CHAPTER XXXIV.

THE SAILOR'S POST-OFFICE.

We crossed the line on the last day of June. I need not rehearse the description of a hackneyed ceremony known to all--how curtains were rigged amidships--how Father Neptune with his hempen beard came on board, seated on a gun-carriage, and how roughly all who had _not_ crossed the line before were tarred, scraped, shaved, and soused by his whimsically attired barbers, courtiers, and Tritons, to the great delight of the older salts--a ceremony which I only escaped in consequence of my recent sufferings.

Two days after, we passed St. Matthew, a little desert isle on which the Portuguese formed a settlement so early as 1516, and which lies "amid the melancholy main," at a vast distance from the African coast. It is the abode of sea-birds alone.

Then we completed our bag of letters, which were all duly gummed up--wax will not do in the tropics--for delivery at Ascension, which, after three hundred miles' further run, we sighted on the evening of the 9th July, for we had a fine wind, and the _Princess_ carried her studdingsails night and day.

I was not without hope that we might find some homeward-bound vessel at Ascension, on board of which we might be transferred, as I was most anxious to return home to tranquillize the minds of my own family, whom I knew must long since have numbered me with the dead; but this hope was dissipated when we came abreast of the roadstead, which was _empty_, and let go our anchor about midnight, in fourteen fathom water, on a red sandy bottom.

The anchorage of this solitary isle is a sheltered creek, overshadowed by a high pyramidal mountain, having on its summit the remains of two great crosses, erected of old by the pious and adventurous followers of Juan de Nova, a Portuguese mariner who flourished in the days of King Alfonzo Africanus.

The heat was so great now that the atmosphere in the cabin rendered one absolutely breathless; and with pleasure, Hartly and I, clad in light clothes, with broad straw hats, furnished to us by kind Captain Baylis, accompanied him and his wife ashore next morning after anchoring, and landed at the little town, which is fortified, and the harbour of which frequently forms a rendezvous for our African squadron. The longboat with her crew afterwards came off for fresh water and turtles. The superintendence of collecting these was left to the chief mate, while with Hartly (who had been there before), Captain Baylis and I set forth on a ramble over the island, which is only nine miles long by six miles broad.

An undefinable interest is excited when landing on a lonely little island after a long sea voyage; and for ages Ascension has been a species of halfway house, or resting-place for ships between Europe and the Cape.

We resolved to visit the _Sailor's Post-office_, a cranny in the rocks, known for ages to the mariners of all nations, who were wont to deposit their letters there, closed up in a bottle, to be taken away by the first ship which passed in an opposite direction--a custom which the Dominican, Father Navarette, mentions as being _old_, at the time of his visit in 1673.

The little isle is barren, but having been rent by volcanic throes, it has hills of pumice-stone and calcined rocks, with abrupt precipices overhanging sterile ravines that are full of black ashes. Here and there a solitary goat might be seen cropping the scanty herbage, or perched upon a sharp pinnacle, snuffing the sea breeze that waved its solemn beard. Where a spring gurgled from the rocks into the sea the turtle were seen in plenty, and there our boat's crew came in search of them. There also lay the skeletons of great numbers, which seamen, in mere wantonness, had turned on their backs, and left thus to die.

From the summit of the pyramidal hill which overlooks the anchorage we could survey the boundless ocean, spreading away towards the distant shores of Africa, the still more distant coast of Peru, and the unexplored waves of the Southern Sea, all glassy, heaving, and vibrating like a mighty mirror under the vertical glare of the tropical sun.

Fanning ourselves with banana leaves, for at times we gasped in the heat, we trod among ashes ankle deep, and over rocks where the power of the sun had turned to fine salt the spray cast upon them by the sea.

At last we reached the Sailor's Post-office, and examined the cleft in the rocks, where the bottles or cases containing many a letter that carried to the hearts and homes of generations long since gone to dust, hope and happiness, or it might be sorrow and woe--the tidings of loved and lost ones far away in lands and seas that were then so little known and so little traversed; and then combining prose with poetry, we sat down to discuss some light sherry, pale ale, and sandwiches, which the worthy Captain Baylis insisted on conveying for us in a travelling-bag slung over his shoulder.

As evening drew on, the sterile rocks and impending bluffs, the great rugged pyramidal hill that towered over the anchorage, the little town of Ascension, with its battery and gaudy Union Jack, all assumed a dusky red hue; and when the sun sank westward, the shadow of the _Princess_ at her anchor was thrown far across the bright blue water of the creek. Our last boat with turtle, bananas, fish, and fresh water, was to leave the harbour at sunset; so we were preparing to descend, when an object lying among some stones at the bottom of the cleft in the rock, caught Hartly's eye.

Scrambling among ashes and black pumice-stone, he reached, and drew it forth.

It was a stone jar, shaped like a ginger-beer bottle, tightly corked, and covered over the mouth and neck by thin sheet-lead, which was paid over with old tarred spunyarn; but it was so thickly encrusted with lichens and dust, which the sun and dew had baked upon it, that it had quite the colour and aspect of the stones that lay around it.

"Now, what the deuce is this?" asked Captain Baylis.

"A bottle," said Hartly, turning it over.

"A bottle in the Post-office!"

"It must have lain here a long time, if we judge by its outside," said I.

"Letters have never been deposited here since 1816," observed Baylis, "when the British built the town and battery yonder."

"So if it has lain here one year, it must have lain fifty."

"Shake it, Hartly," said I.

"It is full of something that rattles!"

"Letters, probably; but few folks can care about them now."

"Faith! the man's head does not ache that untwisted this spunyarn; it is at least seventy years old!" said Captain Baylis, fraying the strands with his fingers; "but we'll crack the bottle when we get on board, and see what the contents are."

We joined Mrs. Baylis at the landing-place. She was reclining in the stern of the gig with a large white umbrella over her head, and could scarcely repress her curiosity to discover the contents of the old stone jug, or bottle, till we got on board.

Then we broke it by a blow of a hammer, and there fell out, not letters, as we expected, but a roll of paper, consisting of leaves stitched together, and closely covered with writing, containing a narrative, or something of the kind, which had been deposited in that strange mode and strange place by some waggish or eccentric person, in the hope, perhaps, that if ever discovered, by the mystery enveloping their literary production, it would assuredly be given to the public.

It was without date; but fortunately the handwriting was plain and legible, though the ink was dim and faded, for the stone bottle being porous, the paper had become damp, almost wet, and had to be carefully dried in the sunshine, which curled it up like crisped leaves in autumn, so the preparation of it for perusal was consigned to my care by Captain Baylis, who had discovered that I was, as he said, "a regular-built bookworm."

"It is a history," said he, as he lighted his long clay pipe in the cabin, after the _Princess_ got under weigh next evening, and stood out of the anchorage under her courses and topgallant sails, with her royals, spanker, and gaff-topsail set.

"Or the narrative of an unfortunate voyage," suggested Hartly, thinking, doubtless, of his own.

"Or the revelation of some dreadful crime, or unfortunate love-story," lisped Mrs. Baylis, all impatience, pausing and looking up in the act of pouring out our tea.

"It is none of these," said I; "but seems to be the translation of a Portuguese legend, connected in some way with the discovery of the Cape of Good Hope."

And so, while the good captain lounged in his shirt sleeves on the cabin sofa, and puffed away with his long clay pipe, while his buxom wife made tea for us, and Hartly lit his Havannah, I commenced to read the MS. we had found so singularly; and it ran thus--but requires a chapter or two to itself.