June 9.—I met the chief engineer in an alleyway of the main deck. We stopped to yarn, for we have become no more intimate yet than is possible across the mess-room table. One of his Chinese firemen squeezed past us as we were talking, and the chief’s eyes followed him. Then he chuckled. “I found that man below last week with a bit of spun yarn round his throat. He was pretending suicide, and kept up the joke to amuse me. The Chink said, ‘Me all same Jesus Clist.’ I told him he was wrong. Christ did not commit suicide. Christ was topside man, not a devil. That Chink was quite surprised. He shook his head. I could see he did not believe me. Nothing that I explained to him convinced him that Jesus was not a devil. ‘Clist no devil? Velly good.’” The fellow smiled bitterly and shook his head at the joke. It took me some minutes to get at his idea, and from what I could make out that Chink thought it was incredible we should go to any trouble about a good man. Good spirits would do us no harm. People only kow-tow to devils they are afraid of.
June 10.—We are nearing the Laccadives. A dragonfly passed over the ship on the wind. The wind is southwest, and the nearest land in that direction is Africa, over one thousand miles away. Some day a sailor who has a taste for natural history will give us the records of his voyages, and his notes may surprise the ornithologists, at least. Our men caught a merlin in the Red Sea, which was quite friendly, and took its own time to depart when it was released. Another day, while in the same waters, I was looking at a group of Chinese, firemen sprawled on the after hatch and was wondering where in England a chance group of workers could be found to match those models, when a ray of colored light flashed over them and focused on a davit. It was an unfamiliar bird, and I began to stalk it with binoculars while it changed its perches about the poop, till it was made out to be a bee-eater. Then I found the chief mate was behind me, intent also with his binoculars. We had some bickering about it. He said the bird was a roller; but I told him he should stick to his chipping hammer and leave the birds to better men. He said he would soon show me who was the better man, and escorted me the length of the ship to his cabin, where he produced a bird book, which was a log of several long voyages to the Far East. Like so many sailors to-day he is versed in several matters which we landsmen think are certainly not the business of sailors at all. He has been keeping a log of the land birds which he has recognized at sea, and his record suggested what an excellent book a sailor, who is also a naturalist, may write for us some day.
This sailor had observed for himself, what naturalists know well enough, that the gulls are not sea birds at all in the sense that are albatrosses and petrels, and the frigate and bo’sun birds of the tropics. When you see gulls, then land is near, though dirty weather may hide it. The herring gulls, kittiwakes, and black-backs never follow a ship to blue water. When, outward bound, land dissolves astern, then they, too, leave you. You may meet their fellows again off Ushant or Finisterre if your ship passes not too far from the land; but should you be well to the westward, then the ship’s next visitors will be land birds when approaching Gibraltar.
Several pairs of noddies kept about the ship at the lower end of the Red Sea, and not because of anything we could give them except our society. They did not beg astern, like hungry gulls, for scraps, but wheeled about the bows, or maneuvered close abeam like swallows at play. As a fact, I think they were tired and wanted to rest. Once or twice they alighted on our bulwarks and went through some astonishing aërial acrobatics while their tiny webbed feet sought the awkward perch.
After sundown one actually tried to alight on my head, while I stood in the dusk on the captain’s bridge watching its evolutions. It swerved and stooped so unexpectedly that I ducked, as one used to at the sound of a shell going over. But soon it alighted behind me, and it made no more fuss about being picked up than though it were a rag. It was only a little sick, but got over that, and settled down on the palm of my hand. A group of shipmates were overworking a gramophone below on a hatch, where lamps made the deck bright. Down went the noddy and I to them. Our visitor cocked an eye at the gramophone and took quiet stock of the men who came round to stroke it. It accepted us all as quietly as though it had known us for years, and this was the usual routine. It heard its mate later, or else our musical records were not to its taste, for it shook itself disconsolately, waddled a little, and projected itself into the night.
Last night the surgeon brought to my cabin another visitor. It was a petrel, about the size of a blackbird, and of a uniform dark chocolate color. We judged it was uncommon, and there was a brief hint of chloroform, which was immediately dismissed, for our captain might have objected to any modern version of the Ancient Mariner’s crime on his ship, even in the name of science. We enjoyed our guest in life till it was pleased to leave us.[1]
June 11.—The south end of Ceylon was in sight twenty miles distant on the port bow at 2 P.M. I did not notice any spicy breeze, but the water had changed to an olive green. The coast was dim as we drew abreast of Dondra Head, but the white stalk of its beacon was distinct and the pulsing light of the combers. We seem to have been at sea for an age. The exposed forecastle with its rusty gear, where I feel most at home, has become friendly and comforting. You are secluded there. You are elevated from the sea and outside the ship. The great red links of the cable, the ochraceous stains on the plates, the squat black winches like crouched and faithful familiars, the rush and gurgle of fountains in the hawse pipes when the ship’s head dips, the glow of the deck and the rails, like the grateful warmth of a living body, and the ancient smell, as if you could sniff the antiquity of the sea and the sweat of a deathless ship on a voyage beyond the counting of mere days, give me a deeper conviction of immortality than all the eager arguments from welcome surmises. I am in eternity. There is no time. There is no death. This is not only the Indian Ocean. Those leisurely white caps diminishing to infinity, the serene heaven, the silence except for the sonority of the waters, are Bideford Bay, too, on a summer long past, and the Gulf Stream on a voyage which ended I forget when, and what Magellan saw in the Pacific, and is the Channel on our first passage across, and they are the lure and hope of all the voyagers who ever stood at a ship’s head and looked to the unknown. They are all the seas under the sun, and I am not myself, but the yearning eyes of Man. To-day, when so disembodied and universal, leaning on the rail over the stem, both the confident interrogation and the answer to the mystery of the world, a little flying fish appeared in the heaving glass beneath me, was bewildered by our approaching mass, and got up too late. He emerged from a wave at the wrong angle, and the water and draught flung him against our iron.
FOOTNOTES
[1] Later, Mr. Moulton, of the Raffles Museum at Singapore, showed me a rarity, one of the six specimens taken of Swinhoe’s fork-tailed petrel. Our little friend of the Indian Ocean was at once recognized and named, and his visit to our liner added something new to our knowledge of his kind, for it was unknown that he was likely to be found so far to the westward.