Show Me the Sky - Nicholas Hogg [43]
13 February 1835
A humid and heated night has passed, with little change to our conditions but a stronger breeze now riffling the previously smooth surface.
This afternoon the sailors were employed in fastening loose articles to the deck, binding, nailing, and roping any object not already fixed to the Caroline. I dare say Mrs Stevens, the entire voyage suffering from acute seasickness, would also benefit from being firmly attached to the vessel!
I am now returned to my cabin after running on deck to investigate the cheering and calling of the crew. As I appeared from the hatch I was slapped about the jaw, almost to the deck by the surprise and force of my attacker. Fists clenched and ready to fight, I saw that my enemy was an immense shoal of flying fish, rising up and over the Caroline like a flock of silver birds. While some whizzed and glittered past our ears, others struck the sails and masts and dropped to the deck, beating and flaring their gills in suffocation. The sea foamed with their multitude, all thrashing winged-fins fleeing from invisible predators, for no birds dived on them from above. The sailors, some puzzled and some afraid, others jumping on the fish run aground on the deck, forgot their labours entirely.
Then when the sea quietened, and the last of the flyers skipped away, we were left with an eerie hush, again that rolling landscape of billowing waves. The silence was broken by a call of ‘Land ahoy!’ from the crow’s nest.
Capt. Drinkwater bellowed, ‘Impossible!’ before the midshipman called again.
‘Land, captain! And hills, mountains that touch the sky!’
The capt. extended his telescope and scanned the horizon. All on-board saw his Adam’s apple genuflect when he gulped.
The floating range was a storm, the clouds smoked up so black and tall it seemed the sea had extinguished the sun. We all gathered at the prow of the Caroline, felt the wind cooling, saw the whitecaps flare on the crests of waves and watched the darkness grow.
We are but insects clinging to a strip of bark.
14 February 1835
Dear Father who art in Heaven, deliver us from this tempest so we may preach your name and your love to those who do not yet know it is you who allows them to live. In your oceans we understand that we are all but miserable sinners ready to be drowned at thy command. Know that with each giant wave that breaks upon the Caroline our love and obedience to your power only strengthens. Amen.
16 February 1835
When dawn broke this morning, and our good Caroline glowed in the rising sun, bruised and battered but floating, we first gave a solemn prayer to those we had lost, taken by the sea in the midst of her rage, swallowed by the depths, but now, we pray, at peace with the Lord above.
I have written nothing for two days but a shaky prayer, as I feared each wave that crashed over my head was the end of my bodily life. In that violent gale we seemed no more than a blow- away kite snapped from its line, the labour of the men in the masts a feeble resistance.
On the first morning of the storm, the sky was as black as night, the only torch to our plight veins of lightning streaking from cloud to sea, splitting and illuminating, shattering white beneath the waves like trees of ice. The claps of thunder were loud enough to blow the glass from the portholes.
When I felt brave enough to face my great tormentor, I unfastened the hatch to lift my head above deck. The rain pelted my face like buckshot. The sky was sea. We faced a wave so huge that we were like Noah, running aground on the peak of Ararat. But just as I believed my soul would be washed from my body, for the summit of sea was poised to crush our raft into splinters, we sailed those slopes as though the Lord himself were raising us that little closer to Heaven, so we may know He can transform oceans into mountains.
Then again the valley, bottomed in the gloom, walls of water towering over the ship, each time seemingly the last. But the good Caroline rode the tempest, and in this predicament of doom there was God, an exaltation