“And shippes by the brinke comen and gon,

And in swich forme endure a day or two.”

The Frankeleyn’s Tale.

Landfall and Departure mark the rhythmical¹ swing of a seaman²’s life and of a ship’s career. From land to land is the most concise³ definition of a ship’s earthly fate.

A “Departure” is not what a vain people of landsmen may think. The term “Landfall” is more easily understood; you fall in with the land, and it is a matter of a quick eye and of a clear atmosphere. The Departure is not the ship’s going away from her port any more than the Landfall can be looked upon as the synonym⁴ of arrival. But there is this difference in the Departure: that the term does not imply so much a sea event as a definite act entailing⁵ a process — the precise observation of certain landmarks⁶ by means of the compass card.

Your Landfall, be it a peculiarly-shaped mountain, a rocky headland, or a stretch of sand-dunes, you meet at first with a single glance. Further recognition will follow in due course; but essentially⁷ a Landfall, good or bad, is made and done with at the first cry of “Land ho!” The Departure is distinctly a ceremony of navigation. A ship may have left her port some time before; she may have been at sea, in the fullest sense of the phrase, for days; but, for all that, as long as the coast she was about to leave remained in sight, a southern-going ship of yesterday had not in the sailor’s sense begun the enterprise of a passage.

The taking of Departure, if not the last sight of the land, is, perhaps, the last professional recognition of the land on the part of a sailor. It is the technical, as distinguished⁸ from the

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