The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and PoliticsVarious
Philosophy
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics
Various
American periodicals
salt-water sympathy. Men are born landsmen, and are born on land, but
belong to the Ocean's family. Sooner or later, whatever their calling,
they recognize the tie. They may struggle against it, and scotch it, but
cannot kill it. They may not be seamen,--they may wear black coats and
respectable white ties, and have large balances in the bank, but they
are the Sea's men,--brothers by blood-relationship, if not by trade, of
Ulysses and Vasco, of Columbus and Cabot, of Frobisher and Drake.
Other stories of the sea are floating through my memory as I
write,--tales told with elbows leaning on cabin-tables, while the
swinging-lamp oscillated drearily overhead, and sent uncertain shadows
into the state-room doors. There is the story which Vivian Grey told us
of the beautiful clipper "Nighthawk,"--her who sailed with the "Bonita"
and "Driving-Scud" and "Mazeppa," in the great Sea-Derby, whose course
lay round the world. How, one Christmas-day, off the pitch of Cape Horn,
he, standing on her deck, saw her dive bodily into a sea, and all of her
to the mainmast was lost in ocean,--her stately spars seemingly rising
out of blue water unsupported by any ship beneath;--it seemed an age to
him, he said, before there was any forecastle to be seen rising from the
brine. Also, how, caught off that same wild cape, they had to make sail
in a reef-topsail-breeze to claw off its terrible rocks, seen but too
plainly under their Ice. How, as he said, "about four in the afternoon
it seemed to blow worse than ever, and you could see the staunch boat
was pressed down under her canvas, and every spar was groaning and
quivering, while the ship went bodily to leeward." And next, "how she
seemed to come to herself, as it were, with a long staggering roll, and
to spring to windward as if relieved of a dead weight; for the gale had
broken, and the foam-belt along the cliffs grew dimmer and dimmer, and
the land fainter and fainter. And then," he said, "to hear the
fo'castle-talk, you would have said that never was such a ship, such
spars, such a captain, such seamanship, and such luck, since Father
Jason cleared the 'Argo' from the Piraeus, for Colchis and a market."
Or I might tell you how Dr. ----, the ship-surgeon, was in that Collard
steamer which ran down the fishing-boat in the fog off Cape Race,--and
how, looking from his state-room window, he saw a mighty cliff so near
that he could almost lay his hand upon it. How Fanshaw was on board the
"Sea-King" when she was burned, off Point Linus,--and how he hung in the
chains till he was taken off, and his hair was repeatedly set on fire by
the women--emigrant-passengers--jumping over his head into the sea.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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