Tintin Forums

Unfortunately, during the series we don't get to witness sails of silk and ropes of sandal. Why?

Describe the scene.

Moderator Note: Isn't this a version of the question already posed here?

"Sails of silk and ropes of sandal" is the first line of the second stanza of a poem called The Secret of the Sea by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Here's the whole poem:

THE SECRET OF THE SEA

Ah! what pleasant visions haunt me
  As I gaze upon the sea!
All the old romantic legends,
  All my dreams, come back to me.

Sails of silk and ropes of sandal,
  Such as gleam in ancient lore;
And the singing of the sailors,
  And the answer from the shore!

Captain Haddock quotes the first stanza on page 32 of Red Rackham's Treasure, trailing his fingers in the water as the Thompsons are rowing them back from the island to the Sirius. But before he starts the second stanza, Tintin shouts, "Look Out!... A shark!...", saving Haddock from having his hand bitten off. Haddock starts shooting at the sharks, and never returns to his Longfellow rendition, thus never allowing the reader to witness (or hear about) the sails of silk and ropes of sandal.

Presumeably sandal is a type of cordage material, which gave its name to the open-toed footwear, presumeably because they were originally made from the stuff.

I'd like to pretend that I'm so well read that I carry chunks of Longfellow around in my head and thus recognized the line in Ranko's queston. But the truth is, I simply googled "sails of silk ropes of sandal" and found the poem that way, then remembering that this instance of Haddock quoting Longfellow had been mentioned somewhere in this forum before. From that thread, I seem to remember that it's a different poem and poet altogether in Hergé's original French version.

Once again, Balthazar, you are right on the money!

For years I mistakenly thought that the passage was part of Coleridge's Rime Of The Ancient Mariner. I'm not one for Longfellow poetry (NZ poets such as James K Baxter and Sam Hunt are more my thing)
but I love that first stanza, and yes, I do quote it whenever I go near a boat or the ocean :-)

Well done.
Give yourself a point and hit us with the next question.

Cool question and well answered.

I was thinking it was somewhere in Tintin and Tibet... maybe one of the mystic Monk's visions. After that The Blue Lotus... after that I was hoping it would slip through to a clue. :)