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Updated: June 18, 2025
But the old world of heroes is over now. The skies above us are dark with sentimentalism, the sand beneath us is shoaling fast, we are running with streaming canvas upon ruin; all ideals have gone; nothing remains to us for worship but the Mass, the blind, inchoate, insatiate Mass; fog and fen land before us, we shall founder in putrefying mud, creatures of the ooze and rushes about us we, the great ship that has floated up from the antique world.
"By the mark seven," was soon afterwards heard from the man in the port chains. "Quarter less six," was the next shouted out. "We are shoaling our water rapidly," observed Captain Lascelles to the first lieutenant. "Stand by to go about." All eyes had been fixed on the dark mass ahead. Onward it seemed to glide through the darkness. Every one felt certain that their eyes did not deceive them.
We first tried Narborough island, but finding the road unsafe, sailed for the mouth of St Domingo river on the continent, where we had twenty-eight fathoms, shoaling as we advanced from eighteen to less than five as fast as a man could heave the lead. Finding this place too hazardous, we stood out to sea, and were blown farther north than we designed.
The squadron continued to stand on in a direct line towards the four anchored dows, gradually shoaling from the depth of our anchorage to two and a half fathoms, where stream anchors were dropped under foot, with springs on the cables, so that each vessel lay with her broadside to the shore. A fire was now opened by the whole squadron, directed to the four dows.
It was with considerable apprehension that I observed the river to be shoaling fast, more especially as a huge sand-bank, a little below us, and on the same side on which the natives had gathered, projected nearly a third-way across the channel. To this sand-bank they ran with tumultuous uproar, and covered it over in a dense mass.
On flew the dhows, on raced the Mermaid, flopping her tail as represented by the boats in tow, for we did wag about pretty considerably, as one of our men who was half a Yankee said; until, presently, on the water showing signs of shoaling, the Mermaid brought up broadside on and began pitching shot and shell as fast as the men could work her batteries at the dhows, which were now well inshore and almost on the rocks which latter seemed to jut out from this coast in the most shapeless, uncanny fashion, like the solitary tusk or two still possessed by some nearly toothless old hag.
The surf, at the particular spot we steered for, did not break on the shore in a rolling curling wave, as it usually does, but smoothed away under the lee of a small sandy promontory that ran out into the sea, about half a cable's length to windward, and then slid up the smooth white sand, without breaking, in a deep clear green swell, for the space of twenty yards, gradually shoaling, the colour becoming lighter and lighter, until it frothed away in a shallow white fringe, that buzzed as it receded back into the deep green sea, until it was again propelled forward by the succeeding billow.
Darkness oozed out from between the trees, through the tangled maze of the creepers, from behind the great fantastic and unstirring leaves; the darkness, mysterious and invincible; the darkness scented and poisonous of impenetrable forests. The men poled in the shoaling water. The creek broadened, opening out into a wide sweep of a stagnant lagoon.
It lacked only the cone of Vesuvius smoking beyond to make the memory complete. Nor has the Bay of Naples bluer waters than those that danced below me. Some stray current of the Gulf Stream must have curled about the tip of Cape Cod and spread its wonder bloom over them. Here were the same exquisite soft blues, shoaling into tender green, that I have seen among the Florida keys.
Then, if that sunset scene had been repeated, I should have looked upon it without rapture, and should have commented upon it, inwardly, after this fashion: This sun means that we are going to have wind to-morrow; that floating log means that the river is rising, small thanks to it; that slanting mark on the water refers to a bluff reef which is going to kill somebody's steamboat one of these nights, if it keeps on stretching out like that; those tumbling 'boils' show a dissolving bar and a changing channel there; the lines and circles in the slick water over yonder are a warning that that troublesome place is shoaling up dangerously; that silver streak in the shadow of the forest is the 'break' from a new snag, and he has located himself in the very best place he could have found to fish for steamboats; that tall dead tree, with a single living branch, is not going to last long, and then how is a body ever going to get through this blind place at night without the friendly old landmark.
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