The modern steamship advances upon a still and overshadowed sea with a pulsating tremor of her frame, an occasional clang in her depths, as if she had an iron heart in her iron body; with a thudding rhythm in her progress and the regular beat of her propeller, heard afar in the night with an august and plodding sound as of the march of an inevitable future.  But in a gale, the silent machinery of a sailing-ship would catch not only the power, but the wild and exulting voice of the world’s soul.  Whether she ran with her tall spars swinging, or breasted it with her tall spars lying over, there was always that wild song, deep like a chant, for a bass to the shrill pipe of the wind played on the sea-tops, with a punctuating crash, now and then, of a breaking wave.  At times the weird effects of that invisible orchestra would get upon a man’s nerves till he wished himself deaf.

And this recollection of a personal wish, experienced upon several oceans, where the soul of the world has plenty of room to turn over with a mighty sigh, brings me to the remark that in order to take a proper care of a ship’s spars it is just as well for a seaman to have nothing the matter with his ears.  Such is the intimacy with which a seaman had to live with his ship of yesterday that his senses were like her senses, that the stress upon his body made him judge of the strain upon the ship’s masts.

I had been some time at sea before I became aware of the fact that hearing plays a perceptible part in gauging the force of the wind.  It was at night.  The ship was one of those iron wool-clippers that the Clyde had floated out in swarms upon the world during the seventh decade of the last century.  It was a fine period in ship-building, and also, I might say, a period of over-masting.  The spars rigged up on the narrow hulls were indeed tall then, and the ship of which I think, with her coloured-glass skylight ends bearing the motto, “Let Glasgow Flourish,” was certainly one of the most heavily-sparred specimens.  She was built for hard driving, and unquestionably she got all the driving she could stand.  Our captain was a man famous for the quick passages he had been used to make in the old Tweed, a ship famous the world over for her speed.  The Tweed had been a wooden vessel, and he brought the tradition of quick passages with him into the iron clipper.  I was the junior in her, a third mate, keeping watch with the chief officer; and it was just during one of the night watches in a strong, freshening breeze that I overheard two men in a sheltered nook of the main deck exchanging these informing remarks.  Said one: 

“Should think ’twas time some of them light sails were coming off her.”

And the other, an older man, uttered grumpily:  “No fear! not while the chief mate’s on deck.  He’s that deaf he can’t tell how much wind there is.”