Harper's New Monthly Magazine, No. VII, December 1850, Vol. II. Various
amid long desolations, and kindred forms of vast and coarse sublimity – be to his ashes!
It is lamentable to contemplate the fate of such a man. Newly married, sobered into strength and wisdom, in the prime of life, and with mildness settling down upon his character, like moonlight on the rugged features of the Sphinx, he was snatched away. "One feels," says Scott of him, "as if the eagle had been brought down by a 'mousing owl.'" More melancholy still to find him dying "game," as it is commonly called – that is, without hope and without God in the world – caracolling and exulting, as he plunged into the waters of what he deemed the bottomless and the endless night; as if a spirit so strong as his could die – as if a spirit so stained as his could escape the judgment – the judgment of a God as just as he is merciful; but also – blessed be his name! – as merciful as he is just.
RATTLIN THE REEFER'S DREAM. A TOUGH BUT TRUE YARN
It was about the middle of August, 18 – , that the Old Lucifer was cruising in the Monar Passage, a strait about forty miles wide, which separates the eastern end of St. Domingo from the island of Porto Rico. I was "middy" of the morning watch: it had been dead calm all night, but the gentle trade-wind was rising with the rising sun, and morning was glorious with the magic gilding of a tropical sky. Some time after eight bells,7 when Ned Rattlin, who was never very punctual or methodical in any of his movements, came on deck to relieve me, and I was about to hurry down to my breakfast of warm skilligalee, or, as our old French negro, who served as midshipmen's steward and maid-of-all-work, with true French tact for murdering the king's English, called it, "giggeragee," Ralph seized me by the collar of my jacket, crying,
"Avast! Careless, my boy; you really must not make sail for the cockpit till you have heard the horrid dream which I had last night or this morning, for I dreamt it twice over, and can not get it out of my head. I must tell it to some one, and you are the only one that I dare tell it to; I should be so confoundedly laughed at by the servum pocus of the cockpit; but you and I know each other, and have some pursuits and feelings in common. We have our day-dreams and our night-dreams, and we know that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in the philosophy of a midshipman's berth."
Now, had not Ralph seized hold of me by the lappel of my jacket, as before said, I should certainly have cut and run; for a reefer of sixteen, who is just relieved from the morning-watch, which he has kept for four hours, from four o'clock in the morning, and who has taken a cold bath in the wash-deck tub, is not likely to be in a humor to let his breakfast of cocoa or skilligalee grow cold. But, with the powerful grip of Ralph's shoulder-of-mutton fist on my collar, there was no chance of escape without tearing my jacket from clue to earring, which I felt that I could not afford to do; for, as I have before remarked, Ralph Rattlin was my senior by two years at least, and overtopped me in height by a foot, or something near it. I therefore made a virtue of necessity, and said,
"Well, Jemmy, if you'll promise not to keep me long, and allow me, first, to run down below and tell old Dom to keep my burgoo8 warm, I'll return and hear your wonderful dream, though I fancy it's all gammon, and only manufactured to try the capacity of my swallow; because you know that, like yourself, I have a bit of hankering after the marvelous, and, as the negro Methodist said of the prophet Jonah, am 'a tellible fellow for fish,' though I doubt whether, like him, I could quite swallow a whale."
"Well, then, make sail, you little flibbertigibbet, and make haste back, that's a good fellow."
The above elegant soubriquet he generally favored me with, when, in Yankee parlance, I had "riled" him and got his "dander up," as was always the case when he was called Jemmy Caster; he being but too conscious that his long loose figure and shambling gait bore, at that time, no small resemblance to those of a waister of that name, though he afterward became a remarkably fine, handsome man, bearing a striking resemblance, not without sufficient reason, to King George the Fourth.
In a few minutes I had made arrangements with old Dominique for the safe custody of my breakfast, and was again pacing the lee side of the quarter-deck, by the side of my gigantic messmate.
"And now, my dear Careless," said he, with unusual gravity, "if you can be serious for a few minutes, I will relate to you this infernal dream, which so preys upon my spirits that I do not feel like myself this morning, and must unburden my mind. I dreamt, then, that I was on the second dog-watch, as you know I shall be this evening; it was between seven and eight bells, the night pitch-dark, with the wind blowing fresh from the northeast, the ship under double-reefed topsails, and foresail close hauled on the starboard tack, running at the rate of five knots as I had found upon heaving the log. Suddenly the sea became like one sheet of flame; its appearance was awfully grand; the head of every wave, as it curled over and broke, diffused itself in broad streaks and flashes of blue and white flame; and I involuntarily repeated to myself the two lines of that singular, soul-freezing rhapsody, the 'Ancient Mariner,' which, though descriptive of a very different state of the ocean from that now presented to my imagination, I felt to be most applicable to what I saw before me —
The water, like a witch's oils,
Burnt green, and blue, and white;
and then, referring to the two preceding lines of the stanzas —
About, about, in reel and rout,
The death-fires danced at night.
For that strangely wild and beautiful poem had taken a powerful hold on my sleeping fancy. I asked myself, with a shudder, can there be 'death-fires?' And it seemed that the question uttered half aloud, had no sooner passed my lips, than it received its answer in a most strange and fearful manner; for a voice, like no human voice that I ever yet heard, shrieked out, in a tone of horror and distress, that made my blood run cold, 'Ship a-hoy – ship a-hoy!' I turned toward the lee quarter, whence the voice came; and, jumping on a carronade-slide, I saw the body of a man appearing out of the sea, from the waist upward, of gigantic size, and of most forbidding – and at the same time woeful – countenance. His body appeared covered with scales, like that of a fish, which reflected the ghastly phosphoric light of the waters in radiating hues of green and gold, and purple and violet. His ample jaws, which opened from ear to ear, and which were furnished with a triple row of saw-shaped teeth, like those of a shark, were fringed with a thick curled beard and mustache, of pale sea-green, which fell in wavy masses, mingling with long elf-locks of the same sickly hue, over his broad breast and shoulders; his deep sunk eyes flashed out with a strange unearthly light from beneath thick, overhanging eyebrows of that self-same sea-green hue, and his head was surrounded and surmounted with a waving diadem of 'green, and blue and white' flames, flashing upward, and radiating sideways, and curling over their waving tops, so as to ape the exact form of ostrich feathers. Awful as the figure was, and though it made my flesh creep, yet dreaming as I was, I felt conscious that there was something of the ridiculous attached to the bizarrerie of its appearance. You know my vein, Careless, and will give me credit for a true exposition of my feelings, when I tell you that, though in a most awful funk, I could not help adopting the words of Trinculo, and asking myself, half aloud,
What have we here – a man or a fish?
I had not, till that moment, noticed the quarter-master of the watch, a fine old weather-beaten seaman, who stood close to my side, and was, like myself, attentively watching the movements of the strange demon-like merman, who continued to follow the ship within a few fathoms of the lee quarter-gallery, with a continual bowing or nodding motion of the head, which caused his plumes of livid flame to flash and corruscate, so that, to my eyes, they appeared to assume various forms of terror, as of 'fiery flying serpents,' entwining his temples and thence shooting upward, hissing and protruding their forked tongues, and lashing the air with their wings and tails of flame; and then, again, they subsided as before into the form of gracefully-curling ostrich plumes; meanwhile he kept opening his terrific jaws, from which issued a thin blue luminous vapor, as if in act to speak, but uttered no audible sound, except that every now and then he would wring his huge hands, which appeared to be webbed to the second joint of the fingers, like the feet of a water fowl,
Time is regulated on board a king's ship by a half-hour glass, which is placed in the binnacle, in charge of the quarter-master of the watch on deck, and who when he turns the glass, passes the word forward to strike the bell, which, in a man-of-war, is hung to the main-bitts, just over the main-hatchway, and where it is consequently heard with facility all over the ship.
Burgoo, or skilligalee, is the sea-term for what in Scotland is called "parritch," and in Ireland "stirabout," namely, oatmeal boiled in water.