Between Decks It Is
Very Close And Suffocating In Rough Weather, As All Is Shut Up.
We
shall be still three weeks before we reach the Cape; and now the
sun sets with a sudden plunge before six, and the evenings are
growing too cold again for me to go on deck after dinner.
As long
as I could, I spent fourteen hours out of the twenty-four in my
quiet corner by the wheel, basking in the tropical sun. Never
again will I believe in the tales of a burning sun; the vertical
sun just kept me warm - no more. In two days we shall be bitterly
cold again.
Immediately after writing the above it began to blow a gale
(favourable, indeed, but more furious than the captain had ever
known in these seas), - about lat. 34 degrees S. and long. 25
degrees. For three days we ran under close-reefed (four reefs)
topsails, before a sea. The gale in the Bay of Biscay was a little
shaking up in a puddle (a dirty one) compared to that glorious
South Atlantic in all its majestic fury. The intense blue waves,
crowned with fantastic crests of bright emeralds and with the spray
blowing about like wild dishevelled hair, came after us to swallow
us up at a mouthful, but took us up on their backs, and hurried us
along as if our ship were a cork. Then the gale slackened, and we
had a dead calm, during which the waves banged us about
frightfully, and our masts were in much jeopardy. Then a foul
wind, S.E., increased into a gale, lasting five days, during which
orders were given in dumb show, as no one's voice could be heard;
through it we fought and laboured and dipped under water, and I
only had my dry corner by the wheel, where the kind pleasant little
third officer lashed me tight. It was far more formidable than the
first gale, but less beautiful; and we made so much lee-way that we
lost ten days, and only arrived here yesterday. I recommend a
fortnight's heavy gale in the South Atlantic as a cure for a blase
state of mind. It cannot be described; the sound, the sense of
being hurled along without the smallest regard to 'this side
uppermost'; the beauty of the whole scene, and the occasional crack
and bear-away of sails and spars; the officer trying to 'sing out',
quite in vain, and the boatswain's whistle scarcely audible. I
remained near the wheel every day for as long as I could bear it,
and was enchanted.
Then the mortal perils of eating, drinking, moving, sitting, lying;
standing can't be done, even by the sailors, without holding on.
THE night of the gale, my cot twice touched the beams of the ship
above me. I asked the captain if I had dreamt it, but he said it
was quite possible; he had never seen a ship so completely on her
beam ends come up all right, masts and yards all sound.
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