ON THE OCEAN WAVE.

An Amateur’s Experience on a Steamship.

A VERY TALL STORY.—THE FIRST IMPRESSIONS.—A SIDE VIEW OF SEA-SICKNESS.—THE SIGHT OF THE OCEAN.—LAND AT LAST AND GLAD OF IT.

[SPECIAL CORRESPONDENCE OF THE COURIER.]

Philadelphia, Feb. 20, 1876.—The ocean is a greatly exaggerated affair. About four years ago, my friend Charles I. Graves and myself were sitting on a country fence, in Floyd County, after the manner of lizards, drinking in the sunshine, when a wagon containing a small box wheeled past us. It had hardly got abreast us when my friend dropped from his comfortable perch as if he were shot, and rushed to the wagon. Then ensued a remarkable scene. You have all seen a well-bred country dog meet a city dog on some green highway. You know with what hurried circumspection he smells the stranger at all points. So did my friend approach the little square box on the wagon. He sniffed at it as if “he would draw his soul through his nose.” I examined the ugly little box closely. It was marked

To Mr. Berckmans,

Mont Alto, Near Rome,

Ga., U.S.A.

It was Rhenish wine shipped from Paris.

My friend explained to me, after his rhapsody was over, that the box having been brought across the ocean in the hold of a steamer, retained a subtle scent of bilge-water, that brought the sea with all its dangerous fascination back 239to him—he having served all his young life before the mast. He was, at this writing, a plain, staid farmer, content among his cattle and clover. And yet that sharp, briny, saline flavor, thrown on the bosom of the still country breeze, put a restless devil in his breast. It was as if a born gallant, exiled for a decade to the heart of some desert, should, near the expiration of his sentence, stumble upon a cambric handkerchief, redolent with the perfume of a lady’s boudoir. In less than two years after the sight or rather the smell of that box my friend had sold his plantation, convinced his wife, and gone to the ocean again. Had Dr. Berckmans been content to drink native wine, Mr. Graves would yet be alternating cotton with clover, in the peaceful valley of the Etowah.

After this strong proof of the fascination that the sea has for its votaries, I achieved a strong desire to try it for myself. It renewed in my mature days the wild ambition that put turmoil into my schoolboy life, after I had read “Lafitte, or the Pirate of the Gulf.”

I have longed for many a day to run a “gore” into each leg of my pantaloons, roll back my collar, tousle my hair, fold my cloak about my shoulders, and stand before the mast in a stiff breeze, and there read Byron with one eye, and with the other watch the effect of the tableau on the female passengers.

I never had a chance to gratify the desire until lately. I never saw the ocean until the trip that results in this letter; I shall never forget the impression it made on me.

I had imagined that it would be a moment of ecstasy. I had believed that my soul, in the glad recognition of something as infinite, as illimitable as itself, would laugh with joy, and leap to my lips, and burn in my fingers, and tingle in my veins. I wisely reserved the first sight until we had steamed out beyond the land, and then with the air of one who unchains himself, I raised my head and looked out to the future. There, as far as the eye could reach, aye, and way beyond, as if mocking the finiteness of sight, stretched the blue waters. Ah! how my fine-spun 240fancies crumbled and came tumbling back on me in dire confusion! My soul literally shriveled! My very imagination was cowed and driven to its corner, and I sat there dumb and trembling!

No tenant of a cradle was ever more simple or more trusting than I became at that moment. I literally rejoiced in the abrogation of all the pride and manliness that I had boasted of two hours before. I flung away my self-dependence, and my soul ran abashed into the hollow of His hand, even as a frightened child runs to its father’s arms. As I looked shuddering upon the vast and restless waste of waters in front of me, I felt as if some person had taken me to the confines of that time which human calculation can compass, and holding me on the chill edge of that gulf called the Eternal, had asked me to translate its meaning, and pronounce its uttermost boundary.

I suppose the truth of the matter is that I was about scared to death; certain it is that I crouched there for hours, trembling, and yet gazing out beyond me upon the lapping waters, from where they parted before our ship to where they curled up against the half-consenting sky! At last I arose, shook myself, as if throwing off some nightmare, and sought the crowd again.

I can never forget how dissonant and inopportune the flippant conversation of the voyagers seemed to me to be at that time. It was as if some revelers should jest and shout in a great church. With the awful abyss in front, and these prattlers to the rear, one had the two extremes. There was God in the deep and awful stillness ahead, and the world behind in the chatter and gayety that rang out “like a man’s cracked laughter heard way down in hell.”

The first man’s voice that I heard, as I turned away from the solemn hush of the Eternal that yawned before us, was that of a young fellow who remarked to his chum rhapsodically (evidently alluding to some female acquaintance), “Why, she had a leg on her like a government mule.” These words bit into my memory as if they were cut there by white-hot pincers.

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HOW SEA-SICKNESS WORKS.

I believe I have said somewhere in this letter that my soul didn’t leap to my lips when I went out to meet the ocean. I regret to say that my breakfast did. I do not know whether any writer has addressed himself to sea-sickness. I am certain that no writer of sacred or profane literature can do it sufficient injustice. Walt Whitman might do it. He’s better on the yawp than any poet I know. Never tell me again that hell is a lake of fire and brimstone. Eternal punishment means riding on a rough sea, in a steamer that don’t roll well, without a copper-bottomed stomach, and a self-acting stop-valve in the throat. To have been jostled about in a lake of fire would have been real cheerful business compared to the unutterable anguish that I suffered for three days. I do believe that if I had tied a cannon-ball to a crumb of bread and swallowed them both, the crumb would have come prancing to the front again, and brought the cannon-ball with it. It at last became a sort of dismal joke to send anything down. But this was not what made it so hard to bear. It was the abject degradation that it brought upon me. The absolute prostration of every mental, moral and physical activity, of every emotion, impulse and ambition; the reduction of a system that boasted of some nervous power and of excessive tone, to the condition of a wet dish-clout,—these were the things that made sea-sickness a misery beyond the power of words. For three days I lay like an old volcano, still, desolate and haggard; but with an exceedingly active crater. I was brought to that condition which Chesterfield says is the finest pitch to which a gentleman can be brought, that sublime pitch of indifference that enables him to hear of the loss of an estate, or a poodle dog, with the same feeling. Nothing disturbs the man who is sea-sick. He blinks in the face of disaster, and yawps at death itself. He actually longs for sensation. To stick him with a pin, or drop ice down his back, would be a mercy. He spraddles madly over the ship, flabbing himself like a mollusk over everything 242he stumbles on, and knows not night or morning. As far as I was concerned, I was seized with a yawning that came very near proving fatal. I was taken with a longing to turn myself wrong-side outwards, and hang myself on the taffrail. Several times I was on the point of doing it; but I struggled against it and saved myself.

THE SIGHTS OF THE SEA.

The “sights” of the sea are not what they are cracked up to be. Some writer, Lowell, I believe, who was seduced into going seaward, had a sovereign contempt for everything connected with the sea. With a charming abandon, he says, “A whale looks like a brown paper parcel—the white stripes down his back resembling the pack-thread.” It is not hard to bring everything down to this standard.

The very motion of the waves, the cause of rhymes unnumbered, becomes terribly monotonous after the first day or two. The rise and relapse of the tinted water glistening in the sun, and blooming lilies on the wave-crest, is a pretty enough sight at first; but before long one longs to shiver the surface of the deep, and calm its eternal restlessness. The waves, wriggling up like a woman’s regrets from nowhere, come dragging themselves over the weary waste, and, plashing back upon each other, spring off on another uneasy remonstrance, until the brain of the looker-on is actually addled. I would have given a great deal to have had the power to have settled the upheaving waters for one hour, just as a schoolboy has the power, and the inclination, too, to break the inexorable calm of a mill-pond by splashing it with rocks. Nothing tires us like sameness; sameness, inactivity, is intolerable.

We saw some flying-fish. And we saw, what I valued much more, on board with us a man who knew a man whose cousin had seen the great sea-serpent. I have a great respect for a man who knows somebody that has seen the sea-serpent. He is a link between us and the supernatural in the ocean. He is a relic, stranded by the shore of science, of that world of wonders that began with the syrens, was 243modernized with the mermaids, and that ends in the devil-fish and sea-serpent. While he lives I want to be near him. When he dies I want his tooth set on my mantel-piece; it will be a sort of guarantee, under which I can read the weird stories of the old, unexplored ocean, that made boyhood joyous. Give me the sea-serpent as a fact, and I will swear to the mermaids, bet on the phantom ship, and pin my faith to the syrens.

THE LOVERS AND THE PILOT.

The intercourse between the passengers was not pleasant. We got tired of each other. The fact that none of us could get on or off, gave us a sort of feeling that we were prisoners; or, when locked up at night in our berths, that we were animals traveling in the same menagerie; brought together by chance, and held together through necessity.

There was one couple on board that won my attention. It was a man, full-grown, handsome and accomplished, but with the deep furrows in his brow that always come after a man has wrestled with the world; and the girl not more than fifteen years of age. The girl had not worn off the subtle bloom of childhood that gave her grace and glow, as the dew-chrism of early dawn graces the lily. She was not beautiful, after the approved models, but there was an elastic freshness, a bright charm that would have put beauty to the blush. She was brimming with the splendid and tender divinity that fills the odorous buds just before they burst into life’s beauty. She was full of spring. She carried its balms about with her, its aroma hung about her skirts, and its auroral light illuminated her very being. She was April, with all its joys and all its happy tears—its dear restlessness, and its thrills. I marveled to see how the man of affairs loved her. It annoyed me to see how this man, with all his vast concerns, his rugged schemes, his vaulting ambition, bowed down at the feet of a child. It was a very miracle of love that centered all the impulses, aspirations, hopes, and endeavors of this man of the world in a bright slip of a girl. She understood her power, too; 244and taking the reins of affairs in her little fingers, carried herself with a pretty imperiousness. Not always was she mistress, though. Once in awhile I noticed, when he held her beneath his words, her eyes softened and fell, and she sat half absorbed and trembling, thrilling under an ecstasy that stirred her soul to its very depths, and yet left her unconscious of what it meant or from what it came. I watched this couple with a strange interest, and my heart went out to the child. But beyond this there was nothing interesting on shipboard. The people were all tame. They seemed to have been planted on the ship, and grown there. They were all indigenous; and hence, when the pilot—a breezy fellow, by the way—jumped on board just outside of New York, he brought with him the charm of a rare exotic, and actually acquired a sort of game flavor, by being a stranger.

SOME CONCLUSIONS NOT JUMPED AT.

Altogether, a trip on the ocean is a very great bore. It does not compare to the cozy and bustling comforts of an inland trip, especially if one have the benefits of a Pullman.

The ocean is meant to be looked at and enjoyed—from the shore, or through books. You may see more of it by going on board a ship. It is pretty apt to see more of you, though, than you do of it. There are many moments during the first day or two, when, leaning over the taffrail, you yawp into its face, that it can see clear through to your boots. That’s the way it was with

John, Jr.

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