Letters from India Volume I/To a Friend 5
But I know we are within ten degrees of the line, and that the thermometer is at 80° the coolest part of the twenty-four hours, and that though they say we have been only twenty-four days on board, I am quite sure it must be nearly a year.
This is to be the beginning of a letter to you, and if the ship does not roll always, I will try to turn it into a journal, and you must keep it, as I cannot write another for myself, and should like to know in after-days how much I endured on board this monster. I shall never believe it when I read it.
I have not been half so sick since we left Madeira, and there are only three days on which I have not dined upstairs; but still it is a detestable life. I am always more or less giddy, and never can read or occupy myself for five minutes without growing worse; so that makes the days long, and the nights are long of themselves, for the noise and heat make it impossible to sleep much. The creaking of the bulkheads and staircases grew so intolerable, that Captain Grey was forced at last into taking some active measures; and it was really true that, except a next neighbour, no two people could hear each other speak in the same cabin. Now, the creaking is not more than is agreeable, so as to harmonise with the other noises of the ship. I wonder whether George would have come if he had known the full extent of the horrors of the voyage. I make a point of asking him constantly, ‘Do you give it up?’ and though he has not said yes, yet I think he must at last, and let us go home again. The whole thing is such a thorough take in! Sometimes the wind is favourable, and then everybody goes fussing about. ‘Well, now we have got the trade; those trades are quite surprising—such luck!’
Then the next hour there comes a dead calm, which I like; for I am not sick in a calm, and by all accounts Calcutta is no pleasanter than the ‘Jupiter,’ so I like it better than tearing along till one is shaken to pieces; but everybody else gets into another fuss, and they go about, ‘Well, we have lost the trade. I don’t feel sure we ever had the real trade. I believe we are in the variables.’ Just as if it signified the least; ‘the wind bloweth where it listeth,’ and it is a mockery calling any item of our monotonous life by the name of variable. And the shocking thing is, that though I take great relief in pouring out my complaints to you in unmeasured language, yet I believe we are making an uncommonly prosperous voyage, with ten times as many comforts as most people have at sea; so what must a sea life be in general?
We are all talking eternally of those stupid ceremonies about crossing the Line; there are 112 victims, and the horror with which they look to it is not to be told; particularly some of the young ones, and also some of the unpopular characters in the ship, who are likely to be very roughly used on that day.
The midshipmen are going to get up a play too, which is a good amusement, as it gives them something new to talk about. Wright and Jones are very busy making dresses for Mrs. Sneak and Mrs. Bruin. Neptune and Amphitrite have begged a great many of our things, and have riven the ribbons off half my caps and bonnets.
I hope you have read Sir James Mackintosh—just the book you will like. I have seldom been more interested. Such extracts! and do you observe what good quotations there are from Bacon? I think we don’t study Bacon half enough.
I forget what happened to the weather—the weeks are so long I cannot remember a whole one; but I know there are five days that the ship pitched so much I could neither eat, nor speak, nor stir. It is so tiresome of me, and nobody else is the least ill, and I thought I had got over it too. However, we are now in the ‘south-east trade’ (such humbugs!); but, at all events, we have sailed very smoothly the last ten days, and moreover we crossed the Line at ten on Friday night. It is a great rope, you know—not one of the lines that are sent by post. Neptune hailed the ship, &c., and yesterday we all went out to see the procession, which was very well got up. Amphitrite, a very tall sailor, looked quite handsome in one of Wright’s gowns and my cap. Neptune made a speech to George, and begged to introduce his wife to us with the two babies—‘the precious pledges of our affection;’ and he gave a letter to Fanny and me, saying the weather had been so bad he could not catch us any fish, but he begged to present us with a couple of snow-birds—two white pigeons; and we all said our say, and made our little jokes, and then got out of the way as fast as we could before the shaving and ducking began. As far as sea-water is concerned, I do not see much objection to the business, if it amuses them to be tossed into a sail and half drowned, and to have engines playing on them from below, and buckets emptied on them from above; but the shaving is a horrid process, and the two or three obnoxious individuals were nearly choked with pitch, and very much cut with a razor, jagged like a sharp saw. It is a savage-looking process, and I wonder the captain did not stop it.
Till we get to Calcutta (a physical impossibility, for we shall be dead of old age long before the Cape), I must go on making my journal into single letters; and even then, you will probably think them extravagant amusements; but I don’t think you will either, judging by myself. I would give 5l. at this moment for the smallest three-cornered note from you; and though in England you cannot guess the mad desperate yearning after friends, and home, and letters, that eats one’s heart out in this floating prison, yet I know you will be so glad to see some long letters from me! I know it—
by this conscious sign,
The deep communion of my soul with thine.
It is one of the worst parts of this business, that when we could understand each other so well there are no means of our getting at each other but by these vain longings and regrets.
We had the sun right over our heads at twelve o’clock to-day, and ought all to have been as shadowless as Peter Schlemihl for once in our lives, but it happened to be a cloudy day. I must own the heat is not that annoyance we were told to expect; it was troublesome a fort-night ago, for a few days, but it is really very nice weather now; and we have been going on since Monday a good steady pace, which promises to bring us to Rio on Monday or Tuesday, if we get over the danger of a calm off Cape Frio, which is a common event. We make lotteries for each place—Madeira, the Line, Rio, &c.; and seven of us put in a dollar apiece and draw a day of the week; in fact, there is nothing we do not do to try and seem amused, but we make sad failure of it. takes horrible fits of bore at times; George hardly ever, except when the wind falls and we cannot make seven knots an hour, and then he fidgets and groans. I have not seen Fanny in such good health and spirits for ages. The servants are all very contented. Rosina (the ayah) is a good merry old black thing. Chance is the only individual amongst us whose happiness has been actually improved by the voyage. He has a little window of his own, with a netting over it, in the after—cabin; and there he sits all day, making his oddest sobs of pleasure at the foam, or Mother Carey’s chickens, or anything that he can see moving. It is supposed that he keeps a log for the benefit of the other dogs.