Fac pelagus me scire probes, quo carbasa laxo.
"Muse, help me to show that I know the sea over which I spread
my sails."
Thus, six hundred years ago, wrote Guillaume-le-Breton[458], my fellow-countryman. Restored to the sea, I began anew the contemplation of my solitude; but across the ideal world of my dreams, stern monitors appeared to me: France and the events of reality. My lurking-place during the day, when I wished to avoid my fellow-passengers, was the main-top, to which I climbed nimbly amid the applause of the sailors. I there sat and commanded the waves.
The vast expanse, doubly hung with azure, had the appearance of a canvas prepared to receive the future creations of a mighty painter. The colour of the water was like that of liquid glass. Long and steep undulations opened within their hollows vistas of the ocean deserts: those wavering landscapes made clear to my eyes the comparison drawn in the Scriptures of the earth reeling before the Lord, like a drunken man[459]. Sometimes one might have pronounced the space narrow and restricted, for want of a vanishing point; but if a wave happened to raise its crest, a billow to curve in imitation of a distant coast, a shoal of dog-fish to pass along the horizon, then one had a scale to measure by. The expanse was revealed still more when a mist, creeping to the ocean's surface, seemed to enlarge the very immensity.
On descending from the eyrie of the mast, as when, in former days, ever reduced to a solitary existence, I climbed down from my nest in the willow-tree, I supped on a ship-biscuit, a little sugar, and a lemon; I then lay down, either wrapped in my cloak on deck, or in my cot below: I had but to stretch my arm to reach from my bed to my coffin.
The wind compelled us to bear to the North, and we came alongside of the bank of Newfoundland. Floating icebergs roamed in the midst of a pale, cold mist.
The men of the trident have sports which are handed down to them from their ancestors: when you cross the Line, you must make up your mind to receive "baptism;" the same ceremony occurs beneath the Tropics, the same ceremony on the bank of Newfoundland, and whatever the spot, the leader of the masquerade is always "the Old Man of the Tropics." To the sailors, tropical and hydropical are interchangeable terms: the Old Man of the Tropics therefore has an enormous paunch; he is dressed, even when beneath his native Tropics, in all the sheepskins and all the furred jackets that the crew can supply. He sits squatting in the main-top and roaring from time to time. Every one looks at him from below: he begins to climb down the shrouds, moving heavily like a bear, and stumbling like Silenus. As he sets foot on deck, he utters fresh roars, gives a bound, seizes a pail, fills it with sea-water, and empties it over the chief of those who have not crossed the Equator or who have not reached the line of ice. You fly beneath the decks, you spring upon the hatches, you clamber up the masts: Old Father Tropics is after you; all this ends in a generous gift of drink-money: games of Amphitrite which Homer would have celebrated, even as he sang Proteus, if old Oceanus had been known in his entirety in the time of Ulysses; but, in those days, only his head was visible at the Pillars of Hercules: his body lay hidden and covered the world.
We steered for the islands of Saint-Pierre and Miquelon, in search of a new port. When we came in sight of the former, one morning between ten and twelve o'clock, we were almost upon it; its coast showed like a black hump through the fog.
We anchored in front of the capital of the island: we could not see it, but we heard the sounds on land. The passengers hastened to disembark; the Superior of Saint-Sulpice, who had been constantly racked with sea-sickness, was so weak that he had to be carried on shore. I took a separate lodging; I waited until a gust of wind tore the mist asunder and showed me the place in which I was living and, so to speak, the faces of my hosts in this land of shadows.
The Isle of Saint-Pierre.
The port and roadstead of Saint-Pierre are situated between the east coast of the island and a long-shaped islet called the Île aux Chiens, or Isle of Dogs. The port, known as the Barachois, or Little Inlet, cuts into the land and ends in a brackish pool. Small, barren mountains crowd together in the centre of the island; some are detached and overhang the coast; others have at their feet a skirt of flat and turfy moorland. The look-out hill is visible from the market-town.