Glances at Europe. Greeley Horace

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СКАЧАТЬ one of the characteristics of a genuine case of sea-sickness No. 1. I enjoyed some opportunities of observing this during our voyage. For instance: One evening I was standing by a sick gentleman who had dragged himself or been carried on deck and laid down on a water-proof mattress which raised him two or three inches from the floor. Suddenly a great wave broke square over the bow of the ship and rushed aft in a river through either gangway—the two streams reuniting beyond the purser's and doctor's offices, just where the sick man lay. Any live man would have jumped to his feet as suddenly as if a rattlesnake were whizzing in his blanket; but the sufferer never moved, and the languid coolness of eye wherewith he regarded the rushing flood which made an island of him was most expressive. Happily, the wave had nearly spent its force and was now so rapidly diffused that his refuge was not quite overflowed.

      Of course, those who have voyaged and not suffered will pronounce my general picture grossly exaggerated; wherein they will be faithful to their own experience, as I am to mine. I write for the benefit of the uninitiated, to warn them, not against braving the ocean when they must or ought, but against resorting to it for pastime. Voyaging cannot be enjoyment to most of them; it must be suffering. The sonorous rhymesters in praise of "A Life on the Ocean Wave," "The Sea! the Sea! the Open Sea!" &c. were probably never out of sight of land in a gale in their lives. If they were ever "half seas over," the liquid which buoyed them up was not brine, but wine, which is quite another affair. And, as they are continually luring people out of soundings who might far better have remained on terra firma, I lift up my voice in warning against them. "A home on the raging deep," is not a scene of enjoyment, even to the sailor, who suffers only from hardship and exposure; no other laborer's wages are so dearly earned as his, and his season of enjoyment is not the voyage but the stay in port. He is compelled to work hardest just when other out-door laborers deem working at all out of the question. To him Night and Day are alike in their duties as in their exemptions; while the more furious and blinding the tempest, the greater must be his exertions, perils and privations. In fair weather his hours of rest are equal to his hours of labor; in bad weather he may have no hours of rest whatever. Should he find such, he flings himself into his bunk for a few hours in his wet clothes, and turns out smoking like a coal-pit at the next summons to duty, to be drenched afresh in the cold affusions of sea and sky—and so on. An old sea-captain assured me that his crew were sometimes in wet clothing throughout an Atlantic voyage.

      Our weather was certainly bad, though not the worst. We started on our course, after leaving Sandy-Hook, in the teeth of a North-Easter, and it clung to us like a brother. It varied to East North-East, East South-East, South East, and occasionally condescended to blow a little from nearly North or nearly South, but we had not six hours of Westerly or semi-Westerly wind throughout the passage. There may have been two days in all, though I think not, in which some of the principal sails could be made to draw; but they were necessarily set so sharply at angles with the ship as to do little good. Usually, one or two trysails were all the canvass displayed, and they rather served to steady the ship than to aid her progress; while for days together, stripped to her naked spars, she was compelled to push her bowsprit into the wind's very eye by the force of her engines alone. And that wind, though no hurricane, had a will of its own; while the waves, rolled perpetually against her bow by so long a succession of easterly winds, were a decided impediment to our progress. I doubt whether there is another steamship which could have made the passage safely and without extra effort in less time than the Baltic did.

      Our weather was not all bad, though we had no thoroughly fair day—no day entirely free from rain—none in which the decks were dry throughout. In fact, the spray often kept them thoroughly drenched, especially aft, when there was no rain at all. During four or five of the twelve days we had some hour or more of semi-sunshine either at morning, midday or toward night. The only gales of much account were those of our first night off Long Island and our last before seeing land (Saturday), when on coming into soundings off the coast of Ireland, we had a very decided blow and (the ship having become very light by the consumption of most of her coal) the worst kind of a sea. It gave me my sickest hour, though not my worst day.

      Our dreariest days were Wednesday and Thursday, 23d and 24th, when we were a little more than half way across. With the wind precisely ahead and very strong, the skies black and lowering, a pretty constant rain, and a driving, blinding spray which drenched every thing above the decks, themselves ankle-deep in water, I cannot well imagine how two hundred fellow-passengers, driven down and kept down in the cabins and state-rooms of a steamship, could well be treated to a more dismal prospect. I thought the philosophy even of the card-players (who were by far the most industrious and least miserable class among us) was tried by it.

      Spacious as the Baltic is, two hundred passengers with fifty or sixty attendants, confined for days together to her cabins, fill her quite full enough. For those who are thoroughly well, there are society, reading, eating, play and other pastimes; but for the sick and helpless, who can neither read nor play, whom even conversation fatigues, and to whom the under-deck smell, especially in connection with food, is intensely revolting, I can imagine no heavier hours short of absolute torture. Having endured these, I had nothing beyond them to dread, and it was rather a satisfaction, on reaching the Irish coast, to be greeted with a succession of hail-squalls—to work up the Channel against a wet North-Easter, and be landed in Liverpool (after a tedious detention for lack of water on the bar at the mouth of the Mersey) under sullen skies and in a dripping rain. I wanted to see the thing out, and would have taken amiss any deceitful smiles of Fortune after I had learned to dispense with her favors.

      There yet remains the grateful duty of speaking of the mitigations of our trials. And in the first place, the Baltic herself is unquestionably one of the safest and most commodious sea-boats in the world. She is probably not the fastest, especially with a strong head wind and sea, because of her great bulk and the area of resistance she presents both above and below the water-line; but for strength and excellence of construction, steadiness of movement, and perfection of accommodations, she can have no superior. Her wheels never missed a revolution from the time she discharged her New-York pilot till the time she stopped them to take on board his Liverpool counterpart, off Holyhead: and her sailing qualities, tested under the most unfavorable auspices, are also admirable. She needs but good weather to make the run in ten days from dock to dock; she would have done it this time had the winds been the reverse of what they were or as the Asia had them before her. The luck cannot always be against her.

      Praise of commanders and officers of steamships has become so common that it has lost all emphasis, all force. I presume this is for the most part deserved; for it is not likely that the great responsibility of sailing these ships would be entrusted to any other than the very fittest hands; and this is a matter wherein mistakes may by care be avoided. The qualities of a seaman, a commander, do not lie dormant; the ocean tries and proves its men; while in this service the whole traveling public are the observers and judges. But such a voyage as we have just made tries the temper as well as the capacity, it calls into exercise every faculty, and lays bare defects if such there be. To sweep gaily on before a fresh, fair breeze, is comparatively easy, but few landsmen can realize the patient assiduity and nautical skill required to extract propelling power from winds determined to be dead ahead. How nicely the sails must be set at the sharpest angle with the course of the vessel, and sometimes that course itself varied a point or two to make them draw at all; how often they must be shifted, or reefed, or furled; how much labor and skill must be put in requisition to secure a very slight addition to the speed of the ship—all this I am not seaman enough to describe, though I can admire. And during the entire voyage, with its many vicissitudes, I did not hear one harsh or profane word from an officer, one sulky or uncivil response from a subordinate. And the perfection of Capt. Comstock's commandership in my eyes was that, though always on the alert and giving direction to every movement, he did not need to command half so much nor to make himself anything like so conspicuous as an ordinary man would. I willingly believe that some share of the merit of this is due to the admirable qualities of his assistants, especially Lieuts. Duncan and Hunter, of the U. S. Navy.

      In the way of food and attendance, nothing desirable was wanting but Health and Appetite. Four meals per day were regularly СКАЧАТЬ