group together. We had no lack of music, for one played the
accordion, another the violin, and another (who usually began at
six o’clock A.M.) the key-bugle: the combined effect of which
instruments, when they all played different tunes in differents
parts of the ship, at the same time, and within hearing of each
other, as they sometimes did (everybody being intensely satisfied
with his own performance), was sublimely hideous.
When all these means of entertainment failed, a sail would heave in
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sight: looming, perhaps, the very spirit of a ship, in the misty
distance, or passing us so close that through our glasses we could
see the people on her decks, and easily make out her name, and
whither she was bound. For hours together we could watch the
dolphins and porpoises as they rolled and leaped and dived around
the vessel; or those small creatures ever on the wing, the Mother
Carey’s chickens, which had borne us company from New York bay, and
for a whole fortnight fluttered about the vessel’s stern. For some
days we had a dead calm, or very light winds, during which the crew
amused themselves with fishing, and hooked an unlucky dolphin, who
expired, in all his rainbow colours, on the deck: an event of such
importance in our barren calendar, that afterwards we dated from
the dolphin, and made the day on which he died, an era.
Besides all this, when we were five or six days out, there began to
be much talk of icebergs, of which wandering islands an unusual
number had been seen by the vessels that had come into New York a
day or two before we left that port, and of whose dangerous
neighbourhood we were warned by the sudden coldness of the weather,
and the sinking of the mercury in the barometer. While these
tokens lasted, a double look-out was kept, and many dismal tales
were whispered after dark, of ships that had struck upon the ice
and gone down in the night; but the wind obliging us to hold a
southward course, we saw none of them, and the weather soon grew
bright and warm again.
The observation every day at noon, and the subsequent working of
the vessel’s course, was, as may be supposed, a feature in our
lives of paramount importance; nor were there wanting (as there
never are) sagacious doubters of the captain’s calculations, who,
so soon as his back was turned, would, in the absence of compasses,
measure the chart with bits of string, and ends of pockethandkerchiefs,
and points of snuffers, and clearly prove him to be
wrong by an odd thousand miles or so. It was very edifying to see
these unbelievers shake their heads and frown, and hear them hold
forth strongly upon navigation: not that they knew anything about
it, but that they always mistrusted the captain in calm weather, or
when the wind was adverse. Indeed, the mercury itself is not so
variable as this class of passengers, whom you will see, when the
ship is going nobly through the water, quite pale with admiration,
swearing that the captain beats all captains ever known, and even
hinting at subscriptions for a piece of plate; and who, next
morning, when the breeze has lulled, and all the sails hang useless
in the idle air, shake their despondent heads again, and say, with
screwed-up lips, they hope that captain is a sailor – but they
shrewdly doubt him.
It even became an occupation in the calm, to wonder when the wind
WOULD spring up in the favourable quarter, where, it was clearly
shown by all the rules and precedents, it ought to have sprung up
long ago. The first mate, who whistled for it zealously, was much
respected for his perseverance, and was regarded even by the
unbelievers as a first-rate sailor. Many gloomy looks would be
cast upward through the cabin skylights at the flapping sails while
dinner was in progress; and some, growing bold in ruefulness,
predicted that we should land about the middle of July. There are
always on board ship, a Sanguine One, and a Despondent One. The