Читать книгу Round the Galley Fire онлайн

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A man might linger a long hour at the altitude of the crosstrees among the shadows of the moonlit, placid ocean night without weariness. Better than the loftiest and loneliest cliff is the mast head of a ship for the surveyal of the sublime and mighty surface on which she floats, for you rock in unison with the breathings of the deep; you are upon her great heart, and every beat of it is marked by a stately motion of the towering masts against the stars; phosphoric outlines of huge fish haunt the sluggish wake; or a sound as of a long, deep-drawn respiration denotes the neighbourhood of a leviathan whose vast proportions, as they heave in the broad silver stream of moonlight, resemble the hull of a ship keel up, driven to the surface by some hidden power and slowly settling downwards again.

These are some of the excitements and some of the quiet pleasures of “going aloft.” It is, no doubt, a highly sentimental view of the duty, and sailors who have had to let go the reef points, and beat their hands against the yards to drive life enough into their fingers to enable them to hold on, may consider that a very different representation of that kind of work would recommend itself a good deal more than this to their experience. Very possibly. But retrospection is apt to make us tender; and since “going aloft” must in the course of time—unless the shipbuilders change their minds—become a thing of the past, it is worth while spending a few minutes in trying to discover what there was of poetry and the picturesque in that old obligation of the marine life in the discharge of which the English sailor has always proved a shining example to all mariners. Even now—in these days when the steam-engine has so eaten into our maritime habits that a sailing-ship is looked upon as a kind of wonder of other times—do we not find Jack doing honour to his Queen by standing erect upon the main truck? But, oh! master mariners, mates, boatswains, and able seamen, all you who have youngsters under your charge or among you as shipmates, have mercy upon the timid lad, give him time to feel his way aloft, show him the lubber’s hole, and remember that many a first-rate sailor has faltered at the outset, and gazed with horror and despair at those giddy heights whose summits seemed to his boyish gaze to pierce the sky.