IN THE ROARING FIFTIES

By

EDWARD DYSON
1906

I

THE night was bright and cool, and the old East Indiaman moved slowly on
the heaving bosom of the ocean, under a strong full moon, like a
wind-blown ghost to whose wanderings there had been no beginning and
could be no end--so small, so helpless she seemed between the two
infinities of sea and sky. There was no cloud to break the blue
profundity of heaven, no line of horizon, no diversity in the long lazy
roll of the green waters to dispel the illusion of an interminable ocean.
The great crestless waves rose and fell with pulsing monotony, round,
smooth and intolerably silent. It was as if the undulating sea had been
stricken motionless, and the ship was damned to the Sisyphean task of
surmounting one mysterious hill that eternally reappeared under her prow,
and beyond which she might never pass. Suddenly the ghost faltered on the
crest of a wave, fluttering her rags in the moonlight, possessed with a
vague indecision. Shouting and the noise of hurrying feet broke the
silence. There was a startling upheaval of men; they swarmed in the
rigging, and faces were piled above the larboard bulwarks. A boat dropped
from the ship's side, striking the sea with a muffled sound, and was
instantly caught into the quaint lifting and falling motion of the
Francis Cadman, as the oily-backed waves slid under. Four men in the boat
bent smartly to the oars, a fifth stood erect in the prow, peering under
his hand over the waste of waters; another at the tiller encouraged the