Reprinted Pieces
Reprinted Pieces
THE LONG VOYAGE
WHEN the wind is blowing and the sleet or rain is driving against
the dark windows, I love to sit by the fire, thinking of what I
have read in books of voyage and travel. Such books have had a
strong fascination for my mind from my earliest childhood; and I
wonder it should have come to pass that I never have been round the
world, never have been shipwrecked, ice-environed, tomahawked, or
eaten.
Sitting on my ruddy hearth in the twilight of New Year’s Eve, I
find incidents of travel rise around me from all the latitudes and
longitudes of the globe. They observe no order or sequence, but
appear and vanish as they will – ‘come like shadows, so depart.’
Columbus, alone upon the sea with his disaffected crew, looks over
the waste of waters from his high station on the poop of his ship,
and sees the first uncertain glimmer of the light, ‘rising and
falling with the waves, like a torch in the bark of some
fisherman,’ which is the shining star of a new world. Bruce is
caged in Abyssinia, surrounded by the gory horrors which shall
often startle him out of his sleep at home when years have passed
away. Franklin, come to the end of his unhappy overland journey –
would that it had been his last! – lies perishing of hunger with
his brave companions: each emaciated figure stretched upon its
miserable bed without the power to rise: all, dividing the weary
days between their prayers, their remembrances of the dear ones at
home, and conversation on the pleasures of eating; the last-named
topic being ever present to them, likewise, in their dreams. All
the African travellers, wayworn, solitary and sad, submit
themselves again to drunken, murderous, man-selling despots, of the
lowest order of humanity; and Mungo Park, fainting under a tree and
succoured by a woman, gratefully remembers how his Good Samaritan
has always come to him in woman’s shape, the wide world over.
A shadow on the wall in which my mind’s eye can discern some traces
of a rocky sea-coast, recalls to me a fearful story of travel
derived from that unpromising narrator of such stories, a
parliamentary blue-book. A convict is its chief figure, and this
man escapes with other prisoners from a penal settlement. It is an
island, and they seize a boat, and get to the main land. Their way
is by a rugged and precipitous sea-shore, and they have no earthly
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Dickens, Charles – Reprinted Pieces
hope of ultimate escape, for the party of soldiers despatched by an
easier course to cut them off, must inevitably arrive at their
distant bourne long before them, and retake them if by any hazard
they survive the horrors of the way. Famine, as they all must have
foreseen, besets them early in their course. Some of the party die
and are eaten; some are murdered by the rest and eaten. This one
awful creature eats his fill, and sustains his strength, and lives
on to be recaptured and taken back. The unrelateable experiences
through which he has passed have been so tremendous, that he is not
hanged as he might be, but goes back to his old chained-gang work.
A little time, and he tempts one other prisoner away, seizes
another boat, and flies once more – necessarily in the old hopeless
direction, for he can take no other. He is soon cut off, and met
by the pursuing party face to face, upon the beach. He is alone.
In his former journey he acquired an inappeasable relish for his
dreadful food. He urged the new man away, expressly to kill him
and eat him. In the pockets on one side of his coarse convictdress,
are portions of the man’s body, on which he is regaling; in
the pockets on the other side is an untouched store of salted pork
(stolen before he left the island) for which he has no appetite.
He is taken back, and he is hanged. But I shall never see that
sea-beach on the wall or in the fire, without him, solitary
monster, eating as he prowls along, while the sea rages and rises