List, Ye Landsmen! A Romance of Incident

by William Clark Russell

We, passing the Horn on December 12, found the southern hemisphere’s midsummer there. We met, for the most part, with bright skies, a cheerful sun, not wanting in warmth, coming soon and going late, and a noble field of swelling blue seas. One iceberg we sighted. It was infinitely remote—a point of pearl on the sea-line.

“She vhas like a babe’s milk tooth,” said Yan Bol, pointing to it.

There was a fancy of milk in the whiteness of it; but, when I brought my eyes from the distant berg to Bol’s face, I said unto myself—“What should that man know of a babe’s milk tooth?”

Two disappointments await those who round the Horn with expectations bred of the reading of books. First, the weather. Often is it as placid as any quiet day that sleeps over the Straits of Dover, when the sky is streaked with the lingering smoke of vanished steamers and the white cliffs of France hang in the air. No; the weather off the Horn is not the everlasting saddle of the Storm Fiend. The seas are not always boiling, the hurricanes of wind are not always black with frost, heavy with snow, man-killing with ice-darts.

Next, the constellation called the Southern Cross. It hangs over you when you are off the Horn; often have I looked up at it, and never have I thought it beautiful. The smallest of the gems of the English skies is a richer jewel than the Southern Cross. A singular superstition is this widespread faith in the beauty of the Crux of the ancient mariner. The stars are unequally set; one is disproportionately small.

But now came a morning when we struck a meridian that enabled us to shift our helm for a northern passage, and then we had the whole length of the mighty seaboard of South America to climb. We were in the South Pacific at last. The island was hard upon three thousand miles distant; but it was over the bows—it was ahead! We had turned the stormy corner, and the verification of Greaves’ yarn could be thought of as something that was about to happen soon.

Day by day we climbed the parallels, and all went well. Certain stars sank behind the edge of the sea astern of us, and as we sailed northward many particular stars which were familiar to our northern eyes rose over the bows and wheeled in little arcs. We made some westing that we might give the land a wide berth, for whether Great Britain was or was not at war with Spain, the Spaniards of that vast seaboard were scarcely less jealously and passionately tenacious in those days of their dominion in the South Sea, and under the Line to beyond Panama, than they were in the preceding century; and though we could not positively affirm that there was anything to be afraid of, anything curiously and sneakingly dangerous to be shunned (if it were not Commodore Porter, whose ship the Essex was believed to lie prowling hereabouts at this time), yet Greaves was determined to provide his bad angel with the slenderest possible opportunity for delaying or arresting the voyage to the island.

So we kept well out to the west, and fine sailing it was. For days we hardly touched a brace; the steady wind, growing daily warmer, sweetly blew the little brig along. It was the South Pacific Ocean. Many reports are there of the various tempers of that sea, but, for my part, northward of the parallel of forty degrees I have ever found it a gentle breast of ocean. Long and lazy was the blue swell brimming to our counter, drowsy the flap of the sunny canvas, soft the cradled motion of the ship. Once again the silver flying fish glanced from the slope of the violet knolls. The wet, black fin of a shark hung steadfast in our wake. What a world of waters it was! Never the gleam of a ship’s canvas for days and days to break the boundless continuity of the distant sea-line. The men relaxed their labors, Yan Bol took no notice, and I, who was never a “hazer,” was willing that they should lounge through their toil of the hours in a climate so enervating that one yearned to sling a hammock in some cool corner of the deck, to lie in it all day, to smoke and doze while the imagination slided away on the stream of the rippling music made by the broken waters and passed into the fairy harbors of dreams.

“By this time to-morrow,” said Greaves to me one evening, “if this breeze holds, and our reckoning is true, and the island has not been exploded by a volcano or an earthquake, you will be having a good view of the ship in the cave—no, I am wrong, a good view of her you will not obtain from the sea, but you will be having a good view of the cave in which she lies, and I shall be very much surprised if you are not mightily impressed by the magnitude and beauty of that great hole or split in the rock, and by the indescribable complicated atmosphere or shadow within, caused, as I long ago explained to you, by the interlacery of the ship’s gear and spars, visible and indeterminable.”

“Visible and indeterminable! Captain, you put it as though it were some mystery of religion.”