ine wrath sent as a punishment
for the sin of some one of them not having, for example,
paid a debt of honour before sailing. The guilty person or
persons were soon identified, even if they attempted to join
in the secret investigation, and the penalty of being
ostracised was rigidly enforced. It was a hard fate, which
sometimes continued the whole voyage, especially if no
redeeming features presented themselves. The sailor's
calling makes superstition a part of his nature. The weird
moaning of the wind suggests to him at times saintly
messages from afar; and he is easily lost in reverie. He
holds sweet converse with souls that have long since passed
into another sphere, but the hallucinary charm causes him to
fix his faith in the belief that they are hovering about
him, so that he may convey to them some message to transmit
to those friends or relatives who are the objects of his
devout veneration. Yet he ceases to be a sentimentalist when
duty calls him to face the realities of life. An order to
shorten sail transforms him at once into another being. He
usually swears with refined eloquence on unexpected
occasions, when a sudden order draws him from visionary
meditation. Dreams, which may be the creation of
indigestible junk--that is, salt beef which may have been
round the Horn a few times--are realities: privileged
communications from a mystic source. There is great vying
with each other in the relation of some grotesque nightmare
fancy, which may have lasted the twentieth part of a second,
but which takes perhaps a quarter of an hour to repeat;
traverses vast space in a progression of hideous tragedy and
calamitous shipwreck; and is served up with increased
profusion of detail when the history of the passage is
manuscripted to their homes and to their lovers. Here is an
instance of this mania in an unusually exaggerated form. For
obvious reasons it is undesirable that the name of the
vessel, or the captain, should be mentioned here. The
captain had a dream, or, as he stated, a vision, when off
Cape Horn bound to Valparaiso in a barque belonging to a
South Wales port. The vessel had been tossed about for days
with nothing set but close reefed topsails, amid the angry
storming and churning of liquid mountains. One midnight,
when eight bells had been struck to call the middle watch,
there suddenly appeared on the poop the commander, who was
known to be a man of God. He gave the order to hard up the
helm and make