He sat for awhile in silence, thinking and drumming upon the table. Shortly afterward we went to our respective berths, and I lay reading in a book he had lent me until four o’clock. That book—what was it? It was the “Castle of Otranto.” I recollect nothing of it saving the gigantic helmet. But what a wizardry there is in names! Memories for me are imperishably wreathed round about the title of that old-fashioned, all but forgotten novel. Never do I hear the name of that book pronounced but there arises before me the picture of the interior of the brig Black Watch. I behold the plainly-furnished cabin, the stand of arms, the midship table upon which Greaves and I would lean, heads supported on our elbows, for an hour at the time, yarning over the past, talking about the future. There is a finer magic in names, even than in perfumes—a subtler power of evocation. I forget the story that that old book tells, but the simple utterance of the name of it will yield me a vision as sharp in detail, as brilliant in color, as though it were the reality beheld at noontide.
The trade wind freshened again in the evening. At sundown it was blowing too strong for a topgallant studding sail. There was the promise of a gale in the windward sky, though I felt pretty sure that no gale was meant; and the mercury hung steady in the cabin. But such a sky as it was! bronzed with the western light, and the green seas shaping out of it in dissolving heaps, and on all sides a wilderness of confused airy coloring that sobered, as the eye watched, to the stemming of the shadow out of the east. I never beheld such a wreckage of cloud. All northeast it was like the ruins of a vast continent of vapor, huge heaps of the stuff, mighty pyramids, round-backed mountains staring with copper countenances sunward, and of a milk-white softness in their skirts. I thought I spied twenty ships among them, low down, where the sea line worked against the ridged and rising and breaking stuff, and every ship was a pinion of cloud that soared into a Teneriffe, then went to pieces, and sailed in rent and rugged masses over our mastheads.
I spent my dog-watch alone, and paced the deck, keeping an askant eye upon the crew, who were lounging about the galley. I admired the postures of the men. How long does a man need to follow the sea to acquire the art of leaning? The boatmen of our coasts are artists in this picturesque accomplishment; but there is no man leans with the art of the old, deep-water sailor. Not a bone in him but lounges. The very pipe in his mouth loafs.
And of the several loafing, lounging pictures upon which my eye rested the completest were the Dutchmen’s. But they were built for it, bolstered as they were by a swell of stern that pitched their bodies into an attitude unattainable by the English Jacks, who, like all British sailors, were remarkable for flatness there. Yan Bol walked to and fro abreast of the row of loungers, his hands buried in his pockets, a pipe inverted betwixt his lips, his deep voice rumbling at intervals. The tones of the men—I could not hear their speech—the looks of them, one and all, hinted at a sort of dog-watch council.
’Twas a perfect ocean picture in that dying light. The brig pitched heavily as she rushed forward, and under the wide yawn of the swollen foresail you saw, as her bows came down, the streaming rush of the white waters set boiling by her steam, and sweeping up the green and freckled acclivity into whose hollow she had swept. You saw the figures of the men dimming to the deepening shadow, one clear tint of costume after another waning, the red shirt growing ashen, the blue blending with the gloom, here and there a face stealing out red against the light of a flaming knot of ropeyarns handed through the galley door for lighting a pipe.
Oh, but I felt weary of it, though! That salt hissing over the side, that sullen thunder of smiting and smitten surge, that ceaseless shrilling and piping aloft, the buoyant rise, the roaring fall—I was fresh from two years of it, and here it was all to do and to hearken to and to suffer over again, for how many months? But, courage! thought I, whistling “Tom Bowling” in time with the lift of the seas; there should be plenty of land in sight from the height of such a heap as six thousand pounds will make. Only is it a dream? is it a dream? is it a dream? and the melody of “Tom Bowling” sped through my set teeth shriller than the song of the backstay that my hand had grasped.
The night passed. Nothing of moment happened. The brig throughout my watch had averaged over eleven knots an hour, and once, on heaving the log when the wind freshened into a squall, the fore topmast studding sail being on her, the speed rose to thirteen. It was noble sailing. The race of the milk astern was so glaring white that in the darkest hour one could almost have seen to read by it as by moonlight. Let what will come along, thought I, here be your true heels for scornful defiance. What was likely to come along of a perilous sort? Well, it was impossible to say. Prior to the peace two stout French frigates had been dispatched on a six months’ cruise off the African coast; they had stretched across to the Western Islands; they had picked up a Guineaman or two; but we did not know then that their fate had overtaken them in the shape of a two-decker glorified by bunting that was, is, and forever will be abhorred by the French. We did not know, I say, that the two Crapeaux had been carried away, tricolors under the Union Jack, all in correct keeping with historic teaching, to enlarge, by two fine ships, the fighting powers of Britannia. But, supposing those two frigates afloat; we were at peace with France, though, to be sure, the frigates might not have got the news of peace. What was there to be afraid of on the ocean? The Yankee—the jolly privateersman on his own hook! For those two we needed to keep a bright lookout until we should be well south of the equator. Yet could I not imagine anything afloat likely to beat, I will not say to match, the Black Watch. That I felt, as I counted the knots on the log line by the feeble light of a lantern, while the brig washed roaring before the trade squall, and whitened out the dark ocean till it looked sheer snow astern.
Next morning I was in my cabin after breakfast when the lad Jimmy brought me a message from Greaves. I put down my book and pipe, got out of my bunk, pulled on my coat, and went to the captain’s berth. He was holding a sheet of paper before him, with an expression of amusement on his face.
“Here’s a Round Robin,” said he. “You may judge of the quantity of literature that freights our forecastle by observing the number of ‘his marks.’ It seems there are but two that can write their names.”
He extended the sheet of paper. On inspecting it I found that it was formed of several sheets—spotted, fly-blown, and moldy—seemingly blank fly leaves from two or three old volumes. These fly leaves were stuck together by glue, and the artist who had fashioned the sheet had thought proper to clothe the sailors’ sentiments with crape, by ruling broad lines of tar along the margins. This strange Round Robin ran thus: