第7章 CHAPTER I(4)

The great feature of the southern seas is the multitude of birds which inhabit it.Huge albatrosses,molimorks (a smaller albatross),Cape hens,Cape pigeons,parsons,boobies,whale birds,mutton birds,and many more,wheel continually about the ship's stern,sometimes in dozens,sometimes in scores,always in considerable numbers.If a person takes two pieces of pork and ties them together,leaving perhaps a yard of string between the two pieces,and then throws them into the sea,one albatross will catch hold of one end,and another of the other,each bolts his own end and then tugs and fights with his rival till one or other has to disgorge his prize;we have not,however,succeeded in catching any,neither have we tried the above experiment ourselves.

Albatrosses are not white;they are grey,or brown with a white streak down the back,and spreading a little into the wings.The under part of the bird is a bluish-white.They remain without moving the wing a longer time than any bird that I have ever seen,but some suppose that each individual feather is vibrated rapidly,though in very small space,without any motion being imparted to the main pinions of the wing.I am informed that there is a strong muscle attached to each of the large plumes in their wings.It certainly is strange how so large a bird should be able to travel so far and so fast without any motion of the wing.Albatrosses are often entirely brown,but farther south,and when old,I am told,they become sometimes quite white.The stars of the southern hemisphere are lauded by some:I cannot see that they surpass or equal those of the northern.Some,of course,are the same.The southern cross is a very great delusion.It isn't a cross.It is a kite,a kite upside down,an irregular kite upside down,with only three respectable stars and one very poor and very much out of place.Near it,however,is a truly mysterious and interesting object called the coal sack:it is a black patch in the sky distinctly darker than all the rest of the heavens.No star shines through it.The proper name for it is the black Magellan cloud.

We reached the Cape,passing about six degrees south of it,in twenty-five days after crossing the line,a very fair passage;and since the Cape we have done well until a week ago,when,after a series of very fine runs,and during as fair a breeze as one would wish to see,we were some of us astonished to see the captain giving orders to reef topsails.

The royals were stowed,so were the top-gallant-sails,topsails close reefed,mainsail reefed,and just at 10.45p.m.,as I was going to bed,I heard the captain give the order to take a reef in the foresail and furl the mainsail;but before I was in bed a quarter of an hour afterwards,a blast of wind came up like a wall,and all night it blew a regular hurricane.The glass,which had dropped very fast all day,and fallen lower than the captain had ever seen it in the southern hemisphere,had given him warning what was coming,and he had prepared for it.That night we ran away before the wind to the north,next day we lay hove-to till evening,and two days afterwards the gale was repeated,but with still greater violence.The captain was all ready for it,and a ship,if she is a good sea-boat,may laugh at any winds or any waves provided she be prepared.The danger is when a ship has got all sail set and one of these bursts of wind is shot out at her;then her masts go overboard in no time.Sailors generally estimate a gale of wind by the amount of damage it does,if they don't lose a mast or get their bulwarks washed away,or at any rate carry away a few sails,they don't call it a gale,but a stiff breeze;if,however,they are caught even by comparatively a very inferior squall,and lose something,they call it a gale.

The captain assured us that the sea never assumes a much grander or more imposing aspect than that which it wore on this occasion.He called me to look at it between two and three in the morning when it was at its worst;it was certainly very grand,and made a tremendous noise,and the wind would scarcely let one stand,and made such a roaring in the rigging as I never heard,but there was not that terrific appearance that I had expected.It didn't suggest any ideas to one's mind about the possibility of anything happening to one.It was excessively unpleasant to be rolled hither and thither,and I never felt the force of gravity such a nuisance before;one's soup at dinner would face one at an angle of 45degrees with the horizon,it would look as though immovable on a steep inclined plane,and it required the nicest handling to keep the plane truly horizontal.So with one's tea,which would alternately rush forward to be drunk and fly as though one were a Tantalus;so with all one's goods,which would be seized with the most erratic propensities.Still we were unable to imagine ourselves in any danger,save that one flaxen-headed youth of two-and-twenty kept waking up his companion for the purpose of saying to him at intervals during the night,"I say,isn't it awful?"till finally silenced him with a boot.While on the subject of storms I may add,that a captain,if at all a scientific man,can tell whether he is in a cyclone (as we were)or not,and if he is in a cyclone he can tell in what part of it he is,and how he must steer so as to get out of it.A cyclone is a storm that moves in a circle round a calm of greater or less diameter;the calm moves forward in the centre of the rotatory storm at the rate of from one or two to thirty miles an hour.A large cyclone 500miles in diameter,rushing furiously round its centre,will still advance in a right line,only very slowly indeed.A small one 50or 60miles across will progress more rapidly.One vessel sailed for five days at the rate of 12,13,and 14knots an hour round one of these cyclones before the wind all the time,yet in the five days she had made only 187miles in a straight line.I tell this tale as it was told to me,but have not studied the subjects myself.Whatever saloon passengers may think about a gale of wind,I am sure that the poor sailors who have to go aloft in it and reef topsails cannot welcome it with any pleasure.