Thoughts of eternity thicken.  He begins to feel anxious concerning his soul.

The stillness of the calm is awful.  His voice begins to grow strange and portentous.  He feels it in him like something swallowed too big for the esophagus.  It keeps up a sort of involuntary interior humming in him, like a live beetle.  His cranium is a dome full of reverberations.  The hollows of his very bones are as whispering galleries.  He is afraid to speak loud, lest he be stunned; like the man in the bass drum.

But more than all else is the consciousness of his utter helplessness.  Succor or sympathy there is none.  Penitence for embarking avails not.  The final satisfaction of despairing may not be his with a relish.  Vain the idea of idling out the calm.  He may sleep if he can, or purposely delude himself into a crazy fancy, that he is merely at leisure.  All this he may compass; but he may not lounge; for to lounge is to be idle; to be idle implies an absence of any thing to do; whereas there is a calm to be endured:  enough to attend to, Heaven knows.

His physical organization, obviously intended for locomotion, becomes a fixture; for where the calm leaves him, there he remains.  Even his undoubted vested rights, comprised in his glorious liberty of volition, become as naught.  For of what use?  He wills to go:  to get away from the calm:  as ashore he would avoid the plague.  But he can not; and how foolish to revolve expedients.  It is more hopeless than a bad marriage in a land where there is no Doctors’ Commons.  He has taken the ship to wife, for better or for worse, for calm or for gale; and she is not to be shuffled off.  With yards akimbo, she says unto him scornfully, as the old beldam said to the little dwarf:—­“Help yourself”

And all this, and more than this, is a calm.

CHAPTER III A King For A Comrade

At the time I now write of, we must have been something more than sixty degrees to the west of the Gallipagos.  And having attained a desirable longitude, we were standing northward for our arctic destination:  around us one wide sea.

But due west, though distant a thousand miles, stretched north and south an almost endless Archipelago, here and there inhabited, but little known; and mostly unfrequented, even by whalemen, who go almost every where.  Beginning at the southerly termination of this great chain, it comprises the islands loosely known as Ellice’s group; then, the Kingsmill isles; then, the Radack and Mulgrave clusters.  These islands had been represented to me as mostly of coral formation, low and fertile, and abounding in a variety of fruits.  The language of the people was said to be very similar to that or the Navigator’s islands, from which, their ancestors are supposed to have emigrated.

And thus much being said, all has been related that I then knew of the islands in question.  Enough, however, that they existed at all; and that our path thereto lay over a pleasant sea, and before a reliable Trade-wind.  The distance, though great, was merely an extension of water; so much blankness to be sailed over; and in a craft, too, that properly managed has been known to outlive great ships in a gale.  For this much is true of a whale-boat, the cunningest thing in its way ever fabricated by man.