PART V.
The next evening our friend the Captain found his fair audience by the taffrail increased to a round dozen, while several of the gentlemen passengers lounged near, and the chief officer divided his attention between the gay group of ladies below and the "fanning" main-topsail high up, with its corresponding studding-sail hung far out aloft to the breeze; the narrative having by this time contracted a sort of professional interest, even to his matter-of-fact taste, which enabled him to enjoy greatly the occasional glances of sly humour directed to him by his superior, for whom he evidently entertained a kind of admiring respect, that seemed to be enhanced as he listened. As for the commander himself, he related the adventures in question with a spirit and vividness of manner that contributed to them no small charm; amusingly contrasted with the cool, dry, indifferent sort of gravity of countenance, amidst which the keen gray seawardly eye, under the peak of the naval cap, kept changing and twinkling as it seemed to run through the experience of youth again—sometimes almost approaching to an undeniable wink. The expression of it at this time, however, was more serious, while it appeared to run along the dotted reef-band of the mizen-topsail above, as across the entry in a log-book, and as if there were something interesting to come.
"Well, my dear captain," asked his matronly relative, "what comes next? You and your friend had picked up a—a-what was it now!"
"Ah! I remember, ma'am," said the naval man, laughing; "the bottle—that was where I was. Well, as you may conceive, this said scrap of penmanship in the bottle did take both of us rather on end; and for two or three minutes Westwood and I sat staring at each other and the uncouth-looking fist, in an inquiring sort of way, like two cocks over a beetle. Westwood, for his part, was doubtful of its being the Planter at all; but the whole thing, when I thought of it, made itself as clear to me, so far, as two half-hitches, and the angrier I was at myself for being done by a frog-eating, bloody-politeful set of Frenchmen like these. Could we only have clapped eyes on the villanous thieving craft at the time, by Jove! if I wouldn't have manned a boat from the Indiaman, leave or no leave, and boarded her in another fashion! But where they were now, what they meant, and whether we should ever see them again, heaven only knew. For all we could say, indeed, something strange might have turned up at home in Europe—a new war, old Boney got loose once more, or what not—and I could scarce fall asleep for guessing and bothering over the matter, as restless as the first night we cruised down Channel in the old Pandora."
Early in the morning-watch a sudden stir of the men on deck woke me, and I bundled up in five minutes' time. But it was only the second mate setting them to wash decks, and out they came from all quarters, yawning, stretching themselves, and tucking up their trousers, as they passed the full buckets lazily along; while a couple of boys could be seen hard at work to keep the head-pump going, up against the gray sky over the bow. However, I was so anxious to have the first look-out ahead, that I made a bold push through the thick of it for the bowsprit, where I went out till I could see nothing astern of me but the Indiaman's big black bows and figurehead, swinging as it were round the spar I sat upon, with the spread of her canvass coming dim after me out of the fog, and a lazy snatch of foam lifting to her cut-water, as the breeze died away. The sun was just beginning to rise; ten minutes before, it had been almost quite dark; there was a mist on the water, and the sails were heavy with dew; when a circle began to open round us, where the surface looked as smooth and dirty as in a dock, the haze seeming to shine through, as the sunlight came sifting through it, like silver gauze. You saw the big red top of the sun glare against the water-line, and a wet gleam of crimson came sliding from one smooth blue swell to another; while the back of the haze astern turned from blue to purple, and went lifting away into vapoury streaks and patches. All of a sudden the ship came clear out aloft and on the water, with her white streak as bright as snow, her fore-royal and truck gilded, her broad foresail as red as blood, and every face on deck shining as they looked ahead, where I felt like a fellow held up on a toasting-fork, against the fiery wheel the sun made ere clearing the horizon. Two or three strips of cloud melted in it like lumps of sugar in hot wine; and, after overhauling the whole seaboard round and round, I kept straining my eyes into the light, with the notion there was something to be seen in that quarter, but to no purpose; there wasn't the slightest sign of the brig or any other blessed thing. What struck me a little, however, was the look of the water just as the fog was clearing away: the swell was sinking down, the wind fallen for the time to a dead calm; and when the smooth face of it caught the light full from aloft, it seemed to come out all over long-winding wrinkles and eddies, running in a broad path, as it were, twisted and woven together, right into the wake of the sunrise. When I came inboard from the bowsprit, big Harry and another grumpy old salt were standing by the bitts, taking a forecastle observation, and gave me a squint, as much as to ask if I had come out of the east, or had been trying to pocket the flying-jib-boom. "D'you notice anything strange about the water at all?" I asked in an offhand sort of way, wishing to see if the men had remarked aught of what I suspected. The old fellow gave me a queer look out of the tail of his eye, and the ugly man seemed to be measuring me from head to foot. "No, sir," said the first, carelessly; "can't say as how I does,"—while Harry coolly commenced sharpening his sheath-knife on his shoe. "Did you ever hear of currents hereabouts?" said I to the other man. "Hereaway!" said he; "why, bless ye, sir, it's unpossible as I could ha' heer'd tell on sich a thing, 'cause, ye see, sir, there an't none so far out at sea, sir—al'ays axin' your parding, ye know, sir!" while he hitched up his trousers and looked aloft, as if there were somewhat wrong about the jib-halliards.
The Indiaman by this time had quite lost steerage-way, and came sheering slowly round, broadside to the sun, while the water began to glitter like a single sheet of quicksilver, trembling and swelling to the firm edge of it far off; the pale blue sky filling deep aloft with light, and a long white haze growing out of the horizon to eastward. I kept still looking over from the fore-chains with my arms folded, and an eye to the water on the starboard side, next the sun, where, just a fathom or two from the bright copper of her sheathing along the water-line, you could see into it. Every now and then little bells and bubbles, as I thought, would come up in it and break short of the surface; and sometimes I fancied the line of a slight ripple, as fine as a rope-yarn, went turning and glistening, round one of the ship's quarters, across her shadow. Just then the old sailor behind me shoved his face over the bulwark, too, all warts and wrinkles, like a ripe walnut-shell, with a round knob of a nose in the middle of it, and seemed to be watching to see it below, when he suddenly squirted his tobacco-juice as far out as possible alongside, and gave his mouth a wipe with the back of his tarry yellow hand; catching my eye in a shame-faced sort of way, as I glanced first at him and then at his floating property. I leant listlessly over the rail, watching the patch of oily yellow froth, as it floated quietly on the smooth face of the water; till all at once I started to observe that beyond all question it had crept slowly away past our starboard bow, clear of the ship, and at last melted into the glittering blue brine. The two men noticed my attention, and stared along with me; while the owner of the precious cargo himself kept looking after it wistfully into the wake of the sunlight, as if he were a little hurt; then aloft and round about, in a puzzled sort of way, to see if the ship hadn't perhaps taken a sudden sheer to port. "Why, my man," I said, meeting his oyster-like old sea-eye, "what's the reason of that?—perhaps there is some current or other here, after all, eh?" Just as he meant to answer, however, I noticed his watch-mate give him a hard shove in the ribs with his huge elbow, and a quick screw of his weather top-light, while he kept the lee one doggedly fixed on myself. I accordingly walked slowly aft as if to the quarterdeck, and came round the long-boat again, right abreast of them.
Harry was pacing fore and aft with his arms folded, when his companion made some remark on the heat, peering all about him, and then right up into the air aloft. "Well then, shipmate," said Harry, dabbing his handkerchief back into his tarpaulin again, "I've seen worse, myself,—ownly, 'twas in the Bight o' Benin, look ye,—an' afore the end on it, d'ye see, we hove o'board nine of a crew, let alone six dozen odds of a cargo!" "Cargo!" exclaimed his companion in surprise. "Ay, black passengers they was, ye know, old ship!" answered the ugly rascal, coolly; "an' I tell ye what it is, Jack, I never sails yet with passengers aboard, but some'at bad turned up in the end,—al'ays one or another on 'em's got a foul turn in his conscience, ye see! I say, 'mate," continued he, looking round, "didn't ye note that 'ere 'long-shore looking customer as walked aft just now, with them bloody soft quest'ns o' his about—" "Why," said Jack, "it's him Jacobs and the larboard watch calls the Green Hand, an' a blessed good joke they has about him, to all appearance,—but they keeps it pretty close." "Close, be d——d!" growled Harry, "I doesn't like the cut of his jib, I tell ye, shipmate! Jist you take my word for it, that 'ere fellow's done some'at bad at home, or he's bent on some'at bad afloat—it's all one! Don't ye mark how he keeps boxhaulin' and skulking fore an' aft, not to say looking out to wind'ard every now an' again, as much as he expected a sail to heave in sight!" "Well, I'm blowed but you're right, Harry!" said the other, taking off his hat to scratch his head, thoughtfully. "Ay, and what's more," went on Harry, "it's just comed ath'art me as how I've clapped eyes on the chap somewheres or other afore this—d——n me if I don't think it was amongst a gang o' Spanish pirates I saw tried for their lives and let off, in the Havanney!" "Thank you, my man!" thought I, as I leant against the booms on the other side, "the devil you did!—a wonder it wasn't in the Old Bailey, which would have been more possible, though less romantic,—seeing in the Havannah I never was!" The curious thing was that I began to have a faint recollection, myself, of having seen this same cross-grained beauty, or heard his voice, before; though where and how it was, I couldn't for the life of me say at the moment. "Lord bless us, Harry!" faltered out the old sailor, "ye don't mean it!—sich a young, soft-looked shaver, too!" "Them smooth-skinned sort o' coves is kimmonly the worst, 'mate," replied Harry; "for that matter ye may be d——d sure he's got his chums aboard,—an' how does we know but the ship's sold, from stem to starn? There's that 'ere black-avizzed parson, now, and one or two more aft—cuss me if that 'ere feller smells brine for the first time! An' as for this here Bob Jacobs o' yours, blow me if there an't over many of his kind in the whole larboard watch, Jack! A man-o'-war's-man's al'ays a blackguard out on a man-o'-war, look ye!" "Why, bless me, shipmate," said Jack, lowering his voice, "by that recknin', a man don't know his friends in this here craft! The sooner we gives the mate a hint, the better, to my thinking?" "No, blow me, no, Jack," said Harry, "keep all fast, or ye'll kick up a worse nitty, old boy! Jist you hould on till ye see what's to turn up,—ownly stand by and look out for squalls, that's all! There's the skipper laid up below in his berth, I hears,—and to my notions, that 'ere mate of ours is no more but a blessed soldier, with his navigation an' his head-work, an' be blowed to him—where's he runned the ship, I'd like to know, messmate!" "Well, strike me lucky if I'm fit to guess!" answered Jack, gloomily. "No, s'help me Bob, if he knows hisself!" said Harry. "But here's, what I says, anyhow,—if so be we heaves in sight of a pirate, or bumps ashore on a ileyand i' the dark, shiver my tawsels if I doesn't have a clip with a handspike at that 'ere soft-sawderin' young blade in the straw hat!" "Well, my fine fellow," thought I, "many thanks to you again, but I certainly shall look out for you!" All this time I couldn't exactly conceive whether the sulky rascal really suspected anything of the kind, or whether he wasn't in fact sounding his companion, and perhaps others of the crew, as to how far they would go in case of an opportunity for mischief; especially when I heard him begin to speculate if "that 'ere proud ould beggar of a naboob, aft yonder, musn't have a sight o' gould and jowels aboard with him!" "Why, for the matter o' that, 'mate," continued he, "I doesn't signify the twinklin' of a marlinspike, mind ye, what lubberly trick they sarves this here craft,—so be ownly ye can get anyhow ashore, when all's done! It's nouther ship-law nor shore-law, look ye, 'mate, as houlds good on a bloody dazart!" "Ay, ay, true enough, bo'," said the other, "but what o' that?—there an't much signs of a dazart, I reckon, in this here blue water!" "Ho!" replied Harry, rather scornfully, "that's 'cause you blue-water, long-v'yage chaps isn't up to them, brother! There's you and that 'ere joker in the striped slops, Jack, chaffing away over the side jist now about a current,—confounded sharp he thinks hisself, too!—but d'ye think Harry Foster an't got his weather-eye open? For my part I thinks more of the streak o' haze yonder-away, right across the starboard bow, nor all the currents in—" "Ay, ay," said Jack, stretching out again to look, "the heat, you means?" "Heat!" exclaimed the ugly topman, "heat be blowed! Hark ye, 'mate, it may be a strip o' cloud, no doubt, or the steam over a sand-bank,—but so be the calm lasts so long, and you sees that 'ere streak again by sundown, with a touch o' yallow in't—" "What—what, shipmate?" asked Jack, breathless with anxiety. "Then, dammee, it's the black coast iv Africay, and no mistake!" said Harry. "And what's more," continued the fellow, coolly, after taking a couple of short turns, "if there be's a current, why, look ye, it'll set dead in to where the land lays—an' I'm blessed if there's one aboard, breeze or no breeze, as is man enough for to take her out o' the suck of a Africane current!" "The Lord be with us!" exclaimed the other sailor, in alarm, "what's to be done, Harry, bo',—when d'ye mean for to let them know, aft?" "Why, maybe I'm wrong, ye know, old ship," said Harry, "an' a man musn't go for to larn his betters, ye know,—by this time half o' the watch has a notion on it, at any rate. There's Dick White, Jack Jones, Jim Sidey, an' a few more Wapping men, means to stick together in case o' accidents—so d—n it, Jack, man, ye needn't be in sich an a taking! What the—" (here he came out with a regular string of topgallant oaths,) "when you finds a good chance shoved into your fist, none o' your doin', an't a feller to haul in the slack of it 'cause he's got a tarry paw, and ships before the mast? I tell ye what it is, old ship, 'tan't the first time you an' me's been cast away, an' I doesn't care the drawin' of a rope-yarn, in them here latitudes, if I'm cast away again! Hark 'ye, ould boy,—grog to the masthead, a grab at the passengers' wallibles, when they han't no more use for 'em, in course—an' the pick on the ladies, jist for the takin' o' them ashore!" "Lord love ye, Harry, belay there!" said Jack, "what's the good o' talkin' on what an't like to be?" "Less like things turns up!" said Harry. "More by token, if I hasn't pitched upon my fancy lass a'ready—an' who knows, old ship, but you marries a naboob's darter yet, and gets yourself shoved all square, like a rig'lar hare, into his heestate, as they calls it? For my part, I've more notion of the maid! An' it'll go hard with me if we doesn't manage to haul that 'ere mishynar' parson safe ashore on the strength of it!" "God bless ye, Harry," answered Jack, somewhat mournfully, "I'm twice spliced already!" "Third time's lucky, though," replied Harry, with a chuckle, as he walked towards the side again, and looked over; the rest of the watch being gathered on the other bow, talking and laughing; the passengers beginning to appear on the poop, and the Scotch second-mate standing up aft on the taffrail, feeling for a breath of wind. The big topman came slowly back to his companion, and leant himself on the spars again. "Blowed if I don't think you're right, 'mate," said he, "you and that 'ere lawyer. You'd a'most say there's a ripple round her larboard bow just now, sure enough—like she were broadside on to some drift or another. Hows'ever, that's nouther here nor there,—for my part, I sets more count by the look o' the sky to east'ard, an' be blowed, shipmate, if that same yonder don't make me think o' woods!" "Well," said Jack, "I goes by sunrise, messmate, an' I didn't like it overmuch myself, d'ye see! That 'ere talk o' yours, Harry, consarnin' dazarts and what not—why, bless me, it's all my eye,—this bout, at any rate—seein' as how, if we doesn't have a stiff snuffler out o' that very quarter afore twenty-four hours is over, you call me lubber!" "Ho, ho! old salt," chuckled Harry, "none o' them saws holds good hereaway, if its the coast of Africay—d——n it, 'mate, two watches 'll settle our hash in them longitudes, without going the length o' six! Han't I knocked about the bloody coast of it six weeks at a time, myself, let alone livin' as many months in the woods?—so I knows the breedin' of a turnady a cussed sight too well, not to speak on the way the land-blink looms afore you sights it!" "Lived in them there woods, did ye?" inquired Jack. "Ay, bo', an' a rum rig it was too, sure enough," said Harry; "the very same time I tould you on, i' the Bight o' Benin." "My eye!" exclaimed the other, "a man never knows what he may come to. Let's into the rights of it, Harry, carn't ye, afore eight-bells strikes?" "Woods!" said Harry, "I b'lieve ye, ould ship. I see'd enough o' woods, that time, arter all!—and 'twan't that long agone, either—I'll not say how long, but it wan't last v'yage. A sharp, clinker-built craft of a schooner she wor, I'm not goin' to give ye her right name, but they called her the Lubber-hater,[13]—an' if there wan't all sorts on as aboard, it's blaming ye—an' a big double-jinted man-eatin' chap of a Yankee was our skipper, as sly as slush—more by token, he had a wart alongside o' one eye as made him look two ways at ye—Job Price by name—an' arter he'd made his fortin, I heard he's took up a tea-total chapel afloat on the Missishippey. She'd got a hell of a long nose, that 'ere schooner, so my boy we leaves everything astarn, chase or race, I promise ye; an' as for a blessed ould ten-gun brig what kept a-cruising thereaway, why, we jest got used to her, like, and al'ays lowers our mainsail afore takin' the wind of her, by way o' good bye, quite perlite. 'Blowed if it warn't rum, though, for to see the brig's white figger'ed over the swell, rollin' under a cloud o' canvass, sten-s'ls crowded out alow an' aloft, as she jogged arter us! Then she'd haul her wind and fire a gun, an' go beating away up in chase of some other craft, as caught the chance for runnin' out whenever they sees the Lubber-hater well to sea—why, s'elp me Bob, if the traders on the coast didn't pay Job Price half a dozen blacks a piece every trip, jist for to play that 'ere dodge! At last, one time, not long after I joined the craft, what does he do but nigh-hand loses her an' her cargo, all owin' to reckonin' over much on this here traverse. Out we comes one night in the tail of a squall, an' as soon as it clears, there sure enough we made out the brig, hard after us, as we thinks,—so never a rag more Job claps on, 'cause two of his friends, ye see, was jist outside the bar in the Noon river. Well, bloody soon the cruiser begins to overhaul us, as one gaff-taups'l wouldn't do, nor yet another, till the flying-jib and bonnets made her walk away from them in right 'arnest,—when slap comes a long-shot that took the fore-topmast out of us in a twinkling. So when the moonlight comed out, lo an' behold, instead o' the brig's two masts stiff and straight against the haze, there was three spanking sticks all ataunto, my boy, in a fine new sloop-o'-war as had fresh came on the station—the Irish, they called her—and a fast ship she wor. But all said and done, the schooner had the heels of her in aught short of a reef-taups'l breeze,—though, as for the other two, the sloop-o'-war picked off both on 'em in the end." At this point of the fellow's account, I, Ned Collins, began to prick up my ears, pretty sure it was the dear old Iris he was talking of; and thought I, "Oho, my mate, we shall have you directly,—listening's fair with a chap of this breed."
"Well," said he, "'twas the next trip after that, we finds the coast clear, as commonly was—for, d'ye see, they couldn't touch us if so be we hadn't a slave aboard,—in fact, we heerd as how the cruiser was up by Serry Lony, and left some young lufftenant or other on the watch with a sort o' lateen-rigged tender. A precious raw chap he was, by all accounts,—and sure enough, there he kept plying off and on, inshore, 'stead of out of sight to seaward till the craft would make a bolt; an' as soon as ye dropped an anchor, he'd send a boat aboard with a reefer, to ax if ye'd got slaves in the hold. In course, ye know, Job Price sends back a message, "palm-ile an' iv'ry, an' gould if we can,"—h'ists the Portingee colours, brings up his Portingee papers, and makes the Portingee stoo'rd skipper for the spell,—but anyhow, bein' no less nor three slavers in the mouth of the Bonny river at the time, why, he meant to show fight if need be, and jest manhandle the young navy sprig to his heart's content. Hows'ever, the second or third night, all on a suddent we found he'd sheered off for decency's sake, as it might be, an hour or two afore we'd began to raft off the niggers. Well, 'mate, right in the midst of it there comes sich a fury of a turnady off the land, as we'd to slip cable and run fair out to sea after the other craft what had got sooner full,—one on 'em went ashore in sight, an' we not ninety blacks aboard yet, with barely a day's water stowed in. The next morning, out o' sight of land, we got the sea-breeze, and stood in again under everything, till we made Fernandy Po ileyand three leagues off, or thereby, an' the two ebony-brigs beating out in company,—so the skipper stands over across their course for to give them a hail, heaves to and pulls aboard the nearest, where he stays a good long spell and drinks a stiff glass, as ye may fancy, afore partin'. Back comes Job Price in high glee, and tould the mate as how that mornin' the brigs had fell foul o' the man-o'-war tender, bottom up, an' a big Newfoundling dog a-howlin' on the keel—no doubt she'd turned the turtle in that 'ere squall—more by token he brought the dog alongst with him in a present. So away we filled again to go in for the Bonny river, when the breeze fell, and shortly arter there we was all three dead becalmed, a couple o'miles betwixt us, sticking on the water like flies on glass, an' as hot, ye know, as blazes—the very moral o' this here. By sundown we hadn't a drop o' water, so the skipper sent to the nearest brig for some; but strike me lucky if they'd part with a bucketful for love, bein' out'ard bound. As the Spanish skipper said, 'twas either hard dollars or a stout nigger, and t'other brig said the same. A slight puff o' land-wind we had in the night, though next day 'twas as calm as ever, and the brigs farther off—so by noon, my boy, for two blessed casks, if Job Price hadn't to send six blacks in the boat. Shorter yarn, Jack,—but the calm held that night too, and 'blowed if the brigs would sell another breaker—what we had we couldn't spare to the poor devils under hatches, and the next day, why, they died off like rotten sheep, till we hove the last on 'em o'board; and frightful enough it was, mind ye, for to see about fifty sharks at work all round the schooner at once, as long as it lasted. Well, in the arternoon we'd just commenced squabbling aboard amongst ourselves, round the dreg water, or whether to board one o' the brigs and have a fair fight, when off come a bit of a breeze, betwixt the two high peaks on Fernandy Po, both the brigs set stensails, and begins slipping quietly off—our skipper gave orders to brace after them, and clear away the long gun amidships; but all on a suddent we made out a lump of a brig dropping down before it round the ileyand, which we knowed her well enough for a Bristol craft as had lost half her hands up the Callebar, in the gould an' iv'ry trade. Down she comed, wonderfle fast, for the light breeze, if there hadn't been one o' yer currents besides off the ileyand, till about half-a-mile away she braces up, seemingly to sheer across it and steer clear of us. Out went our boat, an' the skipper bids every man of her crew to shove a short cutlash inside his trousers. Says he, "I guess we'll first speak 'em fair, but if we don't ha' water enough, it'll be 'tarnal queer, that's all," says he—an' Job was a man never swore, but he looked mighty bad, that time, I must say; so we out oars and pulls right aboard the trader, without answerin' ever a hail, when up the side we bundled on deck, one arter the other, mad for a drink, and sees the master with five or six of a crew, all as white as ghostesses, and two or three Kroomen, besides a long-legged young feller a-sittin' and kicking his feet over the kimpanion-hatch, with a tumblerful o' grog in his fist, as fresh to all seemin' as a fish, like a supper-cargo or some'at o' the sort, as them craft commonly has. "What schooner's that?" axes the master, all abroad like; an' says Job, says he out o' breath, "Never you mind; I guess you'll let's have some water, for we wants it almighty keen!" "Well, says the other, shaking his head, "I'm afeared we're short ourselves—anyhow," says he, "we'll give ye a dipper the piece,"—and accordingly they fists us along a dozen gulps, hand over hand. "'Twon't do, I guess, mister," says our skipper; "we wants a cask!" Here the master o' the brig shakes his head again, and giv a look to the young 'long-shore-like chap aft, which sings out as we couldn't have no more for love nor money,—an' I see Cap'en Price commence for to look savitch again, and feel for the handle on his cutlash. "Rather you'd ax iv'ry or gould-dust!" sings out the supper-cargo—"hows'ever," says he: "as ye've tooken sich a fancy to it, short o' water as we is, why a fair exchange an't no robbery," says he: "you wants water, an' we wants hands; haven't ye a couple o' niggers for to spare us, sir, by way off a barter, now?" he says. Well,'mate, I'll be blowed if I ever see a man turn so wicked fur'ous as Job Price turns at this here,—an' says he, through his teeth, "If ye'd said a nigger's nail-parin', I couldn't done it, so it's no use talkin'." "Oh come, capting," says the young fellow, wonderfle angshis like, "say one jist—it's all on the quiet, ye know. Bless me, captin," says he, "I'd do a deal for a man in a strait, 'tickerly for yerself—an' I think we'd manage with a single hand more. I'll give ye two casks and a bag o' gould-dust for one black, and we'll send aboard for him just now, ourselves!" "No!" roars Job Price, walkin' close up to him; "ye've riz me, ye cussed Britisher ye, an' I tell ye we'll take what we wants!" "No jokes, though, captin!" says the feller—"what's one to a whole raft-ful I heerd of ye shipping?" "Go an' ax the sharks, ye beggar!" says the skipper;—"here my lads!" says he, an' makes grab at the other's throat, when slap comes a jug o' rum in his eye-lights, and the young chap ups fist in quick-sticks, and drops him like a cock, big as he was. By that time, though, in a twinklin', the master was flat on deck, and the brig's crew showed no fight—when lo an' behold, my boy, up bundles a score o' strapping men-o'-war's-men out of the cabin. One or two on us got a cut about the head, an' my gentleman supper-cargo claps a pistol to my ear from aft, so we knocked under without more to do. In five minutes time everyman jack of us had a seizing about his wrists and lower pins,—and says Job Price, in a givin-up sort o' v'ice, 'You're too cust spry for playin' jokes on, I calc'late, squire,' he says. 'Jokes!' says the young feller, 'why, it's no joke—in course you knows me?' 'Niver see'd ye atween the eyes afore,' says Job, 'but don't bear no malice, mister, now.' 'That's it,' says the t'other, lookin' at the schooner again,—'no more I does—so jist think a bit, han't you really a nigger or so aboard o' ye—if it was jist one?' 'Squash the one!' says Job, shakin' his head nellicholly like—an' 'Sorry for it,' says the chap, ''cause ye see I'm the lufftenant belongin' to the Irish, an' I carn't titch yer schooner if so be ye han't a slave aboard.' 'Lawk a'mighty!—no!' sings out Job Price, 'cause bein' half blinded he couldn't ha' noted the lot o' man-o'-war's-men sooner.—'But I can,' says the other, 'for piratecy, ye see; an' what's more,' he says, 'there's no help for it now, I'm afeared, mister what-they-call-ye!' Well, 'mate, after that ye may fancy our skipper turns terrible down in the mouth; so without a word more they parbuckles us all down below into the cabin—an' what does this here lufftenant do but he strips the whole lot, rigs out as many of his men in our duds, hoists out a big cask o' water on the brig's far side, and pulls round for the schooner,—hisself togged out like the skipper, and his odd hands laid down in the boat's bottom." You won't wonder at my being highly amused with the fellow's yarn, since the fact was that it happened to be one of my own adventures in the days of the Iris, two or three years before, when we saw a good many scenes together, far more, wild and stirring, of course, in the thick of the slave-trade; but really the ugly rascal described it wonderfully well.
"Well," said Harry, "I gets my chin shoved up in the starn-windy, where I see'd the whole thing, and tould the skipper accordently. The schooner's crew looked out for the water like so many oysters in a tub; the lufftenant jumps up the side with his men after him, an' not so much as the cross of two cutlashes did we hear afore the onion-jack flew out a-peak over her mains'l. In five minutes more, the schooner fills away before the breeze, and begins to slide off in fine style after the pair o' brigs, as was nigh half hull-down to seaward by this time. There we was, left neck an' heel below in the trader, and he hauled up seemin'ly for the land,—an' arter a bit says the skipper to me, 'Foster, my lad, I despise this way o' things,' says he, 'an't there no way on gettin' clear?' 'Never say die, cap'en!' I says; an' says he, 'I calc'late they left considerable few hands aboard?' 'None but them sleepy-like scum o' iv'ry men,' I says,—but be blowed if I see'd what better we was, till down comes a little nigger cabin-boy for some'at or other, with a knife in his hand. Job fixes his eye on him—I've heerd he'd a way in his eye with niggers as they couldn't stand—an' says he, soft-sawderin' like, 'Come here, will ye, my lad, an' give us a drink,'—so the black come for'ad with a pannikin, one foot at a time, an' he houlds it out to the skipper's lips—for, d'ye see, all on us had our flippers lashed behind our backs. 'Now,' says he, 'thankee, boy,—look in atwixt my legs, and ye'll find a dollar.' With that, jest as the boy stoops, Job Price ketches his neck fast betwixt his two knees, an' blowed if he didn't jam them harder, grinning all the time, till down drops the little black throttled on the deck. 'That's for thankin' a bloody niggur!' says he, lookin' as savitch as the devil, and got the knife in his teeth, when he turned to and sawed through the seizing round my wrists—an' in course I sets every man clear in quick-sticks. 'Now!' says Job, lookin' round, 'the quicker the better—that cussed lubber-ratin' hound's got my schooner, but maybe, my lads, this here iv'ry man'll pay expenses—by th'almighty, if I'm made out a pirate, I'll arn the name!'
"Well, we squints up the hatchway, and see'd a young midshipman a-standing with his back to us, watching the brig's crew at the braces, an' a pistol in one hand—when all at once our skipper slips off his shoes, run up the stair as quiet as a cat, an' caught the end of a capstan-bar as lay on the scuttle. With that down he comes crash on the poor fellow's scull from aft, and brained him in a moment. Every man of us got bloody-minded with the sight, so we scarce knowed what we did, ye know, 'mate, afore all hands o' them was gone,—how, I an't goin' for to say, nor the share as one had in it more nor another. The long an' the short on it was, we run the brig by sundown in amongst the creeks up the Camaroons river, thinkin' to lie stowed away close thereabouts till all wor cold. Hows'ever they kicked up the devil's delight about a piratecy, and the sloop-o'war comes back shortly, when night an' day there was that young shark of a lufftenant huntin' arter us, as sharp as a marlinspike—we dursn't come down the river nohow, till what with a bad conscience, fogs, and sleepin' every night within stink o' them blasted muddy mangroves an' bulrushes together, why, mate, the whole ten hands died off one arter the other in the fever—leaving ownly me an' the skipper. Job Price was like a madman over the cargo, worth, good knows how many thousand dollars, as he couldn't take out—but for my part, I gets the brig's punt one night and sculls myself ashore, and off like a hare into the bush by moonlight. No use, ye know, for to say what rum chances I meets with in the woods, livin' up trees and the like for fear o' illiphants, sarpents, an' bloody high-annies,—but, blow me, if I didn't think the farther ye went aloft, the more monkeys an' parrykeets you rowsed out, jabberin' all night so as a feller couldn't close an eye—an' as for the sky, be blowed if I ever once sighted it. So, d'ye see, it puts all notions o' fruits an' flowers out o' my head, an' all them jimmy-jessamy sort o' happy-go-lucky yarns about barbers' ileyands and shipherdresses what they used for to spell out o' dicshinars at school—all gammon, mate!" "Lord love ye, no, surely," said Jack; "it's in the Bible!" "Ay, ay," said Harry, "that's arter ye've gone to Davy Jones, no doubt; but I've been in the South-Sy ileyands since, myself, an' be blowed if it's much better there! Hows'ever, still anon, I took a new fancy, an' away I makes for the river, in sarch of a nigger villache, as they calls 'em; and sure enough it warn't long ere right I plumps in the midst on a lot o' cane huts amongst trees. But sich a shine and a nitty as I kicks up, ye see, bein' half naked, for all the world like a wild man o' the woods, an' for a full hour I has the town to myself, so I hoists my shirt on a stick over the hut I took, by way of a flag o' truce, an' at last they all begins for to swarm in again. Well, ye see, I knowed the ways o' the natifs thereabouts pretty well, an' what does I do but I'd laid myself flat afore a blasted ugly divvle of a wooden himmache, as stood on the flour, an' I wriggles and twists myself, and groans like a chap in a fit—what they calls fittish, thereaway—an' in course, with that they logs me down at once for a rig'lar holy-possel from Jerusalem. The long an' the short on it was, the fittish-man takes me under charge, and sets me to tell fortins or the like with an ould quadrant they'd got somewheres—gives me a hut an' two black wives, begad! and there I lives for two or three weeks on end, no doubt, as proud as Tommy—when, one fine morning, what does I see off shore in the river but that confounded man-o'-war tender, all ship-shape an' ataunto again. So, my boy, I gives 'em to understand as how, bein' over vallible at home with the King of England, in course he'd sent for to puckalow me away—an' no sooner said, but the whole town gets in a fluster—the fittish-man, which a knowing chap he was, takes an' rubs me from heel to truck with ile out on a sartain nut, as turned me coal-black in half an hour, an' as soon as I looks in the creek, 'mate, be blowed if I'd a knewn myself from a nigger, somehow!" To tell the truth, as I thought to myself, it was no wonder, as Master Harry's nose and lips were by no means in the classic style, and his skin, as it was, didn't appear of the whitest. "So there, ye know, I sits before a hut grindin' away at maize, with nothink else but a waist-cloth round me, and my two legs stuck out, till such time as the lufftenant an' two boats' crews had sarched the villache, havin' heerd, no doubt, of a white man thereabouts—an' at last off they went. Well, in course, at first this here affair gives the fittish-man a lift in the niggerses eyes, by reason o' havin' turned a white man black—'cause, ye see, them fittish-men has a riglar-bred knowledge on plants and sichlike. But hows'ever, in a day or two I begins for to get rayther oneasy, seein' it didn't wash off, an' accordently I made beknown as much to the fittish-man, when, my boy, if he doesn't shake his mop-head, and rubs noses, as much as to say, 'We an't agoin' to part.' 'Twas no use, and thinks I, 'Ye man-eatin' scum, be blowed if I don't put your neck out, then!' So I turns to with my knife on a log o' wood, carves a himmage twice as big an' ugly as his'n, and builds a hut over it, where I plays all the conjerin' tricks I could mind on—till, be hanged if the niggers didn't begin to leave the fittish-man pretty fast, an' make a blessed sight more o' me. I takes a couple more wives, gets drunk every day on palm-wine and toddy-juice—as for the hogs an' the yams they brought me, why I couldn't stow 'em away; an' in place o' wantin' myself white again, I rubs myself over an' over with that ere nut, let alone palm-ile, till the bloody ould fittish-man looks brown alongside o' me. At last the king o' the niggers thereaway—King Chimbey they called him, or some'at o' the sort—he sends for to see me, an' away to his town they takes me, a mile or two up the country, where I see'd him; but I'm blowed, Jack, if he'd got a crown on at all, ounly a ould red marine's coat, an' a pair o' top-boots, what was laid away when he warn't in state. Hows'ever he gives me two white beans an' a red un, in sign o' high favour, and gives me to know as I wor to stay there. But one thing I couldn't make out, why the black king's hut an' the josst-house, as they calls it, was all stuck round with bones an' dead men's skulls!—'twan't long, though, ere I finds it out, 'mate! That ere fittish-man, d'ye see, wor a right-down imp to look at, and devilish wicked he eyed me; but still anon I sends over for my wives, turns out a black feller out on his hut, an' slings a hammock in it, when the next day or so I meets the first fittish-man in the woods, an' the poor divvle looks wonderfle friendly-like, makin' me all kinds o' woeful signs, and seemin'ly as much as to say for to keep a bright look-out on the other. All on a suddent what does he do, but he runs a bit, as far as a tree, picks up a sort of a red mushroom, an' he rubs with it across the back o' my hand, gives a wink, and scuttles off. What it meaned I couldn't make out, till I gets back to the town, when I chanced to look at my flipper, and there I see a clean white streak alongst it! Well, I thinks, liberty's sweet, an' I'm blessed if a man's able to cruize much to windward o' right-down slavery, thinks I, if he's black! Howsomever, thinks I, I'll jest hold on a bit longer. Well, next day, the black king had the blue-devils with drinkin' rum, an' he couldn't sleep nohow, 'cause, as I made out, he'd killed his uncle, they said—I doesn't know but he'd eaten him, too—anyhow, I see'd him eat as much of a fat hog, raw, as ud sarve out half the watch—so the fittish-man tells him there's nought for it but to please the fittish. What that wor, blowed if I knew; but no sooner sundown nor they hauls me out o' my hut, claps me in a stinking hole as dark as pitch, and leaves me to smell hell till mornin', as I thought. Jist about the end o' the mid-watch, there kicks up a rumpus like close-reef taups'ls in a hurricane—smash goes the sticks over me; I seed the stars, and a whole lot o' strange blacks with long spears, a-fightin', yellin', tramplin', an' twistin' in the midst o' the huts,—and off I'm hoisted in the gang, on some feller's back or other, at five knots the hour, through the woods,—till down we all comes in a drove, plash amongst the very swamps close by the river, where, lo an' behold, I makes out a schooner afloat at her anchor. The next thing I feels a blasted red-hot iron come hiss across my shoulders, so I jumped up and sang out like blazes, in course. But, my flippers bein' all fast, 'twas no use: I got one shove as sent me head-foremost into a long canoe, with thirty or forty niggers stowed away like cattle, and out the men pulls for the schooner. A big bright fire there was ashore, astarn of us, I mind, where they heated the irons, with a chap in a straw hat sarvin' out rum to the wild blacks from a cask; and ye saw the pitch-black woods behind, with the branches shoved out red in the light on it, an' a bloody-like patch on the water under a clump o' sooty mangrooves. An' be d—d, Jack, if I didn't feel the life sick in me, that time—for, d'ye see, I hears nothin' spoke round me but cussed French, Portingeese, an' nigger tongue—'specially when it jist lightens on me what sort on a case I were in; an' thinks I, 'By G—if I'm not took for a slave, arter all!—an' be hanged but I left that 'ere, 'farnal mushroom a-lying under that there tree yonder!' I begins for to think o' matters an' things, an' about Bristol quay, an' my old mother, an' my sister as was at school—mind ye, 'mate, all atwixt shovin' off the mangroves an' coming bump again the schooner's side—an' blow me if I doesn't tarn to, an' nigh-hand commences for to blubber—when jist then what does I catch sight on, by the lantern over the side, but that 'ere villain of a fittish-man, an' what's more, King Chimbey hisself, both hauled in the net. And with that I gives a chuckle, as ye may suppose, an' no mistake; for, thinks I, so far as consarns myself, this here can't last long, blow me, for sooner or later I'll find some un to speak to, even an I niver gets rid o' this here outer darkness—be blowed if I han't got a white mind, any ways, an' free I'll be, my boy! But I laughs, in course, when I see'd the fittish-man grin at me,—for thinks I, my cocks, you're logged down for a pretty long spell of it!"
"Well, bo', somehow I knows no more about it till such time as I sort o' wakes up in pitch-dark, all choke and sweat, an' a feller's dirty big toe in my mouth, with mine in some un else's eye,—so out I spits it, an' makes scramble for my life. By the roll an' the splash, I knowed I wor down in the schooner's hold; an' be hanged if there wan't twenty or thirty holding on like bees to a open weather-port, where the fresh wind and the spray come a-blowing through—but there, my boy, 'twere no go for to get so much as the tip o' yer nose. Accordently, up I prizes myself with my feet on another poor devil's wool,—for, d'ye see, by that time I minds a man's face no more nor so much timber!—an' I feels for the hatch over me, where by good luck, as I thought, there I finds it not battened down yet, so I shoved my head through on deck like a blacksmith's hammer. Well, 'mate, there was the schooner's deck wet, a swell of a sea on round her, well off the land, no trifle of a morning gale, and the craft heeling to it—a lot o' hands up on her yards, a-reefing at the boom mains'l and fo'taups'l, an' begod if my heart doesn't jump into my mouth with the sight, for I feels it for all the world like a good glass o' grog, settin' all to rights. Two or three there was walkin' aft the quarterdeck, so out I sings 'Hullo! hullo there, shipmates, give us a hand out o' this!' Two on 'em comes forud, one lifts a handspike, but both gives a grin, as much as to say it's some nigger tongue or other, in place o' good English—for, d'ye see, they'd half their faces black-beard, and rings i' their ears—when up walks another chap like the skipper, an' more the looks of a countryman. 'D—n it,' roars I again, 'I'm a free-born Briton!' with that he lends me a squint, looks to the men, an' gives some sort o' a sign—when they jams-to the hatch and nips me fast by the neck. 'Devil of a deep beggar, this here!' says he; 'jist, give him the gag, my lads,' says he; 'the planters often thinks more of a dumby, 'cause he works the more, and a stout piece o' goods this is!' says he. Well, 'mate, what does they do but one pulls out a knife, an' be blowed if they warn't agoin' for to cut out my tongue; but the men aloft sung out to hoist away the yards; so they left me ready clinched till they'd belay the ropes. Next, a hand forud, by good luck, hailed 'Sail-O,' and they'd some'at else to think o' besides me; for there, my boy, little more nor three miles to wind'ard, I see'd the Irish as she come driving bodily out o' the mist, shakin' out her three to'gallant-sails, an' a white spray flying with her off one surge to another. Bloody bad it was, mind ye, for my wind-pipe, for every time the schooner pitched, away swings my feet clear o' the nigger's heads,—'cause, d'ye see, we chanced for to be stowed on the 'tween-decks, an' another tier there was, stuffed in her lower hold—an' there I stuck, 'mate, so as I couldn't help watchin' the whole chase, till at last the hatch slacks nip a bit, and down I plumps into the dark again."
"Well, bo', the breeze got lighter, an' to all seemin' the cursed schooner held her own; but hows'ever, the sloop-o'-war kept it up all day, and once or twice she tips us a long shot; till by sunset, as I reckoned, we hears no more on her. The whole night long, again, there we stews as thick as peas—I keeps harknin' to the sighs an' groans, an' the wash along the side, in a sort of a doze; an' s'help me Bob, I fancies for a moment I'm swinging in my hammock in the fox'sle, an' it's no more but the bulkheads and timbers creakin'. Then I thinks its some un else I dreams on, as is d—d oneasy, like to choke for heat and thirst; an' I'm a-chuckling at him—when up I wakes with the cockroaches swarming over my face. Another groan runs from that end to this, the whole lot on us tries hard, and kicks their neighbours to turn, an' be blowed if I knowed but I was buried in a churchyard, with the blasted worms all acrawl about me. All on a sudden, nigh-hand to daybreak it was, I hears a gun to wind'ard, so with that I contrives for to scramble up with my eye to the scuttle-port. 'Twas a stiffish breeze, an' I see'd some'at lift on a sea, like a albatrosse's wing, as one may say—though what wor this but the Irish's bit of a tender, standing right across our bows—for the schooner, ye see, changed her course i' the night-time, rig'lar slaver's dodge, thinkin' for to drop the sloop-o'-war, sure enough. But as for the little f'lucca, why, they hadn't bargained for her at all, lying-to as she did, with a rag o' sail up, in the troughs of the sea, till the schooner was close on her. Well, no sooner does they go about, my boy, but the muskeety of a cruiser lets drive at her off the top of a sea, as we hung broadside to them in stays. Blessed if I ever see sich a mark!—the shot jist takes our fore-top fair slap—for the next minute I see'd the fore-topmast come over the lee-side, an' astarn we begins to go directly. What's more, mate, I never see a small craft yet handled better in a sea, as that 'ere chap did—nor the same thing done, cleaner at any rate—for they jist comes nigh-hand tip on our bowsprit-end, as the schooner lifted—then up in the wind they went like clock-work, with a starnway on as carried the f'lucca, right alongside on us, like a coachman backing up a lane, and grind we both heaved on the swell, with the topmast hamper an' its canvass for a fender atwixt us. Aboard jumps the man-o'-war's-men, in course, cutlash in hand, an' for five minutes some tough work there was on deck, by the tramp, the shots, an' the curses over our heads—when off they shoved the hatches, and I see'd a tall young feller in a gold-banded cap look below. Be blowed if I wasn't goin' to sing out again, for, d'ye see, I'm blessed if I took mind on the chap at all, as much by reason o' the blood an' the smoke he'd got on his face as aught else. Hows'ever, I holds a bit meantime, on account o' Job Price an' that 'ere piratecy consarn—till what does I think, a hour or two arter, when I finds as this here were the very lufftenant as chased us weeks on end in the Camaroons. So a close stopper, sure enough, I keeps on my jaw; an' as for scentin' me out amongst a couple o' hundred blacks in the hold, why, 'twere fit to Paul my own mother herself.
"Well, Jack, by this time bein' near Serry Lone, next day or so we got in—where, what does they do but they lubber-rates us all, as they calls it, into a barracoon ashore, till sich time as the slaver ud be condemned—an' off goes the tender down coast again. Arter that, they treats us well enough, but still I dursn't say a word; for one day, as we goed to work makin' our huts, there I twigs a printed bill upon the church-wall, holdin' out a reward, d'ye see, consarnin' the piratecy, with my oun name and my very build logged down—ownly, be hanged if they doesn't tack on to it all, byway of a topgallant ink-jury to a man, these here words—'He's a very ugly feller—looks like a furriner.' Well, mate, I an't a young maiden, sure enough—but, thinks I, afore I fell foul o' that blasted fittish-man an' his nut, cuss me if I looks jist so bad as that 'ere! So ye know this goes more to my heart nor aught else, till there I spells out another confounded lie in the bill, as how Cap'en Price's men had mutinied again him, and murdered the brig's crew—when, in course, I sees the villain's whole traverse at once. So seein' I watched my chance one night, an' went aboard of a Yankee brig as were to sail next day; an' I tells the skipper part o' the story, offerin' for to work my passage across for nothin'—which, says he, 'It's a hinteresstin' narritife'—them was his words; an' says he, 'It's a land o' freedom is the States, an' no mistake—an't there no more on ye in the like case?' he says. 'Not as I knows on, sir,' I answers; an' says he, 'Plenty o' coloured gen'lmen there is yonder, all in silks an' satins; an' I hear,' says he, 'there's one on 'em has a chance o' bein President next time—anyhow I'm your friend,' says he, quite hearty. Well, the long an' short of it was, I stays aboard the brig, works my spell in her, an' takes my trick at the helm—but I'm blowed, Jack, if the men ud let me sleep in the fok'sle, 'cause I was a black,—so I slung my hammock aft with the nigger stoo'rd. D'ye see, I misgived myself a bit when we sank the coast, for thinks I its in Africay as that 'ere blessed mushroom are to be found, to take the colour off me—hows'ever, I thinks it carn't but wear out in time, now I've got out o' that 'ere confounded mess, where, sure enough, things was against me—so at last the v'yage were up, an' the brig got in to New Orleens. There I walks aft to the skipper for to take leave, when says he, wonderfle friendly-like,—'Now my lad,' says he, 'I'm goin' up river a bit for to see a friend as takes a interesst in your kind—an' if ye likes, why, I'll pay yer passage that far?' In course I agrees, and up river we goes, till we lands at a fine house, where I'm left in a far-handy, ye know, while the skipper an' his friend has their dinner. All at once the gen'lman shoves his head out of a doure, takes a look at me, an' in again,—arter that I hears the chink o' dollars—then the skipper walks out, shuts the doure, an' says he to me, 'Now,' he says, 'that's a 'cute sort o' tale you tould me, my lad—but it's a lie, I guess!' 'Lie, sir!' says I, 'what d'ye mean?' for ye see that 'ere matter o' the iv'ry brig made me sing small, at first. 'No slack, Pumpey,' says he, liftin' his fore-finger like a schoolmaster,—ain't yer name Pumpey?' says he. 'Pumpey be d——d!' says I, 'my name's Jack Brown'—for that wor the name, I'd gived him, afore. 'Oh!' says he, 'jest say it's Gin'ral Washinton, right off! Come,' says he, 'I guess I'd jest tell ye what tripe you belongs to—you're a Mandingy niggur,' says he. 'It's all very well,' he says, 'that 'ere yarn, but that's wot they'd all say when they comes, they've been dyed black! Why,' says he, 'doesn't I see that 'ere brand one night on yer back—there's yer arms all over pagan tattooin'—' 'Bless ye, cap'en,' I says, a-holdin' up my arm, 'it's crowns an' anchers!' 'Crowns!' says he, turnin' up his nose, 'what does we know o' crowns hereaway—we ain't barbers yet, I guess.'—Of what he meaned by barbers here, mate, I'm hanged if I knowed—'sides,' says he, 'you speaks broken Aimerricane!' 'Merricain?' I says, 'why, I speaks good English! an' good reason, bein' a free-born Briton—as white's yerself, if so be I could ownly clap hands for a minnet on some o' them mushrooms I tould ye on!' 'Where does they grow, then?' axes he, screwin' one eye up. 'In Africay yonder, sir,' I says, 'more's the pity I hadn't the chance to lay hands on 'em again!' 'Phoo!' says he, 'glad they ain't here! An does you think we're agoin' for to send all the way over to Africay for them mushrooms you talks on? Tell ye what, yer free papers 'ud do ye a sight more good here!' says he—'its no use, with a black skin, for to claim white laws; an' what's more, ye're too tarnation ugly-faced for it, let alone colour, Pumpey, my man!' he says. 'I tell ye what it is, Cap'en Edwards,' says I, 'my frontispiece an't neither here nor there, but if you calls me Pumpey again, 'blowed an' I don't pitch inty ye!'—so with that I handles my bones in a way as makes him hop inside the doure—an' says the skipper, houldin' it half shut, 'Harkee, lad,' he says, 'it's no go your tryin' for to run, or they'll make ye think angels o' bo'sun's-mates. But what's more,' says he, 'niver you whisper a word o' what ye tells me, about nuts an' mushrooms, or sichlike trash—no more will I; for d'ye see, my lad, in that case they'd jest hush ye up for good!' 'Who d'ye mean!' I says, all abroad, an' of a shiver, like—mindin' on the slave-schooner again. 'Why, the planter's people,' says he, 'as I've sold ye to;' an' with that he p'ints into his mouth, and shuts the door. Well, 'mate, ye may fancy how I feels! Here I stands, givin' a look round for a fair offing; but there was bulwarks two-fadom high all round the house, a big bloodhound chained, with his muzzle on his two paws, an' nobody seems for to mind me. So I see'd it were all up wonst more; an' at the thou't of a knife in my tongue, I sits right down in the far-handy, rig'lar flabbergasted,—when out that 'ere blasted skipper shoots his head again, an' says he 'Pumpey, my lad, good day,' says he; 'you knows some'at o' the water, an' as they've boat-work at times hereaway, I don't know but, if you behaves yerself, they'll trust you with an oar now an' then; for I tould yer master jist now,' says he, 'as how you carn't speak no English!' Well, I gives him a damn, 'cause by that time I hadn't a word to throw at a dog; an' shortly arter, up comes the overseer with his black mate, walks me off to a shed, strips me, and gives me a pair o' cotton drawers an' a broad hat—so out I goes the next mornin' for to hoe sugar-cane with a gang o' niggers.
"Well, 'mate, arter that I kept close enough—says no more but mumbles a lot o' no-man's jargon, as makes 'em all log me down for a sort o' double-guinea savitch—, cause why, I were hanged afeared for my tongue, seein', if so be I lost it, I'd be a nigger for ever, sure enough. So the blacks, for most part bein' country bred, they talks nothin' but a blessed jumble, for all the world like babbies at home; an' what does they do but they fancies me a rig'lar African nigger, as proud as Tommy, an' a'most ready for to washup me they wor—why, the poor divvles ud bring me yams an' fish, they kisses my flippers an' toes as I'd been the Pope; an' as for the young girls, I'm blowed if I wan't all the go amongst em—though I carn't say the same where both 's white, ye know! What with the sun an' the cocoa-nut ile, to my thinkin', I gets blacker an' blacker—'blessed if I didn't fancy a feller's very mind tarned nigger. I larns their confounded lingo, an' I answers to the name o' Pumpey, blast it, till I right-down forgets that I'd ever another. As for runnin', look ye, I knowed 'twas no use thereaway, as long as my skin tould against me, an' as long as Africay wor where it wor. So, my boy, I see'd pretty clear, ye know, as this here bloody world ud turn a man into a rig'lar built slave-nigger in the long run, if he was a angel out o' heaven!
"Well, 'mate, one day I'm in the woods amongst a gang, chopping firewood for the sugar-mill, when, by the Lord! what does I light on betwixt some big ground-leaves and sichlike, but a lot o' them very same red mushrooms as the fittish-man shows me in Africay!—blowed if there warn't a whole sight o' them round about, too! So I pulls enough for ten, ye may be sure, stuffs 'em in my hat, an' that same night, as soon as all's dark, off I goes into the woods, right by the stars, for the nearest town 'twixt there an' New Orleens. As soon as I got nigh-hand it, there I sits down below a tree amongst the bushes, hauls off my slops, an' I turns to for to rub myself all over, from heel to truck, till daybreak. So, in course, I watches for the light angshis enough, as ye may suppose, to know what colour I were. Well, strike me lucky, Jack, if I didn't jump near a fadom i' the air, when at last I sees I'm white wonst more!—'blessed if I didn't feel myself a new man from stem to starn! I makes right for a creek near by, looks at my face in the water, then up I comes again, an' every bloody yarn o' them cussed slave-togs I pulls to bits, when I shoves 'em under the leaves. Arter that I took fair to the water for about a mile, jist to smooth out my wake, like; then I shins aloft up a tree, where I stowed myself away till noon—'cause, d'ye see, I knowed pretty well what to look for next. An' by this time, mind ye, all them queer haps made a feller wonderfle sharp, so I'd schemed out the whole chart aforehand how to weather on them cussed Yankees. Accordently, about noon, what does I hear but that 'ere blasted bloodhound comin' along up creek, with a set o' slave-catchers astarn, for to smell out my track. With that, down I went in the water again, rounds a point into the big river, where I gets abreast of a landin'-place near the town, with craft laying out-stream, boats plying, an' all alive. D'ye see, bo', I'd got no clothes at all, an' how for to rig myself again, 'blowed if I knows—seein' as how by this time I'd tarned as white as the day I were born, an' a naked white man in a town arn't no better nor a black nigger. So in I swims like a porpus afore a breeze, an' up an' down I ducks in the shallow, for all the world like a chap a-takin' a bath; an' out I hollers to all an' sundry, with a Yankee twang i' my nose, for to know if they'd see'd my clothes, till a whole lot on 'em crowds on the quay. Hows'ever, I bethinks me on that 'ere blasted brand atwixt my shoulders, an' I makes myself out as modest as a lady, kicks out my legs, and splashes like a whale aground, an' sticks out my starn to 'em for to let 'em see it's white. 'Hullo!' I sings out, 'han't ye seen my clothes?' 'No, stranger,' says they, 'some un's runned off with 'em, we calc'lates!' With that I tells 'em I'm a Boston skipper new comed up from New Orleens; an' not bein' used to the heat, why, I'd took a bath the first thing; an' I 'scribes the whole o' my togs as if I'd made 'em,—'split new,' says I, 'an' a beaver hat, more by token there's my name inside it; an'' says I, 'there's notes for a hundred dollars in my trousers!' By this time down comes the slave-catchers, an' says they, hearin' on it, 'That 'ere tarnation niggur's gone of with 'em, we'll know un by them marks well enough,' says they, an' off they goes across river. 'Hullo!' I sings out to the folks, 'I'm a gettin' cold here, so I guess I'll come ashore again, slick off!' I twangs out. 'Guess ye can't, straunger!' they hails; 'not till we gets ye some kiverin's!—we're considerable proper here, we are!' 'An't this a free country, then?' I says, givin' a divvle of a splash; an' with that they begs an' axes me for to hould on, an' they'd fix me, as they calls it, in no time. Well, mate, what does they do but one an' another brings me somethin' as like what I 'scribed as could be, hands 'em along on a pole, an' I puts 'em on then an' there. Arter that, the ladies o' the place bein' blessed modest, an' all of a fright leest I'd a comed out an' gone through the town,—why, out o' grannytude, as they says, they gets up a supper-scription on a hundred dollars to make up my loss—has a public meetin' logged down for the evenin', when I'm for to indress the citizens, as they says, all about freedom an' top-gallantry, an' sichlike. Hows'ever, I jist sticks my tongue in my cheek, eats a blessed good dinner in a hot-ell, watches my chance, an' off by a track-boat at sundown to New Orleens, where I shipped aboard a English barque, an' gets safe out to sea wonst more." "Lord love ye, Harry!" exclaimed Jack hereupon, "the likes o' that now! But I've heerd say, them fittish-men you talks on has wonderful knowledge—why, mayhap it's them as keeps all the niggers black, now?" "Well, bo'," said Harry, "I don't doubt but if them 'Merricane slaves jist knowed o' that 'ere red mushroom, why, they'd show the Yankees more stripes nor stars! D'ye see, if a Yankee knowed as his own father were a-hoein' his sugar-canes, 'blowed if he wouldn't make him work up his liberty in dollars! All the stripes, d'ye see, 'mate, is for the blacks, an' all the stars is for the whites, in them Yankee colours as they brags so much about! But what I says is, it's curst hard to get through this here world, shipmate, if ye doesn't keep well to wind'ard of it!" I was the more amused with this account of the ugly rascal's adventures, that I remembered two or three of the occasions he mentioned, and he told them pretty exactly so far as I had to do with them. As for the fetish-man's curious nut, and that extraordinary mushroom of his, why 'ten to one' thought I, 'but all the while the fellow never once touched a piece of soap!' which, no doubt, had as much to do with it as anything besides. Somehow or other, notwithstanding, I had taken almost a fancy to the villain—such a rough sample of mankind he was, with his uncouth, grumpy voice and his huge black beard; and he gave the story in a cool, scornful sort of way that was laughable in itself. 'So, my lad,' I thought, 'it seems you and I have met twice before; but if you play any of your tricks this time, Master Harry, I hope you've found your match;' and certainly, if I had fancied my gentleman was in the slaver's hold that time off the African coast, I'd have 'lubber-rated' him with a vengeance! "I say, 'mates," said he again, with a sulky kind of importance, to those of the watch who had gathered round during the last half of his yarn, "there's three things I hates—an' good reason!" "What be's they, Harry?" asked the rest. "One's a Yankee," said he, "an' be blowed to him! the second's a slaver; and the third is—I carn't abide a nigger, nohow. But d'ye see, there's one thing as I likes——" Here eight bells struck out, and up tumbled the watch below, with Jacobs' hearty face amongst them; so I made my way aft, and, of course, missed hearing what that said delightful thing might be, which this tarry Æsop approved of so much.
While I was listening, I had scarcely noticed, that within the last few minutes a light air had begun to play aloft among the higher canvass, a faint cat's-paw came ruffling here and there a patch of the water, till by this time the Indiaman was answering her wheel again, and moving slowly ahead, as the breeze came down and crept out to the leeches of her sail, with a sluggish lifting of her heavy fore-course. The men were all below at breakfast, forward, and, of course, at that hour the poop above me was quite a Babel of idlers' voices; while I looked into the compass and watched the ship's head falling gradually off from north-east-by-north, near which it had stuck pretty close since daybreak. The sun was brought before her opposite beam, and such a perfect gush of hazy white light shot from that quarter over the larboard bulwarks, that thereaway, in fact, there might have been a fleet of ships, or a knot of islands, and we none the wiser, as you couldn't look into it at all. The chief mate came handing a wonderfully timid young lady down the poop-ladder with great care, and as soon as they were safe on the quarterdeck, she asked with a confiding sort of lisp, "And where are we going now then, Mr Finch?" "Well, Miss," simpered he, "wherever you please, I'll be glad to conduct you!" "Oh, but the ship I mean," replied she, giggling prettily. "Why," said Finch, stooping down to the binnacle, "she heads due south-east at present, Miss." "I am so glad you are going on again!" said the young lady; "but oh! when shall we see dear land once more, Mr Finch?" "Not for more than a week, I fear," answered the mate, "when we arrive at the Cape of Good Hope. But there, Miss, your poetic feelings will be gratified, I assure you! The hills there, I might say, Miss Brodie," he went on, "not to speak of the woods, are quite dramatic! You mustn't suppose the rough mariner, rude as he seems, Miss Brodie, is entirely devoid of romance in his sentiments, I hope!" and he looked down for the twentieth time that morning at his boots, as he handed her down the cabin hatchway, longing to see the Cape, no doubt. 'Much romance, as you call it, there is in ugly Harry yonder!' thought I; and comparing this sort of stuff, aft, with the matter-of-fact notions before the mast, made me the more anxious for what might turn up in a few hours, with this gallant first officer left in full charge, and the captain, as I understood, unable to leave his cot. A good enough seaman the fellow was, so far as your regular deep-sea work went, which those India voyagers had chiefly to do with then; but for aught out of the way, or a sudden pinch, why, the peace had just newly set them free of their leading-strings, and here this young mate brought his new-fangled school navigation, forsooth, to run the Seringapatam into some mess or other; whereas, in a case of the kind, I had no doubt he would prove as helpless as a child. By this time, for my part, all my wishes for some ticklish adventure were almost gone, when I thought of our feelings at the loss of the boat, as well as the number of innocent young creatures on board, with Lota Hyde herself amongst them: while here had I got myself fairly set down for a raw griffin. Yet neither Westwood nor I, unless it came to the very worst, could, venture to make himself openly useful! I was puzzled both what to think of our exact case, and what to do; whereas a pretty short time in these latitudes, as the foremast-man had said, might finish our business altogether; indeed, the whole look of things, somehow or other, at that moment, had a strange unsettled touch about it, out of which one accustomed to those parts might be sure some change would come. The air, a little ago, was quite suffocating, the heat got greater; and the breeze, though it seemed to strengthen aloft, at times sank quietly out of her lower canvass like a breath drawn in, and caught it again as quietly ere it fell to the masts. What with the slow huge heave of the water, as it washed glittering past, and what with the blue tropical sky overhead, getting paler and paler at the horizon astern, from fair heat—while the sunlight and the white haze on our larboard beam, made it a complete puzzle to behold—why, I felt just like some fellow in one of those stupid dreams after a heavy supper, with nothing at all in them, when you don't know how long or how often you've dreamt it before. Deuce the hand or foot you can stir, and yet you've a notion of something horrid that's sure to come upon you. We couldn't be much more than a hundred miles or so to south'ard of St Helena; but we might be two thousand miles off the land, or we might be fifty. I had only been once in my life near the coast thereaway, and certainly my recollections of it weren't the most pleasant. As for the charts, so little was known of it that we couldn't depend upon them; yet there was no doubt the ship had been all night long in a strong set of water toward north-east, right across her course. For my own part, I was as anxious as any one else to reach the Cape, and get rid of all this cursed nonsense; for since last night, I saw quite well by her look that Violet Hyde would never favour me, if I kept in her wake to the day of judgment. There was I, too, every time I came on deck and saw those roundhouse doors, my heart leapt into my throat, and I didn't know port from starboard! But what was the odds, that I'd have kissed the very pitch she walked upon, when she wasn't for me!—being deep in love don't sharpen the faculties, neither, and the more I thought of matters the stupider I seemed to get. "Green Hand!" thought I, "as Jacobs and the larboard watch call me, it appears—why, they're right enough! A green hand I came afloat nine years ago, and by Jove! though I know the sea and what belongs to it, from sheer liking to them, as 'twere—it seems a green hand I'm to stick—seeing I know so blessed little of womankind, not to speak of that whole confounded world ashore! With all one's schemes and one's weather-eye, something new always keeps turning up to show one what an ass he is; and hang me, if I don't begin to suppose I'm only fit for working small traverses upon slavers and jack-nasty-faces, after all! There's Westwood, without troubling himself, seems to weather upon me, with her, like a Baltimore clipper on a Dutch schuyt!" In short, I wanted to leave the Seringapatam as soon as I could, wish them all a good voyage together away for Bombay, sit down under Table Mountain, damn my own eyes, and then perhaps go and travel amongst the Hottentots by way of a change.
The chief officer came aft towards the binnacle again, with a strut in his gait, and more full of importance than ever, of course. "This breeze'll hold, I think, Macleod?" said he to the second mate, who was shuffling about in a lounging, unseamanlike way he had, as if he felt uncomfortable on the quarterdeck, and both hands in his jacket pockets. "Well," said the Scotchman, "do ye not think it's too early begun, sir?" and he looked about like an old owl, winking against the glare of light past the mainsheet to larboard; "I'll not say but it will, though," continued he, "but 'odsake, sir, it's terrible warm!" "Can't be long ere we get into Cape Town, now," said the mate, "so you'll turn the men on deck as soon as breakfast's over, Mr Macleod, and commence giving her a coat of paint outside, sir." "Exactly, Mr Finch," said the other, "all hands it'll be, sir? For any sake, Mr Finch, give thay lazy scoundrels something ado!" "Yes, all hands," said Finch; and he was going below, when the second mate sidled up to him again, as if he had something particular to say. "The captain'll be quite better by this time, no doubt, Mr Finch?" asked he. "Well—d'ye mean?" inquired the mate, rather shortly; "why no, sir—when the surgeon saw him in the morning-watch, he said it was a fever, and the sooner we saw the Cape, the better for him." "No doubt, no doubt, sir," said the second-mate, thoughtfully, putting his fore-finger up his twisted nose, which I noticed he did in such cases, as if the twist had to do with his memory,—"no doubt, sir, that's just it! The doctor's a sharp Edinbro' lad—did he see aucht bye common about the captain, sir?" "No," said Finch, "except that he wanted to go on deck this morning, and the surgeon took away his clothes and left the door locked." "Did he though?" asked Macleod, shaking his head, and looking a little anxious; "didna he ask for aucht in particular, sir?" "Not that I heard of, Mr Macleod," replied the mate; "what do you mean?" "Did he no ask for a green leaf?" replied the second mate. "Pooh!" said Finch, "what if he did?" "Well, sir," said Macleod, "neither you nor the doctor's sailed five voy'ges with the captain, like me. He's a quiet man, Captain Weelumson, an' well he knows his calling; but sometimes warm weather doesn't do with him, more especial siccan warm weather as this, when the moon's full, as it is the night, ye know, Mr Finch. There's something else besides that, though, when he's taken that way." "Well, what is it?" asked the mate carelessly. "Oo!" said Macleod, "it can't be that this time, of course, sir,—it's when he's near the land! The captain knows the smell of it, these times, Mr Finch, as well's a cockroach does—an' it's then he asks for a green leaf, and wants to go straight ashore—I mind he did it the voy'ge before last, sir. He's a quiet man, the captain, as I said, for ord'nar'—but when he's roused, he's a—" "Why, what was the matter with him?" said Finch, more attentive than before, "you don't mean to say—? go on, Mr Macleod." The second mate, however, looked cautious, closed his lips firmly, and twirled his red whiskers, as he glanced with one eye aloft again. "Hoo!" said he, carelessly, "hoo, it's nothing, nothing,—they just, I'm thinking, sir, what they call disgestion ashore—all frae the stommach, Mr Finch! We used just for to lock the state-room door, an' never let on we heard—but at any rate, sir, this is no the thing at all, ye know!" "Mester Semm," continued he to the fat midshipman, who came slowly up from the steerage, picking his teeth with a pocket-knife, "go forred and get the bo'sun to turn up all hands."
"Sir," said I, stepping up to the mate next moment, before the roundhouse, "might I use the freedom of asking whereabouts we are at present?" Finch gave me a look of cool indifference, without stirring head or hand; which I saw, however, was put on, as, ever since our boating affair, the man evidently detested me, with all his pretended scorn. "Oh certainly, sir!" said he, "of course!—sorry I haven't the ship's log here to show you—but it's two hundred miles or so below St Helena, eight hundred miles odd off south-west African coast, with a light westerly breeze bound for the Cape of Good Hope—so after that you can look about you, sir!" Are you sure of all that, sir?" asked I, seriously. "Oh, no, of course not!" said he, still standing as before, "not in the least, sir! It's nothing but quadrant, sextant, and chronometer work, after all—which every young gentleman don't believe in!" Then he muttered aloud, as if to himself, "Well, if the captain should chance to ask for a green leaf, I know where to find it for him!" I was just on the point of giving him some angry answer or other, and perhaps spoiling all, when I felt a tap on my shoulder, and on turning round saw the Indian judge, who had found me in the way either of his passage or his prospect, on stepping out of the starboard door. "Eh!" said he, jocularly, as I begged his pardon, "eh, young sir—I've nothing to do with pardons—always leave that to the governor-general and councillors! Been doing anything wrong, then? Ah, what's this—still calm, or some of your wind again, Mr officer?" "A fine breeze like to hold, Sir Charles," answered the mate, all bows and politeness. "So!" said Sir Charles, "but I don't see Captain. Williamson at all this morning—where is he?" "I am sorry to say he is very unwell, Sir Charles," said Finch. "Indeed!" exclaimed the Judge, with whom the captain stood for all the seamanship aboard, and looking round again rather dissatisfied. "Don't like that, though! I hope he won't be long unable to attend to things, sir—let me know as soon as he is recovered, if you please!" "Certainly, Sir Charles," said the chief officer, touching his cap with some appearance of pique, "but I hope, sir, I understand my duties in command, Sir Charles." "Daresay, sir," said the Judge, "as officer, probably. Commander absent!—horrible accidents already!" he muttered crossly, changing his usual high sharp key to a harsh croak, like a saw going through a heavy spar, "something sure to go wrong—wish we'd done with this deuced tiresome voyage!" "Ha, young gentleman!" exclaimed he, turning as he went in, "d'ye play chess—suppose not—eh?" "Why yes, sir," said I, "I do." "Well," continued he, overhauling me more carefully than he had done before, though latterly I had begun to be somewhat in his good graces when we met by chance, "after all, you've a chess eye, if you know the game at all. Come in, then, for godsake, and let's begin! Ever since the poor brigadier went, I've had only myself or a girl to play against! 'Gad, sir, there is something, I can't express how horrible to my mind, in being matched against nobody—or, what's worse, damme, a woman! But recollect, young gentleman, I call not bear a tyro!" and he glanced at me as we walked into the large poop-cabin, as sharply and as cold as a nor'-wester ere it breaks to windward. Now I happened to know the game, and to be particularly fond of it, so, restless as I felt otherwise, I gave the old nabob a quiet nod, laid down my griffin-looking straw hat on the sofa, and in two minutes there we were, sitting opposite over a splendid China-made chess-board, with elephants, emperors, mandarins, and china-men, all square and ataunto, as if they'd been set ready for days. The dark Kitmagar commenced fanning over his master's head with a bright feather punka, the other native servant handed him his twisted hookah and lighted it, after which he folded his arms and stood looking down on the board like a pundit at some campaign of the Great Mogul—while the Judge himself waited for my first move, as if it had been some of our plain English fellows in Hindostan commencing against your whole big India hubbub and finery, to get hold of it all in the end. For my part I sat at first all of a tingle and tremble, thinking how near his lovely daughter might be; and there were the breakfast cups laid out on a round table at the other side, behind me. However I made my move, Sir Charles made his, and pitched in to the game in a half impatient, half long-headed sort of way, anxious to get to the thick of it, as it were, once more. Not a word was said, and you only heard the suck of the smoke bubbling through the water-bottle of his pipe, after each move the Judge made; till I set myself to the play in right earnest, and, owing to the old gentleman's haste at the beginning, or his over-sharpness, I hooked him into a mess with which I used to catch the old hands at chess in the cock-pit, just by fancying what they meant to be at. The Judge lifted his head, looked at me, and went on again. "Your queen is in check, Sir Charles!" said I, next time, by way of a polite hint. "Check, though, young gentleman!" said he, chuckling, as he dropped one of his outlandish knights, which I wasn't yet up to the looks of, close to windward of my blessed old Turk of a king; so the skirmish was just getting to be a fair set-to, when I chanced to lift my eyes, and saw the door from the after-cabin open, with Miss Hyde coming through. "Now, papa," exclaimed she on the moment, "you must come to breakfast,"—when all of a sudden, at seeing another man in the cabin, she stopped short. Being not so loud and griffin-like in my toggery that morning, and my hat off, the young lady didn't recognise me at first,—though the next minute, I saw by her colour and her astonished look, she not only did that, but something else—no doubt remembering at last where she had seen me ashore. "Well, child," said the Judge, "make haste with it, then!—Recollect where we are, now, young gentleman,—and come to breakfast." She had a pink muslin morning-dress on, with her brown hair done up like the Virgin Mary in a picture, and the sea had taken almost all the paleness off her cheek that it had in the ball-room at Epsom, a month or two ago,—and, by Jove! when I saw her begin to pour out the tea out of the silver tea-pot, I didn't know where I was! "Oh, I forgot," said the Judge, waving his hand from me to her, in a hurry, "Mr Robbins, Violet!—ho, Kitmagar, curry l'ao!" "Oh," said she, stiffly, with a cold turn of her pretty lip, "I have met Mr—Mr—" "Collins, ma'am," said I. "I have met this gentleman by accident before." "So you have—so you have," said her father; "but you play chess well, Mr—a—a—what's his name?—ah! Colley. Gad you play well, sir,—we must have it out!" The young lady glanced at me again with a sort of astonishment; at last she said, no doubt for form's sake, though as indifferently as possible,—"You have known your friend the missionary gentleman long, I believe, sir?—the Reverend Mr Thomas—I think that is his name?" "Oh no, ma'am!" said I hastily, for the Judge was the last man I wished should join Westwood and me together, "only since we crossed the Line, or so." "Why, I thought he said you were at school together!" said she, in surprise. "Why—hem—certainly not, ma'am—a—a—I—a—a—I don't remember the gentleman there," I blundered out. "Eh, what?—check to your queen, young gentleman, surely?" asked Sir Charles. "What's this, though! Always like to hear a mystery explained, so"—and he gave me one of his sharp glances. "Why, why—surely, young man, now I think of it in that way, I've seen you before in some peculiar circumstances or other—on land, too. Why, where was it—let me see, now?" putting his finger to his forehead to think, while, I sat pretty uneasy, like a small pawn that had been trying to get to the head of the board, and turn into a knight or a bishop, when it falls foul of a grand figured-out king and queen. However, the queen is the only piece you need mind at distance, and blessed hard it is to escape from her, of course. Accordingly, I cared little enough for the old nabob finding out I had gone in chase of them; but there sat his charming little daughter, with, her eyes on her teacup; and whether the turn of her face meant coolness, or malice, or amusement, I didn't know—though she seemed a little anxious too, I thought, lest her father should recollect me.
"It wasn't before me, young man?" asked he, looking, up of a sudden: "no, that must have been in India—must have been in England, when I was last there—let me see." And I couldn't help fancying what a man's feelings must be, tried for his life, as I caught a side-view of his temples working, dead in my wake, as it were. The thing was laughable enough, and for a moment I met Lota's eye as he mentioned England—'twas too short a glimpse, though, to make out; and, thought I, "he'll be down on Surrey directly, and then Croydon—last of all, the back of his garden wall, I suppose!" "Check" it was, and what I was going to say I couldn't exactly conceive, unless I patched up some false place or other, with matters to match, and mentioned it to the old fellow, though small chance of its answering with such a devil of a lawyer—when all at once I thought I heard a hail from aloft, then the second-mate's voice roared close outside, "Hullo!—aloft there!" The next moment I started up, and looked at Miss Hyde, as I heard plainly enough the cry, "On deck there—land O!" I turned round at once, and walked out of the roundhouse to the quarterdeck, where, two minutes after, the whole of the passengers were crowding from below, the Judge and his daughter already on the poop. Far aloft, upon the fore-to'gallant-yard, in the hot glare of the sun, a sailor was standing, with his hand over his eyes, and looking to the horizon, as the Indiaman stood quietly before the light breeze. "Where-away-ay?" was the next hail from deck. "Broad on our larboard bow, sir," was the answer.
[PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY.][14]
We have here combined the best of all books, and the best of all maps, for the study of the most interesting description of geography. Mr Johnston's Physical Atlas, now published in a form which renders it accessible to greater numbers, is without a rival as a companion and guide in this department of study; and by dwelling on its merits and utility, we should be only echoing a verdict which has already been pronounced by almost every journal of scientific or critical celebrity. And, indeed, the same might be said of our commendation of Mrs Somerville's book; our praise comes lagging in the rear, and is well-nigh superfluous. But not only are we desirous to tender our tribute of respect to one who has done more than any other living writer to extend amongst us sound, as well as general knowledge of physical science; we are anxious also to recommend to our youth the enlarged method of studying geography, which her present work demonstrates to be as captivating as it is instructive.
Mrs Somerville's Physical Geography does not assume so profound an aspect, nor has it so lofty an aim, as the Cosmos of Alexander Von Humboldt; neither can it claim, like that work, to be written by one who has himself surveyed the greater part of the terraqueous globe he undertakes to describe. This latter circumstance gives an extraordinary interest to the Cosmos. From time to time the professor of science, gleaning his knowledge from books, and laboratories, and museums, steps aside, and we hear, and almost see, the adventurous traveller, the man Humboldt himself, who seems to speak to us from the distant ocean he has traversed, or the sublime mountain heights he has ascended. Our countrywoman can claim no such peculiar prerogative. Who else can? To few—to none other—has it ever been permitted to combine so wide a range of knowledge with so wide a range of vision—to have carried his mind through all science, and his eye over all regions. He is familiar with all the grandeurs of our earth. He speaks with the air of the mountain still around him. When he discourses of the Himalaya or the Andes, it is with the vivid impression of one whose footsteps are still lying uneffaced amongst their rarely-trodden and precipitous passes. The phenomena he describes he has seen. He can reveal to us, and make us feel with him, that strange impression which "the first earthquake" makes even upon the most educated and reflective man, who suddenly finds his old faith shaken in the stability of the earth. And what lecturer upon electricity could ever arrest the attention of his auditors by so charming a reference to his personal experience as is contained in the following passage?—
"It was not without surprise that I noticed, on the shores of the Orinoco, children belonging to tribes in the lowest stage of barbarism amusing themselves by rubbing the dry, flat, shining seeds of a leguminous climbing plant (probably a negretia) for the purpose of causing them to attract fibres of cotton or bamboo. It was a sight well fitted to leave on the mind of a thoughtful spectator a deep and serious impression. How wide is the interval which separates the simple knowledge of the excitement of electricity by friction, shown in the sports of these naked, copper-coloured children of the forest, from the invention of the metallic conductor, which draws the swift lightning from the storm-cloud—of the voltaic pile, capable of effecting chemical decomposition—of a magnetic apparatus, evolving light—and of the magnetic telegraph!"
The writer naturally reflects on the wide interval which separates the knowledge of electricity shown by these naked children on the banks of the Orinoco, and the inventions of modern science, which have taught the lightnings of heaven to do our messages on the earth. But, to our mind, this wide interval is far more strikingly displayed by the picture which is here presented to the imagination, of the profound and meditative European looking down, pleased and surprised, at the first unconscious steps in experimental philosophy which these copper-coloured children of the forest are making in their sport.
But if Mrs Somerville's book has none of this extraordinary interest which the great traveller has thrown over his work, and if it does not aspire to that philosophic unity of view, (of which a word hereafter, in passing,) it must take precedence of this, and of all other works, as a useful compendium of the latest discoveries, and the soundest knowledge we possess, in the various subjects it embraces. Nowhere, except in her own previous work, The Connexion of the Physical Sciences, is there to be found so large a store of well-selected information, so lucidly set forth. In surveying and grouping together whatever has been seen by the eyes of others, or detected by their laborious investigations, she is not surpassed by any one; and the absence of all higher aim, or more original effort, is favourable to this distinctness of exposition. We have no obscurities other than what the imperfect state of science itself involves her in; no dissertations which are felt to interrupt or delay. She strings her beads distinct and close together. With quiet perspicacity she seizes at once whatever is most interesting and most captivating in her subject.
The Cosmos of Humboldt has the ambitious aim of presenting to us the universe, so far as we know it, in that beauty of harmony which results from a whole. Thus, at least, we understand his intention. He would domineer, as with an eagle's glance, over the known creation, and embrace it in its unity, displaying to us that beauty which exists in the harmony of all its parts. The attempt no one would depreciate or decry, but manifestly the imperfect state of science forbids its execution. We have attained no point of view from which we can survey the world as one harmonious whole. Our knowledge is fragmentary, uncertain, imperfect; and the most philosophic mind cannot reduce it into any shape in which it shall appear other than uncertain and fragmentary. We cannot "stand in the sun," as Coleridge says in his fine verse, and survey creation; we have no such luminous standing-point. There never, indeed, was a time when the attempt to harmonise our knowledge, and view the universe of things "in the beauty of unity," was so hopeless, so desperate. For the old theories, the old methods of representing to the imagination the more subtle and invisible agencies of the physical world, are shaken, or exploded, and nothing new has been able to take their place. What is new, and what is old, are alike unsettled, unconfirmed. In reality, therefore, the work of Mrs Somerville is as much a Cosmos as that of Von Humboldt; and, as a work of instruction, is far better for not aiming higher than it does. Mrs Somerville presents to us each gospel of science—if we may give that title to its imperfect revelations—and does not bewilder or confuse by attempting that "harmony of the gospels" which the scientific expositor is, as yet, unable to accomplish.
As yet, we have said—but, indeed, will science be ever able to realise this aspiration of the intellect after unity and completeness of view? To the reflective mind, human science presents this singular aspect. Whilst the speculative reason of man continually seeks after unity, strives to see the many in the one—as the Platonist would express himself—or, as we should rather say, strives to resolve the multiplicity of phenomena into a few ultimate causes, so as to create for itself a whole, some rounded system which the intellectual vision call embrace; the discoveries of science, by which it hopes and strives to realise this end, do in fact, at every stage, increase the apparent complexity of the phenomena. The new agencies, or causes, which are brought to light, if they explain what before was anomalous and obscure, become themselves the source of innumerable difficulties and conjectures. Each discovery stirs more questions than it sets at rest. What, on its first introduction, promised to explain so many things, is found, on further acquaintance, to have added but one more to the inexplicable facts around us. With each step, also, in our inquiry, the physical agents that are revealed to us become more subtle, more calculated to excite and to elude our curiosity. Already, half our science is occupied with matter that is invisible. From time to time some grand generalisation is proposed—electricity is now the evoked spirit which is to help us through our besetting difficulties—but, fast as the theory is formed, some new fact emerges that will not range itself within it; the cautious thinker steps back, and acknowledges that the effort is as yet premature. It always will be premature.
There is a perpetual antagonism between the intellectual tendency to reduce all phenomena to a harmonious and complete system, and that increase of knowledge which, while it seems to favour the attempt, renders it more and more impracticable. With our limited powers, we cannot embrace the whole; and therefore it must follow, that it is only when our knowledge is scanty, that we seem capable of the task. Every addition to that knowledge, from the time that Thales would have reduced all things to the one element of water, has rendered the task more hopeless. And as science was never so far advanced as at the present time, so this antagonism was never so clearly illustrated between the effort of reason to generalise, and the influx of broken knowledge, reducing the overtasked intellect to despair. How much has lately been revealed to us of the more subtle powers and processes of nature—of light, of heat, of electricity! How tempting the generalisations offered to our view! We seem to be, at least, upon the eve of some great discovery which will explain all: an illusion which is destined to prompt the researches of the ardent spirits of every age. They will always be on the eve of some great discovery which is to place the clue of the labyrinth into their hand. The new discovery, like its predecessor, will add only another chamber to the interminable labyrinth.
Let us, for instance, suppose that we have discovered, in electricity, the cause of that attraction to which we had confided the revolution of the planets; of that chemical affinity to which we had ascribed the various combinations of those ultimate atoms of which the material world is presumed to be composed; of that vital principle which assimilates in the plant, and grows and feels in the animal. Let us suppose that this is a sound generalisation; yet, as electricity cannot be alone both attraction in the mass, and chemical affinity in the atom, and irritability and susceptibility in the fibre and the nerve, what has the speculative reason attained but to the knowledge of a new and necessary agent, producing different effects according to the different conditions in which, and the different co-agencies with which it operates? These conditions, these co-agencies, are all to be discovered. It is one flash of light, revealing a whole world of ignorance.
To the explanation of the most obstinate of all problems—the nature of the vital principle—we seem to have made a great step when we introduce a current of electricity circulating through the nerves. If this hypothesis be established, we shall probably have made a valuable and very useful addition to our stock of knowledge; but we shall be as far as ever from solving the problem of the vital principle. We have now a current of electricity circulating along the nerves, as we had before a current of blood, circulating through the veins and arteries; the one may become as prominent and as important a fact in the science of the physician as the other; but it will be equally powerless with the old discovery of Harvey to explain the ultimate cause of vitality. To the speculative reason it has but complicated the phenomena of animal life.
Within the memory of a living man, there has been such progress and revolution in science, that not one of the great generalisations taught him in his youth can be now received as uncontested propositions. Not many years ago, how commodiously a few words, such as attraction, caloric, affinity, rays of light, and others, could be used, and how much they seemed to explain! Caloric was a fluid, unseen indeed, but very obedient to the imagination—expanding bodies, and radiating from one to the other in a quite orderly manner. What is it now? Perhaps the vibration of a subtle ether interfused through all bodies; perhaps the vibration of the atomic parts themselves of those bodies. Who will venture to say? Attraction and affinity are no longer the clearly defined ultimate facts they seemed to be; we know so much, at least, that they are intimately connected with electrical phenomena, though not to what extent. That electricity is implicated with chemical composition, and recomposition, is clearly recognised; and Sir J. Herschel has lately expressed his opinion, that it is impossible any longer to attempt the explanation of the movements of all the heavenly bodies by simple attraction, as understood in the Newtonian theory—these comets, with their trains perversely turned from the sun, deranging sadly our systematic views. The ray of light, which, with its reflection and its refraction, seemed a quite manageable substance, has deserted us, and we have an ethereal fluid—the same as that which constitutes heat, or another—substituted in its stead. Science has no language, and knows not how to speak. If she lectures one day upon the "polarisation" of light, she professes the next not to know what she means by the term; she is driven even to talk of "invisible rays" of light, or chemical rays. Never was it so difficult to form any scientific conception on these subjects, or to speak of them with any consistency. Mrs Somerville is a correct writer; yet she opens her brief section upon magnetism thus:—"Magnetism is one of those unseen imponderable existences, which, like electricity and heat, are known only by their effects. It is certainly identical with electricity, for," &c. It is like, and it is identical, in almost the same sentence.
Even in the fields of astronomy, where we have to deal with large masses of matter, it is no longer possible for the imagination to form any embraceable system. We are plunged into hopeless infinitude, and the little regularities we had painfully delineated on the heavens are all effaced. The earth had been torn from its moorings and sent revolving through space, but it revolved round a central stationary sun. Here, at least, was something stable. The sun was a fixed centre for our minds, as well as for the planetary system. But the sun himself has been uprooted, and revolves round some other centre—we know not what—or else travels on through infinite space—we know not whither. A little time ago, the stately seven rolled round their central orb in clear and uninterrupted space; their number has been constantly increasing; we reckon now seventeen planetary bodies that can be reduced to no law of proportion or harmony, either as to their size, their orbits, the inclination of their axes, or any other planetary property;[15] and the space they circulate in is intruded on by other smaller and miscellaneous bodies, asteroids, and the like, some of which, it seems, occasionally fall to the earth. Comets come sweeping in from illimitable space, requiring, it is thought, some eight thousand years for their revolution round the sun. Some of these cross each other's orbits: one has crossed the orbit of the earth; and their decreasing circle round the sun, gives notice of some unknown ether suffused through the interstellar spaces. The outlying prospect, beyond our system, grows still more bewildering. The stars are no longer "fixed," nor is their brilliancy secured to them; this increases and diminishes with perplexing mystery. What seemed a single point of light, resolves itself into two stars revolving round each, perhaps reciprocally sun and planet. The faint and telescopic nebula, just reached by the glass in one age, is found in the next to be a congregation of innumerable stars. Our milky way is, at the same distance, just such another nebula. "The elder Herschel calculates that the light of the most distant nebula, discovered by his forty-feet refractor, requires two millions of years to reach our eyes." Oh, shut up the telescope! the reason reels.
Science, in short, presents before us a field of perpetual activity—of endless excitement, and that of the highest order—of practical results of the greatest utility and most beneficial description; but it gives no prospect of any resting-place—any repose for the speculative reason—any position with which the scientific mind shall be content, and from which it shall embrace the scene before it in its unity and harmony. Always will it be
"Moving about in worlds half-realised."
Having touched upon these subtle agencies of light, and heat, and electricity, and on the increasing difficulty we have of framing to ourselves any distinct conception of them, we cannot refrain from alluding to a little work or pamphlet, by Mr Grove, entitled, The Correlation of Physical Forces, in which this subject is treated with great originality. Mr Grove has made himself a name in experimental science by his discoveries in electricity and chemistry; in this pamphlet he shows, that he has the taste and power for enlarged speculation on the truths which experiment brings to light. We would recommend the perusal of his pamphlet to all who are interested in these higher and more abstract speculations. How far the wide generalisation he adopts is sustained by facts, we are not prepared to say. But it is a powerful work, and it is a singular one; for it is not often, in this country at least, that a man so well versed in the minutiæ of science ventures upon so bold a style of generalisation. After reviewing some of the more lately discovered properties of electricity, heat, light, and magnetism, and showing how each of them is capable of producing or resolving itself into the others, he reasons that all the four are but the varied activity of one and the same element. He adds, that this element is probably no other than the primitive atom itself; and that, in fact, these may be all regarded as affections of matter, which follow in their legal sequence, and not as the results of separate fluids or ethers. We are not sure that we do justice to his views, as we have not the work at hand, and it is some time since we read it; but we are persuaded that its perusal will be of interest to a philosophic reader, though its reasoning should fail to satisfy him.
But we have not placed the title of Mrs Somerville's book at the head of this paper, as an occasion to involve ourselves in these dark and abstract discussions. We are for out-of-door life; we would survey this visible round world, whose various regions, with their products and their inhabitants, she has brought before us.
"Physical geography," thus commences our writer, "is a description of the earth, the sea, and the air, with their inhabitants animal and vegetable, of the distribution of these organised beings, and the causes of that distribution. Political and arbitrary divisions are disregarded: the sea and the land are considered only with respect to these great features, that have been stamped upon them by the hand of the Almighty; and man himself is viewed but as a fellow-inhabitant of the globe with other created things, yet influencing them to a certain extent by his actions, and influenced in return."
Physical geography stands thus in contrast with political and historical geography. Russia is here no despotism, and America no democracy; they are only portions of the globe inhabited by certain races. To some persons it will doubtless seem a strange "geography" that takes no notice of the city, and respects not at all the boundaries of states. Those to whom the name recalls only the early labours of the school-room, when counties and county-towns formed a great branch of learning—where the blue and red lines upon the map were so anxiously traced, and where, doubtless, some suspicion arose that the earth itself was marked out by corresponding lines, or something equivalent to them—will hardly admit that to be geography which takes no note of these essential demarcations, or allow that to be a map in which the very city they live in cannot be found. To them the Physical Atlas will still seem nothing but a series of maps, in which most of the names have still to be inserted. They unconsciously regard cities and provinces as the primary objects and natural divisions of the earth. They share something of the feeling of that good man, more pious than reflective, who noted it as all especial providence that all the great rivers ran by the great towns.
Others, however, will be glad to escape for a time from these landmarks which man has put upon the earth, and to regard it in its great natural lineaments of continent and sea, mountain and island. To do this with advantage, it is necessary to disembarrass ourselves, both in the book and the map, of much that in our usual nomenclature ranks pre-eminently as geography. Nor is it easy to study this, more than the older branch of geography, without an appropriate atlas. To turn over the maps of Mr Johnston's, and con the varied information which accompanies them, is itself a study, and no disagreeable one. Of the extent of this information we can give no idea by extract or quotation; it is manifestly in too condensed a form for quotation; it is a perfect storehouse of knowledge, gathered from the best authorities.
The first thing which strikes an observant person, on looking over a map, or turning round a globe, is the unequal division and distribution of land and water. Over little more than one-fourth of the surface of the earth does dry land appear; the remaining three-fourths are overflowed by water. And this land is by no means equally disposed over the globe. Far the greater part of it lies in the northern hemisphere. "In the northern hemisphere it is three times greater than the south."
Of the form which this land assumes, the following peculiarities have been noticed:—
"The tendency of the land to assume a peninsular form is very remarkable, and it is still more so that almost all the peninsulas tend to the south—circumstances that depend on some unknown cause which seems to have acted very extensively. The continents of South America, Africa, and Greenland, are peninsulas on a gigantic scale, all tending to the south; the Asiatic peninsula of India, the Indo-Chinese peninsula, those of Corea, Kamtchatka, of Florida, California, and Aliaska, in North America, as well as the European peninsulas of Norway and Sweden, Spain and Portugal, Italy and Greece, take the same direction. All the latter have a rounded form except Italy, whereas most of the others terminate sharply, especially the continents of South America and Africa, India, and Greenland, which have the pointed form of wedges; while some are long and narrow, as California, Aliaska, and Malacca. Many of the peninsulas have an island, or group of islands, at their extremity—as South America, which terminates with the group of Terra del Fuego; India has Ceylon; Malacca has Sumatra and Banca; the southern extremity of New Holland ends in Van Diemen's Land; a chain of islands run from the end of the peninsula of Aliaska; Greenland has a group of islands at its extremity; and Sicily lies close to the termination of Italy. It has been observed, as another peculiarity in the structure of peninsulas, that they generally terminate boldly, in bluffs, promontories, or mountains, which are often the last portions of the continental chains. South America terminates in Cape Horn, a high promontory which is the visible termination of the Andes; Africa with the Cape of Good Hope; India with Cape Comorin, the last of the Ghauts; New Holland ends with South-East Cape in Van Diemen's Land; and Greenland's farthest point is the elevated bluff of Cape Farewell."
These are peculiarities interesting to notice, and which may hereafter explain, or be explained by, other phenomena. Resemblances and analogies of this kind, whilst they are permitted only to direct and stimulate inquiry, have their legitimate place in science. It was a resemblance of this description, between the zig-zag course of the metalliferous veins, and the path of the lightning, which first suggested the theory, based, of course, on very different reasonings, that electricity had essentially contributed to the formation of those veins—a theory which Mrs Somerville has considered sufficiently sound to introduce into her work.
What lies within our globe is still matter of conjecture. The radius of the earth is 4000 miles, and by one means or another, mining, and the examination of the upheaved strata, and of what volcanoes have thrown out, we are supposed to have penetrated, with speculative vision, to about the depth of ten miles.
"The increase of temperature," writes Mrs Somerville, "with the depth below the surface of the earth, and the tremendous desolation hurled over wide regions by numerous fire-breathing mountains, show that man is removed but a few miles from immense lakes or seas of liquid fire. The very shell on which he stands is unstable under his feet, not only from those temporary convulsions that seem to shake the globe to its centre, but from a slow, almost imperceptible, elevation in some places, and an equally gentle subsidence in others, as if the internal molten matter were subject to secular tides, now heaving and now ebbing; or that the subjacent rocks were in one place expanded and in another contracted by changes in temperature."
Perhaps these "immense lakes or seas of liquid fire" are a little too hastily set down here in our geography. But of these obscure regions beneath the earth, the student must understand he can share only in the best conjectures of scientific men. Geology is compelled, at present, in many cases, to content herself with intelligent conjecture.
To return again to the surface of the earth, the first grand spectacle that strikes us is the mountains. Before it was understood how the mountain was the parent of the river, the noble elevation was apt to be regarded in the light of a ruin, as evidence of some disastrous catastrophe, and Burnett, in his Theory of the Earth, conceived the ideal or normal state of our planet to be that of a smooth ball, smooth as an egg. The notion not only betrays the low state of scientific knowledge in his age, but a miserable taste in world-architecture, which, we may remark in excuse for poor Burnett, was, almost as much as his scientific ignorance, to be shared with the age in which he lived. For it is surprising, with the exception of a few poets, how destitute men were, in his time, of all sympathy with, and admiration of, the grander and more sublime objects of nature. "We have changed all that!" The mountain range, pouring down its streams into the valleys on both sides, is not only recognised as necessary to the fertility of the plain; but, strange to say, we become more and more awake to its surprising beauty and magnificence. The description of the mountain ranges of the several continents of the world, forms one of the principal attractions of the study of physical geography, and one of the great charms of Mrs Somerville's book.
The mountains of Asia take precedence of all others in altitude and length of range.
"The mean height of the Himalaya is stupendous. Captain Gerard and his brother estimated that it could not be less than from 16,000 to 20,000 feet; but, from the average elevation of the passes over these mountains, Baron Humboldt thinks it must be under 15,700 feet. Colonel Sabine estimates it to be only 11,510 feet, though the peaks exceeding that elevation are not to be numbered, especially at the sources of the Sutlej. Indeed, from that river to the Kalee, the chain exhibits an endless succession of the loftiest mountains on earth: forty of them surpass the height of Chimborazo, one of the highest of the Andes, and several reach the height of 25,000 feet at least.... The valleys are crevices so deep and narrow, and the mountains that hang over them in menacing cliffs are so lofty, that these abysses are shrouded in perpetual gloom, except where the rays of a vertical sun penetrate their depths. From the steepness of the descent the rivers shoot down with the swiftness of an arrow, filling the caverns with foam and the air with mist.
"Most of the passes over the Himalaya are but little lower than the top of Mont Blanc; many are higher, especially near the Sutlej, where they are from 18,000 to 19,000 feet high; and that north-east of Khoonawur is 20,000 feet above the level of the sea, the highest that has been attempted. All are terrific, and the fatigue and suffering from the rarity of the air in the last 500 feet is not to be described. Animals are as much distressed as human beings, and many of them die; thousands of birds perish from the violence of the winds; the drifting snow is often fatal to travellers, and violent thunder-storms add to the horror of the journey. The Niti Pass, by which Mr Moorcroft ascended to the sacred lake of Manasa, in Tibet, is tremendous: he and his guide had not only to walk bare-footed, from the risk of slipping, but they were obliged to creep along the most frightful chasms, holding by twigs and tufts of grass, and sometimes they crossed deep and awful crevices on a branch of a tree, or on loose stones thrown across. Yet these are the thoroughfares for commerce in the Himalaya, never repaired, nor susceptible of improvement, from frequent landslips and torrents.
"The loftiest peaks, being bare of snow, give great variety of colour and beauty to the scenery, which in these passes is at all times magnificent. During the day, the stupendous size of the mountains, their interminable extent, the variety and sharpness of their forms, and, above all, the tender clearness of their distant outline melting into the pale blue sky, contrasted with the deep azure above, is described as a scene of wild and wonderful beauty. At midnight, when myriads of stars sparkle in the black sky, and the pure blue of the mountains looks deeper still below the pale white gleam of the earth and snow-light, the effect is of unparalleled sublimity; and no language can describe the splendour of the sunbeams at daybreak streaming between the high peaks, and throwing their gigantic shadows on the mountains below. There, far above the habitation of man, no living thing exists, no sound is heard; the very echo of the traveller's footsteps startles him in the awful solitude and silence that reigns in these august dwellings of everlasting snow."
The table-lands of Asia are on a scale corresponding with its mountains. But the same elevation, it is remarked, is not accompanied with the same sterility in these parts of the world, as in the temperate zone. Corn has been found growing at heights exceeding the summit of Mont Blanc. "According to Mr Moorcroft, the sacred lake of Manasa, in Great Tibet, and the surrounding country, is 17,000 feet above the sea, which is 1240 feet higher than Mont Blanc. In this elevated region wheat and barley grow, and many of the fruits of Southern Europe ripen. The city of H'Lassa, in eastern Tibet, the residence of the Grand Lama, is surrounded by vineyards, and is called by the Chinese 'the Realm of Pleasure!'" Nevertheless the general aspect of the table lands is that of a terrific sterility. Here is a striking description of them. We should have been tempted to say, that in this singularly dark appearance of the sky at mid-day, there was something of exaggeration, if our own limited experience had not taught us to be very cautious in attributing exaggeration where the scenic effects of nature are concerned.
"In summer the sun is powerful at mid-day; the air is of the purest transparency, and the azure of the sky so deep that it seems black as in the darkest night. The rising moon does not enlighten the atmosphere; no warning radiance announces her approach, till her limb touches the horizon, and the stars shine with the distinctness and brilliancy of suns. In southern Tibet the verdure is confined to favoured spots; the bleak mountains and high plains are sternly gloomy—a scene of barrenness not to be conceived. Solitude reigns in these dreary wastes, where there is not a tree, nor even a shrub to be seen of more than a few inches high. The scanty, short-lived verdure vanishes in October; the country then looks as if fire had passed over it; and cutting dry winds blow with irresistible fury, howling in the bare mountains, whirling the snow through the air, and freezing to death the unfortunate traveller benighted in their defiles."
The description of the territory of the East India Company will be read with interest. We cannot afford space to extract it. Plains and valleys the very richest in the globe are to be found here, as also much rank marshy land, and also much jungle. "It has been estimated that a third of the East India Company's territory is jungle."
As a set-off against this jungle we have it intimated that, if proper search were made, gold would probably be found in this territory, as abundantly as in California. We sincerely hope no such discovery will be made. If there is a sure specific for demoralising a people, it is to involve them in the chase for gold, instead of that profitable industry which produces the veritable wealth for which gold has become the symbol and representative. The discovery of gold in one of our colonies would not only demoralise, it would impoverish. It would demoralise, by substituting for steady industry, with steady returns, a species of enterprise which has all the uncertainty and fluctuation of gambling; and it would finally impoverish by diverting labour from the creation of agricultural and manufacturing wealth, to the obtaining of the dry barren symbol of wealth, which, apart from its representative character, has but very little value whatever.
We will not look back towards Chimborazo and the Andes, as we should involve ourselves in long and tempting descriptions. In Africa, it is remarkable that we are little acquainted with the mountains. "No European has yet seen the Mountains of the Moon!" What a challenge to enterprising travellers! We know the level sands of Africa better than these elevations which have assumed so magnificent a title. What a terrific sterility does a large portion of this the most ill-fated of the great continents present! "On the interminable sands and rocks of these deserts no animal—no insect—breaks the dread silence; not a tree nor a shrub is to be seen in this land without a shadow. In the glare of noon the air quivers with the heat reflected from the red sand, and in the night it is chilled under a clear sky sparkling with its host of stars." The wind of heaven, which elsewhere breathes so refreshingly, is here a burning blast fatal to life; or else it drives the sand in clouds before it, obscuring the sun, and stifling and burying the hapless caravan.
In the new continent of America—if it still retains that title—the desert is comparatively rare. But its enormous forests have, in some regions, proved that excessive vegetation can assume almost as terrific an appearance as this interminable sterility.
"The forests of the Amazons not only cover the basin of that river, from the Cordillera of Chiquitos to the mountains of Parima, but also its limiting mountain-chains, the Sierra Dos Vertentes and Parima, so that the whole forms an area of woodland more than six times the size of France, lying between the 18th parallel of south latitude and the 7th of north, consequently inter-tropical and traversed by the equator. According to Baron Humboldt, the soil, enriched for ages by the spoils of the forest, consists of the richest mould. The heat is suffocating in the deep and dark recesses of these primeval woods, where not a breath of air penetrates, and where, after being drenched by the periodical rains, the damp is so excessive that a blue mist rises in the early morning among the huge stems of the trees, and envelops the entangled creepers stretching from bough to bough. A deathlike stillness prevails from sunrise to sunset, then the thousands of animals that inhabit these forests join in one loud discordant roar, not continuous, but in bursts. The beasts seem to be periodically and unanimously roused by some unknown impulse, till the forests ring in universal uproar. Profound silence prevails at midnight, which is broken at the dawn of morning by another general roar of the wild chorus. The whole forest often resounds when the animals, startled from their sleep, scream in terror at the noise made by bands of its inhabitants flying from some night-prowling foe. Their anxiety and terror before a thunder-storm is excessive, and all nature seems to partake in the dread. The tops of the lofty trees rustle ominously, though not a breath of air agitates them; a hollow whistling in the high regions of the atmosphere comes as a warning from the black floating vapour; midnight darkness envelops the ancient forests, which soon after groan and creak with the blast of the hurricane. The gloom is rendered still more hideous by the vivid lightning, and the stunning crash of thunder."
One of the most interesting subjects, of which mention is made in the work before us, is the gradual elevation and subsidence observed in some portions of these continents themselves. Just when the imagination had become somewhat familiar with the sudden but very partial upheaving of the earth by volcanic agencies, this new discovery came to light of the slow rising and sinking of vast areas of the land, and unaccompanied with any earthquakes or volcanic eruptions. In some parts the crust of the earth has sunk and risen again; in others, sort of see-saw movement on a most gigantic scale has been detected.
"There is a line crossing Sweden from east to west, in the parallel of 56° 3´ N. lat., along which the ground is perfectly stable, and has been so for centuries. To the north of it for 1000 miles, between Gottenburg and North Cape, the ground is rising; the maximum elevation, which takes place at North Cape, being at the rate of five feet in a century, from whence it gradually diminishes to three inches in a century at Stockholm. South of the line of stability, on the contrary, the land is sinking through part of Christianstad and Malmo; for the village of Stassten in Scania is now 380 feet nearer to the Baltic than it was in the time of Linnæus, by whom it was measured eighty-seven years ago."
It is evident that the elevation of the land, in relation to the level of the sea, may be produced either by an uprising of the continent or a depression of the bed of the ocean, permitting the waters to sink; as also the apparent depression of the land may be occasioned by an elevation in the bed of the ocean. This renders the problem somewhat more difficult to solve, because the causes we are seeking to discover may be sometimes operating at that part of the crust of the earth which is concealed from our view. Mr Lyell, who, in his Principles of Geology, has collected and investigated the facts bearing upon this subject, mentions the following as probable causes of the phenomena:—
1. "It is easy to conceive that the shattered rocks may assume an arched form during a convulsion, so that the country above may remain permanently upheaved. In other cases, gas may drive before it masses of liquid lava, which may thus be injected into newly opened fissures. The gas having then obtained more room, by the forcing up of the incumbent rocks, may remain at rest; while the lava, congealing in the rents, may afford a solid foundation for the newly raised district.
2. "Experiments have recently been made in America, by Colonel Patten, to ascertain the ratio according to which some of the stones commonly used in architecture expand with given increments of heat.... Now, according to the law of expansion thus ascertained, a mass of sandstone, a mile in thickness, which should have its temperature raised 200° F., would lift a super-imposed layer of rock to the height of ten feet above its former level. But, suppose a part of the earth's crust one hundred miles in thickness, and equally expansible, to have its temperature raised 600° or 800°, this might produce an elevation of between two and three thousand feet. The cooling of the same mass might afterwards cause the overlying rocks to sink down again, and resume their original position. By such agency, we might explain the gradual rise of Scandinavia, or the subsidence of Greenland, if this last phenomenon should also be established as a fact on further inquiry.
3. "It is also possible that, as the clay in Wedgwood's pyrometer contracts, by giving of its water, and then by incipient vitrification; so large masses of argillaceous strata, in the earth's interior, may shrink, when subjected to heat and chemical changes, and allow the incumbent rocks to subside gradually. It may frequently happen that fissures of great extent may be formed in rocks, simply by the unequal expansion of a continuous mass heated in one part, while in another it remains in a comparatively low temperature. The sudden subsidence of land may also be occasioned by subterranean caverns giving way, when gases are condensed, or when they escape through newly formed crevices. The subtraction, moreover, of matter from certain parts of the interior, by the flowing of lava and of mineral springs, must, in the course of ages, cause vacuities below, so that the undermined surface may at length fall in."[16]
Two agencies of the most opposite, character have apparently been, at all times, acting on the crust of the earth to change its form, or add to the surface of dry land—the volcano and the insect!—the one the most sudden and violent imaginable, producing in a short time the most astonishing effects; the other gradual, silent, and imperceptible, yet leaving the most stupendous monuments of its activity. The volcano has thrown up a mountain in a single night; there is an instance, too, on record, where a mountain has quite as suddenly disappeared, destroying itself in its own violent combustion, and breaking up with repeated and terrific explosions. On the other hand, besides what has been long known of the works of the coral insect, the microscope has revealed to us that huge cliffs have been constructed of the minute fossil shells of animalcule. These creatures, abstracting from the water, or the air, or both, the minute particles of vegetable or other matter they hold in solution, first frame of them their own siliceous shells, and then deposit these shells by myriads, so as ultimately to construct enormous solid mounds out of imperceptible and fluent particles.
Astonishing, indeed, is the new world of animals invisible to the naked eye, which science has lately detected.
"Professor Ehrenberg," says Mrs Somerville, "has discovered a new world of creatures in the infusoria, so minute that they are invisible to the naked eye. He found them in fog, rain, and snow, in the ocean and stagnant water, in animal and vegetable juices, in volcanic ashes and pumice, in opal, in the dusty air that sometimes falls on the ocean; and he detected eighteen species twenty feet below the surface of the ground in peat earth, which was full of microscopic live animals: they exist in ice, and are not killed by boiling water. This lowest order of animal life is much more abundant than any other, and new species are found every day. Magnified, some of them seem to consist of a transparent vesicle, and some have a tail; they move with great alacrity, and show intelligence by avoiding obstacles in their course: others have siliceous shells. Language, and even imagination, fails in the attempt to describe the inconceivable myriads of these invisible inhabitants of the ocean, the air, and the earth."
With every great change, however brought about, in the surface of the earth, and the climate of its several regions, it appears that, either by the direct agency of the Omnipotent Creator, or through the intermediate operations of laws which are at present profound secrets to us, a corresponding change takes place in the forms of animal life, and in the whole vegetable kingdom. Modern science presents no subject to us of more interest than this, and none apparently so inscrutable. Nor does the examination of the globe, as it exists before us at this moment, with its various floras and faunas, at all assist us in forming any conception of the law by which the geological series (if we may so term it) of animal life, has been regulated, for the distribution of the several animals over the several countries and climates of the world follows no rule that one can detect. Of course, no animal can exist where provision has not been made for its subsistence, but the provision has been made with the same abundance in two countries, and in the one the animal is found, and the other not. We should ask in vain why the horse was found a native of the deserts of Tartary, and why it was originally unknown to the plains of America? Nor can any cause be detected for the difference between the congeners, a representative species of one continent or island, and those of another. And not only have the larger animals an arbitrary territory marked out to them by nature, but birds, and even insects, are separated and grouped together in the same unaccountable manner. The chapters which Mrs Somerville has devoted to this subject will be read, especially by those to whom the topic is new, with extreme interest. They are enlightened and judicious.
It is a natural supposition to make, that, in the series of animals which at great geological periods have been introduced upon the earth, there has been a progression, so that each new form of animal life has been, in some marked manner, superior to that which is substituted. The comparative anatomist has not sanctioned this opinion; he tells us that he finds the same "high organisation" in the fossil saurians of a bygone world, as in the lions and leopards of the present day. But we would observe that the presence of this "high organisation" is not sufficient to determine the question. We should be surprised, indeed, if any creature were to be found whose structure was not perfectly adapted to the mode of life it was destined to lead. But it is permissible to compare one animal with another in its whole nature, and the character of its existence. The pig has the same high organisation as the dog, yet we should certainly prefer the one animal to the other; we should say that it was calculated for a happier life. We cannot suppose that a bird is not a more joyous creature than the worm or the snail. The adaptation of the whole form and structure to a pleasurable existence, and not what is termed high organisation, is that which we must regard, in estimating the superiority of one animal to another. Now, in this respect, there surely has been a progression from the earliest epochs. The crocodile and the tortoise are, amongst the animals which now exist, those which most resemble some of the more remarkable of the extinct genera. They are as perfectly adapted, no doubt, as any other creature, to their peculiar mode of being; but that mode of being is not an enviable one. The long stiff unwieldy body of the one, and the slow movement, with the oppressive carcase, of the other, are not consistent with vivid animal enjoyment. The crocodile, accordingly, lies motionless for hours together—waits for its prey—and slumbers gorged with food. And for the tortoise, it appears to lead a life as near to perpetual torpor as may be. Pass through a museum, and note those huger animals, the elephant and the rhinoceros, the seal or walrus, all those which most remind us of the gigantic creatures of the antediluvian world, and compare them with the horse, the deer, the dog, the antelope. Surely the latter present to us a type of animal life superior to the former—superior, inasmuch as the latter are altogether calculated for a more vivacious, sprightly, and happy existence. We must not venture to remark on their greater comparative beauty, for we shall be told that this is a matter for our own peculiar taste. We should not be contented to be so easily silenced on this head, but we should require far more space than we have now at our disposal to defend our æsthetic notions.
We have found ourselves imperceptibly conducted from the inanimate to the animate creation; we shall proceed, therefore, with the same topic, in the few farther extracts we shall be able to make from the work before us. Indeed, with so vast a subject, and so brief a space, it would be idle to affect any great precision in the arrangement of our topics; enough if they follow without abruptness, and are linked together by natural associations of thought.
"Three hundred thousand insects are known!" and every day, we were almost going to add, increases the number. They abound, as may be expected, in equatorial regions, and decrease towards the poles. "The location of insects depends upon that of the plants which yield their food; and as almost each plant is peopled with inhabitants peculiar to itself, insects are distributed over the earth in the same manner as vegetables; the groups, consequently, are often confined within narrow limits, and it is extraordinary that, notwithstanding their powers of locomotion, they often remain within a particular compass, though the plant, and all other circumstances in their immediate vicinity, appear equally favourable for their habitation."
Mountain-chains, Mrs Somerville observes, are a complete barrier to insects; they differ even in the two sides of the Col de Tende in the Alps, and they are limited in the choice of their food. If a plant is taken to a country where it has no congeners, it will be safe from the insects of that country; but if it has congeners, the insect inhabitants will soon find the way to it. Our cabbages and carrots, when transplanted to Cayenne, were not injured by the insects of that country; and the tulip tree, and other magnolias brought here, are not molested by our insects.
The insect is a race, or order, of creatures not friendly to man, or any of the larger animals.
"The mosquito and culex are spread over the world more generally than any other tribe; they are the torment of men and animals from the poles to the equator, by night and by day; the species are numerous, and their location partial.... Of all places on earth, the Orinoco, and other great rivers of tropical America, are the most obnoxious to this plague. The account given by Baron Humboldt is really fearful; at no season of the year, at no hour of the day or night, can rest be found; whole districts in the Upper Orinoco are deserted on account of these insects. Different species follow one another with such precision, that the time of day or night may be known accurately from their humming noise, and from the different sensations of pain which the different poisons produce. The only respite is the interval of a few minutes between the departure of one gang and the arrival of their successors, for the species do not mix. On some parts of the Orinoco, the air is one dense cloud of poisonous insects to the height of twenty feet."
The sea, as well as the air, is populous with insect life. The discoloured portions of the ocean generally owe their tint to myriads of insects. The vermilion sea off California is probably to be accounted for from this cause, "as Mr Darwin found red and chocolate-coloured water on the coast of Chili, over spaces of several square miles, full of microscopic animalcules, darting about in every direction, and sometimes exploding"—we hope for joy. "In the Arctic seas, where the water is pure transparent ultramarine colour, parts of twenty or thirty square miles, one thousand five hundred feet deep, are green and turbid, from the quantity of minute animalcules. Captain Scoresby calculated that it would require eighty thousand persons working unceasingly, from the creation of man to the present day, to count the number of insects contained in two miles of the green water."
Captain Scoresby must be very fond of calculations. We have noticed, by the way, on several occasions, how very bold these men of figures are! One pounds and pulverises the Pyrenees, and strews them over France, and tells us how many feet this would raise the level of the whole country. Another calculates how much soil the Mississippi brings down, per hour, to the ocean; and another, still bolder, undertakes to say what quantity of ice lies amongst the whole range of the Alps. Some of these calculations are laborious inutilities, as it is evident that no accurate data can be obtained to proceed upon. In the last instance, how find the depth of the ice? The sand of the desert has been sounded in one place, we are told, and the lead has sunk three hundred and sixty feet without finding a bottom; but what plummet can sound the glacier? Here and there a crevice may let us into the secret of its depth, and we know that below a certain level ice cannot remain unmelted; but who can tell the configuration of the mountain under the ice, how shallow the glacier may be in some parts, and into what profound caverns it may sink in others? There is something childish in giving us an array of figures, when the figures present no useful approximation to the truth.
We have alluded to the difficult problem of the distribution of the different species of animals throughout the several regions of the globe: the same problem meets us in the vegetable world. Here we might expect to grapple with it with some better hopes of success, yet the difficulties are by no means diminished; we only seem to see them more plainly. In the first place, it is clear, as Mrs Somerville says, that "no similarity of existing circumstances can account for whole families of plants being confined to one particular country, or even to a very limited district, which, as far as we can judge, might have grown equally well in many others." But the difference of the floras is not the only difficulty. While there is difference in a great number of the species, there is identity in a certain other number. If now we account for the difference by supposing that the several portions of land emerged from the ocean at different epochs, and under different conditions, and that, therefore, the generative powers of vegetable life, (in whatever, under the will of Divine Providence, these may be supposed to consist) manifested themselves differently, how shall we next account for this identity? "In islands far from continents, the number of plants is small; but of these a large proportion occur nowhere else. In St Helena, of thirty flower-bearing plants one or two only are native elsewhere." But these one or two become a new perplexity. "In the Falkland Islands there are more than thirty flowering plants identical with those in Great Britain." Very many similar cases might be cited; we quote these only to show the nature of the difficulty with which science has to cope.
And here comes in the following strange and startling fact, to render this subject of vegetable production still more inexplicable:—
"Nothing grows under these great forests, (of South America;) and when accidentally burnt down in the mountainous parts of Patagonia, they never rise again; but the ground they grow on is soon covered with an impenetrable brushwood of other plants. In Chili the violently stinging Loasa appears first in these burnt places, bushes grow afterwards, and then comes a tree-grass, eighteen feet high, of which the Indians make their huts. The new vegetation that follows the burning of primeval forests is quite unaccountable. The ancient and undisturbed forests of Pennsylvania have no undergrowth; and when burnt down they are succeeded by a thick growth of rhododendrons."—(Vol. ii. p. 190.)
But we must bring our rambling excursion through these pleasant volumes to a close; the more especially as we wish once more to take this opportunity, not as critics only, but as readers also, to express our grateful sense of the benefit which Mrs Somerville has conferred upon society by this and her preceding volume, The Connexion of the Physical Sciences. It was once a prevailing habit to speak in a sort of apologetic strain of works of popular science. Such habit, or whatever residue of it remains, may be entirely laid aside. If by popular science is meant the conveyance, in clear intelligible language, as little technical as possible, of the results of scientific inquiry, then are we all of us beholden more or less to popular science. The most scientific of men cannot be equally profound in all branches of inquiry. The field has now become so extensive that he cannot hope to obtain his knowledge in all departments from the first sources. He must trust for much to the authority of others. Every one who is desirous of learning what anatomy and physiology can teach us, cannot attend the dissecting table. How much that we esteem, as amongst the most valuable of our acquisitions, depends on this secondary evidence! How few can follow the calculations of the mathematician, by which he establishes results which are nevertheless familiar to all as household words! And the mathematician himself, great aristocrat as he is in science, must take the chemist on his word for the nice analysis the latter has performed. He cannot leave his papers to follow out experiments, often as difficult and intricate as his own calculations. Indeed the experiments of the man of science have become so refined and elaborate, and deal often with such subtle matter, and this in so minute quantities, that, as it has been said of the astronomer, that it requires a separate education, and takes half a life to learn to observe, so it may be truly said, that to devise and conduct new experiments in philosophy has become an art in itself. We must be content to see a great deal with the eyes of others; to be satisfied with the report of this or that labourer in the wide field of science. We cannot all of us go wandering over moor and mountain to gather and classify herbs and flowers; interested as we all are in geological speculations, we cannot all use the geological hammer, or use it to any purpose; still less can we examine all manner of fishes, or pry with the microscope into every cranny of nature for infusoria.
Mrs Somerville gives us the book!—the neat, compact, valuable volume, which we hold so commodiously in the hand. The book—the book for ever! There are who much applaud the lecture and the lecture-room, with its table full of glittering apparatus, glass and brass, and all the ingenious instruments by which nature, as we say, is put to the torture. Let such as please spend their hot uneasy hour in a crowd. We could never feed in a crowd; we detest benches and sitting in a row. To our notion, more is got, in half the time, from a few pages of the quiet letterpress, quietly perused: the better if accompanied by skilful diagrams, or, as in this case, by admirable maps. As to those experiments, on the witnessing of which so much stress is laid, it is a great fallacy to suppose that they add anything to the certainty of our knowledge. When we see an experiment performed at a distance, in a theatre, we do, in fact, as entirely rely on the word of the lecturer as if we only read of its performance. It is our faith in his character that makes all the difference between his exhibition and that of the dexterous conjurer. To obtain any additional evidence from beholding the experiment, we ought to be at the elbow of the skilful manipulator, and weigh, and test, and scrutinise.
But, indeed, as a matter of evidence, the experiment in a popular lecture-room is never viewed for a moment. It is a mere show. It has degenerated into a mere expedient to attract idlers and keep them awake. The crowd is there, and expect to see something; and it has become the confirmed habit of the whole class of popular lecturers to introduce their experiments, not when they are wanted to elucidate or prove their propositions, but whenever and wherever they can answer the purpose of amusing the audience. If a learned professor is lecturing upon the theory of combustion, he will burn a piece of stick or paper before you, to show that when such things are burnt flame is produced. He would on no account forego that flame. Yes; and the audience look on as if they had never seen a stick or a piece of paper burn before. And when he is so happy as to arrive at the point where a few grains of gunpowder may be ignited, they give him a round of applause! In the hands of many, the lecture itself becomes little more than an occasion for the experiment. The glittering vials, the air-pump, the electrical machine, undoubtedly keep the eyes at least of the audience open; but the expedient, with all due deference be it said, reminds us of the ingenious resource of the veteran exhibitor of Punch, who knows that if his puppets receive knocks enough, and there is sufficient clatter with the sticks, the dramatic dialogue may take its course as it pleases: he is sure of his popularity.
Therefore it is we are for the book; and we hold such presents as Mrs Somerville has bestowed upon the public to be of incalculable value, disseminating more sound information than all the literary and scientific institutions will accomplish in a whole cycle of their existence. We will conclude with one or two practical suggestions, which would add to the utility of the last of her two works—The Physical Geography. Mrs Somerville has thought it well to insert a few notes explanatory of some scientific terms. But these notes are few. If it was well to explain such terms as "Marsupial animals," or "Testacea," a reader might be excused for wishing to know what a "torsion balance" was, or what a "moraine,"—terms which fall upon him just as suddenly, and unexplained by any previous matter. Would not a glossary of such terms be advisable? But whatever may be thought of this suggestion, our next remark is indisputable. To such a work as this, an index is extremely useful—is all but essential. There is an index, but it is so defective, so scanty, that it is worth nothing. We cannot say whether this last remark applies equally to The Connexion of the Physical Sciences, not having that work at present under our eye. But we beg to intimate to all authors and authoresses, that whenever a book is of such a nature that it becomes valuable as a work of reference, it should be accompanied by a good index. It is a plodding business, but it must be executed.
[CIVIL REVOLUTION IN THE CANADAS—A REMEDY.]
To be British, or not to be, is now literally the question in all the North American colonies. Like England, when Mr Cobden and the potato blight produced, together, a panic which seemed to obliterate, for the time, all past arguments, and all future consequences—changing minds before deemed unchangeable, and raising to fame and greatness men and reasoning that the world was never previously able to see the force or the depth of—like England then, are the colonies now. They are in all the depths and mazes of a panic. One of the storms which occasionally break over the heads of all people is now raging over theirs. Nor is it surprising—with England's history for ten years before us—if there should be those among them who shrink from its drenchings or its shocks, or are incapable, in the midst of its wild commotions, of seeing sunshine in the distance. For our part, we are fond of that sturdy greatness which can put its shoulder to the blast, and say, "Blow on, great guns; we can stand your thunder."
Not that the panic in the colonies arises from the people's looking forward to having nothing to eat. They have plenty, thank God, and to spare. But they have nothing in their pockets; and, what is worse, they are afraid, if they go on much longer as they are now doing, they will soon be without pockets too. Factory cotton may be but fourpence a yard; but if they haven't the fourpence to pay for it, it might as well be as dear as diamonds, as far as they are concerned.
The policy of England, from the day that Lord Chatham said "that he would not allow the colonies to make a hob-nail for themselves," has been to convert them into marts for her manufactures—to make them useful and profitable to her, by causing them to consume those things which give her poor employment, her merchants and manufacturers profit, and her commercial navy all the incidental carrying trade. As a return for this, the colonies were directly and indirectly assured by England, that their produce should be protected in her markets—that, for all the profits England might make by manufacturing for the colonies, they should have a full return in the profits they should have by their produce being protected.
Meantime, the United States pursued an entirely different system. They, notwithstanding the interests of the great body of the southern states—whose interest, their principal product being cotton, was to buy what they wanted of manufactured goods in the lowest market, and to sell their cotton in the highest—rigidly adhered to the system of forming manufacturing interests of their own, and of fostering and encouraging them by every means in their power. While the colonies, therefore, bought, with the produce of their country, broad cloths, cottons, silks, blankets, scythes, hardware, and crockery, which were manufactured in England, they saw all the profits of their manufacture, their sale, and their carriage, go to another country, to be spent among another people. The Americans, on the other hand, who bought, with the produce of their lands, the manufactures of their own country, saw the profits upon these manufactures applied to building up factories, villages, and towns, which brought together a useful population; built churches, made roads, established places of learning and improvement; made better markets for some things which might have been sold otherwise, and made sale for many that could not otherwise have been sold at all, besides greatly enhancing the values of all adjacent property, and increasing the general wealth of the whole country. The advantages of the one system over the other, however, did not stop here. The necessities and the advantages of manufactures, which first dictated the making and improving of a common road, next conceived the benefit of a railroad and a canal, and the profits of manufacturing were straightway applied to their construction, and they were done. The farmer, therefore, imperceptibly to himself, was placed within a few hours of the best markets over the continent—found his produce carried to them for a trifle, in comparison to what it used to cost him—and found, withal, the process which made it so, bringing thousands upon thousands of people into the country, to develop its riches, to increase the price of its lands, and to contribute to its civilisation and conveniencies, from the establishment of a college down to the building of a blacksmith's shop. The colonial farmer, too, who bought the goods of an English or a Scotch manufacturer, contributed to send those manufacturers' children to school, to give them a profession, or to leave them a fortune. The American farmer, who bought his neighbours' manufactures, contributed to establish a school in his own neighbourhood, where his children could be educated; and to bring people together to support them, if they chose to study a profession or to enter into business.
To trace, within the limits of a whole magazine even, much less in the fragment of an article, the wealth and prosperity that have accrued to the States over the Colonies, by this system, would be impossible. We must content ourselves, for the present, with glancing at the accumulation of capital, and the extraordinary improvements in one State, as an example of what must have, and in truth what has, accrued to the rest, in a greater or less degree, in proportion as they have been engaged in manufacturing.
The state of Massachusetts, in point of soil, climate, and resources, has fewer, or, at all events, as few advantages as any other state in the American Union. With a few verdant valleys, and some highly productive land, it has much that is rocky and barren, and more that is marshy and useless. Yet this state, far below Upper Canada in natural advantages, has, intersecting it in different ways, five canals, their aggregate length being ninety-nine miles. It has, too, no fewer than eleven railroads winding through it and round it, constructed at an immense cost, and affording a profitable return to their proprietors. Now what is the cause of this extraordinary growth of capital, in a place where there was literally so little for it to grow upon?—and how came such immense facilities for public business to be employed, where nature has done so little to create business? The answer is obvious. Massachusetts has not prospered by its land, or natural resources—it has prospered by its manufactures; and its improvements, great and extraordinary though they be, are but the natural offspring of those manufactures. Its principal manufacturing town, Lowell, the largest such town in the United States, has grown from a few hundred inhabitants, that the land might have feebly supported, to some forty thousand, that manufactures have profitably employed. The necessities of these manufactures called for a canal and a railroad. The profits of the capital invested in them, and the labour they employed, soon constructed them. Salem, wholly by the profits of making cotton fabrics, has become a town of fifteen thousand inhabitants. Salem's manufacturing interests required a railroad to Boston, and Salem's manufacturers' and artisans' profits were able to construct it. Manchester and Lawrence owe their existence and prosperity, and the adjacent country owes the advantages they are to it, wholly to manufactories. They wanted, too, a railroad to connect them; and they were able to make, and have made one. Springfield, also in this State, and Worcester, Fallriver, Lynn, and Newburyport, and several other places of minor consequence, owe equally their existence and prosperity to the same cause. Nor is it to be wondered at that, in so short a period, such vast improvements should be made, when we consider the immense profits that have accrued upon the capital employed in these manufactories, and upon the labour engaged in them. There is a cotton factory in Salem which itself employs a capital of £200,000, giving work to five hundred and seventy-five operatives,—three-fourths of whom are girls,—whose average wages are three pounds twelve shillings sterling a month. Yet, a great proportion of these being very young, it necessarily follows that the wages of the grown up are reduced to make up the average of those of the weaker, and that in reality an industrious woman "can generally earn a dollar a day; and there are those who have been known, from one year's end to another, even to exceed this." Speaking of the character of this labour, and of its effect upon the States, Mr Webster, the highest authority upon this subject in America, thus truthfully and eloquently remarks—
"I have spoken of labour as one of the great elements of our society, the great substantial interest on which we all stand. Not feudal service, not predial toil, not the irksome drudgery by one race of mankind, subjected, on account of colour, to the control of another race of mankind; but labour, intelligent, manly, independent, thinking and acting for itself, earning its own wages, accumulating those wages into capital, becoming a part of society and of our social system, educating childhood, maintaining worship, claiming the right of the elective franchise, and helping to uphold the great fabric of the State. That is American labour, and I confess that all my sympathies are with it, and my voice, until I am dumb, will be for it."
Of the profits arising from the capital invested in these manufactures, they have varied in different years, but have, on the average, vastly exceeded those upon all similar investments in England, or in any part of Europe. The Newburyport Herald, a couple of years since, gave a statement of the profits arising from the Essex Steam Mill Company in that town, by which it appeared that forty-two and a half per cent upon the capital invested was paid to the stockholders, as the amount of profits for 1845. The Dedham Company, in the same state, also divided ten per cent for six months of the same year; the Norfolk Company, twelve per cent for the same period; and the Northern Company ten. All these companies were engaged in the manufacture of cotton goods—the most profitable, however, of all manufactures in the States.
But against this immense accumulation of capital in the States, against the vast incidental improvements and wealth to the country that have arisen from manufactures, what have the British colonies to show? What have the Canadas to arrest the eye of the traveller, and to prove to him that, though they have pursued the system which Lord Chatham chalked out for them, of not manufacturing a hob-nail for themselves—and which the policy of England has ever since prevented their doing—they have still wherewithal to attest that they have prospered; and that their labour has been equally rewarded by agriculture as by manufactures?
From one end of the provinces to the other, in every colony Britain has in America, there are no evidences of prosperity approaching, much less equalling that of Massachusetts; there is nothing, in truth, wherewith to institute a comparison between them. Beyond the towns which are supported by the trade incident to selling England's goods, there are none to be found in British America. Beyond the little villages throughout the provinces, that owe their existence to the necessity for agencies to collect the profits of the whole products of the country, and to send them to other lands to be spent, there is no appearance of labour employed in business, or capital reproducing capital. Probably one of the best cultivated and most productive districts in Upper Canada, is the Gore. It is situated at the head of Lake Ontario; has the beautiful little city of Hamilton for its capital; is composed of very fair land, and is settled by a population distinguished for their industry, and for the great comfort and independence it has brought them. Upon entering this district by the high road from Toronto, or in passing in a steamer up the north shore of Lake Ontario, the traveller is struck with the appearance of a little village called Oakville. It is situated on the bank of the lake, has its neat white churches, and its little picturesque cottages, looking out upon the broad lake. A stranger at a distance, from its situation and appearance, would imagine it one of those villages that spring up so magically in America,—full of activity, energy, and prosperity. He visits it, and to his surprise he finds, that though it bears all the evidences of having been built in a hurry, it bears also all the tokens of rapid decay—its shops being for the most part unoccupied, its houses untenanted, and its streets without people. And what may be the reason, in a district so prosperous as the Gore, and surrounded by a country teeming with grain, and with still many unused resources, that this village has so palpably disappointed the expectations if its founder? It is this,—Oakville was projected and built with a view to the largest prosperity of the country; and with facilities and necessities for a trade equal to the cultivation of every lot of land in the adjacent country that could support a family, and to the manufacturing into staves and boards, and square timber, of every tree in the surrounding woods. But the policy of England has rendered it unprofitable to get out the timber; and free trade has taken away the inducement to enter into Canadian farming. The consequence is that the shops, which were built to do an anticipated trade in Oakville, are now unrequired; and the people, who built houses for the accommodation of those who were to be engaged in the expected business, have their houses upon their hands. Nor can any one well acquainted with Upper Canada fail to recognise in Oakville a faithful picture of many, if not most, of the towns and villages in the province.
But let us now reverse the picture, and suppose that Oakville, instead of looking forward to rising, and being supported by the trade incident to selling England's goods, and the draining of the country's resources to pay for them, had looked forward to prosperity by manufacturing and selling goods of its own. Let us suppose that its founder—who, fifteen years ago, spent some £20,000 in adapting its harbour for ships, that never had occasion to come; and in building storehouses, for which there has never been use—had spent the same money in establishing one of these factories which first formed the nucleus of Lowell or Salem in Massachusetts. Is it not reasonable to infer, that in the same country, and among a people having the same necessities, the same results would have accrued in the Canadas which have accrued in the States? That the profits of fifteen years' manufacturing would have surrounded Oakville with mansions, proving the success of enterprise; and filled its streets with houses, showing that labour had prospered, and the country had its benefits? Would not its capitalists, instead of empty houses and ruined hopes, have now the proceeds of well-invested capital, or see them reproducing wealth in railroads, or public improvements?
But let us suppose, further, that the whole province of Upper Canada had invested in manufactures, from time to time, for fifty years, the whole profits that England and other countries have made by the sale of all the goods to it that it has consumed, and that this capital had been augmenting and reproducing itself during this period—what would be the probable result? It is impossible to calculate it. It can only be measured by the towns that have sprung up, by the railroads and canals that have been made, and by the vast capital that has been accumulated in the same period by Massachusetts, and the other manufacturing states of America.
It is not, therefore, to institutions or to laws, to peculiarities of race or of situation, that we ascribe the present undeniable prosperity of the States, or, at all events, of those states which have manufactured, over the Canadas. It is to the system the one adopted, of manufacturing what they required, and thus securing to their country the benefit of the population it required to do so, the profits of the labour employed in it, and the incidental improvements it occasioned. It is the system the other followed, or which was chalked out for them, of spending all they could make in the purchase of goods manufactured in England, the profits of which all went there to be spent. The States, by the one system, have made the most of their country's resources and its labour; the Canadas, by the other, have made the least. The States have cities, and railroads, and canals, and elegant mansions, to show for their labour of fifty years; the Canadas have built elegant mansions, too, by their labour, and have bought fine countryseats, and have contributed to make railroads, but they are unfortunately all in England and Scotland. What holds good of a family, sometimes holds good of a people. There is as much often accumulated by saving as by making. Probably the making little, and saving it, will end better than making much and saving little. The States might have made but little on their produce at first—probably less, for many years, than the Canadas; but their system inevitably tended to saving for the country all they did make; whereas the Canadian system, whatever the provinces made, much or little, as inevitably tended to the country's losing it: and the consequences are, the vast difference in the growth of capital in the one country over the other.
The arguments, however, in favour of England's manufacturing for the colonies, were not without their speciousness, and, as applied to other countries, were not without their truth. These were, that England could manufacture cheaper for the colonies than they could manufacture for themselves; and, moreover, that the labour the colonies might apply to manufacturing, could be more profitably employed in raising produce. But these arguments, as far as the Canadas and all America are concerned, are fallacious. In a country where the largest possible reward for labour bears frequently no sort of proportion to the advantages gained by individuals and the whole commonwealth, by the mere fact of that labour's being employed in it, the question changes from what the people save upon a yard of calico, to what the country loses by towns not being built, by railroads not being made, and by improvements not taking place that always follow manufactures. It may be true, that where the greatest possible reward for labour is the only object sought for or attainable, that a people should find out, and engage in what pays them best: but where the congregation of a hundred people in one place raises the value of property there ten thousand fold—and such has often been the case in the States—and every farmer adjacent not only gains a market by them, but has his roads improved, his lands increased in value, double, and triple, and ten times; and has a thousand conveniences and benefits supplied him by them, that he never otherwise could have had—then the question arises with him, Which benefited him most?—the hundred people's manufacturing, and spreading the profits of their labour around them, or the buying a few yards of cloth a few shillings cheaper, and keeping the hundred people away? For every penny that the whole people of the United States have lost, by buying their own goods, they have made pounds by making them. And the profits of a mechanic's own labour sink into utter insignificance, in comparison to the wealth he often acquires by a single lot of land, upon which he settles down with others, and which makes him rich by also enriching all around him. To measure, indeed, the advantages that manufactures have given to America, by the mere profits of the actual labour employed in them, would be but like valuing an oak at the price of one of its acorns. Men may compute the probable profits of labour employed in manufacturing, by computing the cost of raw material with the expense of manufacturing it, and what it sold for. But the enormous wealth that has accrued to America,—by the increase of population incident to manufacturing, by the development of its resources, and the gigantic improvements that have followed it—would be utterly out of the reach of all human industry to compute.
But in striking out the system England did for her colonies, she should, at least have considered whether the benefits she intended to confer would be really used as benefits; whether the system of protection to colonial produce was not, in fact, something like that of indulgent parents giving to their sons pocket-money in addition to sufficient salaries—which same pocket-money does not generally add to the morals or property of the recipients. And, in truth, this was in effect the character of England's colonial protective system. But it went a little farther than the wisdom displayed by anxious parents; for, with the gifts, it took good care to furnish temptations to spend them—a piece of amiable generosity that we would acquit even all indulgent mothers of. However, this was—whatever England meant, or expected, to the contrary—practically the effect of the system. When money was sent out to buy produce or timber, it was always sure to be accompanied by a proportionate stock of broad cloths and silks, challis and shawls. Those who could have done very well with Canadian gray, were induced to buy broad cloths, and often found but these in the market; for England bought the country's crop, and England's merchants knew full well what the farmers could afford to pay for. Women wore silk dresses and satin bonnets, who might have looked charming enough, before their friends at meeting, in Hoyle's prints, or before all reasonable beaus at home, in good, honest, home-made flannel. Brandy and water, too, was too often substituted for wholesome cider, and fashionable tailors for industrious women. The sliding-scale of expenditure always went up and down to suit the times. A good year was marked by an increase of finery and extravagance; a bad one by debts and law-suits, depressions and complaints—the country gaining nothing, from year to year, for its labour or its resources. And what is now the consequence? The system which occasioned the evil is now done away, but the evil and its results remain. The farmer, unknowing the cause at first of the declension in his income, went into debt, thinking, as had often been the case before, that a good year would follow a bad one; and that he would be able to retrieve by it. But the next year came, and it was worse than the former. He could not pay his debts, and he was obliged to mortgage his property, or sell his stock, to do so. He could no longer get credit from the shopkeeper, and he was unable to purchase with cash the quantity or the quality of goods he bought before. The shopkeeper, in his turn depending upon the custom of the farmer for the sale of his goods, and depending upon receiving his accounts from him to meet his own, found both fail him together; was obliged to curtail his business to a miserable remnant; or to shut up his shop, or to wait for the sheriff to do it for him. Hence the altered appearance of every part of Canada, both town and country. Hence the whole streets in Montreal with hardly a single shop open. Hence those sorry emblems of poverty and retrogression—empty houses with broken windows, and streets without people, which may be seen in almost every village in the provinces.
Now, for the system which has produced this state of things, who is to blame? Clearly and unmistakeably, England. If the colonies, as is now palpable to all America, have worked but with one arm towards prosperity, while the States have worked with two, it was England's manufacturing interests that tied the colonies' arm. The colonies were, in this respect, wholly in the hands of England. She not only established a system for them, by which the proceeds of every acre of land they cleared, and every tree they hewed, went to give work to her poor, and wealth to her rich, but she reserved the right of thinking for them as well. Without her, they must have naturally adopted the course taken by the rest of America. She legislated for them; they believed her wise, and followed her dictates without thought or apprehension. They are injured; and she is to blame.
But when Lord Chatham laid the foundation of the system by which the colonies have been, in effect, prevented manufacturing for themselves, he established mutuality of interests between them and the mother country. If he would have England's poor employed, and England's capitalists enriched by making goods for the colonies, he would have the colonies profit equally by protection in the English markets. The partnership, for such it really was, gave to each country its own particular share of benefits; and the system was such, too, that the more the profits of the one rose, though by its own individual efforts, the more it was able to benefit the other. For the more people engaged in Canadian farming, the more land that became cleared, and the more timber that was got out, the more English manufactures were consumed. But we have shown, by comparison, with the States, the disastrous effect of this system upon the prosperity of the colonies. We have shown, too, from its own character, that it never was, and never could have been, of any substantial benefit to them; that it made them extravagant, without leaving them capital; that it made them to all intents and purposes poorer, whilst it was expected to make them richer. And who was this system expressly and avowedly intended to benefit? Who were, in all seasons, and at all times, whether good or bad for the colonies, the only benefiters by it? It was the manufacturers of England. For if the colonies could buy but prints and cottons, they bought of these all they could pay for, and these manufacturers had all the profit. If they could buy broad cloths and silks, they purchased as much as their crops were worth, and often were induced to draw upon the future, English manufacturers and merchants getting all the benefit. But after these manufacturers had thus bled the colonies of all their vitality, in the shape of capital, for upwards of half a century—after the colonies' right arm had been tied up so long, for their express benefit, that it became impotent from want of exercise, these same manufacturers turned round and told their colonial partners—"We have now made all we can out of you or, if we have not, we think we can make a little more by free trade than we can by keeping our honest engagements with you. We are sorry you have acquired a lamer arm in our service. It is a pity. It can't be helped now. Good-bye." Yes, it was these manufacturers, who so long bled the colonies, that turned round to strike them in the end the blow that should finish them. It was their selfish agitation for years; it was their constant sounding into the ears of England one unvarying theme; it was their disregard of all interests, of all duties, and of all obligations to all men, in one deadly, unwavering struggle for the attainment of one object, and for one class, that cost the colonies their solemnly pledged protection—that cost them, we may add, their respect for the honour and the justice of England.
But we have now, after a digression which has been somewhat of the longest, come to the point of our argument, and that is this:—Upon a question so vitally affecting the interests of the colonies, upon a question that might cost them the institutions of England; upon a question where all truth and justice demanded that they should have been in a situation to protect themselves against manufacturing selfishness, does it not occur to the reader, that the colonies should have had a representation where it was decided? The measures that exasperated the old colonies to rebellion, shrink into utter insignificance, as far as injury or effect are concerned, in comparison to this one. Here are three millions of people, the main profits of whose labour for upwards of fifty years have gone to enrich a certain class of people in England. And here they are now, sacrificed to the selfishness of that very class, without having the opportunity of saying a word for themselves. If the legislation of England, for ten years past, has been pregnant with vaster consequences to her than the legislation of a century, it has hardly affected her so deeply as it has affected her North American colonies. If her landowners see ruin, in it—if her agricultural labourers see in it the means of depriving them of bread—still her other classes see, or think they see, advantages in it to counteract the evils, and prosperity to balance the injury. But in England all have been heard—all have contended, where giant intellect sways as well as mighty interests; where mind has its influences as well as matter. But in the colonies, where every interest and every class saw, in imperial legislation, injustice and ruin, neither their intellect nor their interests availed them anything. They were literally placed in the legislative boat of England: they found that they must either sink or float in it; that legislation happened to sink them; and though they saw themselves going down, and might, with their friends, have pulled themselves ashore, they were not allowed an oar to do so—they were not in a situation to make an effort to save themselves.
In the face of these deeply important considerations, can it be fairly said that the colonies have no interest in imperial legislation, and that there are no interests for imperial legislation to guard in the colonies? Palpably to all the world, the States have been making gigantic strides in prosperity, while the colonies have been standing still. Yet in the British House of Commons, whenever the question of the colonies has been mooted, has it not been with the view to consider how the colonies could be made to consume more English manufactures, rather than how they should prosper by manufactures of their own? Who has urged the question there, that instead of England's perpetually sending out goods, and draining the colonies of all the fruits of their labour, England should send out people to make goods, who in making them would make the country? Yet this is the root of the depression and the poverty of the Canadas. And who with this vast country's resources before him—with its ways and means of making millions independent, and with the vast facilities for the investment of capital it afforded and affords—can say that no interests could spring up in it of consequence to the legislation of England?
It is true that the colonies have had their own parliaments; and it has been imagined that these parliaments encompassed the whole of their interests. But when did the colonial legislatures decide that the colonies should not make a hob-nail for themselves? Yet the want of making the hob-nails has been the ruin of their prosperity. It is estimated that the colonies lose upwards of two hundred thousand pounds a year by the loss of protection: it is but too well known how deeply this loss has affected them. Yet whose legislation and policy educated them literally to feel this loss? whose interests were consulted in giving the protection, and taking it away again, that has been the cause of all the evil? It was England's. The colonies have been allowed by their legislatures to shake the leaves of their interests; imperial legislation has always assailed the trunk. But this is not all; colonial interests have been, unheard and unheeded, sacrificed to other interests in England. The destiny of the colonies, without question and without redress, has been placed in the hands of men who have made a convenience of their interests, and an argument of their misfortunes, brought about by these men themselves. Nor could, nor ever can, whatever may be imagined to the contrary, the connexion of the colonies be preserved with England, without her policy and her legislation vitally affecting them. For they must be either English or American; they must be, as they ever have been, if the connexion is maintained, made subservient to the interests of England, or their interests must be identified with hers: and if their interests are identical, their legislation should be identical also. It is impossible that the flag of England can long wave over what is all American. If the colonies are to be wholly independent in their interests of England, it is in the very nature of things, that their measures and their policy may become, not only what England might not like, but what might be an actual injury to her; and what might owe its very success, like much of the policy of America, to its being detrimental to her interests. And it is as unnatural as it is absurd to suppose, that England would or could, for any length of time, extend her protection over a people whose interests and whose policy might be pulling against her own, whose success might be marked by her injury, and whose prosperity might increase at the expense of her adversity.
But, apart from the abstract right of the colonies being represented where they are, and, we insist, must continue to be, so deeply concerned, it is time the present humiliating system of understanding their views or feelings in the English parliament should come to an end. Upon a vitally important question to them—upon one of these things that only come up once in a century, or in a people's whole history—take the following, as an example of the way in which their opinions and their interests were regarded:—
"Dishonesty of Public Men. (From the London Post.)—Mr Labouchere wished to show that Canada chafed under the restrictions of the Navigation Laws, and that they would be satisfied with 'the new commercial principle,' provided the Navigation Laws were repealed. For this purpose the minister took a course which he would no more have thought of taking in the affairs of private life, than he would have thought of taking purses on the highway. The minister quoted the statement of three respectable gentlemen at Montreal, which coincided with his views; and he did not let fall one word from which the house could have inferred that the opinions thus alluded to, were not the general mercantile opinions of Montreal. Now, the minister could scarcely be ignorant that this question about free trade, and the alteration of the Navigation Laws, has been the subject of very earnest discussion in Montreal; and he cannot but have known that Mr Young and Mr Holmes, however respectable in their position, and influential in their business, are the leaders of a small minority of the body to which they belong. Mr Labouchere read a statement to the House of Commons, which he had the confidence to call 'a proof irrefragable' of the mercantile public opinion of Montreal and Upper Canada, when the truth is—as he could not but have known—that the opinions of that statement are the opinions of a few persons utterly opposed to the general opinion of the mercantile body. There was held in Montreal, on the 17th of last month, the largest public in-door meeting that ever assembled in that city, at which a string of resolutions was passed by acclamation, in favour of the policy of protection, and against the 'new commercial principle' of the government. That meeting was addressed both by Mr Young and Mr Holmes. They endeavoured to support the views held by Mr Labouchere, but against the overwhelming sense of the meeting, from which they retired in complete discomfiture. We are bound to suppose that the minister who is head of the British Board of Trade cannot but be aware of this; and yet he not only conceals it altogether from the House of Commons, but he reads to that house the statement of Mr Young and Mr Holmes, as 'proof irrefragable' of the opinion of the colony of Canada, in favour of the ministerial policy. The President of the Board of Trade would as soon cut off his right hand as do anything of the kind in the ordinary concerns of life; and yet so warped is he by party politics—so desirous of obtaining a triumph for the political bigotry which possessed him—that he represents the mercantile interest of Montreal and Upper Canada as if it were decidedly on his side, when, if he had told the whole story fairly and honestly, he would have been obliged to admit that exactly the contrary was the fact."
Now, if it be necessary for England to understand colonial feelings, and opinions in order to legislate for them, is this a fair or honourable way of treating them? Are the interests of these great provinces to be thus made subservient to political trickery? Is their destiny of so little importance to Great Britain, that it should be even in the very nature of things for any man, or any party, in England, to have it in his or their power thus to insult their intellect as well as to violate their interests? And is this circumstance not a counterpart of others that have from time to time occurred, when Canadian subjects have been before parliament? If we mistake not, upon another vitally important question to them—the corn laws—the petitions and the remonstrances even of their governor and their legislature were, to enable misrepresentation and untruth to have its influence in a debate, kept back and concealed. A party's interests in England were at stake; the colonies were sacrificed. Now, can it be reasonably urged, that the allowing these colonies to speak for themselves, and to be understood for themselves, in that place and before that people who literally hold their destiny in their hands, would be pregnant with more danger to England than this dishonourable system is to both her and to them? Would it not be better to have them constitutionally heard than surreptitiously represented? Is it necessary to the understanding of the wants and wishes of the colonies, and to the good government of them, that tricking and dishonesty should triumph over truth and principle, and that the legislative boons which reach them should be filtered through falsehood and deception? It will be in the recollection of all who have read the debate in the House of Lords upon the Navigation Laws, how Lord Stanley exposed these same Messrs Holmes and Young, mentioned by Mr Labouchere, but who, on this occasion, in the Lords, were joined with a Mr Knapp. It was shown by his lordship that these eminent commercial men (who seem to be the standing correspondents of the present ministry,) wrote what is called in America a bunkum letter to Earl Grey, to be used in the House of Lords, making a grand flourish of their loyalty, and a great case out in favour of the colonial secretary's side of the question. But it was unfortunately, or rather fortunately, discovered, that these eminent individuals had been, at the very same time, writing to their commercial correspondents in London to shape their business for an early annexation of the colonies to the United States! Yet it is upon such eminent testimony as this that imperial legislation for the colonies is founded. This is the way England comes to a sufficient understanding of a people's interests, to shape a policy which may change their whole political existence.
But, in addition to these reasons why the colonies themselves should be represented in England, there may be reasons why England herself might wish the same thing. May it not be possible, nay, is it not the fact, that a vast amount of trouble, vexation, and expense might be avoided by it? How many commissioners sent out to find out difficulties and to redress grievances,—how many investigations before parliamentary committees,—how many debates in parliament,—how many expenses of military operations, might have been avoided, had these colonies been in a situation from time to time to have explained their own affairs, and to have allowed their petty squabbles of race and of faction to have escaped in the safety-valves of imperial legislation? In 1827, it cost England the time and expense incident to a parliamentary report, upon the civil government of Lower Canada alone, which extends over nearly five hundred pages octavo. And this was irrespective, of course, of the questions and debates which led to it, besides all that grew out of it. Next came the debates upon the causes of the failure of the remedies proposed in the report—for the report itself turned out to be like throwing a little water on a large fire—it only served to increase the blaze. Then came Lord Gosford, with extensive powers to settle all difficulties, and, it was hoped, with a large capacity for understanding them. But he, whatever else he did, succeeded to admiration in bringing matters to a head; or, being an Irishman, perhaps he thought he would make things go by contraries—for he came out to pacify all parties, and he managed to leave them all fighting. Next came the debates upon, and the cost of, the rebellion, and then rose the bright star of Canadian hope and prosperity; for the Earl of Durham was deputed, with a large collection of wisdom, and a pretty good sprinkling of other commodity as well, to settle the whole business. But, in sooth, these Canadians must be a sad set, for he procured them responsible government, and this seems to have set them clean into the fire.
Now, although it may be true that the colonies might have had but few interests at first to engage the attention of imperial legislation, yet it would have been far better to have educated them to understand that legislation, and to have appreciated England's true greatness through her institutions—and at the same time, to have England taught, by practical association and connexion with them, their real worth—than to have had English legislation largely and perpetually wasted upon colonial broils, and the colonies as perpetually dissatisfied with English legislation. The truth is, their system of international legislation only made the two countries known to each other by means of their difficulties. The colonies were never taught to look to the proceedings of the imperial parliament, unless when there was some broil to settle, or some imperial question to be decided, that was linked with colonial ruin, and in the decision of which the colonies had the interesting part to play of looking on. Nor has England ever thought of, or regarded the colonies, except to hand them over bodily to some subordinate in the colonial office—unless when they were forced upon her attention by her pride being likely to be wounded by her losing them, or by some other equally disagreeable consideration. The legislative intercourse between them has ever been of the worst possible kind. Instead of intending to teach the people of England to respect, to rely upon, and to appreciate the real worth of the colonies, it has taught them to underrate, to distrust, and to avoid them. Instead of imperial legislation's forming the character of the people, as it has formed the character of the people of England, and giving them principles to cling to, and to hope upon, it has directly tended to concentrate their attention upon America, and to alienate their feelings from England.
But it is not alone in the passing of laws, or in the arrangements of commerce, or the harmonising and combining of interests, that the colonies would be benefited by imperial representation. They would be benefited a thousand times more by the intercourse it would occasion between the two countries. The colonies would then be taught to regard England as their home. They would read the debates of her parliament as their own debates; they would feel an interest in her greatness, in her struggles, and in her achievements, because they would participate in their accomplishment. The speeches of English statesmen—the literature of England—her institutions and her history, would then be studied, understood, and appreciated by them; and instead of the colonies belonging to the greatest empire in the world, and being the most insignificant in legislation, they would rise to the glory and dignity of that empire of which they formed a part—sharing in its intellectual greatness, its rewards, and the respect that is due to it from the world. Every person, too, who represented the colonies in England, would not simply be the representatives of their public policy, or national interests—he would also represent their vast resources, their thousand openings for the profitable investment of capital, which the people of England might benefit by as much as the colonies. The public improvements now abandoned in the colonies for want of capital to carry them on, and for want of sufficient confidence in their government on the part of capitalists, to invest their money in them, would then become, as similar improvements are in the States, a wide field for English enterprise to enrich itself in, and for English poverty to shake off its misery by. If the resources of the colonies—if their means of making rich, and being enriched, were understood and taken advantage of—if international legislation, common interests, and a common destiny, could make the colonies stand upon the same footing to England as England does to herself, God only call tell the vast amount of human comfort, independence, and happiness, that might result from the consummation.
But how can these advantages accrue to England, or to the colonies, as long as it is understood that, the moment a man plants his foot upon a colony, that moment he yields up the fee-simple of his forefathers' institutions—that moment he takes, as it were, a lease of them, conditioned to hold them by chance, and to regard them as a matter of temporary convenience and necessity. And who that has observed the tone of public feeling in England for years, or the spirit of the debates in her parliament, can deny that this is the case?—who that now lives in the colonies can deny it? And with such an understanding as this, and with all education perpetually going on in colonial legislatures, weaning the feelings and separating the interests of the colonies from the mother country, how can it be expected that that interest in England necessary to all true loyalty, and that knowledge and appreciation of her institutions necessary to all enlightened or patriotic attachment, can take root, or subsist for any length of time in the colonies? If the colonies, in truth, are to be made, or to be kept British, in anything else than in name—if even in name they can long be kept so—it must be by the infusion of the essential elements of British character and British principle into them, by means of British legislation. If they are to be part and parcel of the great oak, the grafts must be nourished by the same sap that supports the tree itself. The little boat that is launched on the great sea to shift for itself, must soon be separated from the great ship. The colonies, denied all practical participation in the true greatness of England, and having with them, by virtue of their very name as colonies, the prestige of instability and insecurity, must, in the very nature of things, be avoided by all who, though they would be glad to trust the great ship, cannot rely upon one of its frail boats. The great wings of England's legislation must be made to cover the North American colonies, and to warm them into a British existence; or they will be doomed to stray and to wander, and to be disrespected and uncared for, until inevitable destiny at last forces them under the wings of another.
Franklin, the profoundest thinker of the many great men connected with the American Revolution, thus wrote upon this subject:—
"The time has been when the colonies might have been pleased with imperial representation; they are now indifferent about it; and if it is much longer delayed, they will refuse it. But the pride of the English people cannot bear the thought of it, and therefore it will be delayed. Every man in England seems to consider himself as a piece of a sovereign over America—seems to jostle himself into the throne with the King, and talks of our subjects in the colonies. The parliament cannot well and wisely make laws suited to the colonies, without being properly and truly informed of their circumstances, ability, temper, &c. This cannot be without representatives from the colonies; yet the parliament of England is fond of exercising this power, and averse to the only means of acquiring the necessary knowledge for exercising it; which is desiring to be omnipotent without being omniscient.... There remains among the colonists so much respect, veneration, and affection for Britain, that, if cultivated prudently, with a kind usage, and tenderness for their privileges, they might be easily governed by England still for ages, without force, or any considerable expense. But I do not see there a sufficient quantity of the wisdom that is necessary to produce such a conduct, and I lament the want of it."—Letter to Lord Kames.
But it is most strange, that while England's policy, and the spirit of her legislation, have for some years past clearly indicated to the world, that she expected and seemed disposed to pave the way for a separation between herself and her colonies, her conduct in other respects should be so opposed to her views in this. For while she was foreshadowing in her legislature the independence of her colonies, she was building, at a heavy expense, garrisons in them to support her power for all time to come. Within the ten years last past, garrison quarters, upon a large scale, have been built at Toronto; and large sums have been laid out upon every fort and place of defence in the colonies. Surely this must have been done with some other view than making safe and convenient places for the stars and stripes to wave on in a few years! Yet when we come to look back upon England's legislation for the same period, and upon the spirit evoked by the debates in her parliament, it would really seem, if she had any rational design in these expenditures at all, that she must have intended them for the express benefit of her once rebellious son Jonathan. England, by these defences, would seem to say to the colonists—"Look there, my lads, and see the emblems of your protection, and of British rule in America for ever." By her legislation and free trade policy, she has unequivocally told them, "that she must buy her bread where she pleases; and they may find a government where they please." With one hand she has taken her colonies by the shoulder, and told them they must behave themselves: with the other, she has shaken hands with them, and told them they may kick up their heels as they please for all she cares.
But there is a question, upon the satisfactory answering of which rests the whole matter of whether the colonies can, or cannot, continue connected with Great Britain. And that question is, can they prosper in proportion to their abilities to prosper, by that connexion?
We have already partially answered it by showing the benefit that would inevitably accrue to the colonies from their being represented in the imperial parliament—by their whole property and worth being, by this means, placed in the market of the world side by side with the property and worth of England herself; and by England's capital partially, if not to all intents and purposes, flowing into the colonies upon the same footing that it flows through England—i.e., upon the principle of advantageous investment. But we shall prove that they can and should prosper, to the fullest extent of their capabilities, in connexion with Britain, in another way.
It is admitted, on all hands, that were their connexion with England broken off, and were the colonies to become, as it is certain they would, several States of the American Union, they would prosper, in proportion to their capabilities, equally with any of the northern states having no greater advantages in soil or resources. It is thought, and we believe with truth, that the public improvements which now lie dormant for want of capital to carry them on, or for want of sufficient knowledge of, or confidence in, the colonies from without, to induce the necessary capital to be advanced for them, would be completed, if the colonies were joined to the States. It is thought, too, and with equal propriety, that Lower Canada, whose population is singularly well fitted to prosper and be benefited by manufactures, would, were it a State, be directed in that course most conducive to its prosperity. And it is thought—likewise correctly—that the great resources of Upper Canada, were that province too a State, would become greatly more available than they now are: its population would increase; its cities and towns enlarge; and every man having an acre of land, or a lot in a town in it, would become much better off than he is at present. This, if the States remain united as they have been, and prosper as they have done, might be all strictly true. But why is it that the colonies believe this, and that the States are also of the same opinion? It is because the colonies know what the Americans are, and the Americans know what the colonies are capable of. They understand each other, and they know how they could work together for good.
But what means would the Americans employ to develop the undeveloped resources of the colonies, and to secure wealth to themselves, while they brought prosperity to them? They would simply employ their capital in them; and they know that it could, and they would see that it should, be so employed as to secure these results.
But let us now inquire,—Is it impossible to employ the capital of England in these colonies, so as to effect the same thing? If American enterprise and skill could cause wealth to spring up in Lower Canada, and could enrich itself by doing so, is it impossible for English enterprise and skill to do likewise? If American capitalists could, beyond any manner of question, accumulate wealth for themselves, and vastly benefit the Canadas, by constructing railroads through them, or rather by continuing their own, is it out of the power of English capitalists to be enriched by the same process? If the Canadas, as we have said, believe the States can infuse prosperity into them, because they see the States understand them, and know what they are capable of, is it impossible for England to understand them also, and to take advantage of their worth? But then, it will be answered, there is the difficulty of colonial government. Who will invest his capital for a period of fifteen or twenty years, where he may be paid off by a revolution—when, as Moore said of the old colonies—
"England's debtors might be changed to England's foes?"
But suppose the stability of England's own government were imparted to the colonies, suppose the permanency and the interests of England became effectually and for ever identified with them—what then? That there is no reason under heaven left why they should not prosper, to the fullest extent of their ability to prosper, and that England might not be benefited by them in proportion.
But even this is but a partial view of the case; for the Americans would actually borrow the money in England that they would invest in the colonies, and yet enrich themselves by doing so. The colonies, in truth—joined to the States—would prosper by diluted benefits, the Americans reaping all the advantages of the dilution. Connected with Great Britain—did Britain confide in them as she might, and understand them as she should, and were they in a situation to inspire that confidence, and to occasion that understanding—they must inevitably reap, in many respects, double the benefits they would enjoy with the States.
But the States would benefit the colonies all they could. Will England?
The scheme of imperial representation for the North American colonies may be, and doubtless is, open to many objections; and many difficulties would have to be got over before it could be accomplished. The first, if not the only great difficulty, is—Would the colonies bear the burden of taxation, and the responsibility of being part and parcel of the British empire, for better or for worse, for all time to come? And could they, if they would?
In considering these questions, it is but fair to view them, not only in regard to the responsibilities the system we propose would entail, but also in regard to the responsibilities they would and must incur by any other system they might adopt. For this may be taken for granted—they must soon become all American, or all English. They must enjoy English credit and English permanency, or they must have some other. A great country, with an industrious, enterprising people, cannot long remain without credit, without prosperity, and without either the use or the hope of capital. The Canadas are now in this situation.
If, then, the colonies should become independent, and it were possible for them to continue so, they would have to pay for their own protection. And if they became a republic, they would have to take their stand with the other powers of the world, and bear the expense of doing so. If, on the other hand, they were taken into the American Union, they would have to contribute, in addition to the cost of their own local or state governments, to the support of the general government of the whole Union; they would have, too, to contribute to the forming a navy for the States, such as England has now got; and they would be obliged to contribute, too, for the construction of military defences for America, which England is pretty well supplied with. They would have, in short, to expend upon America a great deal of what England, in three or four centuries, has been expending upon herself as a nation.
It may also be fairly presumed, that, with interests every day becoming more independent of England; with a system of government which leaves England nothing in America but a name—or, as Lord Elgin says, a "dignified neutrality," and which really means a dignified nothingness—with a system of government such as this, every sensible man must foresee that England will soon get tired of paying largely for the support of her dignified nothingness in America; that she will—as indeed she has already done—inquire what right or occasion she has for protecting colonies from their enemies from without, or, what is much more serious to her, from themselves within, when she has ceased to have a single interest in commerce with them; and when she must see—if the present system be kept up much longer—that every day must separate her still more widely from them in feeling, and in all the essential principles that bind a people to each other, or a colony to a mother country?
In view, therefore, of all these considerations, taken separately or together, it is but reasonable to suppose that the colonies may soon be called upon to pay for their own protection from their enemies from without, or for their own squabbles within, if they must indulge in such expensive amusements. And the question then arises—Would their being practically identified with the British empire, participating in all its greatness, and enjoying the prestige of its stability and its credit, entail upon them greater cost or responsibility, than they would have to incur to maintain a puny, helpless independence, or in becoming states of the American Union?
It is out of our power to make the calculation, as it is impossible for us to know upon what terms England would agree to the colonies participating in her government as we propose. It is likewise impossible for us to tell how much might be saved by removing the tea-pots, so pregnant with tempests, in the shape of colonial legislatures; in removing governors to preserve "dignified neutrality;" and courts to keep up the shadow of England's government in America, the substance having grown "beautifully less" of late years. But after much thought and investigation, by both ourselves and others better accustomed to such matters than we are, we have come to the conclusion—that imperial representation might cost the colonies nothing more, if as much, as any other change they would have to make; that England would gain immensely by the change; and that the proceeds of the vast tracts of country lying north and north-west of the Canadas, their fisheries, their mineral resources, and their other unused and unappropriated wealth in timber and other things, might be converted into a sinking fund by the united governments of England and her colonies, that, in its effects, might astonish both England and the world. We can but throw out the suggestion; it is for others to consider it.
But if the connexion of the colonies with Great Britain is to be made a mere matter of time and convenience, as to when it shall end, or how, then it is of little use in hoping much, or thinking deeply, upon what may be pregnant with such vast consequences to England's race in America, and even America's own race in it. A time, it would seem, which has taught Britons to know what their institutions are worth, must cost them in America these institutions. A time, which has exhibited, during the principal settlement of the Canadas, the fall alike of the fabric of the political enthusiast and the fortress of the despot in Europe, must cost, it seems, the colonies that government which bore freedom aloft through the wild storm. England has stood upon a rock, and, after pointing out to her colonies the wreck of human institutions, she is about to push them off to share the fate she has taught them so much to dread. If England has the heart to do it, it must be done. Three millions of people will cease to say "God save the Queen!" The sun will set upon her empire. Full many an honest tear will be shed at hearing that it must. Full many a heart will be torn from what it would but too gladly die for. But the days of chivalry are gone; the days of memory are fled. The selfish, mercenary nineteenth century will be marked with the loss of the best jewel in Britain's crown.
Hamilton, Canada West,
August 1849.
[THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH, OR THE GLORY OF MOTION.]
Some twenty or more years before I matriculated at Oxford, Mr Palmer, M.P. for Bath, had accomplished two things, very hard to do on our little planet, the Earth, however cheap they may happen to be held by the eccentric people in comets: he had invented mail-coaches, and he had married the daughter[17] of a duke. He was, therefore, just twice as great a man as Galileo, who certainly invented (or discovered) the satellites of Jupiter, those very next things extant to mail-coaches in the two capital points of speed and keeping time, but who did not marry the daughter of a duke.
These mail-coaches, as organised by Mr Palmer, are entitled to a circumstantial notice from myself—having had so large a share in developing the anarchies of my subsequent dreams, an agency which they accomplished, first, through velocity, at that time unprecedented; they first revealed the glory of motion: suggesting, at the same time, an under-sense, not unpleasurable, of possible though indefinite danger; secondly, through grand effects for the eye between lamp-light and the darkness upon solitary roads; thirdly, through animal beauty and power so often displayed in the class of horses selected for this mail service; fourthly, through the conscious presence of a central intellect, that, in the midst of vast distances,[18] of storms, of darkness, of night, overruled all obstacles into one steady co-operation in a national result. To my own feeling, this Post-office service recalled some mighty orchestra, where a thousand instruments, all disregarding each other, and so far in danger of discord, yet all obedient as slaves to the supreme baton of some great leader, terminate in a perfection of harmony like that of heart, veins, and arteries, in a healthy animal organisation. But, finally, that particular element in this whole combination which most impressed myself, and through which it is that to this hour Mr Palmer's mail-coach system tyrannises by terror and terrific beauty over my dreams, lay in the awful political mission which at that time it fulfilled. The mail-coaches it was that distributed over the face of the land, like the opening of apocalyptic vials, the heart-shaking news of Trafalgar, of Salamanca, of Vittoria, of Waterloo. These were the harvests that, in the grandeur of their reaping, redeemed the tears and blood in which they had been sown. Neither was the meanest peasant so much below the grandeur and the sorrow of the times as to confound these battles, which were gradually moulding the destinies of Christendom, with the vulgar conflicts of ordinary warfare, which are oftentimes but gladiatorial trials of national prowess. The victories of England in this stupendous contest rose of themselves as natural Te Deums to heaven; and it was felt by the thoughtful that such victories, at such a crisis of general prostration, were not more beneficial to ourselves than finally to France, and to the nations of western and central Europe, through whose pusillanimity it was that the French domination had prospered.
The mail-coach, as the national organ for publishing these mighty events, became itself a spiritualised and glorified object to an impassioned heart; and naturally, in the Oxford of that day, all hearts were awakened. There were, perhaps, of us gownsmen, two thousand resident[19] in Oxford, and dispersed through five-and-twenty colleges. In some of these the custom permitted the student to keep what are called "short terms;" that is, the four terms of Michaelmas, Lent, Easter, and Act, were kept severally by a residence, in the aggregate, of ninety-one days, or thirteen weeks. Under this interrupted residence, accordingly, it was possible that a student might have a reason for going down to his home four times in the year. This made eight journeys to and fro. And as these homes lay dispersed through all the shires of the island, and most of us disdained all coaches except his majesty's mail, no city out of London could pretend to so extensive a connexion with Mr Palmer's establishment as Oxford. Naturally, therefore, it became a point of some interest with us, whose journeys revolved every six weeks on an average, to look a little into the executive details of the system. With some of these Mr Palmer had no concern; they rested upon bye-laws not unreasonable, enacted by posting-houses for their own benefit, and upon others equally stern, enacted by the inside passengers for the illustration of their own exclusiveness. These last were of a nature to rouse our scorn, from which the transition was not very long to mutiny. Up to this time, it had been the fixed assumption of the four inside people, (as an old tradition of all public carriages from the reign of Charles II.,) that they, the illustrious quaternion, constituted a porcelain variety of the human race, whose dignity would have been compromised by exchanging one word of civility with the three miserable delf ware outsides. Even to have kicked an outsider might have been held to attaint the foot concerned in that operation; so that, perhaps, it would have required an act of parliament to restore its purity of blood. What words, then, could express the horror, and the sense of treason, in that case, which had happened, where all three outsides, the trinity of Pariahs, made a vain attempt to sit down at the same breakfast-table or dinner-table with the consecrated four? I myself witnessed such an attempt; and on that occasion a benevolent old gentleman endeavoured to soothe his three holy associates, by suggesting that, if the outsides were indicted for this criminal attempt at the next assizes, the court would regard it as a case of lunacy (or delirium tremens) rather than of treason. England owes much of her grandeur to the depth of the aristocratic element in her social composition. I am not the man to laugh at it. But sometimes it expressed itself in extravagant shapes. The course taken with the infatuated outsiders, in the particular attempt which I have noticed, was, that the waiter, beckoning them away from the privileged salle-à-manger, sang out, "This way, my good men;" and then enticed them away off to the kitchen. But that plan had not always answered. Sometimes, though very rarely, cases occurred where the intruders, being stronger than usual, or more vicious than usual, resolutely refused to move, and so far carried their point, as to have a separate table arranged for themselves in a corner of the room. Yet, if an Indian screen could be found ample enough to plant them out from the very eyes of the high table, or dais, it then became possible to assume as a fiction of law—that the three delf fellows, after all, were not present. They could be ignored by the porcelain men, under the maxim, that objects not appearing, and not existing, are governed by the same logical construction.
Such now being, at that time, the usages of mail-coaches, what was to be done by us of young Oxford? We, the most aristocratic of people, who were addicted to the practice of looking down superciliously even upon the insides themselves as often very suspicious characters, were we voluntarily to court indignities? If our dress and bearing sheltered us, generally, from the suspicion of being "raff," (the name at that period for "snobs,"[20]) we really were such constructively, by the place we assumed. If we did not submit to the deep shadow of eclipse, we entered at least the skirts of its penumbra. And the analogy of theatres was urged against us, where no man can complain of the annoyances incident to the pit or gallery, having his instant remedy in paying the higher price of the boxes. But the soundness of this analogy we disputed. In the case of the theatre, it cannot be pretended that the inferior situations have any separate attractions, unless the pit suits the purpose of the dramatic reporter. But the reporter or critic is a rarity. For most people, the sole benefit is in the price. Whereas, on the contrary, the outside of the mail had its own incommunicable advantages. These we could not forego. The higher price we should willingly have paid, but that was connected with the condition of riding inside, which was insufferable. The air, the freedom of prospect, the proximity to the horses, the elevation of seat—these were what we desired; but, above all, the certain anticipation of purchasing occasional opportunities of driving.
Under coercion of this great practical difficulty, we instituted a searching inquiry into the true quality and valuation of the different apartments about the mail. We conducted this inquiry on metaphysical principles; and it was ascertained satisfactorily, that the roof of the coach, which some had affected to call the attics, and some the garrets, was really the drawing-room, and the box was the chief ottoman or sofa in that drawing-room; whilst it appeared that the inside, which had been traditionally regarded as the only room tenantable by gentlemen, was, in fact, the coal-cellar in disguise.
Great wits jump. The very same idea had not long before struck the celestial intellect of China. Amongst the presents carried out by our first embassy to that country was a state-coach. It had been specially selected as a personal gift by George III.; but the exact mode of using it was a mystery to Pekin. The ambassador, indeed, (Lord Macartney) had made some dim and imperfect explanations upon the point; but as his excellency communicated these in a diplomatic whisper, at the very moment of his departure, the celestial mind was very feebly illuminated, and it became necessary to call a cabinet council on the grand state question—"Where was the emperor to sit?" The hammer-cloth happened to be unusually gorgeous; and partly on that consideration, but partly also because the box offered the most elevated seat, and undeniably went foremost, it was resolved by acclamation that the box was the imperial place, and, for the scoundrel who drove, he might sit where he could find a perch. The horses, therefore, being harnessed, under a flourish of music and a salute of guns, solemnly his imperial majesty ascended his new English throne, having the first lord of the treasury on his right hand, and the chief jester on his left. Pekin gloried in the spectacle; and in the whole flowery people, constructively present by representation, there was but one discontented person, which was the coachman. This mutinous individual, looking as blackhearted as he really was, audaciously shouted—"Where am I to sit?" But the privy council, incensed by his disloyalty, unanimously opened the door, and kicked him into the inside. He had all the inside places to himself; but such is the rapacity of ambition, that he was still dissatisfied. "I say," he cried out in an extempore petition, addressed to the emperor through a window, "how am I to catch hold of the reins?"—"Any how," was the answer; "don't trouble me, man, in my glory; through the windows, through the key-holes—how you please." Finally, this contumacious coachman lengthened the checkstrings into a sort of jury-reins, communicating with the horses; with these he drove as steadily as may be supposed. The emperor returned after the briefest of circuits: he descended in great pomp from his throne, with the severest resolution never to remount it. A public thanksgiving was ordered for his majesty's prosperous escape from the disease of a broken neck; and the state-coach was dedicated for ever as a votive offering to the God Fo, Fo—whom the learned more accurately call Fi, Fi.
A revolution of this same Chinese character did young Oxford of that era effect in the constitution of mail-coach society. It was a perfect French revolution; and we had good reason to say, Ca ira. In fact, it soon became too popular. The "public," a well known character, particularly disagreeable, though slightly respectable, and notorious for affecting the chief seats in synagogues, had at first loudly opposed this revolution; but when all opposition showed itself to be ineffectual, our disagreeable friend went into it with headlong zeal. At first it was a sort of race between us; and, as the public is usually above 30, (say generally from 30 to 50 years old,) naturally we of young Oxford, that averaged about 20, had the advantage. Then the public took to bribing, giving fees to horse-keepers, &c., who hired out their persons as warming-pans on the box-seat. That, you know, was shocking to our moral sensibilities. Come to bribery, we observed, and there is an end to all morality, Aristotle's, Cicero's, or anybody's. And, besides, of what use was it? For we bribed also. And as our bribes to those of the public being demonstrated out of Euclid to be as five shillings to sixpence, here again young Oxford had the advantage. But the contest was ruinous to the principles of the stable-establishment about the mails. The whole corporation was constantly bribed, rebribed, and often sur-rebribed; so that a horse-keeper, ostler, or helper, was held by the philosophical at that time to be the most corrupt character in the nation.
There was an impression upon the public mind, natural enough from the continually augmenting velocity of the mail, but quite erroneous, that an outside seat on this class of carriages was a post of danger. On the contrary, I maintained that, if a man had become nervous from some gipsy prediction in his childhood, allocating to a particular moon now approaching some unknown danger, and he should inquire earnestly,—"Whither can I go for shelter? Is a prison the safest retreat? Or a lunatic, hospital? Or the British Museum?" I should have replied—"Oh, no; I'll tell you what to do. Take lodgings for the next forty days on the box of his majesty's mail. Nobody can touch you there. If it is by bills at ninety days after date that you are made unhappy—if noters and protesters are the sort of wretches whose astrological shadows darken the house of life—then note you what I vehemently protest, viz., that no matter though the sheriff in every county should be running after you with his posse, touch a hair of your head he cannot whilst you keep house, and have your legal domicile, on the box of the mail. It's felony to stop the mail; even the sheriff cannot do that. And an extra (no great matter if it grazes the sheriff) touch of the whip to the leaders at any time guarantees your safety." In fact, a bed-room in a quiet house seems a safe enough retreat; yet it is liable to its own notorious nuisances, to robbers by night, to rats, to fire. But the mail laughs at these terrors. To robbers, the answer is packed up and ready for delivery in the barrel of the guard's blunderbuss. Rats again! there are none about mail-coaches, any more than snakes in Von Troil's Iceland; except, indeed, now and then a parliamentary rat, who always hides his shame in the "coal-cellar." And, as to fire, I never knew but one in a mail-coach, which was in the Exeter mail, and caused by an obstinate sailor bound to Devonport. Jack, making light of the law and the lawgiver that had set their faces against his offence, insisted on taking up a forbidden seat in the rear of the roof, from which he could exchange his own yarns with those of the guard. No greater offence was then known to mail-coaches; it was treason, it was læsa majestas, it was by tendency arson; and the ashes of Jack's pipe, falling amongst the straw of the hinder boot, containing the mail-bags, raised a flame which (aided by the wind of our motion) threatened a revolution in the republic of letters. But even this left the sanctity of the box unviolated. In dignified repose, the coachman and myself sat on, resting with benign composure upon our knowledge—that the fire would have to burn its way through four inside passengers before it could reach ourselves. With a quotation rather too trite, I remarked to the coachman,—
——"Jam proximus ardet
Ucalegon."
But, recollecting that the Virgilian part of his education might have been neglected, I interpreted so far as to say, that perhaps at that moment the flames were catching hold of our worthy brother and next-door neighbour Ucalegon. The coachman said nothing, but by his faint sceptical smile he seemed to be thinking that he knew better; for that in fact, Ucalegon, as it happened, was not in the way-bill.
No dignity is perfect which does not at some point ally itself with the indeterminate and mysterious. The connexion of the mail with the state and the executive government—a connexion obvious, but yet not strictly defined—gave to the whole mail establishment a grandeur and an official authority which did us service on the roads, and invested us with seasonable terrors. But perhaps these terrors were not the less impressive, because their exact legal limits were imperfectly ascertained. Look at those turnpike gates; with what deferential hurry, with what an obedient start, they fly open at our approach! Look at that long line of carts and carters ahead, audaciously usurping the very crest of the road: ah! traitors, they do not hear us as yet, but as soon as the dreadful blast of our horn reaches them with the proclamation of our approach, see with what frenzy of trepidation they fly to their horses' heads, and deprecate our wrath by the precipitation of their crane-neck quarterings. Treason they feel to be their crime; each individual carter feels himself under the ban of confiscation and attainder: his blood is attainted through six generations, and nothing is wanting but the heads-man and his axe, the block and the sawdust, to close up the vista of his horrors. What! shall it be within benefit of clergy, to delay the king's message on the highroad?—to interrupt the great respirations, ebb or flood, of the national intercourse—to endanger the safety of tidings running day and night between all nations and languages? Or can it be fancied, amongst the weakest of men, that the bodies of the criminals will be given up to their widows for Christian burial? Now, the doubts which were raised as to our powers did more to wrap them in terror, by wrapping them in uncertainty; than could have been effected by the sharpest definitions of the law from the Quarter Sessions. We, on our parts, (we, the collective mail, I mean,) did our utmost to exalt the idea of our privileges by the insolence with which we wielded them. Whether this insolence rested upon law that gave it a sanction, or upon conscious power, haughtily dispensing with that sanction, equally it spoke from a potential station; and the agent in each particular insolence of the moment, was viewed reverentially, as one having authority.
Sometimes after breakfast his majesty's mail would become frisky; and in its difficult wheelings amongst the intricacies of early markets, it would upset an apple-cart, a cart loaded with eggs, &c. Huge was the affliction and dismay, awful was the smash, though, after all, I believe the damage might be levied upon the hundred. I, as far as was possible, endeavoured in such a case to represent the conscience and moral sensibilities of the mail; and, when wildernesses of eggs were lying poached under our horses' hoofs, then would I stretch forth my hands in sorrow, saying (in words too celebrated in those days from the false[21] echoes of Marengo)—"Ah! wherefore have we not time to weep over you?" which was quite impossible, for in fact we had not even time to laugh over them. Tied to post-office time, with an allowance in some cases of fifty minutes for eleven miles, could the royal mail pretend to undertake the offices of sympathy and condolence? Could it be expected to provide tears for the accidents of the road? If even it seemed to trample on humanity, it did so, I contended, in discharge of its own more peremptory duties.
Upholding the morality of the mail, à fortiori I upheld its rights, I stretched to the uttermost its privilege of imperial precedency, and astonished weak minds by the feudal powers which I hinted to be lurking constructively in the charters of this proud establishment. Once I remember being on the box of the Holyhead mail, between Shrewsbury and Oswestry, when a tawdry thing from Birmingham, some Tallyho or Highflier, all flaunting with green and gold, came up alongside of us. What a contrast to our royal simplicity of form and colour is this plebeian wretch! The single ornament on our dark ground of chocolate colour was the mighty shield of the imperial arms, but emblazoned in proportions as modest as a signet-ring bears to a seal of office. Even this was displayed only on a single pannel, whispering, rather than proclaiming, our relations to the state; whilst the beast from Birmingham had as much writing and painting on its sprawling flanks as would have puzzled a decipherer from the tombs of Luxor. For some time this Birmingham machine ran along by our side,—a piece of familiarity that seemed to us sufficiently jacobinical. But all at once a movement of the horses announced a desperate intention of leaving us behind. "Do you see that?" I said to the coachman. "I see," was his short answer. He was awake, yet he waited longer than seemed prudent; for the horses of our audacious opponent had a disagreeable air of freshness and power. But his motive was loyal; his wish was that the Birmingham conceit should be full-blown before he froze it. When that seemed ripe, he unloosed, or, to speak by a stronger image, he sprang his known resources, he slipped our royal horses like cheetahs, or hunting leopards after the affrighted game. How they could retain such a reserve of fiery power after the work they had accomplished, seemed hard to explain. But on our side, besides the physical superiority, was a tower of strength, namely, the king's name, "which they upon the adverse faction wanted." Passing them without an effort, as it seemed, we threw them into the rear with so lengthening an interval between us, as proved in itself the bitterest mockery of their presumption; whilst our guard blew back a shattering blast of triumph, that was really too painfully full of derision.
I mention this little incident for its connexion with what followed. A Welshman, sitting behind me, asked if I had not felt my heart burn within me during the continuance of the race? I said—No; because we were not racing with a mail, so that no glory could be gained. In fact, it was sufficiently mortifying that such a Birmingham thing should dare to challenge us. The Welshman replied, that he didn't see that; for that a cat might look at a king, and a Brummagem coach might lawfully race the Holyhead mail. "Race us perhaps," I replied, "though even that has an air of sedition, but not beat us. This would have been treason; and for its own sake I am glad that the Tallyho was disappointed." So dissatisfied did the Welshman seem with this opinion, that at last I was obliged to tell him a very fine story from one of our elder dramatists, viz.—that once, in some Oriental region, when the prince of all the land, with his splendid court, were flying their falcons, a hawk suddenly flew at a majestic eagle; and in defiance of the eagle's prodigious advantages, in sight also of all the astonished field-sportsmen, spectators, and followers, killed him on the spot. The prince was struck with amazement at the unequal contest, and with burning admiration for its unparalleled result. He commanded that the hawk should be brought before him; caressed the bird with enthusiasm, and ordered that, for the commemoration of his matchless courage, a crown of gold should be solemnly placed on the hawk's head; but then that, immediately after this coronation, the bird should be led off to execution, as the most valiant indeed of traitors, but not the less a traitor that had dared to rise in rebellion against his liege lord the eagle. "Now," said I to the Welshman, "how painful it would have been to you and me as men of refined feelings, that this poor brute, the Tallyho, in the impossible case of a victory over us, should have been crowned with jewellery, gold, with Birmingham ware, or paste diamonds, and then led off to instant execution." The Welshman doubted if that could be warranted by law. And when I hinted at the 10th of Edward III. chap. 15, for regulating the precedency of coaches, as being probably the statute relied on for the capital punishment of such offences, he replied drily—That if the attempt to pass a mail was really treasonable, it was a pity that the Tallyho appeared to have so imperfect an acquaintance with law.
These were among the gaieties of my earliest and boyish acquaintance with mails. But alike the gayest and the most terrific of my experiences rose again after years of slumber, armed with preternatural power to shake my dreaming sensibilities; sometimes, as in the slight case of Miss Fanny on the Bath road, (which I will immediately mention,) through some casual or capricious association with images originally gay, yet opening at some stage of evolution into sudden capacities of horror; sometimes through the more natural and fixed alliances with the sense of power so various lodged in the mail system.
The modern modes of travelling cannot compare with the mail-coach system in grandeur and power. They boast of more velocity, but not however as a consciousness, but as a fact of our lifeless knowledge, resting upon alien evidence, as, for instance, because somebody says that we have gone fifty miles in the hour, or upon the evidence of a result, as that actually we find ourselves in York four hours after leaving London. Apart from such an assertion, or such a result, I am little aware of the pace. But, seated on the old mail-coach, we needed no evidence out of ourselves to indicate the velocity. On this system the word was—Non magna loquimur, as upon railways, but magna vivimus. The vital experience of the glad animal sensibilities made doubts impossible on the question of our speed; we heard our speed, we saw it, we felt it as a thrilling; and this speed was not the product of blind insensate agencies, that had no sympathy to give, but was incarnated in the fiery eyeballs of an animal, in his dilated nostril, spasmodic muscles, and echoing hoofs. This speed was incarnated in the visible contagion amongst brutes of some impulse, that, radiating into their natures, had yet its centre and beginning in man. The sensibility of the horse uttering itself in the maniac light of his eye, might be the last vibration in such a movement; the glory of Salamanca might be the first—but the intervening link that connected them, that spread the earthquake of the battle into the eyeball of the horse, was the heart of man—kindling in the rapture of the fiery strife, and then propagating its own tumults by motions and gestures to the sympathies, more or less dim, in his servant the horse.
But now, on the new system of travelling, iron tubes and boilers have disconnected man's heart from the ministers of his locomotion. Nile nor Trafalgar has power any more to raise an extra bubble in a steam-kettle. The galvanic cycle is broken up for ever; man's imperial nature no longer sends itself forward through the electric sensibility of the horse; the inter-agencies are gone in the mode of communication between the horse and his master, out of which grew so many aspects of sublimity under accidents of mists that hid, or sudden blazes that revealed, of mobs that agitated, or midnight solitudes that awed. Tidings, fitted to convulse all nations, must henceforwards travel by culinary process; and the trumpet that once announced from afar the laurelled mail, heart-shaking, when heard screaming on the wind, and advancing through the darkness to every village or solitary house on its route, has now given way for ever to the pot-wallopings of the boiler.
Thus have perished multiform openings for sublime effects, for interesting personal communications, for revelations of impressive faces that could not have offered themselves amongst the hurried and fluctuating groups of a railway station. The gatherings of gazers about a mail-coach had one centre, and acknowledged only one interest. But the crowds attending at a railway station have as little unity as running water, and own as many centres as there are separate carriages in the train.
How else, for example, than as a constant watcher for the dawn, and for the London mail that in summer months entered about dawn into the lawny thickets of Marlborough Forest, couldst thou, sweet Fanny of the Bath road, have become known to myself? Yet Fanny, as the loveliest young woman for face and person that perhaps in my whole life I have beheld, merited the station which even her I could not willingly have spared; yet (thirty-five years later) she holds in my dreams; and though, by an accident of fanciful caprice, she brought along with her into those dreams a troop of dreadful creatures, fabulous and not fabulous, that were more abominable to a human heart than Fanny and the dawn were delightful.
Miss Fanny of the Bath road, strictly speaking, lived at a mile's distance from that road, but came so continually to meet the mail, that I on my frequent transits rarely missed her, and naturally connected her name with the great thoroughfare where I saw her; I do not exactly know, but I believe with some burthen of commissions to be executed in Bath, her own residence being probably the centre to which these commissions gathered. The mail-coachman, who wore the royal livery, being one amongst the privileged few,[22] happened to be Fanny's grandfather. A good man he was, that loved his beautiful granddaughter; and, loving her wisely, was vigilant over her deportment in any case where young Oxford might happen to be concerned. Was I then vain enough to imagine that I myself individually could fall within the line of his terrors? Certainly not, as regarded any physical pretensions that I could plead; for Fanny (as a chance passenger from her own neighbourhood once told me) counted in her train a hundred and ninety-nine professed admirers, if not open aspirants to her favour; and probably not one of the whole brigade but excelled myself in personal advantages.
Ulysses even, with the unfair advantage of his accursed bow, could hardly have undertaken that amount of suitors. So the danger might have seemed slight—only that woman is universally aristocratic: it is amongst her nobilities of heart that she is so. Now, the aristocratic distinctions in my favour might easily with Miss Fanny have compensated my physical deficiencies. Did I then make love to Fanny? Why, yes; mais oui donc; as much love as one can make whilst the mail is changing horses, a process which ten years later did not occupy above eighty seconds; but then, viz. about Waterloo, it occupied five times eighty. Now, four hundred seconds offer a field quite ample enough for whispering into a young woman's ear a great deal of truth; and (by way of parenthesis) some trifle of falsehood. Grandpapa did right, therefore, to watch me. And yet, as happens too often to the grandpapas of earth, in a contest with the admirers of granddaughters, how vainly would he have watched me had I meditated any evil whispers to Fanny! She, it is my belief, would have protected herself against any man's evil suggestions. But he, as the result showed, could not have intercepted the opportunities for such suggestions. Yet he was still active; he was still blooming. Blooming he was as Fanny herself.
"Say, all our praises why should lords—"
No, that's not the line:
"Say, all our roses why should girls engross?"
The coachman showed rosy blossoms on his face deeper even than his granddaughter's,—his being drawn from the ale-cask, Fanny's from youth and innocence, and from the fountains of the dawn. But, in spite of his blooming face, some infirmities he had; and one particularly, (I am very sure, no more than one,) in which he too much resembled a crocodile. This lay in a monstrous inaptitude for turning round. The crocodile, I presume, owes that inaptitude to the absurd length of his back; but in our Grandpapa it arose rather from the absurd breadth of his back, combined, probably, with some growing stiffness in his legs. Now upon this crocodile infirmity of his I planted an easy opportunity for tendering my homage to Miss Fanny. In defiance of all his honourable vigilance, no sooner had he presented to us his mighty Jovian back, (what a field for displaying to mankind his royal scarlet!) whilst inspecting professionally the buckles, the straps, and the silver turrets of his harness, than I raised Miss Fanny's hand to my lips, and, by the mixed tenderness and respectfulness of my manner, caused her easily to understand how happy it would have made me to rank upon her list as No. 10 or 12, in which case a few casualties amongst her lovers (and observe—they hanged liberally in those days) might have promoted me speedily to the top of the tree; as, on the other hand, with how much loyalty of submission I acquiesced in her allotment, supposing that she had seen reason to plant me in the very rearward of her favour, as No. 199+1. It must not be supposed that I allowed any trace of jest, or even of playfulness, to mingle with these expressions of my admiration; that would have been insulting to her, and would have been false as regarded my own feelings. In fact, the utter shadowiness of our relations to each other, even after our meetings through seven or eight years had been very numerous, but of necessity had been very brief, being entirely on mail-coach allowance—timed, in reality, by the General Post-Office—and watched by a crocodile belonging to the antepenultimate generation, left it easy for me to do a thing which few people ever can have done—viz., to make love for seven years, at the same time to be as sincere as ever creature was, and yet never to compromise myself by overtures that might have been foolish as regarded my own interests, or misleading as regarded hers. Most truly I loved this beautiful and ingenuous girl; and had it not been for the Bath and Bristol mail, heaven only knows what might have come of it. People talk of being over head and ears in love—now, the mail was the cause that I sank only over ears in love, which, you know, still left a trifle of brain to overlook the whole conduct of the affair. I have mentioned the case at all for the sake of a dreadful result from it in after years of dreaming. But it seems, ex abundanti, to yield this moral—viz. that as, in England, the idiot and the half-wit are held to be under the guardianship of Chancery, so the man making love, who is often but a variety of the same imbecile class, ought to be made a ward of the General Post-Office, whose severe course of timing and periodical interruption might intercept many a foolish declaration, such as lays a solid foundation for fifty years' repentance.
Ah, reader! when I look back upon those days, it seems to me that all things change or perish. Even thunder and lightning, it pains me to say, are not the thunder and lightning which I seem to remember about the time of Waterloo. Roses, I fear, are degenerating, and, without a Red revolution, must come to the dust. The Fannies of our island—though this I say with reluctance—are not improving; and the Bath road is notoriously superannuated. Mr Waterton tells me that the crocodile does not change—that a cayman, in fact, or an alligator, is just as good for riding upon as he was in the time of the Pharaohs. That may be; but the reason is, that the crocodile does not live fast—he is a slow coach. I believe it is generally understood amongst naturalists, that the crocodile is a blockhead. It is my own impression that the Pharaohs were also blockheads. Now, as the Pharaohs and the crocodile domineered over Egyptian society, this accounts for a singular mistake that prevailed on the Nile. The crocodile made the ridiculous blunder of supposing man to be meant chiefly for his own eating. Man, taking a different view of the subject, naturally met that mistake by another; he viewed the crocodile as a thing sometimes to worship, but always to run away from. And this continued until Mr Waterton changed the relations between the animals. The mode of escaping from the reptile he showed to be, not by running away, but by leaping on its back, booted and spurred. The two animals had misunderstood each other. The use of the crocodile has now been cleared up—it is to be ridden; and the use of man is, that he may improve the health of the crocodile by riding him a fox-hunting before breakfast. And it is pretty certain that any crocodile, who has been regularly hunted through the season, and is master of the weight he carries, will take a six-barred gate now as well as ever he would have done in the infancy of the Pyramids.
Perhaps, therefore, the crocodile does not change, but all things else do: even the shadow of the Pyramids grows less. And often the restoration in vision of Fanny and the Bath road, makes me too pathetically sensible of that truth. Out of the darkness, if I happen to call up the image of Fanny from thirty-five years back, arises suddenly a rose in June; or, if I think for an instant of the rose in June, up rises the heavenly face of Fanny. One after the other, like the antiphonies in a choral service, rises Fanny and the rose in June, then back again the rose in June and Fanny. Then come both together, as in a chorus; roses and Fannies, Fannies and roses, without end—thick as blossoms in paradise. Then comes a venerable crocodile, in a royal livery of scarlet and gold, or in a coat with sixteen capes; and the crocodile is driving four-in-hand from the box of the Bath mail. And suddenly we upon the mail are pulled up by a mighty dial, sculptured with the hours, and with the dreadful legend of TOO LATE. Then all at once we are arrived in Marlborough forest, amongst the lovely households[23] of the roe-deer: these retire into the dewy thickets; the thickets are rich with roses; the roses call up (as ever) the sweet countenance of Fanny, who, being the granddaughter of a crocodile, awakens a dreadful host of wild semi-legendary animals—griffins, dragons, basilisks, sphinxes—till at length the whole vision of fighting images crowds into one towering, armorial shield, a vast emblazonry of human charities and human loveliness that have perished, but quartered heraldically with unutterable horrors of monstrous and demoniac natures; whilst over all rises, as a surmounting crest, one fair female hand, with the fore-finger pointing, in sweet, sorrowful admonition, upwards to heaven, and having power (which, without experience, I never could have believed) to awaken the pathos that kills in the very bosom of the horrors that madden the grief that gnaws at the heart, together with the monstrous creations of darkness that shock the belief, and make dizzy the reason of man. This is the peculiarity that I wish the reader to notice, as having first been made known to me for a possibility by this early vision of Fanny on the Bath road. The peculiarity consisted in the confluence of two different keys, though apparently repelling each other, into the music and governing principles of the same dream; horror, such as possesses the maniac, and yet, by momentary transitions, grief, such as may be supposed to possess the dying mother when leaving her infant children to the mercies of the cruel. Usually, and perhaps always, in an unshaken nervous system, these two modes of misery exclude each other—here first they met in horrid reconciliation. There was also a separate peculiarity in the quality of the horror. This was afterwards developed into far more revolting complexities of misery and incomprehensible darkness; and perhaps I am wrong in ascribing any value as a causative agency to this particular case on the Bath road—possibly it furnished merely an occasion that accidentally introduced a mode of horrors certain, at any rate, to have grown up, with or without the Bath road, from more advanced stages of the nervous derangement. Yet, as the cubs of tigers or leopards, when domesticated, have been observed to suffer a sudden development of their latent ferocity under too eager an appeal to their playfulness—the gaieties of sport in them being too closely connected with the fiery brightness of their murderous instincts—so I have remarked that the caprices, the gay arabesques, and the lovely floral luxuriations of dreams, betray a shocking tendency to pass into finer maniacal splendours. That gaiety, for instance, (for such at first it was,) in the dreaming faculty, by which one principal point of resemblance to a crocodile in the mail-coachman was soon made to clothe him with the form of a crocodile, and yet was blended with accessory circumstances derived from his human functions, passed rapidly into a further development, no longer gay or playful, but terrific, the most terrific that besieges dreams, viz.—the horrid inoculation upon each other of incompatible natures. This horror has always been secretly felt by man; it was felt even under pagan forms of religion, which offered a very feeble, and also a very limited gamut for giving expression to the human capacities of sublimity or of horror. We read it in the fearful composition of the sphinx. The dragon, again, is the snake inoculated upon the scorpion. The basilisk unites the mysterious malice of the evil eye, unintentional on the part of the unhappy agent, with the intentional venom of some other malignant natures. But these horrid complexities of evil agency are but objectively horrid; they inflict the horror suitable to their compound nature; but there is no insinuation that they feel that horror. Heraldry is so full of these fantastic creatures, that, in some zoologies, we find a separate chapter or a supplement dedicated to what is denominated heraldic zoology. And why not? For these hideous creatures, however visionary,[24] have a real traditionary ground in medieval belief—sincere and partly reasonable, though adulterating with mendacity, blundering, credulity, and intense superstition. But the dream-horror which I speak of is far more frightful. The dreamer finds housed within himself—occupying, as it were, some separate chamber in his brain—holding, perhaps, from that station a secret and detestable commerce with his own heart—some horrid alien nature. What if it were his own nature repeated,—still, if the duality were distinctly perceptible, even that—even this mere numerical double of his own consciousness—might be a curse too mighty to be sustained. But how, if the alien nature contradicts his own, fights with it, perplexes, and confounds it? How, again, if not one alien nature, but two, but three, but four, but five, are introduced within what once he thought the inviolable sanctuary of himself? These, however, are horrors from the kingdoms of anarchy and darkness, which, by their very intensity, challenge the sanctity of concealment, and gloomily retire from exposition. Yet it was necessary to mention them, because the first introduction to such appearances (whether causal, or merely casual) lay in the heraldic monsters, which monsters were themselves introduced (though playfully) by the transfigured coachman of the Bath mail.