Far from Land

by George Hill, English journalist

(Aboard H.M.S. Rose, May 1996)

The sea is different when you sail far from the shore. On her first voyage to Europe, the Rose has sailed hundreds of miles out into the deep wilderness of the Atlantic.

Far from the land, you discover that what we think of as the smell of the sea is predominantly the smell of creatures living (and especially dying) on the edge of the sea. Out here, those smells are absent. The ocean wind has an almost clinical freshness.

It is quite uncomfortable, being so alone. People tumble out on deck to look almost yearningly at the distant masts of a passing ship, after days without any human company except our own. Even a vapor trail across the sky is a welcome indication that the world of people still carries on somewhere.

Signs of other kinds of life are almost as rare. Storms have driven us far south of the Gulf Stream, which is said to teem with marine life. Here, even seabirds have almost disappeared, except for an occasional narrow-winged sooty shear water, soaring on the air-currents between the wave-crests. There must be fish ranging below our keel, but they give no sign of their presence.

Twice, while the wind was blowing a gale, exhausted swallows have landed momentarily on deck, hundreds of miles off their course, blue and red like bedraggled jewelry. We caught one, and Captain Bailey put it in a box to dry out. But it died within hours.

Once we caught a glimpse of a turtle, and now and then a passing whale has spouted far away. Once a whale sent up a tower of white directly ahead, and we ran to the shrouds to watch it as it went by. It sighed its cloud into the air every two minutes or so as we approached it. Then it missed a turn, and we saw no other sign of it until it breathed again a quarter of an hour later, far off on the quarter. Whales have good reason to be wary of men and their ships. It was a strange thing to think of that mysterious consciousness passing so close, and evidently aware of our presence.

Only two kinds of life visit us regularly. We have sailed through whole armadas of Portuguese men-of-war - jellyfish with sails, tacking hopefully along in the middle of nowhere. They look absurdly toylike and festive, with their translucent scalloped coxcombs tinted pink and blue. But in fact they are highly poisonous, and sail with a deep-keel of entangled brown fronds loaded with venom.

Our best company are the dolphins. They venture out into the deepest water. They never stay with us long. We see them picking their way through the waves towards us, obviously alerted from far off that something entertaining is passing by. They will play for half an hour in our bow-wave, cavorting unscathed inches away from the ship's barrel-shaped snout, then suddenly depart. They can match our speed with scarcely a turn of their tails. Often they are family groups, with parents and infants swimming fin to fin in effortless formation.

Even Captain Bailey has been drawn into the bowsprit chains to watch them. Alix Thorne reached down far enough to touch their backs as they swam, though she got drenched in spray in the process.

Once they came in the night, and played in the phosphorescent waves under the figurehead, glittering deep in the water as if their bodies were made of light. Hardly any living creature expresses the joy of life as infectiously as the dolphins, in the lonely mid-ocean.