Three sides of our cabin, a room some ten feet by twelve, and barely six feet under the beams, are taken up by four roughly-made berths; one on each side, and two extending crosswise, with a space between them, fitted up with shelves, and used for the flour-barrel, and as a cupboard. Beneath the berths are trunks, tubs, bags, boxes and bundles, most of our choicest stores. From the centre, and close upon the steep, obtrusive stairs, covered with a glossy oil-cloth, of a cloudy brown and yellow, our table looks round placidly upon this domestic scene, so indicative of refreshment and repose. With this little sketch of our sea-apartment, the stage upon which was enacted our last night’s brief play, I will undertake its description, promising a brevity that rather suggests, than paints it.
After the midnight look-out forward for ice, and the retreat to the cabin, I soon joined in the general doze, rather suffered than enjoyed. In the uproar above, sharp voices and the rush of footsteps over the deck, occasionally stamping almost in our very faces, we were too frequently called back to full consciousness, to escape away into any thing better than the merest snatch of a dream. In my own case, the stomach, as usual, indulged itself in taking the measure of those motions, so disastrous to its peace and equipose; those rollings, risings, sinkings, divings, flings and swings, in which there is the sense of falling, and of vibrations smooth and oily. Where one’s mind’s eye is perpetually looking down in upon the poor remains of his late departed dinner, there is no possibility for the outer eye to sink into any true and honest slumber. The shut lid is a falsehood. It is not sleep. The live, wakeful eye is under it, looking up against the skinny veil. Occasionally the veil is lifted just to let the dark out; occasionally the dumb blackness falls in upon the retina like a stifling dust, and dims it, for a moment, to a doze. But the fire of wakefulness soon flashes up from the cells of the brain, and throws out the sleepy darkness, as the volcanic crater throws out its smoke and ashes.
Through some marine manœuvre, thought necessary by the master spirit on deck, and which could be explained by a single nautical word, if I only knew what the word is, we began to roll and plunge in a manner sufficiently violent and frightful to startle from its staid quiet almost every movable in the cabin. Out shot trunks and boxes—off slid cups and plates with a smash—back and forth, in one rough scramble with the luggage, trundled the table, followed by the nimble chairs. At this rate of going on, our valuables would soon mix in one common wreck. Determining to interfere, I sprang into the unruly confusion, and succeeded in lighting a candle just in time to join in the rough-and-tumble, at the risk of ribs and limbs, and the object of mingled merriment and alarm to the more prudent spectators. Botswood, an experienced voyager, shouted me back to my berth instantly, if I would not have my bones broken at the next heavy lurch of the vessel. I was beginning to feel the force of the counsel, when another roll, almost down upon the beam-ends, overturned the butter-tub and a box of loaf-sugar, and brought their contents loose upon the field of action. They divided themselves between the legs of the table and the individual, and so, candle in hand and adorned in modest white, he sat flat down upon the floor among them, at once their companion in trouble and their protector. The marble-white sugar and the yellow butter, our luxuries and indispensable necessaries, there they were, on the common floor, and disposed for once to join in a low frolic with plebeian boots and shoes and scullion trumpery. With an earnest resolve to prevent all improprieties of the kind, one hand grasped, knuckle deep, the golden mellow mass, of the size of a good Yankee pumpkin, and held on, while the other was busy in restoring, by the rapid handful, the sugar to the safety of its box. The candle, in the mean time, encouraged by the peals of laughter in the galleries, slid back and forth in the most trifling manner possible. When we tipped one way, then I sat on a steep hill-side, looking down toward the painter, roaring in his happy valley: away slid the candle in her tin slippers, and away the barefooted butter wanted to roll after, encouraged to indulge in the foolish caper by a saucy trunk jumping down from behind. When we tipped the other way, then I sat on the same hill-side, legs up, looking up, an unsatisfactory position: back slid the candle, followed by a charge of sharp-pointed baggage, and off started the butter with the best intentions toward the tub, waiting prostrate and with open arms. Notwithstanding the repetition and sameness of this performance, the beholders applauded with the same heartiness, as if each change back and forth was a novel and original exhibition. What heightened the effect of the scene, and gave it a suspicion of the tragic, was a keg of gunpowder, which evinced, by several demonstrations of discontent in the dark corner where it tumbled about, a disposition to come out and join the candle. By a happy lull, not unusual in the very midst of these cabin confusions during a brush at sea, the powder did not enter, and I was enabled to pitch the butter into the tub, and finally myself, after some few preliminaries with a towel, into my berth, where, in the course of the small remnant of the night, I fell into some broken slumbers.
CHAPTER XXXI.
THE CAPE AND BAY OF ST. LOUIS.—THE ICEBERG.—CARIBOO ISLAND.—BATTLE HARBOR AND ISLAND.—THE ANCHORAGE.—THE MISSIONARIES.
Five o’clock, P. M. What a pleasing contrast! We have been tossing nearly all day upon a rough, inclement ocean, and are now on the sunny, smooth waters of the bay, gliding westward, with Cape St. Louis close upon our right. We have sailed from winter into summer, almost as suddenly as we come out of the fog, at times—bursting out of it into the clear air, as an eagle breaks out of a cloud. It is fairly a luxury to bask in this delicious sunshine, and smell the mingled perfume of flowers and the musky spruce. Mr. Hutchinson is filled with delight to find himself once more on this beautiful bay. The rocky hill-country along the western shores, nine or ten miles distant, is not the mainland, he tells us, but islands, separated from the mainland, and from each other, by narrow waters, occasionally expanding into lakes of great depth, and extending more than forty miles from the sea. Were these savage hills and cliffs beautified with verdure, and sprinkled with villages and dwellings, this would class among the finest bays of the world. Across it to the south, some seven miles, and partly out to sea, lies a cluster of picturesque islands, where is Battle Harbor, the home of the missionaries, and the principal port on the lengthy coast of Labrador.
A fine iceberg, of the fashion of a sea-shell, broken open to the afternoon sun, and unfolding great beauty, lies in the middle of the bay. We are sailing past it, on our passage to the harbor, just near enough for a good view. It gleams in the warm sun like highly-burnished steel, changing, as we pass it, into many complexions—changeable silks and the rarest china. The superlatives are the words that one involuntarily calls to his aid in the presence of an iceberg. From this bright creation floating in the purple water, I look up to the bright clouds floating in the blue air, and easily discover likenesses in their features, ways and colors.
The coast of Labrador is the edge of a vast solitude of rocky hills, split and blasted by the frosts, and beaten by the waves of the Atlantic, for unknown ages. Every form into which rocks can be washed and broken, is visible along its almost interminable shores. A grand headland, yellow, brown and black, in its horrid nakedness, is ever in sight, one to the north of you, one to the south. Here and there upon them are stripes and patches of pale green—mosses, lean grasses, and dwarf shrubbery. Occasionally, miles of precipice front the sea, in which the fancy may roughly shape all the structures of human art, castles, palaces and temples. Imagine an entire side of Broadway piled up solidly, one, two, three hundred feet in height, often more, and exposed to the charge of the great Atlantic rollers, rushing into the churches, halls, and spacious buildings, thundering through the doorways, dashing in at the windows, sweeping up the lofty fronts, twisting the very cornices with snowy spray, falling back in bright green scrolls and cascades of silvery foam. And yet, all this imagined, can never reach the sentiment of these precipices.
More frequent, though, than headlands and perpendicular sea-fronts are the sea-slopes, often bald, tame, and wearisome to the eye, now and then the perfection of all that is picturesque and rough, a precipice gone to pieces, its softer portions dissolved down to its roots, its flinty bones left standing, a savage scene that scares away all thoughts of order and design in nature. If I am not mistaken, there are times when a slope of the kind, a mile or more in length, and in places some hundreds of feet in breadth from the tide up to the highest line of washing, is one of the most terribly beautiful of ocean sights. In an easterly gale, the billows roll up out of the level of the ocean, and wreck themselves upon these crags, rushing back through gulfs and chasms in a way at once awfully brilliant and terrific.
This is the rosy time of Labrador. The blue interior hills, and the stony vales that wind up among them from the sea, have a summer-like and pleasant air. I find myself peopling these regions, and dotting their hills, valleys, and wild shores with human habitations. A second thought, and a mournful one it is, tells me that no men toil in the fields away there; no women keep the house off there; there no children play by the brooks, or shout around the country school-house; no bees come home to the hive; no smoke curls from the farm-house chimney; no orchard blooms; no bleating sheep fleck the mountain-sides with whiteness; and no heifer lows in the twilight. There is nobody there; there never was but a miserable and scattered few, and there never will be. It is a great and terrible wilderness of a thousand miles, and lonesome to the very wild animals and birds. Left to the still visitations of the light from the sun, moon, and stars, and the auroral fires, it is only fit to look upon, and then be given over to its primeval solitariness. But for the living things of its waters, the cod, the salmon and the seal, which bring thousands of adventurous fishermen and traders to its bleak shores, Labrador would be as desolate as Greenland.