Two Years Before the Mast
But ill luck seemed to have lighted upon us. Not four hours had we
been standing on in this course, before it fell dead calm; and in half
an hour it clouded up; a few straggling blasts, with spits of snow and
sleet, came from the eastward; and in an hour more, we lay hove-to
under a close-reefed main topsail, drifting bodily off to leeward
before the fiercest storm that we had yet felt, blowing dead ahead,
from the eastward. It seemed as though the genius of the place had
been roused at finding that we had nearly slipped through his fingers,
and had come down upon us with tenfold fury. The sailors said that
every blast, as it shook the shrouds, and whistled through the rigging,
said to the old ship, "No, you don't!"--"No, you don't!"
For eight days we lay drifting about in this manner.
Sometimes,--generally towards noon,--it fell calm; once or twice a
round copper ball showed itself for a few moments in the place where
the sun ought to have been; and a puff or two came from the westward,
giving some hope that a fair wind had come at last. During the first
two days, we made sail for these puffs, shaking the reefs out of the
topsails and boarding the tacks of the courses; but finding that it
only made work for us when the gale set in again, it was soon given up,
and we lay-to under our close-reefs.
We had less snow and hail than when we were farther to the westward,
but we had an abundance of what is worse to a sailor in cold
weather--drenching rain. Snow is blinding, and very bad when coming
upon a coast, but, for genuine discomfort, give me rain with freezing
weather. A snow-storm is exciting, and it does not wet through the
clothes (which is important to a sailor); but a constant rain there is
no escaping from. It wets to the skin, and makes all protection vain.
We had long ago run through all our dry clothes, and as sailors have no
other way of drying them than by the sun, we had nothing to do but to
put on those which were the least wet.
At the end of each watch, when we came below, we took off our clothes
and wrung them out; two taking hold of a pair of trowsers,--one at each
end,--and jackets in the same way. Stockings, mittens, and all, were
wrung out also and then hung up to drain and chafe dry against the
bulk-heads. Then, feeling of all our clothes, we picked out those
which were the least wet, and put them on, so as to be ready for a
call, and turned-in, covered ourselves up with blankets, and slept
until three knocks on the scuttle and the dismal sound of "All
starbowlines ahoy! Eight bells, there below! Do you hear the news?"
drawled out from on deck, and the sulky answer of "Aye, aye!" from
below, sent us up again.
On deck, all was as dark as a pocket, and either a dead calm, with the
rain pouring steadily down, or, more generally, a violent gale dead
ahead, with rain pelting horizontally, and occasional variations of
hail and sleet;--decks afloat with water swashing from side to side,
and constantly wet feet; for boots could not be wrung out like drawers,
and no composition could stand the constant soaking. In fact, wet and
cold feet are inevitable in such weather, and are not the least of
those little items which go to make up the grand total of the
discomforts of a winter passage round the Cape. Few words were spoken
between the watches as they shifted, the wheel was relieved, the mate
took his place on the quarter-deck, the look-outs in the bows; and each
man had his narrow space to walk fore and aft in, or, rather, to swing
himself forward and back in, from one belaying pin to another,--for the
decks were too slippery with ice and water to allow of much walking.
To make a walk, which is absolutely necessary to pass away the time,
one of us hit upon the expedient of sanding the deck; and afterwards,
whenever the rain was not so violent as to wash it off, the weatherside
of the quarter-deck and a part of the waist and forecastle were
sprinkled with the sand which we had on board for holystoning; and thus
we made a good promenade, where we walked fore and aft, two and two,
hour after hour, in our long, dull, and comfortless watches. The bells
seemed to be an hour or two apart, instead of half an hour, and an age
to elapse before the welcome sound of eight bells. The sole object was
to make the time pass on. Any change was sought for, which would break
the monotony of the time; and even the two hours' trick at the wheel,
which came round to each of us, in turn, once in every other watch, was
looked upon as a relief. Even the never-failing resource of long
yarns, which eke out many a watch, seemed to have failed us now; for we
had been so long together that we had heard each other's stories told
over and over again, till we had them by heart; each one knew the whole
history of each of the others, and we were fairly and literally talked
out. Singing and joking, we were in no humor for, and, in fact, any
sound of mirth or laughter would have struck strangely upon our ears,
and would not have been tolerated, any more than whistling, or a wind
instrument. The last resort, that of speculating upon the future,
seemed now to fail us, for our discouraging situation, and the danger
we were really in, (as we expected every day to find ourselves drifted
back among the ice) "clapped a stopper" upon all that. From
saying--"when we get home"--we began insensibly to alter it to--"if we
get home"--and at last the subject was dropped by a tacit consent.
In this state of things, a new light was struck out, and a new field
opened, by a change in the watch. One of our watch was laid up for two
or three days by a bad hand, (for in cold weather the least cut or
bruise ripens into a sore,) and his place was supplied by the
carpenter. This was a windfall, and there was quite a contest, who
should have the carpenter to walk with him. As "Chips" was a man of
some little education, and he and I had had a good deal of intercourse
with each other, he fell in with me in my walk. He was a Fin, but
spoke English very well, and gave me long accounts of his country;--the
customs, the trade, the towns, what little he knew of the government,
(I found he was no friend of Russia), his voyages, his first arrival in
America, his marriage and courtship;--he had married a countrywoman of
his, a dress-maker, whom he met with in Boston. I had very little to
tell him of my quiet, sedentary life at home; and, in spite of our best
efforts, which had protracted these yarns through five or six watches,
we fairly talked one another out, and I turned him over to another man
in the watch, and put myself upon my own resources.
I commenced a deliberate system of time-killing, which united some
profit with a cheering up of the heavy hours. As soon as I came on
deck, and took my place and regular walk, I began with repeating over
to myself a string of matters which I had in my memory, in regular
order. First, the multiplication table and the tables of weights and
measures; then the states of the union, with their capitals; the
counties of England, with their shire towns; the kings of England in
their order; and a large part of the peerage, which I committed from an
almanac that we had on board; and then the Kanaka numerals. This
carried me through my facts, and, being repeated deliberately, with
long intervals, often eked out the two first bells. Then came the ten
commandments; the thirty-ninth chapter of Job, and a few other passages
from Scripture. The next in the order, that I never varied from, came
Cowper's Castaway, which was a great favorite with me; the solemn
measure and gloomy character of which, as well as the incident that it
was founded upon, made it well suited to a lonely watch at sea. Then
his lines to Mary, his address to the jackdaw, and a short extract from
Table Talk; (I abounded in Cowper, for I happened to have a volume of
his poems in my chest;) "Ille et nefasto" from Horace, and Goethe's Erl
King. After I had got through these, I allowed myself a more general
range among everything that I could remember, both in prose and verse.
In this way, with an occasional break by relieving the wheel, heaving
the log, and going to the scuttle-butt for a drink of water, the
longest watch was passed away; and I was so regular in my silent
recitations, that if there was no interruption by ship's duty, I could
tell very nearly the number of bells by my progress.
Our watches below were no more varied than the watch on deck.
All washing, sewing, and reading was given up; and we did nothing but
eat, sleep, and stand our watch, leading what might be called a Cape
Horn life. The forecastle was too uncomfortable to sit up in; and
whenever we were below, we were in our berths. To prevent the rain,
and the sea-water which broke over the bows, from washing down, we were
obliged to keep the scuttle closed, so that the forecastle was nearly
air-tight. In this little, wet, leaky hole, we were all quartered, in
an atmosphere so bad that our lamp, which swung in the middle from the
beams, sometimes actually burned blue, with a large circle of foul air
about it. Still I was never in better health than after three weeks of
this life. I gained a great deal of flesh, and we all ate like horses.
At every watch, when we came below, before turning-in, the bread barge
and beef kid were overhauled. Each man drank his quart of hot tea
night and morning; and glad enough we were to get it, for no nectar and
ambrosia were sweeter to the lazy immortals, than was a pot of hot tea,
a hard biscuit, and a slice of cold salt beef, to us after a watch on
deck. To be sure, we were mere animals and had this life lasted a year
instead of a month we should have been little better than the ropes in
the ship. Not a razor, nor a brush, nor a drop of water, except the
rain and the spray, had come near us all the time; for we were on an
allowance of fresh water; and who would strip and wash himself in salt
water on deck, in the snow and ice, with the thermometer at zero?
After about eight days of constant easterly gales, the wind hauled
occasionally a little to the southward, and blew hard, which, as we
were well to the southward, allowed us to brace in a little and stand
on, under all the sail we could carry. These turns lasted but a short
while, and sooner or later it set again from the old quarter; yet each
time we made something, and were gradually edging along to the
eastward. One night, after one of these shifts of the wind, and when
all hands had been up a great part of the time, our watch was left on
deck, with the mainsail hanging in the buntlines, ready to be set if
necessary. It came on to blow worse and worse, with hail and snow
beating like so many furies upon the ship, it being as dark and thick
as night could make it. The mainsail was blowing and slatting with a
noise like thunder, when the captain came on deck, and ordered it to be
furled. The mate was about to call all hands, when the captain stopped
him, and said that the men would be beaten out if they were called up
so often; that as our watch must stay on deck, it might as well be
doing that as anything else.
Accordingly, we went upon the yard; and never shall I forget that piece
of work. Our watch had been so reduced by sickness, and by some having
been left in California, that, with one man at the wheel, we had only
the third mate and three beside myself, to go aloft; so that at most,
we could only attempt to furl one yard-arm at a time. We manned the
weather yard-arm, and set to work to make a furl of it. Our lower
masts being short, and our yards very square, the sail had a head of
nearly fifty feet, and a short leach, made still shorter by the deep
reef which was in it, which brought the clew away out on the quarters