("Oh, you very miserable ass," said Captain Brentwood; "to sit down and try to describe the indescribable. Do you think that because you can see all the scene before you now, because your flesh creeps, and your blood moves as you call it to mind, do you think, I say, that you can describe it? Do you think that you can give a man, in black and white, with ink, and on paper, any real notion of that most tremendous spectacle, a sharp bowed ship running before a gale of wind through the ice in the great South Sea, where every wave rolls round the world? Go to—read Tom Cringle, who has given up his whole soul to descriptions, and see how many pictures dwell in your mind's eye, after reading his books. Two, or at most three, and they, probably, quite different from what he intended you to see, lovely as they are;—leave describing things, man, and give us some more facts."
Said Major Buckley, "Go on, Hamlyn, and do the best you can. Don't mind him." And so I go on accordingly.)
61 degrees 30 minutes South. The Horn, storm-beaten, desolate, four hundred miles to the North, and barely forty miles to the South, that cruel, gleaming, ice barrier, which we saw to-day when the weather lifted at noon, and which we know is there yet, though we dare not think about it. There comes to us, though, in spite of ourselves, a vision of what may happen any hour. A wild cry from the foretop. A mass, grey, indistinct, horrible, rising from the wild waters, scarce a hundred yards from her bowsprit. A mad hurrying to and fro. A crash. A great ruin of masts and spars, and then utter, hopeless destruction. That is the way the poor old Madagascar must have gone. The Lord send us safe through the ice.
Stunned, drenched to the skin, half-frightened, but wildly excited and determined to see out, what a landsman has but seldom a chance of seeing, a great gale of wind at sea, I clung tight to the starboard bulwarks of Mr. Richard Green's new clipper, Sultan, Captain Sneezer, about an hour after dark, as she was rounding the Horn, watching much such a scene as I have attempted to give you a notion of above. And as I held on there, wishing that the directors of my insurance office could see me at that moment, the first mate, coming from forward, warping himself from one belayingpin to another, roared in my ear, "that he thought it was going to blow."
"Man! man!" I said, "do you mean to tell me it is not blowing now?"
"A bit of a breeze," he roared; but his roar came to me like a whisper. However, I pretty soon found out that this was something quite out of the common; for, crawling up, along the gangway which runs between the poophouse and the bulwarks, I came with great difficulty to the stern; and there I saw the two best men in the larboard watch (let us immortalize them, they were Deaf Bob, and Harry the digger), lashed to the wheel, and the Skipper himself, steadfast and anxious, alongside of them, lashed to a cleat on the afterpart of the deck-house. So thinks I, if these men are made fast, this is no place for me to be loose in, and crawled down to my old place in the waist, at the after end of the spare topsail-yard, which was made fast to the starboard-bulwarks, and which extended a little abaft of the main shrouds.
If any gentleman can detect a nautical error in that last sentence, I shall feel obliged by his mentioning it.
Somebody who came forth from the confusion, and was gone again, informed me that "He was going to lay her to, and that I'd better hold on." I comforted myself with the reflection that I was doing exactly the right thing, holding on like grim death.
Then something happened, and I am sorry to say I don't exactly know what. I find in my notes, taken shortly afterwards, from the dictation of an intelligent midshipman, "that the fore royal-yard got jammed with the spanker-boom, and carried away the larboard quarter boat." Nautical friends have since pointed out to me that this involves an impossibility. I daresay it does. I know it involved an impossibility of turning in without subjecting yourself to a hydropathic remedy of violent nature, by going to bed in wet blankets, and of getting anything for breakfast besides wet biscuit and cold tea. Let it go; something went wrong, and the consequences were these.
A wall of water, looming high above her mainyard, came rushing and booming along, dark, terrible, opaque. For a moment I saw it curling overhead, and would have cried out, I believe, had there been time; but a midshipman, a mere child, slipped up before me, and caught hold of my legs, while I tried to catch his collar. Then I heard the skipper roar out, in that hoarse throaty voice that seamen use when excited. "Hold on, the sea's aboard," and then a stunning, blinding rush of water buried us altogether. The Sultan was on her beamends, and what was more, seemed inclined to stay there, so that I, holding on by the bulwarks, saw the sea seething and boiling almost beneath my feet, which were swinging clear off the deck.