Project Gutenberg's A Book for the Hammock, by William Clark Russell This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you'll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Title: A Book for the Hammock Author: William Clark Russell Release Date: January 20, 2020 [EBook #61207] Language: English Character set encoding: UTF-8 *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A BOOK FOR THE HAMMOCK *** Produced by The Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive) A BOOK FOR THE HAMMOCK I A BOOK FOR THE HAMMOCK WORKS BY W. CLARK RUSSELL. Crown 8vo, cloth extra, 6s. each; post 8vo, illustrated boards, 2s. each. ROUND THE GALLEY FIRE. ON THE FO’K’SLE HEAD: A Collection of Yarns and Sea Descriptions. IN THE MIDDLE WATCH. Crown 8vo, cloth extra, 6s. each. A VOYAGE TO THE CAPE. A BOOK FOR THE HAMMOCK. THE FROZEN PIRATE, the New Serial Novel by W. Clark Russell, Author of “The Wreck of the Grosvenor,” began in “Belgravia” for July, 1887, and will be continued till January, 1888. One Shilling, Monthly. Illustrated by P. Macnab. LONDON: CHATTO AND WINDUS, PICCADILLY. II A BOOK FOR THE HAMMOCK BY W. CLARK RUSSELL AUTHOR OF “A VOYAGE TO THE CAPE,” “ROUND THE GALLEY FIRE,” “IN THE MIDDLE WATCH,” ETC. London CHATTO AND WINDUS, PICCADILLY 1887 [The right of translation is reserved] III PREFACE. The reader will please regard these papers as the mere whiskings of a petrel’s pinions skimming the blue surge of deep waters. The utmost hope of the author goes no further than that here and there something may be found to pleasantly lighten the tedium of a sleepless half-hour in the bunk or hammock, or relieve the dulness of a spell of quarter-deck lounging. The articles are reprinted from The Daily Telegraph, The Gentleman’s Magazine, The Contemporary Review, and Longman’s Magazine. It would have been troublesome to disturb the original text, and some new matter, therefore, has been included in the form of notes. V CONTENTS. PAGE A Nautical Lament 1 Superstitions of the Sea 24 Old Sea Ordnance 53 The Honour of the Flag 63 The Naval Officer’s Spirit 79 Women as Sailors 91 Fighting Smugglers 104 Sea Phrases 115 Then and Now 135 Costly Shipwrecks 146 Curiosities of Disasters at Sea 157 Infernal Machines 168 Queer Fish 179 Strange Craft 190 Mysterious Disappearances 200 Rich Captures 219 Peculiarities of Rig 230 How the Old Navigators Managed 243 Plates and Rivets 254 French Smacksmen 273 Old Sea Customs 284 Who is Vanderdecken? 294 VII A BOOK FOR THE HAMMOCK. 1 A NAUTICAL LAMENT. I asked myself the question one day whilst standing on the bridge of one of the handsomest and stoutest of the Union Company’s steamboats, outward bound to the Cape of Good Hope, What has become of the old romance of the sea? “Whither is fled the visionary gleam? Where is it now, the glory and the dream?” It was a brilliant afternoon. The sunshine in the water seemed to hover there like some flashful veil of silver, paling the azure so that it showed through it in a most delicate dye of cerulean faintness. The light breeze was abeam; yet the ship made a gale of her own that stormed past my ears in a continuous shrill hooting, and the wake roared away astern like the huddle of foaming waters at the foot of a high cataract. On the confines of the airy cincture that marked the junction of sea and sky gleamed the white pinions of a little barque. The fabric, made fairy-like by distance, shone with a most exquisite dainty distinctness in the lenses of the telescope I levelled at it. The vessel showed every cloth she had spars and booms for, and leaned very lightly from the wind, and hung like a star in the sky. But our tempestuous passage of thirteen knots an hour speedily slided that effulgent elfin structure on to our quarter, where she glanced a minute or two like a wreath of mist, a shred of light vapour, and then dissolved. What has become, thought I, of the old romance of the sea? The vanished barque and the resistless power underneath my feet, shaking to the heart the vast metal mass that it was impelling, symbolized one of the most startling realities of modern progress. In sober truth, the propeller has sent the poetry of the deep swirling astern. It is out of sight. Nay, the demon of steam has possessed with its spirit the iron interior of the sailing ship, and from the eyes of the nautical occupants of that combination of ore and wire “the glory and the dream,” that ocean visionary life which was the substance and the soul of the sea-calling of other days, has faded as utterly as it has from the confined gaze of the sudorific fiends of the engine-room. To know the sea you must lie long upon its bosom; your ear must be at its heart; you must catch and interpret its inarticulate speech; you must make its moods your own, rise to the majesty of its wrath, taste to the very inmost reaches of your vitality the sweetness of its reposeful humour, bring to its astonishments the wonder of a child, and to its power and might the love and reverence of a man. “Enough!” cries Rasselas to Imlac, “thou hast convinced me that no human being can ever be a poet.” And I have convinced myself that the conditions of the sea-life in these times prohibit the most ardent of imaginative sailors from the exercise of that sort of divination which is to be found in perfection in the old narratives. The vocation is too tedious, the stress of it too harassing, the despatch insisted upon too exacting, to furnish opportunity for more than the most mechanical motions of the mind. A man is hurried from port to port with railway punctuality. He is swept headlong through calms and storms, and if there come a pause it will be found perilous; and consternation takes the place of observation. Nothing new is left. The monsters of the deep have sunk into the ooze and blackness of time and lie foundered, waiting for the resurrection that will not come until civilization has run its course and man begins afresh. All seaboards are known; nothing less than an earthquake can submit the unfamiliar in island or coast scenery. The mermaid hugging her merman has shrunk, affrighted by the wild, fierce light of science, and by the pitiless dredging of the deep-water inquirer, into the dark vaults beneath her coral pavilions. Her songs are heard no more, and her comb lies broken upon the sands. Old ocean itself, soured by man’s triumphant domination of its forces, by his more than Duke of Marlborough-like capacity of riding the whirlwind and directing the storm, has silenced its teachings, sleeps or roars blindly, an eyeless lion, and avenges its neglect and submission by forcing the nautical mind to associate with the noblest, the most romantic vocation in the world no higher ideas than tonnage, freeboard, scantlings, well-decks, length of stroke, number of revolutions, the managing owner, and the Board of Trade! The early mariner was like the growing Boy whom Wordsworth sings of in that divine ode from which I have already quoted— “But he beholds the light, and whence it flows, He sees it in his joy; The Youth, who daily farther from the East Must travel, still is Nature’s Priest, And by the vision splendid Is on his way attended.” Were I asked to deliver my sense of the highest poetical interpretation of the deep, I should point into distant times, to some new and silent ocean on whose surface, furrowed for the first time by a fabric of man’s handiwork, floats some little bark with a deck-load of pensive, wondering, reverential men. Yes! you would find the noblest and most glorious divination of the true spirit of the deep in the thoughts which fill the breasts of that company of quaintly apparelled souls. The very ship herself fits the revelation of the sea to those simple hearts who have hardily sailed down the gleaming slope behind the familiar horizon, and penetrated the liquid fastnesses of the marine gods and demons. Mark the singular structure swinging pendulum-like to the respirations of the blue and foamless swell. Her yellow sides throw a golden lustre under her. Little ordnance of brass and black iron sparkle on her bulwarks and grin along her sides. Her poop and top-lanthorns flash and fade with the swaying of her masts. Her pennons enrich the white sails with their dyes, and how long those banners may be let us conceive from that ancient account of the Armada in which it is written: “For the memory of this exploit, the foresayd Captain Banderdness caused the banner of one of these shippes to be set up in the great Church of Leiden in Holland, which is of so great a length, that being fastened to the very roofe, it reached down to the grounde.” Her men are children, albeit bearded, and not yet upon them have the shades of the prison- 2 3 4 house begun to close. Are we not to be pitied that all the glories which enraptured them, the wonders which held them marvelling, the terrors which sent them to their devotions, should have disappeared for ever from our sight? We have still indeed the magnificence of the sunset, the splendour of the heavens by night, the Andean seas of the tempest, the tenderness of the moonlighted calm; but these things are not to us as they were to them; for a magic was in them that is gone; the mystery and fear and awe begotten of intrusion into the obscure and unknown principalities of the sea-king have vanished; our interpretation gathers nothing of those qualities which rendered theirs as romantic and lovely as a Shakesperean dream; and though we have the sunset and the stars and the towering surge—what have we not? what is our loss? what our perceptions (staled and pointed to commonplace issues by familiarity) compared with their costly endowment of marine disclosure? You see, the world of old ocean was before them; they had everything to enjoy. It was a virgin realm, also, for them to furnish with the creations of their imagination. The flying-fish! what object so familiar now? The house-sparrow wins as much attention, to the full, in the street as does this fish from the sailor or the passenger as it sparks out from the seething yeast of the blue wave and vanishes like a little shaft of mother-o’-pearl. But in those old times they found a wonder here; and prettily declared that they quitted the sea in summer and became birds. Hear how an old voyager discourses of these be-scaled fowls: “There is another kind of fish as bigge almost as a herring, which hath wings and flieth, and they are together in great number. These have two enemies, the one in the sea, the other in the aire. In the sea the fish which is called Albocore, as big as a salmon, followeth them with great swiftnesse to take them. This poore fish not being able to swimme fast, for he hath no finnes, but swimmeth with mooving of his taile, shutting his wings, lifteth himselfe above the water, and flieth not very hie; the Albocore seeing that, although he have no wings, yet he giveth a great leape out of the water and sometimes catcheth the fish being weary of the aire.” It is wonderland to this man. He writes as of a thing never before beheld and with a curious ambition of accuracy, clearly making little doubt that in any case his story will not be credited, and that therefore since the truth is astonishing enough, he may as well carefully stick to it. And the barnacle? Does the barnacle hold any poetry to us? One would as soon seek for the seed of romance in the periwinkle or the crab. Taking up the first dictionary at hand, I find barnacle described as a “shell-fish, commonly found on the bottom of ships, rocks, and timber.” But those wonderful ancient mariners made a goose of it; as may be observed in Mr. John Lok’s account of his ship which arrived home “marvellously overgrowne with certaine shells” in which he solemnly affirms “there groweth a certain slimie substance, which at the length slipping out of the shell and falling in the sea, becometh those foules which we call Barnacles.” Were not those high times for Jack? A barnacle, whether by the sea-side brim or anywhere else, is to us, alas! in this exhaustive age, a barnacle, and nothing more. Or take the maelstrom—a gyration not quite so formidable as the imagination of Edgar Allan Poe would have us believe, but by report exactly one of those features of the ocean to alarm the primitive fancy with frightful ideas: “Note,” says Mr. Anthonie Jenkinson in his voyage to Russia, 1557, “that there is between the said Rost islands and Lofoot a whirlepoole called Malestrand which ... maketh such a terrible noise, that it shaketh the rings in the doores of the inhabitants’ houses of the sayd islands tenne miles off. Also if there cometh any whale within the current of the same, they make a pitiful crie.” And so on. How fine as an artistic touch should we deem this introduction of the whale by the hand of an imaginative writer! The detail to the contemporary readers of Mr. Jenkinson’s yarn would make an enormous horror of that “whirlepoole,” for what should be able to swallow leviathan short of some such stupendous commotion as would be caused by the breaking up of the fountains of the waters of the earth? Let it be remembered that whales were fine specimens in that age of poetry. They were then big enough to gorge a squadron of men-of-war, ay, and to digest the vessels. We have had nothing like them since—the nearest approach to such monsters being the shark in which, on its being ripped open, there was found one full-rigged ship only, with the captain and the mate quarrelling in the cabin over the reckoning. The age of marine romance supplied the mariner with many extraordinary privileges. We cannot control the winds as those old people did. There are no longer gale-makers from whom Jack can buy a favourable blast. The very saints have deserted us, since it is certain that—at sea—we now pray to them in vain. Observe that in fifty directions, despite our propellers, donkey-engines, steam-windlasses, and the like, the ancient mariner was out and away better off than we are. Did he want wind? Then he had nothing to do but apply to a Finn, who, for a few shillings, would sell to him in the shape of a knotted handkerchief three sorts of gale, all prosperous, but one harder than another, by which he could be blown to his port without anxiety or delay. Did a whirlwind threaten him? Then read in the Voyage of Pirard in Harris’ Collection how he managed: “We frequently saw great Whirl-winds rising at a Distance, called by the Seamen Dragons, which shatter and overturn any Ship that falls in their way. When these appear the Sailors have a Custom of repairing to the Prow or the Side that lies next the storm, and beating naked swords against one another crosswise.” Purchas, in his “Pilgrims,” repeats this, and adds that this easy remedy of the sword hinders the storm from coming over their ship, “and turneth it aside.” Did human skill and judgment fail him? There were the Saints. “Before the days of insurance offices and political economy,” writes the author of “Lusitanian Sketches,” “merchants frequently insured their ships at the highly esteemed shrine of Mantozimbo, by presenting a sum equal to the pay of captain or mate, and that, too, without stipulating for any equivalent should the vessel be wrecked.” Was it not his custom to carry the image of his patron saint to sea with him, to pray to it, to make it responsible for the winds, and, if it proved obstinate, to force it into an obliging posture of mind by flogging it? Consider what a powerful marine battery of these saints he could bring to bear upon the vexed, refractory ocean and the capricious storming of winds. St. Anthony, St. Nicholas, whose consecrated loaves of bread quelled many a furious gale, St. Roland, St. Cyric, St. Mark, St. George, St. Michael, St. Benedict, St. Clement—the list is as long as my arm, the number great enough to swell out a big ship’s company. Did pirates threaten him? There was no occasion to see all clear for action. He had but to invoke St. Hilarion—who once on a time by prayer arrested the progress of a picaroon whilst chasing—and away would scuttle the black flag. Was smooth water required for safely making a port? Then no matter how high the sea ran, all that was needful was first to find a pious man on board, light tapers (where they would burn), bring up the incense, erect a crucifix, read prayers (this being done by the pious man), sprinkle the decks with holy water, and straightway the sea under the vessel’s 5 6 7 8 9 forefoot would flatten into a level lane, smooth as oil, albeit the surges on either hand continued to leap to the height of the maintop. Who now regards, save with mild curiosity, the corposant—the St. Elmo’s fire—the dimly burning meteoric exhalation at the yard-arm? It is no more to modern and current imagination than the phosphoric flashes in black intertropic waters. But the ancient mariner made an omen of it—a saint—a joy to be blessed; he wrought it into a beneficent symbol, and endowed it with such powers of salvation as comforted him exceedingly whilst he kneeled on quivering knees in the pale illumination of that mystic marine corpse-candle. Who now scratches the mast for a breeze? Who fears the dead body as a storm-maker? What has become of the damnatory qualities of the cat, and who now hears the dimmest echo of comminatory power in her loudest mew? And most galling of all reflections, into what ocean unknown to man has sailed the Flying Dutchman? Let it not be supposed, however, that the elimination of poetry from the sea-life by the pounding steam engine and the swift voyage is deplorable on no further grounds than these which I have named. The utilitarian aspect is not the only one. There was romance and lustre outside those mere conditions of poetic seamanship which enabled the mariner to direct the wind by a knot, to control the tempest by a candle, to put the pirate to flight by an invocation. Emerge with me from the darkness of remote times into the light of the last—yes, and of the beginning of the present—century. Ladies were then going to sea, as they had in remoter times, dressed as men. They do so no longer. Who ever hears now of some youthful mariner with blooming cheeks and long eyelashes exciting the suspicions of his mahogany- cheeked mates by the shortness of his steps, or the smallness of his hands and feet, or a certain unboyish luxuriance of cropped hair? No, the blushing Pollies and Susans of the East End, resolved by love, by betrayal, or by the press-gang, into the shipping of breeks have had their day. No longer do we read of pretty ship-boys standing confessed as girls. I mourn this departed romantic forecastle feature. Even in fiction how the imagination is captivated by the clever insinuations of the author in his treatment of the youth whose sex he springs upon us presently to our glad surprise! The Edwins whom the Angelinas followed were not indeed very engaging people; but even attentive consideration of their rascalities will not neutralize the pleasant poetic bouquet that haunts the old tales of fine-eyed women going to sea for love or vengeance, living among the sailors, eating the bitter bad provisions of the forecastle, fighting the guns, doing the seamen’s work, and remaining for months undetected. Again, whither has vanished a feature of the old sea-life even yet more romantically interesting than the nautical masquerading of black-eyed Susans and yellow-haired Molls—the flirtation of the long ocean passage? What we call flirtation now at sea is a mere shadow of a shadow as compared with the robust and solid reality of a period when it took a ship four months to sail to Bombay or Calcutta. There is no time allowed in this age for love-making. Before you can fairly consider yourself acquainted with a girl some wretch on the forecastle is singing out “land-ho!” I took particular notice of this matter on board the Union steamer in which I made the passage home from Cape Town. It must certainly have ended in a proposal in the case of one couple had the propeller dropped off or a boiler burst and the ship been delayed. They only wanted another week. But the steamer was impertinently punctual, about eight hours before her time: the people went ashore at Plymouth, and, for all I can tell, the young man, in the excitement of landing and meeting his friends and seeing plenty of pretty women about, may have abandoned his intention and ended for the girl a chance that would have been a certainty in the old romantic poetical sea-days. Why, we all know how the British matron used to ship her darlings off in the East Indiamen for husbands in the country with which those vessels trafficked, and how scores and scores of these unsophisticated young ladies would land engaged, having affianced themselves to gentlemen on board in calms on the Equator or in the tail of the south-east Trades, or in a small swell with a moderate breeze off Agulhas, some possibly hesitating as far as the Madagascar parallels. How many marriages originate at sea in these times of thirteen knots an hour, I wonder? Out of the several millions of passengers who are annually sea-borne, how many pledge their vows on board ship, how many fall in love there, how many become husband and wife in consequence of meeting on ship board? But a few, I’ll warrant. But only think of the old East Indiaman; four months for Captain Thunder and Miss Spooner to be together to start with; four months, and perhaps longer, with possibly Lieutenant Griffin to give a swift maturity to emotion by importing a neat and useful element of jealousy. Oh, if moonlight and music and feeling are one ashore, what are they at sea, on the deck of a sleeping fabric lifting visionary wings to the lovely stars, when the sea-fire flashes like sheet lightning to the soft surge of the ship’s bows or counter upon the light fold of the invisible swell, when the westering moon, crimsoning as she sinks, wastes her heart’s blood in the deep for love of what she is painfully and ruefully leaving, when the dew upon the bulwarks sparkles like some diamond encrustations to the starlight, when the peace of the richly clad night presses like a sensible benediction upon the breathless, enchanted, listening ship, subduing all sounds of gear-creaking in blocks, of chains clanking to the stirring of the rudder, to a tender music in sweetest harmony with the fountain-like murmur at the bows as the vessel quietly lifts to the long-drawn heave there—think of it! was there ever a bower by Bendemeer’s stream comparable as a corner for the delicate whispers of passion, for the coy reception of kisses, with some quiet nook on the white quarter-deck, shadowed from the stars and protected from the dew by the awning? If you thrill now it is because the whole ship shakes with the whirling and thrashing of those mighty beams of steel below. Emotion must be blatant or it cannot be heard. Not yet has a generation that knows I am speaking the truth in all this passed away. Confirm me, ye scores of elderly master-mariners enjoying your well-earned repose in spots hard by that ocean ye loved and sailed for years! Confirm me too, ye many survivors of a sea-going time, when the most blissful hours of your long and respectable lives were passed under the shadow of the cross-jack-yard! I lament the decay of the old nautical costumes. There was a poetry in the dress of the people who had the handling of the big Indian ships which you will not get out of the brass buttons and twopenny cuff-rings of the contemporary skipper and mate. Nowadays it is almost impossible to tell the difference between the rigs of the mercantile captain, the dock master, the Customs man, and the harbour master. But what do you say to a blue coat, black velvet lappels, cuffs and collar with a bright gold embroidery, waistcoat and breeches of deep buff, the buttons of yellow gilt, cocked hats, side arms, and so forth? What dress has done for romance ashore we know. Pull off the feathered hats and high boots, the magnificent doublets and diamond buckles of many of those gentlemen of olden times, who show very stately in 10 11 12 13 history, and button them up in the plain frock-coat of to-day, and who knows but that you might not be diverted with a procession of rather insignificant objects? In the poetical days of the sea-profession the ships very honestly deserved the dignity they got from the gilded and velveted figures that sparkled on their quarter-decks. Over no nobler fabrics of wood did the red ensign ever fly. They went manned like a line-of-battle ship. Observe this resolution arrived at by the Court of Directors (Hon. E.I.C.) held the 19th of October, 1791:—“That a ship of 900 tons do carry 110 men; 1000 ditto, 120; 1100 ditto, 125; 1200 ditto, 130.” Were not those fine times for Jack? How many of a crew goes to the manning of a 1200-ton ship nowadays? And it is proper to note that of these 130 men there were only ten servants, i.e. a captain’s steward, ship’s steward, and men to attend to the mate, surgeon, boatswain, gunner, and carpenter. Contrast these with the number of waiters who swell the ship’s company of our 5000-ton mail boats. Those vessels went armed too, as befitted the majesty of the bunting under which old Dance had gloriously licked Johnny Crapeau.[1] The bigger among them carried thirty-eight eighteen pounders; they were all furnished with boarding-nettings half-mast high and close round the quarters. The chaps in the tops were armed with swivels, musquetoons, and pole-axes. In those romantic times the merchantman saw to himself. There were no laminated plates formed of iron one remove only from the ore betwixt him and the bottom of the ocean; he sailed in hearts-of-oak, and the naval page of his day resounds with his thunder. The spirit of that romantic period penetrated the ladies who were passengers. Relations of this kind in the contemporary annals are common enough: 1. It is interesting to know that Sir John Franklin was in that particular fight, and worked the signals for the Commodore. “Mrs. Macdowall and Miss Mary Harley, who lately distinguished themselves so much in the gallant defence of the ship Planter, of Liverpool, against an enemy of very superior force off Dover, are now at Whitehaven. These ladies were remarkable, not only for their solicitude and tenderness for the wounded, but also for their contempt of personal danger, serving the seamen with ammunition, and encouraging them by their presence.” Again: “I cannot omit mentioning that a lady (a sister of Captain Skinner), who, with her maid, were the only female passengers, were both employed in the bread-room during the action making up papers for cartridges; for we had not a single four-pound cartridge remaining when the action ceased.”[2] 2. Many similar notices may be found in the Annual Register, the Naval Chronicle, and other publications of the kind. The glory and the dream are gone. No doubt there are plenty of ladies living who would manufacture cartridges during a sea-fight with pleasure, and animate the crew by their example and presence. But the heroine’s chance in this direction is dead and over. As dead and over as the armed passenger ship, the privateer, the pirate, and the plate- galleon. Would it interest anybody to know that the Acapulco ship was once more on her way from Manila with a full hold? Dampier and Shelvocke are dead, Anson’s tome is rarely looked into, the cutlass is sheathed, the last of the slugs was fired out of yonder crazy old blunderbuss ages ago; how should it concern us then to hear that the castellated galleon, loaded with precious ore minted and in ingots, with silk, tea, and gems of prodigious value, is under weigh again? Candish took her in 1587, Rogers in 1709, Anson in 1742. Supposing her something more substantial than a phantom, where lives the corsair that should take her now? The extinction of that ship dealt a heavy wound to marine romance. She was a vessel of about two thousand tons burden, and was despatched every year from the port of Manila. She sailed in July and the voyage lasted six months—six months of golden opportunity to the gentlemen who styled themselves buccaneers! The long passage, says the Abbé Raynal, “was due to the vessel being overstocked with men and merchandise, and to all those on board being a set of timid navigators, who never make but little way during the night time, and often, though without necessity, make none at all.” Anson took 1,313,843 pieces of eight and 35,682 oz. of virgin silver out of his galleon, raising the value of his cruise to about £400,000 independent of the ships and merchandise. They knew how to fillibuster in those days. How is it now? It has been attempted of late and found a glorious termination in a police court. The buccaneer has made his exit and so has his fierce brother, the pirate. That dreadful flag has long been hauled down and stowed away by Davy Jones in one of his lockers. “The pirates,” says Commodore Roggewein in 1721, “observing this disposition, immediately put themselves in a fighting posture; and began by striking their red, and hoisting a black flag, with a Death’s Head in the centre, a powder-horn over it, and two bones across underneath.” Alas! even the sentiment of Execution Deck has vanished with the disappearance of this romantic flag, and there are no more skeletons of pirates slowly revolving in the midnight breeze and emitting a dismal clanking sound to the stirring of the damp black gusts from which to borrow a highly moving and fascinating sort of marine poetry. Again, though to be sure it is not a little comforting when in the middle of a thousand leagues of ocean to feel that your ship is navigated by men furnished with the exquisite sextant, the costly chronometer, the wonderful appliances for an exact determination of position, yet there is surely less poetry and romance in the nautical scientific precision of the age, reconciling as it undoubtedly is—particularly when you are afloat—than in the old shrewd half-blind sniffing and smelling out of the right liquid path by those ancient mariners who stumbled into unknown waters, and floundered against unconjecturable continents with nothing better to ogle the sun with than a kind of small gallows called a fore- staff. “If,” writes Sir Thomas Browne to his sailor son in 1664, “you have a globe, you may easily learne the starres as also by bookes. Waggoner[3] you will not be without, which will teach the particular coasts, depths of roades, and how the land riseth upon several poynts of the compasse.... If they have quadrants, crosse-staffes, and other instruments, learn the practicall use thereof; the names of all parts and roupes about the shippe, what proportion the masts must hold to the length and depth of a shippe, and also the sayles.” 3. Wagenar’s “Speculum Nauticum,” Englished in 1588. Here we have pretty well the extent of a naval officer’s education in navigation and seamanship in those rosy times. 14 15 16 17