They saw the land disappear; but suppose no other vessels had been in company, and it had chanced that none of the crew had seen the land sink, you have then the seeds of an amazing relation. Figure a dead calm, all hands below at dinner, and nobody on deck but the man at the wheel nodding drowsily over the spokes. The land was plain enough in sight, a mile distant, perhaps, when the crew left the deck; when they return it has vanished. Had it been a ship they would, of course, suppose that she had foundered. But land! is it possible that a tall, substantial mass of land shall vanish on a sudden like a wreath of tobacco smoke? Had the vessel been whirled away out of sight of it by a fierce current? Had she been insensibly blown some leagues along by a stout breeze of wind? No. The man at the wheel is questioned; he rubs his eyes, stares; it is the same marvel to him as to the others. Knowing something of the sailor’s character, I will venture to say that had not those men of the Seahorse actually seen the land go down, two-thirds of them would have gone to their graves persuaded that there had been witchcraft in the business. But put the date back three centuries, into the period of the real Ancient Mariner. He shall behold the cliff founder, if you please, and yet land at Plymouth or Erith with an imagination charged to bursting point with this obvious Satanic engorgement. I think I see him telling the story. Can his hearers, gazing upon his mahogany face, doubt that there are islands which rise and sink? and how can they rise or sink without magical possession, without being under the government of something to direct them? The ancient mariner may, indeed, be beforehand with a solution by importing, let me say, one jaw of a monstrous fish that did “suck ye londe down to ye admiration of ye beholders.” But failing some such explanation, the reason must be sought for devil-wards. The island or cliff easily becomes the abode of demons or of ocean-spirits, who use their dominions as a sort of ship, and who, when they desire a change of air or scene, alter their latitude and longitude by the easy expedient of a submarine excursion. Such a solution could not long miss of confirmation. For presently arrives some Elizabeth-Jonah, or some Ascension, of London, or Jesus, of Hull, with an extraordinary and incredible report: to wit, that being about fifty leagues to the westwards of the island of Madeira, there did happen a mighty commotion in the sea; the water boiled furiously, and out of the midst of it there arose a great flame that was followed by a thick black coil of smoke which emitted a most detestable stench. This, rising, did overspread the heavens with a sable canopy, through which the sun, that had before been ardent, glowed ruefully with a most affrighting face. When the atmosphere had somewhat cleared, and the sea fallen flat again, they observed a great heap of black land floating just where the flame had been; but now, to their great joy, a small gale happening, they hastily trimmed their sails to it and departed, with hearty thanksgiving for their merciful deliverance from a hideous and diabolic spot. There would be to the full as much truth in this as in the account of the subsidence. In every century there have been submarine volcanic disturbances which have dislodged or uphove points of land, rocks, little and even big islands. Suppose what these cheery old mariners beheld was, instead of land, a body of compacted weed; or, not impossibly, a dead whale. No matter! home with the thrilling story; and let any man be pilloried who shall dare to doubt that the rock that came up is not the very identical rock that went down!
I find a singular example of the credulity that gives to the sea the choicest flavour of romance in a note to the life of Sir William Gascoigne, Lord Chief Justice of the King’s Bench in the reign of King Henry IV., in the first edition (1750) of the “Biographia Britannica”:—
“When the said Sir Bernard Gascoigne” (the writer is referring to a descendant of Sir William) “returned from his embassy into England, he took shipping at Dunkirk, and one of the passengers who came over with him was Mrs. Aphra Behn, the ingenious poetess. It is asserted by the writer of her life that in the course of their voyage they all saw a surprising Phænomenon, whether formed by any rising exhalations or descending vapours shaped by the winds and irradiated by refracted lights, is not explained; but it appeared through Sir Bernard’s telescopes, in a clear day at a great distance, to be or to resemble a fine, gay, floating fabrick, adorned with figures, festoons, etc. At first they suspected some art in his glasses, till at last, as it approached, they could see it plainly without them; and the relater is so particular in the description as to assert that it appeared to be a four-squared floor of various coloured marble, having rows of fluted and twisted pillars ascending, with cupids on the top circled with vines and flowers, and streamers waving in the air. ’Tis added of this strange visionary, if not romantic or poetical, pageant—for fancy is an architect that can build castles in the clouds as well by sea as land—that it floated almost near enough for them to step out upon it; as if it would invite them to a safer landing than they sought by sailing; or pretended that the one should be as dangerous and deceitful as the other; for soon after the calm which ensued there arose such a violent storm that they were all shipwreckt, but happily in sight of land, to which by timely assistance they all got safe.”
Here, to be sure, we have a very circumstantial account of a very astonishing apparition. This would seem to have been the Blessed Island for which the saints and a noble Spanish lord made search in earlier times. It is a pity that the story comes to us in the life of so lively a romancer as Mrs. Aphra Behn; one would rather have had the grave and wary Sir Bernard’s version. Certain points suggest the legend of Vanderdecken, as for example the circumstance of the storm rising and shipwreck following the approach of the island-pavilion. This fabric of fluted pillars and radiant banners must count among the mysterious disappearances. Why, when these phenomenal glories of the deep floated into full view of the mariner—why had not he the heart to straightway launch his shallop, row with anchor and cable to the magic strand, and “fix” the place, as the Yankees would say, for the satisfaction and diversion of posterity? Why should all those wonders have been in vain? If the modern seaman lack the poetic vision of the early navigator, he is more generous in his detections; he desires the world to share in his own satisfaction, and goes very painfully and exactly to his relation, though it does but concern an iceberg or a body of vapour. The gallant Rodney, when Commodore (1752), was sent cruising in search of an island which one Captain W. Otton, of the snow[[70]] St. Paul, of London, discovered in his passage from South Carolina, about three hundred leagues west of Scilly. The record in Otton’s journal was extremely minute. He gave the date and hour—March 4, 1748–9, two in the afternoon—on which he made the land. He related how it bore, how he tacked, how the wind was, and what the latitude and longitude:—
[70]. A snow is a brig.
“This island stretches N.W. and S.E., about five leagues long and about nine miles wide. On the south side five valleys and a great number of birds. This day a ship’s masts came alongside. On the south point of said island is a small marshy island.”
As though all this should not be deemed confirmatory enough of his discovery, the Captain added that he thought he saw a tent on the island, and would have gone ashore, “but had unfortunately stove his boat.” Rodney, in company with Captain Mackenzie, a distinguished mathematician, cruised for many days, but to no purpose. The island was entirely in the eye of the captain of the snow St. Paul. An old saint or ancient Spanish nobleman would not have let us off so easily. The comparatively modern skipper tells of an ordinary island, prosaically but generously invites all mariners to participation in his discovery, but humanely leaves land-going imagination and curiosity unvexed. The saint or the nobleman would probably have heard the sound of viols, perhaps an organ; the hymning of a collection of monks would have been a distinguishable music; the more erotic vision of the nobleman might have witnessed lovely forms and the seductive beckoning of foam-white hands. We should have had gilded dolphins gambolling among the breakers, and been tickled by a hundred tales more startling than Marryat’s Pasha was regaled with.
Of what material are these fantastic fabrics, real to the beholders, manufactured? Imagination is the loom, but whence comes the stuff? Yet there are many spectacles at sea which the meditative, artless fancy may easily work into creations of beauty, or fear, or brilliance, melancholy, and horror. You must go back—put yourself in the place of the mariner newly arrived in an ocean-waste whose surface his keel is the first to furrow. Then think how the iceberg in the heart of the black gale will strike you: the pallid mountain-mass flashing out to the wild violet lightning dart, the vision or phantasm of a city of pinnacles, spires, minarets, with the crystal smoke of the storm whirling in clouds about its towering heights, whose ravines and scars thunder back in echoes the cannonading of the rushing surges hurling their madness upon the side of that mass of rocky faintness. Or consider the magnificence and splendour of the Northern sunset—different, indeed, from the bald glory of the sinking of the rayless tropic orb—viewed by one who, having for days stemmed towards the Pole, penetrates for the first time the wide white silence of the Greenland parallels. From those dyes of the luminary, or the more amazing coruscations of the aurora borealis, what shadows of realities might not the wondering eye of the mariner evoke, observing rainbow islands to repose on seas of gold, lands of delicate effulgence and of tints too exquisitely beautiful to serve for less than the home of a race of beings whose idea and raiment must be sought in those classic poems in which the gods of the Greeks and the Romans are described! From the texture of the shoulders of rising clouds, from shifting veins of moonlight in the lace-like drapery of white mist, from the luminous shadow of the waterspout with its wing-shaped peak and boiling base, the new imagination, far out upon the bosom of nameless waters, would readily snatch material enough for half those wonders of magic spaces of shore which in those times dotted the oceans of the world from the latitude of Schouten’s iron headland to the height of Nova Zembla. Or, to descend to homelier stuff, omitting the mirage—perhaps the fancy’s noblest opportunity on the deep—there is the ship bottom up; the inverted hulk that for months may have been washing about until she has gathered to her sodden timbers a large estate of sea-weed and marine fungi. The Telmaque rock had undoubtedly no better foundation than this. The passengers—it was in 1786—saw green grass and moss on the rock. This settled the matter; the new island was duly logged and then charted; yet what could it prove but a capsized hull? So of the famous Ariel Rocks, which, in my humble opinion, must be put down to a dead whale or two.
“Captain T. Dickson, of the Ariel, when on a voyage from Liverpool to Valparaiso, December, 1827, saw something of a reddish appearance about a quarter of a mile from the vessel; sounded in forty-seven fathoms, fine grey sand. Approaching the object it seemed about six feet above water, when another appeared about three feet below the surface; the sea broke on both; much sea-weed and many birds around; the position was determined by good mer. alt. of sun, and by lunar and chronometric observations.”[[71]]
[71]. “South Atlantic Directory,” 1870. A long list of apocryphal islands, rocks, and shoals is given in this volume.