At length, on our sixteenth day out from the reef, in latitude 1 degree 42 minutes north, the wind showed signs of failing us; and by sunset, that night, it had fallen stark calm, with a rapidly subsiding swell; yet the sky was clear, the barometer high, and, in short, there was every indication that we were booked for a long spell of calm weather before we should find ourselves to the southward of the Equator. So indeed it proved; for I believe I may say with absolute truth that never, for five consecutive minutes during the ten succeeding days, had we sufficient wind to extinguish the flame of a candle. True, there were occasional evanescent breathings that came stealing along from nowhere in particular, gently ruffling a few superficial yards of the ocean’s glassy surface into faintest blue for a brief two or three minutes at a time, and then vanishing again; but during the whole of that period we never had enough wind to keep our canvas fully distended for a whole minute. Or course, being short-handed, we could not resort to the various devices usually adopted in a fully manned craft for profiting by those transient breathings. The yards were altogether too heavy for us to attempt to swing them to meet every fickle draught of air that we saw coming toward us; it was therefore only the most favourable that we made any effort to utilise; yet, despite this, we somehow contrived to drift daily a little farther south; it might be, perhaps, no more than a mile, or it might rise to as much as five or six miles. Everything depending upon whether the favourable zephyrs happened to hit the ship, or whether they passed her by—sometimes at a distance of only a few yards.
When we first ran into this belt of calm our horizon was bare, neither land nor ship being in sight—indeed we had not sighted so much as one solitary sail since leaving the island; but at dawn on the sixth morning of the calm we sighted the mastheads of a small craft far away down in the southern board, which, upon being inspected from aloft, proved to be a schooner of, possibly, a hundred or one hundred and twenty tons measurement. During the day it became apparent that she was bound to the northward, for she assiduously utilised every chance breath of wind that touched her to work her way in that direction, while we did what we could to make way in the opposite direction, with the result that by sunset we had shortened the distance between us by three or four miles. The succeeding four days were simply repetitions in all respects of the same wearisome, monotonous state of things; yet the way in which the Mercury and the strange schooner insensibly drew ever nearer to each other during that time was singularly illustrative of what could be accomplished in the way of progress by sailing-ships, even in the embrace of what was to all intents and purposes a stark calm, by active and intelligent officers. It is true that we in the Mercury did but little toward the abbreviation of the distance between the two vessels, for the reason already mentioned, yet when the tenth day of the calm dawned the schooner was hull-up in the southern board, some six miles distant from us.
None but those who have endured a long spell of calm in the vicinity of the Equator can have the faintest idea of the deadly monotony of the experience. Day after day comes and goes, bringing a cloudless sky of dazzling blue, in the midst of which circles a merciless sun, from the scorching rays of which there is no escape, even under an awning; for the stoutest canvas seems incapable of completely intercepting the fiery darts that cause the pitch to bubble up out of the deck seams, and heat metal and dark-painted wood to a temperature high enough to blister the hand unwarily laid upon either. Even though an awning be spread, and shelter sought thereunder, those burning rays are not to be evaded; for they flash up from the mirror-like surface of the sea with a power which is scarcely to be distinguished from that exerted by those which fall direct from the great luminary himself. As to going below in order to escape the arrows of the fiery archer, the thing is not to be thought of; for the whole interior of the ship is, at such times, simply an oven, the air of which is too hot to breathe! Under such circumstances with what eagerness does the long-enduring seaman scan the polished surface of the sleeping ocean in search of the little smudge of faint, evanescent blue, the cat’s-paw that betrays the presence of some wandering eddy in the stagnant air which, even though it be too feeble and insignificant to move the ship by so much as a single inch, may at least afford his fevered body the momentary relief of a suggestion of comparative coolness. And how often does the panting and perspiring officer of the deck drag his weary, enervated frame to the skylight in the almost despairing hope that he may detect a depression of the mercury in the barometric tube, giving the promise of a coming change, only to turn away again with a weary, disappointed sigh.
It was under such circumstances as these that, during the forenoon of the tenth day of the calm, Gurney, upon examining the barometer, reported a concavity in the surface of the mercury, which, as we all knew, was the first indication of a tendency to fall; and a falling barometer of course meant a change of weather, which, in its turn, meant wind, from what quarter we scarcely cared, so long as it came with strength enough to fill our canvas and give us steerage-way. Yet the change was long in coming, for the fall of the mercury was so slow as to be all but undistinguishable, while up till noon the only difference that could be detected in the aspect of the sky was a certain subtle thickening of the atmosphere, that robbed the blue of its exquisite clarity, and reduced the sun to a shapeless blazing; mass that could be gazed at without bringing tears to the eyes, although there was thus far no appreciable alleviation of the scorching heat of the rays that he showered down upon us. But there was an added quality of closeness in the air that caused one literally to gasp for breath occasionally, while the slightest exertion—even that of moving from one part of the deck to another—induced instant profuse perspiration. So hot, indeed, was it that with one accord we decided against cooking any food that day, the idea of hot viands of any kind being absolutely repulsive to us all, and we accordingly dined all together upon the poop, under the shelter of the awning, upon such cold food as the steward’s pantry afforded.
It was about four bells in the afternoon watch when the upper edge of a great bank of livid purple cloud began to heave itself up above the north-western horizon; but when once it had risen into sight its progress was rapid—so rapid, indeed, that within an hour of its first appearance it had soared high enough to blot out the sun, to our intense relief, for with the disappearance of the luminary we were at once freed from the scorching of his beams, although the closeness of the atmosphere became intensified, rather than otherwise. Of course there was no mystery as to what we were to expect; we were undoubtedly in for a first-class tropical thunderstorm, with its usual accompaniments of torrential rain and, very probably, a sharp squall of wind that might perhaps last half an hour or so, and, if we were in luck, end in a breeze that would carry us across the Line. The moment, therefore, that the sun was hidden we proceeded to make our preparations for the welcome change, beginning by striking the awning, following this by clewing up and furling the mizen topsail, and winding up by close-reefing the fore and main topsails. This task, which kept us all busy until close upon eight bells (that is, four o’clock in the afternoon), left the ship under close-reefed fore and main topsails and fore topmast staysail, which was snug canvas enough to enable a vessel, even as short-handed as the Mercury then was, to face anything like the weather which we had reason to expect. Meanwhile, as we found time to notice, the schooner had followed our example and, long before our preparations were complete, had been stripped of everything except her boom-foresail.
By the time that our labours had come to an end, and we were once more free to sit down and await the issue of events, the pall of thundercloud had overspread the entire visible heavens, from horizon to horizon, enshrouding the scene in a kind of murky twilight, under which the ocean, undulating sluggishly in long, low, irregular folds, like the breathings of a sleeping giant, gleamed pallid and lustreless as a sea of molten lead. The atmosphere was still oppressively close, but it was no longer as deadly stagnant as it had been during the earlier hours of the day; for, at intervals, the vane at our main-royal masthead, which hitherto had drooped heavy as a sodden deck swab, save for the swaying motion imparted to it by the lift of the ship to the heave of the scarcely visible swell, lifted and fluttered feebly for a second or two, pointing now this way, and anon in some other direction, showing that, away up aloft there, and as yet too high to reach and stir the surface of the sea, the air currents were awakening under the brooding influence of the coming storm. These movements occurred at first at long intervals, and were of the most evanescent character; but the intervals rapidly shortened, and within an hour of the occurrence of the first manifestation of atmospheric movement it had increased to such an extent as to cause our topsails to rustle and fill, or fall aback, for a moment, while, a little later still, we could feel the light breathings upon our faces, and even note their light touch here and there upon the glassy surface of the water.