XXXIII.

A ship in dock, surrounded by quays and the walls of warehouses, has the appearance of a prisoner meditating upon freedom in the sadness of a free spirit put under restraint.  Chain cables and stout ropes keep her bound to stone posts at the edge of a paved shore, and a berthing-master, with brass buttons on his coat, walks about like a weather-beaten and ruddy gaoler, casting jealous, watchful glances upon the moorings that fetter a ship lying passive and still and safe, as if lost in deep regrets of her days of liberty and danger on the sea.

The swarm of renegades—­dock-masters, berthing-masters, gatemen, and such like—­appear to nurse an immense distrust of the captive ship’s resignation.  There never seem chains and ropes enough to satisfy their minds concerned with the safe binding of free ships to the strong, muddy, enslaved earth.  “You had better put another bight of a hawser astern, Mr. Mate,” is the usual phrase in their mouth.  I brand them for renegades, because most of them have been sailors in their time.  As if the infirmities of old age—­the gray hair, the wrinkles at the corners of the eyes, and the knotted veins of the hands—­were the symptoms of moral poison, they prowl about the quays with an underhand air of gloating over the broken spirit of noble captives.  They want more fenders, more breasting-ropes; they want more springs, more shackles, more fetters; they want to make ships with volatile souls as motionless as square blocks of stone.  They stand on the mud of pavements, these degraded sea-dogs, with long lines of railway-trucks clanking their couplings behind their backs, and run malevolent glances over your ship from headgear to taffrail, only wishing to tyrannize over the poor creature under the hypocritical cloak of benevolence and care.  Here and there cargo cranes looking like instruments of torture for ships swing cruel hooks at the end of long chains.  Gangs of dock-labourers swarm with muddy feet over the gangways.  It is a moving sight this, of so many men of the earth, earthy, who never cared anything for a ship, trampling unconcerned, brutal and hob-nailed upon her helpless body.

Fortunately, nothing can deface the beauty of a ship.  That sense of a dungeon, that sense of a horrible and degrading misfortune overtaking a creature fair to see and safe to trust, attaches only to ships moored in the docks of great European ports.  You feel that they are dishonestly locked up, to be hunted about from wharf to wharf on a dark, greasy, square pool of black water as a brutal reward at the end of a faithful voyage.