In about latitude 9° N. we ran out of the doldrums and into a fresh breeze from the southwest, which the captain said was the southwest monsoon. I did not then know what a monsoon was. It sounded like simoon and typhoon, and I knew that some of them were ferocious and terrible things, but I was not at all sure which was the worst. It was the strange and foreign sound, I have no doubt, that scared me. If typhoons had been called simple hurricanes they would not have seemed nearly so bad. I had studied about typhoons and simoons and monsoons, and other winds, in my physical geography at school, but they had meant nothing to me but names, largely because they were nothing but names to my teacher. How could they be anything more? When we ran into it we found that the monsoon—this one, at any rate—was nothing to be afraid of. It is a sort of seasonal trade wind, due to the nearness, in this case, of the continent of Africa. We changed our course to southeast, and held it until we ran into the southeast trades a few degrees farther south; then changed again, running nearly west at first, to accommodate the ship to the wind, which at first was nearly south. The wind got around more to the eastward as we went on, and when we crossed the line we could lay a southwest course.
We crossed the equator in about longitude 25° W. The actual crossing occurred at night, but I think that fact had nothing to do with the attitude of the men toward that important event. They took absolutely no notice of it, and I do not believe that more than two or three of them thought of it at all.
In the latitude of Cape St. Roque and Pernambuco, the usual tracks for sailing ships from the United States and Europe to Cape Horn and the Cape of Good Hope converge because of the trade winds. The tracks of vessels, either sail or steam, from Cape Horn and the eastern ports of South America naturally pass through the same somewhat narrow area; but although it seems narrow when you see it on a chart, it covers six or seven degrees of longitude, which is about four hundred miles in this latitude. The chance of meeting ships here is, therefore, not so great as any one might suppose, but we did see five ships in four days. We spoke none of them, although we did try to speak one, a big ship which Captain Nelson thought was bound to New York. He wanted to send letters, and we all hastily got together what we had to send—there was no time to write more than a half dozen words—and made up a packet.
The ship did not respond to our signal, however. She was nearly a mile away, going like a race-horse, with everything she owned on her yards, and the wind just abaft the beam. She may not have seen our signal—she may not have looked for it, her master being unwilling to go to the very considerable trouble involved in taking a packet of letters from an old whaler. At any rate, she did not stop or give any sign. She was a beautiful sight as she passed to windward under her cloud of canvas, making a good sixteen knots, bowing slowly and gracefully, and shouldering the seas out of her way, smothered in foam to her knightheads. There is nothing so beautiful as a full-rigged clipper ship with all her towering spread of sail, and with as much wind as she can stagger under. I watched her as long as I could see her, thinking that merely sailing in such a ship must be sheer pleasure such as we in the Clearchus could not realize. I found that I was smiling to myself. I wish that the day of the sailing ship might come again. It really seems as if it might. There is a wide field for the large, fast sailing ship. There is none for the small, slow ship. After all, it is a question of costs: crews and wages against investment and depreciation and the price of coal or oil.
We kept on down the coast of South America, but well out of sight of land, for ten days. For the first half of the time we had the southeast trades, which were very nearly east, and nothing happened to break the pleasant monotony. I read the “Lives of the Navigators,” for before long we should be off the coast of Patagonia, and I wished to prepare for that experience. No information was to be despised, and who knows how much the true Patagonians have changed in three hundred years? I kept track of Peter’s scrimshawing too, although I did none myself, and I devoted a good deal of time to my studies.
Mr. Brown spent a good deal of time in helping me, and from casual remarks and allusions that he made from time to time I had pieced out a fragmentary history of his career. I had a pretty good notion that Brown was not his real name, but I had no evidence of it. His story, as far as I had been able to get at it, with some guesses on my part, was this.
He had come of good family, with some money; how much I could not tell, but enough to send him to a good school and to college. At school he was rather wild and uncontrollable, and at college he was worse. In the middle of his college course came the Civil War, and he left college and enlisted. What his history had been in the war I could not guess, for he made but one allusion to being in it at all. When the war was over, he went back to college; but in his senior year he got into some drunken scrape, and was expelled. His father seemed to have been a hard kind of man, or perhaps he had got discouraged and tired of pulling him out of scrapes, and he turned him adrift.
Mr. Brown, as I must call him, wandering down upon the Boston wharves, rather desperate, shipped in a fisherman. He had always been used to boats. It was a very short cruise, and upon his return he shipped in a merchantman for the East. On this voyage, as I inferred, he had not abandoned his bad habits, and somehow or other he found himself cast adrift for the second time, and “on the beach” at Batavia. Here he got into some row—a fight, which almost ended him—with his outcast companions, and barely escaped with his life. That seemed to have sobered him. He pulled himself together, and reformed; shipped as foremast hand on a whaler which had put into Batavia short of men, and had followed whaling for the six years since. Now he was thirty-two or thirty-three, quiet and kind and efficient, and he had my unqualified admiration and affection. If I were a second Conrad I would make a book of him.
In about latitude 17° S. the southeast trades left us, and the wind came out from the northeast and north, which suited us just as well. We continued on our course for another five days, and then stood in to the westward for Rio.