CHAPTER XV.

THE WHITE WATER.

The _Black Watch_ had sailed through the Downs in the middle of September, and on the morning of December 12, 1814, she was upon the meridian of Cape Horn, and in about fifty-seven degrees south latitude. This passage, for so swift a keel, was a long one. It was owing to diabolical weather between the degrees of forty and fifty south.

Greaves and I would sometimes say that the devil was afloat in a craft of his own within that belt of ten degrees. Head winds more maddening to the most angelic soul, calms more provocative of impious and affrighting language, it is not in the imagination of the most seasoned mariner to conceive.

But enough. We were off the Horn at last. Our bowsprit would be heading north presently, and, when our ship’s forefoot cut this meridian again, the little fabric would (but would she?) be deeper in the water (by what division of a strake?) with a cargo of minted silver!

In 1814 much was made of the passage of the Horn. The doubling of that bleak, inhospitable, deep-seated rock was accepted, on the whole, as a considerable adventure. The old traditions of mountain-high seas and gales of cyclonic fury survived. The traffic down there was small; the colonies of New Holland were still raw in their making; and ships bound for Europe from that distant continent chose the mild but tedious passage of the South African headland.

The old dread has vanished. Experience has footed prejudice out of time. In furious weather the ocean off the Horn is as terrible as the North Atlantic, as the Southern Ocean, as any vast breast of water is in furious weather; and that is the long and short of it. Oh, yes; off the Horn you get some monstrous seas, it is true. I have known what it is to be running off the Horn before a westerly gale and to be afraid--seasoned as I then was--_to look astern!_ But there is a safety in the mighty swing of those wide Andean heaps of brine which the sharper-edged surge of the smaller ocean does not yield.

The old freebooters and the early navigators are responsible for the evil reputation of the Horn. They returned from the wonders of foreign sight-seeing, from the joys of plunder and the delights of discovery, with their hearts full of astonishment and their mouths full of lies. There is Shelvocke’s description of the Horn; it is heartrending reading in these days. The ice forms upon the page as you read; the atmosphere darkens with snow. And what, on the testimony of such a record, did Wapping think of that distant, ice-girt, howling navigation, with its enchanted islands and bergs, whose spires seemed to pink the moon? What did Wapping think when there was never a man in every company of a thousand jackets who had rounded the Horn and could tell of it?

We, passing the Horn on December 12, found the southern hemisphere’s midsummer there. We met, for the most part, with bright skies, a cheerful sun, not wanting in warmth, coming soon and going late, and a noble field of swelling blue seas. One iceberg we sighted. It was infinitely remote--a point of pearl on the sea-line.

“She vhas like a babe’s milk tooth,” said Yan Bol, pointing to it.

There was a fancy of milk in the whiteness of it; but, when I brought my eyes from the distant berg to Bol’s face, I said unto myself--“What should _that_ man know of a babe’s milk tooth?”

Two disappointments await those who round the Horn with expectations bred of the reading of books. First, the weather. Often is it as placid as any quiet day that sleeps over the Straits of Dover, when the sky is streaked with the lingering smoke of vanished steamers and the white cliffs of France hang in the air. No; the weather off the Horn is not the everlasting saddle of the Storm Fiend. The seas are not always boiling, the hurricanes of wind are not always black with frost, heavy with snow, man-killing with ice-darts.

Next, the constellation called the Southern Cross. It hangs over you when you are off the Horn; often have I looked up at it, and never have I thought it beautiful. The smallest of the gems of the English skies is a richer jewel than the Southern Cross. A singular superstition is this widespread faith in the beauty of the Crux of the ancient mariner. The stars are unequally set; one is disproportionately small.

But now came a morning when we struck a meridian that enabled us to shift our helm for a northern passage, and then we had the whole length of the mighty seaboard of South America to climb. We were in the South Pacific at last. The island was hard upon three thousand miles distant; but it was over the bows--it was ahead! We had turned the stormy corner, and the verification of Greaves’ yarn could be thought of as something that was about to happen soon.

Day by day we climbed the parallels, and all went well. Certain stars sank behind the edge of the sea astern of us, and as we sailed northward many particular stars which were familiar to our northern eyes rose over the bows and wheeled in little arcs. We made some westing that we might give the land a wide berth, for whether Great Britain was or was not at war with Spain, the Spaniards of that vast seaboard were scarcely less jealously and passionately tenacious in those days of their dominion in the South Sea, and under the Line to beyond Panama, than they were in the preceding century; and though we could not positively affirm that there was anything to be afraid of, anything curiously and sneakingly dangerous to be shunned (if it were not Commodore Porter, whose ship the _Essex_ was believed to lie prowling hereabouts at this time), yet Greaves was determined to provide his bad angel with the slenderest possible opportunity for delaying or arresting the voyage to the island.

So we kept well out to the west, and fine sailing it was. For days we hardly touched a brace; the steady wind, growing daily warmer, sweetly blew the little brig along. It was the South Pacific Ocean. Many reports are there of the various tempers of that sea, but, for my part, northward of the parallel of forty degrees I have ever found it a gentle breast of ocean. Long and lazy was the blue swell brimming to our counter, drowsy the flap of the sunny canvas, soft the cradled motion of the ship. Once again the silver flying fish glanced from the slope of the violet knolls. The wet, black fin of a shark hung steadfast in our wake. What a world of waters it was! Never the gleam of a ship’s canvas for days and days to break the boundless continuity of the distant sea-line. The men relaxed their labors, Yan Bol took no notice, and I, who was never a “hazer,” was willing that they should lounge through their toil of the hours in a climate so enervating that one yearned to sling a hammock in some cool corner of the deck, to lie in it all day, to smoke and doze while the imagination slided away on the stream of the rippling music made by the broken waters and passed into the fairy harbors of dreams.

“By this time to-morrow,” said Greaves to me one evening, “if this breeze holds, and our reckoning is true, and the island has not been exploded by a volcano or an earthquake, you will be having a good view of the ship in the cave--no, I am wrong, a good view of her you will not obtain from the sea, but you will be having a good view of the cave in which she lies, and I shall be very much surprised if you are not mightily impressed by the magnitude and beauty of that great hole or split in the rock, and by the indescribable complicated atmosphere or shadow within, caused, as I long ago explained to you, by the interlacery of the ship’s gear and spars, visible and indeterminable.”

“Visible and indeterminable! Captain, you put it as though it were some mystery of religion.”

“Do you object, Fielding,” said he, “to sailors, I mean quarter-deck sailors, expressing themselves as educated men would, nay, as average gentlemen would? Are you for keeping the quarter-deck sailor down to Smollett’s platform of Hatchway and Trunnion? Must we swear, must we drink, must we behave when ashore like lascivious baboons and at sea like Newgate felons, who have burst through the iron bars and are sailing away for their lives, merely to justify the landgoing notion that the best of all sailors are the most brutal of all beasts.”

“I beg your pardon,” said I; “I meant nothing.”

“Visible and indeterminable. Are they not good words? Do they not exactly express what I want to convey to your mind? How ‘der toyfell’ would you have me talk?”

He looked at me and I looked at him. He then burst into a laugh, and we stepped the deck for a little while in silence. The time was something after half-past seven. The sun was gone, and night had descended upon the sea. It was a tropic night. The dark sky was full of splendid brilliants. A mild air blew from the westward and the brig, with her two spires of canvas lifting pale to the stars, dreamily floated over the black water that here and there shone with a little cloud of sea-fire, as though some luminous jelly fish was riding past, while here and there it caught and feathered back the flash of some large star, whose silver in a dead calm would have made an almost moon-like wake. Galloon marched by our side. Jimmy, forward, with a pipe in his mouth, lay leaning over the windlass and gazing aft, seemingly at the shadowy form of the dog, as though he hoped to coax the brute that way by persistent staring and wishing. The men, in twos and threes, trudged the forecastle. So still was the evening, so seldom the flap of canvas, so unvexing to the hearing the summer sound of the water lightly washing in the furrow of bubbles and foam-bells astern, that the voices of the men fell distinctly upon the ear; by hearkening one might have caught the syllables of their speech.

It had gone forward--taken there by Yan Bol, or whispered by the lad Jimmy, who by listening to the captain and me, as we discoursed at the cabin table at meals, would be able to pick up news enough to repeat; it had gone forward, I say, that, the weather holding as it was, and all continuing well, by some hour next day we should be having the island on the bow or beam, perhaps hove to off it, or with an anchor down. Expectation was strong in the men’s voices. It was the very night for their flute or fiddle; for “Tom Tough,” or “Britons, strike home!” or for some boisterous Dutch song in Yan Bol’s thunder, for Call’s lamp-blacked Jack Puddingisms, for Teach’s hornpipe, for general caper-cutting, in a word, with a can of grog betwixt the knight-heads, and the fumes of mundungus strong in the back-draughts. But the humor of the sailors, this night, was to walk up and down the deck in twos and threes, and to talk of to-morrow and of dollars.

“If _La Perfecta Casada_--a fine-sounding name, by the way, captain,” said I, “what is the English of it?”

“The Perfect Wife.”

“The Spaniards,” said I, “choose strange names for their ships. They have many _Holy Virgins_ and _Purest Marias_ at sea. I knew a Spanish ship that was called the _Holy Ghost_. Figure an English vessel so called. She meets another English vessel, which hails her: ‘Ship ahoy!’ ‘Hallo!’ ‘What ship’s that?’ ‘The _Holy Ghost_.’ There is a looseness in this sort of naming that is not very pleasing to Protestant prejudice. I asked the mate of the _Holy Ghost_, ‘Why is your ship thus named?’ ‘That she may not sink,’ he answered. ‘Hell lies downward. If the _Holy Ghost_ goes anywhere, ’tis upward.’”

“You are in a talkative humor this evening.”

“Well, it is like being homeward bound when the end of the outward passage is within hail.”

“What were you going to say about the _Casada_?”

“I have never clearly gathered--supposing her to be still lying in that cave where you saw her----”

“She is still lying in that cave where I saw her,” he interrupted, repeating my words in a strong voice.

“I have never clearly gathered,” I continued, “whether it is your intention to tranship her cargo--I mean the cocoa and wool?”

“I cannot make up my mind whether or not to meddle with those commodities,” said he, “and so, because I have not been able to form an intention, you have not been able to gather one from our conversation. The weather will advise me. Then I shall want to know the condition of the cargo. The wool, cocoa, and hides in the hair may not be worth lifting out of a hold that has been aground in a cave since 1810. But there are a thousand quintals of tin, and there are some casks of tortoise shell--we shall see, we shall see.”

“Mynheer Tulp,” said I, “will, no doubt, be able to find room for all that you can carry home.”

“Room and a market. But I am here for dollars. I believe I shall not meddle with the other stuff. We’ll tranship as fast as the boats can ply, and then away.”

I made no answer, being occupied at that instant with admiring the effect of a flash of lightning in the southwest--a clear and lovely blaze of violet which threw out the horizon in a black, firm, indigo line.

I went below with Greaves, at eight o’clock, to drink a glass of cold grog before turning in. Greaves had brought the chart of this part of the American coast out of his cabin, and we sat together conversing and looking at it. At intervals I was sensible of the burly figure of Yan Bol pausing near the open skylight, under which we sat, to peer down and to listen. But there was nothing Greaves desired to withhold from the crew, nothing he was not willing that any man of them should overhear if it were not, perhaps, the value of the money on board the _Casada_; though even their overhearing of this would be a matter of indifference, since they were bound to form an opinion of their own of the contents and value of the cases of dollars when they came to handle them.

Greaves had marked down upon the chart the position of the island in accordance with his observations when he hove to off it and sighted the ship in the cave on his way to Guayaquil. The position of the brig by dead reckoning since noon brought us, at this hour of eight, within twenty leagues of the spot, and, therefore, supposing Greaves’ observations to have been correct, and supposing that the weak wind that was flapping us onward continued to blow throughout the night, we had good reason to hope that the bright morning light would give us a view of the tall heap of cinder cliffs before another twelve hours should have gone round.

Greaves was making certain calculations with a pencil on a sheet of paper, and I, with a pair of compasses, was measuring the distance of the island from the mainland, when we were startled by the roaring voice of Yan Bol, whose full face was thrust into the open skylight.

“For der love of Cott, captain, goom on deck und see vhat vhas wrong! Der sea vhas on fire. Quick! or ve vhas all burnt up.”

“What does he say?” cried Greaves, who had been unable to promptly disengage his attention from his calculations.

“He says that the sea is on fire and that we shall all be burnt up,” I exclaimed, picking up my cap; and, in a moment, we were both on deck.

“Der sea vhas on fire!” thundered Yan Bol as we stepped through the hatch.

I looked ahead over the bows of the brig, and the sea all that way was splendid and terrible with light. I call it light, but light it was _not_, unless that be light which is made by snow in darkness. It was a wonderful whiteness that seemed a sort of fire. It blended the junction of sea and sky into a wide and ghastly glare, and the light of the white water rolled upward into the sky as the clearly-defined edge of the milky surface advanced, as you see a blue edge of breeze sweeping over a silver surface of dead calm. The sea where the brig was sailing was black, as it had been before we went below, and in the deep, soft, indigo dusk over our mastheads the stars were shining; but the sparkling of the luminaries languished over our fore yardarms, and it was easy to guess that, if the coming whiteness spread, the sky and all that was shining in it would be hidden.

“Captain,” cried Bol, “vhat in der good anchel’s name vhas she?”

“A star has fallen,” answered Greaves, “and is shining at the bottom of the sea.”

“A star? Vhat, a star from der sky?”

“Where do stars grow?” said Greaves.

“Do you mean a shooting star, captain?” cried Bol.

“Yan Bol,” said Greaves, nudging me as we stood side by side, “you have much to learn. Do not you know that the stars are often falling? They drop into other worlds than ours. Sometimes they plump into our earth, fizz into the sea, and lie on the ooze, shining for awhile and making queer lights upon the water like that yonder.”

Bol breathed deeply. He could read, indeed; but he was as ignorant, prejudiced, and grossly superstitious as most forecastle hands in his day--fitter for the faiths of a Finn than a Hollander. He stared at the advancing whiteness, and seemed not to know what to make of the captain’s discourse. “Yes,” continued Greaves, “they are frequently falling. They are the stars which were loosed in the pavement of heaven when the angels fell. There should be many more stars than there are. Unhappily, when Lucifer was hurled over the battlements he swept away a number of stars with his tail and loosened many more, and it is those which drop.”

“Der toyfell!” muttered Bol. “Von lifs und larns.”

“It is a wonderful sight,” said I, gazing with astonishment, not wholly unmixed, at the mighty whiteness that was coming along.

Already on high the verge of the startling milky reflection was over our fore royal masthead. You might look straight up now and see no stars. The line of the flaring whiteness upon the sea was a little more than a mile distant. The wind blew softly, and before it the brig floated onward, meeting the coming whiteness with an occasional flap of canvas that fell upon the ear like a note of alarm from aloft.

“Did you never before see the white water, Fielding?” exclaimed Greaves.

“Never, sir.”

“I have sailed through it three times,” said he. “Once off Natal, once in Indian, and once in China seas. I did not know it was to be met with on this side the world; but everything is probable and possible at sea. I tell you what, Bol,” he exclaimed, calling across to the Dutchman, who had gone to the side to stare, and was holding on to a shroud, or backstay, with his big body painted black as ink against the whiteness that was coming along, “I believe I am mistaken, after all. It is not a star; it is an insect.”

“I likes to handle dot insect. I likes her in der forecastle to read by und light my pipe by,” said Bol, with a coarse, heavy, uneasy laugh, that sounded like the bray of an ass.

“It is a subglobular insect,” said Greaves, nudging me again, “compressed vertically, convex above, concave beneath, wrapped in a transparent coriaceous envelope, containing a white, gelatinous substance. Repeat that to the men, Bol, will you, should the whiteness make them uneasy. Very few sailors,” said he, addressing me, and talking without appearing in the least degree sensible of the wonderful and alarming milk-white light that was now almost upon us, “take the trouble to scientifically examine what passes under their noses. What, for example, is more often under a sailor’s nose than bilge water? An Irish skipper once asked me what bilge water was. I told him that it was sulphuretted hydrogen, hydrosulphate of ammonia, oxide of iron, and compounds of lead and zinc. ‘Jasus,’ said he, ‘and is that how you spell shtink in English?’”

As he spoke the brig, with a long-drawn flap up aloft, smote the sharply-defined white line, and in an instant was bathed in the unearthly light. We had not been able to see each other’s faces before. Now the very expression of countenance was visible. The whole body of the brig was revealed as though by the light of the moon, and the ghastliness of the light lay in its making no shadow. The seamen stood staring and gaping; withered, they seemed, into a posture of utter lifelessness. But no shadows lay at their feet, no shadow stretched from the foot of the mast; I looked down, the planks lay plain, the seams clear, but I made no shadow. Nor did this magic light mirror itself. I glanced at the polished brass piece aft, but no star of reflection burnt in it, no gleam lay up on the cabin skylight. It was light and yet it was not light, and the wonder of it, and, perhaps, the fearfulness of it, to me, who had never beheld such a sight before, lay in _that_.

And now, by this time, the whole sea was as though covered with snow or milk, as far as we could extend the gaze. The sky reflected the light and the stars were eclipsed, but the reflection on high had not the glare of the ocean surface. I went to the side and peered over; the brig seemed to be thrusting through an ocean of quicksilver. The water broke thickly and sluggishly in small heaps from the bows, and the patches, as they came eddying aft, were like clots of cream.

The sensation induced by the progress of the vessel was as though she were forcing her way through a dense jelly. The slight heave of the sea was flattened; there was not the least visible motion in this surface of whiteness; the brig stood upright on it and the swing of the trucks would not have spanned the diameter of the moon. There was no fire in the water, no corruscation of sea glow, no green gleam of phosphor. To the very recesses of the horizon went sheeting this marvelous breast of milk-white softness that, though it was not luminous, yet flung an illumination as of the radiance of a faint aurora borealis upon the heavens.

“This is a beautiful sight,” exclaimed Greaves.

“It will be a memorable one,” I answered.

“I have never before,” said he, “seen the white water so white, but the like of this phenomenon which I witnessed off the coast of Natal was heightened and beautified by a strange light in the heavens to the northward. It was a delicate, rosy light. I should have imagined it was the moon rising, had not the moon been up.”

“Do I understand,” said I, “that this sublime light is produced by a marine insect?”

“By nothing more nor less--so ’tis said. It is the marine insect that will sometimes give you an ocean of blood, and sometimes an ocean of exquisite violet, and sometimes, as I have heard, though it is something rare to witness, an ocean of ink.”

“An insect!” I exclaimed. “And how many go to this show?”

“Oh, for a shipload of infidels now!” cried he. “D’ye see them looking up to God after gazing, white as the water itself, at the ocean?”

By this time the watch below had turned out, aroused, no doubt, by one of the sailors on duty. The men in a body had gradually worked their way from the forecastle to the gangway. They were all as plainly to be viewed as by the sickly light of a foggy day. No man spoke; not for minute after minute did the grunt or growl of any one of their hurricane throats reach my ears. The wild vast scene of whiteness terrified them. The impression produced was the deeper because this was the night before the day that was to heave Greaves’ island out of the sea for our sight to feast on. For let it be remembered at least that the adventure we were on was highly romantic; the plain, illiterate Jacks would find something almost magical, something a little out of nature, according to their scuttle-butt and harness-cask views of life, in Greaves’ discovery of an uncharted island, with a ship full of dollars in a hole in it. Also in these seas stood the Galapagos, islands of mystery and darkness, whose dusky rocks had not width enough of front to receive from the chisel or the knife the records of the bloody and diabolical tragedies of which they had been the theater.

A man stepped out of the group; he coughed hoarsely and spat. His hand went to his forehead, and he scraped the sea bow of those times.

“Capt’n, I beg your honor’s pardon,” he said, “us men would like to know what sea this here is?”

“The South Pacific--always the South Pacific,” answered Greaves.

“Will your honor tell us what’s the meaning of this here chalkiness?”

“My lads, some clumsy son of a gun has capsized a milk can. Look for his ship, my hearts; she can’t be far off.” Some of the men stupidly gazed seaward.

“Vhas der island vashed by dis milkiness, captain?” exclaimed Wirtz.

“It stands in the bluest sea in the world,” answered Greaves.

“This here’s a sight,” said Travers, “that may be all blooming fine to read about, but ’taint lucky, to my ways of thinking. Give me natur, says I.”

He did not use the word _blooming_. This elegant expression was not to be heard in those days; but let it stand.

“Has none of you ever seen such a sight as this before?” called Greaves.

After a pause, “Ne’er a man,” answered Teach.

“Then gaze your eyes full! drink your hearts full! Never again may you behold the like of this field of glory. Look thirstily! look till ye burst with the beauty that’ll come into you by looking! Fear not, my sons--we shall be out of it all too soon. Gaze, my livelies, and silver your souls with this brightness as it silvers your cheeks. Bol, out whistle and pipe grog, that we may watch with enjoyment.”

Bol blew. Jimmy, with Galloon at his heels, arrived with the can; the tot measure was dipped into the black liquor, lifted and emptied, and the dram seemed to give every man heart enough to look about him with common curiosity. One of the fellows fetched a bucket, dropped it over the side, and hauled it up full. I drew close. It was as though a pail of cream had been handed aboard.

I put my finger into the whiteness. It was as thin as salt water, nothing gluey or cheesy about it, though from the bows the whiteness rolled away from the rending slide of the cutwater as thickly and obstinately as melted ore, and astern there was no wake; it might have been oil.

For an hour we sailed through this sea of cream and under a dimmer sky of white. Bald and ghostly was that passage rendered by the shadowlessness of our decks. The sails swelled dark against the paleness; so clear was the tracing of the fabric of mast and canvas against the sky, that the course of so delicate a rope as the royal backstay could be traced to the head of the mast, and you saw the jewel block at each topsail and topgallant yardarm, clean cut as a pear on a bough against a sunset. Greaves came to a stand opposite me and looked me in the face.

“You make me think of my dreams of the dead,” said he; “the dead are always pale when they come to me in dreams. Most people who dream of the dead dream of them as they remember them in life. There is light in the eye, and color on the cheek. They always rise before me pale from their coffins.”

“Inspiriting talk, captain,” said I, “at such a moment! But I hope I look no more like a dead man than the rest of us.”

“If I were an artist,” said he, “I would give many guineas out of my earnings for the chance of beholding such a light as this; this is the sort of light through which I would paint the Phantom Ship sailing. Figure that wondrous ghost out upon those white waters, the pallid faces of her men, to whom death is denied, looking over her side at the white sky, every timber in her glowing with the jewelry of rottenness--you know what I mean--the green phosphoric sparkling of decay. Cannot you see her out yonder, dully gleaming with dim green crawlings of fire as she steals noiselessly through this frothy softness, the hush of living death upon her, the silence of catalepsy? But what is the name of the painter, I should like to know, who is going to give us this light upon canvas? Oh, tell me his name, Fielding, that I may offer him all the ducats I hope to be in sight of to-morrow for his secret.”

“Less my whack.”

“Less yours. But mine, plus Tulp’s. Damn Tulp; I’ll drink his health.” He called to Jimmy: “Two glasses of brandy-and-water, three finger-nips, James.”

The liquor was brought, we chinked glasses, and down went the doses, to the benefit of _one_ of us certainly; for I had not liked his talk of my looking like a dead man, and his fancies of the Phantom Ship with her crawlings of fire and cheese-like faces overhanging the side. Jack, if you are reading this, bear with me. I was a sailor, and, as a sailor, _you_ will know that I would not relish such talk at such a time.

On a sudden the wind slightly freshened, with a melancholy cry, across the white water, and, as if by magic, the sea ahead opened black, with a few stars hovering over it. Some minutes later, the northern edge of the milky surface came streaming to our bows, and swept past us as though ’twas the edge of a mighty white sheet dragged by giant hands down in the south over the surface of the ocean. I watched the marvelous appearance receding astern, the sky unveiling its stars as the whiteness dimmed away, till it was pure nature once again, the heavens shining, the swell coming into the ocean with its long and lazy lift of the brig, the pleasant hiss of foam under her bow, and a little dance of jewels in the furrow astern.

It was my watch below, and I went to my cabin.