“Often in the cool night that succeeds a day of heat have I lain awake for hours, fanned by the breath of the sea, gazing on the watery world beneath and beyond me, and the silvery moon and tiny stars, that make one think of home, till sleep stole gently down on a moonbeam, and wafted me off to dreamland.
“But in witnessing even the war of the elements at sea, a sailor often finds a strange, wild pleasure. Enveloped in the thundercloud you mount with every wave to meet the lightning’s flash, or descend, like an arrow, into the gulf below—down, down, down, till the sun, lurid and red, is hidden at last from view by the wall of black waters around you.
“Or fancy the picture, which no artist could depict, of a ship far away in ocean’s midst by night in a thunderstorm. Dimly through the murky night behold that tumbling sea, lighted only by its own foam and the occasional flash from the storm-cloud. See that dark spot on the sea; it is a ship, and living souls are there—human beings, each with his own world of cares and loves and thoughts that are even now far away, all in that little spot. Whish! now by the pale lightning’s flash you can see it all. The black ship, with her bare poles, her slippery, shining deck and wet cordage, hanging by the bows to the crest of that great inky wave. What a little thing she looks, and what a mighty ocean all around her; and see how pale appear the faces of the crew that ‘cling to slippery shrouds,’ lest the next wave bear them into eternity.
“Whoever has been to prayers at sea during a storm has had a solemn experience he will never forget.”
“Perhaps there is no more impressive ocean-scene ever beheld by the sailor,” said Captain Ben Roberts, “than the phosphorescent seas witnessed at times in the tropics.” But though far more common in these regions than in the temperate zones, this extraordinary luminosity of the water is sometimes observed around our own coasts.
“I shall always remember,” he continues, “the first time I witnessed the phenomenon, though I’ve often seen it since.
“What a happy day we had had, to be sure! We were a party of five—I but a schoolboy, my comrades little more. It was the first time I had been to that most bewitching of western islands called Skye. We had started off one morning early on a ramble. We simply meant to go somewhere—anywhere, so long as we did not come back again for a night or two. Not that we were not happy enough in the old-fashioned manse of K—. But we wanted change, we wanted adventure if we could find any, and if we did not, then probably we should be able to make some. There was, at all events, the wild mountain peak of Quiraing to be climbed, with its strange top—the extinct crater of a burning mountain. Ah! but long before we came anywhere near it, there was a deal to be done.
“We had started from the beautiful little bay of Nigg, keeping a northerly course over a broad Highland upland.
“It was the month of June; the heather was not purple yet, but it was long and rank and green, and it was inhabited by many a curious wild bird, whose nests we hunted for, but did not rob; we saw some snakes, too, and one of us killed a very long one, and we all thought that boy a very hero, though I know now it was no more dangerous or deadly than a tallow candle.