Part 2

But as steamers multiply and the number of sailing ships decreases, going aloft will become the least and most infrequent of sea duties. Practical seamanship, in the old sense, is bound to die out, because there is no need to preserve it. It was only the other day that an old skipper assured me that he was acquainted with the mate of a steamer who did not know what a harness-cask was, “and, worst of all, sir,” cried my friend, “he’s not ashamed of his ignorance.” It is true that harness-casks have not much to do with seamanship; but one may excuse a shipmaster of the old school for taking a very gloomy view of the contemporary marine when he meets a man holding a master mariner’s certificate, ignorant of the receptacle in which Jack’s salt horse is kept when he is at sea. Most of the steamers nowadays are monkey-rigged, many of them with pole-masts, which are useful mainly as derricks upon which a little bit of fore and aft canvas will be hoisted to steady the vessels. What should men who serve in such ships know about going aloft? Even a landsman may comprehend the emotion excited in a seaman who has passed his life in sailing ships when he sees sailors without any spars or rigging to attend to, and with nothing to do but to wash decks down. Nearly all the work of the traditional mariner lies aloft, and to reflect upon Jack without dead-eyes to turn in, chafing gear to look after, reef-points to knot, rigging to tar, masts to stay, studdingsail gear to reeve, and the like, is almost as confounding as to think of him sleeping aft, eating fresh meat throughout the run, and going to the steward for a can of filtered water, instead of to the capstan for his eight bells caulker of fiery black rum. No doubt things are pleasanter as they are. It must be nice to turn in with the certainty of having the whole of your watch below, instead of going to bed in your sea-boots in readiness for the thundering of a handspike, and the cruel roar of “All hands shorten sail!” And yet, to the true sailor, going aloft is so much the part of his life, it is so complete a condition of his vocation, that when such a man finds himself aboard a steamer with nothing to take notice of above his head, it may be supposed that at the first going off he is as fully bewildered as a steamer’s man--that is, a man who has never served in anything but steamers--would be among the ropes of a full-rigged ship, taken aback with her studding sails abroad. He will miss the old songs at the reef tackles, the flapping of canvas, the thud of coils of halliards and clew-lines flung down on deck, the springing into the shrouds, the helter-skelter for the weather earing, or the ascent of the topgallant mast that jumps to the flogging of the clewed-up sails.

There is a touch of wild excitement in going aloft in heavy weather, which no seaman can be insensible to; just as in a calm day or night a man may find a strange pleasure in lingering a few moments aloft after he has done his work, and looking down. The labour of reefing has been greatly diminished by the double topsail yards, which halve the great sails, so that when the halliards of the upper yards are let go, the ship is under close-reefed topsails. Moreover, there is only half the weight of the sail to handle in reefing or stowing. This valuable contrivance makes the task of shortening sail light in comparison with what the labour was in the days of the whole topsail. Old seamen will remember what that kind of canvas involved in a ship of fourteen or fifteen hundred tons, manned by about eighteen or twenty men, capable of doing sailors’ work aloft.

It is the second dog watch. The royals and mizzen-topgallant sail have been furled, but the wind comes in freshening puffs, the sky has a menacing look away out on the starboard beam, and at eight bells all hands are kept on deck to roll up the mainsail and topgallant sails, and tie a single reef in the fore and mizzen topsails. The sea washes noisily against the weather bow, and the night settles down as black as a pocket; but the ship is tolerably snug, there is no great weight of wind as yet, and the watch below are dismissed to the forecastle. They have been an hour in their hammocks or bunks, when, on a sudden, the scuttle is rudely flung open, and a loud cry summons them on deck. They are up in a moment, scarcely waiting to pull on their jackets, for the instant they are awake they perceive that the vessel is on her beam ends, and they can hear the thunder of a gale of wind raging overhead. All three topsail halliards have been let go, and the watch are yelling out at the reef-tackles, the skipper shouting at the mizzen-rigging, the chief mate bawling from the break of the poop, and the second mate and boatswain roaring in the waist and on the forecastle. The sea is flying heavily over the weather rail of the prostrate ship, and adding its peculiar bursting noise to the din of the furiously-shaken canvas, to the deafening booming of the wind, and the hoarse long-drawn cries of the sailors hauling upon the ropes. You can barely see the weather shrouds, though to leeward their black lines are plain enough against the washing heights of foam which swell up as high as the rail of the bulwarks. You do not feel the force of the gale until you are in the rigging, and then for a spell the iron-hard pressure of it pins you against the shrouds as if you had been made a spread-eagle. The rain drives along in slashing horizontal lines, and you see the sparkle of the deluge over the skylight where the light of the cabin lamp is shining; or, maybe, the gale is charged with sleet and hail, and the cold so tautens your fingers that you can scarcely curl them to the shape of the rope you grasp. Over the top you swarm in company with the rest of your watch, perhaps getting a blow on the head from the heel of some fellow above you as you lay yourself backwards to swing over the futtock shrouds; and then, finding the weather side of the topsail yard with as many hands on it as are needed, you pass over to leeward, where you find the boatswain or third mate astride of the yard-arm, ready for the cry of “Haul out to leeward,” to pass the earing. At such a time as this a man has too much to do to look about him; the ship is brought close to shake the sail, that the men may get the reef-bands against the yard, otherwise the canvas stands out to the force of the gale in a surface as round as St. Paul’s dome, and so hard and tense that it would serve as a platform for a ball-room.

In the whole-topsail days I have seen half a dozen men standing upon the canvas in the slings and quarters trying to stamp the sail down to bring the reef points within reach without so much as dinting the wind-swollen convexity. Still it is possible to knot a reef-point, and take a look round and below. It is a wonderful scene; no landsman can conceive of its wild and awful majesty. The ship surges heavily through the black heavings, and with every headlong plunge fills a wide circumference of the far-down ebony waters with a furious swirling of foam, in the midst of which her long narrow shape is distinctly visible. Overhead is a dim vision of naked spars and yards, reeling in the boisterous void in whose gloom it is just possible to trace the outline of huge black clouds rushing past like folds of swiftly-carried smoke. The yard on which you stand is at an angle of thirty or thirty-five degrees, and every lean-down of the slender fabric that supports the immense superstructure of masts threatens to submerge the point of it, astride of which--riding it as a horse--sits the seaman who takes the lee-earing; and his figure and that of the fellow beneath swinging on the flemish-horse, and those of the row of men who overhang the yard, and who chorus with a kind of shriek that rings athwart the yelling of the gale to the cry from the weather yard-arm of “Light over to windward!” are marked like pen-and-ink drawings upon white paper against the snow of the seas which stretch from the ship’s side into the darkness.

But this is only one aspect of “going aloft.” Another--if the bowsprit and jibbooms may be included under the head of the word “aloft”--is that of laying out to furl, let me say the outer jib, when it has come on to blow hard enough to make the stowing of that sail necessary. From the masthead you see the ship under you; you can watch her hull flying through the sea, mark the glorious white of the foam that bursts from her bows and races in a broad band astern, and behold the ship in her noble solitude amid the tenantless world of waters whose pale green skirts lean against the hazy azure of the remote heavens. But on the jibboom you have the ship rushing at you, as it were; her cutwater seems to bear right down upon you; you see her coppered forefoot gleaming with a greenish tinge through the glass-clear water whose surface it divides into two feather-shaped fountains, whose seething and hissing and prismatic summits arch away from the glossy bends. And now, as she dips with a glorious rush into the hollow over whose yawning gloom you are poised as you overhang the jibboom, the half-buried bows break the sea into smoke, and yeast, and snow; the white and hissing mass, splendid with sunshine or rendered more vivid yet by the dark green of the seas along which it is sent rolling, roars and runs ahead of the ship as far as the flying jibboom, where its impetus fails and the soaring vessel swings over it, rising almost noiselessly over the thick froth, and in a breath it is passed, whilst you look down along the sloping deck from the forked-up boom and mark how like a creature of instinct the noble ship seems to be gathering herself together for the next headlong jump, her copper shining to windward, her black sides lustrous as a curried hide with the whirling spray, her leaning masts full of thunder on high, the white sails hard and still as carven marble, no sound reaching you but the regular wash of the spurned and trampled waters under the bows, the rude and clear moaning of the wind in the rigging, and the complaining of massive timbers as the stem of the ship lengthens in a steady upheaval, and then crushes down until the torn and sobbing billows of foam are flashing their white feathers over the head-boards. Or jump aloft to loose, let us say, the mizzen royal after the tropical squall has gone away to leeward, and left the clear moon shining in a purified heaven of indigo, and striking a cone of silver glory in the dark sea whose northern waters are studded with flakes of light from the great stars. It is the middle watch; you have overhauled your clewlines, the yard has been hoisted over your head, you come down the topgallant rigging into the crosstrees, and linger there a few moments. All is silent on deck; the helmsman stands motionless at the wheel; you hear the faint jar of the tiller chains; you mark the delicate nimbus of light round the binnacle hood. Nowhere is the mystery wrought by the magical beams of the moon felt so much as at sea. The pearl-like radiance steeps the fabric of the ship in an atmosphere of soft light as illusive as the clouds of phosphorescent fires which break from her sides as she leans with the swell. The movements of the sails are like the flapping of phantom wings; and not a sigh of air, not a sound of chafing rope, not a voice calling suddenly from the distant deck, but seems to take from the moonlight and the measureless and impenetrable spaces of the deep, and the immense and enfolding silence of those far-off waters, a character of unreality that makes them seem the very phantasm and mockery of the things they veritably are.

A man might linger a long hour at the altitude of the crosstrees among the shadows of the moonlit, placid ocean night without weariness. Better than the loftiest and loneliest cliff is the mast head of a ship for the surveyal of the sublime and mighty surface on which she floats, for you rock in unison with the breathings of the deep; you are upon her great heart, and every beat of it is marked by a stately motion of the towering masts against the stars; phosphoric outlines of huge fish haunt the sluggish wake; or a sound as of a long, deep-drawn respiration denotes the neighbourhood of a leviathan whose vast proportions, as they heave in the broad silver stream of moonlight, resemble the hull of a ship keel up, driven to the surface by some hidden power and slowly settling downwards again.

These are some of the excitements and some of the quiet pleasures of “going aloft.” It is, no doubt, a highly sentimental view of the duty, and sailors who have had to let go the reef points, and beat their hands against the yards to drive life enough into their fingers to enable them to hold on, may consider that a very different representation of that kind of work would recommend itself a good deal more than this to their experience. Very possibly. But retrospection is apt to make us tender; and since “going aloft” must in the course of time--unless the shipbuilders change their minds--become a thing of the past, it is worth while spending a few minutes in trying to discover what there was of poetry and the picturesque in that old obligation of the marine life in the discharge of which the English sailor has always proved a shining example to all mariners. Even now--in these days when the steam-engine has so eaten into our maritime habits that a sailing-ship is looked upon as a kind of wonder of other times--do we not find Jack doing honour to his Queen by standing erect upon the main truck? But, oh! master mariners, mates, boatswains, and able seamen, all you who have youngsters under your charge or among you as shipmates, have mercy upon the timid lad, give him time to feel his way aloft, show him the lubber’s hole, and remember that many a first-rate sailor has faltered at the outset, and gazed with horror and despair at those giddy heights whose summits seemed to his boyish gaze to pierce the sky.

_A TRICK AT THE WHEEL._

I remember a seaman, who had served for years both in sailing and steamships, telling me that never in all his life did he remember the like of the impression produced upon him one night when he was at the helm of a large ocean passenger steamer. He described the darkness; the occasional scattering of red sparks blown low down upon the sea on the lee beam; the glimmer of white water here and there out in the windy gloom; the silence aboard the vessel, disturbed only by the muffled beating of the engines and the seething of water washing in snow from under the bows; and he told me how all these things, combined with the thought that under his feet there lay sleeping a whole crowd of men and women, made him feel as though he and the ship and the great wind-swept shadow through which she was speeding, were portions of a phantom world, and that nothing was real and sentient but the compass, whose illuminated card stood out upon the gloom like a composant at a ship’s yard-arm.

I can conceive of many a strange, fanciful thought coming into a sailor’s mind as he stands grasping the wheel in the lonely night watch, and I say this with a plentiful knowledge of the seaman’s prosaic and unsentimental character. A man must be but a very short way removed from a four-footed animal not to feel at times the wonderful and subduing spell which the ocean will fling over the human soul; and being at the wheel will give him the best chance of yielding to the nameless witchery, for at such a time--in most cases--he is alone, no one accosts him, the gloom falls down and blots out the figure of the officer of the watch, and completes the deep sense of solitude that is to be got from a spell at the helm on a dark and quiet night at sea. I cannot but think that the spirit of the deep is brought, at such a time, nearer to you aboard a sailing than aboard a steamship. The onward-rushing fabric that is impelled by engines demands incessant vigilance; she may be off her course even in the time that a man takes to lift his eyes to mark a flying meteor; there are no moments of rest. But in a sailing-ship you have the moonlit night and burnished swell heaving up in lines of ebony out of the visionary horizon, where the stars are wanly winking, until it rolls in billows of sparkling quicksilver under the wake of the bland and beautiful luminary; there is not a breath of air aloft, though little creepings of wind circle softly about the decks as the pallid surfaces of canvas swing in and out with the leaning of the ship; the moonlight lies in pools of light upon the planks, and every shadow cast upon those pearl-like surfaces is as black and sharp and clear as a tracing in ink; the after portions of the sails are dark as bronze, but looking at them forward they rise into the air like pieces of white satin, soaring into a stately edifice full of delicate hurrying shadows which resemble the streaky lustre on the inside of an oyster-shell as the cloths swell out or hollow in with the drowsy motion, and crowned with the little royals, which seem to melt even as the eye watches them like summer clouds upon the heaven of stars.

Moments of such repose as this you will get in a sailing-ship. Who that has stood at the wheel at such a time but remembers the soft patter of reef-points upon the canvas, the frosty twinkling of the dew upon the skylights and rail, the hollow sob of the swell under the counter as the ship heaves her stern, and the tiller-chains rattle, and the wheel jumps to the echo of the groan of the rudder-head? It is the middle watch; eight bells were struck a quarter of an hour since; the watch on deck are forward, coiled away anywhere, and nothing stirs on the forecastle; the officer on duty walks the starboard side of the deck, for the yards are braced to port, and that makes a weather deck where the mate is pacing, sleepily scratching the back of his head, and casting drowsy glances aloft and at the sea. The moon is low in the west, and has changed her silver into copper, and will be gone soon. The calm is wonderfully expressed by the reflection she drops; the mirrored radiance streams towards you like a river of pallid gold, narrow at the horizon and broadening, fan-shaped, until it seems within a biscuit’s throw of the ship, where it vanishes in a fine haze; but on either hand of it the water is as black as ink, while the lustre of the moon has quenched the stars all about her, and left the sky in which she hangs as dark as the ocean.

The setting orb carries the mind with it. The eye will seek the light, and it is a kind of instinct that makes a man watch the sinking of the moon at sea, when there is a deep repose in the air and nothing to hinder his thoughts from following the downward-sailing orb. Many a time have I watched her, and thought of the old home she would be shining upon; the loved scenes she would be making beautiful with her holy light. There is nothing in life that gives one such a sense of distance, of infinite remoteness, as the setting of the sun or moon at sea. It defines the immeasurable leagues of water which separate you from those you love with a sharpness that is scarcely felt at other times. It is the only mark upon the circle of the ocean, and courts you into a reckoning which there is something too vague in the bare and infinite horizon to invite. As one bell strikes the moon rests her lower limb upon the horizon, and her reflection shortens away from the ship’s side as the red fragment of disc sinks behind the black water-line. In a few seconds nothing but a speck of light that glows like a live ember is visible; and when that is quenched the faint saffron tinge that hung about the sky when the moon was setting dies out and the whole circumference of the ocean is full of the blackness of night.

The ship makes but a ghostly shape. The stars are there, but a haze floats like a veil under them; the diamond-dust that glittered in the hollow caverns of the firmament is eclipsed, and the planets are rayless and sickly in their defined and blueish-coloured forms. A fold of deeper darkness seems to have swept along in the wake of the vanished moon, and the officer of the watch coming up to the binnacle takes a brief look at the card, and then goes to the quarter and stands there softly whistling, while the canvas aloft echoes with a louder note, and the rolling of the ship breaks the water under her counter into foam that seethes sharply and expires quickly. Black as the water is out on the starboard bow you notice a shadow upon it that gives a fresh shade, a further profundity, to the jetty obscurity, and in a few moments the sails aloft fall asleep as though the wand of a magician had been waved over the swaying spars and a soft air comes blowing over the rail.

“All aback forrards!” rings out a hoarse voice, and the cry finds an echo in the hollow canvas. The mate runs along the deck bawling out orders to flatten in the head-sheets and square the after yards, and so forth; the men come out of a dozen corners, coils of rigging are flung down, songs are raised, sheaves squeal as the yards are swung, topsail sheets rattle, and all is bustle and hurry. Meanwhile the wind freshens with a moan in the gathering gust, and the ship leans under it as her headsails fill, and she pays off. Presently the yards are braced round, the vessel brought to her course, and the wind is found to be a point free. The decks are still full of life, tacks have to be boarded, “small pulls” are wanted here and there, and the running gear has to be coiled away; the light from the binnacle lamp puzzles your eye, and when you lift your gaze from the illuminated card the darkness seems to stand around you like a wall; but the compass is there to tell you that the ship heads her course. You would know with your eyes blindfolded, by the mere feel of the helm, that everything is drawing, and amidst the calls of the mate and the songs of the sailors you can hear the sloppy sound of flat falls of water under the weather bow, and the hiss of exploding bubbles, and the faint wash of froth churned up by the rudder below you.

Two bells are struck, and all is quiet once more. The skipper has been on deck, talked with the mate, pushed his bronzed face betwixt you and the binnacle, and after a few turns and several prolonged looks aloft and around the sea, has gone below again. The wind has steadily freshened, and the ship, under all plain sail, heels amid the darkness like a leaning column of white vapour. So softly she sweeps through the snow with which she girdles her shapely length, curtseying with queenly grace as she runs over the long-drawn undulations out of whose inky coils the wind is striking phosphoric sparks, that she steers herself; you have nothing to do but keep hold of the spokes, and let the breeze blow the noble fabric along. The deep gloom is full of strange sounds now that the seamen are forward, and all is silent aft.