Again, though to be sure it is not a little comforting when in the middle of a thousand leagues of ocean to feel that your ship is navigated by men furnished with the exquisite sextant, the costly chronometer, the wonderful appliances for an exact determination of position, yet there is surely less poetry and romance in the nautical scientific precision of the age, reconciling as it undoubtedly is—particularly when you are afloat—than in the old shrewd half-blind sniffing and smelling out of the right liquid path by those ancient mariners who stumbled into unknown waters, and floundered against unconjecturable continents with nothing better to ogle the sun with than a kind of small gallows called a fore-staff.
“If,” writes Sir Thomas Browne to his sailor son in 1664, “you have a globe, you may easily learne the starres as also by bookes. Waggoner[[3]] you will not be without, which will teach the particular coasts, depths of roades, and how the land riseth upon several poynts of the compasse.... If they have quadrants, crosse-staffes, and other instruments, learn the practicall use thereof; the names of all parts and roupes about the shippe, what proportion the masts must hold to the length and depth of a shippe, and also the sayles.”
[3]. Wagenar’s “Speculum Nauticum,” Englished in 1588.
Here we have pretty well the extent of a naval officer’s education in navigation and seamanship in those rosy times. The longitude was as good as an unknown quantity to them. How quaint and picturesque was the old Dutch method of navigating a ship! They steered by the true compass, or endeavoured to do so by means of a small central movable card, which they adjusted to the meridian, and whenever they discovered that the variation had altered to the extent of 22 degrees, they again corrected the central card. In this manner they contrived to steer within a quarter of a point, and were perfectly satisfied with this kind of accuracy. They never used the log, though it was known to them. The officer of the watch corrected the leeway by his own judgment before marking it down. J. S. Stavorinus, writing so late as 1768–78, says, “Their manner of computing their run is by means of a measured distance of forty feet along the ship’s side. They take notice of any remarkable patch of froth when it is abreast of the foremost end of the measured distance, and count half seconds till the mark of froth is abreast of the after end. With the number of half seconds thus obtained they divide the number forty-eight, taking the product for the rate of sailing in geographical miles in one hour, or the number of Dutch miles in four hours. It is not difficult,” he adds, “to conceive the reason why the Dutch are frequently above ten degrees out in their reckoning.” Here we have such a form of Arcadian simplicity, if anything maritime can borrow that pastoral word, as cannot fail to excite the enthusiasm of the romancist. A like delightful and fascinating primitiveness of sea-procedure you find in Mr. Thomas Stevens’ black-letter account of his voyage; wherein he so clearly sets forth the manner of the navigation of the ancient mariner, that I hope this further extract from other people’s writings will be forgiven on the score of its curiousness, and the information it supplies:—
You know that it is hard to saile from East to West or contrary, because there is no fixed point in all the skie, whereby they may direct their course, wherefore I shall tell you what helps God provided for these men.[[4]] There is not a fowle that appereth, or signe in the aire, or in the sea, which they have not written, which have made the voyages heretofore. Wherefore, partly by their own experience, and pondering withal what space the ship was able to make with such a winde, and such direction, and partly by the experience of others, whose books and navigations they have, they gesse whereabouts they be, touching degrees of longitude, for of latitude they be alwaies sure.
[4]. That is, for the mariners with whom he sailed.
“Gesse whereabouts they be!” The true signification of this sentence is the revelation of the fairy world of the deep. It was this “gessing,” this groping, this staring, the wondering expectation, that filled the liquid realm with the amazements you read of in the early chronicles. It would not be delightful to have to “gess” now. It could hardly mean much more than an unromantic job of stranding, a bald prosaic shipwreck, with some marine court of inquiry at the end of it, to depress the whole business deeper yet in the quagmire of the commonplace. But attached to the guesswork of old times was the delightful condition of the happening of the unexpected. The fairy island inhabited by faultless shapes of women; fish as terrible as Milton’s Satan; volcanic lands crimsoning a hundred leagues of sky with the glare of the central fires of the earth, against whose hellish effulgent background moved Titanic figures dark as the storm-cloud—of such were the diversions which attended the one-eyed navigation of the romantic days. Who envies not the Jack of that period? Why should the poetic glories of the ocean have died out with those long-bearded, hawk-eyed men? I can go now to the Cape of Good Hope—in a peculiar degree the haunt of the right kind of marvels, and the headland abhorred by Vanderdecken—I can steam there in twenty days, and not find so much as the ghost of a poetical idea in about six thousand miles of ocean. Everything is too comfortable, too safe, too smooth. There is the same difference between my mail-boat and the jolly old carrack as there is between a brand-new hotel making up eight hundred beds and an ancient castle with a moated grange. What fine sights used to be witnessed through the windows of that ancient castle! Ghosts in armour on coal-black steeds, lunatic Scalds bursting into dirges, an ogre who came out of the adjacent wood, dwarfs after the manner of George Cruikshank’s fancies—in short, Enchantment that was substantial enough too. But the brand-new hotel! Why, yes, certainly, I would rather dine there, and most assuredly would rather sleep there, than in the moated-grange arrangement. What I mean is: I wish all the wonders were not gone, so that old ocean should not bare such a very naked breast.
Observe again how elegant and splendid those ancients were in their sea notions. When they built a ship they embellished her with a more than oriental splendour of gold and fancy work. Read old Stowe’s description of the Prince Royal: how she was sumptuously adorned, within and without, with all manner of curious carving, painting, and rich gilding. They had great minds; when they lighted a candle it was a tall one. How nobly they brought home the body of Sir Philip Sydney, “slaine with a musket-shot in his thigh, and deceased at Arnim, beyond seas!” The sails, masts, and yards of his “barke” were black, with black ancient streamers of black silk, and the ship “was hanged all with black bayes, and scorchions thereon on pastboard (with his and his wyfes in pale, helm and crest); in the cabin where he lay was the corpse covered with a pall of black velvet, escochions thereon, his helmet, armes, sword, and gauntlette on the corpse.” In the regality of the names they gave their ships there is a fine aroma of poetry: Henri-Grace-a-Dieu, the Soverayne-of-the-Seas, the Elizabeth-Jonah, the Jesus-of-Lubeck, the Constant-Warwick! The genius of Shakespeare might be thought to have presided over these christenings if it were not for the circumstance of numberless squadrons of sweetly or royally named ships having been launched before the birth of the immortal bard; and a list of them harmonised into blank verse would have the organ-sounds delivered by his own great muse.
The visionary gleam has fled; the glory and the dream are over. Yes, and the prosaics of the sea have entered into the sailor’s nature and made a somewhat dull and steady fellow of him, though he will shovel you on coals as well as another, and pull and haul as heartily as his forefathers. For where be his old caper-cutting qualities? Where be the old high jinks, the Saturday night’s carouse, the pretty forecastle figment of wives and sweethearts, the grinning salts of the theatre-gallery, the sky-larking of liberty days, the masquerading humours, such, for example, as Anson’s men indulged themselves in after the sacking of Paita, when the sailors took the clothes which the Spaniards in their flight had left behind them, and put them on—a motley crew!—wearing the glittering habits, covered with yellow embroidery and silver lace, over their own dirty trousers and jackets, clapping tie and bagwigs and laced hats on their heads; going to the length, indeed, of equipping themselves in women’s gowns and petticoats; so that, we read, when a party of them thus metamorphosed first appeared before their lieutenant, “he was extremely surprised at the grotesque sight, and could not immediately be satisfied they were his own people.” They were a jolly, fearless, humorous, hearty lot, those old mariners, and their like is not amongst us to-day. The sentiment that prevailed amongst them was in the highest degree respectable.
“Yes, seamen, we know, are inured to hard gales;