"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 rhythmical swing of a seaman's life
and of a ship's career. From land to land is the most concise
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 synonym 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 entailing a
process--the precise observation of certain landmarks 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
essentially 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.