periods of certain winds, is an essential part of the officer's work, without which no ship can be well navigated. For the reader must remember that the modern mariner adopts a far bolder, and at the same time more scientific system of sailing than his forefathers, who directed a ship by what is now contemptuously called "the rule of thumb." Thus, when a vessel was on her route to India, the captain no sooner passed the Cape of Good Hope than he turned the ship's head direct for her destination. "And with reason, surely!" some readers may exclaim, deeming a short course the best. But this passage was not short-that is, in time; which is, of course, the grand point, as nothing is gained by a short road which requires double the time necessary for traversing a longer but better route. Mark the consequence of sailing direct for India as soon as the Cape was reached. The ship had, indeed, a straight path before her, but the winds to impel her forwards are wanting: a stagnating calm settles upon the sea into which she enters, and there she lies, baking in the sun till the timbers crack, and the very ocean seems corrupting for want of motion. All this time a splendid breeze is blowing in more southern latitudes, ready to waft thousands of vessels to the shores of India. But this our becalmed ship has lost, in consequence of her standing too soon to the east. Had she ran directly south after passing the Cape, careless of the apparent circuitousness of the passage, she would have fallen in with the trade-winds, when a straight course might have been held without a change of sail for a thousand miles. Such a mode of sailing, requiring a knowledge of the trade-wind localities, and the latitudes where they may be best used, brings a ship to her port in far less time than the "rule of thumb" would usually require. Such principles of navigation will not allow officers to indulge in neglect or indolence. Thus all on board a ship have their hands full, whether before the mast or on the quarter-deck. Though a sailor has no time to nourish idle fancies, he is the most superstitious of mortals. Nor is this matter for wonder; many of us have felt the close connection between silence, vast solitudes, and that mysterious awe which whispers of the supernatural. A man hurries. carelessly through a crowded city, and feels little superstition whilst passing through Temple Bar in mid-day, or down Regent-street in the height of its stir. But place him on a lonely moor, as the autumn sun is setting behind a dark range of distant hills; let no sound reach him save the moan of the bittern-no living object appear, except the ghost-like owl, silently flapping its wings over the darkening heath. What a strange feeling would, in such circumstances, steal over the minds of most men! whilst to the ignorant and credulous peasant the thickening gloom will seem the home of spirits commencing their nightly walk. But it is on the ocean that the natural excitements of superstition act in all their power, and impress the mariner with a thousand wild legends. At one time the natural causes of refraction and reflection make the image of a distant vessel appear near, for the mirage ship holds on her course close to a real vessel, then disappears at once, with a change in the direction of the reflected rays. The sailors gaze upon the vacant sea, and for ever after speak of the phantom ship. Coleridge has finely wrought up some of those traditional superstitions in his "Ancient Mariner," where he brings in a crew beholding with terror the approach of a spectre bark : When looking westward, I beheld A something in the sky: It moved, and moved, and took at last A speck-a mist-a shape, I wist! And still it neared and neared: As if it dodged a water-sprite, It plunged, and tacked, and veered! 66 See, see!" I cried, "she tacks no more! Without a breeze, without a tide, She steadies with upright keel." The western wave was all a flame; Alas! thought I, and my heart beat loud- Are those her sails that glance in the sun, The sun's rim dips, the stars rush out; The sudden deaths which so often happen at sea tend to promote superstition in sailors. An alteration is then perceptible for a time at least in the manners and feelings of the crew; a species of melancholy perception of the nearness of death presses upon them. An unexpected and serious event then seizes with peculiar energy upon the feelings of the more ignorant. Dana well describes the effect of a sudden death by drowning on a crew: "Death is at all times solemn, but never so much so as at sea. A man dies on shore; his body remains with his friends, and the mourners go about the streets;' but when a man falls overboard at sea, and is lost, there is a suddenness in the event and a difficulty in realizing it, which gives to it an air of awful mystery. A man dies on shore; you follow his body to the grave, and a stone marks the spot. You are often prepared for the event. There is always something which helps you to realize it when it happens, and to recall it when it has passed. A man is shot down by your side in battle, and the mangled body remains an object, and a real evidence; but at sea the man is near you-at your side ; you hear his voice, and in an instant he is gone, and nothing but a vacancy shows his loss. Then, too, at sea-to use a homely but expressive phrase you miss a man so much. A dozen men are shut up together in a little bark, upon the wide, wide sea, and for months see no forms and hear no voices but their own, and one is taken suddenly from among them, and they miss him at every turn. It is like losing a limb; there are no new faces or new scenes to fill up the gap. There is one less to take the wheel, and one less to lay out with you upon the yard. You miss his form and the sound of his voice, for habit had made them almost necessary to you, and each of your senses feels the loss." The possession of a power over the elements was at one period ascribed to those deluded or deluding beings known in history as witches. To raise the winds and whelm ships in the yeasty waves were deeds common enough with the foul sisterhood, if we may believe old chroniclers. Nor is this notion yet extinct amongst the peasantry in some parts of the British isles; but it is amongst seamen that we find the belief most strongly declared. An amusing instance of this occurred on board the vessel in which Dana was a sailor. The cook was observed to be exceedingly civil to the sailmaker, whom he supposed to be a Fin, which people he firmly believed capable of raising the wind. The moment doubts of this power were hinted at, a host of facts were brought forward, all tending to prove the supernatural powers of the Fins. Finnish vessels had been seen sailing against wind and tide, and stories were told of Fins revenging themselves upon troublesome captains by raising adverse winds, and thus retarding the vessel. These superstitions extend to animals also, and some sailors would as soon put to sea in a washing-tub as sail in a ship from which a black cat had been thrown overboard; whilst others would apprehend the most fearful consequences should one of the small sea-birds, called "Mother Carey's chickens," have been shot. What particular influence the sable quadruped is supposed to exercise over the ship is not easy to say; but its ghost, or the ghosts of all drowned black cats from the earliest times of cat-history, will surely haunt the vessel in the dark nights, or amid the sulphurous glare of the thunder-storm. As to the aforesaid "chickens," the belief is decidedly strong that death will enter the crew of any vessel from which one has been shot. Should a careless passenger or officer, unimpressed with the superstitions which find a home in Jack's mind, shoot one of these birds, immediately the ship is filled with predictions of evil; and it is strange if in some way the croakers do not bring about the accomplishment of their own prophecies. But the superstition of the sailor has nothing of the feminine about it-it is wild as the fables of the north, and has little effect in softening the manners. The manners of a sailor! What are they like? Some may think of a bear practising the courtier, or the politeness of Suvaroff in the moment of battle. But the sailor is not rude, far from it; he is only bluff of which British quality he has abundance. "An overstrained sense of manliness is the characteristic of seafaring men. This often gives an appearance of want of feeling, and even of cruelty. From this, the sick are neglected at sea; and whatever sailors may be ashore, a sick man finds little sympathy or attention forward or aft. A man, too, can have nothing peculiar or sacred on board ship; for all the nicer feelings they take pride in disregarding, both in themselves and others. A thin-skinned man could not live an hour on shipboard. One would be torn raw unless he had the hide of an ox. A moment of natural feeling for home and friends, and then the frigid routine of sea life returned." With all this roughness is combined a great and almost reckless generosity, united to much dash and fearlessness of manner, which seem inseparably connected with our notions of a sailor. Life at sea opens some strange chapters in the book of human life. All sailors are not men from the common classes of society. Sometimes the forecastle becomes the sorrowful home of one whose early life was passed amidst case and refinement. The wild spendthrift, who fled from college, wandered an exile and beggar through strange lands, and at last finds a refuge on the deck of a ship, may here and there be found. Others are frequently men of superior natural powers and adventurous habits, who, fitted for the highest employments, live and die common sailors. Some, too, have been forced on the sea by a long series of crime and desperate profligacy. Thus life at sea exhibits some of the most startling histories of human eccentricity-weakness and sin relieved by much of a higher and nobler nature. Some of these seawanderers might furnish materials for the most stirring biographies, their lives being marked by the greatest contrasts at one time all brightness; at another, blackened by crime or suffering. Were some of these to read the essay of the celebrated Foster on a "Man writing Memoirs of himself," and then note the various scenes through which they have passed, with the peculiar feelings linked to each past deed, some dark revelation of the deeps of man's nature would startle the moral philosopher. Dana thus mentions one of those seamen who, though ranked as common, are in mental power far above the thousands who deem the sailor always an ignorant or an unthinking machine: "Tom Harris was the most remarkable man I have ever seen; but the most remarkable thing about him was the power of his mind. His memory was perfect, seeming to form a regular chain reaching from his earliest childhood up to the time I knew E |