The Rate of Descent

by Herman Melville, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

I. The Twine

A pound of good sounding-twine, laid up hard from the best Kentucky hemp and well tarred, runs to a hundred fathoms; which is six hundred feet; which is the spire of Trinity Church in New York twice over, and something more. It will bear sixty pounds hung free without parting. The Government winds it on reels of ten thousand fathoms each, and marks it with a bit of bunting at every hundredth fathom, so that a man sitting in the stern of a boat with a watch in his hand may call the marks as they go over the gunwale and set down against each the minutes and seconds it took to go. On the far end of the twine is a thirty-two-pound shot, of the kind that is otherwise fired at Englishmen.

That is the whole of the instrument. There is no more to it than a ball and a string and a watch, and with it, in the years I am speaking of, the Navy of the United States proposed to find the floor of the sea.

I was the watch. I was eighteen, a landsman rated ordinary seaman in the surveying schooner Wauwinet, and because I had been a year at an academy in Albany before my father failed, and wrote a fair round hand, I was taken out of the foretop and put in the stern-sheets of the cutter with the ship's best chronometer-watch in a box on my knees and a blank book under my arm. The men called me Clock. My name was Thomas Worth, and I have answered to both since, but the first is the one I earned.

II. The Lieutenant

Lieutenant Josiah Fenn commanded the Wauwinet, and Lieutenant Fenn was the man who had found no bottom.

It was four years before, in another vessel, in the warm blue water south and west of the Azores. He had paid out six thousand one hundred fathoms of twine, which is something more than thirty-six thousand feet, nearly seven miles of hemp going down into the sea at a steady pace for most of an afternoon; and the shot never struck, and the twine never slackened, and at last it parted of its own weight and the sea kept the whole of it. He wrote in his report: No bottom. The newspapers took it up. A clergyman in Providence preached a sermon on it, upon the text Thy judgments are a great deep, and sent the Lieutenant a printed copy, which he kept in his writing-desk. In the wardroom they called him No-Bottom Fenn, though not to his face, and not unkindly. He had the column of his times copied fair and framed and hung on the bulkhead of his cabin, where another captain would hang his wife's likeness.

He was not a large man. He was narrow and dark and neat, with long hands, and he had the habit of looking over the side when he spoke to you, as though the thing he was really attending to were down there. He was a good seaman and a just officer and he never flogged a man in the whole of that cruise, which is more than I can say of better-liked captains. But he believed the sea had no floor in it. I do not mean that he believed it as a man believes a fact in a book. I mean that he believed it the way the Providence clergyman believed in the great deep of judgment; and I have since come to think that he was the only man aboard the Wauwinet who went to sea for the sake of the sea, and not for the pay, or the rating, or to get away from something ashore.

Our orders that summer of 1854 were from the Observatory at Washington: to run a line of deep soundings across the North Atlantic between the Banks of Newfoundland and the coast of Ireland, where certain gentlemen in New York and London had a mind to lay a telegraph wire along the bottom. There was something in that which galled the Lieutenant, and he said so once at table, in my hearing, when I came aft with the day's book. "They want a floor to lay their wire on," he said. "They have sent us out to find them one, the way you would send a boy to find a shelf." Nobody answered him. Mr. Hollis the master laughed a little, and stopped.

We had also aboard, in a long deal case lashed under the break of the quarter-deck, an instrument of a new contrivance. Of that, more presently.

III. The First Cast

We made our first deep cast on the eleventh of July, in fifty-one degrees north, some three hundred leagues west of Ireland, in a long grey swell with no wind to speak of and a sky like the inside of a pewter cup.

The cutter was lowered and brought round under the lee. In her went the Lieutenant, and the master's mate, and four oarsmen to keep her head to the swell, and old Elnathan Hedges the quartermaster, who had been a whaleman out of Sag Harbor for twenty years before he took the Government's money, to tend the reel; and I, with my box and my book. The reel was shipped on a crotch in the stern. The shot was made fast. The Lieutenant looked at me, and I opened the box and laid my thumb on the watch, and he said, "Let go," and Hedges let go, and the shot went down into the grey water without a sound and the twine began to run.

I will set down how a cast goes, because I sat through some forty of them in that cruise and the one I am telling of is not to be understood without the others.

At first the twine fairly hisses off the reel, and the little bunting marks go over the gunwale so fast that you can scarcely call them. The first hundred fathoms go in something under a minute. Then the shot begins to feel the weight of all the twine behind it, and the drag of the water upon so much line, and it goes slower; and slower; and every hundred fathoms takes a little longer than the last. That is the law of it. A falling ball in the sea is like an old man walking home, it does not go faster as it goes on. By four hundred fathoms each mark was taking two minutes and some seconds. By a thousand, three minutes and a half. By eighteen hundred, upwards of four and a half minutes, and the twine was going over the gunwale slow as a hymn, and the oarsmen had stopped talking, and the whole boat sat listening to it.

I called them, and wrote them. Nineteen hundred, four minutes thirty-eight. Two thousand, four minutes forty-four. Two thousand one hundred, four minutes fifty-one.

And then, at the next mark: Two thousand two hundred, three minutes forty.

I thought I had misread the watch. I looked again at the second-hand and at my column and at the next bit of bunting coming up out of the reel, and I said nothing, and timed it. Three minutes forty-one. And the next, three minutes thirty-nine. And the next, three minutes forty.

"Call them, Clock," said the Lieutenant.

I called them. He was looking over the side, where the twine went down into the grey water at a long slant, and he did not ask me anything, and I did not offer anything. Hedges, at the reel, had turned his head and was looking at me across the boat with his small blue whaleman's eyes, and I knew that he had heard the same thing I had heard.

The marks went over, one every three minutes and forty seconds, as regular as a pump. They went over for three hours. The swell lifted the cutter and set her down. The ship lay a mile off, rolling, with her topsails hanging in the brails. At four thousand fathoms the Lieutenant took off his cap and set it on the thwart beside him. At five thousand he said, half to himself, "It is the same as before. It is the same water," and his voice was so quiet and so glad that one of the oarsmen crossed himself. At six thousand he looked at me, and I gave him the time, three minutes forty, and he nodded as a man nods at a hymn-tune he knows. At seven thousand fathoms the reel was nearly bare. He told Hedges to cut. Hedges cut. The end of the twine went over the gunwale and down, a little bunting flag going after it like a leaf, and the sea had it.

"No bottom," said the Lieutenant. "Seven thousand fathoms. Write it, Mr. Worth."

I wrote it.

IV. Of the Sideways Sea

Hedges did not speak to me of it until the dog-watch, when we were at the lee rail together and nobody near.

"Your times," he said. "Ball don't run faster as it gets tired."

I said that I knew it. I said that I had thought, at first, that the watch was wrong.

"Watch ain't wrong." He spat over the side and watched the spittle go aft. "I seen that in the whale-fishery. You put a whale-line over in a current and it'll run out of the tub all day long, steady, with the iron hanging fast in nothing. It ain't the sea going down, Clock. It's the sea going sideways. Down at the foot of that there's water running like a river, and when the ball's lying on the ground it takes the line away with it, as steady as you please. Three minutes forty, three minutes forty. That's the rate of the river. That ain't the rate of the ball."

"Then the ball struck at two thousand one hundred."

"Somewheres about there," said Hedges. "God knows what it struck."

"Will you tell him?"

He looked at me as I have seen old seamen look at a boy who asks whether the mate may be told that his reckoning is out.

"He's got your book," he said.

The Lieutenant had my book. He had it in his cabin that night, under the framed column of the old cast, and he sat up with it until the middle watch. I know because I had the middle watch and his light was burning. I do not know whether he saw what Hedges and I had seen. I think now that a man who has spent four years listening to that steady pace in his mind, the pace of a ball going down and down for ever, would hear it everywhere, and would hear it most of all where it had changed; for what is a quickening, to such a man, but the ball breaking through some last floor into a deeper fall? I think that is what he heard. But I am an old man now and I have had leisure to think a great many things about him, and it may be that I only think them.

V. The New Contrivance

Now the deal case under the break of the quarter-deck.

It had been sent aboard at Norfolk with a letter from the Observatory and a drawing, and the Lieutenant had read the letter and put the drawing in his desk and had not had the case opened since. It held a sounding instrument of the design of a young officer of the service, which I will describe because it was a very pretty thing and because, at the time, nobody had seen it but a few.

It was a rod of iron, about the length of a man's forearm, with a little cup hollowed at its foot. A thirty-two-pound shot, bored through the middle, was slipped on over the rod like a bead on a needle, and held there by a pair of slings hooked over a trigger at the top. When the foot of the rod struck the bottom, the trigger tripped, the slings fell loose, the shot slid off and lay where it was, and the rod, freed of its weight, could be hauled up again by the twine, light enough that the twine would not part. In the cup at its foot was a dab of tallow, or soap, which they called the arming, and whatever the rod had struck would be stuck in the tallow and brought up to the light. A quill or two was stopped into the cup besides, to take a little core. It was a cheap thing, a rod and a ball and a dab of grease. It did what the whole art of navigation had not done until a year or two before. It came back from the floor of the deep sea with a piece of it.

The Observatory wished us to use it. The letter said so. It said, I learned afterward, that it was to be used at every deep station without fail.

On the morning of the twelfth, with the ship hove-to near enough the spot of the first cast as Mr. Hollis the master could make it by the noon sight, the Lieutenant had the case broken open on deck, and he stood over it for some time with his long hands behind him, looking down at the rod in its straw.

Then he said, "Very well. Rig it."

VI. The Second Cast

It went as the first had gone, and I called it as I had called the first: one thousand, three minutes twenty-six; eighteen hundred, four minutes thirty-five; the marks slowing, slowing, like the old man walking home. The Lieutenant sat as before, in the stern, looking over the side.

At two thousand one hundred and forty fathoms, by the bunting and the reckoning of the reel, the twine went slack in Hedges' hand.

It did not quicken. It stopped. The reel turned once more of its own way and stopped, and the twine lay on the water in a long loose bight, and the swell lifted it and laid it down again. Hedges put his thumb on it like a man feeling a pulse.

"She's let go her shot, sir," he said.

The Lieutenant said nothing for a long while. Then he said: "Haul in."

To haul up two thousand fathoms of twine by hand, gently, so as not to part it, with a little iron rod at the bottom of it rising through two and a half miles of black water, takes the better part of an afternoon. We changed the oarsmen twice. I had nothing to time, and sat with the watch shut in its box on my knees. The Lieutenant did not move from the stern-sheets the whole while. Once, about the middle of it, he put his hand in the water over the side and held it there, as if to feel for something coming up, and took it out again and dried it on his handkerchief, finger by finger.

The rod came up out of the sea at eight bells in the afternoon watch, swinging, black and wet, with a little weed of twine about its head. Hedges brought it in over the gunwale and turned the foot of it up to the light.

There was a pinch of something in the tallow. It was no bigger than a thimbleful, and it was not sand, nor rock, nor any colour of mud I had seen on any shore. It was a kind of fine greyish white, like flour that a baker has let fall on a damp board, and it lay soft in the grease and the quills.

"That's the bottom, sir," said Hedges.

"That is something the rod struck," said the Lieutenant. "It may be a ledge. It may be a shoal of some deep-water animal. There are fish down there the size of the Wauwinet, for all anybody knows." He took the rod from Hedges, and looked at the foot of it a long time, and gave it to me. "Put it in the box with the watch, Mr. Worth, and take it to Dr. Pease."

VII. What Was Under the Glass

Dr. Abner Pease, the surgeon, kept a microscope in his berth, a brass one of the Paris make, which he had bought out of his own pay at Philadelphia and with which he looked at drops of the sea in the evening when nobody was sick. He took my rod into the light of his port, and with a penknife scraped the least speck of the grey stuff from the tallow onto a slip of glass, and wet it, and laid a thinner glass over it, and put his eye to the tube. He looked for some time. Then he got up and made me sit and look.

I have tried for forty years to say what I saw, and I will try once more, and then I will give it up.

They were shells. The whole of that grey flour was shells, and not one grain of sand among them. They were so small that the speck on the doctor's glass, which I could have hidden under the nail of my smallest finger, held hundreds; and every one was whole and perfect. Some were coiled, like a ram's horn too small for any ram. Some were built up in chambers, one chamber on another, each a little larger than the last, like the bubbles a child blows in a pipe, but set in order, as a mason sets his courses. Some were round as shot, and pierced all over with holes too fine to count. Some were like little urns, and some like the spires of churches, and some like nothing at all. They were white, and clear in their thin parts, and under the doctor's lamp they shone.

"Foraminifera," said Dr. Pease, behind me. "That is the Frenchman's name for them. Animalcules with shells. They live near the top of the sea, I believe, where the light is; some say not, but I believe it. I have them in my evening bucket by the thousand. And when they die, it seems, they go down."

"All the way down?"

"It takes them a long while, I should think," he said. "They are very light. But there is nothing to stop them, and they have a great deal of time."

I took my eye from the glass. Through the doctor's open port I could see the long grey swell going by, and the light on it, and I thought of them coming down through all that water, through the light and out of the light, two miles and more, so slowly, the whole time the sea had been the sea; and lying down at last on the ones that had come before; so that the floor the gentlemen wanted for their wire, the floor Lieutenant Fenn would not have, was neither rock nor sand nor any foundation at all, but was made, the whole of it, of the small dead of the upper waters. I did not think then that it meant anything. I do not think so now. But I sat with my hand on the brass of the doctor's microscope until he took it away from me to put it in its box.

VIII. The Times

The Lieutenant entered the second cast in the log in his own hand, as he did all the deep casts: Bottom at 2,140 fathoms by Brooke's sounder. Specimen obtained. And beneath it, for the cast of the day before, at the same station: No bottom at 7,000 fathoms. He let both stand. He did not strike out either one. I have seen the log since; it is in the Department at Washington, in a cupboard, and the two lines are there one above the other in the same neat hand, and neither has a mark against it.

We made thirty-eight more casts that summer, all with the new rod, along the whole line from the Banks to Valentia, and found bottom at every one, and brought up the white flour from every one. The gentlemen in New York got their floor. I timed every cast. The Lieutenant sat in the stern of the cutter for all of them, looking over the side, and spoke very little.

On the last night before we raised the Irish land, he sent for me.

He was sitting at his desk under the framed column of the old cast, and he had my first book open before him, at the page of the eleventh of July. He did not look up when I came in. He said, "Read me the times, Mr. Worth. From the beginning."

I read them. I read from the first hundred fathoms, fifty-two seconds, down through the slowing marks, two minutes, three minutes, four, the old man walking home; and I came to two thousand one hundred, four minutes fifty-one; and I stopped.

"Go on," he said.

"Two thousand two hundred, sir. Three minutes forty."

He shut his eyes.

"Go on."

I read them all. I read forty-nine marks at three minutes forty, or three thirty-nine, or three forty-one, one after another, in the lamp-light, while the Wauwinet went easy under her topsails in a following sea and the bell struck forward and the watch was called. My voice went on so evenly that I could hear the sea in it, going sideways, steady as a pump. It was a long time. He did not stop me and he did not open his eyes. When I came to seven thousand I stopped, because there was nothing further in the book.

He sat still a while. Then he put out one long hand, without looking, and turned the page back to the beginning, and laid it flat, and held it there.

"Again," he said.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem septimum decimum Kalendās Novembrēs (16 October 2026), ab Hermannō Melvillō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

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

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