ENGLAND AGAIN

I have generally been happy at sea; and when not so, it has been from reasons apart from the sea itself,—­preoccupations which kept me insensible to the old charm, or mental troubles which made me insensible to everything beside them.  On this voyage I had the company of an old friend of the days of “The Crayon,” one of our most thoughtful and successful portrait painters, George Fuller, and a young friend of his, a Mr. Ames.  We sailed just before Christmas, in an old sailing ship of about eight hundred tons burthen; for, unless time is of importance, I prefer a sailing ship to a steamer, and one pleasant companion is worth a shipload of commonplace fellow-voyagers.  A stiff westerly blow caught us off Sandy Hook, and never left us till we were halfway across the Atlantic, increasing in violence every day, until it gave me, what I had always longed for, but never seen, a first-class gale on the open ocean.

I had said to the captain (one of the old sort of Cape Cod sailors, still a young man, however) that I wanted to see a real gale; and one day, after we had been out nearly a week, he called me up on deck, saying, “You wanted to see a gale, and now you may see it; for unless you get into a tornado you will never see anything worse than this.”  I went on deck, obliged to hold firmly to the rails or some part of the rigging, for the wind was such as to have carried me overboard if I had attempted to stand alone on the quarter-deck.  We were running with the wind dead abaft, under a reefed fore-topsail and a storm jib, everything else having been taken in the night before.  The studding-sail boom of the foreyard, which had been carelessly left out, had been broken off short in the earing, from the pressure of the wind on the bare spar.  The roaring of the wind through the rigging was such as only one who has heard it can conceive.

I gripped close the quarter-deck railing, and drew myself aft to the shelter of the wheelhouse, where, securing myself from being blown away like a piece of paper, I watched the sea.  It rose behind us in huge mountains, the summits of which were always combing over and sliding down the weltering flanks of the wave,—­not like the surf on a shore, but pushed over like snow; and as a wave overtook us lying in the bottom of the valley, it so overhung that it seemed impossible that when it broke it should not bury us; but the stern was always caught by the forefoot of it, and the old ship began to rise, and went up, up, up, until I was dizzy.  Then we hovered on the summit a moment, looking out on such an expanse of gigantic waves as I had never pictured to myself, the distance lost in the driving spray; and, while I looked, the wave passed from under us, and we went down and down with a rapidity of descent which was almost like falling from a balloon.  Then, after another moment’s rest in the valley, came the shuddering half apprehension of the next wave as it rose above us, threatening again, and then, after