I went to bed.
It was pretty much the same for the next two days, with a tolerably
fair wind and dry weather. I read in bed (but to this hour I don’t
know what) a good deal; and reeled on deck a little; drank cold
brandy-and-water with an unspeakable disgust, and ate hard biscuit
perseveringly: not ill, but going to be.
It is the third morning. I am awakened out of my sleep by a dismal
shriek from my wife, who demands to know whether there’s any
danger. I rouse myself, and look out of bed. The water-jug is
plunging and leaping like a lively dolphin; all the smaller
articles are afloat, except my shoes, which are stranded on a
carpet-bag, high and dry, like a couple of coal-barges. Suddenly I
see them spring into the air, and behold the looking-glass, which
is nailed to the wall, sticking fast upon the ceiling. At the same
time the door entirely disappears, and a new one is opened in the
floor. Then I begin to comprehend that the state-room is standing
on its head.
Before it is possible to make any arrangement at all compatible
with this novel state of things, the ship rights. Before one can
say ‘Thank Heaven!’ she wrongs again. Before one can cry she IS
wrong, she seems to have started forward, and to be a creature
actually running of its own accord, with broken knees and failing
legs, through every variety of hole and pitfall, and stumbling
constantly. Before one can so much as wonder, she takes a high
leap into the air. Before she has well done that, she takes a deep
dive into the water. Before she has gained the surface, she throws
a summerset. The instant she is on her legs, she rushes backward.
And so she goes on staggering, heaving, wrestling, leaping, diving,
jumping, pitching, throbbing, rolling, and rocking: and going
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Dickens, Charles – American Notes for General Circulation
through all these movements, sometimes by turns, and sometimes
altogether: until one feels disposed to roar for mercy.
A steward passes. ‘Steward!’ ‘Sir?’ ‘What IS the matter? what DO
you call this?’ ‘Rather a heavy sea on, sir, and a head-wind.’
A head-wind! Imagine a human face upon the vessel’s prow, with
fifteen thousand Samsons in one bent upon driving her back, and
hitting her exactly between the eyes whenever she attempts to
advance an inch. Imagine the ship herself, with every pulse and
artery of her huge body swollen and bursting under this
maltreatment, sworn to go on or die. Imagine the wind howling, the
sea roaring, the rain beating: all in furious array against her.
Picture the sky both dark and wild, and the clouds, in fearful
sympathy with the waves, making another ocean in the air. Add to
all this, the clattering on deck and down below; the tread of
hurried feet; the loud hoarse shouts of seamen; the gurgling in and
out of water through the scuppers; with, every now and then, the
striking of a heavy sea upon the planks above, with the deep, dead,
heavy sound of thunder heard within a vault; – and there is the
head-wind of that January morning.
I say nothing of what may be called the domestic noises of the
ship: such as the breaking of glass and crockery, the tumbling
down of stewards, the gambols, overhead, of loose casks and truant
dozens of bottled porter, and the very remarkable and far from
exhilarating sounds raised in their various state-rooms by the
seventy passengers who were too ill to get up to breakfast. I say
nothing of them: for although I lay listening to this concert for
three or four days, I don’t think I heard it for more than a
quarter of a minute, at the expiration of which term, I lay down
again, excessively sea-sick.
Not sea-sick, be it understood, in the ordinary acceptation of the
term: I wish I had been: but in a form which I have never seen or
heard described, though I have no doubt it is very common. I lay
there, all the day long, quite coolly and contentedly; with no
sense of weariness, with no desire to get up, or get better, or