An illustrated history of shipbuilding would furnish the student with a series of plates of objects quite as astonishing for variety of shapes and freaks of taste as anything to be found in pictures in books of zoology and the physiology of fishes. The summit of perfection in form, beauty, in an almost spirit-like interpretation of the poetry of the sea, moulded and embodied by the hand of the shipwright and the rigger, was reached in some of the frigates afloat at the period of the introduction of iron. Grace and loveliness are now perpetuated by the yacht builder. Some of the iron sailing ships are, it must be admitted, framed with much elegance of judgment. But the vicious obligations of economy, supplemented by the severe conditions which now enter into naval arming, have forced us into many hideous forms, and render this age in the matter of marine taste the heaviest sinner of all the centuries. The uncouthness of the junk, the clumsiness of the galliot, the absurd freeboard, crowning poops, square bows, and tower-like rigs of the ships of olden times are admitted features; but all staring qualities were sobered by an atmosphere of quaintness, a complexion of romance, by elements of colour and furniture and apparel, which did somehow greatly help the imagination into ideal surveys and considerations. But is there anything to idealize in the leviathan mass of twelve-inch plates that floats past like a gasworks gone adrift? And what of poetry may we find in a metal tube that shows nothing above water but a short polemast and a conning-tower?
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“Land in your eye!” said the mate, who was looking through the telescope.—_Two Years Before the Mast._
Something of humour goes to the fancy of a shipmaster homeward bound with a mind oppressed by the discovery of land that is literally “all in his eye.” The emotions excited by Samuel Weller’s lantern in the soul of the scientific gentleman would be trifling compared with the _fine_ triumph of a man who is the first to discover land. Though it be but a rock—nay, a reef or shoal—is it not a surer hand than that of the greatest poet for the carrying of one’s name down to the remotest posterity? What as a memorial so excellent and enduring as a piece of mother-earth? Every new chart enlarges the bounds of the discoverer’s fame. Take such a man as Bugsby. In what old black-letter book the life of him lies pierced through and through by worms I know not. I might search Limehouse and Poplar and find no oldest inhabitant able to tell me a word about Bugsby, whether he was a great merchant or a haggard water-thief, whether he fetched his last breath in Execution Dock, or died very honestly in a four-poster. Yet so long as the silver Thames continues to flow, so long (I am afraid) will its translucent tide—particularly in the neighbourhood of the East India Docks and the aromatic Isle of Dogs—go on murmuring the elegant name of Bugsby. Bugsby’s Reach! Think of the enormous fame of Bugsby! Then should not a master-mariner, sailing home with an entry concerning a discovery of land in his log-book, feel extremely boastful and happy? Supposing it to be, as it almost always is in this age of an exhausted world, an island or a rock entirely “in his eye:” it will be the same to him; he will go to his grave as cocksure about it as if he had landed, hoisted the Union Jack, taken possession of it in the Queen’s name, and called it by his own. Several nations may send forth ships to examine the spot: all whose commanders shall return and say there is nothing to be seen. But the first discoverer of land is a being not to be easily cheated out of his convictions. “Land-ho?” “Whereaway?” “Dead abeam!” And there it must stand, a piece of holy ground in our skipper’s faith, latitude unquestionable, longitude exact, though a shift of wind or a new complexion of light would attenuate the solid object into a texture considerably thinner than the most difficult of the difficult airs of the mountaintops.