Round the Galley Fire

by William Clark Russell

“Why,” said he, with a loud rumbling laugh, “the skipper had to find out what purging in hopen court means. He was brought up afore an old gentleman, who lectured him for about half an hour, said that the law was meant to be respected and that it would be a bad job for any man as sneered at it; and after having talked out all that lay in his mind, he up and fines the captain ten pounds and fifty shillings costs. It served him right. He’d no business to bring that bailiff back. But he was hoperated on by the fear o’ words, and depend upon it the man who allows that sort of alarm to wisit him is not a fit person to carry a bailiff to sea.”

OFF THE HORN.

The passage of the Horn has long ceased to be a thing to boast about. Time was when a man who had doubled that formidable iron headland reckoned he had performed a feat that entitled him to a good deal of respect. This is characteristically shown in “Two Years before the Mast,” the author of which dwells at great length upon the struggles of the Alert among the ice in latitude 58 deg. South, as though he considered that part of the voyage to be something proper to hand on to posterity in a bulky form. Not so much notice is taken of the achievement nowadays. It still confers privileges; it qualifies a man to “spit to windward,” for instance, and no doubt it inspires many a youthful midshipman or apprentice with much big talk and nautical airs in the presence of lads who have yet to see with their own eyes what an Antarctic iceberg is like.

But the passage of the Horn is much too common an occurrence in these days to inflate anything but a boy. In Dana’s time a ship was a wonderful object down there; it seemed almost a deserted ocean; nothing was to be met but an old “spouter” jogging along with stump topgallant-masts, and her sides full of boats; or a cargo-ship, with a freight of “notions,” bound to the Peruvian or Mexican ports. Now, if it is not so full as the Atlantic, it is pretty nearly as busy; for since those days Australia has grown a mighty and populous continent; towns have sprung up as if by magic along the western seaboard of the Americas; even the little remote South Sea Islands have lent a hand in the thronging of the great Cape Horn highway; and the most desolate, sterile region in the world—such a harsh, forbidding, icebound piece of coast as no man who has passed within sight of it can ever forget—is skirted, week after week and year after year, by scores and scores of great steamers and sailing ships, bound west, and east, and north, if never south. The Panama Canal threatens the famous old route; and should that waterway ever be completed, the Horn will probably fall even more out of date than the Cape of Good Hope has. It is not to be expected, however, that even the most ancient mariners will be found to mourn over the desuetude. There are many uncomfortable spots to be encountered in a voyage round the world; but a turn off the Horn, in the months which we call summer here, probably beats anything in the shape of marine discomforts to be found on the ocean. Of course this is speaking of it as sailors find it—as it is experienced by the men who have to remain on deck, go aloft, stand at the wheel, and whose shelter is a forecastle with the scuttle closed, and not a dry stitch of clothes to be found by groping.

For it is off the Horn where the galley-fire gets washed out, and where, therefore, the streaming and hungry watch below have nothing to eat but what they may find in the bread-barge; where the tears freeze in a man’s eyes faster than the most pitying angel of a woman living could wipe them away; where one is glad to keep one’s sea-boots on for fear that one’s toes may go as well as the boots when they are hauled off; where everything is like sheet and bar iron aloft; where the very cockroaches turn in to wait for the Equator, and the hardiest rats are so put to it with frost that they watch in the gloom until a man goes to bed and falls asleep, in the hope of getting a meal off his nose. Unhappily the Horn does not improve. It blows and snows as hard there now as it did when the old Wager rounded it, and when Drake or Anson was rolling among its stupendous combers. Other places are more tractable. For instance, Dana, twenty-four years after he made his memorable voyage, found that the climate off Point Conception had altered, that the south-easters were no longer the curse of the coast, and that vessels anchored inside at Santa Barbaro and San Pedro all the year round. No one could have told him this of the Horn. Had he chosen to beat to the eastward or westward a second time in the months when the attempt was made by the Pilgrim and the Alert he would have found the same blinding snow-storms, the same hurling seas, the same sunless, melancholy sky, the same plunging, washing, straining, roaring tumblification he recorded forty-two years ago. Let the story of a brig of 300 tons’ register bear witness to this.

It was in the month of May that the vessel in question was bound to Callao with a cargo of coal, but a strong north-westerly gale had driven her much further to the southward than the captain had any desire to find himself. The gale left them on a Wednesday morning, rolling their yardarms into it on a real Cape Horn swell. What is there to which to liken these prodigious heavings? The actual altitude of those liquid hills may seem small in comparison with the appearance they present when viewed from their hollows; but whatever may be their height, to lie dipping and wallowing among them in a vessel of the tonnage of that brig is to undergo an experience hardly less formidable than what was devised by the Mohocks, when they shut up old women in empty casks, and sent them spinning down Ludgate Hill. What straining and groaning and complaining of the tortured fabric, if it be of timber! Every beam, carling, tree-nail, transom, knee, stanchion, and futtock lifts up its dismal creaking and wailing voice as the bewildered craft, with her topsails rattling in the motionless atmosphere, is swung like a pendulum up the shoulder of the swelling mass of green water, leaning down as she goes until she is fairly on her beam-ends, with pots and pannikins, sea-boots and sea-chests, dishes, books, furniture, and whatever else may be inside of her, fetching away with dreadful noise to leeward, amid a volley of sea-blessings from skipper, cook, and steward, and muffled shouts from the watch below in the forecastle.

Luckily Cape Horn calms do not last very long; indeed, there is nothing but “weather” down in those regions, and a calm is only a short pause among the gales and squalls whilst they are considering whose turn it is next. Within an hour from the time of the first gale failing them, another gale from a little to the north-of-west was bowing down the bothered and beaten brig, which, under lower topsails and fore-topmast staysail, manfully struggled to look up to it with her head in the direction of Cape Horn and her wake streaming away over her weather quarter. It was one of those pictures of storm which are rarely seen in like perfection out of the parallels that divide Terra del Fuego from the South Shetlands—an ocean of mountainous seas, raising each of them a note of thunder as their arching summits crashed from a dark, oil-smooth ridge of green water into huge avalanches of snow: a sky of gloomy slate, along which masses of scud—torn, ragged, and tendril-shaped—were flying with incredible velocity. The horizon was broken with the incessant rising and falling of the pyramidal billows, dark as the night, against a ring of sooty clouds, from which, ever and anon, one would break away, like a winged messenger of evil, whitening and veiling the air with a kind of boiling appearance as it swept its furious and blinding discharge of snow and hail along. No wonder that in olden times the man who had passed these tempestuous and inclement seas should have considered himself an object of importance. Stand, in fancy, upon the deck of that labouring brig, and survey one of the countless aspects of marine life. The seas are breaking heavily over the port bow of the vessel, deluging her forward and racing aft in a foaming torrent as she sinks her stern to mount the huge surge that almost lays her yardarms level. The bitter, raw, flaying cold of the wind there is nothing in language to express. The flying spray smites the exposed face like a volley of sail needles. Now and again a squall of snow and hail comes along with so much fury in it that it takes the breath away from the strongest of the seamen cowering with their backs to it. The rigging crackles to every strain put upon it like burning wood. The snow upon the yards makes them glimmer like lines of pallid light as they furiously sway against the dismal ground of the dark and rushing sky. There are spears and arrow-heads of ice upon the bulwark rail, upon the catheads, upon the scuttle-butts lashed amidships; and though the seas repeatedly break over them they are always left standing. The helmsman, with his hard fists wrapped up in mits, rigged out in oilskins from his head to his huge, well-greased sea-boots, and with the after-thatch of his sou’-wester blown up by the gale, and standing out from his head like the tail of a gull, gets the full of it. Nothing of the man is visible but a fragment of mahogany face showing between the flannel ear-covers of his head-gear, and a pair of watering eyes, which he now and again wipes upon his mit when a pause in the yaws and come-to’s give him a chance to raise one of his hands from the spokes.

How would some of our summer-water mariners appear beside that salt-water sailor were they to have stood their trick at the helm on such an occasion as this; gazing to windward as yonder skipper is doing, holding on like grim death to a backstay, with the salt drying in crystals in his eyes; or making one of that oil-skinned group there to leeward of the galley, stamping their boots upon the deck to put life into their frozen toes, ducking as a shriek in the wind warns them of the passage of a green sheet of water over their heads, biting doggedly upon the tobacco in their cheeks, and growling as they reflect that another three hours must elapse before they are privileged to quit the deck and take such warmth and comfort as they may find in the forecastle, whose darkness is scarcely revealed by the sputtering slush-lamp, and whose beams and stanchions are decorated with draining clothes?

It was already blowing two or three ordinary gales in one, and the lower topsails were more than the brig could safely stagger under, though the captain held on, since by ratching to the northward he might hope to get clear of the ice, of which, on the previous night and that morning, some monstrous specimens had hove in view. Indeed, at one bell in the afternoon watch, during a flaw in a heavy squall of snow that was blowing in horizontal lines along the sea, they caught sight on the lee bow of the greenish marble-like glimmer of a berg that looked to be a mile long and as tall as St. Paul’s Cathedral. It vanished, but reappeared broad on the lee-beam when the squall passed, and stood out in its complete shape against the smoke-coloured gloom of the sky over the horizon, where, though it was four or five miles off, the men on the brig’s deck could see the white, steam-like haze of the spray that flashed in clouds from its base, and fled past it in eddying volumes, and almost imagine that they heard the thunder of the smiting surges reverberating in the hollows and caverns of the mighty frozen mass. But when it had drawn on the lee-quarter another squall blew up and smothered it, and after that it disappeared entirely.

It was at this time that the gale increased in fury, and the sea grew terrible. The weather was enough to blow the masts out of the vessel, and all hands were turned up to stow both topsails and bring the brig to the wind under a small storm staysail. How is the aspect of that Cape Horn ocean to be described?—the rage of its headlong acclivities; the long sweep of olive-green heights, piebald with hissing and seething tracks of foam, blown along their gleaming sides; the hard iron-grey of the heavens, out of which the storm of wind was rushing, bearing upon its wings masses of vapour, which it tore to pieces in its fury; and the cold—the piercing, poignant cold—of the gale, with its lashing burden of sleet and spray and hail?