“I do not profess to be anything myself; I am only a solitary unit. But I have often heard learned men disputing about a chief originator, or prime cause, and I have never been able to comprehend their arguments; for I have always noticed that it is at the sight of the stupendous movements of nature that the idea of this unknown supreme ‘origin’ becomes manifested to the mind of man.”
This sentence was the more impressed on my memory, from the fact, that, on the very same evening, while reading the appointed portion of the Psalms out of the little Prayer-book which Min had given me—a duty that I had promised her to perform regularly every day—I came across a verse, which, in different language, expressed almost the very same thing. It was the one wherein David exclaims, “They that go down to the sea in ships, and occupy their business in great waters, these men see the works of the Lord, and His wonders in the deep!”
Our voyage was uneventful, beyond this one instance of rough weather—when, throughout the night, as the steamer pitched and heaved, rolling and labouring, as if her last hour was come, the screw propeller worked round with a heavy thudding sound, as if some Cyclops were pounding away under my bunk with a broomstick to rouse me up, my cabin being just over the screw shaft. It went for awhile “thump:—thump! thump, thump, thump! Thump:—thump! Thump, thump, thump!” with even regularity; and then would suddenly break off this movement, whizzing away at a great rate, as the “send” of the sea lifted the blades out of the water, buzzing furiously the while like some marine alarum clock running down, or the mainspring of your watch breaking!
In the morning, however, only the swelling waves—that were rapidly subsiding—remained to remind us of the gale; and, from that date, we had fine weather and a good wind “a-beam,” until we finally sighted Sandy Hook lightship at the foot of New York Bay.
We did this in exactly ten days from the time of our “departure point” being taken, off the Needles.—Rather a fair run on the whole, when you consider that we lost fully a day by the storm, compelling us as it did, not only to slacken speed, but also to reverse our course, in order to keep the vessel’s head to the sea, and prevent her being pooped by some gigantic following wave—as might have been the case if we had kept on before it, as the unfortunate London did, a short period before.
My first impressions of “the Empire city,” as the proud Manhattanese fondly style it, were, certainly, not favourable; rather the contrary, I may say at once, without any “beating about the bush.”
You see, I landed on a Sunday. It was likewise wet—a nasty, drizzling, misty morning, fit to give you the blues with its many disagreeables and make you bless Mackintosh, while cursing Pleiads. Now, either of these two conditions—I do not refer to the act of benediction or its reverse, but to the fact of its being Sunday and wet—would have been sufficient to detract from the attractive merits of any English town; how much more, therefore, from those possessed by the great cosmopolitan metropolis of Transatlantica? This city is in bad weather a hundred-fold more desolate than London, in an aesthetic sense, and that is saying a good deal; and, on a Sunday, through the absence of any Sabbatarian influences and the working of teetotal tastes, it is more outwardly dull and inwardly vicious than any spot north of Tweed—Glasgow, for example, where the name of the illustrious Forbes Mackenzie is venerated!
To commence with, during the early morning we had warped into dock at Hoboken, the Rotherhithe—and, in some respects, Rosherville—of New York, being situated on the opposite side of the river; and here, the Herzog von Gottingen lay, with her bowsprit jammed into a coal shed and her decks, aforetime so white and clean, all bespattered with dirt, and encumbered with hawsers and cables. These latter coiling and uncoiling themselves here, there, and everywhere, like so many writhing sea-serpents, and, tripping you up suddenly just when you believed you had discovered a clear space on which you might stand without imperilling your valuable life.
Besides, the crew were engaged in getting up luggage from the lower hold by the aid of a donkey engine, which made a great deal of clattering fuss over doing a minimum amount of work—in which respect it resembled a good many people of my acquaintance, by the way. It was not pleasant to have the iron-bound cover of a heavy chest poked into the small of one’s back without leave or licence, and the entire article being subsequently deposited on one’s toes! No, it was not. And, to make matters worse, the escape steam, puffing off in volumes from the waste pipe in a hollow roar of relief at being no longer compelled to earn its living, was condensing an additional shower for our benefit—that was not more agreeable, in consequence of being warm—as if the drizzling rain that was falling was not deemed sufficient for wetting purposes!
After settling matters with the Custom House, and crossing the ferry from Hoboken, myself and all my goods packed in a hackney carriage hung on very high springs—like the old “glass coaches” that were used in London during the early part of the century, although, unlike them, drawn by a pair of remarkably fine horses—my drive through the back slums of New York to one of the Broadway hotels was not of a nature to dispel my vapours.