“There are traditions,” says Mr. Wirt Sikes, “of sailors who in the early part of the present century actually went ashore on the fairy islands, not knowing that they were such until they returned to their boats, when they were filled with awe at seeing the islands disappear from their sight, neither sinking in the sea nor floating away upon the waters, but simply vanishing suddenly.”
There is pleasantness and softness in the fancy of men in olden days putting forth to sea in search of islands of bliss, of insulated paradises as visionary as the poet’s dream-like shore dimly resounding the wash of fairy breakers.[[67]] The mariner must have spun his yarn to some purpose to awaken that thirsty desire of emigration. Many wonders, which might have remained hidden for ever in the dark ocean solitude, were lighted on by elderly gentlemen with long hair and in costumes like bed-gowns, who were abroad searching for spots which the Jacks of that age had declared to be out and away superior to Eden. Maildun, a Celtic hero, one of these searchers, came across several islands filled with demons and monsters. He also encountered a Circe, and eventually the terrestrial paradise. But nothing particular seems to have come of these discoveries, and it is to be suspected that he did not take the trouble to verify their position. Another person, a saint, after a long search, found a holy island inhabited by twenty-four monks. How these monks managed to get there, in what condition the saint found them, whether they were spontaneous growths or a kind of melancholic survival of a state of society whose origin is hopelessly indeterminable, we are not told. The same saint also met with an island whose inhabitants were fallen angels, and an island populated by fiends, who fell upon him and forced him to fly. In fact, if this saint is to be believed, he was quite the Captain Cook of his day. Yet his search after the Australia Incognita of bliss must, I think, be pronounced distinctly unsatisfactory, though one cannot but respect a theory of life that could impart the animation of adventure to a monastic bosom.
[67].
“Magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.”—Keats.
But much of what old ocean has of romance in its history lies in the ancient reports of its wonders, and in the interpretation of its legible characters by the child-like vision of the vanished shipmen. Remove those Fortunate Islands, those Blessed Islands, those islands haunted by “demon women wailing for their lovers:” strike out from the annals those fables, faint with a strange light, of venturesome marine saints, of marvelling, bright-eyed, hook-nosed “marineeres;” and I am afraid that what else of human poetry remains must be sought in the ship’s forecastle. The very fish they saw, sporting in the yeast over the side, were as astonishing as the islands they passed. “Along all that coast,” wrote Mr. Thomas Stevens, “we often times saw thing swimming upon the water like a cock’s combe (which they call a ship at Guinea), but the colour much fairer; which combe standeth upon a thing almost like the swimmer of a fish in colour and bignesse, and beareth underneath in the water, strings, which save it from turning over.”[[68]] “Od’s fish!” would seem an appropriate expression in the mouths of such navigators. What sort of thing is this cockscomb with strings? They wrapt up what they saw in quaint dark words; and their imagination operating on what they beheld set life a-teeming with marvels. Or mark them sailing past a headland: “At this Cape lieth a great stone, to the which the barkes that passed thereby, were wont to make offerings of butter, meale and other victuals, thinking that unlesse they did so, their barkes or vessels should there perish, as it hath been oftentimes seene; and there it is very darke and mistie.”[[69]] Thus these poor old fellows, crossing themselves and singing a litany the while, propitiate the demon of the place with offerings of wet and dry stores, and you see them in fancy grouped in a body upon the deck, watching with bowed heads and level, alarmed gaze the sullen and dismal loom of the coast slowly veering away upon the quarter, as though the rugged, fog-swollen mass might at any moment shape itself into the titanic proportions of the fiend-king of the cold and barren land.
[68]. Hakluyt.
[69]. “Jenkins’s Voyage.” Hakluyt.
To those early eyes such monsters revealed themselves, that the like was never heard of before or since. A crew would come home and say that they had met with an extraordinary animal that had a horse’s body and a pig’s head; another, that they had seen a similar wonder, only in this case it was a stag’s body with horns; a third, that one day, the sea being calm, there rose close to the ship an animal that had the head and snout of a boar, and that spurted water through a tube at the top of its head. Those were the halcyon days of the mermaid and the merman; leviathan then sported in twenty different terrible shapes, with mouth most hideously garnished with quadruple rows of teeth, gaping moonwards; the sea-serpent wrapped the spinning globe about with a million leagues of scales; strange voices whispered in mysterious accents under the still intertropic starlight, and shapes like the shadows of pinions moved upon the midnight air; spectral lanthorns were hung up by spirit-hands at the yard-arms and on the bowsprit-end, and, by their dull, graveyard illumination, cast a dismal complexion of death upon the upwards-staring faces of the mariners. I find those early seamen always sailing along as if possessed with an uncontrollable awe and reverence; they are punctual in their prayers; the whole story of their navigation is but a single-hearted reference to the majesty and mercy of the Most High; the atmosphere about them trembles to their devout muttering of Aves and the low chanting of psalms. The ocean was a mystery, the home and the haunt of creatures and objects not to be conceived by the understanding of men. The spirit and influence of the liquid solitude beyond the familiar line, over whose edge the sun rose or sank every day, you will find expressed with artless, most impressive power in the narrative of the first voyage of Columbus in Harris’s Collection, briefly recited as the great admiral’s adventures there are. For such and for earlier mariners—as indeed for later, down even to the times of Dampier, Shelvocke, Cowley, and the Dutch and French explorers of the early years of the last century—the sea could not but hold islands of enchantment, green places deep in its heart, on whose sands the water-nymphs fresh from their coral pavilions, sat combing their yellow hair; paradisaical abodes whose soil was brilliant with gold dust, over whose trees, radiant with fruit, flew birds of a plumage of dazzling splendour, in whose central valley girls of startling beauty might be seen in the moonlight threading with languid eyes the mazes of some amorous dance. Did not even Herman Melville, so recently as 1830 or 1840, find some such enchanted island as this in the Marquesas group?
The sudden emergence or subsidence of land would also help to confirm the ancient mariner in his belief in magic isles, and in their controlment by spells of necromancy. In an old nautical magazine, dated 1802, I find the following: “On the seventh of June, 1790, the Seahorse, Captain Mayo, of Boston, from the coast of Africa, saw (in lat. 73 south) a large point of land sink in one moment into the unfathomable deep! As soon as the crew recovered from the inexpressible horror which so tremendous a spectacle must have impressed on their minds, they steered to some ships catching whales, and found that their men had been spectators of the same awful scene. The seamen involuntarily dropped down upon their knees and thanked God for their escape, having been on the same point of land a short time before its sudden disappearance.”