After we had crossed the parallels of the Horse Latitudes, as they are called, we met with some strange weather: thick skies with a look of smoke hanging about the horizon, sometimes the sun showing as a shapeless oozing, like a rotten orange, a dusky green swell rolling up out of two or three quarters at once, as it seemed, and shouldering one another into a jumble of liquid hills which strained the ship severely with rolling, making every tree-nail, bolt, and strong fastening cry aloud with a voice of its own, whilst the masts were so wrung that you would have expected them any minute to snap and fall away overboard.
Some of our passengers whom the mountainous seas of the Horn had not in the least degree affected were now sea-sick; in fact, I heard of one lady as lying below dangerously ill with nausea. The men declared it made them feel squeamish to go aloft. I should have laughed at this in such salt toughened Jacks as they but for an experience of my own; for being sent to loose the mizzen topgallant sail, I was so oppressed with nausea on my arrival at the cross-trees, that it was as much as I could do to get upon the yard and cast the gaskets adrift. This was owing to the monstrous inequalities of the ship’s movements, to the swift jerks and staggering recoveries which seemed to displace one’s very stomach in one; added to which was the close oppressive temperature, a thickness of atmosphere that corresponded well with the pease-soup-like appearance of the ocean, and that seemed to be explained by the sulphur-coloured, smoky sort of sky that ringed the horizon.
It was on this same day, or rather in the night of it, during the first watch, from eight o’clock to midnight, that a strange thing happened. It was very dark, so black indeed that though you stood shoulder to shoulder with a man you could see nothing of him. There was no wind, but a heavy swell was running on whose murky, invisible coils the ship was violently rolling. There was not a break of faintness, not the minutest spot of light in the sky, whose countenance, with a scowl of thunder upon it, seemed to press close to our wildly sheering mast-heads.
There was something so subduing in the impenetrable gloom, something that lay with so heavy a weight upon the spirits, that the noisiest amongst us insensibly softened his voice to a whisper when he had occasion to speak. I particularly noticed this when some of the watch came aft to clew up the main topgallant sail and snug the main sail with its gear; there was no singing out at the ropes; instead of the hoarse peculiar songs sailors are wont to deliver when they drag, the men pulled silently as ghosts, and not a syllable fell from them that was audible to us when they were upon the yard rolling the sail up.
“SUDDENLY SHONE OUT A LIGHT.”
I was holding on to a belaying pin to steady myself when there suddenly shone out a light upon the boom iron at the extremity of the main-yard. It was of a greenish hue, sickly somewhat, so as to make one think of a corpse-candle or a graveyard Jack-o’-lantern. It swayed as a bladder would or as a soap-bubble might ere it soars from the pipe out of which it is blown. It had some power of illuminating in spite of its wan complexion, for I observed that it threw a very feeble light upon the clew of the sail, and that, as the ship rolled the yard-arm on which it shone towards the sea, the huge, round, ebony black swell mirrored it in the shape of a dull star like a phosphoric jelly-fish.
I had never seen such a sight before, nor indeed had I ever heard of the like of such a thing. I was standing close to Poole at the time, and he said to me—