"As soon as you near St Helena by a few miles, the trade-wind falls light, and making the rock, as you do from the South Atlantic, a good deal to leeward of the harbour, 'twould be pretty slow work beating round to north-east, but for the breeze always coming off the height, with the help of which one can coast easy enough along. Captain Wallis said no more than to bid the first lieutenant make the brig's number at her mast-head, while she still bore in direct upon the breast of the land, as much out of soundings as the day before; the smooth heavy swell seeming to float the island up in one huge lump ahead of us, till you saw it rolling into the very foot, with a line of surf, as if it all rose sheer out of the bottom of the sea; as grim and hard as a block of iron, too, and a good deal the same colour. By noon it hung fairly, as it were, over our mast-heads, the brig looking by comparison as tiny and as ticklish as a craft made of glass, she coasting away round, with yards braced first one way then another, and opening point after point from three hundred to two thousand feet high; while at times she would go stealing in with a faint ripple at her bows, near enough to hear the deep sound of the sea plunging slowly to the face of the rock, where the surf rose white against it without a break.
"There wasn't so much as a weed to be seen, the rocks getting redder and more coppery, sending out the light like metal, till you'd have thought they tingled all over with the heat. Then as you opened another bulge in the line, the sharp sugar-loaf hills, far away up, with the ragged cliffs and crags, shot over against the bare white sky in all sort of shapes; and after a good long spell of the sea, there was little fancy needed to give one the notion that they were changing into these, as we passed ahead, to mock you. There was one peak for all the world like the top of St Paul's, and no end of church spires and steeples, all lengths and ways; then big bells and trumpets, mixed with wild beasts' heads, grinning at each other across some split in the blue beyond, and soldiers' helmets—not to speak of one huge block, like a nigger's face with a cowl behind it, hanging far out over the water. Save for the colour of it all, in fact, St Helena reminds one more of a tremendous iceberg than an island, and not the less that it looks ready in some parts to topple over and show a new face; while the sea working round it, surging into the hollows below water-mark, and making the air groan inside of them, keeps up a noise the like of which you wouldn't wish to cruise alongside of every day. The strangest thing about it, however, was that now and then, as you came abreast of some deep gully running up inland, a sudden blast of wind would rush out of it, sufficient to make the Podargus reel—with a savage thundering roar, too, like the howl out of a lion's mouth; while you looked far up a narrow, bare, black glen, closing into a hubbub of red rocks, or losing itself up a grey hillside in a white thread of a water-course; then the rough shell of the island shut in again, as still as before, save the light breeze and the deep hum of the surf along its foot. Curiously enough in a latitude like St Helena's, the island seems, as it were, a perfect bag of air. What with the heat of the rock, its hollow inside, the high peaks of it catching the clouds, and the narrow outlets it has, 'tis always brewing wind, you may say, to ventilate that part of the tropics—just as one may keep up cold draughts through and through a wet heap of loose stones, no matter how hot the weather is, as long as he pleases. As for a landing-place, though, there wasn't one of the gullies that didn't yawn over without falling to the sea; and, not to mention the surf underneath, where the dark swell came in unbroken from deep water without a shoal to soften it, why, watching it from the brig's side, I shouldn't have said a cat could scramble up or down the steep slopes and the wreck of stones, from the water's edge to the jaws of the easiest gully you saw.
"Once or twice, standing farther off, we caught sight of Diana's Peak over the shoulder of a hill, with the light haze melting about it; at last you noticed a large gun mounted against the sky on a lofty peak, where it looked like a huge telescope; and on clearing another headland, a beautiful frigate came in between us and the burst of light to seaward, cruising to windward under easy sail. She bore up and stood towards the brig-of-war, just as the line of wall was to be seen winding round the middle of Sugarloaf Point, where the sentry's bayonet glittered near his watch-box, and the soldiers' red coats could be seen moving through the covered passage to the batteries. Five minutes after, the Podargus swept round the breast of Rupert's Hill into the bay, in sight of Jamestown and the ships lying off the harbour; clewing up her sails and ready to drop anchor, as the frigate hove to not far astern.
"You can fancy land heaving in sight after thrice as many weeks as you've been at sea, ladies; or the view of a ship to a man that's been long laid up in bed ashore; or a gulp of fresh water in a sandy desert—but I question if any of them matches your first glimpse of Jamestown from the roadstead, like a bright piece of fairy-work in the mouth of the narrow brown valley, after seeing desolation enough to make you wish for a clear horizon again. More especially this time, when all the while one couldn't help bringing to mind one's notion of the French Emperor, how, not long ago, the sight of the French coast, or a strange frigate over the Channel swell, used to make us think of him far ashore, with half the earth for his own, and millions of soldiers. We reefers down in the cockpit would save our grog to drink confusion to Napoleon, and in a rough night near a lee-shore, it was look alive aloft, or choose betwixt cold brine and the clutch of a gendarme hauling you to land. I do believe we looked upon him as a sort of god, as Captain Wallis did in the Temple; every ship or gunboat we saw taken, or had a hand in the mauling of, why, 'twas for the sheer sake of the thing, and scarce by way of harm to Boney; while nothing like danger, from breakers on the lee-bow to a November gale, but had seemingly a taste of him. None of us any more thought of bringing him to this, than we did of his marching into London, or of a French frigate being able to rake our old Pandora in a set-to on green water or blue, with us to handle her.
"But there was the neat little cluster of houses, white, yellow, and green, spreading down close together in the bottom of the valley, and out along the sea's edge; the rough brown cliffs sloping up on each side, with the ladder-like way to the fort on the right, mounting, as it were, out of the very street, to the flagstaff on the top, and dotted with red-coats going up and down; a bright line of a pier and a wall before the whole, the Government House dazzling through a row of spreading trees, and a little square church-tower to be seen beyond. 'Twas more like a scene in a play, than aught else; what with the suddenness of it all, the tiny look of it betwixt the huge rocks, the greenness of the trees and bushes, and patches of garden struggling up as far as they could go into the stone, and the gay little toys of cottages, with scarce flat enough to stand upon; save for the blue swell of the sea plunging lazily in through the bit of a bay, and the streak of air behind, that let you in high over the head of the hollow, up above one height and another, to a flat-headed blue rise in the distance, where Longwood could be seen from the maincross-trees I had gone to as the sails were furled.
"The sunlight, striking from both the red sides of the ravine, made the little village of a place, trees and all, glitter in a lump together, out of it, like no spot in the rest of the world; while elsewhere there wasn't so much as a weed to be seen hanging from the rock, nor the sign of another human habitation, saving the bare batteries on each hand, with a few sheds and warehouses over the beach along the landing-place. Once or twice the same sudden gust as before would come slap down through the valley into the brig's bare rigging, hot as the air was, with a howling kind of a sigh you took some time to get accustomed to, lest there was a hurricane to follow: in fact, one didn't well know whether it was the wild look of it outside, or the lovely spot in its grim mouth of a landing-place, but the whole island gave you the notion of a thing you couldn't be long sure of, without fancying it would give a shake some day or other again; or else spout fire, as no doubt it had done before, if there wasn't more fear of Napoleon getting back somehow to France, and wreaking bloody vengeance on the kings that shut him up in St Helena.
"There was apparently a busy scene ashore, however, both in the little town, which has scarce more than a single street, and along the quay, full of residents, as well as passengers from two Indiamen lying in-shore of us, while the Government esplanade seemed to be crowded with ladies, listening to the regimental band under the trees. The Newcastle frigate, with Sir Dudley Aldcombe's flag hoisted at her mizzen, was at anchor out abreast at Ladder Hill; and our first lieutenant had scarce pulled aboard of the Hebe, which was hove-to off the brig's quarter, before I noticed the Admiral's barge lying alongside the Hebe.
"Seeing Mr Aldridge on his way back shortly after, I came down the rigging, more anxious than ever to have my own matter settled; indeed, Captain Wallis no sooner caught sight of my face, uncomfortable as I daresay it looked, than he told me he was going to wait on the Admiral aboard the Hebe, and would take me with him at once, if I chose. For my part, I needed nothing but the leave, and in ten minutes' time I found myself, no small mark of curiosity, betwixt the waist and the quarter-deck of the Hebe, where the officers eyed me with as little appearance of rudeness as they could help, and I overhauled the spars and rigging aloft as coolly as I could, waiting to be sent for below. The Hebe, in fact, was the very beauty of a twenty-eight; taking the shine, and the wind, too, clean out of everything even at Plymouth, where I had seen her once a year or two before; our poor dear old Iris herself had scarce such a pattern of a hull, falling in, as it did, from the round swell of her bilge, to just under the plank-sheer, and spreading out again with her bright black top-sides, till where the figure-head shot over the cutwater, and out of her full pair of bows, like a swan's neck out of its breast. As for the Iris, our boatswain himself one day privately confessed to me, almost with tears in his eyes, that she tumbled home a thought too much just in front of the fore-chains, and he'd tried to get it softened off with dead planking and paint, but it wouldn't do; everybody saw through them. The truth was, to feel this fine ship under one, with her loose topsails hanging high against the gloom of the red gully towards Longwood, and the gay little town peeping just over her larboard bow, a mile away, it somehow or other cleared one's mind of a load.
"I was thinking already how, if one had the command of such a craft, to do something with her at sea—hang it! but surely that old judge couldn't be too proud to give him a fair hearing. By Jove! thought I—had one only wild enough weather, off the Cape, say—if I wouldn't undertake to bother even a seventy-four a whole voyage through, till she struck her flag; in which case a fellow might really venture to hold his head up and speak his mind, lovely as Violet Hyde would be in Calcutta. But then, again, there was St Helena towering red and rough over the ships, with the grand French Emperor hidden in it hard and fast, and all the work he used to give us at an end!
"Just at the moment, happening to catch sight of the American mate's sallow black visage over the brig-of-war's hammock-cloths, peering as he did from the cliffs to the lofty spars of the frigate, while his negro shipmates were to be made out nearer the bows—somehow or other the whole affair of their being burnt out and picked up started into my mind again, along with our late queer adventures in the Indiaman. Not to mention Captain Wallis's story, it flashed upon me all at once, for the first time, that the strange schooner was after some scheme as regarded the island; and a man more likely to try something uncommon than the Frenchman I never had seen yet. The truth was, but for my thoughts being otherwise taken up, I'd have wondered at my own confounded stupidity in not fathoming the thing sooner; whereas now I'm not going to deny it, I half began actually to wish him good success, or else a close miss of it, where either way one couldn't well fail having a share in the squall.