SEA SUPERSTITION
One moonlit night in the tropics, as my ship was slipping south under all sail, I was put to walking the deck on the lee side of the poop, with orders to watch the ship's clock and strike the bell at each half-hour. It was a duty I had done nightly for many nights, but this night was memorable to me. The ship was like a thing carved of pearl. The sailors, as they lay sleeping in the shadows, were like august things in bronze. And the skies seemed so near me, I felt as though we were sailing under a roof of dim branches, as of trees, that bore the moon and the stars like shining fruits.
Gradually, however, the peace in my heart gave way to an eating melancholy, and I felt a sadness, such as has come to me but twice in my life. With the sadness there came a horror of the water and of the skies, till my presence in that ship, under the ghastly corpse-light of the moon, among that sea, was a terror to me past power of words to tell. I went to the ship's rail, and shut my eyes for a moment, and then opened them to look down upon the water rushing past. I had shut my eyes upon the sea, but when I opened them I looked upon the forms of the sea-spirits. The water was indeed there, hurrying aft as the ship cut through; but in the bright foam for far about the ship I saw multitudes of beautiful, inviting faces that had an eagerness and a swiftness in them unlike the speed or the intensity of human beings. I remember thinking that I had never seen anything of such passionate beauty as those faces, and as I looked at them my melancholy fell away like a rag. I felt a longing to fling myself over the rail, so as to be with that inhuman beauty. Yet even as I looked that beauty became terrible, as the night had been terrible but a few seconds before. And with the changing of my emotions the faces changed. They became writhelled and hag-like: and in the leaping of the water, as we rushed, I saw malevolent white hands that plucked and snapped at me. I remember I was afraid to go near the rail again before the day dawned.
Not very long after that night, when I was sitting with a Danish sailor who was all broken on the wheel of his vices and not far from his death, I talked about the sea-spirits and their beauty and their wildness, feeling that such a haunted soul as my companion's would have room in its crannies for such wild birds. He told me much that was horrible about the ghosts who throng the seas. And it was he who gave me the old myth of the sea-gulls, telling me that the souls of old sailors follow the sea, in birds' bodies, till they have served their apprenticeship or purged their years of penitence. He told me of two sailors in a Norway barque, though I believe he lied when he said that he was aboard her at the time, who illustrated his sermon very aptly. The barque was going south from San Francisco, bound home round the Horn, and the two men were in the same watch. Somehow they fell to quarrelling as to which was the better dancer, and the one killed the other and flung him overboard during one of the night watches. The dead body did not sink, said my friend, because no body dares to sink to the undersea during the night-time; but in the dawn of the next day, and at the dawn of each day till the barque reached Norway, a white gull flew at the slayer, crying the cry of the gulls. It was the dead man's soul, my friend said, getting her revenge. The slayer gave himself up on his arrival at the home port, and took poison while awaiting trial.
When he had told me this tale, the Dane called for a tot of the raw spirits of that land, though he must have known, he being so old a sailor, that drink was poison to him. When he had swallowed the liquor, he began a story of one of his voyages to the States. He said that he was in a little English ship coming from New York to Hamburg, and that the ship—the winds being westerly—was making heavy running, under upper topsails, nearly all the voyage. When he was at the wheel with his mate (for two men steered in the pitch and hurry of that sailing) he was given to looking astern at the huge comber known as "the following sea," which topples up, green and grisly, astern of every ship with the wind aft. The sight of that water has a fascination for all men, and it fascinated him, he said, till he thought he saw in the shaking wave the image of an old halt man who came limping, bent on a crutch, in the ship's wake. So vivid was the image of that cripple, he leaned across the wheel-box to his mate, bidding him to look; and his mate looked, and immediately went white to the lips, calling to the saints to preserve him. My friend then told me that the cripple only appears to ships foredoomed to shipwreck, "And," he said, "we were run down in the Channel and sunk in ten minutes" by a clumsy tramp from London.
After a while I left that country in a steamer whose sailors were of nearly every nation under the sun, and from a Portuguese aboard her I got another yarn. In the night watches, when I was alone on the poop, I used to lean on the taffrail to see the water reeling away from the screws. While loafing in this way one night, a little while before the dawn, I was joined by the Portuguese, an elderly, wizened fellow, who wore earrings. He said he had often seen me leaning over the taffrail, and had come to warn me that there was danger in looking upon the sea in that way. Men who looked into the water, he told me, would at first see only the bubbles, and the eddies, and the foam. Then they would see dim pictures of themselves and of the ship. But at the last they always saw some unholy thing, and the unholy thing would lure them away to death. And it was a danger, he said, no young man should face, for though the other evil spirits, those of the earth and air, had power only upon the body, the evil spirits of the sea were deadly to the soul. There was a lad he had known in Lisbon who had gone along the coast in a brig, and this lad was always looking into the sea, and had at last seen the unholy things and flung his body to them across the rail. The brig was too near the coast, and it blew too freshly inshore, for the sailors to round-to to pick him up. But they found the lad in Lisbon when they got home. He said he had sunken down into the sea, till the sea opened about him and showed him a path among a field of green corn. He had gone up the path and come at last to a beautiful woman, surrounded by many beautiful women, but the one seemed to him to be the queen. She was so beautiful, he said, the sight of her was like strong wine; but she shook her head when she saw him, as though she could never give him her love, and immediately he was at the surface, under the skies, struggling towards some rocks a little distance from him. He reached the shore and went home to Lisbon in a fisher-boat, but he was never quite sane after seeing that beauty beneath the sea. He became very melancholy, and used to go down the Tagus in a row-boat, singing to himself and looking down into the water.
Before I left that ship I had to help clean her for her decent entry to the Mersey. I spent one afternoon with an old man from the Clyde doing up some ironwork, first with rope yarn and paraffin, then with red lead. The mate left us to ourselves all the watch, because the old man was trusty, and we had a fine yarn together about the things of the sea. He said that there were some who believed in the white whale, though it was all folly their calling him the king of all the fishes. The white whale was nothing but a servant, and lay low, "somewhere nigh the Poles," till the last day dawned. And then, said the old man, "he's a busy man raising the wrecks." When I asked him who was the king of all the fishes, he looked about to see that there were no listeners, and said, in a very earnest voice, that the king of the fish was the sea-serpent. He lies coiled, said the old man, in the hot waters of the Gulf, with a gold crown on his head, and a "great sleep upon him," waiting till the setting of the last sun. "And then?" I asked. "Ah, then," he answered, "there'll be fine times going for us sailors."