again soaring aloft, down again into the driving of the spray; the old ship rolling, plunging, and now and then quivering, as some side wave struck her, with a complication of motions, sidelong and headlong, the huge waves flying before us and yet carrying us on,—­wild motions, rolling, pitching, sinking down the long green slope into the valley, to be flung up into the tumult of wind and wave again.  In all this complexity of forces we were as helpless as feathers in the wind, cut off from mother earth as much as if we were carried away on the clouds; the feeling of absolute insignificance growing on one as the ship drove on, the creaking of the ship and the hissing rush of the waters hardly audible for the shrieking of the gale through the rigging.  In all my life I have never so understood the utter impotence and triviality of humanity as I felt it then.

The ship, though not in measure with the colossi of later times, was yet a huge mass as measured by the man, and she was no more than a cork on the tide.  Up and down she went, like a child’s swing,—­wallowing and rolling, with the sea breaking over the side till the channels were full, and pouring over the bows in green torrents, and then in blinding deluges of spray and water over the stern; tearing along ten knots an hour, and yet always seeming to be left behind by the waves that tore by us,—­the great waves, that obeyed the wind only to be crushed down again by it, spurting up here and there fitfully in pinnacles which were instantly driven off in foam and froth; no combing waves, such as the land dweller sees, for no wave could rise enough to comb,—­only great hills of water, crystalline with wavelets, streaked with spun foam, heaving as if from a blind impulse, and leaving us, in a contemptuous toleration, to keep afloat if we could.  And now and then two great waves raced each other, as they will at long intervals, till they ran close to each other and united, and we were thrown aloft a little higher, to see nothing more than a wild waste of foam, spray, and watery chaos which defies human language to express it.

This was the sea as I had wanted to see it, and as no painter has ever painted, or probably ever will paint it, and as very few could ever have seen it; for in seventy thousand miles of sea travel I have seen it only once.  For three days and nights our captain never left the bridge to rest.  Of two other ships that left New York the same day that we did, one was dismasted to the south of us, and the other had her quarters stove in and barely escaped foundering just to the north of us.  The gale blew out and left us in a dead calm, which lasted a couple of days, when another gale of three days drove us in the direction we wanted to go, and dropped us off Torquay in the morning of what seemed a delicious spring day, all sunshine and south wind.  We hailed a fishing boat and went ashore.  We had left a land buried in snow and ice, and we reached one in early spring, though it was still January, the gorse in odorous blossoming, and in the hedgerows the early wild flowers in profusion.  But we learned, on landing, that the recent gales had strewn the shores of England with wrecks, with great loss of life.  It had been one of those terrible winters which have helped make the British sailor the sea dog he is.