A Queer Race: The Story of a Strange People — page 80: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

A QUEER RACE. 1? “Storm, tempest, shipwreck, anything would be better than this intolerable calm.” “Hush! hush! Mr. Erle, don’t you be a-tempting of Providence; we shall have a wind before long, you’ll see. We don’t want no storm, or tempests, or shipwrecks. Justa fair wind, and no more.” Weather-wise as old Tom undoubtedly was, his forecast —infinenced probably by his wishes—remained a dead letter for a whole week. But ashe repeated it every day, he proved himself a true prophet in the end. Oontrary to my expectations—for I had read and heard that trop- ical calms are almost invariably succeeded by terrible storms—the change came gradually. First of all a breath of air, just sufficient to tauten the jibs and fill the fore- sail, without having any sensible effect on the progress of the ship; then a light wind, which gave us steering way, followed at a short interval by a spanking breeze that sent us along at the rate of four or five knots an hour, end made us wild to spread more canvas. We carried this breeze with us several days, and with a lower temperature, bright sunshine, and a grand sea, we felt better and more hopeful than we had felt for a Jong time. Our voyage, we thought, must be coming to anend. Wecould surely not go much further without either sighting a sail or making land. But when our hopes were at the highest, the fine weather suddenly col- lapsed. Clouds gathered, the sun disappeared, and a fine rain fell, so thick and misty that we could not see more than a cable’s length ahead. This went on for days; the wind changed, too, and not being able to tack, we were obliged to change with it, and almost reverse our course, ‘This is worse than the calm,” grumbled old Tom, ‘‘and if it goes on we shall either be ramming the ship ashore, or getting run down by a steamer.” It not only went on, but grew worse. The rain melted into a fog so dense that after sundown we were shrouded in a darkness so impenetrable that we could not see a hand’s breadth before us, and had absolutely to grope our way about the ship. It was like solitary con- finement in a black hole, with an extreme probability of sudden death. Our spirits sunk to zero, and my courage almost gave out. Even old ‘l’om, confident as he had hitherto been, began to despair. ‘lo run aground or be (€(0) mm A boo SH (EO) m