18 
SCENES IN THE PACIFIC 
ders. The watch on duty were huddled under the weather 
bow and lashed to the stays to prevent being washed over¬ 
board. The second mate stood midship, holding fast to the 
rigging. All were looking at the storm. The ship herself 
lay like a lost water bird, rising, falling, buried and mount¬ 
ing again, among the overwhelming w 7 aves. 
The appearance of the sea!—Who can describe it ? 
Like the land, it had its valleys, and mountains, and 
streams. But its vales, instead of flowers and grasses, 
were covered with wisps of torn water; the mountains in¬ 
stead of snowy peaks, were billows, crested with combs of 
light blue water, tipped with foam, perpetually tumbling 
down and forming again, as the floods rushed on, lashing 
one another. And the streams were not such as flow 
through meadows and woodlands among creeping flower 
vines; but swift eddies, whirling through the heaving 
caverns of the sea. 
Its voice ! Its loud bass notes !—What is like it ? Not 
the voice of the storms wTich assemble with lightning, 
thunder and wind, and pour devastating hail and fire on 
the upper heights and vales of the Rocky Mountains. Nor 
is it like the deep monitory groan that booms down the 
Great Prairie Wilderness at midnight, growing louder as it 
draws near, until the accumulated electricity ignites in one 
awful explosion, rending the clouds and tearing up the 
shaken ground! Nor is it like the voice of Niagara. 
That great cataract of the earth has a majestic stave, a 
bold sound, as it leaps from the poised brink to the whirl¬ 
ing depths below ! And when the ancient woods, with all 
their leafy canopies and ringing crags, stood up around it, 
and neither the hammer of the smith, nor other din of cul¬ 
tivated life, cast its vexing discords among the echoes, the 
sounds of Niagara must have resembled this sublime duett 
of the sea and storm ; but never equalled it ! It was a 
single note of nature’s lofty hymns. To the ear of the 
Indian who stood upon the shelving rocks and heard it; 
