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- 11484
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T20:48:14.843Z
- extracted_by
- structure-extraction-lambda
- start_line
- 11429
- text
- winds and fine weather. Trunks were opened for Bibles; and at last,
even prayer-meetings were held over the very table across which the
loud jest had been so often heard.
Strange, though almost universal, that the seemingly nearer prospect of
that death which any body at any time may die, should produce these
spasmodic devotions, when an everlasting Asiatic Cholera is forever
thinning our ranks; and die by death we all must at last.
On the second day, seven died, one of whom was the little tailor; on
the third, four; on the fourth, six, of whom one was the Greenland
sailor, and another, a woman in the cabin, whose death, however, was
afterward supposed to have been purely induced by her fears. These last
deaths brought the panic to its height; and sailors, officers,
cabin-passengers, and emigrants—all looked upon each other like lepers.
All but the only true leper among us—the mariner Jackson, who seemed
elated with the thought, that for _him—_already in the deadly clutches
of another disease—no danger was to be apprehended from a fever which
only swept off the comparatively healthy. Thus, in the midst of the
despair of the healthful, this incurable invalid was not cast down;
not, at least, by the same considerations that appalled the rest.
And still, beneath a gray, gloomy sky, the doomed craft beat on; now on
this tack, now on that; battling against hostile blasts, and drenched
in rain and spray; scarcely making an inch of progress toward her port.
On the sixth morning, the weather merged into a gale, to which we
stripped our ship to a storm-stay-sail. In ten hours’ time, the waves
ran in mountains; and the Highlander rose and fell like some vast buoy
on the water. Shrieks and lamentations were driven to leeward, and
drowned in the roar of the wind among the cordage; while we gave to the
gale the blackened bodies of five more of the dead.
But as the dying departed, the places of two of them were filled in the
rolls of humanity, by the birth of two infants, whom the plague, panic,
and gale had hurried into the world before their time. The first cry of
one of these infants, was almost simultaneous with the splash of its
father’s body in the sea. Thus we come and we go. But, surrounded by
death, both mothers and babes survived.
At midnight, the wind went down; leaving a long, rolling sea; and, for
the first time in a week, a clear, starry sky.
In the first morning-watch, I sat with Harry on the windlass, watching
the billows; which, seen in the night, seemed real hills, upon which
fortresses might have been built; and real valleys, in which villages,
and groves, and gardens, might have nestled. It was like a landscape in
Switzerland; for down into those dark, purple glens, often tumbled the
white foam of the wave-crests, like avalanches; while the seething and
boiling that ensued, seemed the swallowing up of human beings.
By the afternoon of the next day this heavy sea subsided; and we bore
down on the waves, with all our canvas set; stun’-sails alow and aloft;
and our best steersman at the helm; the captain himself at his
elbow;—bowling along, with a fair, cheering breeze over the taffrail.
- title
- Chunk 4