ON THE OCEAN WAVE.
An Amateur’s Experience on a Steamship.
A VERY TALL STORY.—THE FIRST IMPRESSIONS.—A SIDE VIEW OF SEA-SICKNESS.—THE SIGHT OF THE OCEAN.—LAND AT LAST AND GLAD OF IT.
[SPECIAL CORRESPONDENCE OF THE COURIER.]
Philadelphia, Feb. 20, 1876.—The ocean is a greatly exaggerated affair. About four years ago, my friend Charles I. Graves and myself were sitting on a country fence, in Floyd County, after the manner of lizards, drinking in the sunshine, when a wagon containing a small box wheeled past us. It had hardly got abreast us when my friend dropped from his comfortable perch as if he were shot, and rushed to the wagon. Then ensued a remarkable scene. You have all seen a well-bred country dog meet a city dog on some green highway. You know with what hurried circumspection he smells the stranger at all points. So did my friend approach the little square box on the wagon. He sniffed at it as if “he would draw his soul through his nose.” I examined the ugly little box closely. It was marked
To Mr. Berckmans,
Mont Alto, Near Rome,
Ga., U.S.A.
It was Rhenish wine shipped from Paris.
My friend explained to me, after his rhapsody was over, that the box having been brought across the ocean in the hold of a steamer, retained a subtle scent of bilge-water, that brought the sea with all its dangerous fascination back to him—he having served all his young life before the mast. He was, at this writing, a plain, staid farmer, content among his cattle and clover. And yet that sharp, briny, saline flavor, thrown on the bosom of the still country breeze, put a restless devil in his breast. It was as if a born gallant, exiled for a decade to the heart of some desert, should, near the expiration of his sentence, stumble upon a cambric handkerchief, redolent with the perfume of a lady’s boudoir. In less than two years after the sight or rather the smell of that box my friend had sold his plantation, convinced his wife, and gone to the ocean again. Had Dr. Berckmans been content to drink native wine, Mr. Graves would yet be alternating cotton with clover, in the peaceful valley of the Etowah.
After this strong proof of the fascination that the sea has for its votaries, I achieved a strong desire to try it for myself. It renewed in my mature days the wild ambition that put turmoil into my schoolboy life, after I had read “Lafitte, or the Pirate of the Gulf.”
I have longed for many a day to run a “gore” into each leg of my pantaloons, roll back my collar, tousle my hair, fold my cloak about my shoulders, and stand before the mast in a stiff breeze, and there read Byron with one eye, and with the other watch the effect of the tableau on the female passengers.
I never had a chance to gratify the desire until lately. I never saw the ocean until the trip that results in this letter; I shall never forget the impression it made on me.
I had imagined that it would be a moment of ecstasy. I had believed that my soul, in the glad recognition of something as infinite, as illimitable as itself, would laugh with joy, and leap to my lips, and burn in my fingers, and tingle in my veins. I wisely reserved the first sight until we had steamed out beyond the land, and then with the air of one who unchains himself, I raised my head and looked out to the future. There, as far as the eye could reach, aye, and way beyond, as if mocking the finiteness of sight, stretched the blue waters. Ah! how my fine-spun fancies crumbled and came tumbling back on me in dire confusion! My soul literally shriveled! My very imagination was cowed and driven to its corner, and I sat there dumb and trembling!
No tenant of a cradle was ever more simple or more trusting than I became at that moment. I literally rejoiced in the abrogation of all the pride and manliness that I had boasted of two hours before. I flung away my self-dependence, and my soul ran abashed into the hollow of His hand, even as a frightened child runs to its father’s arms. As I looked shuddering upon the vast and restless waste of waters in front of me, I felt as if some person had taken me to the confines of that time which human calculation can compass, and holding me on the chill edge of that gulf called the Eternal, had asked me to translate its meaning, and pronounce its uttermost boundary.
I suppose the truth of the matter is that I was about scared to death; certain it is that I crouched there for hours, trembling, and yet gazing out beyond me upon the lapping waters, from where they parted before our ship to where they curled up against the half-consenting sky! At last I arose, shook myself, as if throwing off some nightmare, and sought the crowd again.
I can never forget how dissonant and inopportune the flippant conversation of the voyagers seemed to me to be at that time. It was as if some revelers should jest and shout in a great church. With the awful abyss in front, and these prattlers to the rear, one had the two extremes. There was God in the deep and awful stillness ahead, and the world behind in the chatter and gayety that rang out “like a man’s cracked laughter heard way down in hell.”
The first man’s voice that I heard, as I turned away from the solemn hush of the Eternal that yawned before us, was that of a young fellow who remarked to his chum rhapsodically (evidently alluding to some female acquaintance), “Why, she had a leg on her like a government mule.” These words bit into my memory as if they were cut there by white-hot pincers.