lips with a steady hand, ready for duty as though he had virtuously slept ten solid hours a better chief

officer than many a man who had never tasted grog in his life. He could manage all that, but could never

Only once he failed to seize the cabindoor handle at the first grab. He waited a little, tried again, and again

Without letting go his hold of me he turned about, his face lit up bright as day by the full moon.

I felt the need to say something, because he hung on to me as if lost, breathing heavily.

And even on that night he "managed it" at last. He got hold of the handle. But he did not manage to light his

lamp (I don't think he even tried), though in the morning as usual he was the first on deck, bullnecked,

curlyheaded, watching the hands turnto with his sardonic expression and unflinching gaze.

I met him ten years afterwards, casually, unexpectedly, in the street, on coming out of my consignee office. I

was not likely to have forgotten him with his "I can manage now." He recognised me at once, remembered

my name, and in what ship I had served under his orders. He looked me over from head to foot.

"I am commanding a little barque," I said, "loading here for Mauritius." Then, thoughtlessly, I added: "And

"I," he said, looking at me unflinchingly, with his old sardonic grin "I am looking for something to do."

I felt I would rather have bitten out my tongue. His jetblack, curly hair had turned irongray; he was

scrupulously neat as ever, but frightfully threadbare. His shiny boots were worn down at heel. But he forgave

me, and we drove off together in a hansom to dine on board my ship. He went over her conscientiously,

praised her heartily, congratulated me on my command with absolute sincerity. At dinner, as I offered him

wine and beer he shook his head, and as I sat looking at him interrogatively, muttered in an undertone:

After dinner we came again on deck. It seemed as though he could not tear himself away from the ship. We

were fitting some new lower rigging, and he hung about, approving, suggesting, giving me advice in his old

manner. Twice he addressed me as "My boy," and corrected himself quickly to "Captain." My mate was

about to leave me (to get married), but I concealed the fact from Mr. B. I was afraid he would ask me to

give him the berth in some ghastly jocular hint that I could not refuse to take. I was afraid. It would have been

impossible. I could not have given orders to Mr. B, and I am sure he would not have taken them from me

very long. He could not have managed that, though he had managed to break himself from drink too late.

He said goodbye at last. As I watched his burly, bullnecked figure walk away up the street, I wondered

with a sinking heart whether he had much more than the price of a night's lodging in his pocket. And I

understood that if that very minute I were to call out after him, he would not even turn his head. He, too, is no

more than a shadow, but I seem to hear his words spoken on the moonlit deck of the old Duke :

"Ships!" exclaimed an elderly seaman in clean shore togs. "Ships" and his keen glance, turning away from

my face, ran along the vista of magnificent figureheads that in the late seventies used to overhang in a

serried rank the muddy pavement by the side of the New South Dock "ships are all right; it's the men in

Fifty hulls, at least, moulded on lines of beauty and speed hulls of wood, of iron, expressing in their forms

the highest achievement of modern shipbuilding lay moored all in a row, stem to quay, as if assembled

there for an exhibition, not of a great industry, but of a great art. Their colours were gray, black, dark green,

with a narrow strip of yellow moulding defining their sheer, or with a row of painted ports decking in warlike

decoration their robust flanks of cargocarriers that would know no triumph but of speed in carrying a

burden, no glory other than of a long service, no victory but that of an endless, obscure contest with the sea.

The great empty hulls with swept holds, just out of drydock, with their paint glistening freshly, sat

highsided with ponderous dignity alongside the wooden jetties, looking more like unmovable buildings than

things meant to go afloat; others, half loaded, far on the way to recover the true seaphysiognomy of a ship

brought down to her loadline, looked more accessible. Their less steeply slanting gangways seemed to invite

the strolling sailors in search of a berth to walk on board and try "for a chance" with the chief mate, the

guardian of a ship's efficiency. As if anxious to remain unperceived amongst their overtopping sisters, two or

three "finished" ships floated low, with an air of straining at the leash of their level headfasts, exposing to

view their cleared decks and covered hatches, prepared to drop stern first out of the labouring ranks,

displaying the true comeliness of form which only her proper seatrim gives to a ship. And for a good quarter

of a mile, from the dockyard gate to the farthest corner, where the old housedin hulk, the President

(drillship, then, of the Naval Reserve), used to lie with her frigate side rubbing against the stone of the quay,

above all these hulls, ready and unready, a hundred and fifty lofty masts, more or less, held out the web of

their rigging like an immense net, in whose close mesh, black against the sky, the heavy yards seemed to be

It was a sight. The humblest craft that floats makes its appeal to a seaman by the faithfulness of her life; and

this was the place where one beheld the aristocracy of ships. It was a noble gathering of the fairest and the

swiftest, each bearing at the bow the carved emblem of her name, as in a gallery of plastercasts, figures of

women with mural crowns, women with flowing robes, with gold fillets on their hair or blue scarves round

their waists, stretching out rounded arms as if to point the way; heads of men helmeted or bare; full lengths of

warriors, of kings, of statesmen, of lords and princesses, all white from top to toe; with here and there a dusky

turbaned figure, bedizened in many colours, of some Eastern sultan or hero, all inclined forward under the

slant of mighty bowsprits as if eager to begin another run of 11,000 miles in their leaning attitudes. These

were the fine figureheads of the finest ships afloat. But why, unless for the love of the life those effigies

shared with us in their wandering impassivity, should one try to reproduce in words an impression of whose

fidelity there can be no critic and no judge, since such an exhibition of the art of shipbuilding and the art of

figurehead carving as was seen from year's end to year's end in the openair gallery of the New South Dock

no man's eye shall behold again? All that patient, pale company of queens and princesses, of kings and

warriors, of allegorical women, of heroines and statesmen and heathen gods, crowned, helmeted,

bareheaded, has run for good off the sea stretching to the last above the tumbling foam their fair, rounded

arms; holding out their spears, swords, shields, tridents in the same unwearied, striving forward pose. And

nothing remains but lingering perhaps in the memory of a few men, the sound of their names, vanished a long

time ago from the first page of the great London dailies; from big posters in railwaystations and the doors of

shipping offices; from the minds of sailors, dockmasters, pilots, and tugmen; from the hail of gruff voices and

the flutter of signal flags exchanged between ships closing upon each other and drawing apart in the open

The elderly, respectable seaman, withdrawing his gaze from that multitude of spars, gave me a glance to

make sure of our fellowship in the craft and mystery of the sea. We had met casually, and had got into contact

as I had stopped near him, my attention being caught by the same peculiarity he was looking at in the rigging

of an obviously new ship, a ship with her reputation all to make yet in the talk of the seamen who were to

share their life with her. Her name was already on their lips. I had heard it uttered between two thick,

rednecked fellows of the seminautical type at the Fenchurch Street Railwaystation, where, in those days,

the everyday male crowd was attired in jerseys and pilotcloth mostly, and had the air of being more

conversant with the times of high water than with the times of the trains. I had noticed that new ship's name

on the first page of my morning paper. I had stared at the unfamiliar grouping of its letters, blue on white

ground, on the advertisementboards, whenever the train came to a standstill alongside one of the shabby,

wooden, wharflike platforms of the dock railwayline. She had been named, with proper observances, on

the day she came off the stocks, no doubt, but she was very far yet from "having a name." Untried, ignorant

of the ways of the sea, she had been thrust amongst that renowned company of ships to load for her maiden

voyage. There was nothing to vouch for her soundness and the worth of her character, but the reputation of

the buildingyard whence she was launched headlong into the world of waters. She looked modest to me. I

imagined her diffident, lying very quiet, with her side nestling shyly against the wharf to which she was made

fast with very new lines, intimidated by the company of her tried and experienced sisters already familiar

with all the violences of the ocean and the exacting love of men. They had had more long voyages to make

their names in than she had known weeks of carefully tended life, for a new ship receives as much attention

as if she were a young bride. Even crabbed old dockmasters look at her with benevolent eyes. In her shyness

at the threshold of a laborious and uncertain life, where so much is expected of a ship, she could not have

been better heartened and comforted, had she only been able to hear and understand, than by the tone of deep

conviction in which my elderly, respectable seaman repeated the first part of his saying, "Ships are all right . .

His civility prevented him from repeating the other, the bitter part. It had occurred to him that it was perhaps

indelicate to insist. He had recognised in me a ship's officer, very possibly looking for a berth like himself,

and so far a comrade, but still a man belonging to that sparselypeopled afterend of a ship, where a great

part of her reputation as a "good ship," in seaman's parlance, is made or marred.

"Can you say that of all ships without exception?" I asked, being in an idle mood, because, if an obvious

ship's officer, I was not, as a matter of fact, down at the docks to "look for a berth," an occupation as

engrossing as gambling, and as little favourable to the free exchange of ideas, besides being destructive of the

He was not averse from talking, either. If he had come down to the dock to look for a berth, he did not seem

oppressed by anxiety as to his chances. He had the serenity of a man whose estimable character is fortunately

expressed by his personal appearance in an unobtrusive, yet convincing, manner which no chief officer in

want of hands could resist. And, true enough, I learned presently that the mate of the Hyperion had "taken

down" his name for quarter master. "We sign on Friday, and join next day for the morning tide," he

remarked, in a deliberate, careless tone, which contrasted strongly with his evident readiness to stand there

"Hyperion," I said. "I don't remember ever seeing that ship anywhere. What sort of a name has she got?"

It appeared from his discursive answer that she had not much of a name one way or another. She was not very

fast. It took no fool, though, to steer her straight, he believed. Some years ago he had seen her in Calcutta,

and he remembered being told by somebody then, that on her passage up the river she had carried away both

her hawsepipes. But that might have been the pilot's fault. Just now, yarning with the apprentices on board,

he had heard that this very voyage, brought up in the Downs, outward bound, she broke her sheer, struck

adrift, and lost an anchor and chain. But that might have occurred through want of careful tending in a

tideway. All the same, this looked as though she were pretty hard on her ground tackle. Didn't it? She

seemed a heavy ship to handle, anyway. For the rest, as she had a new captain and a new mate this voyage, he

In such marine shoretalk as this is the name of a ship slowly established, her fame made for her, the tale of

her qualities and of her defects kept, her idiosyncrasies commented upon with the zest of personal gossip, her

achievements made much of, her faults glossed over as things that, being without remedy in our imperfect

world, should not be dwelt upon too much by men who, with the help of ships, wrest out a bitter living from

the rough grasp of the sea. All that talk makes up her "name," which is handed over from one crew to another

without bitterness, without animosity, with the indulgence of mutual dependence, and with the feeling of

close association in the exercise of her perfections and in the danger of her defects.

This feeling explains men's pride in ships. "Ships are all right," as my middleaged, respectable

quartermaster said with much conviction and some irony; but they are not exactly what men make them.

They have their own nature; they can of themselves minister to our selfesteem by the demand their qualities

make upon our skill and their shortcomings upon our hardiness and endurance. Which is the more flattering

exaction it is hard to say; but there is the fact that in listening for upwards of twenty years to the seatalk that

goes on afloat and ashore I have never detected the true note of animosity. I won't deny that at sea,

sometimes, the note of profanity was audible enough in those chiding interpellations a wet, cold, weary

seaman addresses to his ship, and in moments of exasperation is disposed to extend to all ships that ever were

launched to the whole everlastingly exacting brood that swims in deep waters. And I have heard curses

launched at the unstable element itself, whose fascination, outlasting the accumulated experience of ages, had

For all that has been said of the love that certain natures (on shore) have professed to feel for it, for all the

celebrations it had been the object of in prose and song, the sea has never been friendly to man. At most it has

been the accomplice of human restlessness, and playing the part of dangerous abettor of world wide

ambitions. Faithful to no race after the manner of the kindly earth, receiving no impress from valour and toil

and self sacrifice, recognising no finality of dominion, the sea has never adopted the cause of its masters

like those lands where the victorious nations of mankind have taken root, rocking their cradles and setting up

their gravestones. He man or people who, putting his trust in the friendship of the sea, neglects the

strength and cunning of his right hand, is a fool! As if it were too great, too mighty for common virtues, the

ocean has no compassion, no faith, no law, no memory. Its fickleness is to be held true to men's purposes

only by an undaunted resolution and by a sleepless, armed, jealous vigilance, in which, perhaps, there has

always been more hate than love. ODI ET AMO may well be the confession of those who consciously or

blindly have surrendered their existence to the fascination of the sea. All the tempestuous passions of

mankind's young days, the love of loot and the love of glory, the love of adventure and the love of danger,

with the great love of the unknown and vast dreams of dominion and power, have passed like images

reflected from a mirror, leaving no record upon the mysterious face of the sea. Impenetrable and heartless, the

sea has given nothing of itself to the suitors for its precarious favours. Unlike the earth, it cannot be

subjugated at any cost of patience and toil. For all its fascination that has lured so many to a violent death, its

immensity has never been loved as the mountains, the plains, the desert itself, have been loved. Indeed, I

suspect that, leaving aside the protestations and tributes of writers who, one is safe in saying, care for little

else in the world than the rhythm of their lines and the cadence of their phrase, the love of the sea, to which

some men and nations confess so readily, is a complex sentiment wherein pride enters for much, necessity for

not a little, and the love of ships the untiring servants of our hopes and our selfesteem for the best and

most genuine part. For the hundreds who have reviled the sea, beginning with Shakespeare in the line

down to the last obscure seadog of the "old model," having but few words and still fewer thoughts, there

could not be found, I believe, one sailor who has ever coupled a curse with the good or bad name of a ship. If

ever his profanity, provoked by the hardships of the sea, went so far as to touch his ship, it would be lightly,

The love that is given to ships is profoundly different from the love men feel for every other work of their

hands the love they bear to their houses, for instance because it is untainted by the pride of possession.

The pride of skill, the pride of responsibility, the pride of endurance there may be, but otherwise it is a

disinterested sentiment. No seaman ever cherished a ship, even if she belonged to him, merely because of the

profit she put in his pocket. No one, I think, ever did; for a shipowner, even of the best, has always been

outside the pale of that sentiment embracing in a feeling of intimate, equal fellowship the ship and the man,

backing each other against the implacable, if sometimes dissembled, hostility of their world of waters. The

sea this truth must be confessed has no generosity. No display of manly qualities courage, hardihood,

endurance, faithfulness has ever been known to touch its irresponsible consciousness of power. The ocean

has the conscienceless temper of a savage autocrat spoiled by much adulation. He cannot brook the slightest

appearance of defiance, and has remained the irreconcilable enemy of ships and men ever since ships and

men had the unheard of audacity to go afloat together in the face of his frown. From that day he has gone on

swallowing up fleets and men without his resentment being glutted by the number of victims by so many

wrecked ships and wrecked lives. Today, as ever, he is ready to beguile and betray, to smash and to drown

the incorrigible optimism of men who, backed by the fidelity of ships, are trying to wrest from him the

fortune of their house, the dominion of their world, or only a dole of food for their hunger. If not always in

the hot mood to smash, he is always stealthily ready for a drowning. The most amazing wonder of the deep is

I felt its dread for the first time in midAtlantic one day, many years ago, when we took off the crew of a

Danish brig homeward bound from the West Indies. A thin, silvery mist softened the calm and majestic

splendour of light without shadows seemed to render the sky less remote and the ocean less immense. It

was one of the days, when the might of the sea appears indeed lovable, like the nature of a strong man in

moments of quiet intimacy. At sunrise we had made out a black speck to the westward, apparently suspended

high up in the void behind a stirring, shimmering veil of silvery blue gauze that seemed at times to stir and

float in the breeze which fanned us slowly along. The peace of that enchanting forenoon was so profound, so

untroubled, that it seemed that every word pronounced loudly on our deck would penetrate to the very heart

of that infinite mystery born from the conjunction of water and sky. We did not raise our voices. "A

waterlogged derelict, I think, sir," said the second officer quietly, coming down from aloft with the

binoculars in their case slung across his shoulders; and our captain, without a word, signed to the helmsman

to steer for the black speck. Presently we made out a low, jagged stump sticking up forward all that

The captain was expatiating in a low conversational tone to the chief mate upon the danger of these derelicts,

and upon his dread of coming upon them at night, when suddenly a man forward screamed out, "There's

people on board of her, sir! I see them!" in a most extraordinary voice a voice never heard before in our

ship; the amazing voice of a stranger. It gave the signal for a sudden tumult of shouts. The watch below ran

up the forecastle head in a body, the cook dashed out of the galley. Everybody saw the poor fellows now.

They were there! And all at once our ship, which had the wellearned name of being without a rival for speed

in light winds, seemed to us to have lost the power of motion, as if the sea, becoming viscous, had clung to

her sides. And yet she moved. Immensity, the inseparable companion of a ship's life, chose that day to

breathe upon her as gently as a sleeping child. The clamour of our excitement had died out, and our living

ship, famous for never losing steerage way as long as there was air enough to float a feather, stole, without a

ripple, silent and white as a ghost, towards her mutilated and wounded sister, come upon at the point of death

With the binoculars glued to his eyes, the captain said in a quavering tone: "They are waving to us with

something aft there." He put down the glasses on the skylight brusquely, and began to walk about the poop.

"A shirt or a flag," he ejaculated irritably. "Can't make it out. . . Some damn rag or other!" He took a few

more turns on the poop, glancing down over the rail now and then to see how fast we were moving. His

nervous footsteps rang sharply in the quiet of the ship, where the other men, all looking the same way, had

forgotten themselves in a staring immobility. "This will never do!" he cried out suddenly. "Lower the boats at

Before I jumped into mine he took me aside, as being an inexperienced junior, for a word of warning:

"You look out as you come alongside that she doesn't take you down with her. You understand?"

He murmured this confidentially, so that none of the men at the falls should overhear, and I was shocked.

"Heavens! as if in such an emergency one stopped to think of danger!" I exclaimed to myself mentally, in

It takes many lessons to make a real seaman, and I got my rebuke at once. My experienced commander

"What you're going for is to save life, not to drown your boat's crew for nothing," he growled severely in my

ear. But as we shoved off he leaned over and cried out: "It all rests on the power of your arms, men. Give way

We made a race of it, and I would never have believed that a common boat's crew of a merchantman could

keep up so much determined fierceness in the regular swing of their stroke. What our captain had clearly

perceived before we left had become plain to all of us since. The issue of our enterprise hung on a hair above

that abyss of waters which will not give up its dead till the Day of Judgment. It was a race of two ship's boats

matched against Death for a prize of nine men's lives, and Death had a long start. We saw the crew of the brig

from afar working at the pumps still pumping on that wreck, which already had settled so far down that the

gentle, low swell, over which our boats rose and fell easily without a check to their speed, welling up almost

level with her headrails, plucked at the ends of broken gear swinging desolately under her naked bowsprit.

We could not, in all conscience, have picked out a better day for our regatta had we had the free choice of all

the days that ever dawned upon the lonely struggles and solitary agonies of ships since the Norse rovers first

steered to the westward against the run of Atlantic waves. It was a very good race. At the finish there was not

an oar's length between the first and second boat, with Death coming in a good third on the top of the very

next smooth swell, for all one knew to the contrary. The scuppers of the brig gurgled softly all together when

the water rising against her sides subsided sleepily with a low wash, as if playing about an immovable rock.

Her bulwarks were gone fore and aft, and one saw her bare deck lowlying like a raft and swept clean of

boats, spars, houses of everything except the ringbolts and the heads of the pumps. I had one dismal

glimpse of it as I braced myself up to receive upon my breast the last man to leave her, the captain, who

It had been a weirdly silent rescue a rescue without a hail, without a single uttered word, without a gesture

or a sign, without a conscious exchange of glances. Up to the very last moment those on board stuck to their

pumps, which spouted two clear streams of water upon their bare feet. Their brown skin showed through the

rents of their shirts; and the two small bunches of halfnaked, tattered men went on bowing from the waist to

each other in their backbreaking labour, up and down, absorbed, with no time for a glance over the shoulder

at the help that was coming to them. As we dashed, unregarded, alongside a voice let out one, only one

hoarse howl of command, and then, just as they stood, without caps, with the salt drying gray in the wrinkles

and folds of their hairy, haggard faces, blinking stupidly at us their red eyelids, they made a bolt away from

the handles, tottering and jostling against each other, and positively flung themselves over upon our very

heads. The clatter they made tumbling into the boats had an extraordinarily destructive effect upon the

illusion of tragic dignity our selfesteem had thrown over the contests of mankind with the sea. On that

exquisite day of gently breathing peace and veiled sunshine perished my romantic love to what men's

imagination had proclaimed the most august aspect of Nature. The cynical indifference of the sea to the

merits of human suffering and courage, laid bare in this ridiculous, panictainted performance extorted from

the dire extremity of nine good and honourable seamen, revolted me. I saw the duplicity of the sea's most

tender mood. It was so because it could not help itself, but the awed respect of the early days was gone. I felt

ready to smile bitterly at its enchanting charm and glare viciously at its furies. In a moment, before we shoved

off, I had looked coolly at the life of my choice. Its illusions were gone, but its fascination remained. I had

We pulled hard for a quarter of an hour, then laid on our oars waiting for our ship. She was coming down on

us with swelling sails, looking delicately tall and exquisitely noble through the mist. The captain of the brig,

who sat in the stern sheets by my side with his face in his hands, raised his head and began to speak with a

sort of sombre volubility. They had lost their masts and sprung a leak in a hurricane; drifted for weeks,

always at the pumps, met more bad weather; the ships they sighted failed to make them out, the leak gained

upon them slowly, and the seas had left them nothing to make a raft of. It was very hard to see ship after ship

pass by at a distance, "as if everybody had agreed that we must be left to drown," he added. But they went on

trying to keep the brig afloat as long as possible, and working the pumps constantly on insufficient food,

mostly raw, till "yesterday evening," he continued monotonously, "just as the sun went down, the men's

He made an almost imperceptible pause here, and went on again with exactly the same intonation:

"They told me the brig could not be saved, and they thought they had done enough for themselves. I said

nothing to that. It was true. It was no mutiny. I had nothing to say to them. They lay about aft all night, as still

as so many dead men. I did not lie down. I kept a lookout. When the first light came I saw your ship at once.

I waited for more light; the breeze began to fail on my face. Then I shouted out as loud as I was able, 'Look at

that ship!' but only two men got up very slowly and came to me. At first only we three stood alone, for a long

time, watching you coming down to us, and feeling the breeze drop to a calm almost; but afterwards others,

too, rose, one after another, and byandby I had all my crew behind me. I turned round and said to them that

they could see the ship was coming our way, but in this small breeze she might come too late after all, unless

we turned to and tried to keep the brig afloat long enough to give you time to save us all. I spoke like that to

He gave the command, and gave the example, too, by going himself to the handles, but it seems that these

men did actually hang back for a moment, looking at each other dubiously before they followed him. "He!

he! he!" He broke out into a most unexpected, imbecile, pathetic, nervous little giggle. "Their hearts were

broken so! They had been played with too long," he explained apologetically, lowering his eyes, and became

Twentyfive years is a long time a quarter of a century is a dim and distant past; but to this day I remember

the darkbrown feet, hands, and faces of two of these men whose hearts had been broken by the sea. They

were lying very still on their sides on the bottom boards between the thwarts, curled up like dogs. My boat's

crew, leaning over the looms of their oars, stared and listened as if at the play. The master of the brig looked

They had lost the date. When I told him it was Sunday, the 22nd, he frowned, making some mental

His aspect was miserably unkempt and wildly sorrowful. Had it not been for the unquenchable candour of his

blue eyes, whose unhappy, tired glance every moment sought his abandoned, sinking brig, as if it could find

rest nowhere else, he would have appeared mad. But he was too simple to go mad, too simple with that manly

simplicity which alone can bear men unscathed in mind and body through an encounter with the deadly

Neither angry, nor playful, nor smiling, it enveloped our distant ship growing bigger as she neared us, our

boats with the rescued men and the dismantled hull of the brig we were leaving behind, in the large and

placid embrace of its quietness, half lost in the fair haze, as if in a dream of infinite and tender clemency.

There was no frown, no wrinkle on its face, not a ripple. And the run of the slight swell was so smooth that it

resembled the graceful undulation of a piece of shimmering gray silk shot with gleams of green. We pulled an

easy stroke; but when the master of the brig, after a glance over his shoulder, stood up with a low

exclamation, my men feathered their oars instinctively, without an order, and the boat lost her way.

He was steadying himself on my shoulder with a strong grip, while his other arm, flung up rigidly, pointed a

denunciatory finger at the immense tranquillity of the ocean. After his first exclamation, which stopped the

swing of our oars, he made no sound, but his whole attitude seemed to cry out an indignant "Behold!" . . . I

could not imagine what vision of evil had come to him. I was startled, and the amazing energy of his

immobilized gesture made my heart beat faster with the anticipation of something monstrous and

For a moment the succession of silky undulations ran on innocently. I saw each of them swell up the misty

line of the horizon, far, far away beyond the derelict brig, and the next moment, with a slight friendly toss of

our boat, it had passed under us and was gone. The lulling cadence of the rise and fall, the invariable

gentleness of this irresistible force, the great charm of the deep waters, warmed my breast deliciously, like the

subtle poison of a love potion. But all this lasted only a few soothing seconds before I jumped up too,

Something startling, mysterious, hastily confused, was taking place. I watched it with incredulous and

fascinated awe, as one watches the confused, swift movements of some deed of violence done in the dark. As

if at a given signal, the run of the smooth undulations seemed checked suddenly around the brig. By a strange

optical delusion the whole sea appeared to rise upon her in one overwhelming heave of its silky surface,

where in one spot a smother of foam broke out ferociously. And then the effort subsided. It was all over, and

the smooth swell ran on as before from the horizon in uninterrupted cadence of motion, passing under us with

a slight friendly toss of our boat. Far away, where the brig had been, an angry white stain undulating on the

surface of steelygray waters, shot with gleams of green, diminished swiftly, without a hiss, like a patch of

pure snow melting in the sun. And the great stillness after this initiation into the sea's implacable hate seemed

"Gone!" ejaculated from the depths of his chest my bowman in a final tone. He spat in his hands, and took a

better grip on his oar. The captain of the brig lowered his rigid arm slowly, and looked at our faces in a

solemnly conscious silence, which called upon us to share in his simpleminded, marvelling awe. All at once

he sat down by my side, and leaned forward earnestly at my boat's crew, who, swinging together in a long,

"No ship could have done so well," he addressed them firmly, after a moment of strained silence, during

which he seemed with trembling lips to seek for words fit to bear such high testimony. "She was small, but

she was good. I had no anxiety. She was strong. Last voyage I had my wife and two children in her. No other

ship could have stood so long the weather she had to live through for days and days before we got dismasted

a fortnight ago. She was fairly worn out, and that's all. You may believe me. She lasted under us for days and

days, but she could not last for ever. It was long enough. I am glad it is over. No better ship was ever left to

He was competent to pronounce the funereal oration of a ship, this son of ancient seafolk, whose national

existence, so little stained by the excesses of manly virtues, had demanded nothing but the merest foothold

from the earth. By the merits of his seawise forefathers and by the artlessness of his heart, he was made fit

to deliver this excellent discourse. There was nothing wanting in its orderly arrangement neither piety nor

faith, nor the tribute of praise due to the worthy dead, with the edifying recital of their achievement. She had

lived, he had loved her; she had suffered, and he was glad she was at rest. It was an excellent discourse. And

it was orthodox, too, in its fidelity to the cardinal article of a seaman's faith, of which it was a singleminded

confession. "Ships are all right." They are. They who live with the sea have got to hold by that creed first and

last; and it came to me, as I glanced at him sideways, that some men were not altogether unworthy in honour

and conscience to pronounce the funereal eulogium of a ship's constancy in life and death.

After this, sitting by my side with his looselyclasped hands hanging between his knees, he uttered no word,

made no movement till the shadow of our ship's sails fell on the boat, when, at the loud cheer greeting the

return of the victors with their prize, he lifted up his troubled face with a faint smile of pathetic indulgence.

This smile of the worthy descendant of the most ancient seafolk whose audacity and hardihood had left no

trace of greatness and glory upon the waters, completed the cycle of my initiation. There was an infinite

depth of hereditary wisdom in its pitying sadness. It made the hearty bursts of cheering sound like a childish

noise of triumph. Our crew shouted with immense confidence honest souls! As if anybody could ever make

sure of having prevailed against the sea, which has betrayed so many ships of great "name," so many proud

As I brought the boat under the falls my captain, in high good humour, leaned over, spreading his red and

freckled elbows on the rail, and called down to me sarcastically, out of the depths of his cynic philosopher's

Sarcasm was "his way," and the most that can be said for it is that it was natural. This did not make it lovable.

But it is decorous and expedient to fall in with one's commander's way. "Yes. I brought the boat back all

right, sir," I answered. And the good man believed me. It was not for him to discern upon me the marks of my

recent initiation. And yet I was not exactly the same youngster who had taken the boat away all impatience

Already I looked with other eyes upon the sea. I knew it capable of betraying the generous ardour of youth as

implacably as, indifferent to evil and good, it would have betrayed the basest greed or the noblest heroism.

My conception of its magnanimous greatness was gone. And I looked upon the true sea the sea that plays

with men till their hearts are broken, and wears stout ships to death. Nothing can touch the brooding

bitterness of its heart. Open to all and faithful to none, it exercises its fascination for the undoing of the best.

To love it is not well. It knows no bond of plighted troth, no fidelity to misfortune, to long companionship, to

long devotion. The promise it holds out perpetually is very great; but the only secret of its possession is

strength, strength the jealous, sleepless strength of a man guarding a coveted treasure within his gates.

The cradle of oversea traffic and of the art of naval combats, the Mediterranean, apart from all the

associations of adventure and glory, the common heritage of all mankind, makes a tender appeal to a seaman.

It has sheltered the infancy of his craft. He looks upon it as a man may look at a vast nursery in an old, old

mansion where innumerable generations of his own people have learned to walk. I say his own people

because, in a sense, all sailors belong to one family: all are descended from that adventurous and shaggy

ancestor who, bestriding a shapeless log and paddling with a crooked branch, accomplished the first

coastingtrip in a sheltered bay ringing with the admiring howls of his tribe. It is a matter of regret that all

those brothers in craft and feeling, whose generations have learned to walk a ship's deck in that nursery, have

been also more than once fiercely engaged in cutting each other's throats there. But life, apparently, has such

exigencies. Without human propensity to murder and other sorts of unrighteousness there would have been

no historical heroism. It is a consoling reflection. And then, if one examines impartially the deeds of violence,

they appear of but small consequence. From Salamis to Actium, through Lepanto and the Nile to the naval

massacre of Navarino, not to mention other armed encounters of lesser interest, all the blood heroically spilt

into the Mediterranean has not stained with a single trail of purple the deep azure of its classic waters.

Of course, it may be argued that battles have shaped the destiny of mankind. The question whether they have

shaped it well would remain open, however. But it would be hardly worth discussing. It is very probable that,

had the Battle of Salamis never been fought, the face of the world would have been much as we behold it

now, fashioned by the mediocre inspiration and the shortsighted labours of men. From a long and miserable

experience of suffering, injustice, disgrace and aggression the nations of the earth are mostly swayed by fear

fear of the sort that a little cheap oratory turns easily to rage, hate, and violence. Innocent, guileless fear has

been the cause of many wars. Not, of course, the fear of war itself, which, in the evolution of sentiments and

ideas, has come to be regarded at last as a halfmystic and glorious ceremony with certain fashionable rites

and preliminary incantations, wherein the conception of its true nature has been lost. To apprehend the true

aspect, force, and morality of war as a natural function of mankind one requires a feather in the hair and a

ring in the nose, or, better still, teeth filed to a point and a tattooed breast. Unfortunately, a return to such

simple ornamentation is impossible. We are bound to the chariot of progress. There is no going back; and, as

bad luck would have it, our civilization, which has done so much for the comfort and adornment of our

bodies and the elevation of our minds, has made lawful killing frightfully and needlessly expensive.

The whole question of improved armaments has been approached by the governments of the earth in a spirit

of nervous and unreflecting haste, whereas the right way was lying plainly before them, and had only to be

pursued with calm determination. The learned vigils and labours of a certain class of inventors should have

been rewarded with honourable liberality as justice demanded; and the bodies of the inventors should have

been blown to pieces by means of their own perfected explosives and improved weapons with extreme

publicity as the commonest prudence dictated. By this method the ardour of research in that direction would

have been restrained without infringing the sacred privileges of science. For the lack of a little cool thinking

in our guides and masters this course has not been followed, and a beautiful simplicity has been sacrificed for

no real advantage. A frugal mind cannot defend itself from considerable bitterness when reflecting that at the

Battle of Actium (which was fought for no less a stake than the dominion of the world) the fleet of

Octavianus Caesar and the fleet of Antonius, including the Egyptian division and Cleopatra's galley with

purple sails, probably cost less than two modern battleships, or, as the modern naval bookjargon has it, two

capital units. But no amount of lubberly bookjargon can disguise a fact well calculated to afflict the soul of

every sound economist. It is not likely that the Mediterranean will ever behold a battle with a greater issue;

but when the time comes for another historical fight its bottom will be enriched as never before by a quantity

of jagged scrapiron, paid for at pretty nearly its weight of gold by the deluded populations inhabiting the

Happy he who, like Ulysses, has made an adventurous voyage; and there is no such sea for adventurous

voyages as the Mediterranean the inland sea which the ancients looked upon as so vast and so full of

wonders. And, indeed, it was terrible and wonderful; for it is we alone who, swayed by the audacity of our

minds and the tremors of our hearts, are the sole artisans of all the wonder and romance of the world.

It was for the Mediterranean sailors that fairhaired sirens sang among the black rocks seething in white

foam and mysterious voices spoke in the darkness above the moving wave voices menacing, seductive, or

prophetic, like that voice heard at the beginning of the Christian era by the master of an African vessel in the

Gulf of Syrta, whose calm nights are full of strange murmurs and flitting shadows. It called him by name,

bidding him go and tell all men that the great god Pan was dead. But the great legend of the Mediterranean,

the legend of traditional song and grave history, lives, fascinating and immortal, in our minds.

The dark and fearful sea of the subtle Ulysses' wanderings, agitated by the wrath of Olympian gods,

harbouring on its isles the fury of strange monsters and the wiles of strange women; the highway of heroes

and sages, of warriors, pirates, and saints; the workaday sea of Carthaginian merchants and the pleasure lake

of the Roman Caesars, claims the veneration of every seaman as the historical home of that spirit of open

defiance against the great waters of the earth which is the very soul of his calling. Issuing thence to the west

and south, as a youth leaves the shelter of his parental house, this spirit found the way to the Indies,

discovered the coasts of a new continent, and traversed at last the immensity of the great Pacific, rich in

The first impulse of navigation took its visible form in that tideless basin freed from hidden shoals and

treacherous currents, as if in tender regard for the infancy of the art. The steep shores of the Mediterranean

favoured the beginners in one of humanity's most daring enterprises, and the enchanting inland sea of classic

adventure has led mankind gently from headland to headland, from bay to bay, from island to island, out into

The charm of the Mediterranean dwells in the unforgettable flavour of my early days, and to this hour this

sea, upon which the Romans alone ruled without dispute, has kept for me the fascination of youthful

romance. The very first Christmas night I ever spent away from land was employed in running before a Gulf

of Lions gale, which made the old ship groan in every timber as she skipped before it over the short seas until

we brought her to, battered and out of breath, under the lee of Majorca, where the smooth water was torn by

We or, rather, they, for I had hardly had two glimpses of salt water in my life till then kept her standing

off and on all that day, while I listened for the first time with the curiosity of my tender years to the song of

the wind in a ship's rigging. The monotonous and vibrating note was destined to grow into the intimacy of the

heart, pass into blood and bone, accompany the thoughts and acts of two full decades, remain to haunt like a

reproach the peace of the quiet fireside, and enter into the very texture of respectable dreams dreamed safely

under a roof of rafters and tiles. The wind was fair, but that day we ran no more.

The thing (I will not call her a ship twice in the same halfhour) leaked. She leaked fully, generously,

overflowingly, all over like a basket. I took an enthusiastic part in the excitement caused by that last

infirmity of noble ships, without concerning myself much with the why or the wherefore. The surmise of my

maturer years is that, bored by her interminable life, the venerable antiquity was simply yawning with ennui

at every seam. But at the time I did not know; I knew generally very little, and least of all what I was doing in

I remember that, exactly as in the comedy of Moliere, my uncle asked the precise question in the very words

not of my confidential valet, however, but across great distances of land, in a letter whose mocking but

indulgent turn ill concealed his almost paternal anxiety. I fancy I tried to convey to him my (utterly

unfounded) impression that the West Indies awaited my coming. I had to go there. It was a sort of mystic

conviction something in the nature of a call. But it was difficult to state intelligibly the grounds of this

The truth must have been that, all unversed in the arts of the wily Greek, the deceiver of gods, the lover of

strange women, the evoker of bloodthirsty shades, I yet longed for the beginning of my own obscure

Odyssey, which, as was proper for a modern, should unroll its wonders and terrors beyond the Pillars of

Hercules. The disdainful ocean did not open wide to swallow up my audacity, though the ship, the ridiculous

and ancient GALERE of my folly, the old, weary, disenchanted sugarwaggon, seemed extremely disposed

to open out and swallow up as much salt water as she could hold. This, if less grandiose, would have been as

But no catastrophe occurred. I lived to watch on a strange shore a black and youthful Nausicaa, with a joyous

train of attendant maidens, carrying baskets of linen to a clear stream overhung by the heads of slender

palmtrees. The vivid colours of their draped raiment and the gold of their earrings invested with a barbaric

and regal magnificence their figures, stepping out freely in a shower of broken sunshine. The whiteness of

their teeth was still more dazzling than the splendour of jewels at their ears. The shaded side of the ravine

gleamed with their smiles. They were as unabashed as so many princesses, but, alas! not one of them was the

daughter of a jetblack sovereign. Such was my abominable luck in being born by the mere hair's breadth of

twentyfive centuries too late into a world where kings have been growing scarce with scandalous rapidity,

while the few who remain have adopted the uninteresting manners and customs of simple millionaires.

Obviously it was a vain hope in 187 to see the ladies of a royal household walk in chequered sunshine, with

baskets of linen on their heads, to the banks of a clear stream overhung by the starry fronds of palmtrees. It

was a vain hope. If I did not ask myself whether, limited by such discouraging impossibilities, life were still

worth living, it was only because I had then before me several other pressing questions, some of which have

remained unanswered to this day. The resonant, laughing voices of these gorgeous maidens scared away the

multitude of hummingbirds, whose delicate wings wreathed with the mist of their vibration the tops of

No, they were not princesses. Their unrestrained laughter filling the hot, fernclad ravine had a soulless

limpidity, as of wild, inhuman dwellers in tropical woodlands. Following the example of certain prudent

travellers, I withdrew unseen and returned, not much wiser, to the Mediterranean, the sea of classic

It was written that there, in the nursery of our navigating ancestors, I should learn to walk in the ways of my

craft and grow in the love of the sea, blind as young love often is, but absorbing and disinterested as all true

love must be. I demanded nothing from it not even adventure. In this I showed, perhaps, more intuitive

wisdom than high selfdenial. No adventure ever came to one for the asking. He who starts on a deliberate

quest of adventure goes forth but to gather deadsea fruit, unless, indeed, he be beloved of the gods and great

amongst heroes, like that most excellent cavalier Don Quixote de la Mancha. By us ordinary mortals of a

mediocre animus that is only too anxious to pass by wicked giants for so many honest windmills, adventures

are entertained like visiting angels. They come upon our complacency unawares. As unbidden guests are apt

to do, they often come at inconvenient times. And we are glad to let them go unrecognised, without any

acknowledgment of so high a favour. After many years, on looking back from the middle turn of life's way at

the events of the past, which, like a friendly crowd, seem to gaze sadly after us hastening towards the

Cimmerian shore, we may see here and there, in the gray throng, some figure glowing with a faint radiance,

as though it had caught all the light of our already crepuscular sky. And by this glow we may recognise the

faces of our true adventures, of the once unbidden guests entertained unawares in our young days.

If the Mediterranean, the venerable (and sometimes atrociously ill tempered) nurse of all navigators, was to

rock my youth, the providing of the cradle necessary for that operation was entrusted by Fate to the most

casual assemblage of irresponsible young men (all, however, older than myself) that, as if drunk with

Provencal sunshine, frittered life away in joyous levity on the model of Balzac's "Histoire des Treize"

She who was my cradle in those years had been built on the River of Savona by a famous builder of boats,

was rigged in Corsica by another good man, and was described on her papers as a 'tartane' of sixty tons. In

reality, she was a true balancelle, with two short masts raking forward and two curved yards, each as long as

her hull; a true child of the Latin lake, with a spread of two enormous sails resembling the pointed wings on a

seabird's slender body, and herself, like a bird indeed, skimming rather than sailing the seas.

Her name was the Tremolino. How is this to be translated? The Quiverer? What a name to give the pluckiest

little craft that ever dipped her sides in angry foam! I had felt her, it is true, trembling for nights and days

together under my feet, but it was with the highstrung tenseness of her faithful courage. In her short, but

brilliant, career she has taught me nothing, but she has given me everything. I owe to her the awakened love

for the sea that, with the quivering of her swift little body and the humming of the wind under the foot of her

lateen sails, stole into my heart with a sort of gentle violence, and brought my imagination under its despotic

sway. The Tremolino! To this day I cannot utter or even write that name without a strange tightening of the

breast and the gasp of mingled delight and dread of one's first passionate experience.

We four formed (to use a term well understood nowadays in every social sphere) a "syndicate" owning the

Tremolino: an international and astonishing syndicate. And we were all ardent Royalists of the snowwhite

Legitimist complexion Heaven only knows why! In all associations of men there is generally one who, by

the authority of age and of a more experienced wisdom, imparts a collective character to the whole set. If I

mention that the oldest of us was very old, extremely old nearly thirty years old and that he used to

declare with gallant carelessness, "I live by my sword," I think I have given enough information on the score

of our collective wisdom. He was a North Carolinian gentleman, J. M. K. B. were the initials of his name, and

he really did live by the sword, as far as I know. He died by it, too, later on, in a Balkanian squabble, in the

cause of some Serbs or else Bulgarians, who were neither Catholics nor gentlemen at least, not in the

Poor J. M. K. B., AMERICAIN, CATHOLIQUE, ET GENTILHOMME, as he was disposed to describe

himself in moments of lofty expansion! Are there still to be found in Europe gentlemen keen of face and

elegantly slight of body, of distinguished aspect, with a fascinating drawingroom manner and with a dark,

fatal glance, who live by their swords, I wonder? His family had been ruined in the Civil War, I fancy, and

seems for a decade or so to have led a wandering life in the Old World. As to Henry C, the next in age and

wisdom of our band, he had broken loose from the unyielding rigidity of his family, solidly rooted, if I

remember rightly, in a welltodo London suburb. On their respectable authority he introduced himself

meekly to strangers as a "black sheep." I have never seen a more guileless specimen of an outcast. Never.

However, his people had the grace to send him a little money now and then. Enamoured of the South, of

Provence, of its people, its life, its sunshine and its poetry, narrowchested, tall and short sighted, he strode

along the streets and the lanes, his long feet projecting far in advance of his body, and his white nose and

gingery moustache buried in an open book: for he had the habit of reading as he walked. How he avoided

falling into precipices, off the quays, or down staircases is a great mystery. The sides of his overcoat bulged

out with pocket editions of various poets. When not engaged in reading Virgil, Homer, or Mistral, in parks,

restaurants, streets, and suchlike public places, he indited sonnets (in French) to the eyes, ears, chin, hair, and

other visible perfections of a nymph called Therese, the daughter, honesty compels me to state, of a certain

Madame Leonore who kept a small cafe for sailors in one of the narrowest streets of the old town.

No more charming face, clearcut like an antique gem, and delicate in colouring like the petal of a flower,

had ever been set on, alas! a somewhat squat body. He read his verses aloud to her in the very cafe with the

innocence of a little child and the vanity of a poet. We followed him there willingly enough, if only to watch

the divine Therese laugh, under the vigilant black eyes of Madame Leonore, her mother. She laughed very

prettily, not so much at the sonnets, which she could not but esteem, as at poor Henry's French accent, which

was unique, resembling the warbling of birds, if birds ever warbled with a stuttering, nasal intonation.

Our third partner was Roger P. de la S, the most Scandinavian looking of Provencal squires, fair, and six

feet high, as became a descendant of searoving Northmen, authoritative, incisive, wittily scornful, with a

comedy in three acts in his pocket, and in his breast a heart blighted by a hopeless passion for his beautiful

cousin, married to a wealthy hide and tallow merchant. He used to take us to lunch at their house without

ceremony. I admired the good lady's sweet patience. The husband was a conciliatory soul, with a great fund

of resignation, which he expended on "Roger's friends." I suspect he was secretly horrified at these invasions.

But it was a Carlist salon, and as such we were made welcome. The possibility of raising Catalonia in the

interest of the REY NETTO, who had just then crossed the Pyrenees, was much discussed there.

Don Carlos, no doubt, must have had many queer friends (it is the common lot of all Pretenders), but amongst

them none more extravagantly fantastic than the Tremolino Syndicate, which used to meet in a tavern on the

quays of the old port. The antique city of Massilia had surely never, since the days of the earliest Phoenicians,

known an odder set of shipowners. We met to discuss and settle the plan of operations for each voyage of

the Tremolino. In these operations a bankinghouse, too, was concerned a very respectable bankinghouse.

But I am afraid I shall end by saying too much. Ladies, too, were concerned (I am really afraid I am saying

too much) all sorts of ladies, some old enough to know better than to put their trust in princes, others young

One of these last was extremely amusing in the imitations, she gave us in confidence, of various

highlyplaced personages she was perpetually rushing off to Paris to interview in the interests of the cause

POR EL REY! For she was a Carlist, and of Basque blood at that, with something of a lioness in the

expression of her courageous face (especially when she let her hair down), and with the volatile little soul of

a sparrow dressed in fine Parisian feathers, which had the trick of coming off disconcertingly at unexpected

But her imitations of a Parisian personage, very highly placed indeed, as she represented him standing in the

corner of a room with his face to the wall, rubbing the back of his head and moaning helplessly, "Rita, you

are the death of me!" were enough to make one (if young and free from cares) split one's sides laughing. She

had an uncle still living, a very effective Carlist, too, the priest of a little mountain parish in Guipuzcoa. As

the seagoing member of the syndicate (whose plans depended greatly on Dona Rita's information), I used to

be charged with humbly affectionate messages for the old man. These messages I was supposed to deliver to

the Arragonese muleteers (who were sure to await at certain times the Tremolino in the neighbourhood of the

Gulf of Rosas), for faithful transportation inland, together with the various unlawful goods landed secretly

Well, now, I have really let out too much (as I feared I should in the end) as to the usual contents of my

seacradle. But let it stand. And if anybody remarks cynically that I must have been a promising infant in

those days, let that stand, too. I am concerned but for the good name of the Tremolino, and I affirm that a ship

It was not Tremolino's fault that the syndicate depended so much on the wit and wisdom and the information

of Dona Rita. She had taken a little furnished house on the Prado for the good of the cause POR EL REY!

She was always taking little houses for somebody's good, for the sick or the sorry, for brokendown artists,

cleaned out gamblers, temporarily unlucky speculators VIEUX AMIS old friends, as she used to explain

Whether Don Carlos was one of the "old friends," too, it's hard to say. More unlikely things have been heard

of in smokingrooms. All I know is that one evening, entering incautiously the salon of the little house just

after the news of a considerable Carlist success had reached the faithful, I was seized round the neck and

waist and whirled recklessly three times round the room, to the crash of upsetting furniture and the humming

When released from the dizzy embrace, I sat down on the carpet suddenly, without affectation. In this

unpretentious attitude I became aware that J. M. K. B. had followed me into the room, elegant, fatal, correct

and severe in a white tie and large shirt front. In answer to his politely sinister, prolonged glance of inquiry,

I overheard Dona Rita murmuring, with some confusion and annoyance, "VOUS ETES BETE MON CHER.

VOYONS! CA N'A AUCUNE CONSEQUENCE." Well content in this case to be of no particular

Rearranging my collar, which, truth to say, ought to have been a round one above a short jacket, but was not,

I observed felicitously that I had come to say goodbye, being ready to go off to sea that very night with the

Tremolino. Our hostess, slightly panting yet, and just a shade dishevelled, turned tartly upon J. M. K. B.,

desiring to know when HE would be ready to go off by the Tremolino, or in any other way, in order to join

the royal headquarters. Did he intend, she asked ironically, to wait for the very eve of the entry into Madrid?

Thus by a judicious exercise of tact and asperity we reestablished the atmospheric equilibrium of the room

long before I left them a little before midnight, now tenderly reconciled, to walk down to the harbour and hail

the Tremolino by the usual soft whistle from the edge of the quay. It was our signal, invariably heard by the

He would raise a lantern silently to light my steps along the narrow, springy plank of our primitive gangway.

"And so we are going off," he would murmur directly my foot touched the deck. I was the harbinger of

sudden departures, but there was nothing in the world sudden enough to take Dominic unawares. His thick

black moustaches, curled every morning with hot tongs by the barber at the corner of the quay, seemed to

hide a perpetual smile. But nobody, I believe, had ever seen the true shape of his lips. From the slow,

imperturbable gravity of that broadchested man you would think he had never smiled in his life. In his eyes

lurked a look of perfectly remorseless irony, as though he had been provided with an extremely experienced

soul; and the slightest distension of his nostrils would give to his bronzed face a look of extraordinary

boldness. This was the only play of feature of which he seemed capable, being a Southerner of a

concentrated, deliberate type. His ebony hair curled slightly on the temples. He may have been forty years

Astute and ruthless, he could have rivalled in resource the unfortunate son of Laertes and Anticlea. If he did

not pit his craft and audacity against the very gods, it is only because the Olympian gods are dead. Certainly

no woman could frighten him. A oneeyed giant would not have had the ghost of a chance against Dominic

Cervoni, of Corsica, not Ithaca; and no king, son of kings, but of very respectable family authentic

Caporali, he affirmed. But that is as it may be. The Caporali families date back to the twelfth century.

For want of more exalted adversaries Dominic turned his audacity fertile in impious stratagems against the

powers of the earth, as represented by the institution of Customhouses and every mortal belonging thereto

scribes, officers, and guardacostas afloat and ashore. He was the very man for us, this modern and unlawful

wanderer with his own legend of loves, dangers, and bloodshed. He told us bits of it sometimes in measured,

ironic tones. He spoke Catalonian, the Italian of Corsica and the French of Provence with the same easy

naturalness. Dressed in shoretogs, a white starched shirt, black jacket, and round hat, as I took him once to

see Dona Rita, he was extremely presentable. He could make himself interesting by a tactful and rugged

reserve set off by a grim, almost imperceptible, playfulness of tone and manner.

He had the physical assurance of stronghearted men. After half an hour's interview in the diningroom,

during which they got in touch with each other in an amazing way, Rita told us in her best GRANDE DAME

manner: "MAIS IL ESI PARFAIT, CET HOMME." He was perfect. On board the Tremolino, wrapped up in

a black CABAN, the picturesque cloak of Mediterranean seamen, with those massive moustaches and his

remorseless eyes set off by the shadow of the deep hood, he looked piratical and monkish and darkly initiated

Anyway, he was perfect, as Dona Rita had declared. The only thing unsatisfactory (and even inexplicable)

about our Dominic was his nephew, Cesar. It was startling to see a desolate expression of shame veil the

remorseless audacity in the eyes of that man superior to all scruples and terrors.

"I would never have dared to bring him on board your balancelle," he once apologized to me. "But what am I

In this way I learned that our Dominic had a brother. As to "going into the bush," this only means that a man

has done his duty successfully in the pursuit of a hereditary vendetta. The feud which had existed for ages

between the families of Cervoni and Brunaschi was so old that it seemed to have smouldered out at last. One

evening Pietro Brunaschi, after a laborious day amongst his olivetrees, sat on a chair against the wall of his

house with a bowl of broth on his knees and a piece of bread in his hand. Dominic's brother, going home with

a gun on his shoulder, found a sudden offence in this picture of content and rest so obviously calculated to

awaken the feelings of hatred and revenge. He and Pietro had never had any personal quarrel; but, as

Dominic explained, "all our dead cried out to him." He shouted from behind a wall of stones, "O Pietro!

Behold what is coming!" And as the other looked up innocently he took aim at the forehead and squared the

old vendetta account so neatly that, according to Dominic, the dead man continued to sit with the bowl of

This is why because in Corsica your dead will not leave you alone Dominic's brother had to go into the

MAQUIS, into the bush on the wild mountainside, to dodge the gendarmes for the insignificant remainder

of his life, and Dominic had charge of his nephew with a mission to make a man of him.

No more unpromising undertaking could be imagined. The very material for the task seemed wanting. The

Cervonis, if not handsome men, were good sturdy flesh and blood. But this extraordinarily lean and livid

"Some cursed witch must have stolen my brother's child from the cradle and put that spawn of a starved devil

To look at Cesar was not pleasant. His parchment skin, showing dead white on his cranium through the thin

wisps of dirty brown hair, seemed to be glued directly and tightly upon his big bones, Without being in any

way deformed, he was the nearest approach which I have ever seen or could imagine to what is commonly

understood by the word "monster." That the source of the effect produced was really moral I have no doubt.

An utterly, hopelessly depraved nature was expressed in physical terms, that taken each separately had

nothing positively startling. You imagined him clammily cold to the touch, like a snake. The slightest

reproof, the most mild and justifiable remonstrance, would be met by a resentful glare and an evil shrinking

of his thin dry upper lip, a snarl of hate to which he generally added the agreeable sound of grinding teeth.

It was for this venomous performance rather than for his lies, impudence, and laziness that his uncle used to

knock him down. It must not be imagined that it was anything in the nature of a brutal assault. Dominic's

brawny arm would be seen describing deliberately an ample horizontal gesture, a dignified sweep, and Cesar

would go over suddenly like a ninepin which was funny to see. But, once down, he would writhe on the

deck, gnashing his teeth in impotent rage which was pretty horrible to behold. And it also happened more

than once that he would disappear completely which was startling to observe. This is the exact truth. Before

some of these majestic cuffs Cesar would go down and vanish. He would vanish heels overhead into open

hatchways, into scuttles, behind upended casks, according to the place where he happened to come into

Once it was in the old harbour, just before the Tremolino's last voyage he vanished thus overboard to my

infinite consternation. Dominic and I had been talking business together aft, and Cesar had sneaked up behind

us to listen, for, amongst his other perfections, he was a consummate eavesdropper and spy. At the sound of

the heavy plop alongside horror held me rooted to the spot; but Dominic stepped quietly to the rail and leaned

"Ohe, Cesar!" he yelled contemptuously to the spluttering wretch. "Catch hold of that mooring hawser

"Canallia! Let him hang there," was his answer. And he went on talking over the business in hand calmly,

while I tried vainly to dismiss from my mind the picture of Cesar steeped to the chin in the water of the old

harbour, a decoction of centuries of marine refuse. I tried to dismiss it, because the mere notion of that liquid

made me feel very sick. Presently Dominic, hailing an idle boatman, directed him to go and fish his nephew

out; and byandby Cesar appeared walking on board from the quay, shivering, streaming with filthy water,

with bits of rotten straws in his hair and a piece of dirty orangepeel stranded on his shoulder. His teeth

chattered; his yellow eyes squinted balefully at us as he passed forward. I thought it my duty to remonstrate.

"Why are you always knocking him about, Dominic?" I asked. Indeed, I felt convinced it was no earthly good

I restrained the obvious retort that in this way he ran the risk of making, in the words of the immortal Mr.

"He wants to be a locksmith!" burst out Cervoni. "To learn how to pick locks, I suppose," he added with

"Who would teach him?" he cried. "Where could I leave him?" he asked, with a drop in his voice; and I had

my first glimpse of genuine despair. "He steals, you know, alas! PAR TA MADONNE! I believe he would

He raised his face and both his clenched fists slowly to heaven. However, Cesar never dropped poison into

This voyage, of which the details need not be given, we had to range far afield for sufficient reasons. Coming

up from the South to end it with the important and really dangerous part of the scheme in hand, we found it

necessary to look into Barcelona for certain definite information. This appears like running one's head into

the very jaws of the lion, but in reality it was not so. We had one or two high, influential friends there, and

many others humble but valuable because bought for good hard cash. We were in no danger of being

molested; indeed, the important information reached us promptly by the hands of a Customhouse officer,

who came on board full of showy zeal to poke an iron rod into the layer of oranges which made the visible

I forgot to mention before that the Tremolino was officially known as a fruit and corkwood trader. The

zealous officer managed to slip a useful piece of paper into Dominic's hand as he went ashore, and a few

hours afterwards, being off duty, he returned on board again athirst for drinks and gratitude. He got both as a

matter of course. While he sat sipping his liqueur in the tiny cabin, Dominic plied him with questions as to

the whereabouts of the guardacostas. The preventive service afloat was really the one for us to reckon with,

and it was material for our success and safety to know the exact position of the patrol craft in the

neighbourhood. The news could not have been more favourable. The officer mentioned a small place on the

coast some twelve miles off, where, unsuspicious and unready, she was lying at anchor, with her sails unbent,

painting yards and scraping spars. Then he left us after the usual compliments, smirking reassurringly over

I had kept below pretty close all day from excess of prudence. The stake played on that trip was big.

"We are ready to go at once, but for Cesar, who has been missing ever since breakfast," announced Dominic

Where the fellow had gone, and why, we could not imagine. The usual surmises in the case of a missing

seaman did not apply to Cesar's absence. He was too odious for love, friendship, gambling, or even casual

Dominic went ashore to look for him, but returned at the end of two hours alone and very angry, as I could

see by the token of the invisible smile under his moustache being intensified. We wondered what had become

of the wretch, and made a hurried investigation amongst our portable property. He had stolen nothing.

Cesar had only his shirt and trousers on. He had sold his coat, apparently for pocketmoney.

"You knave!" was all Dominic said, with a terrible softness of voice. He restrained his choler for a time.

Nothing would induce Cesar to answer that question. It was as if he even disdained to lie. He faced us,

drawing back his lips and gnashing his teeth, and did not shrink an inch before the sweep of Dominic's arm.

He went down as if shot, of course. But this time I noticed that, when picking himself up, he remained longer

than usual on all fours, baring his big teeth over his shoulder and glaring upwards at his uncle with a new sort

of hate in his round, yellow eyes. That permanent sentiment seemed pointed at that moment by especial

malice and curiosity. I became quite interested. If he ever manages to put poison in the dishes, I thought to

myself, this is how he will look at us as we sit at our meal. But I did not, of course, believe for a moment that

he would ever put poison in our food. He ate the same things himself. Moreover, he had no poison. And I

could not imagine a human being so blinded by cupidity as to sell poison to such an atrocious creature.

We slipped out to sea quietly at dusk, and all through the night everything went well. The breeze was gusty; a

southerly blow was making up. It was fair wind for our course. Now and then Dominic slowly and

rhythmically struck his hands together a few times, as if applauding the performance of the Tremolino. The

balancelle hummed and quivered as she flew along, dancing lightly under our feet.

At daybreak I pointed out to Dominic, amongst the several sail in view running before the gathering storm,

one particular vessel. The press of canvas she carried made her loom up high, endon, like a gray column

The Padrone made no remark, but, wrapping his black cloak close about him, stood up to look. His

weathertanned face, framed in the hood, had an aspect of authority and challenging force, with the deepset

eyes gazing far away fixedly, without a wink, like the intent, merciless, steady eyes of a seabird.

"CHI VA PIANO VA SANO," he remarked at last, with a derisive glance over the side, in ironic allusion to

The Tremolino was doing her best, and seemed to hardly touch the great burst of foam over which she darted.

I crouched down again to get some shelter from the low bulwark. After more than half an hour of swaying

immobility expressing a concentrated, breathless watchfulness, Dominic sank on the deck by my side. Within

the monkish cowl his eyes gleamed with a fierce expression which surprised me. All he said was:

The perpetual suggestion of a smile under Dominic's piratical moustaches seemed to become more

accentuated quite real, grim, actually almost visible through the wet and uncurled hair. Judging by that

symptom, he must have been in a towering rage. But I could also see that he was puzzled, and that discovery

affected me disagreeably. Dominic puzzled! For a long time, leaning against the bulwark, I gazed over the

stern at the gray column that seemed to stand swaying slightly in our wake always at the same distance.

Meanwhile Dominic, black and cowled, sat crosslegged on the deck, with his back to the wind, recalling

vaguely an Arab chief in his burnuss sitting on the sand. Above his motionless figure the little cord and tassel

on the stiff point of the hood swung about inanely in the gale. At last I gave up facing the wind and rain, and

crouched down by his side. I was satisfied that the sail was a patrol craft. Her presence was not a thing to talk

about, but soon, between two clouds charged with hailshowers, a burst of sunshine fell upon her sails, and

our men discovered her character for themselves. From that moment I noticed that they seemed to take no

heed of each other or of anything else. They could spare no eyes and no thought but for the slight

columnshape astern of us. Its swaying had become perceptible. For a moment she remained dazzlingly

white, then faded away slowly to nothing in a squall, only to reappear again, nearly black, resembling a post

stuck upright against the slaty background of solid cloud. Since first noticed she had not gained on us a foot.

Dominic did not look at me. He remarked absently, but justly, that the heavy weather was in our pursuer's

favour. She was three times our size. What we had to do was to keep our distance till dark, which we could

manage easily, and then haul off to seaward and consider the situation. But his thoughts seemed to stumble in

the darkness of some notsolved enigma, and soon he fell silent. We ran steadily, wingandwing. Cape San

Sebastian nearly ahead seemed to recede from us in the squalls of rain, and come out again to meet our rush,

For my part I was by no means certain that this GABELOU (as our men alluded to her opprobriously) was

after us at all. There were nautical difficulties in such a view which made me express the sanguine opinion

that she was in all innocence simply changing her station. At this Dominic condescended to turn his head.

"I tell you she is in chase," he affirmed moodily, after one short glance astern.

I never doubted his opinion. But with all the ardour of a neophyte and the pride of an apt learner I was at that

"What I can't understand," I insisted subtly, "is how on earth, with this wind, she has managed to be just

where she was when we first made her out. It is clear that she could not, and did not, gain twelve miles on us

Dominic had been sitting motionless, like an inanimate black cone posed on the stern deck, near the

rudderhead, with a small tassel fluttering on its sharp point, and for a time he preserved the immobility of

his meditation. Then, bending over with a short laugh, he gave my ear the bitter fruit of it. He understood

everything now perfectly. She was where we had seen her first, not because she had caught us up, but

because we had passed her during the night while she was already waiting for us, hoveto, most likely, on

"Do you understand already?" Dominic muttered in a fierce undertone. "Already! You know we left a good

eight hours before we were expected to leave, otherwise she would have been in time to lie in wait for us on

the other side of the Cape, and" he snapped his teeth like a wolf close to my face "and she would have

I saw it all plainly enough now. They had eyes in their heads and all their wits about them in that craft. We

had passed them in the dark as they jogged on easily towards their ambush with the idea that we were yet far

behind. At daylight, however, sighting a balancelle ahead under a press of canvas, they had made sail in

"Yes, yes! She came out on an information do you see, it? on information. . . . We have been sold

betrayed. Why? How? What for? We always paid them all so well on shore. . . . No! But it is my head that is

He seemed to choke, tugged at the throat button of the cloak, jumped up openmouthed as if to hurl curses

and denunciation, but instantly mastered himself, and, wrapping up the cloak closer about him, sat down on

We shaved the Cape very close to avoid an adverse current. On the other side, by the effect of the land, the

wind failed us so completely for a moment that the Tremolino's two great lofty sails hung idle to the masts in

the thundering uproar of the seas breaking upon the shore we had left behind. And when the returning gust

filled them again, we saw with amazement half of the new mainsail, which we thought fit to drive the boat

under before giving way, absolutely fly out of the boltropes. We lowered the yard at once, and saved it all,

but it was no longer a sail; it was only a heap of soaked strips of canvas cumbering the deck and weighting

I would have had the yard thrown overboard, too, he said, leading me aft again, "if it had not been for the

trouble. Let no sign escape you," he continued, lowering his voice, "but I am going to tell you something

terrible. Listen: I have observed that the roping stitches on that sail have been cut! You hear? Cut with a knife

in many places. And yet it stood all that time. Not enough cut. That flap did it at last. What matters it? But

look! there's treachery seated on this very deck. By the horns of the devil! seated here at our very backs. Do

To show I could be a man, I resolved to utter no sound as long as Dominic himself had the force to keep his

lips closed. Nothing but silence becomes certain situations. Moreover, the experience of treachery seemed to

spread a hopeless drowsiness over my thoughts and senses. For an hour or more we watched our pursuer

surging out nearer and nearer from amongst the squalls that sometimes hid her altogether. But even when not

seen, we felt her there like a knife at our throats. She gained on us frightfully. And the Tremolino, in a fierce

breeze and in much smoother water, swung on easily under her one sail, with something appallingly careless

in the joyous freedom of her motion. Another halfhour went by. I could not stand it any longer.

"They will get the poor barky," I stammered out suddenly, almost on the verge of tears.

Dominic stirred no more than a carving. A sense of catastrophic loneliness overcame my inexperienced soul.

The vision of my companions passed before me. The whole Royalist gang was in Monte Carlo now, I

reckoned. And they appeared to me clearcut and very small, with affected voices and stiff gestures, like a

procession of rigid marionettes upon a toy stage. I gave a start. What was this? A mysterious, remorseless

"Then you must find the heart for that work too. You must steer her yourself, and I shall see to it that she dies

"Can you?" I murmured, fascinated by the black hood turned immovably over the stern, as if in unlawful

communion with that old sea of magicians, slavedealers, exiles and warriors, the sea of legends and terrors,

where the mariners of remote antiquity used to hear the restless shade of an old wanderer weep aloud in the

"I know a rock," whispered the initiated voice within the hood secretly. "But caution! It must be done

before our men perceive what we are about. Whom can we trust now? A knife drawn across the fore halyards

would bring the foresail down, and put an end to our liberty in twenty minutes. And the best of our men may

be afraid of drowning. There is our little boat, but in an affair like this no one can be sure of being saved."

The voice ceased. We had started from Barcelona with our dinghy in tow; afterwards it was too risky to try to

get her in, so we let her take her chance of the seas at the end of a comfortable scope of rope. Many times she

had seemed to us completely overwhelmed, but soon we would see her bob up again on a wave, apparently as

"Not yet. We must get a little more in first," answered the voice from the hood in a ghostly murmur.

It was settled. I had now the courage to turn about. Our men crouched about the decks here and there with

anxious, crestfallen faces, all turned one way to watch the chaser. For the first time that morning I perceived

Cesar stretched out full length on the deck near the foremast and wondered where he had been skulking till

then. But he might in truth have been at my elbow all the time for all I knew. We had been too absorbed in

watching our fate to pay attention to each other. Nobody had eaten anything that morning, but the men had

I ran down to the cabin. I had there, put away in a locker, ten thousand francs in gold of whose presence on

board, so far as I was aware, not a soul, except Dominic had the slightest inkling. When I emerged on deck

again Dominic had turned about and was peering from under his cowl at the coast. Cape Creux closed the

view ahead. To the left a wide bay, its waters torn and swept by fierce squalls, seemed full of smoke. Astern

Directly he saw me, Dominic, in a placid tone, wanted to know what was the matter. I came close to him and,

looking as unconcerned as I could, told him in an undertone that I had found the locker broken open and the

"Put it round my waist, of course," I answered, amazed to hear his teeth chattering.

"Cursed gold!" he muttered. "The weight of the money might have cost you your life, perhaps." He

"Not yet. I am waiting for that squall to come over," he muttered. And a few leaden minutes passed.

The squall came over at last. Our pursuer, overtaken by a sort of murky whirlwind, disappeared from our

sight. The Tremolino quivered and bounded forward. The land ahead vanished, too, and we seemed to be left

"PRENEZ LA BARRE, MONSIEUR," Dominic broke the silence suddenly in an austere voice. "Take hold

of the tiller." He bent his hood to my ear. "The balancelle is yours. Your own hands must deal the blow. I I

have yet another piece of work to do." He spoke up loudly to the man who steered. "Let the signorino take the

tiller, and you with the others stand by to haul the boat alongside quickly at the word."

The man obeyed, surprised, but silent. The others stirred, and pricked up their ears at this. I heard their

murmurs. "What now? Are we going to run in somewhere and take to our heels? The Padrone knows what he

Dominic went forward. He paused to look down at Cesar, who, as I have said before, was lying full length

face down by the foremast, then stepped over him, and dived out of my sight under the foresail. I saw nothing

ahead. It was impossible for me to see anything except the foresail open and still, like a great shadowy wing.

But Dominic had his bearings. His voice came to me from forward, in a just audible cry:

I bore on the tiller, as instructed before. Again I heard him faintly, and then I had only to hold her straight. No

ship ran so joyously to her death before. She rose and fell, as if floating in space, and darted forward,

whizzing like an arrow. Dominic, stooping under the foot of the foresail, reappeared, and stood steadying

himself against the mast, with a raised forefinger in an attitude of expectant attention. A second before the

Talk of splintered planks and smashed timbers! This shipwreck lies upon my soul with the dread and horror

of a homicide, with the unforgettable remorse of having crushed a living, faithful heart at a single blow. At

one moment the rush and the soaring swing of speed; the next a crash, and death, stillness a moment of

horrible immobility, with the song of the wind changed to a strident wail, and the heavy waters boiling up

menacing and sluggish around the corpse. I saw in a distracting minute the foreyard fly fore and aft with a

brutal swing, the men all in a heap, cursing with fear, and hauling frantically at the line of the boat. With a

strange welcoming of the familiar I saw also Cesar amongst them, and recognised Dominic's old,

wellknown, effective gesture, the horizontal sweep of his powerful arm. I recollect distinctly saying to

myself, "Cesar must go down, of course," and then, as I was scrambling on all fours, the swinging tiller I had

I don't think I was actually unconscious for more than a few minutes, but when I came to myself the dinghy

was driving before the wind into a sheltered cove, two men just keeping her straight with their oars. Dominic,

We landed in a familiar part of the country. Dominic took one of the boat's oars with him. I suppose he was

thinking of the stream we would have presently to cross, on which there was a miserable specimen of a punt,

often robbed of its pole. But first of all we had to ascend the ridge of land at the back of the Cape. He helped

me up. I was dizzy. My head felt very large and heavy. At the top of the ascent I clung to him, and we

To the right, below us, the wide, smoky bay was empty. Dominic had kept his word. There was not a chip to

be seen around the black rock from which the Tremolino, with her plucky heart crushed at one blow, had

slipped off into deep water to her eternal rest. The vastness of the open sea was smothered in driving mists,

and in the centre of the thinning squall, phantomlike, under a frightful press of canvas, the unconscious

guardacosta dashed on, still chasing to the northward. Our men were already descending the reverse slope to

look for that punt which we knew from experience was not always to be found easily. I looked after them

As if repulsing the very sound of the name, the Padrone made that ample, sweeping, knockingdown gesture.

I stepped back a pace and stared at him fearfully. His open shirt uncovered his muscular neck and the thick

hair on his chest. He planted the oar upright in the soft soil, and rolling up slowly his right sleeve, extended

"This," he began, with an extreme deliberation, whose superhuman restraint vibrated with the suppressed

violence of his feelings, "is the arm which delivered the blow. I am afraid it is your own gold that did the rest.

I forgot all about your money." He clasped his hands together in sudden distress. "I forgot, I forgot," he

"And who else? CANALLIA! He must have been spying on you for days. And he did the whole thing.

Absent all day in Barcelona. TRADITORE! Sold his jacket to hire a horse. Ha! ha! A good affair! I tell you

Dominic pointed at the sea, where the guardacosta was a mere dark speck. His chin dropped on his breast.

". . . On information," he murmured, in a gloomy voice. "A Cervoni! Oh! my poor brother! . . ."

"I struck once, and the wretch went down like a stone with the gold. Yes. But he had time to read in my

eyes that nothing could save him while I was alive. And had I not the right I, Dominic Cervoni, Padrone,

He pulled the oar out of the ground and helped me carefully down the slope. All the time he never once

looked me in the face. He punted us over, then shouldered the oar again and waited till our men were at some

distance before he offered me his arm. After we had gone a little way, the fishing hamlet we were making for

"Do you think you can make your way as far as the houses by yourself?" he asked me quietly.

"Anywhere. What a question! Signorino, you are but little more than a boy to ask such a question of a man

having this tale in his family. AH! TRADITORE! What made me ever own that spawn of a hungry devil for

our own blood! Thief, cheat, coward, liar other men can deal with that. But I was his uncle, and so . . . I

wish he had poisoned me CHAROGNE! But this: that I, a confidential man and a Corsican, should have to

ask your pardon for bringing on board your vessel, of which I was Padrone, a Cervoni, who has betrayed you

a traitor! that is too much. It is too much. Well, I beg your pardon; and you may spit in Dominic's face

because a traitor of our blood taints us all. A theft may be made good between men, a lie may be set right, a

death avenged, but what can one do to atone for a treachery like this? . . . Nothing."

He turned and walked away from me along the bank of the stream, flourishing a vengeful arm and repeating

to himself slowly, with savage emphasis: "AH! CANAILLE! CANAILLE! CANAILLE!. . ." He left me there

trembling with weakness and mute with awe. Unable to make a sound, I gazed after the strangely desolate

figure of that seaman carrying an oar on his shoulder up a barren, rockstrewn ravine under the dreary leaden

sky of Tremolino's last day. Thus, walking deliberately, with his back to the sea, Dominic vanished from my

With the quality of our desires, thoughts, and wonder proportioned to our infinite littleness, we measure even

time itself by our own stature. Imprisoned in the house of personal illusions, thirty centuries in mankind's

history seem less to look back upon than thirty years of our own life. And Dominic Cervoni takes his place in

my memory by the side of the legendary wanderer on the sea of marvels and terrors, by the side of the fatal

and impious adventurer, to whom the evoked shade of the soothsayer predicted a journey inland with an oar

on his shoulder, till he met men who had never set eyes on ships and oars. It seems to me I can see them side

by side in the twilight of an arid land, the unfortunate possessors of the secret lore of the sea, bearing the

emblem of their hard calling on their shoulders, surrounded by silent and curious men: even as I, too, having

turned my back upon the sea, am bearing those few pages in the twilight, with the hope of finding in an

"A fellow has now no chance of promotion unless he jumps into the muzzle of a gun and crawls out of the

He who, a hundred years ago, more or less, pronounced the above words in the uneasiness of his heart,

thirsting for professional distinction, was a young naval officer. Of his life, career, achievements, and end

nothing is preserved for the edification of his young successors in the fleet of today nothing but this

phrase, which, sailorlike in the simplicity of personal sentiment and strength of graphic expression,

embodies the spirit of the epoch. This obscure but vigorous testimony has its price, its significance, and its

lesson. It comes to us from a worthy ancestor. We do not know whether he lived long enough for a chance of

that promotion whose way was so arduous. He belongs to the great array of the unknown who are great,

indeed, by the sum total of the devoted effort put out, and the colossal scale of success attained by their

insatiable and steadfast ambition. We do not know his name; we only know of him what is material for us to

know that he was never backward on occasions of desperate service. We have this on the authority of a

distinguished seaman of Nelson's time. Departing this life as Admiral of the Fleet on the eve of the Crimean

War, Sir Thomas Byam Martin has recorded for us amongst his all too short autobiographical notes these few

characteristic words uttered by one young man of the many who must have felt that particular inconvenience

The distinguished Admiral had lived through it himself, and was a good judge of what was expected in those

days from men and ships. A brilliant frigate captain, a man of sound judgment, of dashing bravery and of

serene mind, scrupulously concerned for the welfare and honour of the navy, he missed a larger fame only by

the chances of the service. We may well quote on this day the words written of Nelson, in the decline of a

wellspent life, by Sir T. B. Martin, who died just fifty years ago on the very anniversary of Trafalgar.

"Nelson's nobleness of mind was a prominent and beautiful part of his character. His foibles faults if you

like will never be dwelt upon in any memorandum of mine," he declares, and goes on "he whose splendid

and matchless achievements will be remembered with admiration while there is gratitude in the hearts of

Britons, or while a ship floats upon the ocean; he whose example on the breaking out of the war gave so

chivalrous an impulse to the younger men of the service that all rushed into rivalry of daring which disdained

every warning of prudence, and led to acts of heroic enterprise which tended greatly to exalt the glory of our

These are his words, and they are true. The dashing young frigate captain, the man who in middle age was

nothing loth to give chase singlehanded in his seventyfour to a whole fleet, the man of enterprise and

consummate judgment, the old Admiral of the Fleet, the good and trusted servant of his country under two

kings and a queen, had felt correctly Nelson's influence, and expressed himself with precision out of the

"Exalted," he wrote, not "augmented." And therein his feeling and his pen captured the very truth. Other men

there were ready and able to add to the treasure of victories the British navy has given to the nation. It was the

lot of Lord Nelson to exalt all this glory. Exalt! the word seems to be created for the man.

The British navy may well have ceased to count its victories. It is rich beyond the wildest dreams of success

and fame. It may well, rather, on a culminating day of its history, cast about for the memory of some reverses

to appease the jealous fates which attend the prosperity and triumphs of a nation. It holds, indeed, the heaviest

inheritance that has ever been entrusted to the courage and fidelity of armed men.

It is too great for mere pride. It should make the seamen of to day humble in the secret of their hearts, and

indomitable in their unspoken resolution. In all the records of history there has never been a time when a

victorious fortune has been so faithful to men making war upon the sea. And it must be confessed that on

their part they knew how to be faithful to their victorious fortune. They were exalted. They were always

watching for her smile; night or day, fair weather or foul, they waited for her slightest sign with the offering

of their stout hearts in their hands. And for the inspiration of this high constancy they were indebted to Lord

Nelson alone. Whatever earthly affection he abandoned or grasped, the great Admiral was always, before all,

beyond all, a lover of Fame. He loved her jealously, with an inextinguishable ardour and an insatiable desire

he loved her with a masterful devotion and an infinite trustfulness. In the plenitude of his passion he was an

exacting lover. And she never betrayed the greatness of his trust! She attended him to the end of his life, and

he died pressing her last gift (nineteen prizes) to his heart. "Anchor, Hardy anchor!" was as much the cry of

an ardent lover as of a consummate seaman. Thus he would hug to his breast the last gift of Fame.

It was this ardour which made him great. He was a flaming example to the wooers of glorious fortune. There

have been great officers before Lord Hood, for instance, whom he himself regarded as the greatest sea

officer England ever had. A long succession of great commanders opened the sea to the vast range of

Nelson's genius. His time had come; and, after the great sea officers, the great naval tradition passed into the

keeping of a great man. Not the least glory of the navy is that it understood Nelson. Lord Hood trusted him.

Admiral Keith told him: "We can't spare you either as Captain or Admiral." Earl St. Vincent put into his

hands, untrammelled by orders, a division of his fleet, and Sir Hyde Parker gave him two more ships at

Copenhagen than he had asked for. So much for the chiefs; the rest of the navy surrendered to him their

devoted affection, trust, and admiration. In return he gave them no less than his own exalted soul. He

breathed into them his own ardour and his own ambition. In a few short years he revolutionized, not the

strategy or tactics of seawarfare, but the very conception of victory itself. And this is genius. In that alone,

through the fidelity of his fortune and the power of his inspiration, he stands unique amongst the leaders of

fleets and sailors. He brought heroism into the line of duty. Verily he is a terrible ancestor.

And the men of his day loved him. They loved him not only as victorious armies have loved great

commanders; they loved him with a more intimate feeling as one of themselves. In the words of a

contemporary, he had "a most happy way of gaining the affectionate respect of all who had the felicity to

To be so great and to remain so accessible to the affection of one's fellowmen is the mark of exceptional

humanity. Lord Nelson's greatness was very human. It had a moral basis; it needed to feel itself surrounded

by the warm devotion of a band of brothers. He was vain and tender. The love and admiration which the navy

gave him so unreservedly soothed the restlessness of his professional pride. He trusted them as much as they

trusted him. He was a seaman of seamen. Sir T. B. Martin states that he never conversed with any officer who

had served under Nelson "without hearing the heartiest expressions of attachment to his person and

admiration of his frank and conciliatory manner to his subordinates." And Sir Robert Stopford, who

commanded one of the ships with which Nelson chased to the West Indies a fleet nearly double in number,

says in a letter: "We are halfstarved and otherwise inconvenienced by being so long out of port, but our

This heroic spirit of daring and endurance, in which all public and private differences were sunk throughout

the whole fleet, is Lord Nelson's great legacy, triply sealed by the victorious impress of the Nile,

Copenhagen, and Trafalgar. This is a legacy whose value the changes of time cannot affect. The men and the

ships he knew how to lead lovingly to the work of courage and the reward of glory have passed away, but

Nelson's uplifting touch remains in the standard of achievement he has set for all time. The principles of

strategy may be immutable. It is certain they have been, and shall be again, disregarded from timidity, from

blindness, through infirmity of purpose. The tactics of great captains on land and sea can be infinitely

discussed. The first object of tactics is to close with the adversary on terms of the greatest possible advantage;

yet no hardandfast rules can be drawn from experience, for this capital reason, amongst others that the

quality of the adversary is a variable element in the problem. The tactics of Lord Nelson have been amply

discussed, with much pride and some profit. And yet, truly, they are already of but archaic interest. A very

few years more and the hazardous difficulties of handling a fleet under canvas shall have passed beyond the

conception of seamen who hold in trust for their country Lord Nelson's legacy of heroic spirit. The change in

the character of the ships is too great and too radical. It is good and proper to study the acts of great men with

thoughtful reverence, but already the precise intention of Lord Nelson's famous memorandum seems to lie

under that veil which Time throws over the clearest conceptions of every great art. It must not be forgotten

that this was the first time when Nelson, commanding in chief, had his opponents under way the first time

and the last. Had he lived, had there been other fleets left to oppose him, we would, perhaps, have learned

something more of his greatness as a sea officer. Nothing could have been added to his greatness as a leader.

All that can be affirmed is, that on no other day of his short and glorious career was Lord Nelson more

And yet the fact remains that, had the wind failed and the fleet lost steerage way, or, worse still, had it been

taken aback from the eastward, with its leaders within short range of the enemy's guns, nothing, it seems,

could have saved the headmost ships from capture or destruction. No skill of a great sea officer would have

availed in such a contingency. Lord Nelson was more than that, and his genius would have remained

undiminished by defeat. But obviously tactics, which are so much at the mercy of irremediable accident, must

seem to a modern seaman a poor matter of study. The CommanderinChief in the great fleet action that will

take its place next to the Battle of Trafalgar in the history of the British navy will have no such anxiety, and

will feel the weight of no such dependence. For a hundred years now no British fleet has engaged the enemy

in line of battle. A hundred years is a long time, but the difference of modern conditions is enormous. The

gulf is great. Had the last great fight of the English navy been that of the First of June, for instance, had there

been no Nelson's victories, it would have been wellnigh impassable. The great Admiral's slight and

passionworn figure stands at the parting of the ways. He had the audacity of genius, and a prophetic

The modern naval man must feel that the time has come for the tactical practice of the great sea officers of

the past to be laid by in the temple of august memories. The fleet tactics of the sailing days have been

governed by two points: the deadly nature of a raking fire, and the dread, natural to a commander dependent

upon the winds, to find at some crucial moment part of his fleet thrown hopelessly to leeward. These two

points were of the very essence of sailing tactics, and these two points have been eliminated from the modern

tactical problem by the changes of propulsion and armament. Lord Nelson was the first to disregard them

with conviction and audacity sustained by an unbounded trust in the men he led. This conviction, this

audacity and this trust stand out from amongst the lines of the celebrated memorandum, which is but a

declaration of his faith in a crushing superiority of fire as the only means of victory and the only aim of sound

tactics. Under the difficulties of the then existing conditions he strove for that, and for that alone, putting his

faith into practice against every risk. And in that exclusive faith Lord Nelson appears to us as the first of the

Against every risk, I have said; and the men of today, born and bred to the use of steam, can hardly realize

how much of that risk was in the weather. Except at the Nile, where the conditions were ideal for engaging a

fleet moored in shallow water, Lord Nelson was not lucky in his weather. Practically it was nothing but a

quite unusual failure of the wind which cost him his arm during the Teneriffe expedition. On Trafalgar Day

It was one of these covered days of fitful sunshine, of light, unsteady winds, with a swell from the westward,

and hazy in general, but with the land about the Cape at times distinctly visible. It has been my lot to look

with reverence upon the very spot more than once, and for many hours together. All but thirty years ago,

certain exceptional circumstances made me very familiar for a time with that bight in the Spanish coast which

would be enclosed within a straight line drawn from Faro to Spartel. My wellremembered experience has

convinced me that, in that corner of the ocean, once the wind has got to the northward of west (as it did on the

20th, taking the British fleet aback), appearances of westerly weather go for nothing, and that it is infinitely

more likely to veer right round to the east than to shift back again. It was in those conditions that, at seven on

the morning of the 21st, the signal for the fleet to bear up and steer east was made. Holding a clear

recollection of these languid easterly sighs rippling unexpectedly against the run of the smooth swell, with no

other warning than a tenminutes' calm and a queer darkening of the coastline, I cannot think, without a

gasp of professional awe, of that fateful moment. Perhaps personal experience, at a time of life when

responsibility had a special freshness and importance, has induced me to exaggerate to myself the danger of

the weather. The great Admiral and good seaman could read aright the signs of sea and sky, as his order to

prepare to anchor at the end of the day sufficiently proves; but, all the same, the mere idea of these baffling

easterly airs, coming on at any time within half an hour or so, after the firing of the first shot, is enough to

take one's breath away, with the image of the rearmost ships of both divisions falling off, unmanageable,

broadside on to the westerly swell, and of two British Admirals in desperate jeopardy. To this day I cannot

free myself from the impression that, for some forty minutes, the fate of the great battle hung upon a breath of

wind such as I have felt stealing from behind, as it were, upon my cheek while engaged in looking to the

Never more shall British seamen going into action have to trust the success of their valour to a breath of

wind. The God of gales and battles favouring her arms to the last, has let the sun of England's sailingfleet

and of its greatest master set in unclouded glory. And now the old ships and their men are gone; the new

ships and the new men, many of them bearing the old, auspicious names, have taken up their watch on the

stern and impartial sea, which offers no opportunities but to those who know how to grasp them with a ready

This the navy of the Twenty Years' War knew well how to do, and never better than when Lord Nelson had

breathed into its soul his own passion of honour and fame. It was a fortunate navy. Its victories were no mere

smashing of helpless ships and massacres of cowed men. It was spared that cruel favour, for which no brave

heart had ever prayed. It was fortunate in its adversaries. I say adversaries, for on recalling such proud

memories we should avoid the word "enemies," whose hostile sound perpetuates the antagonisms and strife

of nations, so irremediable perhaps, so fateful and also so vain. War is one of the gifts of life; but, alas! no

war appears so very necessary when time has laid its soothing hand upon the passionate misunderstandings

and the passionate desires of great peoples. "Le temps," as a distinguished Frenchman has said, "est un galant

homme." He fosters the spirit of concord and justice, in whose work there is as much glory to be reaped as in

One of them disorganized by revolutionary changes, the other rusted in the neglect of a decayed monarchy,

the two fleets opposed to us entered the contest with odds against them from the first. By the merit of our

daring and our faithfulness, and the genius of a great leader, we have in the course of the war augmented our

advantage and kept it to the last. But in the exulting illusion of irresistible might a long series of military

successes brings to a nation the less obvious aspect of such a fortune may perchance be lost to view. The old

navy in its last days earned a fame that no belittling malevolence dare cavil at. And this supreme favour they

Deprived by an illstarred fortune of that selfconfidence which strengthens the hands of an armed host,

impaired in skill but not in courage, it may safely be said that our adversaries managed yet to make a better

fight of it in 1797 than they did in 1793. Later still, the resistance offered at the Nile was all, and more than

all, that could be demanded from seamen, who, unless blind or without understanding, must have seen their

doom sealed from the moment that the Goliath, bearing up under the bows of the Guerrier, took up an inshore

berth. The combined fleets of 1805, just come out of port, and attended by nothing but the disturbing

memories of reverses, presented to our approach a determined front, on which Captain Blackwood, in a

knightly spirit, congratulated his Admiral. By the exertions of their valour our adversaries have but added a

greater lustre to our arms. No friend could have done more, for even in war, which severs for a time all the

sentiments of human fellowship, this subtle bond of association remains between brave men that the final

testimony to the value of victory must be received at the hands of the vanquished.

Those who from the heat of that battle sank together to their repose in the cool depths of the ocean would not

understand the watchwords of our day, would gaze with amazed eyes at the engines of our strife. All passes,

all changes: the animosity of peoples, the handling of fleets, the forms of ships; and even the sea itself seems

to wear a different and diminished aspect from the sea of Lord Nelson's day. In this ceaseless rush of shadows

and shades, that, like the fantastic forms of clouds cast darkly upon the waters on a windy day, fly past us to

fall headlong below the hard edge of an implacable horizon, we must turn to the national spirit, which,

superior in its force and continuity to good and evil fortune, can alone give us the feeling of an enduring

Like a subtle and mysterious elixir poured into the perishable clay of successive generations, it grows in truth,

splendour, and potency with the march of ages. In its incorruptible flow all round the globe of the earth it

preserves from the decay and forgetfulness of death the greatness of our great men, and amongst them the

passionate and gentle greatness of Nelson, the nature of whose genius was, on the faith of a brave seaman and