London, April to September 1822
THE LAST book ended just after I boarded the ship in Saint-Malo. Soon we left the Channel, and an immense swell from the west let us know that we had reached the Atlantic.
It is difficult for those who have never been to sea to imagine the feelings that a man experiences aboard a ship when he looks around him and sees nothing but the solemn face of the deep. In the dangerous life of a sailor, there is a freedom that comes of the absence of land. The passions of men are abandoned on shore, and between the world that they leave and the world that they seek, the element on which the sailors are borne is all that there is of love and country. There are no more duties to fulfill, no more visits to pay, no more newspapers, no more politics. The very language of sailors is different from ordinary language: it is a language such as the ocean and the sky, the calm and the tempest might speak. Aboard a ship, you inhabit a universe of water among creatures whose clothing, tastes, manners, and faces do not resemble those of the autochthonic tribes. They have the wildness of the sea wolf and the lightness of the bird; their brows are free of society’s cares, and the wrinkles that do cross it resemble the folds of a slackened sail, formed less by age than by the North wind, like the wrinkles formed upon the waters. The salt-steeped skin of these creatures is red and chapped, like the surface of a reef battered by the waves.
Sailors have a passion for their ship. They cry ruefully when they leave it, tenderly when they see it again; they cannot stay at home with their families. After having sworn a hundred times that they will never again expose themselves to the sea, they find it impossible to live without it, like a young man who cannot tear himself from the arms of a fickle and unfaithful mistress.
On the docks of London and Plymouth, it is not unusual to find sailors who were born on ships. From their childhood until their old age, they never set foot on shore. They see the land only from the sides of their floating cradle, spectators of a world that they will never enter. In this life reduced to so small a space, under the clouds and above the abyss, all things are animate to the mariner: an anchor, a sail, a mast, or a cannon are characters worthy of affection, each of which has a story of its own.
The sail was torn on the coast of Labrador; the master sail-maker put on that patch you see there.
The anchor saved the ship when all the other anchors had dragged in the coral reefs near the Sandwich Islands.
The mast snapped during a hurricane off the Cape of Good Hope; it was originally made of a single pole, but it is much stronger now that it is made of two.
The cannon was the only one not dismounted in the Battle of the Chesapeake.
The news on board is most interesting: the log has been thrown and the ship is making ten knots.
At noon the sky is clear; a measurement is taken: we are at such-and-such a latitude.
A reckoning: it is calculated that we have gone so many leagues on our course.
The declination of the compass is so many degrees: we are traveling north.
The sand in the hourglass is falling fitfully: it is going to rain.
Some of the sailors notice storm petrels in the ship’s wake: a squall is coming.
Flying fish to the south: the weather will be calm.
To the west, a clear spot forms in the clouds; it is the footprint of the wind: tomorrow, the wind will blow from that direction.
The water has changed color; we have seen driftwood and seaweed, gulls and ducks, and a little bird that came and perched on the shrouds: we must turn our course back out to sea, for we are nearing land, and it is no good to sail too close to the coast at night.
In the coop there is a favorite and, so to speak, sacred rooster who has outlived all the others. He is famous for having crowed during a battle as though he were on a farmyard among his hens. Below deck there lives a cat: coat streaked with green, tail hairless, whiskers bushy, firm on his feet, shifting his weight against the pitch and balancing against the roll.[4] He has traveled twice around the world and was saved from a shipwreck on a floating barrel. The ship’s boys give the rooster biscuits steeped in wine, and Tom has the privilege of sleeping, whenever he pleases, curled up in the second mate’s fur coat.
An old sailor resembles an old farmer. Their harvests are different, it’s true: the sailor has led a wandering life, and the farmer has never left his fields; but they both know the stars and predict the future as they plow their furrows. To the one, the nightingale, the lark, and the robin, and to the other, the petrel, the curlew, and the halcyon are prophets. They both retire at evening-time, the one to his hut, the other to his cabin. They both lay their heads down in these frail dwellings, and yet the hurricane that batters them does not disturb their tranquil consciences.
If the wind tempestuous is blowing,
Still no danger they descry;
The guiltless heart its boon bestowing,
Soothes them with its Lullaby, etc., etc.[5]
The sailor knows not where death will take him by surprise, nor on what coast he will lose his life. Perhaps, when his last sigh has mingled with the wind, he shall be launched into the bosom of the tides, bound to two oars, and allowed to continue his journey, or perhaps he will be buried on a desert island that no man will ever find again, and sleep there as isolated as when he slept in his hammock on the open sea.
The vessel alone is a sight to behold. Sensitive to the slightest movement of the helm, a hippogryph or a winged stallion, she responds to the touch of the skipper as a horse to the touch of a rider. The elegance of the masts and the rigging, the nimbleness of the sailors who flit over the shrouds, the different aspects of the ship, when she heels under a contrary blast, or when she scuds before a favorable boreal wind, makes this intelligent contrivance one of the wonders of man’s genius. Sometimes, the swell and its foam break and burst against the hull; sometimes, the peaceful waves divide themselves unresisting before the prow. The flags, the pennants, and the sails complete the beauty of this palace of Neptune: the lowest sails, deployed in all their grandeur, bulge like enormous cylinders, and the topsails, cinched around their middle, resemble the breasts of a Siren. Brought to life by an impetuous breath, the ship’s keel, like a plowshare, loudly creases the blue fields of the sea.
On this ocean road, along which there are no trees, no villages, no towns, no towers, no spires, and no tombstones; on this highway without signposts or milestones, with no borders but the waves, no relays but the winds, no lights but the stars, the most beautiful of adventures, when you are not in search of undiscovered lands or waters, is the meeting of two ships. They catch sight of each other on the horizon through the spyglass, and begin to navigate one toward the other. The crew and the passengers rush upon deck. The structures approach, hoist their flags, take in their reefs, and heave to. When all is silence, the two captains, standing on their quarterdecks, hail one another through speaking-trumpets: “Name of ship? Out of what port? Name of captain? Where are you coming from? How many days out? Latitude and longitude? Farewell now! Farewell!”
They let go the reefs and the sails tumble down again. The sailors and the passengers of the two ships watch each other disappear without saying a word. These ones go to seek the sun of Asia; these others, the sun of Europe; no matter which way they go, the same sun shall see them die. Time carries off and separates travelers on land even more promptly than the wind carries off and separates them at sea. So we make our signals from afar: Farewell now! Farewell! The common port is Eternity.
And if the vessel encountered were that of Cook or La Pérouse?[6]
The boatswain of my Maloan ship was a former cargo supervisor named Pierre Villeneuve, whose very name pleased me, for it recalled my nurse. This Villeneuve had served in India under the Bailli de Suffern and in America under the Comte D’Estaing: he had taken part in a host of engagements. Leaning on the fore of the ship beside the bowsprit, as though he were a veteran seated beneath the trellis of his little garden in the ditch around the Invalides, Pierre would chew a quid of tobacco that filled his cheek like a swelling and describe for me the moment when the decks were cleared, the effect of artillery detonations below board, the damage done by cannonballs and their ricochets against the gun carriages, the guns, and the timber-work. I made him tell me about Indians, Negroes, and colonists. I asked him how these people dressed, how trees were shaped, the color of the earth and the sky, the taste of fruits, if pineapples were better than peaches, if palm trees were more beautiful than oaks. He explained it all to me by drawing comparisons with things I knew. He said that palm trees were large cabbages, that an Indian’s dress was like my grandmother’s dress, that a camel looked like a hunchbacked donkey, and that all the peoples of the Orient, most notably the Chinese, were thieves and cowards. Villeneuve was from Brittany, and we never failed to finish our conversations by praising the incomparable beauty of our native land.
The ship’s bell inevitably interrupted our talk. It rang for the changing of the watch, for dressing, for roll call, and for meals. In the mornings, at its signal, the crew clambered on deck, stripped off the blue shirts they were wearing, and donned another blue shirt that had been left to dry in the shrouds. The cast-off shirts were immediately washed in the same tubs in which this boarding-house of seals lathered their leathery faces and their tar-black paws.
At midday and evening meals, seated in a circle around the mess, the sailors would plunge their pewter spoons one after another, rhythmically and without any cheating, into the swashing and roiling soup. Those who weren’t hungry sold their share of biscuit and salted meat to their mates for a plug of tobacco or a glass of eau-de-vie. The passengers meanwhile ate in the captain’s cabin. When the weather was fine, a sail was spread over the quarterdeck, and we dined in sight of the blue sea, flecked here and there by the white marks made by the skimming of the breeze.
Wrapped in my cloak, I would lie on the deck at night, contemplating the stars above my head. The swelling sails brought me down the cool breeze, which lulled me asleep beneath the celestial dome: half drowsing and driven onward by the wind, I seemed to see the sky change with my changing dreams.
The passengers aboard a ship form a society different from that of the crew. They belong to another element, and their destinies lie on land. Some are running away to find fortune, and some to find rest; that one is returning to his homeland, and this one is leaving it; others are journeying to learn the ways of foreign peoples or to study the arts and sciences. Every one has time to get to know each other on this wandering hotel that travels with the traveler; time to hear many adventures recounted, conceive antipathies, and contract friendships. When they come and go, those young women born of English blood and Indian blood, who combine the beauty of Clarissa and the delicacy of Shakuntala,[7] then chains are formed that bind and unbind the fragrant breezes of Ceylon, which are sweet like them, and like them nimble.