Part 9

This, I say, was an old experience; but it was a time to try the stomach whilst it lasted. Think of three or four days and three or four nights of it! In these days if you are sea-sick you at least have the satisfaction of knowing that the ship is always going ahead, and that the day, if not the hour, when your nausea will have terminated may be pretty accurately fixed. And yet what man hanging over the side or prostrate on his back and execrating existence can get satisfaction out of the thought that, bad as his sufferings are, they might be worse by being protracted? I believe there are some people who, when once their heads are fairly over the rail, or when what Thackeray calls the “expectaroon” is between their knees, are inspired by such a loathing for life that they are not to be moved by the wildest threats of destruction. Once, in crossing from Calais to Dover, I noticed a vast pile of luggage, unsecured by a single lashing, heaped up on the fore-deck. All was well until we got clear of the French coast, when a small beam sea set the vessel rolling. In a few minutes the bulwarks, from the sponsons to the eyes, were crowded with people of both sexes and various nationalities, all engaged in raising their voices in the most dismal manner, wiping their cheeks, and casting bloodshot glances around them, only to direct their gaze again with hideous rapidity upon the giddy white water that rushed in a spinning dance aft while they exploded in loud roars. I looked with alarm at the nodding pile of luggage, feeling sure that an extra lurch would tumble the whole over and seriously injure the unhappy sick people on one side or other of the vessel. I spoke to a French sailor--they were all Frenchmen aboard that steamer--and advised him to secure the luggage. He merely shrugged his shoulders and made off. I addressed another, who could not or would not understand me. Thereupon I went up to the sea-sick people, and touching first one and then another, I pointed to the tower of luggage and advised them to go further aft, out of the way of the boxes, lest they should tumble upon them. They must have seen their danger as plainly as I, but not one of them offered to move. They kept a tight hold of the rail, merely turning their lacklustre eyes upon me with an expression in them, half imploring, half savage, as much as to say, “Let the boxes come! Let us be crushed! What stops the boxes from falling?” Fortunately the second sailor I accosted perceived by this time that if the luggage was not secured the top boxes bade fair to go overboard when the stronger sea of the mid-channel was reached; and so among them the Frenchmen bound the boxes to the deck by ropes, and by so doing, in my humble opinion, saved several valuable sea-sick lives.

In this same journey I was amused by an aspect of sea-sickness, or let me say a condition of it, that will be familiar to many who make short passages by water. Going forward of the funnel, where smoking is not prohibited, I took notice of a gentleman wearing an eye-glass. He was clad in a yachting coat, embellished with brass buttons, and he was smoking a large cigar. A very stout Frenchman was asking him some questions in broken English--I heard the gentleman with the eye-glass say that he believed there was a pretty middling sea on outside, but “if you’re afraid of being sick, mounseer, you should smoke, sir. You should do as I do. Nothing like tobacco for settling the stomach;” and he gave a horribly confident laugh. The corpulent Frenchman withdrew with a groan, and lodged himself in the gloom under the bridge near the engines, the vibration of which caused his immense body to quiver like a jelly on a supper-table when people are dancing overhead, and there he lay so clamorously ill that the firemen dropped their shovels below to come up and look at him.

Meanwhile I kept my eye on the gentleman who believed in tobacco, and when the steamer took the first of the seas I saw him seize hold of a shroud or a funnel stay and set his legs wide apart. He continued puffing at his cigar for some time but the intervals between removing and lifting it to his mouth grew longer and longer; presently it went out, but he took no notice. He had his glass in his eye and his face looked forward; he was deplorably pale, and I never could have believed that such a trifling thing as a brass button and so prosaic an object as a nautically-cut coat could become, on occasion, more cuttingly ironical than anything a man’s friend could say of him. The eye-glass gave this gentleman an unusually glaring expression; he never shifted his gaze--I should say that he never winked. There he stood with his legs wide apart, the extinguished cigar in one hand and the other supporting him with a death-grip, staring with horrible intensity at nothing. I knew perfectly well that if that man were made to shift his posture or speak he would rush to the rail.

It was a brave fight; but it could not last. A young coloured gentleman, the ashiness of nausea visible in his dark skin, suddenly jumped up from under the pile of luggage, where he had been screening himself from the wind, and, bolting to the side, expended himself in a howl full of the deep throaty noise that is peculiar to negroes. It was irresistible; the man with the eye-glass let go, and staggered away, with his cigar gone and his hands extended. I feared that he would find no room, for the bulwark was lined with sufferers; but, with the selfishness of acute suffering, he plumped with all his might between a couple of Frenchmen, squeezed the aperture between them open with his elbows, and fixed himself there; and there he remained until the water grew smooth near the English cliffs, and the steamer went forward on a steady keel.

It is difficult to understand why people should find anything diverting in sea-sickness, than which surely nothing can cause more suffering. Of course, if a man will give himself airs ashore or on smooth water, use nautical words, and deride the misgivings others are honest enough to confess to, then, indeed, if we find that marine gentleman with his head in a basin, or with his face over the side and his hat gone, we have some excuse to laugh at him. There are people who never will own that they are sick at sea, just as there are people who deny with indignation that they snore in their sleep. Such folks deserve our ridicule. For what is there to be ashamed of? I have known old sea-captains quit ships newly arrived from around the world and be ill on a voyage from London Bridge to Hull. If such men can shout for the steward without blushing, it is hard to know why Jones, of the Middle Temple, or Smith, of the Stock Exchange, or Snooks, the celebrated novelist, should sneak to the side and feel humbled if his fellow-sufferers see him blue in the face with his pocket-handkerchief half-way down his throat. It may be that people laugh at sea-sick sufferers because of the enormously and by consequence absurdly levelling character of the malady. One might be the most compassionate creature living and yet find it impossible to stop laughing at the debasement of the high and mighty personage who, when he came aboard, people whispered was the Right Honourable So-and-so, or the acute and famous Mr. Justice Somebody Else. He sits aloof, he is full of dignity, he scarcely raises even a condescending eye from the book or paper in his hand to glance at the other passengers, who sit doggedly, if humbly, waiting for the wheels to go round, inside and outside. I say that a man must be more than human if he can help laughing when the high and mighty personage changes colour, when he puts his paper down and rolls his eyes about, when nothing seems to keep his head on but his shirt-collar, and when an invincible horror of life gleams in that gaze which has grown hollow with surprising rapidity. Alas! no amount of reputation, no social importance, no eloquence, which in other places might affect the heart and even improve the understanding, can save him. Yonder in the bows is a poor little cockney, a second-class passenger, in a shabby coat and his trousers half-way up his legs, sick beyond the power of description; there is no bench long enough on that vessel to furnish room for him and the great man at once if the water were smooth; but Nausea has waved her wand, and the humble little cockney and the high and mighty personage are brothers and equals, fellow-sufferers, with all distinctions vanished between them as, with yellow faces, the cockney forward, the great man aft, they overhang the rushing foam with open mouths, the tears pouring from their eyes, and anguish inimitably expressed in the curve of their backs and the occasional kick-up delivered by their legs.

More pathetic, perhaps, is the newly-married couple, though many a cruel laugh and jeer have been directed even at them. But nothing is sacred at sea. Sentiment that is full of poetry in drawing-rooms, among flowers, under the moonshine, among hedges, takes another character among rough waters.

I remember once crossing fifty miles of sea in company with a young gentleman and his bride. They were returning, I took it, from their honeymoon. They sat together upon a small, uncomfortable bench fixed against the inside of the paddle-box, whence they commanded a fine view of the action of the engines, and where the smell of the oil-cans hung steadily in the wind. They both knew they were going to be sick, and sat with hands locked, two devoted hearts bent on suffering together. The steward--a pale, large, sandy-haired man--considerately anticipated their wants by placing a couple of basins at their feet. The dismal implements made but a melancholy foreground for the impassioned pair, and I wondered how they would like to have had their photographs taken in that posture. A quarter of an hour sufficed to make the picture tragical. The wife leaned across the husband and the husband held on to her. His heroic devotion was immense; I could hear him in guttural accents pouring consolation into her deaf ears amid the intervals of his own convulsions, and when an unusually heavy roll to leeward caused both basins to slide away out of sight under the bench, I never beheld anything more touching than his struggles to replace them without letting go of his wife.

Happily, however, the heart is occasionally steeled against such objects of misery as this by spectacles of selfishness and fear in the last degree contemptible. I particularly recall a gaunt Frenchman with a spiked moustache, who, long before nausea afflicted him, refused to stir from his seat to help his miserable, prostrate wife, and who answered her murmurs to Emile to put something under her head and something over her feet, by fierce commands to her to hold her tongue. This wretched man was himself seized with nausea, and so great was his fear--either excited by the somewhat heavy sea that washed alongside the vessel or by his sufferings, which to judge from the noise he made, must have led him to suppose that, bit by bit, the whole of him was going overboard--that after every explosion I could hear him shrieking, “Maman! maman!” like a girl.

What is the remedy for sea-sickness? I wish I knew--most cheerfully would I impart the secret. There are many prescriptions, from the ice of Dr. Chapman to Jack’s lump of fat pork attached to a ropeyarn; but nothing seems to answer the end designed. Nor is it very remarkable that the wonderful vessels which were to put an end to nausea should still leave the “expectaroon,” even on their own decks, the useful piece of furniture passengers have for generations found it; for whilst clever gentlemen have shown us how the effect of the rolling and pitching movement of a ship upon the head or stomach may be overcome by pivoted saloons and swinging accommodations, they have entirely failed to produce any kind of mechanism to obviate the consequences of those movements of a vessel in a seaway which are alone responsible for sickness; I mean the heave up and the swoop down. If a ship oscillated on an immutable basis, a cot or a balanced chair would effectually stop nausea; like a wineglass on a swinging tray, the passenger could always maintain a posture perpendicular with the horizon. But what is to qualify the sensations which follow the swoop down into the hollows and the roaring heave up on to the summits of the seas? Everything in the ship must accompany her in her falls and in her risings; and it is this motion which sends people rushing to the side, which sets them roaring for the steward, which causes them to loathe life and to lie with their heads anywhere and their feet anyhow.

I cannot help thinking, however that imagination contributes something, and often a very great deal, to sea-sickness; otherwise how are we to account for people suffering from nausea actually before they step on board the vessel that is to carry them? If a sea-sick man could be sent to sleep his sufferings would cease; yet the vessel goes on rolling, and if it is this movement, affecting the stomach, that causes nausea, I cannot quite see why the stomach should not be as sympathetic in sleep as in waking. Any way, I believe that a person could be made to forget to be sea-sick by having his imagination intensely occupied or his fears excited. Let a vessel full of sea-sick people drive ashore, or catch fire, or be in collision; let the captain bawl out, “We are all lost;” it would be interesting to conjecture how much sickness would remain aboard that ship. A good prescription might be a profoundly exciting novel: some hideous mystery so distractingly complicate as to make one sink all thoughts of waves and stewards in the eagerness to discover whether the figure Sir Jasper sees was really a ghost or his first wife, and whether it was her ladyship or the groom she ran away with who shot Signor Squallini in the throat and did the fine arts a real service. But it is better to be sea-sick than in danger; and, if the novelists can do nothing for us, I am afraid there is no alternative but to go on feeing the stewards and building swift vessels.

_A LOG EXTRACT._

The following entry was made in the official log-book of a ship named the _Oxford_:--“Fifth November, 1882, Sunday, 4.0 p.m., lat. 35° 39´ S., long. 18° 53´ E., W. Waters, A.B., while furling the mizzen-topsail fell from the yard into the sea, striking the half round of the poop in his fall. A lifebuoy was promptly thrown him, the ship brought to the wind--it blowing a fresh gale from the S.W., with thick weather and a heavy sea at the time. The port lifeboat was at once lowered, and proceeded under the charge of Mr. A. Bowling, second mate, to pick up the man. Owing, however, to the shock sustained by him in striking the ship, and his being encumbered with oilskins, etc., he sank before the boat could reach him. After an unsuccessful search, the boat returned to the ship and was with difficulty hoisted up, owing to the heavy sea which half filled her. Everything was done that could be done to save the poor fellow. (Signed) J. BRADDICK, Master.”

Now, here is the whole story, as who would not suppose? The sailor dropped overboard, a boat unsuccessfully searched for him, and then the ship braced her mainyard round and sailed away. But extracts from log-books, I have taken notice, are like the little box which the fisherman in the “Arabian Nights” found upon the sea-shore; when it was opened a wonderful creature shaped itself out, and its figure filled the sky. I particularly realized this when Mr. Bowling gave me a sketch of the yarn of which Captain Braddick’s log is the briefest hint. Why, what a world of adventure, of heroism, of peril grows up out of these marine entries! Is it four lines about a ship rescuing a crew from a sinking vessel; or about a captain coming across a smack’s boat in the middle of the North Sea, with nothing in her but a little crouching, starving boy; or about a brig found drifting helplessly, with her crew, dead of frost, lying upon her deck? Assuredly in those four lines there is the making of a thrilling volume to any man who shall faithfully put his hand to the work and, exaggerating nothing, relate merely the adventure as it befell, and how it came about and ended, and what the actors in it said, and did, and thought. Here, in very brief form, is Mr. Bowling’s own yarn, told with my pen, of an incident as common pretty nearly in its way at sea as the sight of froth blowing into a hollow, or of the curve of the bow-wave flashing green and glass-smooth from the shearing cutwater.

“We left Calcutta on Sept. 4, 1882, with a full cargo, bound for the port of London. All went well--if by well you’ll understand nothing extraordinary outside spells of bothersome head winds, dead calms, and now and again a twister over the quarter to give us legs--until came Sunday, Nov. 5, on which date you’ll see by the extract from the log-book where we were; the glass stood low, and in the morning there was a kind of wild wet light in the sun when he sprang up from behind the dull-coloured sea, and the lustre that came along with him seemed to roll on the top of the swell as if it was burning oil lying there instead of being the up and down flashing of fair weather, when the light sounds the very bottom of the ocean with its silver lead-line, as you may see for yourselves if you’ll watch the break of day under a pure sky and over clean blue water. We were under topgallant-sails, on the starboard tack, the wind about west, with weight enough in it to swear by, and a slow gathering of haze all along the horizon over the port quarter--south-west the bearings would be about--and a thick, deep-breathing swell coming out of it, tumbled by the wind into a bit of a sea that washed with a stormy noise along the bends, and made the ship as uncomfortable as an old cab on a road full of stones.

“I had charge of the deck, and not liking the look of the weather, I went below to tell the captain about it. He had been up pretty near all the night that was gone, and was in his cabin taking some rest. But there’s very little rest for shipmasters, who need to have as many eyes as you find in a peacock’s tail, that they might close two or three of them at a time, if ever they’re to get the amount of sleep that all other kinds of people, barring nautical men, find needful to keep themselves alive on. Well, sir, I called the captain and told him that the weather looked threatening, and straightway he came on deck and took a squint around. The wind was freshening slowly and surely, and the topsails and topgallant-sails, out of whose cloths the wet of last night’s squalls of rain were not yet dried, were stretching as if they would burst under it; and the water to leeward washed like boiling milk all along the scuppers as the ship was rushed by the pressure, taking the seas with a floating jump, and making them roar as she split them with her sharp stem and sent them seething in white smothers on either hand. There were clouds crawling up out of the thickness in the west and south, and passing like smoke over the mastheads, and there was a look of racing about the whole ocean with the sailing of those bits of vapour, and the pelting of the ship, and the wild hurrying rolling of the seas, along which there were sea-birds screeching as they skimmed in their low flight through the driving spray in pursuit of us.

“Well, sir, the fore topgallant-sail was furled and the watch lay aft to roll up the mainsail; but not for long did we hold on with the main topgallant-sail; that was clewed up soon, and the wind freshened as sail was diminished; so that, although half stripped of canvas, the ship was heeling to it as before, whilst there was the hard look of a gale of wind in the sky that you saw grey between the scud; and the thickness was blowing up nearer and nearer, making a mere biscuit’s-throw of the horizon, so that the seas looked lumping things as they rolled, all of a sudden like, out of the haze, and were under the ship and standing up on either hand of her almost as fast as they seemed to be formed. We were now under topsails and foresail only--of the square canvas--when on a sudden there comes a bit of a lull, and a sort of silence aloft that sounded strange after the roaring, and a great noise of washing waters all around; and then plump sweeps up the wind in a wild out-fly out of the south-west, driving the ship forwards until the foam of the cutwater looked to be smothering her head. All hands were called to shorten sail, the three upper topsail halliards were let go, the starboard braces rounded in, and the helm shifted to bring the ship to her course. Four able seamen and four boys went aloft to furl the upper mizzen-topsail. You know the old story: the light hands well out, the older hands in the slings and quarters, and the sail swelling up like a sheet of iron to the wind that blew fair into it in a storm betwixt the two yards. I had my eye on those men I am speaking of, when a blast like a squall swept the canvas out of their fists, and in a breath one of them fell with a twirl and a toss of his clenched hands off the yard, striking the half-round of the poop a blow that came along with the yell of the wind in a frightful thud; and with that, rebounding as a ball might, over he goes into the yeast and froth alongside. It is a horrible thing to happen; it will stop the breathing of the strongest for a minute. The fellows on the yard roared out, ‘Man overboard!’ I sprang aft, and had a life-buoy in my hand in an instant, which I threw fair, as I prayed and believed, to the yellow patch of sou’wester that I saw dark on the foam of the side of a sea; but the wind blew the light thing, like a feather, to leeward of him. But he was swimming--there was life in him, though, man, you should have heard the thump of his fall, and then thought of him struggling there with his great sea-boots full of water, and his heavy oilskins dragging him down, and a rushing of froth over his head every time that a sea swept him up into the snow of its breaking crest. Well, sir, we went to work smartly; the hands came tumbling down from aloft, and the ship was brought to with her main-topsail aback, whilst half a dozen of us were obeying with mad haste the order to clear away the quarter-boat ready for lowering.

“Meanwhile a hand remained in the mizzen-topsail yard to keep the poor fellow in sight, and he was shouting that the man was swimming, and swimming strong; that he didn’t seem to see the life-buoy, but that he was struggling bravely; and I, seeing this too, and driven half mad by the pitiful sight of that sailor and shipmate fighting the whole ocean, as I may put it, and battling it with an English seaman’s courage, sang out, ‘Who’s going to volunteer for the boat?’ There was no hanging back; it was just a leap to see who should be first. As fast as they could tumble in, there they were, six of them, the pick of the crew--merchant seamen, sir, whom we’re being taught to despise; there they were, I say, with the others handling the falls, and every one looking as if the saving of the life of the man astern was his business and nobody’s else; for he was a shipmate, and that means a brother at sea, sir, when the forecastle holds real sailors.