There is just a chance of our meeting a homeward-bound ship in these latitudes; and as, at all events, we shall probably be at Calcutta in a fortnight—some sanguine people say in ten days—it is time to be beginning the letter I shall want to send you from there. Our voyage has been most prosperous, and though it seems tedious, yet it has given us little to complain of. We have never had more than twenty-four hours of foul wind since we left England, and few ships have such luck in so long a voyage; sometimes we had a day’s calm, when George is fit to hang himself, and sometimes a very fresh breeze, when the ship shivers away at the rate of eleven miles an hour, and that makes me sick and sorry; but we have generally, since we left the Cape, sailed along very smoothly and pleasantly. We are all in excellent health, and I am grown fat, and now that I can read, and draw, and work, and eat in a natural land-like fashion, the days go off very well, very much better than I thought possible at sea.
The nights are cruelly hot. I cannot think why they are so much worse than the days, for we leave all our doors and windows open, but nothing will make a draught.
Fanny and I have been on the lee-side of the ship almost the whole way (which means the side on which the wind does not blow, not the weather-side), and we have generally thought it great luck, as it allows us to have our windows open without any danger of shipping a sea; but it makes our cabins very close now, and I should think gives us a good foretaste of Calcutta. ’s greyhound has added three small puppies to the population, and one of the horses has been ill, and a tame hawk fell overboard and was drowned, and these are the chief incidents among the live stock.
I bought an album at the Cape, to be called the ‘Jupiter’s Album,’ and invited all the officers to contribute to it, and the idea took their fancies, and set all the ship’s company off drawing. Most of them can draw more or less, and out of the twenty-four drawings they have sent in, there are ten, at least, really very good, some tolerable, and those that are the worst are amusing from the immense pains bestowed upon them by the midshipmen.
It answered as an amusement for ten days, and pleased Captain Grey excessively. Their theatricals have gone on, too; the sailors have acted twice with great success, and the officers twice, and the theatre is to close the first cool night we have, with ‘High Life below Stairs,’ and ‘L’Ours et le Pasha,’ done into English by his Excellency, and consequently it is got up with great care. Mr. is the stage manager, and we flatter ourselves, though he is particularly precise and serious, that he has formed an attachment (perfectly correct and Platonic) for Wright, he and she are in such constant communication about the ladies’ dresses for these plays.
I have made the dresses myself for the Sultana and her attendant in ‘L’Ours et le Pasha,’ and that little Douglas looks so pretty in his Turkish costume! And I made, too, a turban for another, who is to be the Sultan. He looked so horribly shy when he came to try it on, sitting before the glass in his midshipman’s dress—a long false beard, and a mass of muslin and scarlet beads twisted round his head.
We had an adventure yesterday; a sudden squall carried away our maintop-mast. It was just after breakfast—the finest possible day, and no wind, apparently; but it happens constantly so near the line, that a sudden puff of wind does a great deal of mischief up aloft, and is not felt on deck. You may guess what a ‘stramash’ they made, with all the ropes and yards attached to them. The mast was four feet in circumference where it gave way, and it was cut off almost as clean as if it had been cut with a knife. The wind turns out a very active, clever fellow of an element when you live much with him; does just what he likes, and in an authoritative way. At first there was a horrible cry of ‘A man overboard,’ which always puts everybody in a fever; but it was only a hat, and the owner was happily caught in one of the lower sails; and though he was carried down stunned and bruised, yet he was not at all seriously hurt. It was a great mercy, for all the officers who have ever seen a similar accident with a topmast say they never saw it without a great loss of life, besides serious wounds.
As nothing of the kind happened here, we are all glad to have seen once what sailors can do on an emergency, and Captain Grey’s presence of mind (which is always very striking) was quite remarkable. Before we could go from the cabin to the deck, he had given the order, ‘All hands clear wreck,’ which brought every human being up from below, and every man was in his place working away at disentangling the ropes, furling sails, &c., not two minutes after the crash. Except on these occasions, you never see more than half the crew and one-third of the officers at a time; but everybody works in these cases, and it was a curious scene.
We were saying that if any ship had passed at that moment not within speaking distance, they would, with the little exaggeration that attends all disasters, have given you all such a shocking account of our dismasted look; for several smaller sails were carried away by the strain on,them, and you would have heard of us as a wreck on the water. It was supposed that twelve hours would suffice to put us to rights, judging from other ships; but in five everything material was in its place again, and the sails all set.
It was a great triumph to the ship, and says that the midshipmen, who are not given to praise their captains in general, all talk of Captain Grey’s seamanship and readiness with great praise. It was a curious sight altogether, and I made a nice sketch of it, for as the ropes were all out of their places, it was just the time to draw them—nobody can detect any mistakes.
All our hopes of a quick arrival are at an end, we cannot cross that tiresome line; we have been within 100 miles of it for four days without being able to advance a step, but are going tacking about with great trouble and bother, quite contented, after a fashion of content, if we do not lose more by the current than we gain by the wind. We now do not expect to arrive till the 14th, the day that George originally named when we left Portsmouth, so that we shall not have much to complain of; but it would have been better to have had something to boast of.
We crossed the line last Wednesday, but have not averaged thirty miles a day the last ten days. You have no idea how tantalising it is to waste ten such precious days, for the very hot weather begins at Calcutta the middle of March, so George was very anxious that we should have two or three cool weeks to break us in to the climate. If we could have a fair breeze we still might be there in ten days; but many people think we maybe a month or more. We tack about first to the east and then to the west, trying to screw a little northing out of them—so like people who can’t get to sleep, and try first one side to lie on and then the other. However, we are in our own northern hemisphere again, which I mention that I may twit Mr. with what he said one day at dessert, that I should not see the Great Bear again. Dear old beast! he came in sight again the night before last, looking handsome and friendly, worth all the Southern Crosses and Scorpions. I like to be in the same hemisphere with you; it is the best we can do for ourselves now. ‘Hem, sweet hem, there is no hem like ours,’ is the nearest I can come to ‘Home, sweet home,’ and at all events it is something to know my own stars again. What will you bet that we shall have a fair wind by Tuesday? I think we shall, merely because it must come at last. If not, I must eat Chance on Wednesday, for fear other people should want him the next week.
You have lost that bet about the wind; you owe me a shilling, and you ought to make it two, in consideration of our wretched state. This is the fourth day of a dead calm, the sea actually as smooth as this paper, and not a breath of air—and the heat! Few people have ever seen such a dead calm at sea: the master, who has, was detained by one three weeks in the same place; we are now only 160 miles from the line. I shall stick this letter in a bottle soon, and you will know where to look for us when it comes to hand.
Day after day—day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.
It is just what we are—and then the sea—
Still as a slave before his lord,
The ocean hath no blast;
His great bright eye most silently
Up to the moon is cast.
I believe every word of the ‘Ancient Mariner,’ even to the slimy things that crawl on the slimy sea, for the first sea snake was wriggling about yesterday. Swimming is the only amusement for the officers and men; they caught a shark yesterday afternoon, and five minutes after, sixty of them were in the water to get a good bath before another shark came. Hot as it is, I have finished a sketch of little Douglas, which is so like your boy that I was sorry to give it away; but he is charmed with it, and has shown it, they say, to every creature in the ship, and the first lieutenant is having a frame made for it. I gave it to him to send home to his mother, who is a widow; and he is dreadfully puzzled between his wish to send it to her and a desire to offer it to Mr. Julian, one of the mates, who has adopted him, and takes care of him, and teaches him his profession.
I always rather expect to hear that the ‘Liverpool,’ by which we sent our letters from the Cape, went down at sea. She was manned by Arabs, and in a wretched state, and if our letters go to the bottom you will not know half the allusions in our subsequent valuable epistles. I think the little tortoises I sent C may arrive alive. W had some that buried themselves the day they left the Cape, and they are alive. It is not a bad way of doing a voyage. I think I bear the tedium of ours with more outward philosophy and cheerfulness than any of them—at least, I take it more quietly; but if I had known what it would be, to be away from all of you—so far and hopelessly away—and without anybody at hand with whom I can talk over old times and old feelings, I do not think I should have come.
George is very kind, and he says it will be easy to make new interests. It will for him, who has more to learn and to do than the twenty-four hours can hold—and he has no time for regrets. But, at all events, it must be some time before I can care about Calcutta; and there, too, he will be so busy that I shall lose him again as a companion, and then I shall, if possible, long more for a talk with you. I do not think it unwholesome to be driven by loss of other ties to depend more on the only Hope that never fails; but sometimes it is difficult not to grope about in this dark world for something to hold by, instead of looking up, and altogether I want you and a few others.
If all too worldly pant my heart
For human sympathy,—
O’er wayward feelings unexprest
Too oft if I repine,
And ask for one whose kindred breast
Will judge the wants of mine,—
If sometimes on my soul will press,
With overwhelming force,
A sense of utter loneliness
All blighting in its course,—
if all this is the case (and it is), I sometimes think that I might have remained in England; but there is no knowing now, how that would have been.
There! after three more days of a burning calm, a sudden breeze sprang up yesterday; in half-an-hour the ship was running eight knots an hour, and has continued so ever since. The night was quite cool, and we are all beginning to count on arriving this day week, though that is being very sanguine. Everybody was growing melancholy about that calm; the officers had come to an end of their fresh meat, and the midshipmen to an end of their clean clothes, and they were put on a shorter allowance of water; quite enough as yet, but it was to have been shortened again at night.
Still tacking about: a foul wind (little of it), current, everything against us; and though we are now within 200 miles of Sandheads, we may yet be a week reaching them. We shall have been ten weeks on Monday without seeing land, which is an unusual thing, even in a seaman’s life. I was telling George last night that when children learn their Indian history they will come to—‘Sir O. Metcalfe began to reign in 1835, preceded by William of Bentinck, succeeded by George of Auckland, who was surnamed the Navigator, from the very remarkable fact that he never made land during the five years his government lasted.’ That will probably be the case. I shall not write any more till we anchor; you will never be able to read it; besides, I am very busy about a set of little drawings on small cards that I am doing for you from my sketches. I think I shall finish twelve before we arrive.
At last we are in sight of land off Saugur; and, what is more, the steamer is in sight bringing us heaps of letters; that dear steamer and the smoke look like the Thames and home,—and then, all the letters! The pilot came on board at two this morning, and says we were given up for lost at Calcutta (which I am afraid may by ricochet have given you a fidget in England); that the steamers have been looking for us for three weeks; that John Elliot was tired of waiting, and is gone home; and, above all, that there are quantities of letters for us, some that left England the 11th of November, five weeks after us. Only conceive the pleasure of it!
We expect to be at Calcutta to-morrow evening. The steamer has got the ‘Zenobia’ in tow, which ‘Zenobia’ is to take our letters. There is a boat full of Hindoos in sight, with vegetables. We are in great want of fresh provisions. Rosina is in such a state of delight—poor old thing! I had finished a panorama of Rio for you, that was the admiration of the ship, so much so, that two days ago it was stolen out of the cabin, which is provoking. George is quite unhappy about it; it folded up like a map. Perhaps in time I may finish another for you.