Heart of Oak: A Three-Stranded Yarn, vol. 3

by William Clark Russell

I took the worthy Dutchman's hand and thanked him with a silent grip.

At that moment the windlass began to clank; immediately a hoarse voice bawled out a song whose burthen was caught and flung in thunder into the air by the seven or eight hearts who bowed and rose at the windlass handles.

'Come, Mr. Pollak; come, colonel,' I exclaimed; 'there's time for a bumper.'

I called to the captain to send aft the lad who was to wait upon us in the cabin, and descended with my friends. A magnum of champagne was opened, and we filled and drank to the voyage. I obliged Captain Cliffe to come down and drink. He cried through the skylight that he durst not leave the deck for above three minutes; I told him to come, and the two gentlemen toasted the little man, who delivered, with several grimaces, a brief sailorly speech, full of hope, then rushed on deck.

I bade Mr. Pollak good-bye with a full heart. The colonel followed him into the boat, which put off, and then hung by on her oars to watch us. At this time the anchor was off the ground, and the crew were making sail on the brig, whose bowsprit, with a white pinion of jib swelling from it, was rounding, finger-like, in a slow, pointing way for the open; the sheep-faced mate stood on the forecastle shouting orders; a sailor was at the wheel; Captain Cliffe crossed the deck from left to right, looking up and around, moving swiftly, a doll of a man, grimacing and blinking at every pause in his nimble trot.

Some of the ships round about had got our tale, I fancy, or at least the scent of our errand; since from most of them we were watched by many heads above the rail. Presently the brig's stern was to the wind, her topsails filled, the lighter sails glanced wing-shaped to the yard-arms to the drag of the gear; I waved my hat from the quarter to my two friends, and they flourished a last farewell. My voyage, strange as any that had ever been undertaken in this world, was begun!

We were the only ship at that time leaving the Bay, and I think our lonely going must have given a certain majesty and nobleness to the figure of the vessel in the eyes of those who watched us, with the significance of her dangerous, surprising, romantic mission going along with her. I don't know what my own sensations were: I was sensible perhaps of a little triumph of spirits at this getting away so quickly, and then there was the feeling that I was in action, that no time was being lost; and yet there was a heaviness at my heart too, the chill of doubt, a frosty dread that the errand would prove profitless, and that if God suffered me to return home it must be as a mourner for Marie.

But we were sailing through a wide, shining scene of commanding beauty, lofty and gloriously coloured, and the influence of it, I don't doubt, rescued me from the dark mood imagination might have raised. The breeze blew hot, but the sweetness of flowers and fruit was in it, and the scent of the land was brisk with the salt of the sea. In a very little while the seamen had clothed the brig from the main-royal yard to the waterways, and as she floated onwards, now slightly curtseying to a small breathing of swell, the mountains went with her, and the ships astern closed into clusters past the tail of our mirror-bright line of wake. The mountains towered on our left; Cape Town vanished, and we softly drove with a noise of fountains on either hand past rich curves of shore on whose margin the huge Atlantic comber formed and fell in snowstorms with white houses beyond the foam like models in ivory shining amid the greenery.

And all the time we were alone! This was the wonderful feature of our departure. I could not see the smallest boat in motion. The water was like a great lonely lake, and the silence on the face of the mountains was in the wind, in a presence that seemed to compel isolation for us, hushing all life off the face of the bay down to where the ships were lying too far off to trouble the sense of solitude.