Читать книгу Round the Galley Fire онлайн

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I can conceive of many a strange, fanciful thought coming into a sailor’s mind as he stands grasping the wheel in the lonely night watch, and I say this with a plentiful knowledge of the seaman’s prosaic and unsentimental character. A man must be but a very short way removed from a four-footed animal not to feel at times the wonderful and subduing spell which the ocean will fling over the human soul; and being at the wheel will give him the best chance of yielding to the nameless witchery, for at such a time—in most cases—he is alone, no one accosts him, the gloom falls down and blots out the figure of the officer of the watch, and completes the deep sense of solitude that is to be got from a spell at the helm on a dark and quiet night at sea. I cannot but think that the spirit of the deep is brought, at such a time, nearer to you aboard a sailing than aboard a steamship. The onward-rushing fabric that is impelled by engines demands incessant vigilance; she may be off her course even in the time that a man takes to lift his eyes to mark a flying meteor; there are no moments of rest. But in a sailing-ship you have the moonlit night and burnished swell heaving up in lines of ebony out of the visionary horizon, where the stars are wanly winking, until it rolls in billows of sparkling quicksilver under the wake of the bland and beautiful luminary; there is not a breath of air aloft, though little creepings of wind circle softly about the decks as the pallid surfaces of canvas swing in and out with the leaning of the ship; the moonlight lies in pools of light upon the planks, and every shadow cast upon those pearl-like surfaces is as black and sharp and clear as a tracing in ink; the after portions of the sails are dark as bronze, but looking at them forward they rise into the air like pieces of white satin, soaring into a stately edifice full of delicate hurrying shadows which resemble the streaky lustre on the inside of an oyster-shell as the cloths swell out or hollow in with the drowsy motion, and crowned with the little royals, which seem to melt even as the eye watches them like summer clouds upon the heaven of stars.