“why i’m off with all my master’s.”
that pastoral reminiscence hath made me worse. it has given me an appetite—for acres. methinks i yearn and long and crave for nice clay, delicious mould, and crisp pebbles, in a paroxysm of that strange bulimy that attacks the african dirt eater. something of nebuchadnezzar’s grazing propensity comes along with it. gracious heaven! can it be possible that, after having been battered and shaken out of all shape,—a mere mass of living flesh, like the unlicked ursine cub,—this same circean jung vrouw has taken it into her figure-head to beat, bang, bump, and rumbledy-thump me into another form, a horse, a ram, or a brindled bull!
thrice brute and beast-hyæna! were-wolf! dragon! horned devil! that thou wast, my land-steward, peter stuckey! after counselling me before thy last audit to abate my rents, to volunteer to reduce them thyself by absconding, across sea, with the whole receipt! thrice soland goose, booby, noddy, sea-calf, land-donkey, and loggerhead turtle was i, thus impoverished, instead of economising, to pursue thee on an element where i cannot control my out-goings!
donner and blitzen! what a crash! my rash prayer was heard: there is a storm coming—as the powers proposed to storm angiers in king john’s days—from all the four quarters at once! i must needs turn in: but how vilely this bed is made
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with the foot two yards higher than the head! no, the head is highest—perpendicular. i designed to lie down, and here i am standing bolt erect on my heels—no, on my head. it must be getting cold: the very trunks, stools and tables are making a move towards the stove—nay, now we are in some sudden peril, for they are all doing their best to rush up the cabin-stair. whew—that sea last shipped must needs have put all the dutchmen’s pipes out. another plunge; and a flood of brine soaks me through, shirt, sheet, and blankets. there is no washing put out here, i perceive; ’tis all done at home. what a complex, chaotic motion,—the ship tosses and flings like a wild desert-born horse, that is trying to rear, kick up behind, turn round and round, and roll on his back at one and the same moment. this is no dutch ship, but a dutch fair—with the drums, gongs, speaking-trumpets, and other discords, all braying together; and i am on the rocking-horse, the round-about, in the up-and-down, and each of the swings, all at once! another crash! the jung vrouw is bereaved of her little one, alias the long-boat. how kind of vandergroot to come down to tell me of it, direct through the sky-light, instead of going round by the stair! how kind of that table, lying on its back, to catch him in its legs! angels of grace be near us! he tells me, as he sways up and down, partly in high, partly in low dutch, that the jung vrouw herself is washed overboard! but no—i misconstrued him. ’tis only her great ruddy staring figure-head—which the blundering holland shipwrights had stuck astern, on the crown of the tiller—that is gone adrift. oh how i wish from my soul of souls that i could see the commodore of the thames yachts now pulling, within hail, in the wenus! or, the last dibdin taking a chair—or the chair taking him—in this cabin! or, campbell essaying to write down a new sea-song on yon topsy-turvy table! and oh! to behold the author of “the deep deep sea” sitting on the poop, singing to that
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floating young woman’s head and bust, taken by mistake for a mermaid’s!
another shout. pieter pietersoon, in heaving the lead, hath chucked himself in along with it! i do not wonder; he heaveth after my own fashion, by wholesale. have i not within the last two hours rejected, discharged, and utterly cast from me in disgust, the whole ocean, nay all the oceans, german, atlantic, pacific—the arctic last, its solid calms, the next best things to terra firma, not so violently disagreeing with me as the rest. and do i not know and feel that i am now about to give up neptune, trident and all, with the whole salt-water mythology? i warrant, ere ten minutes to come, there shall not remain within me so much as a syren’s mirror, or her tortoise-shell comb:—not one solitary triton will be left on my stomach. some unsavoury odour about the cabin—marvellously like the smell of oil paint—hath just given me a new turn, by conjuring up all the nauseous pictures of marine allegories, which even on steady dry land, used to stir and provoke my spleen.
oh! that they were all here, president, r.a., and a.r.a., in a string, climbing after me up this perilous slippery stair, to the more perilous slippery deck, there to crawl on all-fours to the ship’s side, and clinging like cats or monkeys to the quarter boards, take a trembling peep at what vandergroot calls “den wild zee!” what an awful sight! the tempest-tost sky is as troubled as the ocean: whilst betwixt the jagged base of the low black cloud, and the still jaggeder crest of the sea, the red angry lightning restlessly darts to and fro, as if in search of whatever presuming mortal dares fare between them! oh tell me, mister elias martin—if you a’nt dead—is the tossing crest of yonder mad black billow, that comes racing after us, at all like the black worsted fringe which your brethren are apt to hang on the necks of their marine arabians? but hush, yonder comes neptune himself, in his state-coach—aye, hats off—the wind hath taught
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ye manners. lo! yonder he stands,—pshaw! no, no, no,—zounds! you are all gaping at honest hans vandergroot. look to starboard—to the left hand! that’s the gentleman, without his castor, nor indeed overwell togged otherwise for wet weather—with his beard lather’d but not shaved—standing up in an oyster-shell drag, and attempting, like a sorry whip as he is, to tool his team of bokickers with a potato-fork. did you ever see four such unbroke brutes as he hath to keep together—neither reined-up, nor down, nor indeed, any ribbons to hold at all—and as i would have laid a pony to nothing, there they go, no pace at all, cause why? they are just come to some invisible sea obelisk, and each horse is for going down a road of his own. did you ever set eyes on such action? no stepping out—but all pawing and prancing and putting their feet down again where they picked them up, like ducrow’s dancing stud; as sure as i’m a judge, they have all got the string-halt in their fore-legs, because they can’t have it in their hinder ones! you may swear safely that they have four bad colds besides, and look what a rabble of naked postillions are hanging on by their manes, because they have no saddles, and if they had, they would never be able to sit in them with those salmon tails! between ourselves, elias, ’tis no great shakes of a show; the lord mayor’s pageant on the water beats it all to sticks; and if you make a picture of it, you will be a fool for your pains. yet have i seen paintings by first-rate hands as like to this same trumpery sadlers’ wells water spectacle——
murder! murder! help! help! o lord! a surgeon and a shutter, if there be such comfortable things in this unneighbourly neighbourhood. o! oh! oh! oh! woe is me! i am not—i am now certain and sure i am not a ball! i have limbs and members! legs and arms! like other people’s, only they’re broke; and a very distinct back. my head! oh! my head, my head; there are nine lumps thereon, and there are nine cabin stairs.
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the real sea-king, in resentment, i suppose, of my untimely caricature of him and his state-coach, after spitting nine gallons of foam in my face, knocked me flat with a wave, and then kicked me down stairs; and here i am again trying to anoint my bruises with trunks, and bind them up with stools and tables, on the hard-hearted oak planks of the cabin-floor. yet is it easier with me than i first feared. my legs are not broken but merely bent. i am only bandy and not lame for life; but my sea-sickness is not cured. am i likely to put up, better or worse, think you, with neptune and his satellites, for this unhandsome usage?
