six years Ulysses changed his boat many times. He had learned English, the universal language of the blue dominions, and was refreshing himself with a study of Maury's charts—the sailors' Bible—the patient work of an obscure genius who first snatched from ocean and atmosphere the secret of their laws.
Desirous of exploring new seas and new lands, he did not stop in the usual travel zones or ports, and the British, Norwegian, and North American captains received cordially this good-mannered official so little exacting as to salary. So Ulysses wandered over the oceans as had the king of Ithaca over the Mediterranean, guided by a fatality which impelled him with a rude push far from his country every time that he proposed to return to it. The sight of a boat anchored near by and ready to set sail for some distant port was a temptation that invariably made him forget to return to Spain.
He traveled in filthy, old, happy-go-lucky sea-tramps, in which the crews used to spread all the sails to the tempest, get drunk and fall asleep, confident that the devil, friend of the brave, would awaken them on the following morning. He lived in white boats as silent and scrupulously clean as a Dutch home, whose captains were taking wife and children with them, and where white-aproned stewardesses took care of the galley and the cleaning of the floating hearthside, sharing the dangers of the ruddy and tranquil sailors exempt from the temptation that contact with women provokes. On Sundays, under the tropic sun or in the ash-colored light of the northern heavens, the boatswain would read the Bible. The men would listen thoughtfully with uncovered heads. The women had dressed themselves in black with lace headdress and mittened hands.
He went to Newfoundland to load codfish. There is where the warm current from the Gulf of Mexico meets that from the Poles. In the meeting of these two marine rivers the infinitesimal little beings that the gulf stream drags thither die, suddenly frozen to death, and a rain of minute corpses descends across the waters. The cod gather there to gorge themselves on this manna which is so abundant that a great part of it, freed from their greedy jaws, drops to the bottom like a snowstorm of lime.
In Iceland (the Ultima Thule of the ancients), they showed Ulysses bits of wood that the equatorial current had brought thither from the Antilles. On the coasts of Norway, as he watched the herring during the spawning season, he marveled at the formidable fertility of the sea.
From their refuge in the shadowy depths, these fish mount to the surface moved by the message of the spring, desirous of taking their part in the joy of the world. They swim one against another, close, compact, forming strata that subdivide and float out to sea. They look like an island just coming to the surface, or a continent beginning to sink. In the narrow passages the shoals are so numerous that the waters become solidified, making almost impossible the advance of a row boat. Their number is beyond the possibilities of calculation, like the sands and the stars.
Men and carnivorous fish fall upon them, opening great furrows of destruction in their midst: but the breaches are closed instantly and the living bank continues on its way, growing denser every moment, as though defying death. The more their enemies destroy them, the more numerous they become. The thick and close columns ceaselessly reproduce themselves en route. At sunrise the waves are greasy and viscous—replete with life that is fermenting rapidly. For a space of hundreds of leagues the salt ocean around them is like milk.
The fecundity of these fishy masses was placing the world in danger. Each individual could produce up to seventy thousand eggs. In a few generations there would be enough to fill the ocean, to make it solid, to make it rot, extinguishing other beings, depopulating the globe. … But death was charged with saving universal life. The cetaceans bore down upon this living density and with their insatiable mouths devoured the nourishment by ton loads. Infinitely little fish seconded the efforts of the marine giants, stuffing themselves with the eggs of the herring. The most gluttonous fish, the cod and the hake, pursued these prairies of meat, pushing them, toward the coasts and finally dispersing them.
The cod increases its species most prodigiously, surfeiting itself upon hake, until the world is again menaced. The ocean might be converted into a mass of cod, for each one can produce as many as nine million eggs. … Mankind might be overwhelmed under the onslaught of the more fertile fishes, and the cod might maintain immense fleets, creating, besides, colonies and cities. Human generations might become exhausted without succeeding in conquering this monstrous reproduction. The great marine devourers, therefore, are those that reëstablish equilibrium and order. The sturgeon, insatiable stomach, intervenes in the oceanic banquet, relishing in the cod the concentrated substance of armies of herring. But this oviparous devourer of such great reproductive power would, in turn, continue the world danger were it not that another monster as avid in appetite as it is weak in procreation, intervenes and cuts down with one blow the ever-increasing fecundity of the ocean.
The superior glutton is the shark—that mouth with fins, that natatory intestine which swallows with equal indifference the dead and the living, flesh and wood, cleanses the waters of life and leaves a desert behind its wriggling tail; but this destroyer brings forth only one shark that is born armed and ferocious ready from the very first moment to continue the paternal exploits, like a feudal heir.
Ferragut's wandering life as a pilot abounded in dramatic adventures—a few always standing out clearly from his many confused recollections of exotic lands and interminable seas.
In Glasgow he embarked as second mate on an old sailing tramp that was bound for Chile, to unload coal in Valparaiso and take on saltpeter in Iquique. The crossing of the Atlantic was good, but upon leaving the Malvina Islands the boat had to go out in the teeth of a torrid, furious blast that closed the passage to the Pacific. The Straits of Magellan are for ships that are able to avail themselves at will of a propelling force. The sailboat needs a wide sea and a favorable wind in order to double Cape Horn—the utmost point of the earth, the place of interminable and gigantic tempests.
While summer was burning in the other hemisphere, the terrible southern winter came to meet the navigators. The boat had to turn its course to the west, just as the winds were blowing from the west, barring its route.
Eight weeks passed and it was still contending with sea and tempest. The wind carried off a complete set of sails. The wooden ship, somewhat strained by this interminable struggle, commenced to leak, and the crew had to work the hand-pumps night and day. Nobody was able to sleep for many hours running. All were sick from exhaustion. The rough voice and the oaths of the captain could hardly maintain discipline. Some of the seamen lay down wishing to die, and had to be roused by blows.
Ulysses knew for the first time what waves really were. He saw mountains of water, literally mountains, pouring over the hull of the boat, their very immensity making them form great slopes on both sides of it. When the crest of one broke upon the vessel Ferragut was able to realize the monstrous weight of salt water. Neither stone nor iron had the brutal blow of this liquid force that, upon breaking, fled in torrents or dashed up in spray. They had to make openings in the bulwarks in order to provide a vent for the crushing mass.
The southern day was a livid and foggy eclipse, repeating itself for weeks and weeks without the slightest streak of clearing, as though the sun had departed from the earth forever. Not a glimmer of white existed in this tempestuous outline; always gray—the sky, the foam, the seagulls, the snows. … From time to time the leaden veils of the tempest were torn asunder, leaving visible a terrifying apparition. Once it was black mountains with glacial winding sheets from the Straits of Beagle. And the boat tacked, fleeing away from this narrow aquatic passageway full of perilous ledges. Another time the peaks of Diego Ramirez, the most extreme point of the cape, loomed up before the prow, and the bark again tacked, fleeing from this cemetery of ships. The wind shifting, then brought their first icebergs into view and at the same time forced them to turn back on their course in order not to be lost in the deserts of the South Pole.
Ferragut came to believe that they would never double the Cape, remaining forever in full tempest,
