And there was a sailor named Harry Call. He had served in American ships, and knew the negro character, and when he blacked his face he was good entertainment. Greaves liked his fooling so well that he would call him aft, send for the men, order Jimmy to mix a can of grog, and Call with his spare voice and negro pleasantries would agreeably kill an hour.
My own life was as pleasant as a seafaring life can very well be. Greaves had much to talk about. He had looked into books. He had traveled widely and observed closely. He was a person of much good nature. In truth, a more genial, informing man I could not have prayed for as a shipmate. Yet I would take notice of a certain haziness on one side of his mind. He loved metaphysical speculations, and would wriggle out of a homely topic to start a religious discussion. I humored him for some time, but religion being one of those subjects that I did not much care to talk about, I soon ceased to argue, and then all the talking was his. He entertained some odd notions for a sailor, believed that every man had a good and bad angel, that when a man died his spirit slept with his dust. “Otherwise,” he asked, “what is to bring the parts together again, inform them with mind, and render the whole sensible of what is happening?” I found that he had a leaning toward the Roman Catholic faith. I asked him if he was married. He answered “No.” I then inquired why Van Laar had threatened to take the bed from under him and his wife. “To vex me,” said he.
He would be talking of religion and metaphysics, of dreams and a future life, of the state of his soul a million years ago, and of the inhabitants of certain of the stars, when I would be thinking of his ship in the cave and the dollars aboard of her. But as our voyage progressed, as we drove southward toward the Horn, he found little or nothing to say about his ship in the cave. You would have said he was done with the subject. He had so little to say, indeed, that I would wonder at times whether the purpose of this expedition was not slipping out of his memory as a dream, that is vital and brilliant on one’s awaking from it, fades ere nightfall, and is effaced by the vision of another slumber. “It will be a confounded disappointment should it prove false after all,” I would think; for, spite of my misgivings which sometimes I would nourish and sometimes spurn, I, during those tedious days and weeks running into months, I, in many a lonely watch on deck, in many a waking hour in my hammock, had built my little castles in the air, had furnished them handsomely for one of my degree, had gazed at them with fondness as they glittered in the light of my hope. Six thousand pounds! The money was a bigger pile in those days than it is now; to be so easily earned too! Why, in imagination I had bought me a little house, I had married a wife, I was gardening often in mine own little estate, and every quarter I was receiving dividend warrants; and there was good ale in my cellar, and no stint at meal times; and I was a happy young man, in imagination sitting, as I did, on the apex of that pyramid of promised dollars, whence I commanded a boundless prospect for a mariner’s eye. And now if it was all to end in a hoaxing dream! Bless me! While I was on this side of the Horn how I pined for t’other side, how I thrashed the old brig through it in my watch on deck! With what ardor of expectancy did I every day sit down to work out the sights!
CHAPTER XV.
THE WHITE WATER.
The Black Watch had sailed through the Downs in the middle of September, and on the morning of December 12, 1814, she was upon the meridian of Cape Horn, and in about fifty-seven degrees south latitude. This passage, for so swift a keel, was a long one. It was owing to diabolical weather between the degrees of forty and fifty south.
Greaves and I would sometimes say that the devil was afloat in a craft of his own within that belt of ten degrees. Head winds more maddening to the most angelic soul, calms more provocative of impious and affrighting language, it is not in the imagination of the most seasoned mariner to conceive.
But enough. We were off the Horn at last. Our bowsprit would be heading north presently, and, when our ship’s forefoot cut this meridian again, the little fabric would (but would she?) be deeper in the water (by what division of a strake?) with a cargo of minted silver!
In 1814 much was made of the passage of the Horn. The doubling of that bleak, inhospitable, deep-seated rock was accepted, on the whole, as a considerable adventure. The old traditions of mountain-high seas and gales of cyclonic fury survived. The traffic down there was small; the colonies of New Holland were still raw in their making; and ships bound for Europe from that distant continent chose the mild but tedious passage of the South African headland.
The old dread has vanished. Experience has footed prejudice out of time. In furious weather the ocean off the Horn is as terrible as the North Atlantic, as the Southern Ocean, as any vast breast of water is in furious weather; and that is the long and short of it. Oh, yes; off the Horn you get some monstrous seas, it is true. I have known what it is to be running off the Horn before a westerly gale and to be afraid—seasoned as I then was—to look astern! But there is a safety in the mighty swing of those wide Andean heaps of brine which the sharper-edged surge of the smaller ocean does not yield.
The old freebooters and the early navigators are responsible for the evil reputation of the Horn. They returned from the wonders of foreign sight-seeing, from the joys of plunder and the delights of discovery, with their hearts full of astonishment and their mouths full of lies. There is Shelvocke’s description of the Horn; it is heartrending reading in these days. The ice forms upon the page as you read; the atmosphere darkens with snow. And what, on the testimony of such a record, did Wapping think of that distant, ice-girt, howling navigation, with its enchanted islands and bergs, whose spires seemed to pink the moon? What did Wapping think when there was never a man in every company of a thousand jackets who had rounded the Horn and could tell of it?