If this perpetual motion hold, the cargo of cheeses we shipped at Dordrecht, flat as single Glo’sters, will be delivered in London spherical as bowls! The Jung Vrouw herself, before she reaches the Nore, will be a washing-tub! I have doubts whether the salt beef, produced at this day’s luncheon, was, originally, a round. The leathern conveniency that I brought aboard, a fair and square trunk, is already almost a portmanteau;—and, what is worse, every several morsel I have swallowed this blessed day without bliss, seems rolling itself into a bolus or a pill,—whether of opium or ipecacuanha, I leave you to divine. If the calm should continue, I may become—who knows?—a Ball myself—a Master Biffin! Every half-hour, on feeling my knees and elbows, I find joints by this friction losing some of their asperities, and getting obtuser. A little more, and I shan’t have a good point about me!
Is such as this a season to be squeamishly retentive in delivering one’s sentiments? Or, rather, is not open candour inevitable; seeing that you cannot have any reserve even with the merest stranger? It is impossible to keep your feelings to yourself. In spite, then, of Britannia, the Yacht Club, the Navy Pay,—of Dibdin, Campbell, and Basil Hall,—of the Lords of the Admiralty, with Portsmouth, Devonport, and Gosport, to boot—in spite of the Royal William, nay, in spite of my very self, the truth will out!—not sneaking out, or stepping out, or backing out, but bolting out, in a plain unequivocal straightforward style. I DO envy the simple man, with his sheer ignorance about rudders and compasses. I do detest and abominate the ocean—or to phrase it more mildly—the sea and I cannot agree with each other—there is sure to be falling-out between us—we can never be bosom friends.
The Marine Society must despise me for it; my Elder Brethren of the Trinity House will long to dispose of me as Joseph was made away with by his elder Brethren; Boatswain Smith will preach, write Tracts and distribute them, against me: the Greenwich Pensioners will bind themselves by a round robin to kick me with me with their knottiest legs; Long Tom Coffin himself will be for fetching me, with a shroud in one hand, and a dead-light in the other; but I cannot eat my words.
SEE-SAW.
It is no time, when you cannot keep your legs, to “stand bandying compliments with your sovereign,” that is, Neptune. If he were present at this moment, in this cabin, I would tell him, from this my seat on its floor, that he might very much improve his paternal estate, to wit, by levelling, and still more by draining it. I would flatly say to him, lying flat on my face as it now happens, that a few little gravel walks, merely across and across it, would be of rare advantage both for show and use. For ’tis a sorry pleasure-garden that is all fish-pond; and, finally, I would broadly hint to him, from the broad of my back, as I am at this present—— But this is bullying Taurus behind his back. There is no sea-god present, only the Skipper. How he skips in such weather, give him his pick of all the ropes in the ship, is a miracle I would fain see ere I believe in it. For my own part I cannot even step deliberately over a thread. Perhaps, without going too curiously into the Doctrine of Predestination, as regards the soul, it may hold good as concerns the body. Undoubtedly there be some men born to sit fast upon horses; others to fall off therefrom as if they had soaped saddles. Some to slide and skate upon the ice; others only to slip, straddle, and sprawl upon it. Some to walk, or at least waddle, on ships’ decks; others to flop, flounder, wallow, and grovel thereon. That is my destiny. None can be more safe on the Serpentine, or sure in the saddle;—but Fate, long before my great-great-great-grandfather was put to his feet, forbade me sea-legs. An average pedestrian on land, on the caulked plank I am a born cripple, hopeless of cure. Put me apprentice to the Goodwin, or the Dudgeon Light, at the end of my term you shall find me as unsafe on my soles as when I first paid my footing. Even now, whilst Hans Vandergroot and his crew are comfortably promenading, I rock and totter, balancing one end against the other, like a great rickety babe, until, after some posturing and scrambling, I trip up over nothing, and fall flat on everything. An earthquake in London, when its streets are what is called greasy, could not more puzzle my centre of gravity; if, indeed, I was not born a mathematical monster, devoid of that material point!
By way of clincher, Fate, who never does things by halves, whilst foredooming me incapable of standing my ground at sea, has also denied me the power of settling it. A camp-stool is sure to decamp with me; a chair, as if it stood on Siberian ice, suddenly throws itself on its back, and behold me in an extempore sledge! Barrels roll from under me; coils of rope shuffle me off. Even on the plain bare hard deck, or cabin floor, I throw demi-summersets, as if I had been returned to Parliament to represent the Antipodes by sitting on the back of my head.
To complete the Sea Curse,—there are three Fates, and each had a boon for me at my birth—it was ordained that, like the great Nelson, I should never sail from fresh water into salt, without knowing it by a general rising and commotion, which might be called figuratively, a Mutiny at the Nore.
Like the standing and sitting infirmity, it is incurable. On my voyage outwards I tried every popular recipe; the hard ones first, to wit, raw carrots, raw onions, sailors’ biscuit with Dutch cheese, hard-boiled eggs, hard dumplings, raw stockfish. Next the easy ones: namely, cream cheese, Welsh rabbits, maccaroni, very hasty pudding, and insupportable soup. Then the neutrals: such as chewed blotting-paper, dry oatmeal, pounded egg-shells, scraped chalk, and unbaked dough.
To wash these down, I took, by prescription, tea without milk, coffee without sugar, bark without wine, water without brandy; and these formulæ all failing, I then tried them, as witches pray, backwards; brandy without water, wine without bark, and so forth. The experimental combinations followed; rum and milk, and mustard; eggs and wine, and camomile tea; gin and beer, and vinegar; sea-water and salad-oil, mulled, with sugar and nutmeg. Of which last, I drank by advice most prodigiously, the Doctors of the Marine College dispensing always on the Homœopathic principle, that a large dose of anything, whereof a little would set you wrong on the land, will set you right on the sea.