“Praise God, from whom all blessings flow.”
It had been a day from beginning to end of constant pleasure, from the moment that we entered the Straits of Le Maire. We had accomplished one great design in our voyage. Would that the pleasant theory that musical sounds leave their vibration in the air might have reality given to it, and praise to God break forth from all of every language who navigate the Cape!
We had reason to feel that we were not a great way from circumpolar regions; for at a quarter before eleven, the night previous, there were lingering streaks of pink light in the west. We never before read out of doors so late in the evening as we did that 21st of December on deck.
We had been steering south, going five degrees below the Cape; then we needed to turn and go northward; but the fierce winds made no account of our plan. You may be several weeks trying in vain, as a ship belonging to our firm was, to double the Cape; but by favoring winds, we were only six days. Once only during this time had we a full view of the Horn; our captain had been here six times, and now for the second time only saw the Cape. Nothing lay between us and the Antarctic Circle and the South Pole. The waves were Cape-Horn swells, peculiar to that region. The sight of the ocean there was wild beyond description. Now and then the sun would come out, but his smile seemed sarcastic. Going on deck to view the tempest you are made to feel, as the ship goes down into deep places, that you would be more surprised at her coming up than if she should disappear. It is a good time and place for faith. One of the Latin fathers said, “Qui discat orare, discat navigare;” Let him who would learn to pray go to sea. It is to be doubted whether there are many places on the globe where one feels the power of solitude precisely as here. In the depth of a wilderness, or among mountains, solitude is more like death; but here it seems to have consciousness; you are spell-bound by some awful power; there is an infinitude about these watery realms; it seems like being in eternity. In the ascent of Mont Blanc, while gazing from the Mer de Glace on those needles of granite, inaccessible except to the eagle, I once felt that nothing could exceed the sense of desolateness there inspired; but to be at the end of a continent, with two oceans separating and forming a wild race-way where they go asunder, all the winds and storms being summoned to witness the inauguration of two oceans, their frantic uproar seemingly designed for the great occasion, Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego with their stupendous solitudes listening to the clamor; and then the feeling that the next place recorded on the map is the Antarctic Circle, with its barriers of cold and ice, you are warranted in the conviction that you are as near the confines of unearthly dimensions as you can be on this planet. You think of home, and the thought of your separation from friends and country and your consignment to these awful wilds, gives you a feeling of littleness, of nothingness, seldom if ever experienced elsewhere. And here is the proud ship that stretched her length in the pier at New York so far as to hold her spar over the passing drays, reaching almost to the opposite ware-rooms, now less than an egg-shell in these waters,—a tiny nautilus, a bubble, whose destruction any moment, unseen by any human eye, could not detain any of these proud waters to be so much as a mound over her grave.
One day, before we entered the Straits and reached Cape Horn, along the neighborhood of Patagonia, the sea was more than usually disturbed, a ground-swell succeeding a gale lifting the waves higher than we had seen them, so that the motion of the ship had no uniformity for any two consecutive moments during the larger part of the day,—a cold, cheerless day, the sun now and then shining faintly, the wind ahead, no chance for a nautical observation, everything to the last degree forlorn. A bird came in all this turmoil and lighted in the water near the ship, and swam about us. The sight suggested the following lines:—
THE CAPE-HORN ALBATROSS.
The ship lay tossing on the stormy ocean,
A head wind challenging her right of way;
Sail after sail she furled; in exultation
The waves accounted her their yielding prey.