PASSAGE TO EUROPE.

A space of about a Hundred Days.

From Wednesday, August 20, to Friday, November 15.

WE SAIL FROM THE CAPE.—OUR PASSAGE.—WE ANCHOR IN THE DOWNS.

Towards evening we proceeded to the beach, accompanied by our two excellent hosts of Tygerberg and the Cape, whose hospitable cares, extreme attention, and all the proofs of true affection which they gave us, have inspired us with deep feelings of gratitude. The weather was calm, but as we entered the boat, a favourable breeze sprung up, as by enchantment. We all exclaimed that 286this was an auspicious omen; but it was far from proving so: for it will be seen that our passage turned out to be one of the longest, and, towards the end, most frightful and terrible. We got on board, the anchor was weighed, and we at last set sail for that Europe we had so long wished for.

From the moment we got under weigh, I and my son were separated from Cape Town and the coast of Africa for ever. Not that they were out of sight even on the next day; but, because we both remained shut up below, suffering most terribly from sea-sickness, the effects of which lasted a considerable time, and of which we thought we should die. Our berthberth was small, dirty, and inconvenient; our brig was of about two hundred tons’ at most; and the crew consisted of twelve hands, two of whom were boys; and indeed, with the exception of the Captain and the Mate, the only two who could be reckoned able sea-men, and of the Cook, an infirm old man, all the rest were mere lads. This want of hands was the more striking to me, and tended the more to increase my natural disposition to sea-sickness; as, with the exception of the Griffin, I had never been on board any but seventy-four gun ships, manned by seven or eight hundred men.

After thirteen days’ sailing, we reached the tropic of Capricorn, and fell in with the trade-winds. On the Sunday following, the 7th of September, we passed in sight of St. Helena, but at a distance of upwards of fifteen leagues; it was hardly possible to perceive it. It would be necessary to have been on that Island, situated as I had been, led thither by similar motives, and to have felt the same affections, and all the other sentiments which my residence there had inspired me with, in order to conceive all the sensations which I experienced on finding myself near that spot,—all the thoughts which occurred to my mind,—the feelings of regret which assailed me. I had had it in my power to remain there; and I had wilfully chosen to banish myself from it!... Indeed, the experience I had had of the Cape began to make me fear that I had founded my determination on chimeras.

287We were now sailing smoothly towards the equator, on this tropical sea, on which we had to go upwards of three thousand leagues. Our little vessel composed our universe. What a vast field of meditation! to find one’s self alone, for about a hundred days, on the vast ocean without any other shelter than the immense expanse of the heavens, on a floating atom, and separated only by a frail plank from the voracity of sea monsters, and an unfathomable abyss!

At the expiration of a month, 20th September, we at last got into our northern hemisphere again, by crossing the Line almost at the same time as the sun, which was going down towards the south, on our larboard tack. We were very fortunate in our navigation in the immediate vicinity north of the equator, where calms or storms are invariably met with. In those regions, the excessive heat of the equator, and that produced by the sands of Africa, combine to torment and harass nature, who expresses her lassitude by continued calms, or is roused by torrents of rain and terrible thunder-storms.

Twenty-five days afterwards, we passed the second tropic, and reached the boundaries of the variable winds of our regions.

We had left the Cape in winter, and after having crossed the torrid zone, we again found winter at the gates of Europe: thus tempests were stationed at the two extremities of our navigation. We had fortunately escaped the tempests of departure; but we had still to expect those of arrival: these we found at their post, and furious they turned out to be.

At the end of about twenty days of light and variable winds, we arrived off the Azores. Our voyage had been already extremely long. There have been instances of the passage from the Cape to England having been performed in thirty days;—the average perhaps is fifty days. We had now been eighty days at sea, and our troubles were only about to begin. When in sight of the Azores, our tribulation, and what we called our Passion week, commenced.

On the 1st of November we experienced our first gale; 288a moderate one, it is true, to begin with, as it were, and set us agoing.

On the 2nd November, we had a calm to give us breath. On the 3rd, came a second gale, still tolerable; but, during the night, which was one of the darkest imaginable, a third gale sprang up, and this time, it amounted to an absolute hurricane. The wind suddenly chopped round, from aft to fore, with a dreadful noise; and blowing furiously, it took, sideways, the few sails we had set, and in one instant, with the rapidity of thought, one side of the ship was in the water, and the sea reached nearly to the foot of the masts. A great number of the casks belonging to the cargo were upset, and by their weight increased the heeling of the ship, already so dangerous. Fortunately, the wind carried away the sails, which were abandoned to it, or we should have capsized. We all thought ourselves lost, and we must have been drowned, had not fate ordered it otherwise.

Such a state of things lasted the whole of Friday, the 7th. Suffering from sea sickness, I had not stirred from my hammock for a long while; but at about four o’clock, I took advantage of a more calm moment, to crawl to the outlet of our wretched cabin, to examine the state of our situation. The spectacle was truly grand, sublime, awful, terrible. The vast ocean, surmounted by a sky red with fury, covered with innumerable roaring mountains, and furrowed with deep valleys and fathomless abysses, formed a sight which filled me with an awful feeling of terror. Our little boat glided with admirable rapidity between two moving mountains, the extremities of which often met on our deck, threatening every moment to unite there together for our final destruction, whilst behind us huge rolling billows, similar to the fantastic monsters of fabulous history, pursued us with unrelenting ardour, raising their hideous heads above our stern, as if to contemplate and rush upon their prey, which continually escaped from them, not, however, without their carrying away, here and there, some pieces of timber from our upper works. This situation was one of imminent danger: few words were exchanged between 289us; we looked at each other in silence; and suffered things to take their course. It is certain that a false movement at the helm, or the slightest act of inattention or neglect, would have been sufficient to cause us to be instantly swallowed up. Had we been caught by one of these terrible waves astern of us, its weight would have borne down every thing before it, and that indeed was our greatest peril. We were more than once threatened with seeing our cabin stove in; the waves dashed over our heads, with a noise like the report of a cannon. We observed them, with terror, gaining ground upon us; and we spent a great part of the dreadful night that followed in securing and fortifying ourselves against them.

My son, who could neither go to bed nor sleep, frequently went upon deck to see how things were going on, and then came back to me, as I lay in my hammock. Not knowing what to do during that long and cruel night, to divert our minds from the contemplation of our situation, and beguile time, if possible, I endeavoured for a moment to dictate something to my son; it was a passage of ancient history. But, presently, a wave, having stove in some part of the works above, came and inundated my hammock, and the paper on which my son was writing. We thought ourselves at our last moment.

However, all that has been read was not destined to form the complement of our danger, or the extent of our fears. The tempest still lasted, and seemed even to increase; at last, on Saturday the 8th, towards morning, the man who was at the helm, as being the most dexterous and the most intrepid of the crew, declared that he would no longer take charge of it; he began to feel giddy, he said, and he feared lest some error on his part should prove fatal to all. We were then obliged to have recourse to our last resource, mettre à la cape, that of letting the ship drive before the wind; a most ticklish manœuvre in the desperate situation in which we were placed, because we ran the risk of going down in the attempt to execute it. But Providence still favoured us; by the greatest good fortune possible, we succeeded, and a shout of joy and 290gratitude from the whole of the crew above, imparted to us below the welcome news. We considered ourselves most fortunate, although the difference between the two situations was chiefly this, that whereas before we ran the risk of foundering, by being taken by the sea aft, we now had the chance of foundering, by the sea taking us on the beam.

This violent gale had now lasted three days, and our week was going on towards its completion. I placed great reliance upon the Sunday, which was about to begin, not only on account of the moon, but also because Sunday had happened to be peculiarly marked by something favourable to us ever since our departure. Nor were our hopes disappointed, for, in the course of the night between Saturday to Sunday, the weather became tolerably moderate, and, when daylight appeared, we were enabled once more to pursue our course. It is certain that, from a strange combination of circumstances, the Sundays had always been marked by some fortunate events, since our departure from the Cape. It was on a Sunday that we had passed the southern tropic, and fallen in with the trade-winds; on a Sunday we had seen St. Helena; on a Sunday we had passed the Island of Ascension; on a Sunday we had crossed the Line; on a Sunday we had passed the second tropic; on a Sunday we had arrived in the latitude off Gibraltar, the first point of Europe; lastly, it was on a Sunday that we had arrived in the latitude of Bayonne and Bordeaux, the beginning of our dear France; and it was on a Sunday again that we were at this moment ending that terrible week off Brest. We might fairly reckon henceforward, we said, upon some fine weather; we thought that we had sufficiently paid our tribute; we hoped that we had exhausted the fury of the wind: the lead brought up European clay; and we only thought of an agreeable termination to our voyage. But, vain calculation! our lucky Sunday being over, we had to encounter a fifth gale.

We were now beginning to enter the Channel without, however, having yet seen land, by which means our true position was unknown to us. Prudence required us to 291stand out to sea, but fortunately it was not for a long time; and, having resumed our course, we at last came within sight of the Lizard Point; but we seemed doomed not to have twenty-four hours of comfort. A thick fog almost immediately came on, and a sixth gale sprung up under the most inauspicious appearances. It blew from the south, and therefore threatened to drive us ashore; we were now in the Channel and without shelter: on one side we had the Lizard, and on the other the Scilly isles, which are extremely dangerous; there was a very heavy sea: we did not know precisely where we were; night was coming on, and a night of fourteen hours! How many causes of uneasiness! What a state of perplexity both for the mind and for a calculation of the chances! We were all completely downcast and disheartened; when a shower of rain, accompanied by thunder, although it was then in the middle of November and the weather very cold, broke the spell. The wind suddenly veered to the proper quarter, and this time it put an end to all our difficulties by bringing us into the Downs, where we anchored. Happy, and ten times happy, to have escaped dangers so formidable and so numerous!