Outre-Mer

Excerpt from Outre-Mer: Impressions of America
On Board the -, August, 1893.
The enormous ship - it has three funnels, a displacement of ten thousand tons, and an average speed of five hundred miles a day - is ploughing the broad ocean under full headway. An August afternoon sky broods over the Atlantic with its autumn clouds. It is like a flat gray lid, beneath which, tirelessly, monotonously, the waters heave and swell. The dull gray waves, opaque as the sky, rise up, tower aloft, and then come crashing down. For a second, as each uprears itself, the thin ruffled crest shines green, a fringe of foam plays along it, white and undulating. Then the wavering crest gives way, the emerald wall crashes down in a heavy mass of brackish water under the swelling of another wave. I here are thousands upon thousands of them, heaving, raging, clashing in a frenzy as of a resounding battle; over it sometimes a bird flies with outspread wings, black against the gray sky, seeking its prey in the wind and tempest. The mighty ship ploughs through the terrific heaving of the sea, without either pitching or rolling. So steady is the deck that it would seem like a weird nightmare but for the ceaseless quivering of its metal frame.
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