At noon he took the sun and ascertained that the good ship had made three hundred yards in twenty-four hours, and this enabled him to win the pool. Anybody can win the pool when nobody but himself has the privilege of straightening out the ship’s run and getting it right.
The Admiral has breakfasted alone, in state: bacon, beans, and gin; at noon he dines alone in state: bacon, beans, and gin; at six he sups alone in state: bacon, beans, and gin; at 11 P.M. he takes a night relish, alone, in state: bacon, beans, and gin. At none of these orgies is there any music; the ship-orchestra is modern. After his final meal he returned thanks for his many blessings, a little over-rating their value, perhaps, and then he laid off his silken splendours or his gilded hardware, and turned in, in his little coffin-bunk, and blew out his flickering stencher, and began to refresh his lungs with inverted sighs freighted with the rich odours of rancid oil and bilgewater. The sighs returned as snores, and then the rats and the cockroaches swarmed out in brigades and divisions and army corps and had a circus all over him.
Such was the daily life of the great discoverer in his marine basket during several historic weeks; and the difference between his ship and his comforts and ours is visible almost at a glance.
When he returned, the King of Spain, marvelling, said—as history records:
‘This ship seems to be leaky. Did she leak badly?’
‘You shall judge for yourself, sire. I pumped the Atlantic Ocean through her sixteen times on the passage.’
This is General Horace Porter’s account. Other authorities say fifteen.
It can be shown that the differences between that ship and the one I am writing these historical contributions in, are in several respects remarkable. Take the matter of decoration, for instance. I have been looking around again, yesterday and to-day, and have noted several details which I conceive to have been absent from Columbus’s ship, or at least slurred over and not elaborated and perfected. I observe state-room doors three inches thick, of solid oak, and polished. I note companionway vestibules with walls, doors, and ceilings panelled in polished hard-woods, some light, some dark, all dainty and delicate joiner-work, and yet every joint compact and tight; with beautiful pictures inserted, composed of blue tiles—some of the pictures containing as many as sixty tiles—and the joinings of those tiles perfect. These are daring experiments. One would have said that the first time the ship went straining and labouring through a storm-tumbled sea those tiles would gape apart and drop out. That they have not done so is evidence that the joiner’s art has advanced a good deal since the days when ships were so shackly that when a giant sea gave them a wrench the doors came unbolted. I find the walls of the dining-saloon upholstered with mellow pictures wrought in tapestry, and the ceiling aglow with pictures done in oil. In other places of assembly I find great panels filled with embossed Spanish leather, the figures rich with gilding and bronze. Everywhere I find sumptuous masses of colour—colour, colour, colour—colour all about, colour of every shade and tint and variety; and as a result, the ship is bright and cheery to the eye, and this cheeriness invades one’s spirit and contents it. To fully appreciate the force and spiritual value of this radiant and opulent dream of colour, one must stand outside at night in the pitch dark and the rain, and look in through a port, and observe it in the lavish splendour of the electric lights. The old-time ships were dull, plain, graceless, gloomy, and horribly depressing. They compelled the blues; one could not escape the blues in them. The modern idea is right: to surround the passenger with conveniences, luxuries, and abundance of inspiriting colour. As a result, the ship is the pleasantest place one can be in, except, perhaps, one’s home.
A VANISHED SENTIMENT
One thing is gone, to return no more for ever—the romance of the sea. Soft sentimentality about the sea has retired from the activities of this life, and is but a memory of the past, already remote and much faded. But within the recollection of men still living, it was in the breast of every individual; and the further any individual lived from salt water the more of it he kept in stock. It was as pervasive, as universal, as the atmosphere itself. The mere mention of the sea, the romantic sea, would make any company of people sentimental and mawkish at once. The great majority of the songs that were sung by the young people of the back settlements had the melancholy wanderer for subject, and his mouthings about the sea for refrain. Picnic parties, paddling down a creek in a canoe when the twilight shadows were gathering, always sang