Alone on a Wide Wide Sea, Vol. 1 (of 3)

by William Clark Russell

I remarked two or three men about the deck in the fore-part of the brig. They were ill-clad, lean and yellow, and grim, dark and forbidding for want of the razor. They stared very hard at me, ceasing in their work to do so, and certainly their curiosity was more than justified, for I can well believe that I made an extraordinary figure with my plaistered and withered face, and white hair showing in the twilight of the large hood, and the rest of me draped by the cloak to the very plank of the deck.

It was a beautiful morning, the hour about eleven. The ocean was of the colour of sapphire, and it flowed with the brig in long and regular lines, and here and there the froth fitfully flashed and faded. The sky on the left was shaded with a high delicate network of cloud, but elsewhere the firmament was of purest blue, graced and relieved by widely scattered little bodies of pearl-like vapour, all sailing our way. The wind was sweet and mild, and now every breath that I took of it seemed to give me a new spirit.

‘Look there, madame,’ exclaimed Alphonse, ‘you have not yet seen that beautiful sight,’ and directing my eyes over the bulwark on the right, I beheld a stately ship, a large, lovely, and radiant fabric, with sail upon sail of the milk-white softness of sifted snow swelling and diminishing one above another to an altitude that made one think of the little gold buttons on the top of her masts as stars. She was passing us swiftly. A small white line of foam throbbed along the long red streak that rose up her side a little above the level of the water. Soft flames of white fire broke from many parts of her as she swept her windows and the glass upon the deck and many ornaments of furniture of polished brass into the direct flash of the sun.

‘Oh! that is a beautiful sight, indeed,’ said I.

‘Does it give you no idea, madame?’ said the young Frenchman; then finding that I continued to gaze without answering him, he exclaimed: ‘Look now at the sea. Is there not something in the sight of that sea to make you remember? Figure land yonder, and imagine for yourself a town upon it. What sort of town shall it be? Come, it must be the town you sailed from in the boat with two masts. And see now if we cannot create it. It will have a pier—there will be sands: or say it has no pier, and the cliffs are white——’

‘Oh God, my heart will break,’ I cried.

Another day and yet another day passed. And now I had been a little longer than a week on board the French brig.

It was Sunday. The day had broken in gloom, and when I arose and dressed myself at ten o’clock I could scarcely see in my cabin. There did not seem to be any wind. The vessel was rolling somewhat heavily, and alternately she plunged the circular window of my cabin under water, and then the dusk turned black with nothing but a green glimmer where the porthole was; and then as she rolled away on the other side and lifted the little window weeping and roaring out of the swollen hill of green water, there was a noise as of the explosion of guns; but no foam flew about the window, whence I judged that the vessel was not making any progress.

By this time I had grown accustomed to the motions of a ship at sea. I moved without difficulty, and poised myself to the slanting of the deck under my feet with something of the ease of habit. When I had dressed myself on this Sunday morning I put on the cloak that the mate Hénin had lent me, and entered the little state cabin or living room. The young Frenchman, Alphonse, sat at the table with an open volume before him. He looked up as I approached.