As I stood beside the helmsman, I could feel the gallant vessel springing away from under me, quivering through every oaken nerve, like a high-mettled racer with his goal but a bound before him. As she encountered some more formidable wave, there would be a tremendous outlay of animal-like energy, a momentary struggle, a half recoil, a plunging, trembling—onward rush—then a triumphant riding over the conquered foe, scattering the gems from its shivered crest in glittering showers over her bows. Then gliding with velocity over the glassy concave beyond, swaying to its up-lifting impulse with a graceful inclination of her lofty masts, and almost sweeping the sea with her yards, she would majestically recover herself in time to gather power for a fresh victory.
Within an hour after clearing the last head-land, whose lights, level with the plain of the sea, gleamed afar off, twinkling and lessened like stars, with which they were almost undistinguishably mingled on the horizon—we had exchanged the abrupt, irregular "seas" of the bay, for the regular, majestically rolling billows of the ocean.
I had been for some time pacing the deck, with the "officer of the watch" to recover my sea-legs, when the helmsman suddenly shouted in a wild startling cry, heard, mingling with the wind high above the booming of the sea, the passing hour of the night watch.—"Four bells."—"Four bells," repeated the only one awake on the forecastle, and the next moment the ship's bell rung out loud and clear—wildly swelling upon the gale, then mournfully dying away in the distance as the toll ceased, like the far-off strains of unearthly music—
"—— Died the solemn knell
As a trumpet music dies,
By the night wind borne away
Through the wild and stormy skies."
There is something so awful in the loud voice of a man mingling with the deep tones of a bell, heard at night upon the sea, that familiar as my ear was with the sounds—the blood chilled at my heart as this "lonely watchman's cry" broke suddenly upon the night.
When he again told the hour I was safely stowed away in a comfortable berth, not so large as that of Goliah of Gath by some cubits, yet admirably adapted to the sea, which serves most discourteously the children of Somnus, unless they fit their berths like a modern M. D. his sulkey, lulled to sleep by the rattling of cordage, the measured tread of the watch directly over me, the moanings, et cætera, of sleepless neighbours, the roaring of the sea, the howling of the wind, and the gurgling and surging of the water, as the ship rushed through it, shaking the waves from her sides, as the lion scatters the dew from his mane, and the musical rippling of the eddies—like a glassichord, rapidly run over by light fingers—curling and singing under the keel.
III.
Shakspeare—Suicide or a 'fowl' deed—A conscientious fable—Fishing smacks—A pretty boy—Old Skipper, Skipper junior, and little Skipper—A young Caliban—An alliterate Man—Fishermen—Nurseries—Navy—The Way to train up a Child—Gulf Stream—Humboldt—Crossing the Gulf—Ice-ships—Yellow fields—Flying fish—A game at bowls—Bermuda—A post of observation—Men, dwellings, and women of Bermuda—St. George—English society—Washing decks—Mornings at sea—Evenings at sea—A Moonlight scene—The ocean on fire—Its phosphorescence—Hypotheses.