I imagined him one of those cast-iron images – I will not call them
men – who ask, with red faces, and lusty voices, what sea-sickness
means, and whether it really is as bad as it is represented to be.
This was very torturing indeed; and I don’t think I ever felt such
perfect gratification and gratitude of heart, as I did when I heard
from the ship’s doctor that he had been obliged to put a large
mustard poultice on this very gentleman’s stomach. I date my
recovery from the receipt of that intelligence.
It was materially assisted though, I have no doubt, by a heavy gale
of wind, which came slowly up at sunset, when we were about ten
days out, and raged with gradually increasing fury until morning,
saving that it lulled for an hour a little before midnight. There
was something in the unnatural repose of that hour, and in the
after gathering of the storm, so inconceivably awful and
tremendous, that its bursting into full violence was almost a
relief.
The labouring of the ship in the troubled sea on this night I shall
never forget. ‘Will it ever be worse than this?’ was a question I
had often heard asked, when everything was sliding and bumping
about, and when it certainly did seem difficult to comprehend the
possibility of anything afloat being more disturbed, without
toppling over and going down. But what the agitation of a steamvessel
is, on a bad winter’s night in the wild Atlantic, it is
impossible for the most vivid imagination to conceive. To say that
she is flung down on her side in the waves, with her masts dipping
into them, and that, springing up again, she rolls over on the
other side, until a heavy sea strikes her with the noise of a
hundred great guns, and hurls her back – that she stops, and
staggers, and shivers, as though stunned, and then, with a violent
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Dickens, Charles – American Notes for General Circulation
throbbing at her heart, darts onward like a monster goaded into
madness, to be beaten down, and battered, and crushed, and leaped
on by the angry sea – that thunder, lightning, hail, and rain, and
wind, are all in fierce contention for the mastery – that every
plank has its groan, every nail its shriek, and every drop of water
in the great ocean its howling voice – is nothing. To say that all
is grand, and all appalling and horrible in the last degree, is
nothing. Words cannot express it. Thoughts cannot convey it.
Only a dream can call it up again, in all its fury, rage, and
passion.
And yet, in the very midst of these terrors, I was placed in a
situation so exquisitely ridiculous, that even then I had as strong
a sense of its absurdity as I have now, and could no more help
laughing than I can at any other comical incident, happening under
circumstances the most favourable to its enjoyment. About midnight
we shipped a sea, which forced its way through the skylights, burst
open the doors above, and came raging and roaring down into the
ladies’ cabin, to the unspeakable consternation of my wife and a
little Scotch lady – who, by the way, had previously sent a message
to the captain by the stewardess, requesting him, with her
compliments, to have a steel conductor immediately attached to the
top of every mast, and to the chimney, in order that the ship might
not be struck by lightning. They and the handmaid before
mentioned, being in such ecstasies of fear that I scarcely knew
what to do with them, I naturally bethought myself of some
restorative or comfortable cordial; and nothing better occurring to
me, at the moment, than hot brandy-and-water, I procured a tumbler
full without delay. It being impossible to stand or sit without
holding on, they were all heaped together in one corner of a long
sofa – a fixture extending entirely across the cabin – where they
clung to each other in momentary expectation of being drowned.
When I approached this place with my specific, and was about to
administer it with many consolatory expressions to the nearest