Читать книгу Round the Galley Fire онлайн

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For it is off the Horn where the galley-fire gets washed out, and where, therefore, the streaming and hungry watch below have nothing to eat but what they may find in the bread-barge; where the tears freeze in a man’s eyes faster than the most pitying angel of a woman living could wipe them away; where one is glad to keep one’s sea-boots on for fear that one’s toes may go as well as the boots when they are hauled off; where everything is like sheet and bar iron aloft; where the very cockroaches turn in to wait for the Equator, and the hardiest rats are so put to it with frost that they watch in the gloom until a man goes to bed and falls asleep, in the hope of getting a meal off his nose. Unhappily the Horn does not improve. It blows and snows as hard there now as it did when the old Wager rounded it, and when Drake or Anson was rolling among its stupendous combers. Other places are more tractable. For instance, Dana, twenty-four years after he made his memorable voyage, found that the climate off Point Conception had altered, that the south-easters were no longer the curse of the coast, and that vessels anchored inside at Santa Barbaro and San Pedro all the year round. No one could have told him this of the Horn. Had he chosen to beat to the eastward or westward a second time in the months when the attempt was made by the Pilgrim and the Alert he would have found the same blinding snow-storms, the same hurling seas, the same sunless, melancholy sky, the same plunging, washing, straining, roaring tumblification he recorded forty-two years ago. Let the story of a brig of 300 tons’ register bear witness to this.