He did not use the word blooming. This elegant expression was not to be heard in those days; but let it stand.
“Has none of you ever seen such a sight as this before?” called Greaves.
After a pause, “Ne’er a man,” answered Teach.
“Then gaze your eyes full! drink your hearts full! Never again may you behold the like of this field of glory. Look thirstily! look till ye burst with the beauty that’ll come into you by looking! Fear not, my sons—we shall be out of it all too soon. Gaze, my livelies, and silver your souls with this brightness as it silvers your cheeks. Bol, out whistle and pipe grog, that we may watch with enjoyment.”
Bol blew. Jimmy, with Galloon at his heels, arrived with the can; the tot measure was dipped into the black liquor, lifted and emptied, and the dram seemed to give every man heart enough to look about him with common curiosity. One of the fellows fetched a bucket, dropped it over the side, and hauled it up full. I drew close. It was as though a pail of cream had been handed aboard.
I put my finger into the whiteness. It was as thin as salt water, nothing gluey or cheesy about it, though from the bows the whiteness rolled away from the rending slide of the cutwater as thickly and obstinately as melted ore, and astern there was no wake; it might have been oil.
For an hour we sailed through this sea of cream and under a dimmer sky of white. Bald and ghostly was that passage rendered by the shadowlessness of our decks. The sails swelled dark against the paleness; so clear was the tracing of the fabric of mast and canvas against the sky, that the course of so delicate a rope as the royal backstay could be traced to the head of the mast, and you saw the jewel block at each topsail and topgallant yardarm, clean cut as a pear on a bough against a sunset. Greaves came to a stand opposite me and looked me in the face.
“You make me think of my dreams of the dead,” said he; “the dead are always pale when they come to me in dreams. Most people who dream of the dead dream of them as they remember them in life. There is light in the eye, and color on the cheek. They always rise before me pale from their coffins.”
“Inspiriting talk, captain,” said I, “at such a moment! But I hope I look no more like a dead man than the rest of us.”
“If I were an artist,” said he, “I would give many guineas out of my earnings for the chance of beholding such a light as this; this is the sort of light through which I would paint the Phantom Ship sailing. Figure that wondrous ghost out upon those white waters, the pallid faces of her men, to whom death is denied, looking over her side at the white sky, every timber in her glowing with the jewelry of rottenness—you know what I mean—the green phosphoric sparkling of decay. Cannot you see her out yonder, dully gleaming with dim green crawlings of fire as she steals noiselessly through this frothy softness, the hush of living death upon her, the silence of catalepsy? But what is the name of the painter, I should like to know, who is going to give us this light upon canvas? Oh, tell me his name, Fielding, that I may offer him all the ducats I hope to be in sight of to-morrow for his secret.”