Following the Equator eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 703 pages of information about Following the Equator.

Following the Equator eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 703 pages of information about Following the Equator.

Sept. 4.  Total eclipse of the moon last night.  At 1.30 it began to go off.  At total—­or about that—­it was like a rich rosy cloud with a tumbled surface framed in the circle and projecting from it—­a bulge of strawberry-ice, so to speak.  At half-eclipse the moon was like a gilded acorn in its cup.

Sept. 5.  Closing in on the equator this noon.  A sailor explained to a young girl that the ship’s speed is poor because we are climbing up the bulge toward the center of the globe; but that when we should once get over, at the equator, and start down-hill, we should fly.  When she asked him the other day what the fore-yard was, he said it was the front yard, the open area in the front end of the ship.  That man has a good deal of learning stored up, and the girl is likely to get it all.

Afternoon.  Crossed the equator.  In the distance it looked like a blue ribbon stretched across the ocean.  Several passengers kodak’d it.  We had no fool ceremonies, no fantastics, no horse play.  All that sort of thing has gone out.  In old times a sailor, dressed as Neptune, used to come in over the bows, with his suite, and lather up and shave everybody who was crossing the equator for the first time, and then cleanse these unfortunates by swinging them from the yard-arm and ducking them three times in the sea.  This was considered funny.  Nobody knows why.  No, that is not true.  We do know why.  Such a thing could never be funny on land; no part of the old-time grotesque performances gotten up on shipboard to celebrate the passage of the line would ever be funny on shore—­they would seem dreary and less to shore people.  But the shore people would change their minds about it at sea, on a long voyage.  On such a voyage, with its eternal monotonies, people’s intellects deteriorate; the owners of the intellects soon reach a point where they almost seem to prefer childish things to things of a maturer degree.  One is often surprised at the juvenilities which grown people indulge in at sea, and the interest they take in them, and the consuming enjoyment they get out of them.  This is on long voyages only.  The mind gradually becomes inert, dull, blunted; it loses its accustomed interest in intellectual things; nothing but horse-play can rouse it, nothing but wild and foolish grotesqueries can entertain it.  On short voyages it makes no such exposure of itself; it hasn’t time to slump down to this sorrowful level.

The short-voyage passenger gets his chief physical exercise out of “horse-billiards”—­shovel-board.  It is a good game.  We play it in this ship.  A quartermaster chalks off a diagram like this-on the deck.

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Following the Equator from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.