We were a great number of passengers for so small a vessel. When the fine weather came and the people got their stomachs, no more hospitable scene at meal-time was ever afloat than that saloon of over thirty years ago. There is plenty of finery at sea in this age; but the picturesque is almost dead; it flourished then. Much of the old Indiaman, the old Caper and South Spanier survived in the early steamer. You found this in colours and fittings, and in rig; for, none of us yet making cocksure of the cub of the engine-room, a fabric nigh as spacious and wide as that of the sailing ship was reared to draw from the wind the help the propeller might refuse.
This little steamer, too, would go along in an ambling way when it was fine, like any large ship with the wind on the quarter, taking the wide heaves of the deep in a procession of curtseys whilst she fanned the sky with her squares of canvas. I see again the dinner-picture of a fine afternoon: a row of well-dressed people filling the long table; the captain bland and watchful at one end; someone trembling in brass buttons at the other; the claret-coloured light of the setting sun ripples in polished bulkhead and makes rubies of diamonds on moving hands; every shadow sways with slow grace, and the large round cabin windows deepen into dark blue, or glance out in crimson light as the vessel softly rolls them from sea to sky.
My place at table was at top, on the captain's right: a seat of distinction, but a matter of accident so far as I was concerned. The commander of this steamer, to give the worthy skipper a sounding name, was a kindly hearted seaman named Strutt, who had used the sea for many years in sailing ships, and had much to tell about the ocean life. One of the passengers was a retired shipmaster who, I understood, was making the voyage to the Cape to seek some waterside berth in South Africa; he was a Newcastle man and had been bred to the sea in the coal trade; such was his contempt of steam he could find nothing in his rude and quaint dialect vigorous enough to dress it in. He sat within three or four of the captain on the left and they often argued, and their speech was my diversion.
I remember one day, shortly before we made the island of Madeira, that these two men got upon the subject of Polar expeditions. The captain said that the discovery of the North Pole would be as important to navigation and science as the discovery of America was to civilisation. The other replied that the North Pole was of no use to any mortal man. What was it? An imagination. Nothing you could see, or sit upon, or lean against. At this a great many people laughed.
A middle-aged lady sitting at a little distance on my right begged that the North Pole would not be mentioned; she had lost a promising nephew in consequence of it. He had sailed in one of the expeditions and had fallen into a deep hole beside the ship when she lay upon the ice, and, marvellous to relate, though the body of the poor young man was not discovered until six weeks afterwards, it was so perfectly fresh, the face so lifelike, the colour on the cheeks so exactly as in health, that all wondered he did not speak and smile.
'There's no perishing in ice,' said the retired shipmaster in a deep voice, 'once dead, ye keep arle on. Sir John Franklin was to be found. Nought was wanting but the right sort of men to look for him. He's somewhere up there still, just as he died, poor chap, hard as a statue, him and the rest of them, saving those they fed on.'
'What's the action of salt water on a body?' said an old gentleman sitting five or six down on the opposite side.
'It drowns,' replied the retired shipmaster.
'I don't mean that,' said the other, 'does it preserve as ice does?'