All this, too, is now changed. This terrible master has now found his master in the sea-going steamer. She turns not aside to the right hand or to the left, for all his power. Boreas may send his gales from what quarter he pleases, and urge them with whatever violence he likes to display. The steamer goes steadily on, pointing her unswerving prow directly toward her port of destination, and triumphing easily, and apparently without effort, over all the fury of the wind and the shocks and concussions of the waves. The worst that the storm can do is to retard, in some degree, the swiftness of her motion. Instead of driving her, as it would have done a sailing vessel, two or three hundred miles out of her course, away over the sea, it can only reduce her speed in her own proper and determined direction to eight miles an hour instead of twelve.
Now, this makes a great difference in the effect produced upon the mind by witnessing a storm at sea. If the passenger, as he surveys the scene, feels that his ship, and all that it contains, has been seized by the terrific power which he sees raging around him, and that they are all entirely at its mercy,—that it is sweeping them away over the sea, perhaps into the jaws of destruction, without any possible power, on their part, of resistance or escape,—his mind is filled with the most grand and solemn emotions. Such a flight as this, extending day after day, perhaps for five hundred miles, over a raging sea, is really sublime.
The Atlantic steamer never flies. She never yields in any way to the fury of the gale, unless she gets disabled. While her machinery stands, she moves steadily forward in her course; and so far as any idea of danger is concerned, the passengers in their cabins and state rooms below pay no more regard to the storm than a farmer's family do to the whistling and howling of the wind among the chimneys of their house, in a blustering night on land.
So much for the philosophy of a storm at sea, as witnessed by the passengers on board an Atlantic steamer.
One night, when the steamer had been some time at sea, Rollo awoke, and found himself more than usually unsteady in his berth. Sometimes he slept upon his couch, and sometimes in his berth. This night he was in his berth, and he found himself rolling from side to side in it, very uneasily. The croaking of the ship, too, seemed to be much more violent and incessant than it had been before. Rollo turned over upon his other side, and drew up his knees in such a manner as to prevent himself from rolling about quite so much, and then went to sleep again.
His sleep, however, was very much broken and disturbed, and he was at last suddenly awakened by a violent lurch of the ship, which rolled him over hard against the outer edge of his berth, and then back against the inner edge of it again. There was a sort of cord, with large knobs upon it, at different distances, which was hung like a bell cord from the back side of the berth. Rollo had observed this cord before, but he did not know what it was for. He now, however, discovered what it was for, as, by grasping these knobs in his hands, he found that the cord was an excellent thing for him to hold on by in a heavy sea. By means of this support, he found that he could moor himself, as it were, quite well, and keep himself steady when a heavy swell came.
He was not long, however, at rest, for he found that his endeavors to go to sleep were disturbed by a little door that kept swinging to and fro, in his state room, as the ship rolled. This was the door of a little cupboard under the wash stand. When the door swung open, it would strike against a board which formed the front side of the couch that has already been described. Then, when the ship rolled the other way, it would come to, and strike again upon its frame and sill. Rollo endured this noise as long as he could, and then he resolved to get up and shut the door. So he put his feet out of his berth upon the floor,—which he could easily do, as the berth that he was in was the lower one,—and sat there watching for a moment when the ship should be tolerably still. When the right moment came, he ran across to the little door, shut it, and crowded it hard into its place; then darted back to his berth again, getting there just in time to save a tremendous lurch of the ship, which would have perhaps pitched him across the state room, if it had caught him when he was in the middle of the floor.
Rollo did not have time to fasten the little door with its lock; and this seemed in fact unnecessary, for it shut so hard and tight into its place that he was quite confident that the friction would hold it, and that it would not come open again. To his great surprise, therefore, a few minutes afterwards, he heard a thumping sound, and, on turning over to see what the cause of it was, he found that the little door was loose again, and was swinging backward and forward as before. The fact was, that, although the door had shut in tight at the moment when Rollo had closed it, the space into which it had been fitted had been opened wider by the springing of the timbers and framework of the ship at the next roll, and thus set the door free again. So Rollo had to get up once more; and this time he locked the door when he had shut it, and so made it secure.
Still, however, he could not sleep. As soon as he began in the least degree to lose consciousness, so as to relax his hold upon the knobs of his cord, some heavy lurch of the sea would come, and roll him violently from side to side, and thus wake him up again. He tried to brace himself up with pillows, but he had not pillows enough. He climbed up to the upper berth, and brought down the bolster and pillow that belonged there; and thus he packed and wedged himself in. But the incessant rolling and pitching of the ship kept every thing in such a state of motion that the pillows soon worked loose again.