The steward was passing from the galley to the cabin table with a plate of hash. A sudden lurch made him lose his balance. His arms went into the air and the hash left the plate and went in a body against the side of the ship where a coil of rope hung; and it remained fast, the coil forming an oval frame for it. We pitied the steward but did not weep for the hash. Some of us thought we could understand the action of a company of boys at a boarding school, who were asked in Lent what luxury they would each propose to forego during the season of fasting and humiliation as a religious offering. Slips of paper were given to them and in a little while were collected. Every one of the forty papers bore the word, Hash. Some of our company were so lost to a sense of propriety as to exult at the steward’s mishap.
RELIGIOUS ADMONITION FROM THE STEWARDESS.
We have a stewardess, Annie Cardozo, wife of the steward who is a Cape de Verd, Portuguese, man. She is an Irish woman, very talkative, of good disposition. She was fixing my mattress; I remarked that it was too low on the side next the room. “Well,” said she, pleasantly, “we must think of the Lord, he had no where to lie down.” She may have thought that I was querulous, which in the present instance was not the case; but I accepted the admonition.
DECISION IN A CAPTAIN.
One evening in the Gulf Stream just at dark the top-gallant sail was blowing adrift from the “gaskets,” (the ropes with which it was furled;) and the whole sail was likely to get loose. The captain said that it must be secured. The mate doubted if it was safe to send men aloft in such a gale. The captain replied that he had been obliged when he was before the mast to go aloft in worse weather. He could not spare the sail. The mate gave the order: “Go aloft, some of you, and make fast that top-gallant sail.” Six or eight men sprang into the rigging and soon the sail was furled.
The captain’s eye is necessarily the most of the time all over the ship. We were sitting on deck when the ship was laboring in a cross sea. He noticed that the main topmast stays quivered. The stays had within a few days all been “set up” for Cape weather, but these were not so taut as they should be. It was only a wakeful eye which would have noticed it. The remedy was applied at once. It is interesting to me as a father to hear the young captain spoken of by the sailors to each other as “the old man.” Had he a wife, though she were only eighteen years of age she would nevertheless be called “the old woman.” This made it less offensive to hear myself, though decidedly far from seventy, spoken of as “the old gentleman.”
THE NIGHT WATCH.
At night, or from eight P. M. the two mates take turns to be four hours each on deck, with or near the man at the wheel. They direct the steering according to the captain’s orders, oversee the ship, and report to the captain several times during the night as to wind and weather. Two of the crew keep a lookout in the bows two hours at a time watching against collisions and in some latitudes against ice. The law of the road, “When you meet turn to the right,” is the law at sea. The chances of collision are few. You wonder that you so unfrequently meet a sail, especially remembering the long list in every paper of arrivals, departures, vessels spoken. In thick weather, especially while on a coast, the danger increases and a sharp lookout is the rule.
FLYING FISH
I have seen at least a thousand in the last few weeks. They resemble the smelt, though larger. They start up before or near the ship in small flocks and fly fifty or a hundred feet. By taking wing though for short distances they are able to elude the dolphin, the swiftest of their pursuers, who wondering what has become of them, darts on ahead. Their escape by flying is probably as incredible to the dolphin as the sailors tell us it was to the mother of a sailor who was questioning him as to his experiences at sea. He told her many wonderful things, as, that a wheel of one of Pharaoh’s chariots came up on his anchor; that he saw a whale caught, in whose stomach was found a handkerchief with a Hebrew word on it which a minister on shore declared to be Jonah; that there are now fishes in the sea of Tiberias which have in their gills fluted pieces of pearl resembling money, by which name they are now called, and that some give them the name of “Peter’s pence,” supposing the fishes to be descendants of the fish which Peter drew from the sea. But when he described fishes flying in the air, taking wing before his ship, the faith of the listener gave way; the other stories, she said might be true, for they had a foundation in holy writ; but flying fish were too great a tax on her belief.—One was washed on board, whose wings, extended and dried, had a gossamer appearance so delicate that one might readily believe them to be the wings of something more delicate than a fish.