“Here, sir.”
He was standing in the hatch, gripping the companion for support, but his voice had the old ring. “What have you done with the brig?”
“White water was just now reported. I don’t see it. I don’t see the land—yet we struck.”
“No,” he answered coolly, “it was we who were struck. There is no land. Look there—and there—and there! Those are your shoals!”
At the moment of his speaking one of the sublimest, most beautiful sights which the ocean, prodigal as she is in marvels of terror and splendor, can offer to the sight of man was visible round about us. In at least a dozen different parts of the blackness that stooped to the luminous peaks of the seas I beheld flaming fountains, glittering lines rising and feathering to the gale, coming and going, blowing pale and yet splendid—every jet so luminous that the scoring of the darkness by it was as defined as the track of a rocket. They soared and fell in a breathing way, some near, some afar, ever varying their distances, and one snored like an escape of steam within a biscuit-toss of our weather beam, and the fiery shower flashed on the wind betwixt our masts with a hiss like a volley of shot tearing the surface of water.
“A school of whales,” shouted Greaves. “One of them plumped into us. Now, get your topsail aback, Fielding, get your topsail aback, and stop her till the beasts go clear, or they’ll be butting us into staves. Jump for the well and get a cast.”
The men, hearing their captain’s voice, were quieted. They came to the braces, and, without disorder or any note of cursing terror in their voices, brought the brig to a halt. I dropped the rod and found the vessel stanch; sounded the well four or five times, and always found her stanch. The wondrous luminous appearances vanished, and the blacker hours of the night before the dawn closed upon us in an impenetrable dye, but with less weight in the wind and with less fire in the sea.
“Furl the foresail and let the brig lie as she is till dawn,” said Greaves, and walked slowly from one side of the deck to the other, looking forth, pausing long to look; then, with slow motions, he went below, and stretched himself at full length upon a locker, with a hand upon his side.
My watch came round at four; but, in any case, I should have watched the brig through the darkness. Some while before dawn the wind was spent, the stars glowing, the sea fast slackening its heave, with the muck that had troubled and drenched us settling away in a shadow south and west.
At last broke the day. Melancholy is daybreak at sea. There is nothing sadder in nature; nothing that so sinks the spirits of the watcher who suffers himself to be visited by the full spirit of the sight. On shore there is the chirrup and harmonies of birds, the rosy streaking of the sky over the hilltops; the vane of the church spire burns, the cock crows heartily, the farmyard is in motion, the smell of the country rises in an incense as the sun springs into the sky. But at sea the cold iron-gray of the breaking morn is reflected in the boundless waste. There is nothing to catch the light of the springing sun save the clouds. The vast solitude brims into the unbroken distance, and cold is the ashen sky and cold the picture of the ship, as it steals out of the darkness of the night. The melancholy, however, is but in the dawn’s beginning. When the sun rises, there is a splendor of colors at sea which you will not find ashore. The ocean is a mirror that reverberates the light of day. Times are when the deep flings its own prismatic glories upon the sky. This have I marked at sunrise, when the flash of the luminary has sunk into the heart of the sea, when all is blueness and dazzle below, and, above, a sky of high-compacted cloud, delicate as flowers and figures of frost and snow upon a windowpane, charged with the colors of the great eye of ocean looking up at it.