A few days later, when on deck, we forgot the forbidding pandemonium below; purposely forgot it, as so many people do with other things, and, as the ship did not wrack herself to pieces that voyage, we at least were saved a lot of unnecessary worry.
On July first we were still plowing before it under reefed canvas. All work on deck was at a standstill except that required for sailing the ship, and by way of exercise and safety, the "farmers" dragged the "bear." Cape pigeons were everywhere and we caught a number of them for their wings by trailing a fish line overboard and hooking them. These birds are beautifully marked and when taken on deck invariably vomit their dinners; it almost looks as though the motion of the ship made them seasick. High overhead gray molly-hawks and fulmar gulls soared white-bellied and noisy against the leaden sky.
Oil bags were trailed over the side as the high seas surged past us like race horses, their white crests crinkling dangerously under our transom, and along the full sweep of the bulwarks, slopping aboard as we rolled, filling the gangways and main deck with tons of cold, blue water. Often, at the braces, we would be buried in these seas, a strange sensation that for the moment, as the weight of water lifted the feet from the deck, gave one the sensation of being detached from the ship, of being out in the midst of it all thousands of miles from shore; a funny feeling is this, entirely devoid of fear, though, of course, one held on like blazes to whatever was most handy, usually the pin rail or other substantial deck fitting.
Much has been written about the height of waves, and as we approached the southern limit of our course and headed to the east, well below the parallel of Cape Horn, we got the full benefit of those constant westerly winds that blow around the world. Here the heaviest straight line gales are to be met with and the great fetch of deep water helps to produce magnificent waves of the first magnitude.
Lecky, in his "Wrinkles," a book no sailor should be without, and a book no lover of the sea who likes to "be up" on things nautical should neglect to read, quotes Mr. Thomas Stevenson as the authority for an empirical formula that approximates the possible maximum height of waves, the same being considered as a function of the "fetch."
This is given as a matter of interest, for working it backward it shows how tremendous the sea spaces through which the rollers that followed us had their being. The Stevenson formula is as follows:
Height of wave in feet equals the square root of the "fetch" in nautical miles multiplied by the constant 1.5.
Or, backward: the distance a wave has come equals its height, divided by 1.5, and the quotient squared.
As the wind increased in strength the waves mounted until immense billows were formed that measured from 50 to 60 feet in a vertical line from hollow to crest. This was easily determined by mounting the shrouds and watching until the ship was in the trough, then noting the height of eye on a level with the wave crests. In reversing the Stevenson formula we find that for a 60-foot wave a fetch of at least 1,600 miles is necessary.[8]