Chapter VII: Part 7

Bacon, in his “New Atlantis,” makes the father of Solomon’s House say,
“We have ships and boats for going under water, and brooking of seas;
also swimming girdles and supporters.”

What value the diving vessel of to-day has she owes to conditions which are scarcely much older than the date of the application of electricity to purposes of marine locomotion and to naval warfare. And even if you gave her an electric engine, but provided her with no better apparatuses of destruction than those which preceded dynamite, gun-cotton, and the like she could scarcely, for all her twin screws, her forty-five horse power, her glow lamps, condensed air, and her plates of steel prove more useful than such a boat as that of Fulton, or as that of Cornelius Drebelle, which, urged by twelve rowers, swept under the surface of what was then the silver Thames. Our enormous ordnance and the tremendous destructive forces which we have received from the laboratory of the chemist entitle us to smile, perhaps, at the sheet-lightning and faint thunders of our grandsires’ conflicts. Yet, on the whole, every one must admit that they made a fine show with what they had. Individually the sixty-four-pounder would be but a mean weapon, as weapons now go; yet the flames of a triple row of them caused a mighty blaze, and could one even now hear the explosion of the broadside batteries of any wooden liner you may name the aggregate uproar might suggest the detonation of some greater engine of war than was ever cast at Elswick or at Woolwich.

In submarine machinery the old folks never got further than the Fenians manage to go; a clock in a barrel of gunpowder defined the extent of their genius as murderers. On the surface of the water their most formidable arrangements were the fire-ship and the bomb-vessel, the latter a ketch very strongly built and equipped with mortars. An example of what may be termed explosion-machinery dates as far back as 1585. It was used to destroy the bridge of boats at the siege of Antwerp, and consisted of a ship in which was built a vault of stone filled with two hundred barrels of powder, over which were placed stones of all sizes, together with shot, iron chains, spikes, and so forth. This mine was exploded by a secret fuse, and was so contrived that the vessel did not take fire till it bumped against the bridge, which it shivered. There is extant the description of a fire-ship, called The Infernal, that was used at the bombardment of St. Maloes in 1693. She was a new galliot of about three hundred tons. The bottom of her hold was lined with one hundred barrels of gunpowder, covered with pitch, tar, brimstone, resin, tow, straw, and faggots. Over these things was a perforated platform, upon which were three hundred and forty chests or mortars filled with grenades, cannon-balls, iron chains, loaded firearms, and large pieces of metal wrapped in tarpaulins. This abominable contrivance proved a failure, for after it had sailed fairly enough to the foot of the wall to which it was to be fastened a blast of off-shore wind sent it on to a rock, where the people in charge were forced to fire her and hastily withdraw. The chests or mortars were wet, and did not blow up; but the explosion of what was dry was furious enough to level a part of the town wall and destroy the roofs and a portion of the walls of about three hundred houses.

In 1804, the English attempted to blow up some vessels off Boulogne by casks or coffers furnished with clock-work explosives. A naval officer, describing the effect of these machines, says: “Each cask was primed and set, so as to go off at any desired time after drawing out a pin. A reward depended upon bringing away this pin. We came within pistol shot of a corvette before we let go our coffers, under a fire of shot and shells from the shore. The first explosion, which took place in a few minutes, was very great, and seemed to strike the enemy with general consternation.”[56] Others were sunk, but would not go off. These coffers were made of thick plank lined with lead. When filled they were tarred, covered with canvas, and “payed” with hot pitch. They are described as exactly resembling a large coffin. They each weighed as much as two tons. To one end a line was secured to which was affixed a sort of anchor. Line and anchor were floated with pieces of cork, the idea being that the anchor would catch the cable of the ship that was to be destroyed, and cause the coffer to swing alongside. They were weighted with shot, so that they should only just float, partly that they might come along unnoticed, and partly that, if seen, they would be difficult to hit.

Footnote 56:

“Naval Hist. of the Recent War, 1804.”

These primitive and, as a rule, inoperative “dodges” find another illustration in an experiment made in the Downs in 1805. A large brig was anchored abreast of Walmer Castle, about three-quarters of a mile from the shore. Two or three boats then rowed off and placed the machine across the cable of the brig. The tide in a few moments carried it under the brig, where it affixed itself. Presently the clock-work exploded the contents, a small cloud of smoke was seen to rise, and the brig is declared to have gone to pieces “without any noise or appearance of fire.” In less than the third of a minute not a vestige of her could be seen from the shore. “General Don, with a number of military and naval officers, went with Sir Sydney Smith to Mr. Pitt’s, at Walmer Castle, to witness the experiment, and expressed the utmost astonishment at the destructive powers of the invention.” This was evidently much such a contrivance as the coffers which had been used in the previous year off Boulogne, with some improvement, as perhaps in its power of sliding with the tide under instead of alongside a vessel and attaching itself to the keel.

I find the Americans using clock-work as a means of exploding gunpowder some time before the period of its adoption by the English. In 1774, Captain Vandeput, in the _Asia_, of sixty-four guns, whilst stationed off New York, was nearly blown up by a plan to which, unhappily, we in these more civilized times are no strangers. A quantity of powder was put on board a small vessel. In one of the barrels was an alarum or piece of clock-work, that was wound up before it was placed in the barrel and attached to a musket lock that fired the powder around it. The powder was for the use of the _Asia_, and the barrels would have been received on board together, of course, with that which contained the clock-work arrangement, but for the terror of one of the American prisoners who was in the secret and communicated the plot to Vandeput. There seems a horrible meanness in this manner of waging war. Yet there is nothing more despicable in blowing up a foe by putting a barrel of powder with clock-work in it inside his ship than in annihilating him by means of a coffin load of combustibles fired by clock-work under his ship.

It has been reserved for this age, however, to carry these theories of hidden and deadly warfare to a height assuredly never dreamt of by the most visionary of the old exploders. I call them theories, for so they must remain till a war shall determine them into facts. And, indeed, I think it need not be doubted that many of what in peace-time and on paper we think will be desperately terrible features of all future naval struggles will prove mere impediments and clumsy, fallible, and misleading devices when the time to test them comes. Mr. Pitt and the military officers at Walmer Castle might justly be astonished at the sight of a stout brig crumbling away under a puff of smoke, but it was Jack’s old-fashioned pike that was then doing the real work; that had begun it, and that had to complete it.

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_QUEER FISH._

I was lately reading an account of two queer fish which had been sent to the South Kensington Aquarium. One was a trout, three years old, that was forced to carry its tail hard a starboard—that is, the tail stands out at right angles with the fish’s body. Whether this deformity is due to gout, or whether the fish is in the case of the drunken Irishman who, on becoming sober and discovering that the surgeon at a hospital had been trying, without result, to put his hip right, cried out, “I was born so!” I do not know. That a trout should be able to steer a straight course through the water, however slowly, with his helm hard over, proves that this kind of fish must have a trick of navigation above the reach of mortal mariners. The second marine oddity was a stickleback of the length of a young rat, and extremely like an old mouse. I think I see these two strokes of nature swimming in company and consoling each other. We do not require either the fables of Æsop or the maxims of Rochefoucauld to assure us that there is something in the misfortunes of our best friends that does not secretly displease us. Possibly the stickleback in his heart thinks that, on the whole, he would rather look like a mouse than carry his tail through life athwart ships. On the other hand, the trout may consider that, though the obligation of having on all occasions to struggle against a weather helm must weigh heavy on a life whose essential condition is one of fins, yet, being a fish, it is better to be distorted as a fish than to carry the emotions of a fish in the caricature of a mouse. Presuming these to be their confidential opinions, it may be supposed that their efforts to console each other would not be entirely wanting in unconscious humour.

When absurd natural touches of this kind are brought under one’s attention, one gets to see how it happens that in the old voyages the relaters of the wonders they viewed sometimes wrote as if their hair stood on end. Suppose the stickleback to be a denizen of the deep; then conceive it, wearing the shape of a mouse, to rise beside some becalmed vessel filled with a company of “pilgrimes” of the kind whose narratives are preserved in “Purchas” and “Hakluyt.” The object is observed by some old mariner who carries a child’s eye for wonders and marvels amid the knobs and warts of his walnutshell of a face. Before he can sing out the mouse vanishes. But the ancient mariner has beheld it, and he straightway goes and reports the astonishing spectacle to two or three other ancient mariners, representing the strange fish possibly as of the size of a cat. The tale is bandied from one long-since venerable nautical mouth to another till by the time it reaches the captain’s cabin the sea-mouse has grown as big as a porpoise, collecting, in the course of its enlargement, a very pretty apparel of flaming eyes, “ears which itt did cocke, nostrils whence proceeded a sort of white smoak, a skin whereof ye furre was exceeding riche, and did shine as though covered with manye gemmes of brighte and piercynge lighte.”[57]

Footnote 57:

Take Captain Edward Haies’ description of a sea-lion in his narrative
of Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s Voyage: “So upon Saturday in the afternoon,
August 31, we changed our course, and returned back for England; at
which very instant, even in winding about, there passed along between
us and toward the land, which we now forsook, a very lion, to our
seeming in shape, hair, and colour; not swimming after the manner of a
beast, by moving of his feet, but rather sliding upon the water with
his whole body. Thus he passed along, turning his head to and fro,
yawning and gaping wide, with ugly demonstration of long teeth and
glaring eyes, and to bid us a farewell (coming right against the
Hinde) he sent forth a horrible voice, roaring and bellowing as doth a
lion, which spectacle we all beheld, so far as we were able to discern
the same, as men prone to wonder at every strange thing, as this
doubtless was, to see a lion in the ocean sea, or fish in shape of a
lion; what opinion others had thereof, and chiefly the General
himself, I forbear to deliver, but he took it for _bonum omen_,
rejoicing that he was to war against such an enemy, if it were the
devil.”—Hakluyt’s “Voyages,” vol. iii. p. 154.

Few of the queer fish one reads of in the old travels but were evolved in some such fashion as this, no doubt. It was in a sort of stealthy, peering way, crossing themselves often and chanting their litanies, that the early navigators entered the deep solitudes of the great oceans. Whatever befel them was startling or affrighting, or of wild and amazing beauty. Their meteors were not the waterspouts of to-day; the eclipse provoked their _misericordias_ and _Salve Reginas_ and rendered ashen the chocolate cheeks of the darkest-burnt on board; the glittering exhalations, known to us as corposants, which danced in the gale or burnt in the calm at the yard-arms or on the bowsprit end, were prayed to as the spirit or presence of a saint; the very thunder, though its roar was no louder than that which broke the repose of the Portugal or Andalusian hills of the seamen, snatched a note of horror, reverberated an echo of terror, from the solemn immensity of the liquid plain into whose horizon over the ships’ bows the mariners stared under the shelter of their hands, gaping for the auriferous shores which day after day for weeks their admirals, their captain-generals, had told them they should have in view anon.

“The pilot smote his breast; the watchman cried,
“Land!” and his voice in faltering accents died.
At once the fury of the prow was quelled;
And (whence or why from many an age withheld)
Shrieks, not of men, were mingling in the blast,
And armed shapes of God-like stature passed!
Slowly along the evening sky they went,
As on the edge of some vast battlement;
Helmet and shield and spear and gonfalon
Streaming a baleful light that was not of the sun!”[58]

Footnote 58:

“The Voyage of Columbus.” There are several fine passages in this
neglected poem. Rogers, in some places, has caught the spirit of the
old chronicles very happily.

I am not surprised, then, that many kinds of queer fish—of fish queerer than the trout with its rheumatically-warped tail, or the stickleback with the aspect of a mouse—should figure among the astonishments which the mariners of those prying and creeping, but most bold-hearted, times, set down for the edification of posterity. You particularly notice in these records how exquisitely in keeping with the whole picture of those old ships and oddly-clad sailors, as one loves to imagine them, and with the spirit of the mystery of those unattempted seas as breathed by the salt and ancient chronicler, are the terms in which the writers convey their discoveries. As, for instance, in this passage from the first voyage of Columbus: “A Wagtail flew very near the Ship, and they perceived that the Currents ran not so strong as before, but turned back with the Tides, and there were fewer Weeds; and the Day following they took many gilt Fishes.” The word may not strike others as it strikes me; but there is something in the expression “_gilt_ fishes” that is like a revelation of the intertropical situation of the mariners. You think of the long bald gleaming heave of the darkly pure blue swell of the sea, the fragrance of the yet hidden islands of the Spanish main blowing sweet in the warm wind coming from the west, the liquid light of the moon showering its splendour upon the pallid fabric and her bearded men, and gemming the quaint old structure with diamonds in the dew along her rails and on her yards, lunar brilliants that shine with the glory of the stars which softly crowd the velvet deeps of the sky of the Columbian Antilles. To whom but to mariners exploring for the first time the wonderland of ocean hidden, for how many centuries? from all Europe behind the Atlantic sea line, could such a queer fish as this exhibit itself? “They saw a great Fish, like a middling Whale, and it had on the Neck a large Shell, like that of a Tortoise, little less than a Target; the Head it held above water was like a Pipe or But, the Tail like that of a Tunny Fish, very large, and two vast Fins on the side.”[59] Yet, queer as this marine man-in-armour seems to have been, with its target and its head like a butt, Columbus appears to have known enough of it to enable him to witness in it a barometrical signification; for “by this Fish and other observations in the sky”—the “other” here is a very fine—“the Admiral perceived there was like to be a change of Weather.”

Footnote 59:

“The First Voyage of Columbus” in Harris’s collection.

One might justly count that fish queer which was believed to breed birds. How mean as an illustration of Nature’s capacity as a humourist would be the gnarled and rounded trout or the stickleback like a mouse side by side with a turtle, capable of producing, say, wrens or canaries! The reverend and learned Mr. John Ray, whilst travelling some two centuries ago through the Low Countries, took some trouble to inquire into this matter of bird-breeding by turtles and tortoises, and pronounced it—humbug! He had to oppose a very profound reasoner, no less a personage, indeed, than Michael Meyerus—of whom, of course, every schoolboy has heard—a gentleman who has devoted a whole big book to the subject. But though he terms the statement false and frivolous, there is so much of possibly designed ambiguity in his “explanation” that I confess I cannot understand what he means. The “bernacles,” he says, which are said to be bred in the tortoise, are “hatch’d of eggs of their own laying, like other birds.” Like _other_ birds! Did the learned Mr. Ray conceive a tortoise to be a bird?[60] The Hollanders, he goes on, in their third voyage to discover the North-East Passage, found two islands, “in one of which they observed a great number of these Geese,” he is talking of tortoises! “sitting on their Eggs.” He sums up: “All the Ground of this fancy, as I conceive, is because this fish hath a bunch of _cirri_ somewhat resembling a tuft of feathers, or the tail of a bird, which it sometimes puts out into the water, and draws back again.” Here to be sure is a very great muddle of good meaning. One may take it that the sailors who believed that turtle and tortoise “engendered fowlys” were not going to suffer their solemn affirmations to be discredited by such reasoning as the Rev. John Ray’s.[61]

Footnote 60:

By “bernacle” I suspect he means the barnacle goose.

Footnote 61:

Sinbad the sailor saw “a bird that cometh forth from a sea-shell and
layeth its eggs and hatcheth them upon the surface of the water and
never cometh forth upon the sea upon the face of the earth.” If the
tortoise breeds birds time enough is vouchsafed it for that work.
Grose speaks of the shells of two tortoises: one in the library at
Lambeth Palace that was brought there alive in 1633, and died of the
frost in 1753; the other that was brought to Fulham in 1628, and died
in the same year as the other. “What were the ages of these tortoises
at the time they were placed in the above gardens is not
known.”—_Olio._ 288.

So far as the superstitious emotions they excited are concerned, it may be truly said of queer fish that even in their ashes live the wonted fires. As an example: the quantity of petrified fish-bones found at Malta fired the ingenious Monkish imagination with the idea of a curious fable. It was said that St. Paul when at Malta, on being bitten in the hand by a viper, did by his prayers obtain of God that all the serpents in Malta should be turned into stones. That all the petrified bones upon which this fancy was based belonged to queer fish is not to be supposed; but that many queer fish did deposit their bones on the Maltese shore in the course of ages need not be questioned, and such is my faith in the distorted trouts and mouse-formed sticklebacks of the deep that I do not scruple to count the above fable concerning St. Paul and the vipers due to the inspirations of the fossilized remains of the “queer fish” only. Was not the sea-unicorn a queer fish in the judgment of our great grandsires? If not, it is strange that they should have endowed its horn or sword with quite magical properties. It was even believed of the little _cheval marin_, or _cavaletto_, that if roasted and partly devoured, the remainder being applied to the wound, after some preparing of it with honey and vinegar, would cure the bite of a mad dog. There is no doubt it got this reputation from its fancied resemblance to the unicorn. An old Danish traveller thought to explode this superstition of medicinal and magical virtues in the horn of the sea-unicorn: “Supposing that what has been pretended to be the true horn was really such, I will venture to affirm there is no more virtue in it than in that of a stag, a goat, or elephant’s tooth, which is made use of to stop the spitting of blood, which is done by the astringent quality of these horns, and that cannot so properly be called a virtue as a malignity.” Yet this writer was one of a trading party who presented the King of Denmark with two of these horns, as though they were extraordinary rareties and possessed of a score of curative qualities; and his Majesty took them to be real unicorn horns—the horns of a fabled beast—and valued them accordingly. A queer fish indeed in those old times, but common enough in these, and universally known as the “sword fish.” Dr. Edward Browne when at Utrecht, two hundred years ago, saw three of such horns, one of which, tipped with silver, was used as a drinking cup; and he enters them in his notes as wonders. Possibly he was impressed by the sight of a drinking cup five feet long. But he was in the land of Mynheer van Dunk, who was probably living at that time. He tells of a Danish king that had one hundred horns of the sea-unicorn “for the making of a magnificent throne.” And what finer throne should an old sea king desire to sit upon?

It is not hard to conceive that fish undergo constitutional and organic changes in the course of centuries, and that, say, about the period of the Deluge the sea was full of objects which would strike us as extremely queer specimens now, though to Noah, Ham, and Shem they would be as familiar as the whiting or the dab is to us. But I cannot imagine that very remarkable transformations or developments could take place in three or four, or even five or six centuries. Who shall tell, for example, how many hundreds of years have gone to the making of the unhappy stickleback that was sent to the Aquarium? The changes would be gradual. Taking the evolvments in their gradations, you would possibly find the family mouse-like expression growing less and less marked as you worked your way back through this stickleback’s pedigree. But the extreme circumstantiality of the old voyagers’ descriptions of queer fish should almost really persuade one to suppose that what they beheld died shortly after having been viewed, so that the like has never been seen since. Here is an example of my meaning, taken from Commodore Beaulieu’s voyage:

“While the calm and the excessive heat continued we saw a certain white thing about the bigness of an ostrich-egg floating upon the water, which sunk when the ship came within fifty or sixty paces of it. It resembled a man’s head without hair, and some say they observed two black eyes and a mouth upon it.”

It is the “some say” of these tales which makes them so bewildering. Did this remarkable sea-face with its two black eyes wink? Did it sneer as it sank? Why did not “others say” that ere sinking it raised its thumb to its nose and extended its fingers in the form of a fan, “thereby designing an ironical salutation of farewell”?

But a mere bald head with black eyes and a mouth floating about the sea is but a twopenny queer fish compared with the marine curiosities which ancient mariners have beheld and even given portraits of. Figure a hairy whale, four acres big, with eye-sockets so capacious that fifteen men could sit in each of them, as in a public house parlour, and pass jacks of whiskey about; the eyes themselves of ten cubits in circumference! or hear Père Fournier tell of the monster that “in the reign of Philip II. of Spain”—the epoch of marine chimeras dire!—“appeared in the ocean with two great wings, and sailing like a ship. A vessel saw it, and breaking one of its wings with a cannon ball, the monster swiftly entered the Straits of Gibraltar with horrible cries, and finally came ashore at Valentia, where it was found dead.” Then follow these circumstantial strokes: “Its skull was so large that seven men could enter into it. A man on horseback could enter its throat. The jaw-bone, seventeen feet long, is still in the Escurial.” Most readers would feel inclined to say of this monster, “Very like a whale!”

Unhappily conjecture is blinded by imaginative touches, such as those of the eyes and mouth of the bald-headed fungus of Beaulieu’s voyage. Queer fish as big as islands are constantly occurring in the old accounts. The whale was Job’s Leviathan in those days, and the goggling sailor was easily persuaded by his terrors to multiply the mountain of blubber by two or three hundred. A man saw a whale in the sea of Zendi that was nearly forty-five thousand cubits long—about a mile, if the cubit be eighteen inches. Sinbad wrote in perfect correspondence with the spirit of the Ancient Mariner when he describes his landing on an island which suddenly trembled and proved the back of a prodigious fish. Others tell of fish like cows and camels; of fish dressed like monks and bishops, cowled and mitred, and gazing up at the ship with austere and lenten countenances. Others arrived home with the news of the kraken, that “hugest of living things” as Sir Walter Scott describes it, whose horns would be seen “welking” and waving over the heights of a fog-bank, to the horror and consternation of even the hardiest fishermen, who made haste to bear away under all press of oar and sail. Others, again, would tell of cuttle fish, or squid, so vast in size and titanic in power that they easily coiled their serpentine membranes round about the masts of ships of a thousand tons and quietly capsized them.

Where have all these queer fish gone? Why did they exhibit themselves only in the middle ages and down to about old Sir Thomas Browne’s time? No account of any prodigies such as ravished or affrighted the ancient seaman is to be met in the records of the _Beagle_ or the _Challenger_. Yet let us take heart. The stickleback like a mouse is indeed a meagre substitute for the kraken; and the hard-alee trout looks mean alongside a whale a mile long. But their existence serves to assure us that the age is not wholly barren in wonders, and that there are still some queer fish about.

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_STRANGE CRAFT._

In the beginning of the seventeenth century one Peter Jansen, a Dutch merchant, ordered a ship to be built for him on the lines of Noah’s ark. Of course, as this vessel was designed to contain only a few animals, and those chiefly men, her size was not that of her famous prototype. The Dutchman’s orders were that the vessel should exactly answer proportionally to the dimensions of the fabric that was stranded on Ararat. Jansen flourished in pre-scientific times; but this notion of his went so far beyond the most extravagant credulities of the period that the scheme was viewed as a mere fanatical whim of a Mennonite, to which sect our friend belonged. He persevered, however, in spite of being heartily jeered at, more particularly by the seafaring folk who assembled to view the shipwrights at work; but when the vessel was eventually launched it was discovered that ships built in this manner were, in times of peace, commodious above all others, because they would convey one-third more cargo than other holds, and yet be navigated by the same number of hands which other forecastles carried. Those who would hear more of this ark may consult—if they can find it—the “Bibliotheca Biblia,” vol. i.[62]

Footnote 62:

The story is there related: “Peter Jansen, a Dutch merchant, caused a
ship to be built for him, answering in its respective proportions to
those of Noah’s ark. At first this ark was looked upon as no better
than a fanatical vision of this Jansen; but afterwards it was
discovered that ships built in this manner were, in times of peace,
beyond all others most commodious,” etc.

That Jansen erred, according to the light of his times, who shall declare? Sir Thomas Browne, who lived much about that period, would prove—I do not say he does—that Noah’s ark was the swiftest vessel that ever drove a keel through a surge—nimbler than the Baltimore clippers, the Mediterranean fruiters, the slavers of the Spanish main; in fact, very nearly as fast as the Atlantic expresses which storm through the ocean between the Mersey and New York. I find in the “Extracts from Commonplace Books” in Browne’s works this passage: “Whether Noah might not be the first man that compassed the globe? Since, if the flood covered the whole earth, and no lands appeared to hinder the current, he must be carried with the wind and current according to the sun, and so in the space of the deluge might near make the tour of the globe. And since if there were no continent of America, and all that tract a sea, a ship setting out from Africa without other help would at last fall upon some part of India or China.” This is as much as to say that Noah sailed round the world in forty days! Smart work when you consider that it takes a twelve-knot mail-boat thirty-seven days to steam to New Zealand.

It cannot, however, be concluded from her dimensions that, even though blown along by a gale of wind right over her stern, the ark equalled the speed of a Union or Royal Mail steamer. Sir Walter Raleigh, in his “History of the World,” a mine of exquisite thought and of sweet and noble expression, devotes a page or two to consideration of the size and form of Noah’s ship; and what a man who was as great a sailor as he was poet, philosopher, and soldier, and who lived near to Jansen’s time, has to say of her must be worth hearing in this particular connection. He is unable to point to the place where the ark was “framed,” but suspects it was near the Caucasus where grew “goodly cedars.” “It was thought to have a flat bottom, and a crested roof, and the wood gopher of which it was made was very probably cedar, being light, easy to cut, sweet, and lasting.” The pitch he thinks was bitumen. Her length was six hundred feet, the breadth one hundred feet, and the depth sixty feet. He calculates her internal capacity in cubical cubits, four hundred and fifty thousand, “which is sufficient for an hundred kind of beasts and their meat in the lower and second stories, and two hundred and eighty fowls, with Noah and his family, in the third.” So far as beam and length go she was considerably narrower than the ships in Jansen’s day, which were commonly about three and a half times as long as they were broad. But what of her bows? Had she a run? Had she the flat bottom of a barge or the moulded depth of the clipper? But it matters not; Jansen’s inspiration found no copyists; his fabric has floated solitarily down to us as a strange ship; and now that we have viewed her she may brace round her top-sail yard again and proceed on her phantom course.

I do not think, however, that we can find much title in our own marine performances to justify laughter at the old folks’ ships. Is it conceivable that ugly as Jansen’s Noah’s ark must have been she would not have looked comely alongside some of the metal horrors of recent and contemporary invention? Something of the indefinable charm you find in the simpering shepherds and shepherdesses of the crockery age of literature, in Melibœus piping to the skipping lambkins on an oaten pipe and Daphne toying with a lover’s true-knot under some spreading shade, enters into those vanished ships with their black or yellow sides, their rows of little guns, their gay and fluttering finery of masthead streamers, ancients, pennons, and the like. I know more than one war ship now afloat that you might “dress” from stem to pole-masthead and overboard aft, turn her into a rainbow of bunting, without achieving more than the accentuation of her ugliness. No! it is not for us, forsooth, to talk of taste, smile as we may at the illustrations of our grandsires’ sturdy struggles towards that imperial fruition in which we, their inheritors, find our most reasonable and sovereign boast.

I find a pretty fancy, and an audacious one, too, in an account of a strange ship in 1769. In that year there arrived at Naples from Palermo a small vessel, whose length of keel was twelve feet. She was ship-rigged—that is to say, she had three masts, with all the yards that ships then carried across, and her ship’s company was composed of one man only. She is described as being the model of a man-of-war of sixty guns. Her builder, who navigated her, was a carpenter; he had worked in an Italian arsenal, then went to Trieste, where he built his ship, embarked in her with two men for Messina, then proceeded alone to Palermo and Naples to present his wonderful model to the King. She is probably the only full-rigged model of a ship actually sailed by a man in her from one port to another on record. Figure the blue Italian waters and this lovely toy, with the sunshine flashing up its canvas into satin, blandly leaning over from the fragrant breeze, and slipping through the liquid sapphire with a little curl of silver at her stem!

The model craft exercises a fascination that is felt beyond boyhood. Many a long hour have I spent on the shores of the Round Pond in Kensington Gardens, watching the tiny fleets there till imagination has been transported by the charming miniature imagery into the heart of a horizon capacious enough to hold some scores of Londons with their metropolitan suburbs. This diversion seems to have delighted the fastidious and elegant taste of Nathaniel Hawthorne, who, in his “American Note Books,” speaks of frequent visits to the “Frog Pond” merely to see the boys sail their ships. “There is a full-rigged man-of-war,” he says, “with, I believe, every spar, rope, and sail, that sometimes makes its appearance; and when on a voyage across the pond it so identically resembles a great ship, except in size, that it has the effect of a picture. All its motions—its tossing up and down on the small waves, and its sinking and rising in a calm swell, its heeling to the breeze—the whole effect, in short, is that of a real ship at sea; while, moreover, there is something that kindles the imagination more than the reality would do.” I have a note of another beautiful model constructed so long ago as 1767. It was a little ship of sixty-four guns, completely rigged—four inches long! The materials of which it was composed were gold, silver, steel, brass, copper, ivory, ebony, and hair. The hull, masts, yards, and booms were of ivory; the guns, blocks, anchors, and dead-eyes silver; the colours—the Royal Standard, the Admiralty and union flags, the jack and ensign—were of ivory. The sixty-four guns weighed fifty grains. The scale was forty feet to one inch. His Royal Highness the Duke of York was so delighted with its singular minuteness and the exquisite delicacy of its workmanship, that he recommended it to the attention of his Majesty, who was graciously pleased to place it in his cabinet of curiosities. The artist was an officer in the navy, and I hope the royal admiration was accompanied by recognition of the sailor’s genius.

Herman Melville, in “Redburn,” speaks of an old-fashioned glass ship, about eighteen inches long, of French manufacture. “Every bit of it was glass, and that was a great wonder of itself; because the masts, yards, and ropes were made to exactly resemble the corresponding parts of a real vessel that could go to sea. She carried two tiers of black guns all along her two decks; and often I used to try to peep in at the portholes to see what else was inside.... Not to speak of the tall masts and yards and rigging of this famous ship, among whose mazes of spun glass I used to rove in imagination till I grew dizzy at the main truck, I will only make mention of the people on board of her. They, too, were all of glass, as beautiful little glass sailors as anybody ever saw, with hats and shoes on, just like living men, and curious blue jackets with a sort of ruffle round the bottom. Four or five of these sailors were very nimble little chaps, and were mounting up the rigging with very long strides; but for all that, they never gained a single inch in the year, as I can take my oath. Another sailor was sitting astride of the spanker-boom, with his arms over his head, but I never could find out what that was for; a second was in the foretop with a coil of glass rigging over his shoulder; the cook with a glass axe was splitting wood near the fore hatch; the steward in a glass apron was hurrying towards the cabin with a plate of glass pudding; and a glass dog with a red mouth was barking at him; whilst the captain in a glass cap was smoking a glass cigar on the quarter-deck.”

Among strange vessels may be classed fabrics—no matter of what size—of copper, leather, canvas, cloth, and (for the age) iron. The ancient Briton’s coracle was the leather boat. This is Rees’ presumption, in his “Beauties of South Wales,” from the circumstance of the fishermen in certain Welsh rivers using a corwg, or coracle, “which,” says he, “is probably coeval with the earliest population of the island.” The form of the coracle was nearly oval, its length five feet, and its breadth four. The frame was formed of split rods, plaited like basket-work and covered with raw hide. It was a portable boat, and its owner carried it on his back when he wished to convey it to or from his home. How far iron, as a material for the construction of ships, can be traced back I do not know. Grantham, a sound authority, gets no further than 1787. I can beat that record by ten years. In the “Annual Register” for 1777, under the month of June, I find, “A new pleasure-boat, constructed of sheet-iron, was lately launched into the river Foss, in Yorkshire. She is twelve feet long, sailed with fifteen persons, and is so light that two men may carry her.” Clearly a strange ship to those who beheld her! Twelve years later another strange craft was sent afloat: “A very curious experiment was tried—that of proving how far an entire copper vessel would answer the purpose of sailing. Mr. Williams, a joint proprietor of the great copper mines, was the projector, and a very numerous party attended the experiment. It was launched at Deptford, and promises to answer every purpose for which it was designed. Should it do so entirely it will prove a very singular advantage to the British navy.” The joint proprietor’s patriotic scheme apparently bore no fruit. What would the ship-builder of this day think of copper vessels?

A cheaper experiment in strange craft was adventured in the direction of cloth. What particular merit this boat had is not stated. It was the invention of a Frenchman named Desquinemara. The fabric was said to be impermeable to air and water. All that I can learn of this boat is, the experiments proved so successful that an account of them was sent to the class of the Physical and Mathematical Sciences of the Institute, in order that a decision should be come at as to the useful purposes to which this novel invention was applicable. After which this cloth boat, sliding past on Time’s current, slips into blackness and disappears. Of a strange vessel made of canvas I find a tolerably full account. She was the invention of a certain Colonel Brown, whose brother, a lieutenant in the Royal Navy, accompanied by thirty persons, crossed the Thames in her, and passed through one of the arches of Westminster Bridge, in the view of many thousands of spectators. She is described as a military batteau made of prepared canvas, so as to be impervious to water. Her length was seventeen feet, width five feet, and depth three feet, and when loaded with thirty people she drew only three inches. She was capable of carrying one hundred soldiers with arms, accoutrements, and baggage, fifty of them sitting and fifty lying. She weighed sixty pounds, and could be taken to pieces and put together again in three minutes. I do not learn that this strange vessel was ever employed.[63]

Footnote 63:

In “Shipwrecks and Disasters at Sea,” vol. i. (1812), there is
preserved a singular narrative of an escape of some men from captivity
by means of a canvas boat. The title is quaint: “A small monument of
great mercy, in the miraculous deliverance of five persons from
slavery at Algiers, in a canvas boat; with an account of the great
distress and extremities which they endured at sea.” By William
Okeley, 1644.

Another account of a strange craft I find in 1793. This was a vessel intended to “sail” against wind and tide, and on trial she managed to do it at the rate of four knots an hour. She was fitted with a pump of a diameter of two feet, worked by a steam engine, by means of which a stream of water was driven through the keel. The impetus of the water forced through the square channel against the exterior water acted as an impelling power. This idea has been again and again revived, possibly by some who considered their scheme as surprisingly novel and revolutionary.

One of the strangest vessels which ever floated was the paddle-wheel boat of 1472. A sketch of one form of this boat[64] exhibits a periagua-shaped vessel, sharp at both ends, and fitted with five sets of paddles fitted to beams, which work in orifices like tholes. A somewhat similar boat is heard of in 1681, in which year a vessel, fitted with revolving oars or paddles, distanced the King’s barge, leaving her far astern, though she was manned by sixteen rowers. An ingenious gentleman, in the Middle Ages, invented a mode of propulsion by erecting an immense bellows in the stern of a vessel. He thought that, when the wind dropped, there was nothing to do but fill his sails with the bellows, and so blow himself along his course. He hardly foresaw that the bellows and the sails would act against each other, and leave the ship motionless; or worse yet, in a calm, give her a small sternway. Jonathan Hull’s ship of 1736 would also be reckoned by his contemporaries a strange vessel. She was, indeed, the first steamer that ever blackened the surface of water with the reflection of the smoke of coal. His patent was for “a machine for carrying ships and vessels out of or into any harbour or river against wind and tide, or in a calm.” Hull’s was a stern-wheel boat, and adaptation of his invention of late years has familiarized to us an object that would have been viewed with wonder even a quarter of a century since.

Footnote 64:

Lindsay’s “History of Shipping.”

An illustrated history of shipbuilding would furnish the student with a series of plates of objects quite as astonishing for variety of shapes and freaks of taste as anything to be found in pictures in books of zoology and the physiology of fishes. The summit of perfection in form, beauty, in an almost spirit-like interpretation of the poetry of the sea, moulded and embodied by the hand of the shipwright and the rigger, was reached in some of the frigates afloat at the period of the introduction of iron. Grace and loveliness are now perpetuated by the yacht builder. Some of the iron sailing ships are, it must be admitted, framed with much elegance of judgment. But the vicious obligations of economy, supplemented by the severe conditions which now enter into naval arming, have forced us into many hideous forms, and render this age in the matter of marine taste the heaviest sinner of all the centuries. The uncouthness of the junk, the clumsiness of the galliot, the absurd freeboard, crowning poops, square bows, and tower-like rigs of the ships of olden times are admitted features; but all staring qualities were sobered by an atmosphere of quaintness, a complexion of romance, by elements of colour and furniture and apparel, which did somehow greatly help the imagination into ideal surveys and considerations. But is there anything to idealize in the leviathan mass of twelve-inch plates that floats past like a gasworks gone adrift? And what of poetry may we find in a metal tube that shows nothing above water but a short polemast and a conning-tower?

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_MYSTERIOUS DISAPPEARANCES._

“Land in your eye!” said the mate, who was looking through the
telescope.—_Two Years Before the Mast._

Something of humour goes to the fancy of a shipmaster homeward bound with a mind oppressed by the discovery of land that is literally “all in his eye.” The emotions excited by Samuel Weller’s lantern in the soul of the scientific gentleman would be trifling compared with the _fine_ triumph of a man who is the first to discover land. Though it be but a rock—nay, a reef or shoal—is it not a surer hand than that of the greatest poet for the carrying of one’s name down to the remotest posterity? What as a memorial so excellent and enduring as a piece of mother-earth? Every new chart enlarges the bounds of the discoverer’s fame. Take such a man as Bugsby. In what old black-letter book the life of him lies pierced through and through by worms I know not. I might search Limehouse and Poplar and find no oldest inhabitant able to tell me a word about Bugsby, whether he was a great merchant or a haggard water-thief, whether he fetched his last breath in Execution Dock, or died very honestly in a four-poster. Yet so long as the silver Thames continues to flow, so long (I am afraid) will its translucent tide—particularly in the neighbourhood of the East India Docks and the aromatic Isle of Dogs—go on murmuring the elegant name of Bugsby. Bugsby’s Reach! Think of the enormous fame of Bugsby! Then should not a master-mariner, sailing home with an entry concerning a discovery of land in his log-book, feel extremely boastful and happy? Supposing it to be, as it almost always is in this age of an exhausted world, an island or a rock entirely “in his eye:” it will be the same to him; he will go to his grave as cocksure about it as if he had landed, hoisted the Union Jack, taken possession of it in the Queen’s name, and called it by his own. Several nations may send forth ships to examine the spot: all whose commanders shall return and say there is nothing to be seen. But the first discoverer of land is a being not to be easily cheated out of his convictions. “Land-ho?” “Whereaway?” “Dead abeam!” And there it must stand, a piece of holy ground in our skipper’s faith, latitude unquestionable, longitude exact, though a shift of wind or a new complexion of light would attenuate the solid object into a texture considerably thinner than the most difficult of the difficult airs of the mountaintops.

Some islands have been unaffected dreams. Such was that shore which at the dawning of the day proved to be “a land flat to our sight, and full of boscage, which made it show the more dark,” called by its discoverer New Atlantis. Such was that happy republic whose “figure is not unlike a crescent; between its horns the sea comes in eleven miles broad, and spreads itself into a great bay.” Such, too, are the queer countries of Swift and Rabelais, and of several philosophers and poets, both of ancient and modern times. But, on the other hand, many of the old sea-girt demon-haunted rocks, the sunny and spice-sweetened and flower-coloured dominions of the ocean fairies, the little surf-washed principalities of dead seamen’s souls, were as real as immoderate private conviction could render them. They had been seen! the ancient mariner, with a beard as long as his whom Henrie Lane writes of in “Hakluyt”—“At their rising, the prince called them to his table, to receive each one a cup from his hand to drinke, and tooke into his hand Master George Killingworth’s beard, which reached over the table, and pleasantly delivered it to the Metropolitane, who seeming to blesse it, sayd in Russe, this is God’s gift. As, indeede, at that time it was not onely thicke, broad, and yellow-coloured, but in length five foot and two inches of assize”—the ancient mariner, I say, staring under the sharp of his hand, with eyes on fire with alarm and amazement, his mighty beard blowing like smoke upon his breast; this ancient mariner, standing on his tall poop near to the great lanthorn, with pennons many ells in length streaming from the topmast heads, the bonaventure mast sloping well aft, the sprit-top-sail glancing under the yawn of the forecourse like a sheet of silk, beheld the magic islands with his own fiery eyes under his own shaggy white brows, and on his return did depose to them with awful solemnity, calling upon many saints to bear witness to his veracity, and expressing himself as being perfectly willing to be boiled, fried, burnt, or in any other way “dressed,” if his statement could be proved a lie.

His voyages furnished him with queer relations to deliver. The ocean was a huge mystery; and things which familiarity has long ago rendered mean were instinct with the terror, the splendour, the power, the majesty of the ocean, marvellous with the spirit of the measureless surface and the unfathomed depths, in the midst of which the early mariner found them. The enchanted island was real enough then. The sea-life was in its beginning: it was credulous as a man’s childhood is; and, childlike, it took wonders and astonishments and impossibilities for the truth, and by sheer stress of prodigious faith made them so.