Round the Galley Fire

by William Clark Russell

It is difficult to understand why people should find anything diverting in sea-sickness, than which surely nothing can cause more suffering. Of course, if a man will give himself airs ashore or on smooth water, use nautical words, and deride the misgivings others are honest enough to confess to, then, indeed, if we find that marine gentleman with his head in a basin, or with his face over the side and his hat gone, we have some excuse to laugh at him. There are people who never will own that they are sick at sea, just as there are people who deny with indignation that they snore in their sleep. Such folks deserve our ridicule. For what is there to be ashamed of? I have known old sea-captains quit ships newly arrived from around the world and be ill on a voyage from London Bridge to Hull. If such men can shout for the steward without blushing, it is hard to know why Jones, of the Middle Temple, or Smith, of the Stock Exchange, or Snooks, the celebrated novelist, should sneak to the side and feel humbled if his fellow-sufferers see him blue in the face with his pocket-handkerchief half-way down his throat. It may be that people laugh at sea-sick sufferers because of the enormously and by consequence absurdly levelling character of the malady. One might be the most compassionate creature living and yet find it impossible to stop laughing at the debasement of the high and mighty personage who, when he came aboard, people whispered was the Right Honourable So-and-so, or the acute and famous Mr. Justice Somebody Else. He sits aloof, he is full of dignity, he scarcely raises even a condescending eye from the book or paper in his hand to glance at the other passengers, who sit doggedly, if humbly, waiting for the wheels to go round, inside and outside. I say that a man must be more than human if he can help laughing when the high and mighty personage changes colour, when he puts his paper down and rolls his eyes about, when nothing seems to keep his head on but his shirt-collar, and when an invincible horror of life gleams in that gaze which has grown hollow with surprising rapidity. Alas! no amount of reputation, no social importance, no eloquence, which in other places might affect the heart and even improve the understanding, can save him. Yonder in the bows is a poor little cockney, a second-class passenger, in a shabby coat and his trousers half-way up his legs, sick beyond the power of description; there is no bench long enough on that vessel to furnish room for him and the great man at once if the water were smooth; but Nausea has waved her wand, and the humble little cockney and the high and mighty personage are brothers and equals, fellow-sufferers, with all distinctions vanished between them as, with yellow faces, the cockney forward, the great man aft, they overhang the rushing foam with open mouths, the tears pouring from their eyes, and anguish inimitably expressed in the curve of their backs and the occasional kick-up delivered by their legs.

More pathetic, perhaps, is the newly-married couple, though many a cruel laugh and jeer have been directed even at them. But nothing is sacred at sea. Sentiment that is full of poetry in drawing-rooms, among flowers, under the moonshine, among hedges, takes another character among rough waters.

I remember once crossing fifty miles of sea in company with a young gentleman and his bride. They were returning, I took it, from their honeymoon. They sat together upon a small, uncomfortable bench fixed against the inside of the paddle-box, whence they commanded a fine view of the action of the engines, and where the smell of the oil-cans hung steadily in the wind. They both knew they were going to be sick, and sat with hands locked, two devoted hearts bent on suffering together. The steward—a pale, large, sandy-haired man—considerately anticipated their wants by placing a couple of basins at their feet. The dismal implements made but a melancholy foreground for the impassioned pair, and I wondered how they would like to have had their photographs taken in that posture. A quarter of an hour sufficed to make the picture tragical. The wife leaned across the husband and the husband held on to her. His heroic devotion was immense; I could hear him in guttural accents pouring consolation into her deaf ears amid the intervals of his own convulsions, and when an unusually heavy roll to leeward caused both basins to slide away out of sight under the bench, I never beheld anything more touching than his struggles to replace them without letting go of his wife.

Happily, however, the heart is occasionally steeled against such objects of misery as this by spectacles of selfishness and fear in the last degree contemptible. I particularly recall a gaunt Frenchman with a spiked moustache, who, long before nausea afflicted him, refused to stir from his seat to help his miserable, prostrate wife, and who answered her murmurs to Emile to put something under her head and something over her feet, by fierce commands to her to hold her tongue. This wretched man was himself seized with nausea, and so great was his fear—either excited by the somewhat heavy sea that washed alongside the vessel or by his sufferings, which to judge from the noise he made, must have led him to suppose that, bit by bit, the whole of him was going overboard—that after every explosion I could hear him shrieking, “Maman! maman!” like a girl.

What is the remedy for sea-sickness? I wish I knew—most cheerfully would I impart the secret. There are many prescriptions, from the ice of Dr. Chapman to Jack’s lump of fat pork attached to a ropeyarn; but nothing seems to answer the end designed. Nor is it very remarkable that the wonderful vessels which were to put an end to nausea should still leave the “expectaroon,” even on their own decks, the useful piece of furniture passengers have for generations found it; for whilst clever gentlemen have shown us how the effect of the rolling and pitching movement of a ship upon the head or stomach may be overcome by pivoted saloons and swinging accommodations, they have entirely failed to produce any kind of mechanism to obviate the consequences of those movements of a vessel in a seaway which are alone responsible for sickness; I mean the heave up and the swoop down. If a ship oscillated on an immutable basis, a cot or a balanced chair would effectually stop nausea; like a wineglass on a swinging tray, the passenger could always maintain a posture perpendicular with the horizon. But what is to qualify the sensations which follow the swoop down into the hollows and the roaring heave up on to the summits of the seas? Everything in the ship must accompany her in her falls and in her risings; and it is this motion which sends people rushing to the side, which sets them roaring for the steward, which causes them to loathe life and to lie with their heads anywhere and their feet anyhow.

I cannot help thinking, however that imagination contributes something, and often a very great deal, to sea-sickness; otherwise how are we to account for people suffering from nausea actually before they step on board the vessel that is to carry them? If a sea-sick man could be sent to sleep his sufferings would cease; yet the vessel goes on rolling, and if it is this movement, affecting the stomach, that causes nausea, I cannot quite see why the stomach should not be as sympathetic in sleep as in waking. Any way, I believe that a person could be made to forget to be sea-sick by having his imagination intensely occupied or his fears excited. Let a vessel full of sea-sick people drive ashore, or catch fire, or be in collision; let the captain bawl out, “We are all lost;” it would be interesting to conjecture how much sickness would remain aboard that ship. A good prescription might be a profoundly exciting novel: some hideous mystery so distractingly complicate as to make one sink all thoughts of waves and stewards in the eagerness to discover whether the figure Sir Jasper sees was really a ghost or his first wife, and whether it was her ladyship or the groom she ran away with who shot Signor Squallini in the throat and did the fine arts a real service. But it is better to be sea-sick than in danger; and, if the novelists can do nothing for us, I am afraid there is no alternative but to go on feeing the stewards and building swift vessels.

A LOG EXTRACT.

The following entry was made in the official log-book of a ship named the Oxford:—“Fifth November, 1882, Sunday, 4.0 p.m., lat. 35° 39´ S., long. 18° 53´ E., W. Waters, A.B., while furling the mizzen-topsail fell from the yard into the sea, striking the half round of the poop in his fall. A lifebuoy was promptly thrown him, the ship brought to the wind—it blowing a fresh gale from the S.W., with thick weather and a heavy sea at the time. The port lifeboat was at once lowered, and proceeded under the charge of Mr. A. Bowling, second mate, to pick up the man. Owing, however, to the shock sustained by him in striking the ship, and his being encumbered with oilskins, etc., he sank before the boat could reach him. After an unsuccessful search, the boat returned to the ship and was with difficulty hoisted up, owing to the heavy sea which half filled her. Everything was done that could be done to save the poor fellow. (Signed) J. Braddick, Master.”

Now, here is the whole story, as who would not suppose? The sailor dropped overboard, a boat unsuccessfully searched for him, and then the ship braced her mainyard round and sailed away. But extracts from log-books, I have taken notice, are like the little box which the fisherman in the “Arabian Nights” found upon the sea-shore; when it was opened a wonderful creature shaped itself out, and its figure filled the sky. I particularly realized this when Mr. Bowling gave me a sketch of the yarn of which Captain Braddick’s log is the briefest hint. Why, what a world of adventure, of heroism, of peril grows up out of these marine entries! Is it four lines about a ship rescuing a crew from a sinking vessel; or about a captain coming across a smack’s boat in the middle of the North Sea, with nothing in her but a little crouching, starving boy; or about a brig found drifting helplessly, with her crew, dead of frost, lying upon her deck? Assuredly in those four lines there is the making of a thrilling volume to any man who shall faithfully put his hand to the work and, exaggerating nothing, relate merely the adventure as it befell, and how it came about and ended, and what the actors in it said, and did, and thought. Here, in very brief form, is Mr. Bowling’s own yarn, told with my pen, of an incident as common pretty nearly in its way at sea as the sight of froth blowing into a hollow, or of the curve of the bow-wave flashing green and glass-smooth from the shearing cutwater.

“We left Calcutta on Sept. 4, 1882, with a full cargo, bound for the port of London. All went well—if by well you’ll understand nothing extraordinary outside spells of bothersome head winds, dead calms, and now and again a twister over the quarter to give us legs—until came Sunday, Nov. 5, on which date you’ll see by the extract from the log-book where we were; the glass stood low, and in the morning there was a kind of wild wet light in the sun when he sprang up from behind the dull-coloured sea, and the lustre that came along with him seemed to roll on the top of the swell as if it was burning oil lying there instead of being the up and down flashing of fair weather, when the light sounds the very bottom of the ocean with its silver lead-line, as you may see for yourselves if you’ll watch the break of day under a pure sky and over clean blue water. We were under topgallant-sails, on the starboard tack, the wind about west, with weight enough in it to swear by, and a slow gathering of haze all along the horizon over the port quarter—south-west the bearings would be about—and a thick, deep-breathing swell coming out of it, tumbled by the wind into a bit of a sea that washed with a stormy noise along the bends, and made the ship as uncomfortable as an old cab on a road full of stones.