Part 17

To those early eyes such monsters revealed themselves, that the like was never heard of before or since. A crew would come home and say that they had met with an extraordinary animal that had a horse’s body and a pig’s head; another, that they had seen a similar wonder, only in this case it was a stag’s body with horns; a third, that one day, the sea being calm, there rose close to the ship an animal that had the head and snout of a boar, and that spurted water through a tube at the top of its head. Those were the halcyon days of the mermaid and the merman; leviathan then sported in twenty different terrible shapes, with mouth most hideously garnished with quadruple rows of teeth, gaping moonwards; the sea-serpent wrapped the spinning globe about with a million leagues of scales; strange voices whispered in mysterious accents under the still intertropic starlight, and shapes like the shadows of pinions moved upon the midnight air; spectral lanthorns were hung up by spirit-hands at the yard-arms and on the bowsprit-end, and, by their dull, graveyard illumination, cast a dismal complexion of death upon the upwards-staring faces of the mariners. I find those early seamen always sailing along as if possessed with an uncontrollable awe and reverence; they are punctual in their prayers; the whole story of their navigation is but a single-hearted reference to the majesty and mercy of the Most High; the atmosphere about them trembles to their devout muttering of _Aves_ and the low chanting of psalms. The ocean was a mystery, the home and the haunt of creatures and objects not to be conceived by the understanding of men. The spirit and influence of the liquid solitude beyond the familiar line, over whose edge the sun rose or sank every day, you will find expressed with artless, most impressive power in the narrative of the first voyage of Columbus in Harris’s Collection, briefly recited as the great admiral’s adventures there are. For such and for earlier mariners—as indeed for later, down even to the times of Dampier, Shelvocke, Cowley, and the Dutch and French explorers of the early years of the last century—the sea could not but hold islands of enchantment, green places deep in its heart, on whose sands the water-nymphs fresh from their coral pavilions, sat combing their yellow hair; paradisaical abodes whose soil was brilliant with gold dust, over whose trees, radiant with fruit, flew birds of a plumage of dazzling splendour, in whose central valley girls of startling beauty might be seen in the moonlight threading with languid eyes the mazes of some amorous dance. Did not even Herman Melville, so recently as 1830 or 1840, find some such enchanted island as this in the Marquesas group?

The sudden emergence or subsidence of land would also help to confirm the ancient mariner in his belief in magic isles, and in their controlment by spells of necromancy. In an old nautical magazine, dated 1802, I find the following: “On the seventh of June, 1790, the _Seahorse_, Captain Mayo, of Boston, from the coast of Africa, saw (in lat. 73 south) _a large point of land_ sink in one moment into the unfathomable deep! As soon as the crew recovered from the inexpressible horror which so tremendous a spectacle must have impressed on their minds, they steered to some ships catching whales, and found that their men had been spectators of the same awful scene. The seamen involuntarily dropped down upon their knees and thanked God for their escape, having been on the same point of land a short time before its sudden disappearance.”

They saw the land disappear; but suppose no other vessels had been in company, and it had chanced that none of the crew had seen the land sink, you have then the seeds of an amazing relation. Figure a dead calm, all hands below at dinner, and nobody on deck but the man at the wheel nodding drowsily over the spokes. The land was plain enough in sight, a mile distant, perhaps, when the crew left the deck; when they return it has vanished. Had it been a ship they would, of course, suppose that she had foundered. But land! is it possible that a tall, substantial mass of land shall vanish on a sudden like a wreath of tobacco smoke? Had the vessel been whirled away out of sight of it by a fierce current? Had she been insensibly blown some leagues along by a stout breeze of wind? No. The man at the wheel is questioned; he rubs his eyes, stares; it is the same marvel to him as to the others. Knowing something of the sailor’s character, I will venture to say that had not those men of the _Seahorse_ actually seen the land go down, two-thirds of them would have gone to their graves persuaded that there had been witchcraft in the business. But put the date back three centuries, into the period of the real Ancient Mariner. He shall behold the cliff founder, if you please, and yet land at Plymouth or Erith with an imagination charged to bursting point with this obvious Satanic engorgement. I think I see him telling the story. Can his hearers, gazing upon his mahogany face, doubt that there are islands which rise and sink? and how can they rise or sink without magical possession, without being under the government of something to direct them? The ancient mariner may, indeed, be beforehand with a solution by importing, let me say, one jaw of a monstrous fish that did “suck ye londe down to ye admiration of ye beholders.” But failing some such explanation, the reason must be sought for devil-wards. The island or cliff easily becomes the abode of demons or of ocean-spirits, who use their dominions as a sort of ship, and who, when they desire a change of air or scene, alter their latitude and longitude by the easy expedient of a submarine excursion. Such a solution could not long miss of confirmation. For presently arrives some _Elizabeth-Jonah_, or some _Ascension_, of London, or _Jesus_, of Hull, with an extraordinary and incredible report: to wit, that being about fifty leagues to the westwards of the island of Madeira, there did happen a mighty commotion in the sea; the water boiled furiously, and out of the midst of it there arose a great flame that was followed by a thick black coil of smoke which emitted a most detestable stench. This, rising, did overspread the heavens with a sable canopy, through which the sun, that had before been ardent, glowed ruefully with a most affrighting face. When the atmosphere had somewhat cleared, and the sea fallen flat again, they observed a great heap of black land floating just where the flame had been; but now, to their great joy, a small gale happening, they hastily trimmed their sails to it and departed, with hearty thanksgiving for their merciful deliverance from a hideous and diabolic spot. There would be to the full as much truth in this as in the account of the subsidence. In every century there have been submarine volcanic disturbances which have dislodged or uphove points of land, rocks, little and even big islands. Suppose what these cheery old mariners beheld was, instead of land, a body of compacted weed; or, not impossibly, a dead whale. No matter! home with the thrilling story; and let any man be pilloried who shall dare to doubt that the rock that came up is not the very identical rock that went down!

I find a singular example of the credulity that gives to the sea the choicest flavour of romance in a note to the life of Sir William Gascoigne, Lord Chief Justice of the King’s Bench in the reign of King Henry IV., in the first edition (1750) of the “Biographia Britannica”:—

“When the said Sir Bernard Gascoigne” (the writer is referring to a descendant of Sir William) “returned from his embassy into England, he took shipping at Dunkirk, and one of the passengers who came over with him was Mrs. Aphra Behn, the ingenious poetess. It is asserted by the writer of her life that in the course of their voyage they all saw a surprising _Phænomenon_, whether formed by any rising exhalations or descending vapours shaped by the winds and irradiated by refracted lights, is not explained; but it appeared through Sir Bernard’s telescopes, in a clear day at a great distance, to be or to resemble a fine, gay, floating fabrick, adorned with figures, festoons, etc. At first they suspected some art in his glasses, till at last, as it approached, they could see it plainly without them; and the relater is so particular in the description as to assert that it appeared to be a four-squared floor of various coloured marble, having rows of fluted and twisted pillars ascending, with cupids on the top circled with vines and flowers, and streamers waving in the air. ’Tis added of this strange visionary, if not romantic or poetical, pageant—for fancy is an architect that can build castles in the clouds as well by sea as land—that it floated almost near enough for them to step out upon it; as if it would invite them to a safer landing than they sought by sailing; or pretended that the one should be as dangerous and deceitful as the other; for soon after the calm which ensued there arose such a violent storm that they were all shipwreckt, but happily in sight of land, to which by timely assistance they all got safe.”

Here, to be sure, we have a very circumstantial account of a very astonishing apparition. This would seem to have been the Blessed Island for which the saints and a noble Spanish lord made search in earlier times. It is a pity that the story comes to us in the life of so lively a romancer as Mrs. Aphra Behn; one would rather have had the grave and wary Sir Bernard’s version. Certain points suggest the legend of Vanderdecken, as for example the circumstance of the storm rising and shipwreck following the approach of the island-pavilion. This fabric of fluted pillars and radiant banners must count among the mysterious disappearances. Why, when these phenomenal glories of the deep floated into full view of the mariner—why had not he the heart to straightway launch his shallop, row with anchor and cable to the magic strand, and “fix” the place, as the Yankees would say, for the satisfaction and diversion of posterity? Why should all those wonders have been in vain? If the modern seaman lack the poetic vision of the early navigator, he is more generous in his detections; he desires the world to share in his own satisfaction, and goes very painfully and exactly to his relation, though it does but concern an iceberg or a body of vapour. The gallant Rodney, when Commodore (1752), was sent cruising in search of an island which one Captain W. Otton, of the snow[70] _St. Paul_, of London, discovered in his passage from South Carolina, about three hundred leagues west of Scilly. The record in Otton’s journal was extremely minute. He gave the date and hour—March 4, 1748–9, two in the afternoon—on which he made the land. He related how it bore, how he tacked, how the wind was, and what the latitude and longitude:—

Footnote 70:

A snow is a brig.

“This island stretches N.W. and S.E., about five leagues long and about nine miles wide. On the south side five valleys and a great number of birds. This day a ship’s masts came alongside. On the south point of said island is a small marshy island.”

As though all this should not be deemed confirmatory enough of his discovery, the Captain added that he thought he saw a tent on the island, and would have gone ashore, “but had unfortunately stove his boat.” Rodney, in company with Captain Mackenzie, a distinguished mathematician, cruised for many days, but to no purpose. The island was entirely in the eye of the captain of the snow _St. Paul_. An old saint or ancient Spanish nobleman would not have let us off so easily. The comparatively modern skipper tells of an ordinary island, prosaically but generously invites all mariners to participation in his discovery, but humanely leaves land-going imagination and curiosity unvexed. The saint or the nobleman would probably have heard the sound of viols, perhaps an organ; the hymning of a collection of monks would have been a distinguishable music; the more erotic vision of the nobleman might have witnessed lovely forms and the seductive beckoning of foam-white hands. We should have had gilded dolphins gambolling among the breakers, and been tickled by a hundred tales more startling than Marryat’s Pasha was regaled with.

Of what material are these fantastic fabrics, real to the beholders, manufactured? Imagination is the loom, but whence comes the stuff? Yet there are many spectacles at sea which the meditative, artless fancy may easily work into creations of beauty, or fear, or brilliance, melancholy, and horror. You must go back—put yourself in the place of the mariner newly arrived in an ocean-waste whose surface his keel is the first to furrow. Then think how the iceberg in the heart of the black gale will strike you: the pallid mountain-mass flashing out to the wild violet lightning dart, the vision or phantasm of a city of pinnacles, spires, minarets, with the crystal smoke of the storm whirling in clouds about its towering heights, whose ravines and scars thunder back in echoes the cannonading of the rushing surges hurling their madness upon the side of that mass of rocky faintness. Or consider the magnificence and splendour of the Northern sunset—different, indeed, from the bald glory of the sinking of the rayless tropic orb—viewed by one who, having for days stemmed towards the Pole, penetrates for the first time the wide white silence of the Greenland parallels. From those dyes of the luminary, or the more amazing coruscations of the aurora borealis, what shadows of realities might not the wondering eye of the mariner evoke, observing rainbow islands to repose on seas of gold, lands of delicate effulgence and of tints too exquisitely beautiful to serve for less than the home of a race of beings whose idea and raiment must be sought in those classic poems in which the gods of the Greeks and the Romans are described! From the texture of the shoulders of rising clouds, from shifting veins of moonlight in the lace-like drapery of white mist, from the luminous shadow of the waterspout with its wing-shaped peak and boiling base, the new imagination, far out upon the bosom of nameless waters, would readily snatch material enough for half those wonders of magic spaces of shore which in those times dotted the oceans of the world from the latitude of Schouten’s iron headland to the height of Nova Zembla. Or, to descend to homelier stuff, omitting the mirage—perhaps the fancy’s noblest opportunity on the deep—there is the ship bottom up; the inverted hulk that for months may have been washing about until she has gathered to her sodden timbers a large estate of sea-weed and marine fungi. The Telmaque rock had undoubtedly no better foundation than this. The passengers—it was in 1786—saw green grass and moss on the rock. This settled the matter; the new island was duly logged and then charted; yet what could it prove but a capsized hull? So of the famous Ariel Rocks, which, in my humble opinion, must be put down to a dead whale or two.

“Captain T. Dickson, of the _Ariel_, when on a voyage from Liverpool to Valparaiso, December, 1827, saw something of a reddish appearance about a quarter of a mile from the vessel; sounded in forty-seven fathoms, fine grey sand. Approaching the object it seemed about six feet above water, when another appeared about three feet below the surface; the sea broke on both; much sea-weed and many birds around; the position was determined by good mer. alt. of sun, and by lunar and chronometric observations.”[71]

Footnote 71:

“South Atlantic Directory,” 1870. A long list of apocryphal islands, rocks, and shoals is given in this volume.

H.M.S. _Beagle_, with the late Dr. Darwin on board, passed several times over the position assigned to these rocks, but found nothing—yes, her people found this: “A heavy swell arose on the quarter which struck our weather-quarter boat, and turned her in upon the deck.... I thought we had indeed found the rocks, _and the huge black back of a dead whale which just then showed itself very near the vessel, much increased the sensation_.”

In more ways than one may the mysterious disappearance of islands be accounted for. The sternly prosaic mariner will desire nothing in this direction that is not real, and of this as little as possible. But happily for the poetic student these disappearances stop short at the precincts of ocean literature. Enter, and the magic is all before you, perennial in its gorgeousness or terror, its sweetness or extravagance of horror. Who would wish one of those enchanted islands away? No prow built by human hands need fear them as a danger; they lie in a daylight or a midnight of their own, washed by the elfin surf of faery-land, lashed by the storms of high imagination, phantoms under phantom suns and stars, dreams of the young-eyed mariner. They are uncharted; but love has their bearings, and memory holds them fondly to their moorings. Of the sea they form the daintiest romance, and they give a colouring of poetry even to the dry and austere perpetuation of such things in these days of scientific exactness and the occasional blunders of the triumphant discoverer.

_RICH CAPTURES._

On October 4, 1799, despatches were received at the Admiralty from Captain Young, of the _Ethalion_ frigate, announcing the capture of a Spanish vessel named the _Thetis_, from the Havannah, with one million and a half of dollars on board, besides a quantity of merchandise. Shortly after this came news of the capture of another Spanish galleon, the _Santa Brigida_, with treasure estimated at between two and three millions of dollars, in addition to a valuable cargo of cochineal, sugar, coffee, and the like. A few days later it was rumoured that Lord Bridport’s share alone of the prize-money amounted to £125,000. But the excitement caused by this great capture had led to much exaggerated gossip, and it was shown that if the prizes yielded £800,000, then Lord Bridport, who, as commander-in-chief, shared one-third of an eighth, would get about £33,000. The other two-thirds of an eighth went to subordinate flag officers, who reckoned on £10,000 apiece, whilst the four captains of the frigates divided £50,000.

On the 29th of the same month a singular procession in honour of this great capture passed through Stonehouse and Plymouth to the dungeons of the Citadel. First went a trumpeter of the Surrey dragoons, sounding a charge; then followed two artillery conductors, an officer of the Surrey dragoons, an officer of artillery, Surrey dragoons, two and two, with drawn sabres; a band of drums and fifes, playing “Rule Britannia” and “God save the King;” then _sixty-three waggons full of dollars_, in nine divisions of seven waggons. On the first waggon a seaman, carrying the British over the Spanish jack, and two officers of marines, armed. On the centre waggon a seaman carrying the British ensign over the Spanish ensign, midshipmen armed with cutlasses. On the last waggon a seaman with the British pendant flying over the Spanish pendant; armed mariners and seamen, two and two: a band of drums and fifes playing “Britons, strike home!” armed seamen with cutlasses; an artillery officer; two officers of marines, armed; Surrey dragoons, two and two, with drawn sabres, and two trumpeters sounding a charge closed the procession. Both to larboard and starboard of this procession walked a number of armed sailors and midshipmen.

It is eighty-seven years since this remarkable parade took place. Long ago death wrested the bugle from the trumpeter in the van and sounded _his_ charge. Those dollars lying piled in sixty-three waggons have been spent a hundred times over. The ringing cheers of the thousands of spectators “who testified their satisfaction by repeated huzzas at seeing so much treasure, once the property of the enemy of old England, soon to be in the pockets of her jolly tars and marines,” have been silenced ages agone by that same choking dust, out of which Spaniards, equally with Englishmen, are manufactured. The Don and the Briton are now excellent friends, and one need not be a holder in Spanish securities to heartily hope that the Spaniard’s shadow may never be less. But one cannot help one’s instincts. In this pacific age it must be wrong to feel elated over old triumphs; yet I confess, somehow or other, I cannot listen to the cheers—how infinitely dim and distant soever—of the spectators of that procession of soldiers and sailors, marching with conquering banners, without an unsounding, yet distinct, lifting up of the voice within me in a huzza of my own. “Our echoes roll from soul to soul,” says Tennyson; and I defy a true-born Englishman to watch those waggons of dollars, those rolling seamen, those brave soldiers and valiant marines, those little cocked-hatted middies, passing along over the fairy-like soil of history to the elf-like strains of “Rule, Britannia” and “Britons, strike home!” without joining in the procession and cheering with all his might the thin phantasm of a once brilliantly real pageant.

’Twas a fine haul for Jack. Sixty-three waggons of dollars! How many jorums of grog lay in those piles? How much fiddling, jigging, caper-cutting? But those waggons only represented a part. It was not until the last day of the month that the remaining chests of the Spanish treasure were lodged in the dungeons of the Citadel, and then the record runs: From _El Thetis_ four hundred and twenty-seven boxes of dollars; from _Santa Brigida_ five hundred and eight boxes of dollars, containing nearly three million dollars, besides very valuable cargoes of cocoa, indigo, cochineal, and sugar, “all safely landed and warehoused in Plymouth, under the Excise and Custom House locks.” Booty of this kind makes one think of the old South Seaman, of the big caracks of the spice islands and Western American seaboard, of Dampier, Shelvocke, Clipperton, and Betagh, and of the grand old Commodore Anson. His was possibly as big a bag as ever fell to the mariner’s lot. The galleon he captured had in her one million three hundred and thirteen thousand eight hundred and forty-three pieces of eight, and nearly thirty-six thousand ounces of silver, which, with the treasure already taken by the _Centurion_, amounted to about £400,000, “independent,” says the writer of the voyage, “of the ships and merchandize which she either burnt or destroyed, and which, by the most reasonable estimation, could not amount to so little as £600,000 more; so that the whole damage done the enemy by our squadron did doubtless exceed a million sterling.”

The Acapulco galleons had long inspired the dreams of the English freebooters. All the wonder and romance of the great South Sea, with its coasts and islands gilded by an imagination of more than Oriental ardency, had entered into those vast floating castellated fabrics, and the magnificence of the New Jerusalem as beheld by the holy seer, was faint in comparison with the substantial splendours which the English sailor with his mind’s vision viewed in the holds of the tall Manila ships. Diamonds of incomparable glory, rubies, sapphires, and other gems of a beauty inexpressible; sacks full of rix dollars, ducatoons, ducats, and Batavian rupees; chests loaded with massy plate, gold and silver, with flagons, goblets, crucifixes, and candles—here, to be sure, were temptations to court Jack from places more distant than Wapping and Gravesend, and to invite him to a contest with seas more ferocious than those which shattered the squadron of Pizarro.