The Equinoctial

by Herman Melville, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

"At what hour, Captain, shall we cross it?"

This was Mr. Lemuel Tharp, of Worcester, assayer and surveyor, bound for the placers of the Sacramento with a brass sextant, a crucible, a box of acids in stoppered bottles, a balance that would weigh the eyelash of a flea, and seven shirts. He asked it at the weather rail of the ship Sophronia of Boston, at noon of the sixteenth of March, 1849, forty-one days out, in latitude nought degrees and twenty-nine minutes north by his own observation; which agreed with the Captain's within a mile, a thing he had mentioned.

Captain Kimball was a short square Duxbury man who had been eleven times round the Horn and did not look forward to the twelfth with forty-three passengers aboard. He shut his own sextant in its box before he answered.

"In the night, Mr. Tharp. If this air holds. Somewhere in the middle watch."

"Somewhere," said Mr. Tharp.

"We make two knots, and some of that is current, and I do not know how much. Between now and tomorrow's dawn there is nothing in the sky I can put an instrument to with any honesty. There are the stars; but down here you cannot find the horizon under them at night, it is all one smoke. At dawn I will tell you where we are. Then I will tell you where we were."

"Then you will not know when we crossed it."

"I will know it was in the night," said the Captain, and went below to his dinner.

---

Of all the boundaries a man may pass over in this world, the Equinoctial is the one most talked of and least to be seen. The line between two farms has a wall of fieldstone, or at worst a surveyor's stake, and Mr. Tharp had driven some thousands of those. The line between two States runs through the woods on blazed trees. The line between Christendom and the heathen has at least a custom-house. But the Equinoctial, which is the great circle on which the sun stands overhead at the equinoxes, from which every latitude on the globe is counted north and south, and about which the earth, as the philosophers tell us, is fattest, has upon the water no mark of any kind. The sea on one side of it is the same sea as on the other. It is the same blue. It is crossed by the same flying-fish.

What it has instead is weather, and that of the meanest sort. About the line lie the calms which sailors call the doldrums, where the north-east trade wind fails behind you and the south-east has not yet come to meet you. The ship lies slatting. Her sails slap the masts with a noise like a man beating a carpet, and the reef-points patter on the canvas. The pitch boils up out of the deck-seams and takes the soles off your feet. Every few hours a squall comes up black out of nowhere and drowns the decks for a quarter of an hour, so that men run about with buckets to catch the rain in the spanker, and then it is gone and the sun is back, and the ship steams. And in this sullen water, for want of any mark, the sea long ago set up a court.

On the Sophronia the thing was managed thus. On the afternoon before the crossing, Mr. Lothrop the second mate took the long spy-glass from the beckets over the companion, and having first pulled a hair out of the head of the cook, who was used to it, laid it across the object-glass under the brass ring, and invited the passengers to view the Line. A good many of them did. A shoe-dealer from Lynn, a Methodist, saw it plainly, and said so, and said further that he saw a ship lying on the far side of it, which was a gull. A young man from Salem saw it and pretended not to, which is a common way of seeing things. Mr. Tharp took the glass, looked through it a long moment, lowered it, unscrewed the ring, picked the hair off the object-glass between finger and thumb, and held it up against the sky.

"Cook's?" he said.

Mr. Lothrop said that it was, and Mr. Tharp gave it back to him with great courtesy and went aft.

That evening, in the second dog-watch, as the light went, a voice hailed the ship out of the darkness over the bows. "Ship ahoy!" The Captain, who knew his part, went forward and answered, and the voice, which belonged to Daniel Ruddock the carpenter, standing out on the bowsprit with a speaking-trumpet, asked what ship she was, and whence, and whither, and whether there were any aboard who had not paid their duty to the King of the Sea. Being told there were a good many, it said that His Majesty would come aboard on the morrow to receive them. Then a tar-barrel with a lit wad of oakum in it was dropped over the side, and went burning away astern on the black water for a long time, which the passengers were given to understand was the herald's boat going home.

Now Daniel Ruddock had been Neptune in the Sophronia and in four ships before her, and in the frigate Brandywine before that, and by his own count had crossed the line sixty-three times, going and coming, and kept the oakum beard and the trident in his tool-chest under his adzes. The trident was a grains, the fish-spear, with a tin crown hung on one of its tines. He came aft after the hailing with a list in the cook's hand, and went round the passengers with it, and put to each the old question: whether he would be shaved, or pay a bottle and be let off. There is no shame in the bottle. Most of the gentlemen paid it. The shoe-dealer paid two, being a Methodist.

Mr. Tharp would not pay.

"I will not pay toll," he said, "on a line that is not there."

Ruddock considered him. He was a man of sixty or more, with a skin like the side of a cask and a pair of very pale eyes, and he had the carpenter's habit of looking at a thing a long time before putting a tool to it.

"Then you'll be shaved, sir."

"There is nothing to be shaved for."

"Then you'll be shaved for nothing, sir," said Ruddock, writing him down. "That's the commonest kind."

---

I had the lookout on the forecastle in the middle watch that night, and Mr. Tharp came forward at a little after midnight with his sextant and his box and his Bowditch, and a dark lantern, and set himself up on the windlass-bitts.

He had a plan, and he told it me, since there was nobody else; and as it was a good plan, and as I have since seen better navigators than he try the same and fail in the same manner, I will set it down.

The latitude of any place, he said, is the height of the pole of the heavens above its horizon. At Worcester the pole stands forty-two degrees up the northern sky; at the line, it stands nought, and lies on the horizon itself. There is no star exactly at the pole, but there is the North Star, Polaris, which is very near it; not so near as landsmen think, for it lies a degree and a half off the true pole, near enough, and goes round it once in every day and night in a small circle, so that at one hour it stands a degree and a half above the pole and at another a degree and a half below. But the motion is known, and there is a table for it in the back of Bowditch, by the hour; and a man who will take the height of the North Star with a good instrument, and note his time, and apply the table, will have his latitude by night as well as by day. So, said Mr. Tharp, he would take the North Star every quarter of an hour through the middle watch, and when the corrected height came to nothing, he would have the line, and the minute of it, whatever the Captain might say.

I said that I had heard the North Star went down before the line.

"It cannot go down before the line," said Mr. Tharp. "That is the whole of what the line is."

He took off the cover of his box. He had an artificial horizon in it, a little iron trough to be filled with quicksilver, which in the hills of Worcester County gives a man a level as true as the face of God; and he filled it, and set it on the bitts, and put his eye to the instrument; and the Sophronia, which was slatting in the swell with all her canvas slapping, set the quicksilver shivering in its trough like a dish of jelly on a cart, so that the star in it was not a point but a smear, and then a scatter of points, and then nothing. He tried for some time. He emptied the quicksilver back into its bottle with a steady hand and did not spill a drop.

Then he tried the sea horizon. That was where the Captain had said it would be: a smoke. Down near the line the night air over the water is thick and warm and full of the breath of the sea, and where the sky should come down to meet the water there is only a dimness, a band of grey as high as your hand held out at arm's length, with no edge to it anywhere. He brought the star down to where he judged the edge to be, and read his arc by the dark lantern, and wrote it in a little book, and worked it with a pencil, and found that he had the Sophronia one degree and seven minutes north. A quarter of an hour later he had her one degree and twenty minutes north, which would mean that the Sophronia had sailed backward since noon, and was going on backward at a smart pace. He looked at that a long while.

It was about then that Ruddock came up the forecastle ladder, with his pipe, and sat down on the knightheads, and said good evening to Mr. Tharp, who returned it.

"Getting her, sir?"

"I am getting the North Star," said Mr. Tharp. "I am not getting the horizon. The horizon is not there."

"No," Ruddock agreed. "She's a poor horizon, down here." He smoked. "I was in a frigate once, in the year 'twenty-nine, where the old man had it in his head that the King should come aboard on the line exact. So he hove her to. Got his sight at noon, worked it up, found he was four mile north, and ran her down four mile by the log-line and backed his main-yard on the spot, and had all hands piped to stand by. Near five hundred men. Stood there in the sun near an hour."

"Waiting for what?"

"I don't know, sir," said Ruddock. "I don't know what they was waiting for. I stood with them. Then the old man give it up and we had the shaving."

Mr. Tharp put his eye to the sextant again. The star was a little lower now, and smaller, and less sure of itself; it had the look of a candle seen through a dirty window. He brought it down to the grey. He read the arc. He did not trouble to work it. He took his eye away and looked at the star with his eye only, and it was there, low down in the north over the jib-boom, very small; and he looked away to wipe his eye; and when he looked again it was not.

He looked for it a long time. He looked a little to the left and a little to the right, as you do for a faint star, out of the side of the eye. There was nothing in the north but the smoke and a few stars above it that had no names that I knew.

"She is gone," said Mr. Tharp.

"Yes, sir. She always goes early. I never once saw her go down on the line. Sixty-three times. I don't believe it can be done."

"By the table, we are still a degree north. More."

"Yes, sir."

"Then she has gone down into nothing," said Mr. Tharp; "into the air," and he shut the lid of his box.

But he did not go below. He had another plan; he had the habit of plans, as some men have the habit of tobacco. He went aft and got the ship's speed off the log-slate, and the course, and came forward again and worked it out with his pencil by the lantern, as a dead reckoning from the Captain's noon sight; and by this he found that the Sophronia, at her two knots, would come upon the Equinoctial at forty minutes past two in the morning by his watch, which was a good English lever watch, and had been set at noon by the Captain's chronometer. Then he sat on the windlass-bitts with the watch open in his hand.

Ruddock stayed. I do not know why. He sat on the knightheads with his pipe gone out and said nothing further. The ship slatted and lifted; the reef-points pattered; once a fish jumped somewhere near us in the dark and fell back with a noise like a dropped plank. At four bells, which is two o'clock, a squall came down on us out of the east, with a roar we heard a minute before we felt it, and the rain fell so thick that I could not see the foremast from where I stood under it, and the ship lay over and ran for a quarter of an hour like a scared horse, and the watch were all at the braces. Mr. Tharp sat through it on the bitts with his coat over his watch. When it passed he was wet through and the sea was flat again and the stars were out over the masthead, washed.

At twenty minutes to three by his watch he stood up, and took off his hat.

Nothing happened. The ship went on in the same sea. The water alongside was black, with a little fire in it where the bow broke it; the same fire as an hour before. The air was the same warm air, and smelt of wet canvas and hot pitch. Mr. Tharp stood a minute with his hat in his hand. Then, very carefully, he put it on again.

"Well, sir?" said Ruddock.

"We have crossed it," said Mr. Tharp. "Within a mile or two."

"Which way?" said Ruddock; and I have never known whether he meant it for a joke.

---

At first light the Captain came up with his sextant and took three stars in the short while when there was light enough to see the horizon and dark enough still to see the stars, which is the only honest while in those latitudes; and he went below and worked them, and came up again, and gave out our latitude to Mr. Lothrop for the log: nought degrees and fifty minutes south.

Mr. Tharp was at the rail, unshaven, in a fresh shirt.

"Fifty minutes south, Captain?"

"Fifty, near enough."

"We were twenty-nine north at noon. That is seventy-nine miles of southing since yesterday's noon. At two knots we could not have made the half of it."

"No," said the Captain.

"Then when did we cross?"

"Before midnight, by the look of it. Somewhere in the first watch."

"But what carried us?"

The Captain said it was the current. Mr. Lothrop said the log-line was marked short and always had been. The cook, who was listening, said the squall. Ruddock said nothing. Mr. Tharp asked to see the Captain's figures, and the Captain, who was a patient man, let him see them; and Mr. Tharp went through them twice, and could find nothing wrong with them. So that when he had stood up on the forecastle at twenty minutes to three with his hat in his hand, the line had been some hours and some thirty miles astern of him, out in the dark, unattended; and he had been bareheaded to an empty sea.

He gave the Captain his figures back and thanked him.

At four bells in the forenoon watch the King of the Sea came over the bows.

He came by the bowsprit, as the custom is, with his oakum beard to his waist and his tin crown and his grains, and the boy Amos, who was fifteen, behind him as his Queen, in a wig of teased-out rope-yarns and the cook's apron for a petticoat; and behind them the Barber, who was the sailmaker, with a razor a foot and a half long cut from an iron barrel-hoop and notched like a saw, and his Mate with a bucket of lather made of tar and slush and the scrapings of the coppers. A studding-sail had been rigged on the main deck by the fore-hatch as a bath, and filled with sea-water by the head-pump, and a plank laid across it for a chair. The passengers who had paid their bottles stood along the booms and the rail to watch, and the green hands of the crew and the dozen passengers who had not paid were brought up one at a time, and seated on the plank, and asked their names; and when they opened their mouths to answer, the Barber's Mate put the lather-brush into it, and the Barber shaved them with the hoop, and the plank was tipped, and they went over backward into the sail, and came up blowing, and were Neptune's sons. Most of them laughed. One cried. The young man from Salem fought, and was shaved twice.

When the list was done there was one name left on it. Ruddock looked up from the paper under his crown.

"Mr. Tharp," he said.

Mr. Tharp was at the break of the quarter-deck. He came down the ladder in his fresh shirt, and stood before the King, and said, in his clear Worcester voice, that he had no objection to the King, nor to his Queen, nor to anybody's amusement, but that he must decline to be shaved, for the reason that he had already given; that there was no line.

Ruddock nodded slowly, as if a reasonable thing had been said.

"Then you ain't crossed nothing, sir," he said, "and you're excused, and welcome."

The Barber lowered his hoop. There was a little murmur along the rail; I think some of the gentlemen were disappointed. Mr. Tharp stood where he was. He did not go away. He looked down at the deck a while, and then up at the sky, where there was nothing to look at but the sun, which was very high, and then at Ruddock; and I saw his mouth work, as a man's does who is going through a column of figures and has come to one that will not add.

"The Captain has us fifty minutes south," he said.

"That's right, sir."

"By three stars. I have seen his working. It is good."

"I don't doubt it, sir."

"Then we have crossed it," said Mr. Tharp. "Whatever it is. We are on the far side of it." He took off his coat, and folded it, and laid it on the fore-hatch, and put his watch on top of it, and sat down on the plank over the studding-sail. "Go on," he said.

They went on. He did not open his mouth when his name was asked, being forewarned, and so the brush went into his ear instead. He took the hoop without a sound. When the plank went over he went back into the sea-water with his eyes open, and came up, and stood up to his waist in the sail with the tar running down his face and into the collar of his fresh shirt, and the gentlemen on the booms cheered him, and Ruddock, I am glad to say, shook him by the hand.

---

Having been scrubbed by Amos with soft soap and oakum as far as could be managed, and having put on the sixth of his seven shirts, Mr. Tharp came up at noon to take the sun.

He took it every day. He had taken it at the rail beside the Captain every noon since the Western Islands, as a man in an office winds the clock, and he took it now; only he did not take it.

For it is a thing which I did not then know, and which every navigator knows who has been in the tropics in the season of the equinox, that there is a noon when the sun is not to be taken. Your sextant asks you to bring the sun down to the horizon, and the horizon it will be brought to is the one that lies under it, to the south of you, or to the north, as the case may be; and you swing the instrument a little from side to side to find where the sun touches lowest, and that is the true bearing, and that is your sight. But on that day the sun's declination, by the English Almanac, stood within a few minutes of our own latitude. The sun at noon was not south of us nor north of us. It was over us.

Mr. Tharp put up his sextant to the south, and found nothing; and to the north, and found nothing; and swung east and west, the sun burning white in his shades, and could not tell which way to bring it down, for it was coming down on every side alike, and the horizon lay round him in a ring, and every part of it was the same distance under. The Captain, beside him, had already put his own instrument away. He had seen it before.

I was at the wheel. I saw Mr. Tharp lower the sextant, and stand a while, and then look down at the deck.

He was looking for his shadow. There was none on the planking, east or west; there was only a little dark round the soles of his boots, a rim no wider than the welt, as if he were standing in a small pool of himself. The masts had none. The rigging had none. The Captain had none, nor Ruddock coming aft in his shirt-sleeves with the oakum beard over his arm, nor I at the wheel, nor the wheel. The whole ship went south in the slack water under the sun with nobody aboard of her throwing any shade but straight down; and Mr. Tharp stood on his, with the sextant hanging from his hand, and a smear of tar still in his ear, and turned slowly round once, all the way, the whole circle of the sea.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem sextum decimum Kalendās Novembrēs (17 October 2026), ab Hermannō Melvillō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Herman Melville, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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