Do I dream it, or does some one mention to-morrow as my thirty-eighth birthday? Nonsense! I am only sixteen—making my first sea-voyage "round the Horn" in the ship Sandwich—Drew, master—fifty-eight days out from New York.
I have not found a sailor's life all that my fancy painted it; rather the reverse. I am disappointed with the life for which I once longed so eagerly—disgusted, I may say. Which is not so surprising. Like other home boys, I have been accustomed to wear dry clothing, to sleep all night, to have father and mother— But never mind; those last words make me feel more homesick than ever.
It is seven o'clock a.m.—or six bells, if you like it better. The starboard watch, to which I belong, is on deck, but as all hands have spent rather more time on deck than below for about two weeks, it don't matter much, only for the prospect of hot coffee sweetened with molasses at breakfast-time. And when a fellow has not had a dry thread on him for days, something hot to drink, even if it's only dried peas and chiccory, is a great luxury.
Of course it is blowing a gale of wind—it has done nothing else for a month, but for a wonder the gale comes from the right direction. That is why Captain Drew is carrying sail so, for, taking advantage of the fair wind, the old ship is running like mad through the straits of Le Maire, which is a passage about fourteen miles wide, between Staten Land and Terra del Fuego.
Yesterday the decks were all awash with water, and the rigging dripped like a sponge. To-day everything from the royal truck down is covered with ice. This is very hard upon one's fingers, especially as it don't do to wear mittens aloft—even if you have them.
If you want to know how it seems to reef or stow a sail at such times, just try and roll up a yard or two of sheet-iron, out-of-doors, with bare hands, when the thermometer is at zero or a little lower. But it is not hard to get round deck in icy weather. Oh no. All you have to do is to sit down and wait for the ship to roll the right way—you won't have long to wait, either.
It blows harder than ever. I should like to see a picture of the old ship now, as with everything set but the royals, she goes tearing and plunging through the long gray seas, with a gray sky overhead, and a gray fog-bank all around the horizon. How I should enjoy seeing such a picture—especially if it was hanging against the sitting-room wall, and I was standing directly in front of it!
"Look!" exclaims old Martin, who is standing beside me at the rail. And all at once on the starboard bow I see breaking through the gray mist a bleak, barren, rocky promontory, pointing like a great index finger to the place where the waters of the Pacific and Atlantic oceans meet. At least so I try to express it in a poetical kind of way, but old Martin only grinned.
"That's Cape 'Orn," he replies, "an' before we get round t'other side of it, if we don't ketch it, call me a Dutchman."
I had thought there was nothing left in the way of bad weather to catch. But I am mistaken. By six o'clock in the afternoon the ship is under lower topsails, with yards braced against the backstays, buffeting the longest seas and the fiercest southwest gales of rain, sleet, snow, and hail that we have seen yet.