Volume One—Chapter One.

Departure of the British Embassy from the Shores of india.

It was late on the afternoon of a sultry day in April, which had been passed amid active preparations, when a dark column of smoke, streaming over the tall shipping in the crowded harbour of Bombay, proclaimed the necessity of a hurried adieu to a concourse of friends who still thronged the deck; and scarcely was the last wish for success expressed to the parties that had embarked, before the paddles performed their first revolution, and the Honourable East India Company’s steam frigate “Auckland,” bound upon her maiden voyage, shot through the still blue water.

A turbaned multitude of manifold religions had lined the pier and the ramparts of the saluting battery, to pay a parting tribute of respect to their late governor. Sir James Rivett Carnac, who, with his lady and family, was now returning to his native land. On board also were the officers and gentlemen composing an Embassy organised under instructions by the government of India. More than a fortnight had been diligently passed in the equipment of this mission; but its objects, no less than the destination of its innumerable bales and boxes, still served as puzzles to public curiosity; and many a sapient conjecture on the subject was doubtless launched after the bounding frigate as she disappeared amid the haze of the closing day.

Immortal Watt! sordid is the man who places his foot behind the Titanic engines which owe their birth to thee, and who would withhold, as an offering to the altar of thy memory, a mite, according to his worldly means, wherewith to erect a fabric colossal as the power enthralled by thy transcendent genius! Strange are the revolutions undergone in affairs nautical since the introduction of the marine steam-engine upon the Indian seas. The creaking of yards has given place to the coughing and sobbing of machinery, as it heaves in convulsive throes. Tacking and wearing have become terms obsolete, and through the clang of the fire-doors, and the ceaseless stroke of paddle-wheels, the voice of the pilot is rarely heard, save in conjunction with “Stop her,” or “Turn a-head.”

Marked by a broad ploughed wake, the undeviating course pursued through the trackless main was demonstrated midway of the voyage by a tall pillar of smoke from the funnel of the “Cleopatra,” rising against the clear hot horizon, like a genie liberated from his sealed bottle, to proclaim the advent of the English mails. The deep blue sea was glassy smooth. Each passing zephyr set from Araby’s shores; but, heedless alike of wind and opposing current, the good ship steadily pursued her arrow-like flight,—passed the bold outline of Socotra, redolent of spicy odours,—and before sunset of the ninth day was within sight of her destined haven, one thousand six hundred and eighty miles from the port she had left.

Cape Aden was the bold promontory in view, and it had borrowed an aspect even more sombre and dismal from a canopy of heavy clouds which stole across the naked and shattered peaks, to invest the castle-capped mountain with a funereal shroud. Crossed by horizontal ledges, and seamed with gaps and fissures, Jebel Shemshán rears its turreted crags nearly eighteen hundred feet above the ocean, into which dip numerous bare and rugged buttresses, of width only sufficient to afford footing to a cony, and each terminating in a bluff inaccessible scarp. Sand and shingle strew the cheerless valleys by which these spurs are divided, and save where a stunted balsam, or a sallow clump of senna, has struggled through the gaping fissure, hollow as well as hill is destitute of even the semblance of vegetation.

    “How hideously
    Its shapes are heap’d around, rude, bare, and high.
    Ghastly, and scarr’d, and riven! Is this the scene
    Where the old earthquake’s demon taught her young
    Ruin? Were these their toys? - or did a sea
    Of fire envelope once this dismal cape?”

Rounding the stern peninsula, within stone’s cast of the frowning headlands, the magnificent western bay developed its broad expanse as the evening closed. Here, with colliers and merchantmen, were riding the vessels of war composing the Red Sea squadron. Among the isolated denizens of British Arabia, the unexpected arrival of a steam frigate created no small sensation. Exiles on a barren and dreary soil, which is precluded from all intercourse with the fruitful, but barbarous interior, there is nothing to alleviate a positive imprisonment, save the periodical flying visits of the packets that pass and repass betwixt Suez and Bombay. In the dead of night the sudden glare of a blue light in the offing is answered by the illumination of the blockship, heretofore veiled behind a curtain of darkness. The double thunder of artillery next peals from her decks; and as the labouring of paddle-wheels, at first faint and distant, and heard only at broken intervals, comes booming more heavily over the still waters, the spectral lantern at the mast-head is followed by a red glow under the stem, as the witch, buffeting a cascade of snowy spray, vibrates to every stroke of the engine, and leaving a phosphoric train to mark her even course, glides, hissing and boiling, towards her anchorage. Warped alongside the blockship, the dingy hulls lean over like affectionate sisters that have been long parted; and, flinging their arms together, remain fast locked in each other’s embrace.

And who are these swart children of the sun, that, like a May-day band of chimney-sweeps, are springing with wild whoops and yells over the bulwarks of the new arrival? ’tis a gang of brawny Seedies, enfranchised negroes from the coast of Zanzibar, whose pleasure consists in the transhipment of yonder mountain of coal, lying heaped in tons upon the groaning deck. To the dissonant tones of a rude tambourine, thumped with the thighbone of a calf, their labour has already commenced. Increasing the vehemence of their savage dance, they heave the ponderous sacks like giants busied at pitch and toss, and begrimed from head to foot, roll at intervals upon the blackened planks, to stanch the streaming perspiration. Thus stamping and howling with increased fury, while the harsh notes of the drum peal louder and louder to the deafening vehemence of the frantic musician, they pursue their task, night as well as day, amid clamour and fiendish vociferations, such as might suggest the idea of furies engaged in unearthly orgies. In the first burst of their revelry, the spectator is happy to escape from the suffocating atmosphere of impalpable coal-dust; and rarely does it happen that for every hundred tons of fuel received, fewer than one life is forfeited by the actors in the wild scene described—some doomed victim, swollen with copious draughts, and exhausted by the frenzy of excitement, invariably casting himself down when his Herculean task is done, to rally and rise up no more.