‘The Captain has promised,’ Miss Brown said, to cover the Captain’s confusion, ‘that our crossing of the line will be marked by some ceremony. A naval tradition, you know, sir.’ ‘Ah – really?’ Lannon said. ‘What form does the ritual take?’ ‘That,’ Miss Brown supplied, ‘is a matter swathed in mystery. We are not to know, until the line is crossed.’ ‘Nothing too … pagan, I trust,’ the clergyman roguishly said. No, it is nothing too pagan, as far as I recall, just some tomfoolery with a bucket and mops and a sailors’ pantomime, but the clergyman’s mock-objection had the unmistakable effect of making the table turn from him with its usual mild distaste.
5.
It ought to be clear where we are by now; there ought to be landmarks. One line of latitude is passed, and then another, and then another. We, at least, are excited by these announcements. The small boys on board have all their own charts, on which they have traced our path, and make perfect nuisances of themselves demanding admittance to the secret wisdoms of wind, moon and stars. We pass the tropic; we will pass the equator, in time, with attendant celebrations; and then another tropic. These facts create considerable excitement on board, but they are lines which man has drawn on the globe, and therefore not exciting to me. When the captain assures us that today, we pass the tropic, I look at him, and he is only a man, telling me of lines he has decided to draw on the unbounded ocean. It is no slur on Captain Taylor, our ineffectual commander, that I am not interested by these abstract facts of geography and navigation. I am uninterested by these facts, because they are the inventions of men. I look at the sea, and am only interested by the wordless great world.
To me, you too are a world. I never understood before now how little distance I had previously travelled. A woman’s body is an uncharted universe, of which I had heard. Travellers had brought me back reports, and I nodded credulously. But reports will not do. The empires of the flesh, the rich yielding regions of the breast, the vistas opening up when my lips were laid on yours. A journey between worlds, undertaken in a moment; and to return from these marvels is, I now understand, no less a journey, which I am only now undertaking. I long for the refreshments of you; my watercress girl.
Some days have passed, with no change in our condition that I can perceive. The weather is fine, and we send along merrily. I sit up on deck, an unread and unreadable book in my hands – I fear I shall never advance in Gibbon beyond the sack of Rome, and will not long remain master of what I have read, so rapidly does my mind seem to empty itself of anything resembling rational thought. The vessel sends along merrily, the only still point in this landless salt world of waves and clouds, wind and sky. I get along famously with all the passengers, I must admit – I know not why, perhaps some deceptive appearance of sympathetic listening is to blame. So, as I sit on the deck restfully, I seem to become a sort of safe-box, into which any passing hobbledehoy may load all his grievances and secrets. Mr Lannon had to confess he did not find the amiably smiling Mrs Robinson easy company, proposing that perpetual mildness may prove sharper than a serpent’s tooth. I thought what nonsense he talks – uncharitable nonsense, too – and sent him, amiably smiling, on his way. Mrs Robinson was next in line, to offer the reflection that the relation of companion and confidante could not always be easy, if the confidante herself were allowed no opportunity to unburden herself into a kind, a listening pair of ears. And I must know – ‘you must indeed know, sir,’ Mrs Robinson said, insistently clasping at my sleeve – that certain young persons could be abominably selfish in their habit of constantly dwelling on their own problems, while never allowing that her interlocutress might have problems far, far, sir, more pressing and distressing which she might care to tell, were it not—At this moment, Mrs Robinson, the poor sad lady, dissolved into tears and damply hastened off. I reflected only that interlocutress is a hard word to pronounce with conviction, sincerity, and an aspect of burning self-righteousness, but Mrs Robinson carried it off with celerity and grace. She is nicely educated and neat rather than elegant in appearance; I suspect that in the distant past, she may have been a governess. Next was Miss Brown, who fears that the Captain does not like her, and, having no better occupation, desired reassurance. I shall not tire you with her conversation on this most important subject.
6.
An event has taken place; an interesting and significant event. Captain Taylor was late for dinner yesterday, and that is most unlike the underoccupied and conscientious fellow. We hung around, picking at old and stale topics of conversation like overfed hens. At length, we received word that we were to go in without our host. It was a dull half-hour at first. Captain Taylor is not much of a host, but it is curious how his nervous incapacity at the table animates us all, as if we all compete to find some subject which will engage his interest and divert us all. Without him, we were somewhat morose.
His entrance, too, was unexpected. In ordinary circumstances he sidles in, apologetically, sliding into his chair with eyes lowered, like a virgin at her first ball. Tonight, he was flushed, grand and displaying as much firm front as a Cherokee brave, and he appeared flanked by the awful appendage of two solemn midshipmen. He dismissed them with a brisk wave of his hand – I think he will do very well at sea, to be truthful – and sat down, making his brief and silent grace before starting to eat, hungrily and briskly. Conversation sputtered on, like the little flames on the surface of an old ashpit. Mrs Robinson was the first to address him, and her contribution, as ever, was tactful. ‘The calls on a captain’s time must be most pressing and various, sir,’ she remarked, as if passing a general observation. The Captain did not immediately respond, but seemed sunk in gloom and roasted potatoes. Silence fell, and he was, all at once, raised from his inattentive state. ‘Ha – hum – you were addressing me, madam?’ he cried, his mouth quite full. Mrs Robinson repeated her comment patiently. ‘Indeed, indeed,’ the Captain replied seriously. ‘And not all of them are happy ones.’ ‘I hope you are not troubled by dangerous concerns or – or – mutiny – or—’ the clergyman put in foolishly. ‘Merciful heavens!’ Miss Brown cried in a single ear-piercing squall, and Captain Taylor irritably shook his head. ‘No, sir. Merely a question of naval discipline. That is all.’ ‘In what shape or form, sir?’ Miss Brown asked tremulously. ‘Naval discipline,’ the captain said firmly. ‘That is all.’
He waited until the ladies had withdrawn before telling us what we gentlemen, at least, had all guessed – that a case of – ah –
(Bella, now a local difficulty presents itself. I shall spare you some things – indeed, I freely admit, I have already spared you much – and I do not care to think of you reading what gentlemen talk about, not always: so I proceed in my own manner, satisfying my own odd humour, and you may choose to understand my meaning, and I may choose to think of your unsullied thoughts. Forgive me: I think of your white skin, your wide eyes, your clean small ears, and it is from my own thoughts that I am raising this protection – so –)
– a case of – ah – theft below decks had come to light. ‘I consider it most important in these cases,’ the Captain said sagely, ‘to act immediately, and severely. Once such dishonesty takes hold in a ship, it spreads like any contagion, until no man can consider his purse immune from the thief, nor his hand free from the temptation – no man, I say.’ He fixed me with his eye in a most unusual way, and I felt struck with awe, for no reason whatever. It seems to me unlikely that any man is subject to this temptation, and I could not quite summon up the vision in Captain Taylor’s eye, of a hold full of fifty seamen thieving from each other with no dissenter or refusant. But I dare say he is right. There is no telling what a man may be driven to at sea; and he, it is plain, is no stranger to deprivation.
The two hands were whipped yesterday in full view of the men, whose attendance was required. I suppose it serves as a general admonition. The ladies were absent, of course, so I feel it my duty to set down for your benefit a spectacle you shall never see. It was a most interesting example of discipline. They
were sentenced to thirty lashes each, though there had been some intimation that one had been coerced into theft by the other, more strong-willed fellow, and could have been considered less at fault. By particular order of the Captain, they were tied together, face against face. They swivelled as they hung from the spar like a huge grotesque doll with two backs. Their shirts were rent from them, and two brawny hands stepped up with the whips dangling from their ham-like fists. I noted, not for the first time, how hardened by work all sailors are; those to be beaten, and those who were to be beaten, had not an ounce of spare flesh on them. Weeks of shinning up and down the mast had left them all very much the same; they were hard and seamed and dark as cricket balls. They were whipped each in their turn, so that they howled in the passive face of the other. Their welts began to bleed horribly after only five or six strokes, and when the watching hands observed this, a murmur began to rise among them. To my surprise, it was a sympathetic noise, expressing no distaste except at the punishment. For a moment I wondered whether they considered the guilty pair had been unjustly arraigned before realizing that, in fact, they did not consider the crime particularly severe. This is a strange world, here, and quite unlike the great world. When you place your feet, one in front of the other, the floor beneath you feels firm as earth, mostly; it is only on consideration that you realize that beneath that is the sea, which is never still, never. And boys are whipped for – well, Bella, for a disgraceful act – and their crewmates think they have done nothing much wrong. I looked away from their torn backs, at the Captain’s intense expression. But there was no certainty there, either; his eyes glittered feverishly, and he rubbed himself from time to time, as if cold. The whipping was exciting him. I looked away, altogether, towards the sea which is always there, and always the same, always changing.
7.
In four days we put in at St Helena. It is a matter of considerable anticipation among us. I suspect at least one of our number of harbouring antique sentiments on the subject of Bonaparte. He is a stalwart old Bristol cloth-merchant voyaging out to India for no reason but curiosity. The self-styled French Emperor’s final place of confinement, I have noticed, exercises a passionate hold over a certain sort of Englishman of the later middle years. However ignoble Bonaparte’s end, the prospect of arriving at his final resting place awakes in our Bristol merchant, and many like him, a curiously passionate feeling. He strides the decks, and inspects the horizon as if there were new lands bubbling up from the oceans for him to conquer. I fear, however, that the predominant feeling in his breast at the name of Bonaparte is not a brave unspeaking idealism, but a sentimental remembrance of those days of his youth when he could still feel abstract passion with any warmth. Certainly, he grows very heated on the subject of individual liberty, and whenever a recalcitrant deckhand must be flogged, he mutters darkly about ‘rights’ and ‘universal brotherhood’, those cant words of forty years back. The deckhands, however, regard him with an undisguised amusement; he respects them to the point that he is unwilling to walk across a newly-swabbed deck, in case he soils it anew. The spectacle of this defender of the rights of the ordinary seaman picking his way delicately across the deck never fails to amass a small crowd of idle hands, barely suppressing their disdain. For him, they are Men and Brothers, though he does not address them in any way; for them, he is a fool who has abdicated the place assigned to him by divine providence. Already he trembles at the name of St Helena, and, like a lover, shows great wit and ingenuity in his ability to introduce the name of the beloved, Napoleon, into any conversation. When we put in, he will be easy prey, I can see, for any rude native of that remote place who is quick enough to sell him some old scrap of stuff and pass it off as the tinsel Emperor’s last pair of drawers. His name is Tredinnick. ‘My home is at Bristol,’ he observes. ‘But I am a Cornishman.’ He addresses this frequent remark to me in particular. I perceive he sees some bond between our remote portions of the kingdom; a bond, however, which is not apparent in the slightest degree to anyone but him.
Some days have passed. St Helena is now at, or somewhat beyond, the horizon. We were blown severely off course by a storm. At least, it seemed to me a storm, but the old hands refused to admit it. The Captain, indeed, showed me the barometer, which for days has been low, and I had to agree, clutching to the table as the ship lurched and plummeted, that the barometer was admitting to grand pluie but not tempête. It is storm enough for me, however; and I know that any account of a voyage must contain at least one storm to entertain the reader, and I am happy to be able to oblige you. That is not a great deal of consolation, as I yawn and puke over a chamber pot, but it is something. Once or twice, I have had to leave my cabin and go up on deck, far preferring to be tossed about where I may cling to the mast, in the open air, to being flung about like a pea in a drum and have my head broken. The sea is black; quite black; it hurls itself upwards in great spurts, as the ship’s flank lolls into it, a rainstorm falling upwards. There is a great terror as the ship labours up the great wall of the wave and then pauses for a moment, a long long moment, nauseously, before plummeting down to a deep hole between peaks. I am writing this in a moment of peace and calm, but it is difficult to forget the feeling of your own toes, scrabbling involuntarily within your boot for some simian hold on the deck, not moving one step forward or letting go of your grip with the left hand until the right is firmly around the next piece of rigging.
The storm is abated now, and seemed strangely distant as soon as we passed into calmer waters. All through it, the hands seemed cheerful rather than filled with fear, as I was, and the more audacious of them even made a point of climbing the rigging in what seemed to me impossible seas; it will take a long time before I forget the image of a boy of fourteen, clinging to the topmost stretch of the mast as the ship lolls crazily to one side and he, still grinning, is poised over a great marine abyss. The storm – very well, then, the great rain – continued for three days, driving us hither and thither about the island of St Helena, before abating. The ship sailed serenely towards the remote post, as if nothing had disturbed its calm progress from one end of the earth to the other. It was only the human cargo, and the more respectable part of that, which seemed to have gone through a terrible ordeal. I feel I am a brave sailor, but was shaken almost into pieces by the three days of howling gales. As for the others – Miss Brown, Mrs Robinson, the Reverend Lannon and Tredinnick, the soi-disant Cornishman – I need not describe the harum-scarum wreckage of their appearance when, finally, the seas calmed and they palely ascended from their terrible confinements.
The skies cleared, as if by prior arrangement, and, hovering, floating between a blue sky and a calm blue sea, there was the single mountain of St Helena. Sometimes you sense a geography which you cannot see, and thus it is with this strange, remote peak. It rises from an underwater plain, a mile deep, precipitous as a tower. No other island – no other land – rises within hundreds of miles. The islanders cling to the steep sides, the utmost peak of the huge tower which rises from the cold depths, and peer out at the world like prisoners. The ship anchors at the mouth of the harbour, under Munden’s Battery, and, by long custom, an official party is despatched in a boat. No further progress is made until application has been made to the Governor, and leave to proceed be given in the form of a signal from the battery of heavy guns. There is an awe-inspiring aspect to this distant place, near four and a half thousand miles from England; in itself it is a sublime and picturesque island, but the awe which every visitor feels on approaching it derives, I think, chiefly from its isolation.
8.
We are here for some days before proceeding on our long voyage. It is a remote place, but a civilized one. The Governor invited me, and the Captain, and Tredinnick, but not, to his open disgust, the Reverend Lannon, to spend an afternoon on his estate. It is not quite an English house in appearance. There are profound cracks in the walls and everywhere a torn shabbiness, as if the walls had been gnawed by gigantic pigs. But the Governor and hi
s unruly brood of children live here cheerfully enough; his wife questioned me with great brio, as she would no doubt describe it, about the currently fashionable books, the current fashions in bonnets which prevail in London. These were not questions I could answer with any conviction, and I wished that I could have you by my side. Not, I add, for the first time. The boys run wild, and are fascinated only by the minute differences between the ships which put in here; and, happily, the Captain was able to still them, like Circe, with tales of shipwreck and storm and details of yardage. It was the only occasion on which I have seen him entirely at ease in company, and he was conversing with eight-year-old boys. They are a good-humoured crew, as I suppose they must be, living out here and clinging to this natural beacon, and parried all Mr Tredinnick’s questions about Bonaparte’s last days with brevity and wit. I expect they are quite accustomed to the questions visitors ask of them about the late Emperor, so-called.
After dinner, we took a refreshing turn in the gardens of the Governor’s house. The grounds are laid out with great taste, an English garden which surprises you with its variety of oriental plants: the magnolia, minosa, myrtles thirty feet high, bamboo, gum tree, and cabbage tree, grow alongside the more expected laurel, yew, cypress, fir, and oak. It is a most pleasant place, and soon I found myself asking the Governor’s wife about Bonaparte. ‘Did he come here?’ I asked, and when I heard myself expressing such a banal curiosity, I almost winced. She, however, took it very well. She is a bland, good-natured, stout mother of six; blamelessly respectable, they say she nevertheless will not pass up any opportunity to dance. I rather like her, though she would not quite ‘do’ in London. ‘Indeed he did,’ she assured me, smiling. ‘We were quite friends. We were not his gaolers, after all, and I suppose he understood that this place would be his final resting place. And it was for us to make his last years comfortable. We had no vengeance to pursue with him. Have you seen his tomb, sir?’
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