No tenant of a cradle was ever more simple or more trusting than I became at that moment. I literally rejoiced in the abrogation of all the pride and manliness that I had boasted of two hours before. I flung away my self-dependence, and my soul ran abashed into the hollow of His hand, even as a frightened child runs to its father’s arms. As I looked shuddering upon the vast and restless waste of waters in front of me, I felt as if some person had taken me to the confines of that time which human calculation can compass, and holding me on the chill edge of that gulf called the Eternal, had asked me to translate its meaning, and pronounce its uttermost boundary.
I suppose the truth of the matter is that I was about scared to death; certain it is that I crouched there for hours, trembling, and yet gazing out beyond me upon the lapping waters, from where they parted before our ship to where they curled up against the half-consenting sky! At last I arose, shook myself, as if throwing off some nightmare, and sought the crowd again.
I can never forget how dissonant and inopportune the flippant conversation of the voyagers seemed to me to be at that time. It was as if some revelers should jest and shout in a great church. With the awful abyss in front, and these prattlers to the rear, one had the two extremes. There was God in the deep and awful stillness ahead, and the world behind in the chatter and gayety that rang out “like a man’s cracked laughter heard way down in hell.”
The first man’s voice that I heard, as I turned away from the solemn hush of the Eternal that yawned before us, was that of a young fellow who remarked to his chum rhapsodically (evidently alluding to some female acquaintance), “Why, she had a leg on her like a government mule.” These words bit into my memory as if they were cut there by white-hot pincers.
HOW SEA-SICKNESS WORKS.
I believe I have said somewhere in this letter that my soul didn’t leap to my lips when I went out to meet the ocean. I regret to say that my breakfast did. I do not know whether any writer has addressed himself to sea-sickness. I am certain that no writer of sacred or profane literature can do it sufficient injustice. Walt Whitman might do it. He’s better on the yawp than any poet I know. Never tell me again that hell is a lake of fire and brimstone. Eternal punishment means riding on a rough sea, in a steamer that don’t roll well, without a copper-bottomed stomach, and a self-acting stop-valve in the throat. To have been jostled about in a lake of fire would have been real cheerful business compared to the unutterable anguish that I suffered for three days. I do believe that if I had tied a cannon-ball to a crumb of bread and swallowed them both, the crumb would have come prancing to the front again, and brought the cannon-ball with it. It at last became a sort of dismal joke to send anything down. But this was not what made it so hard to bear. It was the abject degradation that it brought upon me. The absolute prostration of every mental, moral and physical activity, of every emotion, impulse and ambition; the reduction of a system that boasted of some nervous power and of excessive tone, to the condition of a wet dish-clout,—these were the things that made sea-sickness a misery beyond the power of words. For three days I lay like an old volcano, still, desolate and haggard; but with an exceedingly active crater. I was brought to that condition which Chesterfield says is the finest pitch to which a gentleman can be brought, that sublime pitch of indifference that enables him to hear of the loss of an estate, or a poodle dog, with the same feeling. Nothing disturbs the man who is sea-sick. He blinks in the face of disaster, and yawps at death itself. He actually longs for sensation. To stick him with a pin, or drop ice down his back, would be a mercy. He spraddles madly over the ship, flabbing himself like a mollusk over everything he stumbles on, and knows not night or morning. As far as I was concerned, I was seized with a yawning that came very near proving fatal. I was taken with a longing to turn myself wrong-side outwards, and hang myself on the taffrail. Several times I was on the point of doing it; but I struggled against it and saved myself.
THE SIGHTS OF THE SEA.
The “sights” of the sea are not what they are cracked up to be. Some writer, Lowell, I believe, who was seduced into going seaward, had a sovereign contempt for everything connected with the sea. With a charming abandon, he says, “A whale looks like a brown paper parcel—the white stripes down his back resembling the pack-thread.” It is not hard to bring everything down to this standard.
The very motion of the waves, the cause of rhymes unnumbered, becomes terribly monotonous after the first day or two. The rise and relapse of the tinted water glistening in the sun, and blooming lilies on the wave-crest, is a pretty enough sight at first; but before long one longs to shiver the surface of the deep, and calm its eternal restlessness. The waves, wriggling up like a woman’s regrets from nowhere, come dragging themselves over the weary waste, and, plashing back upon each other, spring off on another uneasy remonstrance, until the brain of the looker-on is actually addled. I would have given a great deal to have had the power to have settled the upheaving waters for one hour, just as a schoolboy has the power, and the inclination, too, to break the inexorable calm of a mill-pond by splashing it with rocks. Nothing tires us like sameness; sameness, inactivity, is intolerable.
We saw some flying-fish. And we saw, what I valued much more, on board with us a man who knew a man whose cousin had seen the great sea-serpent. I have a great respect for a man who knows somebody that has seen the sea-serpent. He is a link between us and the supernatural in the ocean. He is a relic, stranded by the shore of science, of that world of wonders that began with the syrens, was modernized with the mermaids, and that ends in the devil-fish and sea-serpent. While he lives I want to be near him. When he dies I want his tooth set on my mantel-piece; it will be a sort of guarantee, under which I can read the weird stories of the old, unexplored ocean, that made boyhood joyous. Give me the sea-serpent as a fact, and I will swear to the mermaids, bet on the phantom ship, and pin my faith to the syrens.