Читать книгу Round the Galley Fire онлайн

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Luckily Cape Horn calms do not last very long; indeed, there is nothing but “weather” down in those regions, and a calm is only a short pause among the gales and squalls whilst they are considering whose turn it is next. Within an hour from the time of the first gale failing them, another gale from a little to the north-of-west was bowing down the bothered and beaten brig, which, under lower topsails and fore-topmast staysail, manfully struggled to look up to it with her head in the direction of Cape Horn and her wake streaming away over her weather quarter. It was one of those pictures of storm which are rarely seen in like perfection out of the parallels that divide Terra del Fuego from the South Shetlands—an ocean of mountainous seas, raising each of them a note of thunder as their arching summits crashed from a dark, oil-smooth ridge of green water into huge avalanches of snow: a sky of gloomy slate, along which masses of scud—torn, ragged, and tendril-shaped—were flying with incredible velocity. The horizon was broken with the incessant rising and falling of the pyramidal billows, dark as the night, against a ring of sooty clouds, from which, ever and anon, one would break away, like a winged messenger of evil, whitening and veiling the air with a kind of boiling appearance as it swept its furious and blinding discharge of snow and hail along. No wonder that in olden times the man who had passed these tempestuous and inclement seas should have considered himself an object of importance. Stand, in fancy, upon the deck of that labouring brig, and survey one of the countless aspects of marine life. The seas are breaking heavily over the port bow of the vessel, deluging her forward and racing aft in a foaming torrent as she sinks her stern to mount the huge surge that almost lays her yardarms level. The bitter, raw, flaying cold of the wind there is nothing in language to express. The flying spray smites the exposed face like a volley of sail needles. Now and again a squall of snow and hail comes along with so much fury in it that it takes the breath away from the strongest of the seamen cowering with their backs to it. The rigging crackles to every strain put upon it like burning wood. The snow upon the yards makes them glimmer like lines of pallid light as they furiously sway against the dismal ground of the dark and rushing sky. There are spears and arrow-heads of ice upon the bulwark rail, upon the catheads, upon the scuttle-butts lashed amidships; and though the seas repeatedly break over them they are always left standing. The helmsman, with his hard fists wrapped up in mits, rigged out in oilskins from his head to his huge, well-greased sea-boots, and with the after-thatch of his sou’-wester blown up by the gale, and standing out from his head like the tail of a gull, gets the full of it. Nothing of the man is visible but a fragment of mahogany face showing between the flannel ear-covers of his head-gear, and a pair of watering eyes, which he now and again wipes upon his mit when a pause in the yaws and come-to’s give him a chance to raise one of his hands from the spokes.