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O'er Many Lands, on Many Seas, by Gordon Stables.
"And I have loved thee, Ocean! and my joy Of youthful sports was on thy breast to be Borne, like thy bubbles, onward; from a boy I wantoned with thy breakers--they to me Were a delight... For I was, as it were, a child of thee."
Byron.
Not a breath of wind from any direction. Not a cloud in the sky, not a ripple on the ocean's blue. Only when a bird alighted on the water, quisling rings of silver formed all around it, and widened and widened, but soon were lost to view. Or when a fish leaped up, or the dorsal fin of some monster shark appeared above the surface, the sea about it trembled for a time, trembled and sparkled as if a shower of diamonds had suddenly fallen there.
And a broad low swell came rolling in from the Indian Ocean, as if the bosom of the sea were moving in its sleep. But landwards, had you looked, you might have seen it break in a long fringe of snowy foam on a beach of yellow sand; and, had you listened, the distant hum and boom of those breakers would have fallen on your ears in a kind of drowsy long-drawn monotone.
No, not with the rising wind, but whenever they moved, the officer who paced up and down the white-scoured quarter-deck, would glance above as if in hope; then he would gaze seawards, and anon shorewards, wistfully, wishfully, uneasily.
Uneasy, indeed, was the feeling on the minds of all on board.
And small mercy could the survivors, if any, expect from the savage Somali Indians, and the still more cruel Arabs, who dwelt in the wretched little towns and villages on the coast. For the ship was here in the Indian Ocean for the avowed purpose of putting down slavery and piracy, and by slavery and piracy those Arabs lived.
It was in the days before steam-power was generally adopted by our navy, when sailors were sailors in reality, and not merely in name.
But to-day, at the time our story opens, there was neither laughing, joking, nor singing to be heard. The men clustered quietly about bows or fo'c'sle, or leaned lazily over the bulwarks watching the vessel roll--for at one moment she would heel over till the cool clear water could be touched with the hand, and the next she would raise her head or side until a yard at least of her copper sheathing shone in the sunlight like burnished gold.
There was no sound to break the stillness save the far-off boom of the breakers; so quiet was it that the sound of even a rope's-end thrown on deck grated harshly on the ear, and a whisper could be heard from one end of the ship to the other.
"Bill," said one sailor to another, biting off the end of a chunk of nigger-head tobacco, "I don't half like this state of affairs."
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