Master Rockafellar's Voyage

by William Clark Russell

The wind came so hard that I seemed to be pinned to the ratlines, and I felt as though all the breath were blown out of my body. I sent a yearning look up, and saw the third mate on the weather mizzen-top-sail yard-arm, striding the spar as though it were a horse, his muscular legs dangling between the dark heavens and the wool-white water. The lads were sliding out upon the foot-ropes, some to windward, some to leeward. I tried to make haste, but the sweep of the blast reduced my struggles to a mere crawling. It took me a full five minutes to reach to the height of the futtock shrouds—thin bars of iron which stretch at a sharp angle from the masts to the rim of the platform called “the top.” I took these irons in my little hands, but lacked the courage to swing myself by them over into the top. How on earth, then, was I to gain the yard upon which the midshipmen were working? Through the irons I spied a hole in the platform, and with great trouble and a deal of trembling I contrived to squeeze through it, and then I found myself on a sort of stage with the ship looking as if she were a mile below me, and the mizzen-royal yard as if it were two miles above me.

The wind screamed frantically in my ears, yet not so loudly but that I could hear my small heart thumping in them. I clutched a rope, and stood staring wildly at the yard on which my shipmates were knotting the reef-points. I thought Mr. Cock a much more wonderful man than Blondin or any tight-rope walker that ever I had heard of, to be able to sit upon that rocking point of spar without tumbling off, and to be passing the earing as coolly as if he were tying his shoes.

“Stop where you are!” he bawled to me; “we’ll endeavour to manage without you this once.”

The sea looked five times bigger than ever I had before seen it. The worst of the squall was over, and past the edge of the flying gloom to windward there was a sort of faintness in the sky, with curls and wisps of scud blowing up it out of the hard green of the distant water that looked calm, so far away it was; and right out in the midst of the distant ocean, over which the dim light of the sky was breaking, I saw a ship, like a toy, vanishing and reappearing amongst the surges, flinging the foam away from her in bursts of steam-light cloud; and so little did she look with her three milk-white bands of topsails and marble-like round of foresail, that whilst my eye dwelt upon her, I could scarce persuade myself that she was real: rather, indeed, some craft of fairy-land, which a great strong fellow, such a man as Mr. Cock for instance, might be able to hold in the hollow of his hand.

I was at no great height, yet the captain looked an insignificant little creature as he stood at the rail sending his gaze aloft; the man at the wheel resembled one of those dolls which you purchase as sailors for your model boat, and the decks of the ship from poop to forecastle showed like a long wet plank. It was wonderful to think so narrow a base should support the tall, wide-spreading fabric of mast, yard, and gear that was now somewhat nakedly shearing through the dusk of the squall, to the plunging and long floating rushes of the hull over whose side a sea would now and again fling a head of water that swept with the sparkle of a fountain clear into the milk-white race to leeward.

“Two reefs, Mr. Cock!” bawled the mate from the foremost end of the poop.

I watched the lads swinging in a row upon the foot-ropes, tossing up their heels as they brought the reef-points upon the yard, and wondered how long it would take me to learn their trick of working aloft, as coolly as though they toiled with the solid earth under them. All three topsails were being reefed at the same time. I could not see forward, but I could hear the voices of the men chorusing as they, lighted, the sails over. Evidently the captain expected dirty weather; and, to be sure, out abeam it looked ugly enough, with a kind of rusty light growing in the atmosphere that threw a malevolent complexion of storm upon the sky.

Presently the last knot had been tied in the mizzen topsail, and the midshipmen were in the act of descending.

“Jump aloft two of you and secure that t’gallants’l before it blows adrift!” roared the captain.