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Though it is easier, and perhaps far better, not to begin at all, yet if a beginning is made it is there that most care is needed. Everything is inherent in the genesis. So I have to record the simple genesis of this affair as a winter morning after rain. There was more rain to come. The sky was waterlogged and the grey ceiling, overstrained, had sagged and dropped to the level of the chimneys. If one of them had pierced it! The danger was imminent.

That day was but a thin solution of night. You know those November mornings with a low, corpse-white east where the sunrise should be, as though the day were still-born. Looking to the dayspring, there is what we have waited for, there the end of our hope, prone and shrouded. This morning of mine was such a morning. The world was very quiet, as though it were exhausted after tears. Beneath a broken gutter-spout the rain (all the night had I listened to its monody) had discovered a nest of pebbles in the path of my garden in a London suburb. It occurs to you at once that a London garden, especially in winter, should have no place in a narrative which tells of the sea and the jungle. But it has much to do with it. It is part of the heredity of this book. It is the essence of this adventure of mine that it began on the kind of day which so commonly occurs for both of us in the year’s assortment of days. My garden, on such a morning, is a necessary feature of the narrative, and much as I should like to skip it and get to sea, yet things must be taken in the proper order, and the garden comes first. There it was: the blackened dahlias, the last to fall, prone in the field where death had got all things under his feet. My pleasaunce was a dark area of soddened relics; the battalions of June were slain, and their bodies in the mud. That was the prospect in life I had. How was I to know the Skipper had returned from the tropics? Standing in the central mud, which also was black, surveying that forlorn end to devoted human effort, what was there to tell me the Skipper had brought back his tramp steamer from the lands under the sun? I knew of nothing to look forward to but December, with January to follow. What should you and I expect after November, but the next month of winter? Should the cultivators of London backs look for adventures, even though they have read old Hakluyt? What are the Americas to us, the Amazon and the Orinoco, Barbados and Panama, and Port Royal, but tales that are told? We have never been nearer to them, and now know we shall never be nearer to them, than that hill in our neighbourhood which gives us a broad prospect of the sunset. There is as near as we can approach. Thither we go and ascend of an evening, like Moses, except for our pipe. It is all the escape vouchsafed us. Did we ever know the chain to give? The chain has a certain length—we know it to a link—to that ultimate link, the possibilities of which we never strain. The mean range of our chain, the office and the polling booth. What a radius! Yet it cannot prevent us ascending that hill which looks, with uplifted and shining brow, to the far vague country whence comes the last of the light, at dayfall.

It is necessary for you to learn that on my way to catch the 8.35 that morning—it is always the 8.35—there came to me no premonition of change. No portent was in the sky but the grey wrack. I saw the hale and dominant gentleman, as usual, who arrives at the station in a brougham drawn by two grey horses. He looked as proud and arrogant as ever, for his face is as a bull’s. He had the usual bunch of scarlet geraniums in his coat, and the stationmaster assisted him into an apartment, and his footman handed him a rug; a routine as stable as the hills, this. If only the solemn footman would, one morning, as solemnly as ever, hurl that rug at his master, with the umbrella to crash after it! One could begin to hope then. There was the pale girl in black who never, between our suburb and the city, lifts her shy brown eyes, benedictory as they are at such a time, from the soiled book of the local public library, and whose umbrella has lost half its handle, a china nob. (I think I will write this book for her.) And there were all the others who catch that train, except the young fellow with the cough. Now and then he does miss it, using for the purpose, I have no doubt, that only form of rebellion against its accursed tyranny which we have yet learned, physical inability to catch it. Where that morning train starts from is a mystery; but it never fails to come for us, and it never takes us beyond the city, I well know.

I have a clear memory of the newspapers as they were that morning. I had a sheaf of them, for it is my melancholy business to know what each is saying. I learned there were dark and portentous matters, not actually with us, but looming, each already rather larger than a man’s hand. If certain things happened, said one half the papers, ruin stared us in the face. If those thing did not happen, said the other half, ruin stared us in the face. No way appeared out of it. You paid your half-penny and were damned either way. If you paid a penny you got more for your money. Boding gloom, full-orbed, could be had for that. There was your extra value for you. I looked round at my fellow passengers, all reading the same papers, and all, it could be reasonably presumed, with fore-knowledge of catastrophe. They were indifferent, every one of them. I suppose we have learned, with some bitterness, that nothing ever happens but private failure and tragedy, unregarded by our fellows except with pity. The blare of the political megaphones, and the sustained panic of the party tom-toms, have a message for us, we may suppose. We may be sure the noise means something. So does the butcher’s boy when the sheep want to go up a side turning. He makes a noise. He means something, with his warning cries. The driving uproar has a purpose. But we have found out (not they who would break up side turnings, but the people in the second class carriages of the morning train) that now, though our first instinct is to start in a panic, when we hear another sudden warning shout, there is no need to do so. And perhaps, having attained to that more callous mind which allows us to stare dully from the carriage window though with that urgent din in our ears, a reasonable explanation of the increasing excitement and flushed anxiety of the great Statesmen and their fuglemen may occur to us, in a generation or two. Give us time! But how they wish they were out of it, they who need no more time, but understand.

I put down the papers with their calls to social righteousness pitched in the upper register of the tea-tray, their bright and instructive interviews with flat earthers, and with the veteran who is topically interesting because, having served one master fifty years, and reared thirteen children on fifteen shillings a week, he has just begun to draw his old age pension. (There’s industry, thrift, and success, my little dears!) One paper had a column account of the youngest child actress in London, her toys and her philosophy, initialed by one of our younger brilliant journalists. All had a society divorce case, with sanitary elisions. Another contained an amusing account of a man working his way round the world with a barrel on his head. Again, the young prince, we were credibly informed in all the papers of that morning, did stop to look in at a toy-shop window in Regent Street the previous afternoon. So like a boy, you know, and yet he is a prince of course. The matter could not be doubted. The report was carefully illustrated. The prince stood on his feet outside the toy shop, and looked in.

To think of the future as a modestly long series of such prone mornings, dawns unlit by heaven’s light, new days to which we should be awakened always by these clamant cockcrows bringing to our notice what the busy-ness of our fellows had accomplished in nests of intelligent and fruitful china eggs, was enough to make one stand up in the carriage, horrified, and pull the communication cord. So I put down the papers and turned to the landscape. Had I known the Skipper was back from below the horizon—but I did not know. So I must go on to explain that that morning train did stop, with its unfailing regularity, and not the least hint of reprieve, at the place appointed in the Schedule. Soon I was at work, showing, I hope, the right eager and concentrated eye, dutifully and busily climbing the revolving wheel like the squirrel; except, unluckier than that wild thing so far as I know, I was clearly conscious, whatever the speed, the wheel remained forever in the same place. Looking up to sigh through the bars after a long spin there was the Skipper smiling at me.

I saw an open door. I got out. It was as though the world had been suddenly lighted, and I could see a great distance.

We stood in Fleet Street later, interrupting the tide. The noise of the traffic came to me from afar, for the sailor was telling me he was sailing soon, and that he was taking his vessel an experimental voyage through the tropical forests of the Amazon. He was going to Para, and thence up the main stream as far as Manaos, and would then attempt to reach a point on the Madeira river near Bolivia, 800 miles above its junction with the greater river. It would be a noble journey. They would see Obydos and Santarem, and the foliage would brush their rigging at times, so narrow would be the way, and where they anchored at night the jaguars would come to drink. This to me, and I have read Humboldt, and Bates, and Spruce, and Wallace. As I listened my pipe went out.

It was when we were parting that the sailor, who is used to far horizons and habitually deals with affairs in a large way because his standards in his own business are the skyline and the meridian, put to me the most searching question I have had to answer since the city first caught and caged me. He put it casually when he was striking a match for a cigar, so little did he himself think of it.

“Then why,” said he, “don’t you chuck it?”

What, escape? I had never thought of that. It is the last solution which would have occurred to me concerning the problem of captivity. It is a credit to you and to me that we do not think of our chains so disrespectfully as to regard them as anything but necessary and indispensable, though sometimes, sore and irritated, we may bite at them. As if servitude fell to our portion like squints, parents poor in spirit, green fly, reverence for our social superiors, and the other consignments from the stars. How should we live if not in bonds? I have never tried. I do not remember, in all the even and respectable history of my family, that it has ever been tried. The habit of obedience, like our family habit of noses, is bred in the bone. The most we have ever done is to shake our fists at destiny; and I have done most of that.

“Give it up,” said the Skipper, “and come with me.”

With a sad smile I lifted my foot heavily and showed him what had me round the ankle. “Poo,” he said. “You could berth with the second mate. There’s room there. I could sign you on as purser. You come.”

I stared at him. The fellow meant it. I laughed at him.

“What,” I asked conclusively, “shall I do about all this?” I waved my arm round Fleet Street, source of all the light I know, giver of my gift of income tax, limit of my perspective. How should I live when withdrawn from the smell of its ink, the urge of its machinery?

“That,” he said. “Oh, damn that!”

It was his light tone which staggered me and not what he said. The sailor’s manner was that of one who would be annoyed if I treated him like a practical man, arranging miles of petty considerations and exceptions before him, arguing for hours along rows of trifles, and hoping the harvest of difficulties of no consequence at the end of the argument would convince him. Indeed I know he is always impatient for the next step in any business, and not, like most of us, for more careful consideration. “Look there,” said the sailor, pointing to Ludgate Circus, “see that Putney ’bus? If it takes up two more passengers before it passes this spot then you’ve got to come.”

That made the difficulty much clearer. I agreed. The ’bus struggled off, and a man with a bag ran at it and boarded it. One! Then it had a clear run—it almost reached us—in another two seconds!—I began to breathe more easily; the danger of liberty was almost gone. Then the sailor jumped for the ’bus before it was quite level, and as he mounted the steps, turned, and held up two fingers with a grin.

Thus was a voyage of great moment and adventure settled for me.

When I got home that night I referred to the authorities for the way to begin an enterprise on the deep. What said Hakluyt? According to him it is as easy as this: “Master John Hawkins, with the Jesus of Lubeck, a ship of 700 tunnes, and the Solomon, a ship of seven score, the Tiger, a barke of 50, and the Swalow of 30 Tunnes, being all well furnished with men to the number of one hundred threescore and ten; as also with ordnance and vituall requisite for such a voyage, departed out of Plinmouth the 18 day of October in the yeere of our Lord 1564, with a prosperous wind.”

But we all know such things were done far better in that century. Yet Master John Hawkins, who seems to have handled a fleet with greater facility than I do this pen now I am so anxious to scratch it across preliminaries and get it to sea, did not come to a decision by the number of passengers on a Putney ’bus. So I turned to a modern authority. Yet Bates, I found, is worse than old John Hawkins, Bates actually arrives at his destination in the first sentence. He steps across in thirty-eight words from England to the Amazon. “I embarked at Liverpool with Mr. Wallace, in a small trading vessel, on the 26th day of April 1848; and, after a swift passage from the Irish Channel to the equator arrived on the 26th of May off Salinas.”

Well, I did not. I say it is a gross deception. Voyaging does not get accomplished in that off-hand fashion. It is a mockery to captives like ourselves to pretend bondage is puffed away in that airy manner. It is not so easily persuaded to disencumber us. Indeed, with this and that, I found the initial step in the pursuit of the sunset red a heavy weight, and hardly suited to the constitution of men who have worked into a deep rut; but that high resolution and a faith equal to belief in the liquefaction of St. Januarius’ blood are needed to drop the protective routine of years, to sheer off the dear and warm entanglements of home and friendships; to shut the front door one bleak winter evening when the house smells comfortable and secure, and the light on the hearth, under such circumstances, is ironic in its bright revelation of years of ease and stability till then not fully appraised; and so depart in the dusk for an unknown Welsh coaling port, there to board a tramp steamer for a voyage that has some serious doubts about it, though its landfall shall be near the line, and have palms in it. The door slammed, I noticed, in a chill and penetrating minor, an incident of travel I have never seen recorded.

Now do I come at last, O Liberty, my loved and secret divinity! Your passionate pilgrim is here, late, though still young and eager eyed; yet with his coat collar upturned for the present. Allons! the Open Road is before him. But how the broad and empty prospects of his freedom shudder with the dire sounds and cries of the milk churns on Paddington Station!

And next I remember black night—it was, I think, about three a.m.—and a calamitous rain, and a Welsh railway station where I had alighted, faint with a famine, a kit bag soon to increase in weight and drag, and a pair of numbed feet. There was a porter who bore himself as though it were the last day and he knew the worst, a dying station light, the wind and rain, and me. Outside was the dark, and one of the greatest coaling ports in the world. As I could not see the coal in great bulk I could not admire it. The railway man turned out the light, conducted me politely into a puddle, set my course for the docks in uncharted night with a dexter having no convictions, and left me. I began to hate the land of the wild bard in which I found myself for the first time, and felt a savage satisfaction in being nearly a pure blooded London Saxon; and as I surveyed my prospects in that country, not even the fact that I had a grandparent named Hughes would have prevented me striking Wales with my umbrella, for it is only a cheap one; but I had left it in the train.

It had never occurred to me (any more than it did to you when you got this book to learn about the tropic sea and the jungle) that the Open Road, where the chains fall from us, would include Swansea High Street four hours before sunrise in a steady winter downpour. But there I discovered that trade wind seas by moonlight, flying fish, Indians, and forests and palms, cannot be compelled. They come in their turn. They are mixed with litter and dead stuff, like prizes in a bran tub. Going down the drear and aqueous street it was clear that if there are exalted moments in travel, as on the instant when we discover we really may prepare to go, yet exaltation implies the undistinguished flats from which, for a while, we are translated. This is a travel book for honest men. I am still on the flat. It will be to-morrow presently.

My chief fear was that my waterproof, rattling in the wind, would alarm silent and sleeping Swansea. I found a policeman standing at a street corner, holding out his cape to help away the rain. He could give me no hope. He knew where the dock was, but the way thither was difficult and torturous. I had better follow the tram lines, and ask again, if I saw anybody. Therefore the tram lines I followed till my portable estate, by compound interest, had increased to untold tons; but the empty tram way went on for ever down the rows of frozen and desolate lamps, so that I surrendered all my chances of the seas of the tropics and the jungle of the Brazils, and turned aside from the course which the policeman said led to ships and the deep, entered the dark portico of a shop, where it was only half wet, and lit my pipe, there to wait for the shy gods to turn my luck. Hesitating footsteps fumbled to where I was hidden, and stopped at the flash of my match. “Could yer ’blige with a light, mister?”

He was a little elderly seaman in yellow oilskins and a so’wester. He was rather drunk. His oilskins gathered the reflected street shine, so that he looked phosphorescent, an old man risen wet and shining from the ocean. He was looking for Buenos Aires, he explained, and hadn’t got any matches. Now he, for the Plate, and I, for ultimate Amazonas, set off down the Swansea tram lines. And the wind whined through overhead wires, and a lost dog followed us along the empty thoroughfare where the only sound was of waterspouts, and the elderly mariner sang bold and improper songs, so that I wondered there was not an irruption of nightcaps at upper Swansea windows to witness this disturbance of their usual peace.

We came at length to abandoned lagoons, where spectral ships were moored down the marges, and round the wide waters was the loom of uncertain monsters and buildings. Railway metals waylaid us and caught us by the feet. There were many electric moons swaying in the gale, and they spilled showers of broken light, which melted on the black water, and betrayed to us our loneliness in outer night. The call of a vessel’s syren across that inhospitable space was heard by us as the prolonged moan of the lost.

The old man of the sea took me under a stack of timber to light his pipe. He borrowed my box of matches, and malicious spurts of wind extinguished each match, steadily, as mine ancient struck them. It was now 4 a.m. He threw each bit of dead wood down, without irritation, as though it were the fate of man to strike lights for the gods to douse, but yet was he uplifted now beyond the hurt of cosmic mockery. The matches were not wasted. At least they lighted up his sorrowful face as he talked to me. I would not have had him any the less drunk, for it but softened his facial integument, which I could see had been hardened and set by bitter experience, masking the man; but now his jaded life, warmed by emotion, though much of the emotion was artificial and of the pewter born, was quick in his face again, and made him a human responsive to his kind, instead of a sober and warped shellback with a sour remembrance of his hardships, and of the futility of his endurance, and of the distance away of his masters with their bowels of iron.

He had seven children, and the sea was a weary place. Had I any children?—and God keep them if I had. He was a troublesome old man (“that’s another light gone”) but he had just left his kids (“ah, to hell wi’ the wind”) and he had to talk to someone about them, and that was my rotten luck, said he. We got to the fifth child, and I heard something about her, when the wind reached round the wood stack at us, and snatched the last glim. So it was in the dark that I heard about the other two and the wife, while one of my pockets filled with rain. Only Milly, he said, was at work, and what was four pound a month for the rest? And he was sick of the sea and chief mates, and did I think a chap stood for a better time when he died, if he kept off drink and did his bit without grousing, like some of the parson fellers said? Then he indicated my ship, and disappeared in the dark. He is still waiting an answer to his last question, which I have saved for you to give him.

For me, I was in no mood to discuss whether balm is to be got in Gilead, when we come to the place; but stumbling among the lumber on the deserted deck of the S.S. “Capella,” I found a cabin, fell into it, and remember nothing more but the smell of hot bread, eggs and bacon, and coffee, which visited me in a beautiful dream. Then I woke to the reveille of a tin whistle, which the chief engineer was playing in my ear; and it was daylight. The jumble of recollections of the night before were but dark insanities. But the smell of that aromatic food, I give grace, did not pass with the awakening, for next door I heard lively sizzling in the galley. Already Fleet Street was hull down.

If you are used only to the methods of passenger steamers and regular routes, then you know little of travel. You are but carried about. Insistent clocks and schedules keep that way, and the upholstered but rigid routine is a soporific. You never see the hither side of the hedge. The granite countenance of fortune, her eyes filmed like frozen pools, which keeps alert and bright the voyager who is unprotected from her unscheduled and unmoral acts except by his own ready buckler, is watched for you by others. You are never surprised into fear by the unlucky position of the planets, nor moved to sing Laus Deo, when now and then, the stars are propitious. I had been brought hastily to the “Capella,” for it was said she was sailing instantly. This morning I learned at breakfast that nobody knew when she could sail. Our steamer sat two feet higher than her capacity. There was some galvanised iron to come from Glascow, some machinery from Sheffield; and owing to labour difficulties we were short of several hundred tons of coal. A little mob of us, all strangers, shuffled after the Skipper’s spry heels that morning to the Board of Trade offices, where an official mumbled over the ship’s articles, to our shut ears, and we signed where we were told. A more glum and unromantic group of voyagers, each man twirling his shabby hat in his hands as he waited his turn for the corroded pen, was never seen this side of the Elizabethan era. I became the purser of the “Capella,” with my wages lawfully recorded at a shilling per month.

I was committed. There was no withdrawal now but desertion. And desertion, at times, I seriously considered, because for a week more the cargo dribbled down to us, while I endured as a moucher about those winter docks with their coal tips, and the muddy streets with their sailors’ slop marts, marine stores, and pawnshops having a cankered display of chronometers, telescopes, and other flotsam of marine failure and wreckage. Daily the quays and the dismal waterside ways with their cheap shops were still more depressed by additional snow mush and drives of sleet; and it was no warmth for this idler that he saw the tradesmen, because of the season, putting holly among their oranges and wreathing beer bottles with chains of coloured paper. The iron decks and cabins of my new home were as chill and unfriendly as the empty grate, the marble tables, and the tin advertisements of chemical slops of a temperance hotel. Am I plain? Such are the conditions which compass the wayward traveller. This is what chills one’s rapid pulse when pursuing at last the rosy visions of boyhood. The deplorable littoral of our island kingdom is part of a life on the ocean wave, and should help you in coming to a decision when next you see a friendless and bestial sailorman. It becomes necessary to declare that we shall really get down to the tropics presently; have the courage to wait, like the crew of the “Capella.” Our ship did sail, when she was ready.

It was the afternoon before we sailed, and having listened long enough to my messmates, who, after dinner, weighed the probabilities of malaria, yellow fever and other alien disasters into our coming strange voyage, that I went into the town to take my last look round a book shop, and to get some marine soap, dungarees, and things. Here was I at last with my heart’s desire. On the very next day I should sail, I myself, and no other hero, veritably Me at last, for a place not on the chart, because the place we should find, at the journey’s end, the map described with those words of magic: “Forest” and “Unexplored.” I made my way round crates and barrels on that untidy deck, which had a thick mud of coal dust and snow, to the ladder overside. Coal dust and melting snow! But where was the uplifted heart, the radiant anticipation, as of one to whom the future was big with treasures to be born, which are the privilege of a young pilgrim, released from his usual obligations to pursue far horizons in the Spanish main, while his envious fellows in the city still cast ledgers under gas lamps? Here was another swindle of the romanticists. You may search their warm and golden pages in vain for coal tips, melting ice, delays, and steam heaters that will not work for cold cabins. Down they go here, though. These gallant affairs, I thought, as I descended the wet and gritty ladder, are much better done before the fire at home, in your slippers; for the large scale map, as you traverse its alluring blank areas, leaves out the conditions which now, when I am on the actual business, precipitate as frozen spicules, as would north winds, my warm, aerial, and cloudy enthusiasms that were wont to be dyed such wonderful hues by sunsets, poems, and tales of old travel. Another of these congealing draughts was now to catch me unbuttoned. Because of our unusual destination, and the wild stories that were told of it, we were a point of interest in Swansea docks, and had many interviewers and curious visitors. Some of them were on the quay then, inspecting our steamer, and as I stepped off the ladder one turned to me.

“Mister,” he whispered, “are you going in her?”

“I am,” I said.

“O gord,” said he.

That night I met a number of my grave fellow shipmates in the town. The question was, Should we then go back to the ship?

“What,” burst out one of us in surprise—his gold-laced cap was already resting on his right eyebrow—“Now? Not me. Boys, don’t freeze the Carnival. Follow me!”

We followed him. The rest of the evening is more easily given in dumb show. There was a mechanical piano in a saloon bar, and it steadily devoured pennies, and returned to us automatic joy, fortissimo, over which our conversation strenuously high-stepped and vaulted. Later, there was a search for cabs, and an engineer carried with him everywhere two geese by their necks and sometimes trod on their loose feet. When he did this he snatched a goose from his own grasp, and then roundly abused us for our post-dated frivolity. We learned our steamer was now moored in mid-dock. We found a quay wall, and at the bottom of it, at a great depth in the dark, the level of the water was seen only because shreds of lamp-shine floated there. We understood a boat was below, and found it was, and we loaded it till the water brimmed at the gunwale. As we mounted the “Capella’s” rope-ladder only one goose fell back into the dock.

The “Capella” started in her sleep, and she woke me. She was still trembling. Resting my hand on her I felt her heart begin to throb, though faintly. We were off.

It was a bright morning, early and keen. Those habitual quays now were moving past us. The decks were cleared, the carpenter and some sailors were fixing the hatches, and the pilot, muffled in a thick white shawl, was on the bridge with the Skipper. We stopped in the outer lock, the exhaust humming impatiently while a pier-head jumper—for we were a sailor short—was examined by our doctor. The Skipper had some short words for an official who had mounted the bridge, because the third mate had deserted, and had taken his half pay; and the official, who had volunteered to get us a substitute, had failed. There were now but two mates for our big tramp steamer going a long and arduous voyage which included the navigation for some months of narrow inland waterways in the tropics. Our first mate, passing amidships where the Purser was leaning overside, stopped to tell me what this meant for him and the second mate. I was mighty glad it was not the purser’s fault. I have never heard a short speech more passionate; and his eyes were feral. Yet it became increasingly clear to me, as the voyage lengthened, that his eyes no more than met the case.

Out we drove at last. It was December, but by luck we found a halcyon morning which had got lost in the year’s procession. It was a Sunday morning, and it had not been ashore. It was still virgin, bearing a vestal light. It had not been soiled yet by any suspicion of this trampled planet, this muddy star, which its innocent and tenuous rays had discovered in the region of night. I thought it still was regarding us as a lucky find there. Its light was tremulous, as if with joy and eagerness. I met this discovering morning as your ambassador while you still slept, and betrayed not, I hope, any greyness and bleared satiety of ours to its pure, frail, and lucid regard. That was the last good service I did before leaving you quite. I was glad to see how well our old earth did meet such a light, as though it had no difficulty in looking day in the face. The world was miraculously renewed. It rose, and received the new-born of Aurora in its arms. There was clouds of pearl above hills of chrysoprase. The sea ran in volatile flames. The shadows on the bright deck shot to and fro as we rolled. The breakfast bell rang not too soon. This was a right beginning.

The pilot was dropped, and a course was shaped to pass between Lundy and Hartland. A strong northwester and its seas caught us beyond the Mumbles, and the quality of the sunshine thinned to a flickering stuff which cast only grey shadows. The “Capella” became quarrelsome, and began to strike the seas heavily. You may know the “Capella” when you see her. She is a modern three-thousand-ton freighter, with derrick supports fore and aft, and a funnel; and the three of them are so fearful of seeming rakish that they overdo the effect of stern utility, and appear to lean ahead. She is a three-island ship, the amidships section carrying the second mate’s cabin, and the cabins of the four engineers, all of them, excepting the Chief’s cabin, looking outwards overseas across a narrow sheltered alleyway; and on a narrower athwartship’s alleyway there, and opening astern, are the Chief’s place, and the cook’s galley, the entrance to the engine-room, and the engineers’ messroom. Above this structure is the boat deck. You may reach the poop, which contains the master’s and chief mate’s quarters, the doctor’s and steward’s berths, and the saloon, by descending a perpendicular iron ladder to the long main deck, or else, as all did at sea, by a flying trestle bridge, which is dismantled when in port. Her black funnel is relieved by a cryptic design in white, and her bows are so bluff that, as the chief mate put it, “her belly begins there.” She might not take your eye, but a shipowner would see her points. She carries a large cargo on a comparatively low registered tonnage. The money that built her went mostly in hull and engines, and the latter do their work as sweetly as an eight-day clock, giving ten and a half knots, weather permitting, on a low coal consumption. There was not much money left, therefore, for balm in the cabins, and that is the reason we do not find it there.

At sundown the sky cleared. The wind, increased in violence, had swept it of the last feather. Lundy was over our starboard bow, a small dark blot in a clear yellow light which poured, with the gale and the rising seas, from the west. The glass was falling. Now, the Skipper has often told me how his “Capella” had faced hurricanes off Cape Hatteras, when laden with ore, and had kept her decks dry. There are other stories about her surprising buoyancy, when deeply laden, and I have heard them all at home, and they are fine stories. But what lies they are! For there below me, with Lundy not even passed, and the Bay of Biscay to come (Para not to be thought of yet) were tons and tons of salt wash that could not get time to escape by the scuppers, but plunged wearily amongst the hatches and winches.

“I’ve never seen her as dirty as this,” grumbled the chief engineer apologetically, peeping from his cabin at cold green water lopping over casually on to the after deck. “It’s that patent fuel—its stowed wrong. Now she’ll roll—you can feel it—the cat she is, she’s never going to stop. It’s that patent fuel and her new load line.”

Certainly she sat close to the sea. I had never seen so much lively water so close. She wallowed, she plunged, she rolled, she sank heavily to its level. I looked out from the round window of the Chief’s cabin, and when she inclined those green mounds of the swell swinging under us and away were superior, in apparition, to my outlook.

“Listen to it,” said the Chief. He stopped triturating some shavings of hard tobacco between his huge palms, and sat quietly, hands clasped, as though in prayer. The surge mourned over the deck. The day, too, was growing towards the dusky hours of retrospection. That sombre monody outside was like the tremor and boom of the drums funebre. “That chap some of you talk about—Lloyd George!”—said the Chief, suddenly rubbing his tobacco again with energy. (Good God, I thought, and here we are at sea too. Now what has the misguided man done.) “If I had him here I’d hold him down in that wash on deck till it cleared. Then he’d know. He put it there, to break sailors’ legs. This steamer, she had dry decks till her load line was altered. She carries more now than she was built for, two hundred tons more. If I had him here—but there you are! Popularity! There’s a fine popular noise for you, isn’t it? Sailors growled for better food. ‘What about this improved food scale?’ says Mr. Lloyd George to the shipowners. ‘Oh,’ said they, ‘we’ll give ’em better food, the drunken insubordinate dogs, if you’ll make overloading legal.’ ‘Why,’ says Lord George, ‘then it wouldn’t be illegal, would it?’ So it was done. What does the public know about a ship’s buoyancy? Nothing. But it understands food. So the clever man heightens the Plimsoll mark, adds a million or so to shipowners’ capital by dipping his pen in the ink, and gives Jack more jam. What you want ashore,” the Chief added bitterly, “is not more voters, as some say, but more lunatic asylums.”

Though I had left politics at home, to be settled by others, like the trouble with the drains, the dog licence, and the dispute about the garden fence, I glanced with interest at the Chief. I know him well. Not only is he a kindly man, but he himself is also a philosophic rebel. But his eye was hard, and he still ground the tobacco with forgetful energy, us though an objectionable thing were between his strong hands. Then impatiently he threw the tobacco loose on his log book, which was open on his deck, paused, and said, “Ah, maybe the man thought a little freeboard the less didn’t matter. God give him grace,” and picked his flute out of a bookshelf which was fastened above his bunk; sat down over the steam heater, and broke out like a blackbird. Yet was it a well-remembered air he fluted so well. I listened so long as respect for the artist demanded, then rose, filled my pipe from the fragrant grains on the log book, and left him. Presently I would listen to such airs; but this was too soon.

I repeat I had confidence in the “Capella” to gain. I went forward to get it, mounting the bridge, where my cabin mate, the youthful second officer, was in charge, in his oilskins. A cheerful sight he looked. “I think,” said he briskly, “we’re going to catch it.” He was puckering his face over our course. Lundy was looming large—even Rat Island was plain—but it looked so frail in that flood of seas, wind, and wild yellow light streaming together from the evening west, that I looked for the unsubstantial island to spring suddenly from its foundations, and to come down on us a stretched wisp of thinned and ragged smoke. The sea was adrift from its old confines. The flood was pouring past, and the wind was the drainage of interstellar space. Lundy was the last delicate fragment of land. It still fronted the upheaval and rush of the ungoverned elements, but one looked for it to be swept away.

Yet that wild and scenic west, of such pallor and clarity that one shrank from facing its inhospitable spaciousness, with each shape of a wave there, black against the light as it reared ahead, a distinct individual foe in the host moving to the attack, was but the prelude. Night and the worst were to come. Just then, while the last of the light was shining on the officer’s oilskins, I was only surprised that our bulk was such a trifle after all. Our loaded vessel looked so bluff and massive when in dock. She began to attempt, off Lundy, the spring and jauntiness of a trawler. The bows sank to the rails in an acre of white, and the spume flew past the bridge like rain. The black bows lifted and swayed, buoyant on submarine upheavals, to cut out segments of the sunset; then sank again into dark hollows where the foam was luminous. The cold and wind were bitter dolours.

We rolled. I grasped the rail of the weather cloth, in the drive of wind and spume, and rode down on our charger like a valiant man; like a valiant man who is uncertain of his seat. Something like a valiant man. We advanced to the attack, masts and funnel describing great arcs, and steadily our bows shouldered away the foe. I think sailors deserve large monies. Being the less valiant—for the longer I watched, the more grew I wet and cold—it came to my mind that where we were, but a few weeks before, another large freighter had her hatches opened by the seas, and presently was but a trace of oil and cinders on the waters. You will remember I am on my first long voyage. The officer was quite cheerful and asked me if I knew Forest Gate. There were, he said, some fine girls at Forest Gate.

We rounded Hartland. It was dusk, the weather was now directly on our starboard beam, and the waves were coming solidly inboard. The main deck was white with plunging water. We rolled still more.

“I can’t make out why you left London when you didn’t have to,” said the grinning sailor. “I’d like to be on the Stratford tram, going down to Forest Gate.”

This was nearly as bad as the Chief’s flute. I held up two fingers over those hatches of ours, called silently on blessed Saint Anthony, who loves sailors, and went down the ladder; for night had come, and the prospect from the “Capella” was not the less apprehensive to the mind of a landsman because the enemy could not be seen, except as flying ghosts. The noises could be heard all right.

I shut my heavy teak door amidships, shut out the daunting uproar of floods, and the sensation that the night was collapsing round our heaving ship. There was a home light far away, on some unseen Cornish headland, rising and falling like a soaring but tethered star. Nor did I want the lights of home.

“I love the sea,” a beautiful woman once said to me. (We, then, stood looking out over it from a height, and the sea was but the sediment of the still air, the blue precipitation of the sky, for it was that restful time, early October. I also loved it then.)

I was thinking of this, when the concrete floor of the cabin nearly became a wall, and I fell absurd-wise, striking nearly every item in the cabin. Was this the way to greet a lover? Sitting on a sea-chest, and swaying to and fro because the ship compelled me to a figure of woe, I began to consider whether it was only the books about the sea which I had loved hitherto, and not the sea itself. Perhaps it is better not to live with it, if you would love it. The sea is at its best at London, near midnight, when you are within the arms of a capacious chair, before a glowing fire, selecting phases of the voyages you will never make. It is wiser not to try to realise your dreams. There are no real dreams. For as to the sea itself, love it you cannot. Why should you? I will never believe again the sea was ever loved by anyone whose life was married to it. It is the creation of Omnipotence, which is not of human kind and understandable, and so the springs of its behaviour are hidden. The sea does not assume its royal blue to please you. Its brute and dark desolation is not raised to overwhelm you; you disappear then because you happen to be there. It carries the lucky foolish to fortune, and drags the calculating wise to the strewn bones. Yet, thought I, that night off Cornwall, if I pray now as one of the privileged and lucky foolish, this very occasion may prove to be set apart for the sole use of the calculating wise. Because that is the way things happen at sea. What else may we expect from It, the nameless thing, new-born with each dawn, but as old as the night? Now for me had it degenerated into its mood of old night, behaving as it did in the lightless days, before poetry came to change it with flattery. It was again as inhuman as when the poet was merely a wonderfully potential blob on a warm mudbank.

Here, you see, is the whole trouble in appealing to Omnipotence. Picture me entering the wide western ocean at night, an inconspicuous but self-important morsel sitting on a sea-chest, at a time when it was perhaps ordained that hundreds of ships should have anxious passages. (Afterwards I learned very many ships did have anxious passages.) How could I expect to be spared, even though somewhere the hairs of my head were all numbered? It is plain that to spare me would be to extend beneficence to all. There only remained to me my liberty to hope that our particular steamer might miss all seventh waves, by luck. I was free to do that.

I turned up the dull and stinking oil lamp, and tried to read; but that fuliginous glim haunted the pages. That black-edged light too much resembled my own thoughts made manifest. There were some bunches of my cabin mate’s clothes hanging from hooks, and I watched their erratic behaviour instead. The water in the carafe was also interesting, because quite mad, standing diagonally in the bottle, and then reversing. A lump of soap made a flying leap from the washstand, and then slithered about the floor like something hunted and panic-stricken. I listened to numerous little voices. There was no telling their origins. There was a chorus in the cabin, rustlings, whispers, plaints, creaks, wails, and grunts; but they were foundered in the din when the spittoon, which was an empty meat tin, got its lashings loose, and began a rioting fandango on the concrete. Over the clothes chest, which was also our table and a cabin fixture, was a portrait of the mate’s sweetheart, and on its frame was one of my busy little friends the cockroaches; for the mate and I do not sleep alone in this cabin, not by hundreds. The cockroach stood in thought, waving his hands interrogatively, as one who talks to himself nervously. The ship at that moment received a seventh wave, lurched, and trembled. The cockroach fell. I rose, listening. I felt sure a new clamour would begin at once, showing we had reached another and critical stage of the fight. But no; the brave heart of her was beating as before. I could feel its steady pulse throbbing in our table. We were alive and strong, though labouring direfully.

It was when I was thinking whether bed would be, as I have so often found it, the best answer to doubt, that I heard a boatswain’s pipe.

I fought one side of the door, and the wind fought the other. My hurry to open the door was great, but the obstinate wind jammed it firmly. Without warning the wind released its hold, the ship fell over to windward, the door flew open, and forth I went, clutching at the driving dark. Then up sailed my side of the ship, and the door shut with the sound of gunfire. I had never experienced such insensate violence. These were the unlawful noises and movements of chaos. Hanging to a rail, I was puzzling out which was the fore and which the rear of the ship, when a flying lump of salt water struck me in the face just as a figure (I thought it was the chief officer) hurried past me bawling “All hands.”

The figure came back. “That you, purser? Number three hatch has gone,” it said, and disappeared instantly.

So. Then this very thing had come to me, and at night! Our hatches were adrift. It was impossible. Why, we had only just left Swansea. It could not be true; it was absurdly unfair. This was my first long voyage, and it had only just begun. I stood like the cricketer who is out for a duck.

If I could tell you how I felt, I would. Somebody was shouting somewhere, but his words were cut off at once by the wind and blown away. I felt my way along a wet and dark iron alleyway which was giddily unstable, pressing hard against my feet, and then falling from under me. I got round by the engine-room entrance. Small gleams, shavings of light, were escaping from seams in the unseen structure, but they showed nothing, except a length of wet rail or a scrap of wet deck. The ship itself was a shade, manned by voices.

I could not see that anything was being done. Were they allowing her to fill up like an open barge? I became aware my surcharged feelings were escaping by my knees, which kept knocking in their tremors against a lower rail. I tried to stop this trembling by hardening my muscles, but my fearful legs had their own way. Yet it is plain there was nothing to fear. I told my legs so. Had we not but that day left Swansea? Besides, I had already commenced a letter which was to be posted at Para. The letter would have to be posted. They were waiting for it at home.

Somewhere below me a heavy mass of water plunged monstrously, and became a faintly luminous cloud over all the main deck aft, actually framing the rectangular form of the deck in the night. It was unreasonable. I was not really one of the crew either, though on the articles. I was there by chance. No advantage should be taken of that. A torrent poured down the athwartships alleyway, and nearly swept me from my feet.

One could not watch what was happening. That was another cruel injustice. The wind and sea could be heard, and the ship could be felt. But how could I be expected to know what to do in the dark in such circumstances? There ought to be a light. This should have happened in the daytime. My garrulous knees struck the lower rail violently in their excitement. I leaned over the rail, shading my eyes. I grew savagely indignant with something having no name and no shape. I cannot even now give a name to the thing that angered me, but can just discern, in the twilight which shrouds the undiscovered, a vast calm face the rock of which no human emotion can move, with eyes that stare but see nothing, and a mouth that never speaks, and ears from which assailing cries and questions fall as mournful echoes, ironic repetitions. This flung stone falls from it, as unavailing as your prayers; but we shall never cease to pray and fling stones, alternately, up there into the twilight.

Nevertheless, when the chief, with his hurricane lamp, found me, he says I was smiling. The youth who was our second mate ran up and stood by us, the better to shout to the deck below. He shouted, bending over the rail, till he was screaming through hoarseness. He turned to us abruptly. “They don’t understand a word I say,” he cried in despair. “There isn’t a sailor or an Englishman in the crowd, the —— German farmers.” This, I found afterwards, was nearly true. These men had been signed on at a Continental port. It was really our Dutch cook who saved us that night. It was the cook who first saw the hatch covers going.

The ship’s head had been put to the seas to keep the decks as clear as possible, and being now more accustomed to the gloom I could make out the men below busy at the hatch. Most conspicuous among them was the cook, who had taken charge there, and he, with three languages, bludgeoned into surprising activity the inexperienced youngsters who were learning for the first time what happens to a ship when the carpenter’s chief job on leaving port has its defects discovered by exceptional weather. They were wading through swirling waters as they worked, and once a greater wave sprang bodily over them, and when the hatch showed through the foam again some of the men had gone as though dissolved. But it was found they had kept the right side of the bulwarks, and the elderly carpenter, whose leg had got wedged in a winch, was the only one damaged.

If you ask me when I shall be pleased to allow the necessary sun to rise upon this narrative to give it a little warmth, then I must tell you it cannot be done till we have fastened down the “Capella’s” number two hatch, at least. That hatch has gone now, and if hatches one and four give way while number two is getting attention from the weary, soaked, and frozen crowd which has just had an hour’s desperate work at number three, then I fear the sun will never rise on this narrative. (How Bates got over to his wonderful blue butterflies in those forest paths under a tropical sun in thirty-eight words I do not know. He must have been thinking of nothing but his butterflies. I cannot do it, with the seas and the ship keeping my mind so busy.)

Luckily, the other hatches kept staunch. We were watertight again. When the Old Man, the Chief, the Doctor, and the Purser, gathered late that night in the Chief’s cabin to see what it was he had secreted in his cupboard, and boasted of, we sat where we could, being comfortably crowded, and I never knew tobacco could taste like that. I felt as if never before had I found such large leisure for extracting its full flavour. From being suddenly confined within a space which gave me a short outlook of a few hours, I was presently released into the open again and of what might remain to me of the usual gift of ample years. I had all that time to smoke in. Never did a pipe taste so sweet. It is idle for good and serious souls to think me graceless here with this talk of tobacco immediately after such a release. Let me tell them my sacrificial smoke rose up straight and accepted. Looking through the smoke I saw clearly how worthy, kind, and lovable were the faces of my comrades. I warmed to this voyage for the first time; as though, after a test, I had been initiated. This was the place for me, with men like these about me, and such great affairs to be met. I revelled in the thought of our valorous bluff, insignificant as we were in that malign desolation, sundered from our kind.

“Chief,” said the Old Man, “it was my department that time. None of your old engines did it.”

“You’ve got a good cook,” said the Chief, “I saw that.” Then the Chief, remembering something, turned in his seat to the picture hanging above his desk of a smiling and handsome matron. “Here’s luck, old girl,” he said, holding up his glass; “you can still send me some letters.”

The Chief, in case of an emergency, slept in his clothes that night on the settee, and I climbed into his bunk. What a comfortable outline the man had, as he lay on his broad back, mildly snoring. There was a tangle of tense hair over a square copper coloured forehead. A long experience of such nights was written in many lines on that brow, and was shown in that indifferent snoring while chaos was without. The nose sprang out of the big face like an ejaculation, and beneath it was a moustache clipped short to show the red of the upper lip. The jaw was powerful, but its curves made it friendly. His body and limbs hid the settee and had a margin over. I quite believed what I had been told of his successful way with refractory stokers. There was confidence to be got from a mere look at that slumbering Jovian form. The storm assailed its hairy and fleshy ears in vain. I braced my knees against the bulkhead to keep myself still, the rolling was so violent, and went to sleep ... waking to find us on a level keel; and was deceived into thinking the parallel lines of grey and gold in the upper air, seen as a picture framed by the port, were the heights about; a harbour into which we had run for shelter; but it was only cloudland over the western ocean. The stillness, too, was but a short reprieve. The wind was merely making a detour, to spring at us from another quarter.

The sun died at birth. The wind we had lost we found again as a gale from the south-east. The waters quickly increased again, and by noon the saloon was light and giddy with the racing of the propeller. I moved about like an infant learning to walk. We were 201 miles from the Mumbles, course S.W. 1/2W.; it was cold, and I was still looking for the pleasures of travel. The Doctor came to introduce himself, like a good man, and tried me with such things as fevers, Shaw, Brazilian entomology, the evolution of sex, the medical profession under socialism, the sea and the poets. But my thoughts were in retreat, with the black dog in full cry. It was too cold and damp to talk even of sex. When my oil lamp began to throw its rays of brown smell, the Doctor, tired of the effort to exalt the sour dough which was my mind, left me. It was night. O, the sea and the poets!

By next morning the gale, now from the south-west, like the seas, was constantly reinforced with squalls of hurricane violence. The Chief put a man at the throttle. In the early afternoon the waves had assumed serious proportions. They soared by us in broad sombre ranges, with hissing white ridges, an inhospitable and subduing sight. They were a quite different tribe of waves from the volatile and malicious natives of the Bristol Channel. Those channel waves had no serried ranks in the attack; they were but a horde of undisciplined savages, appearing to assault without design or plan, but getting at us as they could, depending on their numbers. The waves in the channel were smaller folk, but more athletic, and very noisy; they appeared to detach themselves from the sea, and to leap at us, shouting.

These western ocean waves had a different character. They were the sea. We did not have a multitude of waves in sight, but the sea floor itself might have been undulating. The ocean was profoundly convulsed. Our outlook was confined to a few heights and hollows, and the moving heights were swift, but unhurried and stately. Your alarm, as you saw a greater hill appear ahead, tower, and bear down, had no time to get more than just out of the stage of surprise and wonder when the “Capella’s” bows were pointing skyward on a long up-slope of water, the broken summit of which was too quick for the “Capella”—the bows disappeared in a white explosion, a volley of spray, as hard as shot, raked the bridge, the foredeck filled with raging water, and the wave swept along our run, dark, severe, and immense; with so little noise too; with but a faint hissing of foam, as in a deliberate silence. The “Capella” then began to run down a valley.

The engines were reduced to half speed; it would have been dangerous to drive her at such seas. Our wet and slippery decks were bleak, windswept, and deserted. The mirror of water on the iron surfaces, constantly renewed, reflected and flashed the wild lights in the sky as she rolled and pitched, and somehow those reflections from her polish made the steamer seem more desolate and forlorn. Not a man showed anywhere on the vessel’s length, except merely to hurry from one vantage to another—darting out of the ship’s interior, and scurrying to another hole and vanishing abruptly, like a rabbit.

The gale was dumb till it met and was torn in our harsh opposition, shouting and moaning then in anger and torment as we steadily pressed our iron into its ponderable body. You could imagine the flawless flood of air pouring silently express till it met our pillars and pinnacles, and then flying past rift, the thousand punctures instantly spreading into long shrieking lacerations. The wounds and mouths were so many, loud, and poignant, that you wondered you could not see them. Our structure was full of voices, but the weighty body which drove against our shrouds and funnel guys, and kept them strongly vibrating, was curiously invisible. The hard jets of air spurted hissing through the winches. The sound in the shrouds and stays began like that of something tearing, and rose to a high keening. The deeper notes were amidships, in the alleyways and round the engine-room casing; but there the ship itself contributed a note, a metallic murmur so profound that it was felt as a tremor rather than heard. It was almost below human hearing. It was the hollow ship resonant, the steel walls, decks, and bulkheads quivering under the drumming of the seas, and the regular throws of the crank-shaft far below.

It was on this day the “Capella” ceased to be a marine engine to me. She was not the “Capella” of the Swansea docks, the sea waggon squatting low in the water, with bows like a box, and a width of beam which made her seem a wharf fixture. To-day in the Atlantic her bluff bows rose to meet the approaching bulk of each wave with such steady honesty, getting up heavily to meet its quick wiles, it is true, but often with such success that we found ourselves perched at a height above the gloom of the hollow seas, getting more light and seeing more world; though sometimes the hill-top was missed; she was not quick enough, and broke the inflowing ridge with her face. She behaved so like a brave patient thing that now her portrait, which I treasure, is to me that of one who has befriended me, a staunch and homely body who never tired in faithful well-doing. She became our little sanctuary, especially near dayfall, with those sombre mounts close round us bringing twilight before its time.

Your glance caught a wave passing amidships as a heaped mass of polished obsidian, having minor hollows and ridges on its slopes, conchoidal fractures in its glass. It rose directly and acutely from your feet to a summit that was awesome because the eye travelled to it over a long and broken up-slope; this hill had intervened suddenly to obscure thirty degrees of light; and the imagination shrank from contemplating water which over-shadowed your foothold with such high dark bulk toppling in collapse. The steamer leaning that side, your face was quite close to the beginning of the bare mobile down, where it swirled past in a vitreous flux, tortured lines of green foam buried far but plain in its translucent deeps. It passed; and the light released from the sky streamed over the “Capella” again as your side of her lifted in the roll, the sea falling down her iron wall as far as the bilge. The steamer spouted violently from her choked valve, as it cleared the sea, like a swimmer who battles, and then gets his mouth free from a smother.

Her task against those head seas and the squalls was so hard and continuous that the murmur of her heart, which I fancied grew louder almost to a moaning when her body sank to the rails, the panic of her cries when the screw raced, when she lost her hold, her noble and rhythmic labourings, the sense of her concentrated and unremitting power given by the smoke driving in violence from her swaying funnel, the cordage quivering in tense curves, the seas that burst in her face as clouds, falling roaring inboard then to founder half her length, she presently to raise her heavy body slowly out of an acre of foam, the cascades streaming from her in veils,—all this was like great music. I learned why a ship has a name. It is for the same reason that you and I have names. She has happenings according to her own weird. She shows perversities and virtues her parents never dreamed into the plans they laid for her. Her heredity cannot be explained by the general chemics of iron and steel and the principles of the steam engine; but something counts in her of the moods of her creators, both of the happy men and the sullen men whose bright or dark energies poured into her rivets and plates as they hammered, and now suffuse her body. Something of the “Capella” was revealed to me, “our” ship. She was one for pride and trust. She was slow, but that slowness was of her dignity and size; she had valour in her. She was not a light yacht. She was strong and hard, taking heavy punishment, and then lifting her broad face over the seas to look for the next enemy. But was she slow? She seemed but slow. The eye judged by those assailing hills, so vast and whelmingly quick. The hills were so dark, swift, and great, moving barely inferior to the clouds which travelled with them, the collapsing roof which fell over the seas, flying with the same impulse as the waters. There was the uplifted ocean, and pressing down to it, sundered from it only by the gale—the gale forced them apart—the foundered heavens, a low ceiling which would have been night itself but that it was thinned in patches by some solvent day. And our “Capella,” heavy as was her body, and great and swift as were the hills, never failed to carry us up the long slopes, and over the white summits which moved down on us like the marked approach of catastrophe. If one of the greater hills but hit us, I thought——

One did. Late that afternoon the second mate, who was on watch, saw such a wave bearing down on us. It was so dominantly above us that instinctively he put his hand in his pocket for his whistle. It was his first voyage in an ocean steamer; he was not long out of his apprenticeship in “sails,” and so he did not telegraph to stop the engines. The Skipper looked up through the chart-room window, saw the high gloom of this wave over us, and jumped out for the bridge ladder to get at the telegraph himself. He was too late.

We went under. The wave stopped us with the shock of a grounding, came solid over our fore-length, and broke on our structure amidships. The concussion itself scattered things about my cabin. When the “Capella” showed herself again the ventilators had gone, the windlass was damaged, and the iron ends of the drum on the forecastle head, on which a steel hawser was wound, had been doubled on themselves, like tinfoil.

By day these movements of water on a grand scale, the harsh and deep noises of gale and breaking seas, and the labouring of the steamer, no more than awed me. At least, my sight could escape. But courage went with the light. At dusk, the eye, which had the liberty during the hours of light to range up the inclines of the sea to distant summits, and note that these dangers always passed, was imprisoned by a dreadful apparition. When there was more night than day in the dusk you saw no waves. You saw, and close at hand, only vertical shadows, and they swayed noiselessly without progressing on the fading sky high over you. I could but think the ocean level had risen greatly, and was see-sawing much superior to us all round. The “Capella” remained then in a precarious nadir of the waters. Looking aft from the Chief’s cabin I could see of our ship only the top of our mainmast, because that projected out of the shadow of the hollow into the last of the day overhead; and often the sheer apparitions oscillating around us swung above the truck of it, and the whole length vanished. The sense of onward movement ceased because nothing could be seen passing us. At dusk the steamer appeared to be rocking helplessly in a narrow sunken place which never had an outlet for us; the shadows of the seas erect over us did not move away, but their ridges pitched at changing angles.

You know the Sussex chalk hills at evening, just at that time when, from the foot of them, they lose all detail but what is on the skyline, become an abrupt plane before you of unequal height. That was the view from the “Capella,” except that the skyline moved. And when we passed a barque that evening it looked as looks a solitary bush far on the summit of the downs. The barque did not pass us; we saw it fade, and the height it surmounted fade, as shadows do when all light has gone. But where we saw it last a green star was adrift and was ranging up and down in the night.

This was the dark time when, struggling from amidships to the poop, you knew there was something organised and coherent under you, still a standing place in chaos, only because you could feel it there. And this was the time to seek your fellows in the saloon, where there was light, warmth, sane and familiar things, and dinner. The “Capella’s” saloon was fairly large, and the Skipper’s pride. It was panelled in maple and oak, with a long settee at the foreward end upholstered in red velvet, the velvet protected by a calico cover. A brass oil lamp with an opaline shade hung over the table from a beam beneath the skylight. There was a closed American stove, with a rigorously polished brass flue running up through the deck. On two oak sideboards in corners of the saloon some artificial plants blossomed; from single stems each plant blossomed into flowers of aniline dyes and of different species. One of these plants, an imitation palm, and a better imitation of life than the others, was carefully watered throughout the voyage by the steward till it wilted into corruption and an offence, and became a count against the steward which the skipper never forgave, for he thought his floral ornaments lovely. When a pretty Brazilian lady visitor at Itacoatiara admired the magenta rays of one blossom, he culled it for her (five earnest minutes with a sharp knife, for there was wire behind the green bark) more as a sacrifice and a hard duty than a joy, and often spoke of it afterwards, shaking his head regretfully.

Ah! that saloon. I remember it first, shiny, cold, and repellent, with a handful of fire to its wide capacity for draughts, in the northern seas. It had curious marine odours then, with which I was not friendly till long after, odours that lamps, burnished brass, newly polished wood, food, and the steward’s storeroom behind it, never fully accounted for; and I remember it as I found it in the still heat of the Amazon, when it had the air of an oven; when, writing in it, the sweat ran off the fingers to soil the paper, strange insects crawling everywhere on its green baize table cover, and banging against its lamp. I remember it assiduously now, every trivial feature of it, and the men, now scattered over all the world, thrown together in it then for a spell to make the most of each other. It has the indelible impress of a room of that house where first the interest in existence awakened in us.