Early in the passage to California the men were at work about the ropes on deck, when one of them was told to loosen a topgallant halyard which was foul. He laid hold of the wrong rope. The voice of upbraiding came from one of the oldest of the crew; “Have you been on board this ship a fortnight and don’t you know the topgallant halyard?” Another sailor answered, “O, Daniel is learning fast; he’ll come all right soon; trust him.” Daniel was evidently touched by this unexpected expression of kindness; he wiped his eyes with the back of his hand; but whether from perspiration or not I could not tell.
In the straits of Lemaire, going round Cape Horn, we overtook and were likely to pass a British ship, wire rigged, a ship of fine style. The sea was rough; we were coming too near. The boy Ben was having his trick at the wheel. He was the youngest on board. The little fellow did his best to keep the ship from broaching to, but the sea was too strong for his young arms. I pitied Ben, for I knew how mortified he would be to have another supplant him; and he was ambitious of making good his standing as a sailor. Just then a kind voice called to him; “Ben, you are a good little steersman; you can steer as well as any of them most of the time; but just now the sea is getting up; we should like to pass that ship and not get too near her; one of the able bodied sailors ought to be at the helm; ring the bell and call Nelson to come and take the wheel.” Nelson came, and worked the ship so that she soon shot ahead. Ben left the wheel with the proud satisfaction that his efforts were appreciated and praised; that only Nelson could do better than he; and Nelson was twenty years his senior. The little incident made me also sensitive about the eyes. I would rather do such an act of kindness to a young man than outstrip a British clipper.
As I look back on the dangers of our way, and remember how many times by night and day, aloft and on deck, our men have been exposed to accident, I cannot refrain from recording my gratitude to the Preserver of men. One day all hands were around the mainmast hoisting a yard. I was standing with the captain near the wheel, when we heard a noise unlike anything which we ever heard on ship board. It lasted only two or three seconds, but was so peculiar that it was frightful. Was the ship grating over a sunken rock; had she opened a seam, and was the water pouring in? Going forward, the men were found standing silently over one of their number who was lying senseless on deck. One of the chain runners which hoists a yard twenty-five or thirty feet, had given way in one of its upper links, and the chain had come down through the block to the deck. This was the noise which alarmed us. In falling, the chain struck one of the men on the shoulder and he fell senseless. He was soon restored, but he was laid up a fortnight. Had the blow been upon his head, the weight of the chain made it probable that the hurt would have been more serious. This was the only accident which we had to record during the whole voyage.
One afternoon about five o’clock, several weeks after we had “passed Anjer,” a bird as large as a heron came and sat for half an hour on a yard. We were several hundred miles from any land. The bird was not idle, for his frequent change of position, the motions of his head evidently helping his eye-sight, showed that his thoughts were busy about the next stage in his flight. He will go westward, I said to myself, keeping up as long as possible with the sun; but still he will spend the night somewhere on the waves. I watched him till he flew. To my surprise, instead of going toward the sun he flew eastward. I would have dissuaded him from such a decision, at least would have inquired by what train of thought he came to the conclusion that he would fly toward the night. On reflection it occurred to me that he took the most direct course toward the morning; by going in that direction he would meet the sun before we should see him. Perhaps instinct had taught him this lesson, and therefore he flew into the darkness as the speediest way to the morning. He “who maketh us wiser than the fowls of heaven” has given then an instinct before which ours is as nothing. Experience, the comparison of events, wisdom learned from mistakes, from sorrow, from loss, is ours, to guide us on our heavenward path. Improving by such experience we are “wiser than the fowls;” otherwise their instinct makes our folly more pitiable. As the bird flew from me toward the east, this train of thought arose:
THE BIRD ON THE MIZZEN MAST.
THE PASSENGER.
THE BIRD.
THE PASSENGER.
THE BIRD.
There were four young men, and one who was an occasional substitute, who served the six months that we were in Hong Kong harbor, and at other times, in rowing us ashore and in our visits to ships. Sometimes the service took several hours; the distance was now and then great. When we went ashore at Anjer we were rowed four miles; when we went to church we were each time absent from the boat on shore two hours; calls, shopping, business, made large drafts on their patience; for though our visits ashore gave them also opportunity to supply some wants as well as to gratify their curiosity, still there were unavoidable delays on our part which could not have been to the young crew always pleasant. In no instance did they manifest that they felt these visits to be irksome. In looking back upon their unwearied, prompt, always cheerful service, I feel that we owe them more than thanks; but I fear to write this lest I incur the disapprobation of some of the officers, who would be moved to tell me that the young men had as easy a time as though they had been tarring down, mending sails, scrubbing brass; that passengers must be careful how they praise sailors. This shall be remembered and duly practised on board ship; but on shore the names of Parslow, Twichell, Coffin, Ryder and Treadwell, will always be associated with happy hours. May the young men be successful master mariners, and while they are mates may they know how to mingle kind words with discipline.
During the whole voyage from first to last, it was always exciting to hear the mate issue this summons. Generally, we knew by it that the ship was going at such a quickened speed that the mate wished to verify it by measurement. When the order was given, two of the boys came aft; one of them took from the locker the reel which had on it a line of several fathoms; the other held the glass. The end of the line which was thrown into the water had on it a wide piece of thin wood, triangular. The line was fastened to it through each of the angles, so that the piece of clapboard stood upright in the water, thus feeling the draft as the ship went on. The reel was held by the boy in both hands over his head to keep the line from running foul. Pieces of tape were tied into the line twenty-two and a half feet apart. The glass ran fourteen seconds. When it was empty the boy cried, “up;” and the mate knowing how many knots had passed through his hand in fourteen seconds, easily reckoned how many knots (or miles) an hour the ship was running. We never went over thirteen and a half; sometimes only two; and in a dead calm a reel could not have turned; our rate of motion would have been 0. Perhaps in a short time a breeze would be setting us forward, so that the mate would call out, “Hold the reel.”
It may have been fancy, but the gales at the Cape of Good Hope impressed me differently from those at Cape Horn. The latter place, and the associations with it, make one feel that there is more of a sub base in its winds and waters. There, two oceans form and go apart to either side of a continent; you are near the polar regions, the realms of snow and ice. You expect every manifestation of sublimity, but not of caprice; the awful forms of nature, grandeur with stillness; or, when storms are summoned, there is a heavy tread in their battalions. Off the Cape of Good Hope we had the impression that the wind was as fierce, its rate of motion perhaps greater, but we could not tremble before it as we did at Cape Horn. Two gales off the Cape of Good Hope gave us good specimens of the violent weather in that region. The sun was nearly out on each of the two days, but the wind, though not as fitful as in a typhoon, was as violent as in a typhoon gale in the China Seas. A British ship as large as ours was near us the whole of one day, so that we saw by the way in which the gale was serving her, how we probably appeared to our neighbor. At one time she seemed to be moored on a mountain top; in a few moments she was lost to sight, but this of course was owing as much to our depression and elevation as to hers. There was so much regularity in our motion that it awakened no fear. My daughters were captivated by the wildness of the scenery, but the roll of the ship was so great that it was not easy to keep upright; so the captain had pillows brought on deck, and by passing ropes around the passengers, and making them fast, the pillows and they were secure against the lee and the weather roll, and for a short time they kept their lookout. That the scene was less terrific than corresponding tempests at Cape Horn was owing in part to our having more experience on reaching the eastern continent, but mostly, as it seemed to me, to the more awful grandeur of the Cape Horn region.
I will begin by relating an incident in the sea-faring experience of Dr. Lyman Beecher, who preached in my pulpit one Sabbath soon after returning from England, and related this incident, using it to enforce the text: “Therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God, through our Lord Jesus Christ.” He said that while a storm was raging, he heard a lady enter a room adjoining his and address some one in these words: “Mary, how can you be sitting there in your rocking-chair, as though nothing was going to happen? Do you know that we may all be at the bottom of the sea in five minutes? Stir about and do something. Pray do not sit there rocking and singing.”
He recognized the voice as that of an English lady who was on her way to Canada, her husband connected with the government. Mary was her serving maid.
Mary said, “Please, madam, I have done everything which you told me to do; is there anything else which you think of?”
“No,” said the lady, “but I cannot bear to see you so peaceful, humming your tunes when the ship is breaking up.”
“The men have done all they can to save themselves and us,” said Mary, “and I see nothing to do but pray and wait.”
“‘Pray and wait,’” said her mistress, “on the point of going down! I am raving distracted, and you are as calm as a clock. Why don’t you scream, and show some feeling, and not sit there like a statue?”
“What good would it do to scream?” said Mary. “God can hear us whisper; He is looking on the ship and on each of us, and He hears every petition.”
“Oh,” said the lady, “I would give the world to feel so. But it is too late to pray. I cannot think; I shall die crazy.”
Mary said, “When the storm began I was reading in the fifth of Romans: ‘Therefore being justified by faith we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.’ I felt calm; my peace is made with God through Christ; that text keeps me from screaming. If I die, I shall go to God, for Christ has made peace for me with Him.”
With such words Mary composed the agitated mind of her mistress; when suddenly the sun broke through the clouds, and though the waves were fearfully tempestuous, the ship rode them safely; Mary’s Saviour had said to them, “Peace, be still.”
If there were hours when we might have been made afraid, it was not in gales, nor in the raging of the sea; but in some peaceful, moonlight night, when everything was beautiful to the eye, we saw that we might have reason to tremble. If the insidious current should take the ship and prevent her from passing a certain headland, we might be stranded on a desolate coast and see the ship piled up, a helpless thing, in the sands, and ourselves left to the horrors of want. We would be passing a forlorn place in the China seas, for example, and the current might prove more than the wind could overcome; we might be swept round a point where we heard the surf roar on the beach, and it might depend on a favorable change of wind in a few moments whether we should drift into deep water and go round another point, or whether that spot was to be the graveyard of our noble vessel. At such moments life re-appears to you with its long-forgotten passages, and the future seems filled with pictures of woe, such, perhaps, as you had never seen, even in dreams. At times like these, you have experience of the special care of God, are made to feel the practical value of the doctrine of a particular providence, you receive instruction in the nature of prayer, learn more lessons in faith than years of ordinary experience can furnish, and deep convictions of the privilege and duty of childlike confidence in the Almighty, such that you are persuaded a thousand temptations to unbelief cannot overcome.—them. There are paradoxes in one’s feelings in times of imminent danger. It is easy at these moments, strange as it may seem, to forget your own possible loss and sorrow, and lose yourself in thinking of your ship, of which you may have felt so proud, and which, having borne you half round the globe, must, perhaps, now bury her stem or stern ignobly in the sand, all her rich panelwork being made of no account by the waves breaking ruthlessly in through the rent sides, the spars and sails left free to be the sport of the tempest, and soon her freight melting away in the surge. You feel that you would sacrifice anything short of life itself, to prevent such disaster. And when suddenly the wind comes round the headland, and you find that you have met a favorable breeze, and the ship goes safely again on her way, you wonder at yourself, perhaps, for rejoicing in her deliverance equally with your own, and you fall to repeating passages of the hundred and seventh Psalm, with thanksgiving.
The rudder affords a constant fund of interest when the ship is at her full speed. The parting and closing water makes incessant forms of beauty; you may hang over the counter and look down into the wake for a long time, and not be weary. The swift rush of the water to close up the furrow made by the keel keeps attention awake: the graceful sinking of the stern in alternation with the bows, bringing you down to a level with the waves, then far above them, brings apprehension enough with it to make a novice question why he has never heard people who have seen it describe their pleasure. When night has set in and the phosphoresence happens to be abundant, kaleidoscopes never revealed such wonders to the eye.
We had religious services every Sabbath morning, when the weather allowed, at nine o’clock. Almost all hands would attend, it being left optional with them. On the way from the Sandwich Islands to China, in the trade-wind region, we had the service on deck. No preacher ever enjoyed the sight which met his eye in the objects around his pulpit more than those which were seen from that place of worship. Immediately around the speaker were twenty-five sailors, well dressed, wakeful, well behaved; an awning was over them; their singing was animating; the beauty of the ocean scenery, the sight of distant vessels, the sound of the water as the ship went through it, contributed to the enjoyment of the Sabbath stillness, which seemed to have at sea as on land a hush unlike the week-days. While natural scenery cannot inspire the heart with spiritual emotions, yet when these exist they are sometimes assisted in their peaceful, elevating power over us by a contemplation of such a prospect as we had on that deck in those Sabbath hours.—We had in all about seventy men and boys who sailed with us. The most of these placed themselves under religious influences while on board; now they are scattered like the driftweed which went by us; but in the different vessels in which they now sail they may feel the power of some good impressions which they received; for not only on the Sabbath, but in the weekly Bible-class, they were affectionately exhorted by their captain, who added to his spiritual efforts for them kind instruction in morals, useful information on subjects relating to their calling, and to the younger portion of them lessons in navigation and practical seamanship. In the libraries there was a good mixture of secular books.
Most of the sailors showed by contrast the value of early education in furnishing the mind with religious ideas as well as the letter of scriptural knowledge. It is doubtful whether “George,” at his time of life, can succeed in solving that great mystery “how an ‘elephant’ can go through the eye of a needle;” though had he begun in youth he might have received instruction which would have at least reduced the elephant to a camel. Some sailors like him awaken affection for them which it is pleasant to cherish. But the sea-birds are hardly more vagrant now than they.
May 16, at 11, A. M., we took a pilot off New York, and at 9, P. M., dropped anchor, having been gone nearly nineteen months, and, including our excursions from Hong Kong, having sailed forty-two thousand miles. All this time no sickness, accident, loss, nor painful delay had occurred to us. Our only regret was that the voyage had come to an end.
In looking back upon it and recalling pleasurable seasons, those which most readily recur to me, (and let not the threefold mention of it seem obtrusive,) are, Morning hours on deck alone with a Bible. I only repeat the experience of every one who loves the Word of God. The mind freed from care sees in the Bible at such times meanings which grammars and lexicons never can impart. Nature might reveal things most wonderful at such a place as Singapore; but in a psalm read in the silence of the sea, there would often appear marvellous things in the language of Scripture, in its simple incidents, in the characters portrayed or acting themselves out unconsciously in their trials and joys, which would create an interest never excited by the plumage of East-India birds, or coral branches, or curiously twisted and beautifully enamelled shells, or by the marvellous light on insects and creeping things, or by precious stones, and pearls, and fine linen, and purple, and silk, and scarlet, and all thyine-wood, and cinamon, and odors, and ointments, and frankincense. I cannot forget the impressions made upon me by reading connectedly all the experiences and the language of the prophet Jeremiah. They were like the strange constellations which rise to view in low latitudes. I have felt among the wonderful things of God the truth of that inspired declaration, “Thou hast magnified thy word above all thy name.”
On reaching home, it was deeply interesting to find, at sick-beds, in stricken households, and in circles where the goodness of God had filled pious hearts with thankfulness, that one need not travel to be filled with all the fulness of God. “Neither is it beyond the sea, that thou shouldest say, Who shall go over the sea for us and bring it to us, that we may hear it and do it?” I found that some who had not left home for two years but had toiled in shops, and counting-rooms, and laboratories, and domestic life, had been increased with the increase of God.
It is easier to go round the world than through it. But in going through it we are tempted to think perhaps that in solitude with its retirement, we can have more of God’s presence than in the busy scenes of life. This led me at the close of our voyage, going back with restored health to busy scenes, to resolve that I would endeavor to guard against the feeling that there are places or conditions to which God’s presence is confined. Not in the solitudes of ocean, nor in rural scenes, “neither in this mountain nor yet at Jerusalem,” need we be, to enjoy communion with God.
We left the Golden Fleece in a very narrow dock at Brooklyn, N. Y. It seemed humiliating to the noble ship to be warped among sloops and schooners into her berth; she appeared to be submitting to it as a strong man disabled and sick yields passively to nurses. The sailors, all who had not sprung ashore five minutes after the ship was docked, stood looking at us over the rails, some of them leaning on an arm, some resting their chins on the rails, after we had shaken hands with them, with a long farewell.
It was a pleasant morning in spring when we set out in the cars from New York to Boston. Having been a hundred and sixteen days on the water since leaving Manila, we were prepared to appreciate the solid earth. The privilege of walking and not coming to the ship’s rail every few minutes, was vividly felt. I hardly enjoyed anything in detail, when first on land again; every thing was absorbed in the one consciousness of being on the solid earth. “Then are they glad because they be quiet,” says the sacred penman, describing the sailors’ feelings, on reaching shore.
It was a windy day when we reached Boston. Clouds of dust filled the streets. It was not so at sea. It occurred to me, How do these people endure such discomfort? It seemed to me that they must find sufficient comforts on land, notwithstanding the dust, to make existence tolerable. I soon found that there are things to be enjoyed on land as well as at sea.
Language fails me in attempting to describe the experience of arriving home and of being at home, after an absence of nineteen months on ship board. We are willing, too willing, perhaps, to fancy resemblances in earthly occurrences to possible scenes of terror hereafter; but let us make our joyful experiences foretokens of heavenly bliss.
It had a powerful effect upon our company to hear that shortly after our safe arrival, laden with such experience of the divine goodness, a singular calamity happened to the ship. She came round to Boston in charge of the first officer, the captain having concluded to retire from the sea. She loaded with ice, and sailed for Bombay. In a few days after leaving port, fire was discovered in her lower hold, ascribed to a spark from a cigar or pipe, while loading. She put into Halifax, where fire engines nearly filled her with water. After a long detention at Boston for repairs, she went to sea. We were made to feel that our safety through our long voyage and our happy arrival were not accidents; we recalled moments when a slight change in our affairs would have been followed with disaster; it was sealed afresh upon our hearts that we were under obligation to the providential care of God never to be forgotten, always to be mentioned with humbleness of mind, with thanksgiving and praise.
We were grieved to hear that Nelson, whom I have more than once referred to as an able helmsman, fell from a boat in the harbor of New York a short time after we arrived, and was drowned. The report which we received of the event conveyed an intimation that he had been drinking too freely. He certainly had marks of genius, showing itself in the way in which he made the ship toss the waves from the bows. It was a pleasure, when he was steering, to go forward and climb into the knight heads, and lean over and feel by the way in which the ship went through the water that Nelson was driving her. To be there was as pleasurable as it ever can be to any one to sit by the side of Mr. Bonner, with a cigar in one’s mouth, while he is driving “Fashion.” A great swell coming toward you, looking every moment as though it would overflow the deck, Nelson sees, draws in his nigh rein, runs the ship into it as though he would say, Why leap ye, ye high hills? for now he is on the top of one of them and not a drop has reached the deck; though they are the mighty waves of the sea he seems to sport with them. He fell by strong drink; the great wave overtook him which has engulphed so many; he died ignobly in smooth water, not in battle, hand to hand with a tempest.
Much as I had enjoyed in different climes among the Creator’s works, I remember that when the first fall of snow came after my arrival, it seemed to me that I had not witnessed anything abroad so beautiful. I had not seen snow for two years. I was in the country, and I walked two hours, enjoying what seemed to me a most charming meteoric phenomenon, a snow-storm. In deference to custom I took an umbrella with me, and I felt it proper to open it, but as it hid the falling snow from my view, I shut it. I wondered if people were unhappy from any cause, who lived where they could see the snow crystals forming and alighting around them.
Here let me abruptly close, else I shall more than confirm the general belief to which the preceding narrative may have given confirmation, that there is a fatal power in sea-faring experience to amplify one’s experience beyond due limit. I will only add my thanks to the benevolent reader for his companionship while attending to this narration, wishing him, after a prosperous voyage through life, a safe arrival at his home on high.