Tales of the Chesapeake Part 18

DOMINION OVER THE FISH.

"A gift-book for Christmas. A poem preferred. Limited text, and profuse ill.u.s.tration." What should it be?

As if by invocation, the Ancient Mariner rose before me! He stood in the doorway of my office, and held me with his glittering eye. He lifted his skinny hand to his long gray beard, and then gravely tipped his oiled hat. "The reader for Spry, Stromboli, and Smith?"

I had that honor, and handed him a chair. He sat in it after the manner of a flounder, concentrated his eye upon me like a star-fish, and produced a roll of ma.n.u.script with the fluttering claws of a lobster. Then he stirred and squirmed, like an elderly eel, looking distrustfully into the vestibule. I closed the door and begged to be informed of his business.

"I have a great work for you," he said mysteriously, proffering his ma.n.u.script. As he leaned over to do this, I saw a s.h.i.+ning something on the top of his head, but the thick white hair concealed it when he resumed his place. The ma.n.u.script smelled as if it had contained mackerel, and looked as if it had come from the bottom of the sea. I found, curiously enough, some fish-scales adhering to it, and its t.i.tle very oddly confirmed these testimonies--"Five Years in the Great Deep."

I glanced at the author with some surprise. He was the quaintest of mariners, and if I had met him leagues under the sea, I should have thought him in his proper element. His locks were like dry sea-weed; his cheeks were so swollen that they might have contained gills, but this was probably tobacco. When he wiped his nose with a handkerchief like a scoop-net, some sh.e.l.ls and pebbles fell from his pocket, and his ears flapped like a pair of ventrals. I remarked as he pursued the lost articles over the floor, that he wore a microscope strapped in a leathern case, and a geological hammer belted to his side. He walked as if habituated to swimming, and when he shrugged his shoulders I expected to see a dorsal fin burst out of the back of his jacket. He might have been sixty years of age, but looked much older, and behaved like a well-born person, though, superficially judged, he might have lived in Billingsgate.

"A good t.i.tle for a fiction," I said encouragingly.

"I never penned a line of fiction in my life," exclaimed my visitor sternly.

Referring to the copy again, I saw that it purported to be the work of "Rudentia Jones, Fellow of the Palaeontologic Society, Entomologist to the Inst.i.tute for Harmonizing the Universes, and Ruler of Subaqueous Creation, excepting the Finny Mammalia."

"Ah! I see," said I; "a capital t.i.tle for a satire!"

"Life is too grave, and science too sacred," replied my visitor, "for the indulgence of idle banterings. The work is mine; I am its hero; and it is all true." He wore so earnest a face, and looked so directly and intelligently at me, that I forebore to smile. "I have travelled in strange countries," he said; "Nature has been bountiful in her revelations to me, indeed; my experiences have been so individual, that I sometimes discredit them myself. I do not complain that others ridicule them."

He spoke in the manner of one devoted to his species; and an easy dignity, which some trace to high birth and the consciousness of dominion, became him very naturally. The eldest of the admirals, or old Neptune himself, could not have seemed more kingly; but once or twice he started at a noise from the publis.h.i.+ng-house, as if longing to get back to his legitimate brine. I told him to leave the ma.n.u.script in my hands for a fortnight, that I might form an opinion as to its claims for publication.

"No!" he said quickly. "It is not a girl's romance, or a boy's poem, or the strollings of a man-errant: it is of such rare value that gold cannot purchase it; it is so priceless that I cannot own it myself; it is like the air, or the water, or the light, or the magnet--the property of all the peoples. It must not leave my sight. I must read it to you now!"

He literally held me with his eye. He stood erect dilating, until he seemed to reach the height of a mainmast, as long and lank and brown as the subject of the veritable _rime_; and his ears, contracted, flapped like the pectorals of a flying-fish. It was uncertain whether he was going to fly or swim, or seize and shake me. I believed him to be either a lunatic or an apparition; but when the frenzy of the moment was over, he became a very harmless, kindly, and grave old gentleman, who begged my pardon for transgressing decorum in the enthusiasm for his "great work." He still smelled abominably of fish, but I could not take it into my heart to be harsh with this most pertinacious of authors.

I had been but a short time in the service of Spry, Stromboli & Smith, and my nerves had not yet been exercised by sensitive and eccentric writers. I had led a vagabond career myself, and had frequent reason, in my incipient literary days, to be grieved with publishers'

"readers;" and when promoted to the same exalted place, I resolved to be charitable, careful, and obliging--to do as I would be done by--to crush no delicate Keats, to enrage no Johnson, by slight, prejudice, or deprecation. But to suffer the infliction of a crack-brained old naturalist, repeating an interminable ma.n.u.script in my own office, went beyond my best resolve! Still there was little to do. It would be a paltry task to select a poem for ill.u.s.tration, and had not this same Ancient Mariner suggested an admirable one?

"I can grant your request in part, Mr. Jones," I said at length; "you may read one hour; and if at the end of that period I do not think favorably of your article, you must promise to read no further."

The old gentleman gave his parole at once, took a pair of great green spectacles from a sea-gra.s.s case, and blowing his nose again, rained pebbles and marine sh.e.l.ls over the whole office. When he took the ma.n.u.script from my hand, I saw the s.h.i.+ning something distinctly on the top of his head; and when he sat back to read, he was a perfect copy of a dry old king-fish, looking through a pair of staring, glaring, green eyes. Without more ado, and in a rippling kind of voice, as of the rus.h.i.+ng of deep water, the old naturalist read the following introduction to a most wonderful ma.n.u.script:

"At a very early period of my life I manifested an inclination for the study of the sciences. In my eighteenth year I submitted a theory of inter-stellar telegraphing to the Gymnotian Academy. It was my purpose to have placed the papers simultaneously before the scientific bodies of each of the seven planets in our constellation, but having no capital, the design failed, though I was complimented thereupon by the 'Inst.i.tute for Harmonizing the Universes,' and elected a contributing member of that society. For several years I pet.i.tioned annually for outfit and transportation to Scilly Islands,[2] on the Ecliptic Circle, where I purposed to develop my scheme of transferring a portion of our globe to the system of Orion. In this I was opposed by the Palaeontologic Society, on the ground that some valuable fossils were presumed to be there; and Parliament, opining that my protests were subversive of the law of gravity, rejected them. A number of projects, each of which, I firmly believe, would have benefited my kind, and facilitated correspondence between all created beings, terminated unfortunately, and my relatives at length placed it out of my power to continue these philanthropic exertions. For some years I was denied the ear of man, and in the interval my hair grew gray and my body a trifle faint. But the lofty impulses of youth survived. My mind could not be imprisoned, and I held communication with the stars through the grating of my chamber in the still midnight. At last the relief came. I had long prayed for it! My deliverer was Sirius, the brightest of the celestial intelligences. He shone upon my window bars with an intense concentrated light, and they reddened and melted before daybreak. I fled to Glasgow in the month of April, 184-, and obtained a captain's clerks.h.i.+p on the whaler Crimson Dragon.

[Footnote 2: This group of Scilly Islands is in the South Pacific; not off Land's End.]

"We took in water at the Shetland Islands, and sailing north-westward, skirted the coast of Greenland, whence, cruising in a southerly direction, we lay off Labrador, and waited for our prey. Our crew was fifty men, all told. Our captain had been a whaler thirty-eight years, and had killed five hundred and six animals or eight more than the renowned Scoresby. We carried seven light-boats for actual service, and twenty-seven thousand feet, or more than five miles, of rope.

Three men kept watch, day and night, in the 'crow's-nest,' at the maintop; but though we beat along the whole coast, through Davis'

Strait, and among the mighty icebergs of Baffin's Bay, we saw no cetaceous creatures, save twice some floundering porpoises, and thrice a solitary grampus. With these beings I endeavored to open communication, but they made no intelligible responses. The stars also of this lat.i.tude failed to comprehend my signals, from which I concluded that they were less intelligent than those of more temperate skies. But with the animalcules of the sea I obtained most gratifying relations. A series of experiments with the _infusoria_ satisfied me that they were not loath to an exchange of information, and finally they followed the s.h.i.+p by myriads, so that all the waves were full of fire, which the sailors remarked; and fearful of being observed, I ceased my experiments for a time.

"On the evening of the fifth Sat.u.r.day of our cruise, I waited till the changing of the watch; then I stole noiselessly upon deck, and secreted myself behind a life-boat which hung at the side of the vessel. The helmsman was nodding silently upon his tiller; two seamen sat motionless upon the bow, and the lookout party in the crow's-nest talked mutteringly of our ill-luck as they scanned the horizon. The Northern Lights were pulsing like some great radiating heart, and the sea was alternately flame and shadow. The headlands of Labrador lay to the south--bare, boundless, precipitous; and to the east a glittering iceberg floated slowly towards us, like a palace of gold and emerald.

The s.h.i.+p rolled calmly upon the long swells, the ripples plas.h.i.+ng in low lulling monotone, and her hull and spars were reflected darkly beneath me. I drew a long gray hair from my temple, and subjected it to a gentle friction between my palm and finger; then I p.r.i.c.ked my wrist, and leaning forward, placed it against my heart: five blood-drops--symbols of the five types of organized creation--fell simmering into the depths, and the scintillant hair, floating after them, described a true spiral. In an instant the Aurora grew bright to blindness; there was a rush of infinite stars, and a host of beautiful beings fluttered to the surface of the sea, within the shadow of the s.h.i.+p! A gull darted along the water, and in the far distance I heard the bellow of the huge Greenland whale. All animate nature had acknowledged my message; I had touched the nerve of the universes!

"'Blow me if there warn't a whale, Ben!' said one of the men in the maintop.

"'My eyes! but it wor like it,' replied the other.

"Fearful of being remarked, I slipped below, a second time disappointed, but with such exultant feelings that I tried in vain to sleep. The intimacy of species and their common language, lost in the degeneracy of the first human beings, were about to be restored by me.

Confusion had overcome the counsels of the countless things which had talked and dwelt together in the past, but science was about to win back from sin the great secret of communication. I should translate the scream of eagles and the cooing of doves; I should hear the gossip of my household kittens, and speak familiarly with the mighty hippopotami. The serpent should teach me his traditions, and the mult.i.tude of mollusks should develop the mysteries of their sluggish vitality; nay, the plurality of worlds should be demonstrated, and with the combined intelligences of all the systems, we should wrest the mysteries of life, matter, and eternity from their Divine repository!

"I lay awake all night revelling in these antic.i.p.ations, and at dawn was quite weak of body. It was now the Sabbath, and at nine o'clock all hands were summoned to the p.o.o.p-deck for the customary wors.h.i.+p. I lay upon a coil of rope, when the mate commenced to read the service, and a deep drowsiness came over me. The lesson was a part of the first chapter of Genesis--the weird history of creation. He had reached the twenty-eighth verse when I dropped asleep. It could have been only an instant's forgetfulness, for when I awoke he had not finished the reading of the same verse, but in that instant a vision had pa.s.sed before me.

"A female of marvellous beauty rose from the water. I had seen the long green locks, the eyes of azure, and the glossy neck--it was Tethys, the queen of the sea-nymphs. She was begotten of humidity in the remote beginning, and seemed even now cloudy and incorporeal.

Euripius, the divinity of whirlpools, lay in the waves at her feet, projecting a spectrum of spray, in an arch, above her head.

"'Man,' she said, or rather rippled, for it was like the even voice of waters, 'your love of nature, the boundlessness of your kindness, the daring of your speculation, the profoundness of your introspection, have made you one of us. Awake, and hear our decree!'

"She melted into vapor, and disappeared. I opened my eyes. The crew were grouped about the deck, the mate was reading the lesson, the words which I heard were: 'Have dominion over the fis.h.!.+'

"'A fall! a fall!' was shouted from the maintop. The men on watch had discovered the long-expected prey.

"'Man the boats!' cried the captain; 'all hands be spry! Where away, look out?'

"'Sou'-west!' answered the crow's-nest, 'about two leagues. There must be hoceans of 'em! They 'eave like water-spouts, and, lor! how they lobtail!'

"The seven boats were arranged in curved shape, so as to form a semicircle around the animals; and the captain's, of which I took the helm, formed the left tip of the crescent. We pulled steadily for a half-hour over a smooth sea, and came at length so close to our victims that we could count them. Truly it was 'a fall'! A few cubs played recklessly around the surface; but there was an enormous bull, whose bulk was much greater than that of the s.h.i.+p's hull, which came once in full view, dived vertically, and beat the water with his terrible tail, making such billows that a storm seemed to be raging.

The other animals swam in the froth and foam thus developed, now plunging to the far depths, now shooting their huge bodies into the air, and falling with a splash, as of the emptying of the ocean. The scene was so exciting that even my wonderful discoveries pa.s.sed out of mind. Our oars dipped noiselessly; the crews were silent; the harpooners stood, each in the bow of his launch, with naked weapons extended, waiting to strike. The first opportunity occurred to the launch on our extreme right. At the distance of twenty yards the executioner hurled his javelin full into the back of the great bull; a roar ensued and a frightful leap. The other creatures repeated the agonized cry, and they swam southward with the velocity of a s.h.i.+p under full sail.

"'Now, lads, bend your oars!' shouted the captain through his trumpet.

The entire length of rope unwound directly from the reel or 'bollard'

of the first launch, and the line of a second boat was attached forthwith; a third and a fourth were annexed, but the whale exhibited no sign of exhaustion, and dragged his pursuers like the wind. A fifth and a sixth line spun out. The captain's cheek grew pale, and he opened his clasp-knife with a curse upon his lips. There remained the line of our boat alone: unless the monster stopped within ten minutes, we should lose every foot of the s.h.i.+p's cordage, and this last rope would have to be severed. Tremulously a seaman attached it; it was whirled out as if by a locomotive. The oars moved like light, but no human activity could approach that of our victim. He nearly swamped the launch, and the friction of the bollard threatened to set it ablaze.

"'What devil of the deep is this?' said the captain, bending forward with his blade. The sailors ceased with hot faces, and stared aghast.

I seemed to hear calling voices; I grew faint and blind. The bollard snapped with a dead, dull sound; I was entangled in the stout twine, and tossed into the sea. Some oars were thrown overboard, that I might be buoyed up. Three of the launches were turned toward me, and the seamen called aloud that I should keep up courage. But the line pulled me downward; my heart ceased to beat; I beheld with indescribable terror the pale surface receding, and the dark shapes of the vessels above me were finally lost to view. I knew that at the first inhalation the brine would fill my mouth and lungs; I held my breath hard, and tried to pray. Down, down, down into the blue depths--a cycle of protracted years it seemed! My ears were stunned with strange noises; my lips parted, and at length the sea rushed into my throat; for an instant I seemed to strangle, but I did not perish.

"The fluid was mysteriously expelled from me. I breathed as freely of the water as a moment before I had breathed of the air! A weight was lifted from my brain, which had before been crus.h.i.+ng it, and my temples grew suddenly cool. A spiracle had developed at the apex of my cranium, and I exuded water through a cavity or 'blow-hole' in the top of my head, like the cetacea around me!"

The naturalist here paused and ran his hand through his hair. The s.h.i.+ning something among his gray locks revealed itself as a plate of silver, circular in shape, covering what had evidently been an opening in the skull. He looked less like a man than ever, and when, consulting a glutinous old chronometer, like a jellyfish, he found that his hour was pa.s.sing, he begged so earnestly to be allowed to finish his "Introduction," that I gave him leave. A boy coming in with copy so frightened him, however, that I thought he was going to turn upon his stomach, and swim away through the window.

"I became sensible directly of three organic changes: my heels clave together, my feet flattened, and my toes turned out, like a caudal fin; my integument grew thick and hard, and my blood thin and chill.

But these conditions being novel to me, and my fears only equalled by my wonder as yet, I was paralyzed, and continued to sink. I had descended about one hundred fathoms, and was experiencing a strange oppression, as of the forcing together of my bones, when I heard a sonorous voice close below me say! 'If you go any deeper, you will sustain a pressure of twenty atmospheres, and may not get back at all.'"

I looked beneath, and to my horror a huge whale was coming upward with extended jaws. His half-human eyes were turned benignantly upon me; but he was evidently in pain, and from a point in his back, where a broken harpoon still remained, gouts of blood curdled upward, coloring the water. His vocal power lay in his spiracle, and he said again:

"'I should have been asphyxiated in five minutes.'

"'Who is it that speaks?' I faltered. 'Leviathan, king of the sea, be merciful!'

"'I am called _New England Tom_ by the creatures of the upper element,' answered the whale, 'although falsely thought to be of the family of the Spermaceti; but though my exploits have recommended me to my species, I am not equal to the high t.i.tle you have given me.

_That_ is possessed by you and our sovereign Jonah only!'

"The conviction rushed upon me that I had, indeed, 'dominion over the fish'!

"'I have suffered this wound for your majesty's sake,' said the whale again; 'for I had been deputed to wait in this lat.i.tude for your arrival, and convey you to our sovereign. But though I am now in the third century of my age, I can survive a dozen such p.r.i.c.kings, and if I chose could s.h.i.+ver the Crimson Dragon with a blow of my tail, as in 1804 I stove the Ess.e.x, and made driftwood of her spars.'

"In an instant I was seated within the mighty maw of this famous monster. His jaw-bones were forty feet in length; the roof of his mouth was fifteen feet high, and formed of a s.p.a.cious arch of 'balleen,' or whale-bone. His crescent-shaped tail, thirty-five feet from tip to tip, swept the depths twice or thrice; and when we emerged into the air, the blood spouted from his pores, and he threw cataracts of water through his spiracle. I saw the Crimson Dragon some miles away, but there were no traces of her boats. The crews of the launches were fathoms deep in the ocean!