The caprice of the winds, like the wilfulness of men, is fraught with the disastrous consequences of self-indulgence.  Long anger, the sense of his uncontrolled power, spoils the frank and generous nature of the West Wind.  It is as if his heart were corrupted by a malevolent and brooding rancour.  He devastates his own kingdom in the wantonness of his force.  South-west is the quarter of the heavens where he presents his darkened brow.  He breathes his rage in terrific squalls, and overwhelms his realm with an inexhaustible welter of clouds.  He strews the seeds of anxiety upon the decks of scudding ships, makes the foam-stripped ocean look old, and sprinkles with gray hairs the heads of ship-masters in the homeward-bound ships running for the Channel.  The Westerly Wind asserting his sway from the south-west quarter is often like a monarch gone mad, driving forth with wild imprecations the most faithful of his courtiers to shipwreck, disaster, and death.

The south-westerly weather is the thick weather par excellence.  It is not the thickness of the fog; it is rather a contraction of the horizon, a mysterious veiling of the shores with clouds that seem to make a low-vaulted dungeon around the running ship.  It is not blindness; it is a shortening of the sight.  The West Wind does not say to the seaman, “You shall be blind”; it restricts merely the range of his vision and raises the dread of land within his breast.  It makes of him a man robbed of half his force, of half his efficiency.  Many times in my life, standing in long sea-boots and streaming oilskins at the elbow of my commander on the poop of a homeward-bound ship making for the Channel, and gazing ahead into the gray and tormented waste, I have heard a weary sigh shape itself into a studiously casual comment: 

“Can’t see very far in this weather.”

And have made answer in the same low, perfunctory tone

“No, sir.”

It would be merely the instinctive voicing of an ever-present thought associated closely with the consciousness of the land somewhere ahead and of the great speed of the ship.  Fair wind, fair wind!  Who would dare to grumble at a fair wind?  It was a favour of the Western King, who rules masterfully the North Atlantic from the latitude of the Azores to the latitude of Cape Farewell.  A famous shove this to end a good passage with; and yet, somehow, one could not muster upon one’s lips the smile of a courtier’s gratitude.  This favour was dispensed to you from under an overbearing scowl, which is the true expression of the great autocrat when he has made up his mind to give a battering to some ships and to hunt certain others home in one breath of cruelty and benevolence, equally distracting.

“No, sir.  Can’t see very far.”

Thus would the mate’s voice repeat the thought of the master, both gazing ahead, while under their feet the ship rushes at some twelve knots in the direction of the lee shore; and only a couple of miles in front of her swinging and dripping jib-boom, carried naked with an upward slant like a spear, a gray horizon closes the view with a multitude of waves surging upwards violently as if to strike at the stooping clouds.