CHAPTER IV

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ON SOUNDINGS.—ENGLISH SMALL CRAFT.—HARBOUR OF LIVERPOOL.

_Sunday, May 25th._

[Sidenote: _CAPE CLEAR.—GALE._]

At sunset yesterday the mate went to the royal yard to look for land, but could not see it. By our reckoning we were off Mizzen Head, a point to the westward of Cape Clear, steering east by south, fresh wind and rising, going nine knots, thick weather and rain. Several gannets (a kind of goose with white body and black wings) were about us. Some one said they would probably go to land to spend the night, and there was pleasure in being so made to realize our vicinity to it. Several vessels were in sight, all running inside us, and steering northeast. We thought our captain over anxious to give Cape Clear a wide berth, and were very sorry not to make the land before dark. After sunset it grew thicker, and the wind, which had been increasing all day, by midnight was a gale. He got all sail in but the reefed topsails; then hove-to, and found bottom in fifty-five fathoms. I was quite satisfied now with the captain’s prudence; the sea was running high, and the cliffs of Ireland could not be many miles distant. As it was, I felt perfectly safe, and turned in, sleeping soundly till nine o’clock this morning. About an hour later they made the light on the old Head of Kinsale, where the Albion was lost some thirty years since. The captain says we passed within ten miles of Cape Clear light without seeing it. He was just right in his reckoning, and the vessels that went inside of us were all wrong, and he thinks must have got into trouble. We are now nearly up to Waterford, and off a harbour where, many years ago, a frigate was lost, with fifteen hundred men. It is foggy yet, and we can only see the _loom_ of the land.

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_Monday, May 27th._

[Sidenote: _ENGLISH CHANNEL._]

The Channel yesterday was thick with vessels, and I was much interested in watching them. A collier brig, beating down Channel, passed close under our stern. We were going along so steadily before it that I had not before thought of the violence of the wind. It was amazing to see how she was tossed about. Plunging from the height of the sea, her white figure-head would divide the water and entirely disappear, and for a moment it would seem as if some monster below had seized her bowsprit and was taking her down head foremost; then her stern would drop, a great white sheet of spray dash up, wetting her foresail almost to the foretop; then she would swing up again, and on the crest of the billow seem to stop and shake herself, as a dog does on coming out of the surf; then, as the wind acted on her, she would fall suddenly over to leeward, and a long curtain of white foam from the scuppers would be dropped over her glistening black sides. It was very beautiful, and from our quiet though rapid progress, showed the superior comfort of a large ship very strikingly. We have not rolled or pitched enough during all the passage to make it necessary to lash the furniture in our room. Afterwards we saw a Welsh schooner, then a French lugger with three masts, then a cutter with one, all quite different in rig and cut of sail from any thing we ever see on our coast.

About four o’clock we sighted Tuscar light, and could see beyond it, through the fog, a dark, broken streak, on which we _imagined_ (as the dull-eyed said) darker spots of wood and lighter spots of houses, and which we called Ireland. We saw also at some distance the steamer which left Liverpool the day before for Cork. She was very long and low, and more clipper-like in her appearance than our sea-going steamers of the same class. At sunset we were out of sight of land again and driving on at a glorious rate, passing rapidly by several large British ships going the same course.

I was up two or three times during the night, and found the captain all the while on deck in his India-rubber clothes, the mate on the forecastle, look-outs aloft, every thing drawing finely, and nothing to be seen around us but fog, foam, and fire-flashing surges. At three o’clock this morning, John called me, and I again came on deck. It was still misty, but there was LAND—dark and distinct against the eastern glow—no more “imagination.” It was only a large, dark ledge of rocks, with a white light-house, and a streak of white foam separating between it and the dark blue of the sea; but it seemed thrillingly beautiful. In a few minutes the fog opened on our quarter, and disclosed, a few miles off, a great, sublime mountain, its base in the water, its head in the clouds. The rock was the Skerrys; the mountain, Holyhead. Very soon, high, dark hills, piled together confusedly, dimly appeared on our right—dimly and confused, but real, substantial, unmistakable solid ground—none of your fog-banks! These were on the island of Anglesea. Then, as the ship moved slowly on, for the wind was lulling, past the Skerrys, the fog closed down and hid it all again, and we went below to dress. When again we came up it was much lighter, and the brown hills of Anglesea were backed up by the blue mountains of Wales distinct against the grey cloud behind them. Soon a white dot or two came out, and the brown hill-sides became green, with only _patches_ of dark brown—_ploughed ground_—real old mother earth. As it grew still lighter, the white spots took dark roofs, and coming to Point Linos, a telegraph station was pointed out to us; our signal was hoisted, and in five minutes we had spoken our name to a man in Liverpool. We had just begun to distinguish the _hedgerows_, when there was a sudden flash of light, disclosing the cottage windows, and Charley, looking east, exclaimed, “THE SUN OF THE OLD WORLD.”

[Sidenote: _PILOT.—STEAM-TUG._]

A long, narrow, awkward ugly thing—a cross of a canal-boat with a Mystic fishing-smack—with a single short mast, a high-peaked mainsail, a narrow staysail coming to the stem-head, and without any bowsprit; so out from the last fog-bank like an apparition comes the pilot-boat. Directly she makes more sail, and runs rapidly towards us. Our yachtman-passenger, coming on deck, calls her by name, and says that she is here considered a model of beauty, and that a portrait of her has been published. To say the right thing for her, she does look stanch and weatherly, the sort of craft altogether, if he were confined to her tonnage, and more mindful of comfort than of time, that one might choose to make a winter’s cruise in off Hatteras, or to bang through the ice after Sir John Franklin. The pilot she has now sent aboard of us does not, in his appearance, contrast unfavourably with our own pilots, as travellers have generally remarked Liverpool pilots do. He is an intelligent, burly, sharp-voiced Englishman—a reliable-looking sort of man, only rather too dressy for his work. He brings no news; pilots never do. When we took on board the New York pilot, in my passage from the East Indies, we had had no intelligence from home for more than six months. The greatest news the pilot had for us, turned out to be that another edition of Blunt’s Coast Pilot was out. I contrived to keep myself within earshot of him and the captain, as they conversed for half an hour after he came on our deck, and this was all I could learn, and except the late arrivals and departures and losses of vessels, this was all we got from him for two days. Our Liverpool pilot, however, brings us a Price Current and Shipping-List newspaper, in which we find an allusion to “the unfavorable news from France” as affecting the state of trade, but whether it is of floods, hurricanes, or revolutions, there is no knowing. In the same way we understand that the loyal English nation are blessed with another baby prince, and are stopping their mills to give God thanks for it. There is a slight fall in cotton too reported, and since he read of it, our New Orleans man has been very busy figuring and writing letters.

[Illustration: THE ENGLISH COASTER (_calm_)]

After the pilot came the first English shower (“It’s a fine day,” says the boatman, just now coming on board—we have only had three showers this forenoon), and then it fell calm, and the ship loitered as if fatigued with her long journey. It is now noon, and while I am writing, a low, black, business-like scullion of a steamboat has caught hold of the ship, and means to get her up to the docks before night. On her paddle-boxes are the words in letters once white, and the only thing pretending to be white about her, “The Steam-Tug Company’s Boat, No. 5, the _Liver_ of Liverpool.” Long life to her then, for she is a friendly hand stretched out from the shore to welcome us. A good-looking little boat too she is, much better fitted for her business than our New York tow-boats.

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_May 28th._

We were several hours in getting up to town yesterday, after I had written you. Long before any thing else could be seen of it but a thick black cloud—black as a thunder-cloud, and waving and darkening one way and the other, as if from a volcano—our approach to a great focus of commerce was indicated by the numbers which we met of elegant, graceful, well-equipped and ship-shape-looking steamers, numerous ships—graceful spider-rigged New York liners, and sturdy quarter-galleried, carved and gilt, pot-sided, Bristol built, stump-to’-gallant-masted old English East-Indiamen (both alive with cheering emigrants, hopeful of Australian and Michiganian riches, and yet defiant of sea-sickness), dropping down with the tide, or jerked along by brave little steam-tugs, each belching from her chimney, long, dense, swelling volumes of smoke; with hosts of small craft lounging lazily along, under all sorts of sooty canvass.

[Sidenote: _SAILING CRAFT OF THE CHANNEL._]

These small craft are all painted dead black, and you cannot imagine how clumsy they are. The greater part of them are single masted, as I described the pilot-boat to be. In addition to the mainsail and fore-staysail (an in-board jib), they set a very large gaff topsail, hoisting as a flying sail, with a gaff crossing the topmast (like our men-of-war’s boat sails), their bowsprit is a spar rigging out and in, like a steering sail-boom, and with this they stretch out an enormous jib, nearly as long in the foot as in the hoist, and of this too, before the wind, some of them make a beam-sail. If it blows fresh, they can shorten in their bowsprit and set a smaller jib; and about the time our sloops would be knotting their second reef and taking their bonnets off, they have their bowsprit all in board, their long topmast struck, and make themselves comfortable under the staysail and a two-reefed mainsail. If it comes on to blow still harder, when ours must trust to a scud, they will still be jumping through it with a little storm staysail, and a _balance-reefed_ mainsail as shown in the cut.

[Illustration: THE ENGLISH COASTER (_squalls_)]

These single-masted vessels are called cutters, not sloops (a proper sloop I did not see in England); and our word cutter, wrongly applied to the revenue schooners, is derived from the English term, revenue cutter, the armed vessels of the British preventive service, being properly cutters. Cutters frequently carry yards and square sails. We saw one to-day with square-sail, topsail, top-gallant, and royal set. I have heard old men say that when they were boys, our coasting sloops used to have these sails, and before the revolution our small craft were, not uncommonly, also cutter-rigged. Instead of being of whitewashed cotton, the sails of the coasters here are _tanned_ hemp, having the appearance, at a little distance, of old worn brown velvet. In sailing qualities the advantage is every way with us; in the build, the rig, and in the cut, as well as the material of the sails; for our cotton duck will hold the wind a great deal the best. Ninety-nine in a hundred of our single-masted market-boats, in a light wind, would run around the fastest coaster in the Mersey with the greatest ease. They are not calculated at all for working to windward, but are stiff and weatherly, and do very well for boxing through the Channel, I suppose; but for such business we should rig schooner fashion, and save the expense of an extra hand, which must be wanted to handle their heavy mainsail and boom. Further up, we saw on the beach several cutter-rigged yachts. They were wide of beam, broad sterned, sharp built, and deep, like our sea-going clippers.

[Sidenote: _ARRIVAL AT LIVERPOOL._]

The immediate shores grew low as we entered the Mersey. It was nearly calm, but though the surface of the water was glassy smooth, it was still heaving with the long muscular swell of the sea until we reached the town. We approached nearer the land, where, on the right hand, there was a bluff point, bare of trees, with large rocks cropping out at its base; beneath the rocks a broad, hard, sand beach, and low on the water’s edge, a castle of dark-brown stone, the only artificial defence, that I noticed, of the harbour. The high ground was occupied by villas belonging to merchants of Liverpool, and the place is called New Brighton, and bearing a resemblance to our New Brighton. There is the same barrenness of foliage, and some similarity in the style of the houses, though there are none so outrageously out of taste as some of those that obtrude upon the scenery of Staten Island, and none so pretty as some of the less prominent there.

As we entered the cloud that had hitherto interrupted our view in front, we could see, on the left, many tall chimneys and steeples, and soon discerned forests of masts. On the right, the bank continued rural and charming, with all the fresh light verdure of spring. Below it we could distinctly see, and quite amusing it was, many people, mostly women and children, riding donkeys and driving pony-carriages on the beach. It seemed strange that they did not stop to look at us. There were bathing-wagons too, drawn by a horse out into three or four feet water, and women floundering into it out of them and getting back again very hastily, as if they found it colder than they had expected. We approached incomplete structures of stone-work along the water’s edge, in which men and horses were clustering like bees. Soon we passed them, and were looking up at the immense walls of the docks, each with its city of shipping securely floating fifteen or twenty feet higher than the water on which we were, it being now low ebb. At five, in the rumble and roar of the town, our anchor dropped. The ship could not haul into the docks until midnight tide, and the steam-tug took us, who wished it, to the shore, landing us across the Dublin steamer at the Prince’s Dock quay.

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