it is no time, when you cannot keep your legs, to “stand bandying compliments with your sovereign,” that is, neptune. if he were present at this moment, in this cabin, i would tell him, from this my seat on its floor, that he might very much improve his paternal estate, to wit, by levelling, and still more by draining it. i would flatly say to him, lying flat on my face as it now happens, that a few little gravel walks, merely across and across it, would be of rare advantage both for show and use. for ’tis a sorry pleasure-garden that is all fish-pond; and, finally, i would broadly hint to him, from the broad of my back, as i am at this present—— but this is bullying taurus behind his back. there is no sea-god present, only the skipper. how he skips in such weather, give him his pick of all the ropes in the ship, is a miracle i would fain see ere i believe in
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it. for my own part i cannot even step deliberately over a thread. perhaps, without going too curiously into the doctrine of predestination, as regards the soul, it may hold good as concerns the body. undoubtedly there be some men born to sit fast upon horses; others to fall off therefrom as if they had soaped saddles. some to slide and skate upon the ice; others only to slip, straddle, and sprawl upon it. some to walk, or at least waddle, on ships’ decks; others to flop, flounder, wallow, and grovel thereon. that is my destiny. none can be more safe on the serpentine, or sure in the saddle;—but fate, long before my great-great-great-grandfather was put to his feet, forbade me sea-legs. an average pedestrian on land, on the caulked plank i am a born cripple, hopeless of cure. put me apprentice to the goodwin, or the dudgeon light, at the end of my term you shall find me as unsafe on my soles as when i first paid my footing. even now, whilst hans vandergroot and his crew are comfortably promenading, i rock and totter, balancing one end against the other, like a great rickety babe, until, after some posturing and scrambling, i trip up over nothing, and fall flat on everything. an earthquake in london, when its streets are what is called greasy, could not more puzzle my centre of gravity; if, indeed, i was not born a mathematical monster, devoid of that material point!
by way of clincher, fate, who never does things by halves, whilst foredooming me incapable of standing my ground at sea, has also denied me the power of settling it. a camp-stool is sure to decamp with me; a chair, as if it stood on siberian ice, suddenly throws itself on its back, and behold me in an extempore sledge! barrels roll from under me; coils of rope shuffle me off. even on the plain bare hard deck, or cabin floor, i throw demi-summersets, as if i had been returned to parliament to represent the antipodes by sitting on the back of my head.
to complete the sea curse,—there are three fates, and each
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had a boon for me at my birth—it was ordained that, like the great nelson, i should never sail from fresh water into salt, without knowing it by a general rising and commotion, which might be called figuratively, a mutiny at the nore.
like the standing and sitting infirmity, it is incurable. on my voyage outwards i tried every popular recipe; the hard ones first, to wit, raw carrots, raw onions, sailors’ biscuit with dutch cheese, hard-boiled eggs, hard dumplings, raw stockfish. next the easy ones: namely, cream cheese, welsh rabbits, maccaroni, very hasty pudding, and insupportable soup. then the neutrals: such as chewed blotting-paper, dry oatmeal, pounded egg-shells, scraped chalk, and unbaked dough.
to wash these down, i took, by prescription, tea without milk, coffee without sugar, bark without wine, water without brandy; and these formulæ all failing, i then tried them, as witches pray, backwards; brandy without water, wine without bark, and so forth. the experimental combinations followed; rum and milk, and mustard; eggs and wine, and camomile tea; gin and beer, and vinegar; sea-water and salad-oil, mulled, with sugar and nutmeg. of which last, i drank by advice most prodigiously, the doctors of the marine college dispensing always on the homœopathic principle, that a large dose of anything, whereof a little would set you wrong on the land, will set you right on the sea.
i need hardly say that, with my predisposed necessitarian viscera, all these infallible remedies failed of any effect, except to aggravate my case. nothing short of liquid lead, maybe, or potable plaster of paris, would have proved a settler.
happy the man who hath never been driven in his despair to test, detest, invoke, evoke, swallow, and unswallow, such drugs and draughts of the naval pharmacopœia! thrice happy civic simpleton who hath never learned how the rudder revolveth, at the risk of turning round himself!
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vandergroot is visibly in course of transformation. at every visit to the cabin he looks more and more like a dutch-pin. he talks to me roundly, and gets blunter and blunter! the last time i felt, i had no small to my back. if i may guess at my own figure, it is now about an oval. i must look like one of leda’s babies, just emerged, with their insignificant buds of legs and arms, from the egg! from an oval to a circle is but a step. heaven help me when i get landed, round and sound, as they say of cherries! how shall i get home—how get up—(there will be a short way down)—mine own stairs? how shall i sit? instead of my old library chair, i must borrow its three-legged stool of the terrestrial globe!
either my head swims, or the cabin is getting circular! i shall roll about in it like a bolus in its box! if i am not merely giddy, i am already as spherical as the earth; a little flatted, or so, that is, towards the poles. what a horrible rough calm! i will down on my knees, if i have knees, and with clasped hands, if hands remain to me, pray, beg, and supplicate for a dismal storm to batter me into shape again, though it be but nine-bobble-square!
i get more and more candid and communicative every moment. i can keep nothing to myself: you shall have my whole heart. i abhor, loathe, execrate, the sea! if i could throw up my hat, my cry would be “land for ever!” a fico for tom tough! down with duncan howe, and jervis! no dibdin!
if ever i get ashore, able to chalk upon a wall, you shall read—ask for stoke pogis! try lupton parva! if ever i get to a dry desk again, to write verse upon,—and the poetry of the ocean is all on the land, its prose only upon the sea, you shall have a rare new melody, published by power, to some such strain as this:—
the sea! the d——!
the terrible horrible sea!
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the stormy, tumbling,
qualmy-jumbling,
spirit-humbling,
shingle-stumbling,
sea-weed fumbling,
wearing, crumbling,
mischief-mumbling,
growling, grumbling,
like thunder far off rumbling— —
that last line halteth in its feet, as well it may, when the poet cannot keep his legs. oh! it is well for cornwall, born perchance “with one foot on sea and one foot on shore” at the land’s end,—i have seen a picture of it by turner, a bare bleak rocky promontory, with some nineteen gulls and cormor
[pg 284]
ants sitting thereon, each with its tail turned contemptuously towards the barren granite, feldspar, and like sordid soils which there represent land.—it is well enough for him to chaunt laudations of the briny element, and cry up those amphibia, his first cousins almost, the nereids and tritons. or it may become those others, born in a berth, and christened in brine, with neptune for sponsor, to sing slightingly of the dry ground, on which they cannot claim even a parish. but my nativity was otherwise cast—i am a grass lamb, yeaned on the green sward—oh sweet sweet sweet cropton-le-moor, down in dear dear wiltshire!
