CHAPTER XXX.
THE MIDNIGHT LOOK-OUT FORWARD.—A STORMY NIGHT.—THE COMEDY IN THE CABIN.
Past Midnight. I have been up and watching forward for more than an hour, roused from my berth by the cry of ice. A large ship, with a cloud of sail, passed just across our head, bound for Old England. “That’s a happy fellow,” says the man at the helm; “past the dangers of the St. Lawrence and the Straits, and fairly out to sea.” The wind is rising, and promises a rough time. “There is something,” I said to myself, as I leaned, and looked over the bow, “there is something in all this, familiar as it is to many, very grand and awful, as we rise upon the black seas, and plunge into the darkness, rushing on our gloomy, strange way. We seem to be above the very ‘blackness of darkness,’ and riding upon the bosom of the night. The sounding foam, sweeping forward from beneath our bows, looks like a cloud of supernatural brightness, its whiteness filled, as it is, with the fire and electric scintillations of the sea. One could easily imagine himself sailing on the breeze through the night, with sparks of lightning and a cloud at his vessel’s bow.” The wind freshens to a gale nearly, and all hands are called on deck. We are rolling in a most uncomfortable manner, and I have retreated to my cabin, and will creep back to my berth.
Thursday Noon, July 7. A few scrawls of the pencil will serve to give an outline of our experience for the last twelve hours. A dense fog, high wind and a heavy swell. As a matter of course, our little ship has been in great commotion, and we, miserably sea-sick, regardless of breakfast, absent from the cold, wet deck, and rolled up below, dull and speechless in bed. We have been gradually creeping up into the world, of late, sipping a little coffee and nibbling at crackers. We are off Cape St. Louis, the most eastern land of the continent. The few turns on deck have sufficiently electrified the brain to enable me to get on thus far with my notes, and to venture upon a short description of a cabin-scene, at a very late hour last night.
Three sides of our cabin, a room some ten feet by twelve, and barely six feet under the beams, are taken up by four roughly-made berths; one on each side, and two extending crosswise, with a space between them, fitted up with shelves, and used for the flour-barrel, and as a cupboard. Beneath the berths are trunks, tubs, bags, boxes and bundles, most of our choicest stores. From the centre, and close upon the steep, obtrusive stairs, covered with a glossy oil-cloth, of a cloudy brown and yellow, our table looks round placidly upon this domestic scene, so indicative of refreshment and repose. With this little sketch of our sea-apartment, the stage upon which was enacted our last night’s brief play, I will undertake its description, promising a brevity that rather suggests, than paints it.
After the midnight look-out forward for ice, and the retreat to the cabin, I soon joined in the general doze, rather suffered than enjoyed. In the uproar above, sharp voices and the rush of footsteps over the deck, occasionally stamping almost in our very faces, we were too frequently called back to full consciousness, to escape away into any thing better than the merest snatch of a dream. In my own case, the stomach, as usual, indulged itself in taking the measure of those motions, so disastrous to its peace and equipose; those rollings, risings, sinkings, divings, flings and swings, in which there is the sense of falling, and of vibrations smooth and oily. Where one’s mind’s eye is perpetually looking down in upon the poor remains of his late departed dinner, there is no possibility for the outer eye to sink into any true and honest slumber. The shut lid is a falsehood. It is not sleep. The live, wakeful eye is under it, looking up against the skinny veil. Occasionally the veil is lifted just to let the dark out; occasionally the dumb blackness falls in upon the retina like a stifling dust, and dims it, for a moment, to a doze. But the fire of wakefulness soon flashes up from the cells of the brain, and throws out the sleepy darkness, as the volcanic crater throws out its smoke and ashes.
Through some marine manœuvre, thought necessary by the master spirit on deck, and which could be explained by a single nautical word, if I only knew what the word is, we began to roll and plunge in a manner sufficiently violent and frightful to startle from its staid quiet almost every movable in the cabin. Out shot trunks and boxes—off slid cups and plates with a smash—back and forth, in one rough scramble with the luggage, trundled the table, followed by the nimble chairs. At this rate of going on, our valuables would soon mix in one common wreck. Determining to interfere, I sprang into the unruly confusion, and succeeded in lighting a candle just in time to join in the rough-and-tumble, at the risk of ribs and limbs, and the object of mingled merriment and alarm to the more prudent spectators. Botswood, an experienced voyager, shouted me back to my berth instantly, if I would not have my bones broken at the next heavy lurch of the vessel. I was beginning to feel the force of the counsel, when another roll, almost down upon the beam-ends, overturned the butter-tub and a box of loaf-sugar, and brought their contents loose upon the field of action. They divided themselves between the legs of the table and the individual, and so, candle in hand and adorned in modest white, he sat flat down upon the floor among them, at once their companion in trouble and their protector. The marble-white sugar and the yellow butter, our luxuries and indispensable necessaries, there they were, on the common floor, and disposed for once to join in a low frolic with plebeian boots and shoes and scullion trumpery. With an earnest resolve to prevent all improprieties of the kind, one hand grasped, knuckle deep, the golden mellow mass, of the size of a good Yankee pumpkin, and held on, while the other was busy in restoring, by the rapid handful, the sugar to the safety of its box. The candle, in the mean time, encouraged by the peals of laughter in the galleries, slid back and forth in the most trifling manner possible. When we tipped one way, then I sat on a steep hill-side, looking down toward the painter, roaring in his happy valley: away slid the candle in her tin slippers, and away the barefooted butter wanted to roll after, encouraged to indulge in the foolish caper by a saucy trunk jumping down from behind. When we tipped the other way, then I sat on the same hill-side, legs up, looking up, an unsatisfactory position: back slid the candle, followed by a charge of sharp-pointed baggage, and off started the butter with the best intentions toward the tub, waiting prostrate and with open arms. Notwithstanding the repetition and sameness of this performance, the beholders applauded with the same heartiness, as if each change back and forth was a novel and original exhibition. What heightened the effect of the scene, and gave it a suspicion of the tragic, was a keg of gunpowder, which evinced, by several demonstrations of discontent in the dark corner where it tumbled about, a disposition to come out and join the candle. By a happy lull, not unusual in the very midst of these cabin confusions during a brush at sea, the powder did not enter, and I was enabled to pitch the butter into the tub, and finally myself, after some few preliminaries with a towel, into my berth, where, in the course of the small remnant of the night, I fell into some broken slumbers.