It sailed along so pleasantly,
And all was calm and bright.”
But, alas! the storm did soon begin to rise; by morning we were in troubled waters, and by noon we were battened down and hove to. We had given up all idea of making progress and were riding out the gale as best we might. All the saloon party were more or less laid low, including Mr. Ritchie, for the first time in his life. The steward was not seen for two days; and if it had not been that the under-steward, who shall be known as “Luke,” rose to the occasion, the state of affairs would have been somewhat serious. He not only contrived to satisfy the appetites of the crew, which were subsequently said to have been abnormally good, but also staggered round, with black hands and a tousled head, ministering with tea and bovril to our frailer needs. The engineer, a landsman, was too incapacitated to do any work, and doubt arose as to whether we should not be left without electric light. More alarming was the fact that the place smelt badly of paraffin, arousing anxiety as to the effect the excessive rolling of the ship might have had on our carefully tested tanks and barrels; happily the odour proved to be due merely to a temporary overflow in the engine-room.
We now found the disadvantage of having abandoned, owing to our various delays, the trial runs in home waters which had at one time been planned. The skylights, which would have been adequate for ordinary yachting—which has been described as “going round and round the Isle of Wight”—proved unequal to the work expected of Mana, and the truth appeared of a dark saying of the Board of Trade surveyor that “skylights were not ventilation.” Not only could they of course not be raised in bad weather, but those which, like mine, were arranged to open, admitted the sea to an unpleasant degree; such an amount of water had to be conveyed by means of dripping towels into canvas baths that it seemed at one time as if the Atlantic would be perceptibly emptier. When in the midst of the gale night fell on the lonely ship the sensation was eerie; every now and then the persistent rolling, which threw from side to side of the berth those fortunate enough to be below, was interrupted by a resounding crash in the darkness as a big wave broke against the vessel’s side, followed by the rushing surge and gurgle of the water as it poured in a volume over the deck above. Then the hubbub entirely ceased, and for a perceptible time the vessel lay perfectly still in the trough of the wave, like a human creature dazed by a sudden blow, after a second or two to begin again her weary tossing. I wondered, as I lay there, which was the more weird experience, this night or one spent in camp in East Africa with no palisade, in a district swarming with lions, and again recalled the philosophy of one of our Swahili boys. “Frightened? No, he eats me, he does not eat me; it is all the will of Allah.”
By morning the worst was over, and it was a comfort to hear Mr. Gillam singing cheerfully something about “In the Bay of Biscay O,” a performance he varied with anathemas on the seasick steward. When I was able to get on deck, the waves were still descending on us—if not the proverbial mountains; at any rate hills high, looking as if they must certainly overwhelm us. It was wonderful to see, what later I took for granted, how the yacht rose to each, taking it as it were in her stride. It was reported to have been a “full gale, a hurricane, as bad as could be, with dangerous cross seas”; but the little vessel had proved herself a splendid sea-going boat, and “had ridden it out like a duck.” For the next little while I can only say in the words of the poet, “It was not night, it was not day”; neither the clothes people wore, nor the food they took, nor their times of downsitting and uprising had anything to do with the hours of light and darkness. By Saturday, however, the weather was better, meals were established, and things generally more civilised. We had another bad gale somewhere in the latitude of Finisterre, being hove to for thirty hours, but were subsequently very little troubled with seasickness. The second Sunday out, April 6th, we experienced a short interlude of calm, and I discovered that not only does a sailing ship not travel in bad weather, but that when it is really beautifully smooth she also has a bad habit of declining to go. Anyway, we held our first service, and “O God, our help” went, if not in Westminster Abbey form, at any rate quite creditably.
Mr. Ritchie had decided to take two sides of a triangle, first west and then south, rather than run any risk of being blown on to Ushant or Finisterre; a precaution which, in view of the proved powers of the boat to hold her own against a head wind, he subsequently thought to have been unnecessary. After we left the English shores we only saw two vessels till we were within sight of Madeira, and some of our Brixham men, who had never been far from their native shores or away from their fishing fleet, were much impressed with the size and loneliness of the ocean. “It was astonishing,” said Light, “that there could be so much water without any land or ships,” and he expressed an undisguised desire for “more company.”
Somehow or other we had all come to the conclusion that we would put into Madeira, instead of going straight through to Las Palmas, for which we had cleared from Falmouth. The first land which we sighted was the outlying island of the group, Porto Santo. This was appropriate on a voyage to the New World, as Columbus resided there with his father-in-law, who was governor of the place; and it is said that from his observations there of drift-wood, and other indications, he first conceived the idea of the land across the waters, to which he made his famous voyage in 1492. Our mate entertained us with a tale of how he had been shipwrecked on Porto Santo, the yacht on which he was serving having overrun her reckonings as she approached it from the west; happily all on board were able to escape. The wind fell after we made the group, so that we did not get into the harbour of Funchal for another thirty-six hours, and then only with the help of the motor. It was most enjoyable cruising along the coast of Madeira, watching the great mountains, woods, ravines, and nestling villages, at whose existence the passengers on the deck of a Union-Castle liner can only vaguely guess. The day was Sunday, April 13th, and later it became a matter of remark how frequently we hit off this day of the week for getting into harbour, a most inconvenient one from the point of view of making the necessary arrangements. As we entered, a Portuguese liner, coming out of Funchal, dipped its flag in greeting to our blue ensign; out came the harbour-master’s tug to show us where to take up our position, down went the anchor with a comfortable rattle, and so ended the first stage of our journey.
The voyage had taken eighteen days, and averaged about sixty miles a day, as against the hundred miles on which we had calculated, and which later we sometimes exceeded. A man who crosses the ocean in a powerful steam-vessel, as one who travels by land in an express train, undoubtedly gains in speed, but he loses much else. He misses a thousand beauties, he has no contact with Nature, no sense of the exultation which comes from progress won step by step by putting forth his own powers to bend hers to his will. The late veteran seaman Lord Brassey is reported to have said that “when once an engine is put into a ship the charm of the sea is gone.” All through our voyage also there was a fascinating sense of having put back the hands of time. This was the route and these in the main the conditions under which our ancestors, the early Empire builders, travelled to India; later we were on the track of Drake, Anson, and others. Some of Drake’s ships were apparently about the size of Mana.[[1]] The world has been shrinking of late, and to return to a simpler day is to restore much of its size and dignity.
FIG. 2.—PORTO SANTO.